Diego Alejandro Arias

I

“수도권 전철,” Rodrigo said. 

“Say that again, a little slower.”

He repeated, cutting the speed of the Korean in half, laying the words out to help his friend’s Anglo-phonetic ear. 

“I’m sure it was better than New York.”

“No rats, no garbage, didn’t smell like urine.”

“What was it like, all those years there?”

“That’s the thing.” Rodrigo placed his left ankle on top of his right knee. “When you live outside of the country for so long, you start to see the world through the eyes of others. Sounds easy, and dumb, and played out, but you do. You start to see how small our lives are, all the pretty stupid shit we do on a daily basis, and here there’s a complete other world out there, where people pick up their trash and the subway station smells like fucking fabuloso.”

He remembered when he was only twenty-three and had arrived in Seoul. The way the people greeted him, helped him get from one place to the other when he walked aimlessly around the subway stations. He had spent a year training in Virginia, studying the complexities of Hangul, its characters, its meaning, its complex political and military history. His first night out in town, he found himself at the wrong station and took out a map, trying to understand where he had ended up and how he had been so foolish to mistake south from north. This was before smartphones and google maps. He placed the paper map against a wall and charted his territory with his index finger. He felt a tap on his shoulder. A man, in flawless English, asked him if he could help him find his destination. The man identified the error he had made when he boarded at Gangnam and how he could turn back around and make his way to the marketplace that Rodrigo had been trying to find for the past two hours. He couldn’t imagine someone doing that for a tourist or a lost foreigner in New Jersey or New York. Shit, back in Jersey he used to laugh at aimless tourists walking around Hoboken or Jersey City. Living in Korea had certainly made him a different man. Sometimes so many years in Southeast Asia can make an American kinder, more understanding, more patient and willing to put up with small, petty things that used to drive that person batshit crazy but now can just be approached as an opportunity to help, to fix, to make whole with acts of selflessness and personal sacrifice. What used to be a simple fuck off to a tourist, could now become a you lost there, friend? 

“Maybe I should move out. Marry a Korean girl. Start a new life on the other side of the world,” Big Nate said. 

Rodrigo placed his two feet flat on his friend’s red carpet. He leaned his upper body forward and adjusted his legs, taking the cup of coffee on the small living room table in his right hand. He drank, placed the cup back on the table, and smiled. 

“Yea, that wouldn’t be so bad. You’ve never met friendlier people.”

“Yea? I could get down with that.”

“Maybe. But, well, not everything is peaches.”

Big Nate took a puff of weed and laid back on the couch. He motioned over to Rodrigo, lifting his hand up. 

“Come on partna’, don’t disrespect me like that.”

“Man, I still haven’t after all these years. They would have fired me on the spot if I got tested. And boy oh boy did these motherfuckers test me. I think I was the only intelligence officer ever tested four times in ten years. I think these dudes were hoping they caught that shit in my system. They were expecting that shit, my dude.”

Big Nate smiled. He had bright, large teeth. Some gray hairs covered his beard. When he was a child, he was able to buy his way out of trouble with his handsome face. He was captivating in the way that only matinee idols on posters and large, muscular felines in television documentaries can be when you don’t know much about them. And now, in his late thirties, he still had the same stone jaw and deep, dark eyes. Big Nate used to be a god among men, he used to be the sole reason people flocked to house parties back when social media didn’t exist and no one would be caught dead taking a selfie of themselves in public. When he spoke, he had a buttery tone that could put someone to sleep if they just paid enough attention to him. Rodrigo used to envy him for his handsomeness, the ease with which he spoke to teachers or girls when they were in their late teens, the way he moved so easily through life. They had known each other since childhood, but now it had been so long since they had last spoken. Big Nate had placed the package Rodrigo had brought with him on his dining room table, a small wooden thing he had muddled with beer bottles and boxes of sneakers he had been selling online. Big Nate had not opened the package and Rodrigo hoped now that it would remain unopened until after he left his apartment. The contents of the package would be best revealed when he was no longer in his presence, when he could take the full breadth of the box’s letters and images without having to ask uncomfortable questions or seek an explanation. 

“Well, you are Colombian. How’d you expect them to act? Those white boys you ran around with in Afghanistan and Sudan keep this country safe so their friends and family can consume all the blow they want. And then you join the club, and you remind them of that shit every day, every goddamn day, you bad fucking hombre. I’m surprised they even gave you a gun, or an office, you parce ass motherfucker.” He coughed a bit and then laid his head back, looking up at the ceiling. He chuckled. “I miss you, fam.”

