Candela

At 12:47 in the morning, a woman dressed in white crossed the filling-station parking lot, and for eleven seconds I believed she belonged to me.

I had one hand on the summons and the other on the door when the likeness changed. The eyes were hers, but the mouth belonged to a young man, and beneath the mouth appeared the smooth, untroubled chin of a child. The three faces passed through one another until there was no face at all.

I remained behind the wheel.

Almost is a word the living use to console themselves. An almost-kiss. An almost-victory. An almost-fatal mistake. In my profession, uncertainty and mistakes have consequences – and the consequences are being put out of service. And that is not a pleasant thing like early retirement. And not something I wanted to experience.

The summons lay on the passenger seat.

There was no name on it. That was the problem.

There was only a place—the twenty-four-hour filling station on Paradise Road—an hour, 4:13 in the morning, and a likeness that changed each time I examined it. The likeness printed beneath them would not hold still. It had a young man's mouth, then an old woman's eyes, then the smooth, untroubled face of a child. When I looked away, I could not remember any of them.

Once, an address and an hour were enough. I could pick one stained breath out of ten thousand. The human animal has an instinct that death is around the corner. I once could smell it in the air. I had found men beneath collapsed cities, women in fields of tall grass, infants in houses without doors. Lately, the living came to me smudged at the edges. Their voices ran together. Their little distinctions—the color of the eyes, their distinct odor, the flavor of the fear, the private word each one saved for God—had become one indistinguishable crackle of white noise.

It was not the first deficiency noted in my record.

A mistaken service is permanent. It also adds one thousand years to the server's term. Repeated mistakes lead to deservice. It is not the number of such mistakes. But their import. And frequency.

No one gives us a rulebook when we take on this job.

I wore a black three-piece suit with a narrow tie, hand-cut from cloth woven before Nevada was a state. Black vines had been worked into the lapels in thread so dark they appeared only when I moved. A viper on each side coiled in smooth black thread that shone almost purple. Over the waistcoat and jacket, I had pulled a common hooded sweatshirt, and over that, a long wool coat. The temperature above the gasoline pumps was ninety-seven degrees.

A woman tapped one lacquered fingernail against my window.

I lowered it.

“You planning to rob the place or bury somebody?” she asked.

She had arranged herself in white: white heels, white trousers, a silk blouse tied at her waist. Her hair was black and cut bluntly along her jaw. A small red rose had been painted beside one eye. She leaned into the open window and studied me without smiling.

“Neither requires much planning,” I said.

“Then why are you sitting in a truck dressed for a Siberian winter?”

“I am always cold here.”

She turned and surveyed the flat black desert, the heat rolling off the pavement and bending the lights of the Strip.

“Cold.”

“It is very hot where I come from.”

She looked back at me. Something altered in her expression—not fear, exactly, but recognition.

“Ay,” she said. “Candela.”

“Is that my name?”

“Now it is. Don’t tell me you haven’t been called that before?”

“There is no end to the things I’ve been called.”

She called herself Rosy. Men arriving in Las Vegas called her whatever she told them and they paid what she asked when they purchased her time by the hour. She had come from Cuba eighteen years earlier with one dress, forty dollars, and the telephone number of a cousin in Hialeah. Now she appeared in society photographs beside casino owners and retired prizefighters. She chaired silent auctions. She knew which wives cared and which had stopped caring. Her clients called her a companion, and the magazines called her a socialite, and Rosy accepted both descriptions because labels meant nothing to her.

She was waiting for a man named Bell whose flight from Toronto had been delayed. The upcoming Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix had strangled the streets with barricades, black cars, and men in reflective vests. Hotel rooms cost more than minor surgeries. The filling station was the only place near the airport where Bell's driver could stop without entering the whole luminous snarl.

“He was supposed to land at eleven,” she said. “Now they say two-thirty. Then there is his wife calling to ask if he arrived safely.”

“And you will wait?”

“Waiting is most of the work.” She glanced at the summons. “You are waiting too.”

“I have papers for someone.”

“Process server?”

“After a fashion.”

She laughed softly. “Candela, you serve no paper.”

An engine whined behind us. A bicycle shot between the pumps, sailed over the concrete island beside the air machine, and landed hard enough to jar the rider's teeth. He circled once beneath the canopy as if expecting applause.

No one applauded.

He wore sponsor green Monster Energy trousers and a black jersey crowded with emblems. His full-face helmet hung from one hand. There was a livid bruise at his left temple, another yellowing beneath his eye, and pale seams on his chin from old repairs. He was Clyde Canyon, although Canyon was not the name on his birth certificate. His face appeared fifty feet high on a hotel near the Strip, suspended above the words NO CEILING.

