Episode 05: Last Call, Locked Door

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Episode 05 is a last-call episode, which in this season means a locked door and a man who has nowhere to be until morning. It is the stillest Angel of Bogota episode, and the one that smells most like a room. A bar in La Candelaria with the chairs already up, a bartender counting the till for the ninth year in a row, and one customer who does not finish his drink. The Angel of Bogota episodes rarely stay in one room this long. This one does, and the room earns it.

Orlando is thirty-one and has poured drinks in the same bar for nine years, which is three years longer than the owner has been able to pay the rent. The owner is a soft, worried man named Hernan who told him on Monday that the lease is not being renewed, that the bar closes at the end of the month, and that he is sorry, and that Orlando should start looking.

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So Orlando is looking. He is looking at the till, which has eighty-two thousand pesos in it on a Thursday, and he is looking at the notice on the door that says the bar will close permanently, and he is looking at the one customer left in the place, a stocky man at the end of the bar who has been nursing the same rum since eleven and has not looked at his phone once.

"You are closing," the man says. It is not a question.

"Twenty minutes," Orlando says. "You can finish."

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"I have finished." The man pushes the glass away. "Sit down."

"I am working."

"There is no one here."

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Orlando laughs, because it is true and because the laugh is cheaper than the alternative. He pours himself a measure of the good aguardiente, the bottle Hernan keeps for himself, and sits down on the customer side of his own bar for the first time in nine years.

"You are the owner?" the man asks.

"I am the bartender. The owner is at home, worrying."

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"And you are worrying."

"I am thirty-one and I have no savings and the bar closes in eleven days." Orlando drinks. "So yes. I am worrying."

The man reaches down and lifts a black briefcase onto the bar. He sets it flat, opens it, and turns it so Orlando can see. There is money in it, more money than the till has ever held, and Orlando's first thought is that he is about to be robbed by a very patient man.

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"I am not robbing you," the man says, as if the thought had been spoken out loud. "I want the room. After you lock the door."

"The room."

"You, and the camera. My face does not go in it. Three hundred thousand pesos. You say stop, I stop, the money is yours and I leave. That is the whole of it."

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Orlando looks at the money. Then he looks at the notice on the door, and the chairs stacked upside down on the tables, and the burn mark on the bar where a cigarette went down in 2017, and he feels something in his chest give way with an almost physical sound.

"Three hundred," he says.

"Cash. Now."

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"Then yes." His voice comes out rougher than he meant it to. "Yes. Lock the door."

He locks it himself. He turns the deadbolt and pulls the curtain across the glass and turns off the sign, and when he turns around the man has the phone off the gimbal and is setting it on a tripod on top of the bar, angled down the length of it.

"Behind the bar," the man says. "Take off your shirt there. That is where you belong."

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Orlando goes behind the bar. He unbuttons his shirt and folds it, because he has folded everything in this bar for nine years, and puts it under the counter. The man comes around and stands in front of him with the light behind him and looks at him the way he has looked at no one all night, which is to say directly.

"You are not a boy," the man says.

"No."

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"Good." He puts his hand flat on Orlando's chest. "Boys need to be told what they are. You already know."

Orlando does not answer, because his throat has closed. The man's hand slides down to his belt and opens it, and then the button, and then the zip, and he takes Orlando's cock out and holds it in his fist with the same unhurried patience he brought to his drink.

"Turn around," he says. "Hands on the bar."

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The wood is cold and then warm. The man's body comes up behind him and his mouth finds the back of Orlando's neck and stays there while his hand works, and Orlando's forehead goes down against the bar and his breath fogs the varnish.

"Three hundred thousand pesos," the man says against his skin. "That is four months of rent in a room in San Cristobal. You will not spend it in this bar."

"I might."

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"You might." The hand stops. "Ask me."

"Ask you what."

"You know what."

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Orlando's hands tighten on the edge of the bar. "Do it," he says. "Please. Do it now."

The lubricant is in the briefcase. The man takes his time with it, one finger and then two, and Orlando's legs shake and hold, and the bar creaks under his hands. Then the man fits himself against him and pushes in slowly, one long unbroken movement, and Orlando makes a sound that he has not made in years and could not reproduce if he tried.

The man sets a rhythm and does not vary it, and it is the steadiness that undoes him, the way it goes on and on and does not hurry toward anything. The bar is dark except for the one lamp over the till. Somewhere outside a motorbike goes past. Orlando's hand slips on the wood and the man's hand comes down over it and holds it there.

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"You are good at this," the man says.

"I have had practice at standing still."

"Not the same thing."

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When it ends, Orlando is leaning over his own bar with his cheek on the varnish and his eyes closed, and the man is already dressed and counting money onto the bar in a neat fan.

"Count it," he says.

Orlando counts it with one hand, still leaning. Three hundred thousand. He has not been given anything in nine years without having to earn it twice.

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"Will you come back?" he asks. "Before it closes."

The man snaps the briefcase shut. "No," he says. "I do not come back to the same room twice."

"Why?"

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But the man is already at the door, and he opens it himself, and the cold comes in, and he is gone down the street before Orlando has finished asking. Orlando locks it behind him, then stands there with the money in his hand and the chairs on the tables and the lamp still burning over the till.

The trailer stops here. The episode does not.