“정신,” Rodrigo said. 

“What’s that?”

“That’s my Korean name, The agency gave it to me during language training. It’s a thing they do.”

He looked straight at Rodrigo. He grinned. 

“Fucking look at this guy, learning Korean and shit. Who would’ve thought? We used to steal toys for my sister in Menlo Park Mall. You used to come over my house for beef patties and oxtail stew. Now you speak Korean and you kill people for a living. Go figure baby. You used to be such a pussy, man.”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” he said.

“You keep saying that like you actually believe it.” 

He blew some smoke above him and smiled. The air was thick with weed and grilled meat from some burgers Nate had ordered on Uber.  

“I’m not judging you bro, you did what you were hired to do. You were just following orders.”

Rodrigo had never killed anyone, and he was happy that none of his assignments had ever included that sort of dark experience. 

“Jeooooong-siiiiin.” He said it slower again, waiting for Big Nate to repeat it. 

“Y que e eso, compadre?” He had a thick gringo accent. 

“The name. The Korean name.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“It means to make right, to correct, to believe in something.”

“Man, just take this weed and shut the fuck up. I ain’t trying to hear that.”

II

Rodrigo had become accustomed to the thirteen-hour flight from Incheon to John F. Kennedy. But this was his last flight as a federal officer, and when he flew again, which he planned on doing so often, he would only travel as a civilian. The thought of traveling across Korea, or any country, as a regular person made his heart jump. He adjusted a pillow against his back. He stretched his legs out and fumbled through the brown leather bag placed on the adjacent seat. He would miss the Korean and Chinese airlines’ economy class leg room. He wouldn’t return to East Asia as often as he had the past six years. He figured upon his return to the Western Hemisphere he would be pressed up against another passenger, his legs barely movable inside a United flight from New York to Buenos Aires or Medellin, listening to some man’s breath the entire flight. He looked up from his seat. An airline employee approached him. “도와 드릴 게 있나요?” she asked. 

“아니, 괜찮아. 감사합니다,” he replied. 

She smiled and moved along to the passenger in front of him. 

He looked through his phone and began to search for a movie he had downloaded on Netflix. He had downloaded about ten movies before leaving his apartment. It was a long-term tradition made possible by technology, something that had not existed when he had first joined the agency. The Asian airlines tended to censor the profanity, violence, and sex from Western films. He didn’t like having to watch someone’s artistic vision chopped up like that for the sake of government and societal sensibilities. He looked through his list: a Thai mafia flick, a Chinese historical fantasy, a Mexican crime drama, a British World War II epic. Too much, too soon, he thought. It’s a long flight. He needed something quick and dumb, an appetizer to start off his journey. There was an action movie based on the Tres Fronteras region of Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. That seemed a bit more like it. Some American-led mercenary group ventures into Colombia to find some gold they stole from some drug lord, or guerilla warlord, or a bloodthirsty paramilitary group. Who knows with fucking Hollywood, ya know?, he thought, we’re all just one brown unknown locale to film some jingoistic action flick with a white guy, usually sporting a beard and rolled up sleeves, that saves the day and helps some poor woman escape a tropical hell. Rodrigo chuckled. Why not watch this bullshit? He might as well see some boomer Hollywood executives pretend to understand transnational crime syndicates and make a celebrity with zero experience in war look like a hero for the umpteenth time. He could use a goddamn laugh. The flight attendant walked by his seat.  

“Excuse me, 죄송합니다. 위스키주세요?” he asked. 

“Of course, sir,” she said.

Mamita, as Rodrigo calls his grandmother, has lived in Jersey City for over thirty-five years. Rodrigo and Mamita lived through the crime spikes in the eighties and nineties. Rodrigo walked home from school while he avoided hoods who lived nearby his house or had a habit of sticking up kids and running them for lunch money or a watch or a pair of sneakers. Mamita once caught Rodrigo chillin’ several corners from their small two-bedroom apartment. She yanked him by his Enyce velour sweatsuit and dragged him back home. “Uste cree que se manda? Esta muy grandecito pues?” “I ain’t saying that. I’m just chillin’ with my friends. You wyldin’ Mamita. It ain’t even like that!” “Ah now I’m “wyldin”, and no vengas con ese ain’t, disque ain’t. Either you talk like a man, or you’re staying out there with those hoodlums. They can pay your rent and cook your food. That’s what you want?”