He had come for the USA BMX Las Vegas Nationals, where his sponsors had arranged a freestyle exhibition between the serious races. Big Air was his specialty. Vert when the money was right. He had broken his wrists, clavicle, ankle, jaw, and numerous ribs—most of the surgically recreated structure of his rib cage was made with 3D-printed titanium fixed to the remaining bone with bone cement.

He had never broken his certainty.

“You see that?” he called.

“I saw you nearly strike a propane cage,” Rosy said.

“That's called precision.”

He dropped the bicycle beside my truck. His hands trembled when he removed his gloves, so he shoved them beneath his arms.

“How’s the water?” he asked me, seeing I was sipping on a Perrier.

“Inside.”

“I know there's water inside. I'm asking if you have water.”

Rosy handed him a small glass bottle from her bag. Clyde emptied it, wiped his mouth, and crushed the bottle cap between his fingers.

“Guy's been following me,” he said.

“What guy?”

Clyde pointed across Paradise Road. A black shape stood beyond the fencing where a torn banner snapped in the artificial wind. It was a palm tree burned down to its trunk.

“There. Paparazzi. Maybe a tail. He keeps moving every time I look.”

“That is landscaping,” Rosy said.

“Who asked you?”

He looked at me and went still. For a moment I thought the likeness on the summons had settled.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Everyone does eventually.”

Rosy closed her eyes. “You two are fucking morbid. I can’t handle this for the rest of the night.”

Inside, the filling station had no night. White tubes burned overhead. Hot dogs revolved eternally beneath a red lamp. The pizza cabinet’s heated shelves had reduced its contents to curling cheese and cardboard crust. Four slot machines chimed beside the restroom, celebrating the losses of a woman in medical scrubs.

The clerk looked up from his telephone when we entered and then looked down again. On the television behind him, racecars traveled around the same bright circuit they had occupied an hour earlier. Their speed was tremendous. Their progress was difficult to establish.

Clyde collected an energy drink, aspirin, beef jerky, two lottery tickets, and a cable for his dead telephone. I bought coffee. Rosy purchased nothing but took six paper napkins and folded them into a precise square.

“Legal name,” I said to Clyde.

“What?”

I had placed the envelope on the table between us. “I need to determine whether these are yours.”

“You a cop?”

“Process server,” Rosy said.

“Tell him Canyon,” Clyde said. “Everybody knows Canyon.”

“Your mother?” I asked.

The tremor in his hand sharpened. “What do you know about my mother?”

“Whether she knows your name.”

He rose so quickly that the chair fell behind him. A pair of boys in race credentials had entered the store and were whispering beside the beer case. One raised his telephone.

“Don't film me,” Clyde said.

“We're fans, man.”

“I said don't.”

The telephone remained upright. Clyde slapped it out of the boy's hand. It struck the tile, and the screen broke with the dry little report of ice cracking on a pond.

The second boy began recording.

Clyde lunged. I caught his wrist. His pulse galloped beneath my fingers, broke stride, and galloped again.

He stared over my shoulder.

“It's behind you.”

I turned. There was nothing there but my own black figure in the convex security mirror, bent around the ceiling like an insect trapped beneath glass.

“The demons you see are not real,” I told him.

His face drained.

“You see them too.”

“No. But the likeness is convincing, and the fear checks out.”

He tore his wrist from my hand and stumbled into the restroom. Rosy followed before the door could close.

I looked down at the summons. The face had become hers.

For several minutes I heard Rosy's voice through the door, low and stern, counting Clyde's breaths in Spanish. She had him hold ice against his neck. She told him to name five things he could see, four he could touch, three he could hear. He listened to her without pomposity – without pretense – saying, “Just make it stop, okay.”

When they returned, Clyde sat across from me and stared into the table.

“Doctors say you can't diagnose CTE until you're dead,” he said. “Convenient, right? They get to tell you afterward. Pretty challenging to lock in that forwarding address.”

“There are ways to get someone a message. You fell?”

“Everybody falls.”

“Not like you.”

He smiled. “Falling's not the trick. Any idiot can fall. The trick is picking a point beyond the landing. You look down, you stiffen. You stiffen, you die.”

“And you never look down?” Rosy asked.

“I don't plan for wipeouts.”

His telephone came alive on the charger. Messages appeared in such number that the device seemed to shudder. The broken-telephone incident had already escaped into the world. Clyde watched himself shove the boy on three different screens, each version slower and more decisive than the event had been.

His sponsor called.

He listened. He said no twice, then liar, then a word sufficiently common that even the woman at the slot machine turned around. The exhibition was cancelled. A doctor would meet him in the morning. His credentials were being suspended.

“You can't suspend Canyon,” he said after the call ended. “Canyon is the whole event.”

