Episode 03: The Meter Stops at Midnight

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Episode 03 is the one the guide always flags for first-time viewers, because nothing about it looks like the rest of the season and it is the only Angel of Bogota episode that never gets out of a car. No room. No bed. A white taxi on the road south of the city, a meter ticking, a boy in the back seat with eleven thousand pesos and a bag between his feet. The Angel of Bogota episodes usually get where they are going. This one takes a detour that is not on the route.

Brayan is twenty-four and has been standing at the toll booth since four in the afternoon with his thumb out and his jacket zipped to the throat. He came down from Bucaramanga on a bus ticket bought with his last money and he is trying to reach his sister in Ibague, where there is supposedly a job at a bakery and a room with a mattress in it. He has eleven thousand pesos, a change of clothes, and a phone with twenty-two percent battery that he is saving for the map.

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Cars pass. Trucks pass. A man in a pickup slows down, looks at him, and accelerates. At ten past eleven a white taxi pulls over fifty metres past the toll and waits, hazards blinking, and Brayan walks to it because it is raining and because his feet have stopped being a thing he can feel.

The window comes down. The driver is stocky, unhurried, dark jacket, gold band on his hand, and the car smells of cardamom and something sweeter underneath it.

"Where," the man says.

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"Ibague. But I do not have money for Ibague." Brayan holds up the notes, wet at the corner. "I have this. I know it is not enough."

The man looks at the notes and then at him, and something in his face moves that is almost amusement and not quite. "Get in," he says. "The meter runs."

The taxi is warm. There is a phone mounted on a small gimbal on the dash, angled away from the driver's seat, and a black briefcase on the passenger side. Brayan sits behind it with his bag between his feet and watches the meter climb in the dark, and every time it clicks he feels it in his stomach. The rain comes and goes. The road opens up.

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"The meter is at forty thousand," he says, after a while.

"I know."

"I cannot pay forty thousand."

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"I know that too." The man changes gear. He drives with one hand and does not speed. "You are not from here."

"Bucaramanga."

"And your sister knows you are coming?"

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"More or less."

The man makes a low sound that could be a laugh. "More or less," he repeats. "In this country that is how the whole family finds out."

At midnight, exactly, the man reaches over and switches the meter off. The clicking stops. In the silence it is much louder than the clicking was.

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"The meter stops here," he says. "From here it is not a fare. It is something else."

Brayan's mouth is dry. "What else."

"Two hundred thousand pesos. Cash. You, and the camera. Me, never on camera." The man taps the phone on the gimbal without taking his eyes off the road. "You say stop, I stop, you keep the money and I take you to the terminal. No trouble. That is the offer."

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They drive for a kilometre without either of them saying anything. The rain starts again, hard, and the wipers beat time.

"Why me," Brayan says.

"Because you are in the back seat and you have eleven thousand pesos and you did not lie about it." The man shrugs. "I like that. I do not like liars. Liars talk too much."

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Brayan thinks about the bakery, and the room with the mattress, and the twenty-two percent battery. Two hundred thousand pesos is a bus ticket and a week of food and a new phone charger. He thinks about the way the man said the money would still be his if he said stop, and how he said it like a fact about the weather rather than a favour.

"All right," he says.

The taxi turns off the main road at a garage with a corrugated door, and the man gets out, opens the door with a key, and drives them inside. The door comes down. There is a workbench, a coil of hose, a hanging bulb, and a car under a dust sheet. The man sets the briefcase on the workbench, opens it, and counts two hundred thousand pesos onto the bonnet of the taxi, note by note, and then he turns the phone on its gimbal to face Brayan.

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"Count it."

Brayan counts it. His hands are not steady. The money goes into his jacket pocket and the jacket goes on the workbench and the man watches all of it with the same unhurried patience, as though the watching were the thing he had paid for.

"Take off your clothes," he says. "All of it. It is warmer in here than you think."

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It is not warmer. Brayan strips anyway, shirt then jeans then shorts, and stands in the middle of the garage under the hanging bulb with his arms at his sides, and there is a moment where he is twenty-four years old and broke and being looked at by a stranger in a garage at midnight, and then the moment passes and it is only cold and then it is not even cold.

The man comes close. He is shorter than Brayan by a little and wider by a lot, and when he puts his hand flat on Brayan's chest it is like being held still without being held. He kisses like he drives. Unhurried. Certain. His other hand finds Brayan's hip and pulls it forward, and Brayan's breath goes out of him against the man's mouth.

"On the bonnet," the man says.

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The metal is cold through his back and then warm where he is lying on it. The man takes off his jacket and folds it. He does not take off anything else, which is somehow worse and better at the same time. He gets Brayan's legs over his shoulders and puts his mouth on him, and Brayan's hand goes back and knocks the wing mirror and he says sorry, and the man says nothing at all, only keeps going.

He is thick, and the curve of him is a thing Brayan feels before he understands it. One finger first, then two, with the lubricant cold and then not. Brayan's heels slide on the bonnet. The bulb swings slightly overhead.

"Say it," the man says.

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"Yes."

"Say the whole thing."

"Yes. Do it. Please."

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He does it slowly, one hand braced on the bonnet beside Brayan's head, and the pace never changes, and Brayan finds himself pushing back against it because the alternative is lying still and feeling every second of it. The garage smells of oil and rain and cardamom. The phone on the gimbal watches from the workbench and Brayan, for one strange moment, looks straight into it, and the man makes a low approving sound and goes deeper.

When it is over the man steps back and wipes his hands on a rag from the workbench. Brayan stays where he is, breathing, one arm over his eyes.

"You can sleep in the car," the man says. "Until six. Then I take you to the terminal and you buy your ticket and you do not mention the garage to your sister."

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Brayan sits up. "You are not going to ask me anything?"

"No."

"Not even my name?"

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The man closes the briefcase. "Names are the beginning of questions," he says. "And I leave before those."

He switches off the hanging bulb and goes out through the side door, and the rain comes in for a second and then the door shuts. Brayan lies back on the bonnet of the taxi in the dark with two hundred thousand pesos in his jacket and the engine still ticking as it cools, and at six in the morning the corrugated door goes up and the man is there with two coffees and no questions at all.

The trailer stops here. The episode does not.

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