That’s how Mamita was growing up. Shit, if it wasn’t for her, Rodrigo would have never made it out of New Jersey. Who knows where he would have ended up? And Mamita was still there, still living in Jersey City fending off New York transplants and white women in yoga pants carrying rubber mats around like they have nothing to do at two in the afternoon. Mamita probably misses those hoods from back in the days, he thought.

He arrived in Queens at three in the morning. Coming back from East Asia always felt like time traveling. He would venture out on a Sunday, fly across the globe for half a day, and arrive in New York at the same time he had left. It was a total mindfuck. And doing it regularly became an addictive experience. He enjoyed skipping through time like that, suspended in existence thirty-eight-thousand feet in the air. The first flight he ever took out of the hemisphere, when he flew straight to Guangzhou from Washington, D.C., was a reminder of how much he had missed out on as a child. Little did he think it would have turned into a fifteen-year career with enough frequent flyer miles to fly to Paris every summer for a lifetime.  

“You Rodrigo?” the Uber driver asked. 

“That’s me man.”

“Let me help you with those bags.”

“Thanks.”

The young man loaded his bags into the back of a black SUV.

“Jersey City, right?”

“That’s right. Thanks bro.”

When Rodrigo arrived in Jersey City he used his copy of the apartment key and carried his luggage up six flights of stairs. The elevator was broken. He couldn’t even get the lights to function. Mamita had told him about the damaged elevator, and he felt a guilt come over him when he realized he had never forced the building manager to fix it. Rodrigo pictured his grandmother climbing six flights every time she had to enter her apartment. “I’ve got to get that damn thing fixed,” he said as he lugged two large suitcases up the stairs. Mamita owned the apartment. She didn’t worry about having to leave the community due to increased rent prices or redevelopment projects. The building was old but in fantastic shape. No developer thought of knocking down the structure. In 2007, a venture capital fund bought most of the apartments, remodeled them, and rented them out to young professionals who were being priced out of New York. Mamita refused to sell. Rodrigo covered the increased property taxes and sent her monthly stipends to cover food, clothing, and anything she needed. “All of this will be yours mijo,” she would say. “Don’t worry about that, this will always be yours. Para siempre,” he would say to her. Rodrigo’s plan had originally been to retire from the agency, use a mutual fund with over a quarter million he had saved up while living abroad in government-leased housing or military bases, and purchase a home in Argentina. He had dual citizenship as a Colombian-American, and under South American international treaties between Bogota and Buenos Aires, he had a legal right to take up residence in Argentina indefinitely. He had no interest in living in Jersey City. But circumstances change, and as a result, Rodrigo had to adapt.  

In the morning, Mamita made arepas and Uruguayan chorizo. 

“I’ve been all around the world, and damn, these charruas make a hell of a sausage.” 

“I bet you missed that while you were away,” she said.

“Well they have other delicious things there. You know, Koreans eat a lot of stuff we Colombians eat. Kimchi fried rice is similar to calentado, especially when it’s served for breakfast. They eat chicharron as well. They love it. Tastes almost like ours does. Funny how across the globe we’re all so similar. I can’t wait to take you to Korea.”

“I would love to go.”

She kissed him on the forehead as he wolfed down an arepa covered in cheese and butter. 

Later that afternoon Rodrigo began cleaning out a closet that had been untouched for several years. He took out three boxes. He cleared out each box, full of old birthday cards, photographs, and notebooks, and kept the memories and old documents he could not throw out. There were the obvious items that would end up in the trash: letters from long-forgotten ex-girlfriends, report cards from junior high he didn’t care for or never wanted to see again, and random knickknacks collected over the years. One small booklet, in a glossy, colorful design, caught his attention. It was a Japanese magazine walkthrough for the 1990 Konami game, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. The video game, released in Japan in 1989, took the North American market by surprise. The game is a prequel to the first Castlevania console game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) released in 1987. In Dracula’s Curse, the player is thrust into the life of Trevor Belmont, an ancestor of Simon Belmont, the original vampire slayer from the first game. Both Castlavanias are considered two of the best video games ever created. Their storylines are intertwined. Set in medieval Europe, Simon and Trevor are distant relatives. And although Simon is the first Castlevania hero known to the 1980s and early 1990s Nintendo community during the first serious wave of video game culture, the real star of the franchise is Trevor. Trevor’s story predates Simon’s by two hundred and fifteen years (or 100 years according to the original Japanese version that seemed to confuse the timelines before Nintendo retconned them). In Dracula’s Curse, Trevor is part of a long-exiled family asked to return to Europe to destroy the Count Prince and end his war against the Catholic Church and the rest of humanity. Trevor is accompanied by three friends, Grant, a local tough guy, Sypha, a sorceress, and Alucard, Dracula’s estranged son. The player can assume the identity of Trevor, Grant, Sypha, or Alucard, and the choices made during the game will lead to different storylines and endings. It was a remarkable work of art for 1989 and 1990. 

