What was Bengoa’s shoe size? Would he accept the Adidas in exchange for a box of vials?

Argenis had seen Bengoa’s feet once, when the doctor was washing his brick-colored Russian car in front of his house. Like the rest of his anatomy, his feet were hairy and square, like wolf paws. The symmetry of his false teeth also reminded Argenis of an animal, although he didn’t know which one.

Months ago, on the way to the airport in Santo Domingo, his dad had said to his mom, “Bengoa is a brother in arms,” referring to their old revolutionary fervor. Sitting quietly in the back seat, Argenis had listened to them celebrating the brilliance of Chávez and the achievements of the Dominican volleyball team and its new Cuban coach. The divorce was ancient history and they now chitchatted like old friends, talking about Argenis in the third person. Bengoa and Susana had talked about him in the same way as he had twisted in pain in that broken bed. As if he didn’t exist. “Did he drink any water?” “How many times did he go to the bathroom?” In his mind, Argenis offered Bengoa the T-shirt he was wearing, a Police T-shirt the doctor had once complimented him on and that now smelled of various secretions, in exchange for 1cc of Temgesic.

Bengoa came over almost every afternoon to see how he was doing. He’d take his pulse, check his blood pressure, make cruel jokes about diarrhea and nausea. “This will make you a man,” he’d said, “a real, honest-to-God man.” Then he’d ask Susana for coffee or a soda and both would leave the room. Argenis would follow the doctor’s tenor voice through the apartment, his disorderly laugh, the way he dragged the chairs before sitting in them, until the apartment’s front door would shut and Susana would again enter the room, to get him to drink a broth she’d made from the garlic and plantains Bengoa had so generously brought.

Unlike those invalids in books who lose all sense of time, Argenis knew perfectly well how many days it had been since his last fix. When he was free from the vision of the car, he counted the minutes on the plastic wall clock he had moved to his bedroom the day the vials ran out, knowing that after a certain number of days the withdrawal syndrome would end, but the minutes were long, being, as they were, full of pain and holograms on repeat.

Vantroi finished rehearsing and Argenis heard him rummaging through his dented drawers for lipstick and nylon stockings on the other side of the wall. That night Vantroi would be Janet Jackson at a makeshift club at a house in Vedado. Argenis would take advantage of Vantroi’s absence and, filled with miraculous health, go up to the roof of the building, slip through the neighbor’s balcony, and take back the sneakers, for which he meant to get a month’s worth of vials from Bengoa.