At 3:58, Rosy received a message from Mr. Bell. His flight had been diverted to Phoenix. He proposed tomorrow evening as if rescheduling a dinner reservation.

She read it once and deleted it.

“All that waiting,” I said. “Maybe you can rebook.”

“Waiting is still time,” she answered. “I still get paid.”

“And what will you do with what time you’ve got left?”

“Become someone else.” She looked at me to agree. “That is the great American profession, Candela. You arrive with one name, they give you another, and eventually you learn to answer before they finish calling it.”

Outside, Clyde lifted his bicycle from the pavement.

The appointed hour was approaching, and the two figures on either side of me had become indistinguishable. Rosy's rose floated on Clyde's bruised cheek. His shaking hands hung white and delicate from her wrists. The summons offered first one face and then the other.

Clyde mounted the bicycle.

“Where are you going?” Rosy asked.

“I need to finish something. My time is up.”

“It better not be me, Candela,” she said.

He drove at the concrete island, pulled the front wheel high, and cleared it. Then again. Each landing was harder. On the third pass his rear tire slid, and he struck the pavement with his shoulder.

He rose laughing.

“See?” he shouted. “Nothing.”

Across the road, the burned palm shook in the hot wind. Clyde saw it move and stopped laughing.

He pushed off toward Paradise Road.

Rosy stepped after him. At that instant the likeness fixed itself: dark hair, white clothing, the red flower beside the eye. I reached for her.

My fingers passed through the heat above her shoulder.

The airport shuttle struck Clyde without sounding its horn. He appeared beneath the headlights, rose across the windshield, and vanished behind the vehicle. His bicycle continued alone for several yards before falling against the curb.

The dashboard clock had changed to 4:13. I was eleven seconds late.

Rosy ran toward him. I took slow steps to meet her.

Clyde stood beside his body watching her kneel in the roadway. The bruises were gone from his face. So was the great certainty. Without either, he looked young enough to ask permission before leaving the house.

“Was that thing following me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then what was?”

“You were.”

I held out the envelope. The name had returned to it—not Clyde Canyon, but the smaller name his mother had spoken over his crib.

“You got the wrong guy,” he said.

“Not this time.”

He looked toward the bicycle, its wheel still turning beneath the gas-station light.

“What's past the landing?”

“You know I cannot tell you.”

He considered this, then took the papers.

When I returned to the truck, a second man in the filling-station uniform was seated behind the wheel. He was wearing a sweatshirt with an overcoat over it. The relief clerk, I had assumed, when I saw him mopping near the coffee machines. I had not been able to remember his face. Now every feature was painfully distinct.

He held out his hand.

“Badge and folio.”

“The service was completed.”

“Eleven seconds late.”

“The correct party.”

“You didn’t know that when you took him.”

Rosy stood beyond the windshield speaking with the police. She glanced once toward the truck. She knew.

“Am I being extended?” I asked.

“De-serviced.”

The word passed through me colder than any wind.

I surrendered the leather folio. The man removed the silver pin from inside my coat and placed both beneath the seat. He then took up my gold Spanish watch, which had rested unopened in the cup holder all night.

“What happens now?”

“What happens to everyone.”

“How does it work?”

“We all owe one death. You are no different.”

He pressed the watch into my palm.

The second hand moved.

Heat entered me all at once. It gathered beneath the embroidered collar, inside the waistcoat, under the ridiculous sweatshirt, until sweat ran along my ribs. My heart answered the watch with an awkward blow. Then another. The air acquired weight. My knees weakened beneath it.

I knew the hour at which the night clerk behind the register would die. I knew how long the policeman beside Clyde would live, and which illness would take the woman abandoning the slot machine. I knew Rosy's final name and the face of the person who would speak it at her bedside. All my knowledge remained.

Only my authority had gone.

Rosy approached after the ambulance departed. Dawn had reduced the great electric city to concrete, glass, and tired paint. She touched two fingers to my wrist.

“You are still cold,” she said.

“No. Quite the opposite.”

I removed the overcoat. Then the sweatshirt. The black embroidery on my lapels glimmered in the first honest light.

“What will you do, Candela?”

I looked down Paradise Road. For the first time, it ended. Every road did. The knowledge frightened me. I nearly mistook the fear for meaning.

Then I remembered Clyde sailing over the concrete island, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the landing. I remembered Rosy arriving with one name and teaching the world to call her another.

“I suppose,” I said, “I will have to become someone else. Convincingly enough that even I will believe it.”

“You think you can make it true?”

“What is truth?”

She opened the passenger door of her car.

“After breakfast,” she said. “Nobody should make that decision hungry.”

I climbed in beside her. Behind us, the filling station remained open, the hot dogs continued their revolutions, and the door chimed for a traveler who had nowhere else to go.

“What should I call you?” she asked.

“Nick.”