Rodrigo looked over the small book. He turned several pages and took in words and images he hadn’t seen in decades. The booklet was now over thirty years old. He could make out a lot of the Japanese now, and he wondered how he had spent so many hours looking through the writing as a child without understanding one word in the walkthrough. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Revenge was the third video game he had ever owned. His uncle Wilfer had bought it for him in Menlo Park Mall in Central New Jersey. Back then the only two video games available when buying the original NES system were Super Mario Bros. and Duckhunt, a game where you played a hunter taking down ducks in the American Midwest. 

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse was a phenomenon. It is considered one of the best console video games of all time. In 1990, Rodrigo’s house was full of kids stopping by to try their hand at playing one of the three characters. Lots of kids liked Alucard. He was handsome, ghostly pale, and elegant. He was the rebellious child who opposed his father’s bloodthirsty attacks on 1476 European civilization. But from the start, Rodrigo was a hardcore Trevor Belmont fan. Rodrigo, the son of murdered Colombian social activists in the Urabá region of Antioquia, could relate to Trevor’s family being forced out of their home, killed off by extra-judicial government authorities, and banned from their ancestral origins. Rodrigo’s parents were wealthy landowners in Colombia who decided to support workers’ rights in the Colombian mountains. A year after Rodrigo had been born, paramilitaries rounded up his parents and shot them dead in front of their large coffee growing estate. Rodrigo had been with his grandmother in Medellin. His parents had feared their activism was becoming a danger to the family. They had plans to leave Urabá and resettle in Medellin, but several weeks before they left their twelve-acre estate, they were executed by the United Self-Defenses of Cordoba (AUC) for their participation in supporting the rights of local workers and their families. Mamita, fearing that the AUC would find both her and Rodrigo somewhere in Medellin, boarded a flight to New York City with her grandson and claimed asylum when they reached John F. Kennedy airport in 1982. Like Trevor, Rodrigo was an exile forced out of his family’s land, raised in a new home, unable to return without the authorization of government actors. And exactly like Trevor Belmont, Rodrigo Garcia spent most of his life chasing bad guys across exotic lands, hunting down others in a war on terror based on a ridiculous, nonsensical, and never ending religious, economic, and ideological struggle. 

The game was subject to heavy arguments in Mamita’s house. Rodrigo and his three friends, Big Nate, Anthony Diaz, and Demond Baldwin, would get together every Friday night and whip and kill their way out of Dracula’s castle. They would scream and wrestle in between game sessions. Mamita would often yell at them to settle down and quit making so much noise. “Dejen esa bulla! No wrestling like that in the house. Take it easy!” she’d yell out. 

“Yo chill, relax guys!” Anthony said. 

“Trevor Belmont be taking all these suckas out,” Rodrigo said. 

“Alucard takes out Trevor, Rodry!” Big Nate said. 

“Alucard baby stuff, homes. All his magic and costumes is bullshit. All his powers ain’t shit. Trevor’s the real dope homie. Trevor be taking all these demons out. All these stupid heroes he be whipping they asses. He be going wapish! Wapish! Wapish! Take that demon out! Wapish!”

Rodrigo took an old t-shirt and started whipping his friends around in a frenzy. Big Nate ran towards him, picked him up, and slammed him on the floor.

“You wrong for that. Try that shit again,” he said.  

“Damn, he Roddy Piper’ed his ass!” Demond yelled out. He started laughing and rolling around on the floor. 

“Damn bro, my grandma said keep it down, and you slamming me on the ground,” he said. “My fucking ass hurts.”  

“My favorite Grant, anyway, he’s a pirate. I like pirates.” Big Nate said. 

“He straight murdered your ass,” Demond said. He was still on the ground rolling around and laughing. He wrapped his arms around his stomach. 

“Rodrigo, que deje esa bulla!” Mamita yelled again. “One more noise from that room and you boys are going home to your parents!” 

“Aight, aight. Stop fucking around so much. Let’s get back to this game. I’m about to just beat this whole shit with Trevor. Forget y’all.” 

If you beat the game alone as Trevor Belmont, the ending left him friendless, single, and unsure of his future. The ideal ending, for most kids playing the game, was Trevor marrying Sypha and starting a new life in Europe. 

III

The Chief Operating Officer met Rodrigo at the front entrance and walked him to a meeting room. She introduced him to the treasurer, the board of directors, and the operations manager. There was a bottle of champagne and a dessert table. Little cheeses lay on wooden boards with creams and jellies accompanying them. They had a toast and ate some pastries. The COO walked him to the director’s office. He looked around, sat down on the leather chair behind a large mahogany desk, and smiled. 

“I love it!” Rodrigo said.

“Well, we’re very happy to have you. The board is excited and looking forward to your tenure.”

Rodrigo stood. 

“I honestly couldn’t think of a better place to begin this new phase in my life. As someone who understands the consequences of kids getting caught up in law enforcement, it’s an honor to be here leading such a wonderful team.”

“The honor is ours Rodrigo.” 

“Thanks, but this is a team effort. And I’m just blessed to have the opportunity to work on prisoner reentry and juvenile justice reform. Lo de nosotros es un esfuerzo de comunidad, Cassandra.”

“Yes, certainly. These are trying times and, once again, welcome to our team.”

Rodrigo spent the evening downloading an online version of Castlevania III on his personal laptop. He felt an odd form of nostalgia playing the game after so many years. It was much harder than he remembered. He died within the first five minutes of playing the game. He played for about two hours and then closed the program, turned his computer off, and went to bed. Before falling asleep, he thought of his friends. He hadn’t spoken to Big Nate in years. He had had short online conversations with Anthony and Demond while he was posted in Africa and Asia. Demond had gone out to visit him in Korea while he was living in an apartment in Gangnam with a young woman who worked for an artificial intelligence company in Seoul. Besides that one trip far east, none of his other friends had ever accepted his invitations to see him abroad.  Rodrigo called Anthony.

“Hey man, how are you?” Rodrigo said.

“Doing well. Are you back in Jersey? I heard you were around.”

“Yea. I came back not too long ago. How are you?”

“Good man. Good. I’m investing some money in the cryptogame. How long are you going to be here?”

“Permanently, actually. I quit the service.”

There was a pause.

“Quit? Really? Damn bro, I’m happy to hear you’re back man! Where you at right now?”

“Here in Jersey City. I was wondering if you’d like to meet up. Maybe call up Nate and Demond.”

“Sure man. I’m down to hang out. But I don’t really talk to Big Nate anymore.”

They agreed to meet up in The Ironbound section of Newark at a Portuguese café near the nonprofit where Rodrigo would begin working in the coming weeks. Rodrigo had not seen many of his friends since he left New Jersey. He remembered the day he packed his Dodge Charger with his personal belongings and hugged his grandmother outside of their apartment building. He could still see her cheeks coated in tears, his friends standing around her as he sat in the driver’s seat, looked at the time in the center of the vehicle, and waved at the family that had seen him suffer and struggle to find a job since he had graduated. It seemed like such an odd job to have obtained after having been considered a complete loser by his law school classmates. Years of being seen as a slacker, a good for nothing kid from the ghetto who had fucked up an opportunity he had been given to improve his life, and suddenly, he had been selected—as the lone Latino among dozens of new intelligence recruits—to defend America from those that wished to harm the freedom he held so dear, the same one denied to him and his family so many years ago in Antioquia. Now, over a decade and a half later, it seemed like all the service awards and multiple tours of duty had only exposed to him what he now viewed as a system rigged against those very liberties he had promised to defend. “La bullshit,” he had called it when he told his one Latino buddy at the CIA. “La bullshit made me quit.”

He woke up early on a Saturday morning, looked through a series of e-mails from old political contacts he had begun reconnecting with since his arrival back in Jersey City, and took a shower. He made coffee for himself and Mamita and drove to The Ironbound. The Ironbound, a neighborhood in Newark populated mostly by Portuguese, Brazilian, and Ecuadorian immigrants, had changed little since he had left. Unlike Jersey City, that now resembled another New York City neighborhood populated by a bunch of carpet baggers and out of towners, The Ironbound had maintained true to its iconic immigrant community roots, and the smell of fresh-baked Portuguese goods and Brazilian churrasco filled the morning air, bringing along hundreds of memories of late-night parties, random first dates with local girls, and wild club nights he had experienced with his crew. 

He parked his car outside of Nuno’s, his favorite local bakery, and paid the meter with an app on his phone. When he had left Jersey to train at Langley, he remembered still having to feed the meters with quarters and having to download apps to cover the parking fare was another reminder he had spent too much of his life on the other side of the world while America had kept moving along and changing without him. It’s not the big changes, like a new supermarket or public park that run you down with nostalgia, he thought, it’s the little things that have become common in a society that now, years later, greeted him like a stranger that no longer belonged. I guess that’s the price I get for defending my country, he said to himself, welcome stranger, now adapt. 

“So now, let me get this straight, you were working for the CIA?” Demond asked.

“Yea. Feels weird to finally tell you that, but for the past fifteen years I was working as an intelligence officer.”

“Damn, I knew there was something weird about you working for some economic office as a treasury employee. I wasn’t buying it,” Demond said. 

“You confirmed our suspicions,” Anthony said. 

“Yea, what were those jibarito?”

Rodrigo took a sip from his coffee. He bit into a pastéis de nata and looked up at Anthony. 

“You know. That you were some hired killer taking motherfuckers out.” He ran his butter knife across his neck and made a still, serious face. 

“It was mostly looking through data coming in from places I never heard of.”

“Yea ok. Anyway,” Demond interrupted, “You came back single, no wife, no kids.”

“It’s not easy to maintain a life moving around from one country to the next every two to three years. Few people are willing to sign up for that life.”

“Hell, if you took me out of Jersey for six months to travel the globe, I’d marry you. Can’t see who would say no to that.”

“Yea? How about two years in South Sudan?”

“Yea, I’d still take that over Jersey,” Demond said.

They laughed together. The Portuguese women at the counter looked over. 

“Yea, some things still don’t change, Rodry. They’re still looking over here when black and brown folk make too much noise.” Anthony smiled and held his coffee glass up in the air. 

“Saúde, linda!” he said to the older woman. She wore a white apron and hat. She looked back at him and looked away to sort through some cash in the register. 

“Yea, same thing. Some things take time, I guess,” Rodrigo said.

“So you guys heard from Nate?”

Anthony took a bite out of a sandwich. 

“I suppose he’s been busy. He founded a community organization.”

“Oh yea? Like what’s it about?”

“Community activism. He founded some watchdog group to protect residents from police.”

“Wait, what? Nate founded a police review board?”

“Yea, I guess that’s what you call it, huh?” Anthony replied. 

“How did that happen?”

“I think you should ask him yourself, man,” Demond said. 

“What’s with all the mystery?”

“No mystery Rodrigo. I just think Nate’s business is his business. I don’t think we should be spreading his information around like that,” Demond said.

Rodrigo looked down at his coffee and smiled. He ran his fingers through his hair.

“I didn’t mean to touch a nerve or anything. But I’ll follow up with Nate.”

On the way home, Anthony texted Rodrigo. He checked his phone at a red light. 

He had some shit go down with a cop in Newark. Google it, he wrote. 

IV

He made a right on to Halsey Street and kept several feet from the car in front of him. The dim light of the late afternoon sun kept visibility high, but Rodrigo’s experience with daylight meant he did not have to use the artificial beams of a machine that drew attention to him or to whatever he was driving. Also, in the day there were more people out and about and easier to fade into the subconscious of a wandering traveler. People remembered faces when illuminated with streetlights and brazen neon signs. In the day, people were less strange, less obscure, and less threatening. Rodrigo followed the car a mile and a half more. It had been making its way towards Rutgers Law School’s Center for Legal Studies on University Avenue. It slowed down and turned on its left blinker. “Gotcha,” Rodrigo said. The car parked across the street from a local Irish pub and its lights turned off. Rodrigo kept his distance and parked his car about a block away. He placed his foot on the brake and pressed the button in front of him. The car turned off and Rodrigo looked through his backpack, sorting through the bag for the camera’s correct lens. He looked up and saw a man in a baseball cap exit the vehicle and make his way towards the pub. Rodrigo looked at his cellphone. He had about ten minutes before he could exit his own car and make towards McGovern’s. He gathered his camera, adjusted the lens, set it on automatic focus, and tucked it inside of his backpack. He also had an old Civil Procedure book he had found stuffed inside a box in his closet.  

Once inside, he sat at a booth adjacent to the bar, behind the man in a baseball cap and two students already engaged in heavy day drinking. 

“What’ll it be?”

A young woman asked. She wore a green shirt and a pair of jeans. She smiled. 

“A Guinness, please.”

“Just that?”

“That’s all.”

“Sure.”

Rodrigo spoke up as she turned around and called her back. 

“Something else?”

“I’ll have a burger with onion rings. You can take this as well.” He handed her forty dollars in cash. 

“You can pay after.”

“No, that’s ok. I’ll pay now. I’ve got an exam in about an hour. Don’t want to rush you when it starts getting busy.”

“That’s nice of you. I’ll bring back the change.”

“No, that’s alright.”

She smiled and turned back towards the kitchen. 

Rodrigo fumbled through his bag and took the book out, placing the camera next to him on the booth’s red cushion. He checked his surroundings and lifted the camera, placing the small LCD screen between his fingers and moving it upright towards his eyes. He focused on the man he had followed into the bar and snapped several pictures of him kissing a young woman. He caught pictures of the man placing his arm around her waist, on her ass, feeding her French fries. He placed the camera back in his bookbag. The waitress brought the burger and a tall glass of dark beer. Rodrigo ate silently for several minutes, gulped down his drink, and made his way out of the bar. He waited in his car until the man left McGovern’s with the young woman. She had dark curly hair and wore a pair of baggy jeans and an oversized vintage sweater. They both entered the man’s car. Rodrigo pressed the button next to the steering wheel once again and followed them from a safe distance. The car took an exit into Paterson and drove down another local highway until it reached a hotel with bright green letters that shone like beacons in the autumn night. Rodrigo entered through the back parking lot and watched as they exited the car from the front of the hotel. He turned the lights off and kept his car on. He snapped several pictures of them entering the hotel. 

Two weeks later, Rodrigo asked Anthony to accompany him to Newark during a Saturday morning. Anthony had asked him what the purpose of their trip was and Rodrigo felt that keeping his friend out of the loop would only complicate the matter. Reluctantly, he slightly briefed him on the nature of their trip, gave him some tips to keep him from fucking anything up, and asked him to trust in his experience. Anthony kind of laughed it off and thought he had been joking at first, but when he saw that Rodrigo had been following a squad car for several miles and consistently maintaining three cars between his subject, he realized that his friend had been serious and was engaged in what he had called “an act of domestic justice.” Rodrigo drove without saying much. He concentrated on the car and kept the same spacing between his black Dodge Challenger and the black and white car turning into Broad Street. Rodrigo told Anthony to reach into the glove compartment and remove a black object from inside. 

“What the fuck? A gun?”

Rodrigo laughed. 

“Chill Diaz. Of course not. Please don’t think I’m stupid. Trust me, he’s never going to even realize what we’ve done. Once we’re done, he’ll go on about his day without any idea of what we’ve done with that thing.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see, just help me out real quick. He’s going to park his car near that coffee shop. When he goes in, I’ll crawl underneath the car and place this little thing underneath it.” He removed a small battery-sized object from the larger black box he had taken from Anthony. “We have to time this right. I’ll be underneath the car and need enough time to secure it. If he comes back, I need you to call my cellphone. It’s set to vibrate only if your number calls, anybody else calls and it’s on mute. He can’t take off while I’m underneath the car for obvious reasons. We may not even need you to alert me, but if he is leaving the coffee shop, call me if I’m still caught under there.”

Anthony looked at Rodrigo. His eyes wide. His mouth slightly open. 

“Yo my man, are you for real? Are you fucking serious?” He gestured towards the cruiser parking ahead of them on the right side of the street, half a block from the coffee shop. “That’s a cop, man. Like a real deal cop. You’re putting a bomb underneath a cop car? Yo man, this ain’t Afghanistan. You need to take a quick break and just kind of drop me off somewhere. I won’t say anything man.”

“Easy.” He laughed. “It’s not a bomb. It’s a wireless device. It’ll give me access to the computer in his cruiser. I wish it had a better range, but it doesn’t. The best bet is to place it underneath his car to get into his systems. The other option would be to break into his car while it’s parked outside. You want to do that instead?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Records. If he’s a crooked cop, then he’s crooked all around. Remember that Mobb Deep song, ‘ain’t no such thing as half-way crooks,’ well there isn’t. He’s clearly got something in there that’ll prove he’s been doing shady shit with the privileges that have been given to him.” 

Rodrigo waited until the officer exited his car and entered the small shop located at the corner of Broad Street. He exited the Challenger and walked over to the black and white cruiser. “Damn, he just slid under there without looking around. No one even saw this motherfucker.” Anthony kept his eye on the door and watched the clock on the dashboard. He felt a cold sharp pain run through his back. He imagined what could happen if they were caught, or if Rodrigo were underneath the car and his legs or head were crushed when the officer drove off. Even worse, if he crawled out from under the vehicle and the cop saw him do that. He would take him out right then. Hell, if he had beaten the shit out of Big Nate for a dim headlight, he could only imagine what he would do to Rodrigo if he caught him rolling around under his car. He saw the door open, the dark blue sleeve emerged from the coffee shop. It was then that Anthony realized that Rodrigo had meant to keep an eye on him while he was still inside the shop. He should have been watching him pay for the coffee and alerted Rodrigo’s cell phone before the officer exited. “Fuck, fuck.” Anthony’s head rushed and he began to feel a hot flush across his face. He exited the car and looked around. The officer made his way towards his vehicle, keys in hand. Anthony saw a man in the street corner asking someone for change. He glanced over at the car, tried to see if Rodrigo had rolled out. He walked over to the panhandler. “Suck my dick,” he said to the man. “What the fuck you just say?” the man asked. “Yo you heard me, do I gotta ask again, you son of a bitch? Suck this dick puto.” The man screamed and started throwing fists at Anthony. Anthony yelled. “Officer, officer!” The officer looked over at them and dropped his coffee. “Hey! Fuck is going on over there?” The panhandler kept landing jabs on Anthony’s back. The officer ran over and grabbed the angry man by the arms, hurling him against the concrete. “Come on motherfucker. Put your hands behind your back.” He lay over him, placed his body’s weight on his back and handcuffed him. Anthony watched the car in horror as Rodrigo slid out and stood up, making his way towards the Charger and getting inside. “Fuck you staring at? Get the fuck out of here!” the officer said to Anthony. He ran towards Rodrigo’s car and sat down. He was breathing heavily, gasping for air. 

“Chill out man. You did good.” He laughed and watched the officer drag the panhandler into the backseat of the squad car.

“I just got that poor dude arrested.”

“Ain’t the end of the world man. It’s cold out tonight and he’ll get some heat for the evening.”

“It’s not right,” he said. Anthony tried to compose himself and watched as the squad car took off violently down the street. “Shit wasn’t right, bro.” 

Five days after Rodrigo had dropped Anthony off at his house and watched him curse his way out of the car, he prepared two letter-sized manila envelopes with pictures and one thumb-drive each. In one envelope he placed the photographs of the police officer and a young university woman he had been seeing for several months. He also included photos they had exchanged over private messages and extensive records that included hotel bills, gifts from online retail stores, and a video of the couple kissing and grabbing each other at McGovern’s. This package was mailed to the officer’s home in Lodi. In the other envelope, he included the digital records of the officer’s internal cruiser computer. In the thumb drive, he detailed how the officer had been running thousands of license plate numbers from women, Black, and, Latino drivers. The drivers had all been pulled over and only a small percentage resulted in tickets or arrests. Rodrigo included social media messages sent to the women the officer had pulled over after running their license plates. Rodrigo knew that New Jersey law required officers to only use the license plate technology in their cruiser to randomly run drivers’ numbers, and to only use probable cause when entering plates into a vehicle’s computer. A violation of this protocol would result in a loss of confidence and immediate removal from any law enforcement agency. This envelope he sent to the state’s leading newspaper, The Star Ledger. Fuck his department, he thought, those bastards won’t do anything to hold him accountable. “God only knows how many times I sicced the fourth estate on third world presidents. God only knows how many times they weren’t really bad guys,” he said to himself.  

He then made copies of these documents and placed them in an old Timberland boots box. On top of the copied documents, he placed the old Japanese magazine he had had in his closet for over three decades. He wrote on a piece of paper and included some of the words from the credits that rolled at one of three endings of Castlevania III. The ending includes Trevor and Grant bringing justice to medieval Europe, standing in triumph, blood brothers, bad fucking hombres. 

Big, 

We are not the sum of our parts. We are our community, and without a people, we are just beings in a vacuum. In the end, we will start to rebuild the destroyed areas of the city. 

- Rodrigo