Loudspeaker

The problem wasn’t that it was night. It was timing.

Despite the lack of working streetlights, at ten her neighbors would still have been awake, their outdoor lights still on, and the occasional car could still have been heard passing through with its music thumping at full blast.

But, thanks to her old Nissan, so rusty it was no longer red but maroon, unable to go any faster than fifty miles an hour without making old man noises to complain about the length of the I-95—all rat-tat-tat-tas and sudden pops of sound—she was now never home before midnight. Midnight. When there were no longer signs of life to act as bodyguard. When it was too late for anybody to “walk her” to her door without knowing that’s what they were doing.

During the day, her neighborhood, deep in Miami’s Norwes, was like so many others: bright colors grown dirty, people tired from work, the whole place morphing by evening into a playground for the divorced from society, from jobs and laws and rules.

They moved around, shadows floating from end to end of the empty baseball park across the street from her apartment. That’s when the houses on her sidewalk became spectators, bored of the play they were watching, counting the minutes to its end, while across the street, the park, with every one of its lights switched off, became the darkened stage on which these shadow-beings moved around.

Just last week, she’d realized that the shadows she only ever saw when she got home late were really men. Her “traumas and refusal to move on” had not imagined them. There they were: tattooed, wearing wife beaters, walking their hunched-over walk, shorts sagging precariously above their knees. Around them, a silvery fog, the occasional golden ember of a cigarette, maybe legal, most probably not. They wore heavy metal chains, brassy, silvered, and gold, and they’d watch her pull up.

She, too, would look at them then, and remember things there was no point in remembering. Things she kept locked away along with all the things from her years growing up in her country.

One day they caught on. Figured out she feared them in that way and began whistling at her. Running up to within inches of her car when she got home, making her run to her door and lock it behind her while leaving the car door open and the liter of milk she had just bought at the gas station abandoned on the passenger seat.

Of course she called the police. And they came. Forty-five minutes later. Said there was nothing they could do to help if the men she was accusing hadn’t done anything to her.

After that, she started to hate going home, but where could she go? Her mother would ask a million questions, then blame her for everything she tried to explain. Her girlfriends had boyfriends and girlfriends. Her own ex-boyfriend, too, had a girlfriend.

The coworker who sat at her table in the call center lived with his parents and seemed like a nice guy. One night she explained what was happening, asked if she could sleep over at his house. He agreed, but she had barely taken off her shoes and arranged the pillow and sheets he had handed her ceremoniously, expectantly, when she realized her mistake. Her coworker had assumed the whole “story” had been an excuse to achieve her true goal in life: sleeping with him.

“Look, I’m not running a hotel. I thought you wanted this. But this is my parents’ house, OK?”

She had to work with him so she apologized as if she were wrong. And he kept arguing as if he were right.

“If you’re scared, buy yourself a dog,” was the last thing he said before slamming the door shut behind her.

A dog? Where was she supposed to put a dog? She worked all day. Her landlord wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t have the money for a dog. She didn’t have the soul, the life’s breath, for a dog.

On the third week of fear, she caught one of the tattooed spying on her through the window and let out a scream that froze her own heart. The kind that could only come out of the kind of person she had sworn she wouldn’t be when it was her turn to adult.

It shook her, that scream. Changed something. Made her feel sorry for herself. Showed her who she’d become: poor, alone—apendejada, as her father, the brave man who so enjoyed beating and humiliating her already-too-old-for-that-shit mother, would’ve said.

She saw herself clearly then: surviving a mediocre existence, with little to call her own. A comfy bed to sleep in and a glass of cold milk before bedtime, her only luxuries. And even that! Even those small comforts, she was letting men take from her.

The next morning, the woman went to the hardware store and bought a loudspeaker and a flashlight. She looked online for how to jam a door shut with a chair, then drove to the Salvation Army store in Allapattah and bought one tall enough for her purpose. It was made of wood and bamboo, and the bamboo parts were coming apart, but the wood was reddish and very hard. Made the chair heavy and, she hoped, sturdy. It cost four dollars.

Back in her room, she picked up an old and heavy amber glass ashtray and put seven pieces of sewing thread under it to stretch across the doorframe when she shut the door, so she could tell if someone came in when she wasn’t there. Then she headed to work so she would be in her position by 1 p.m., the shift her supervisor refused to change when she’d told him she lived in a bad neighborhood and was afraid of being assaulted.

“If we gave a day shift to everybody who wants one, we’d have no one to work nights.”

She’d nodded, not trusting her voice to hold up if she tried to explain the difference between the “everybody” that wants, and the one person who needs. How she just knew she would not know how to continue if “that” happened to her again.

When she got home at 11:30 p.m., the men with the tattoos were on the sidewalk in front of her building. When she turned into the communal driveway, they all looked in her direction, their expressions mocking.

She took a few deep breaths, her eyes fixed on them through the rearview mirror. Then she turned off the car, tossed the keys into the purse she slung across her chest, picked up the loudspeaker and the flashlight from the passenger seat, and got out of the car to face them.

The street seemed asleep except for a single streetlight shining over the men and their tattoos, the reflection making their white cotton wife beaters look like silver vests.

When they began to cross the street toward her, she lifted the loudspeaker to her mouth, switched it on, and said, “I am a woman, alone,” the sound louder than she remembered when she’d tested it in the hardware store’s parking lot.

Stunned at first, all four of them burst out laughing after a few seconds.

“I’m a woman, alone, and . . . I want to be left alone,” she continued, feeling the same rage she had felt the night before. “I just got off work. Worked for hours. I am tired.” She felt a light turn on somewhere behind her. Maybe her neighbor, as usual sticking his head out the window at the slightest sound of discord suitable for gossip? She prayed.

Someone somewhere yelled, “Shet up! Tryin’ to sleep here,” and one of the tattooed ones took it as a signal to walk up to her, pupils ignited with a dull, steely shine even before she’d turned on the flashlight and pointed it at his face.

“What do you want? Step back!”

Her voice sounded strangled, shrill. But she knew she had to keep talking if she was going to wake anybody up.

“You . . . you going to attack me? That it? What do you—step back!” she said, still talking into the loudspeaker, trying to articulate every word, to cast a protective spell while thinking about the voice that had told her to shut up from some dark room in some dark house behind her. It had been a woman, she was almost sure, and she wondered what would happen when the novelty of amplified sound wore off.

The guy who’d come up to her turned to look at his friends standing a few feet behind him as if to say, “Watch me.” Then he turned back to face her, spitting his words: “Listen here, bitch, get that thing out of my face now or I’m a bust your head open with it, you unnerstan’?”

But his voice, too, was picked up and amplified by the loudspeaker, and when he heard himself, his eyes darkened even more, his face became taut so that she caught a glimpse of the tattoo she had believed to be a goatee, but which was really the hilt of a sword. A beautiful one that looked like it was part of him and gave him the aspect of a gladiator.

“I can’t,” she said, words wobbly as inexperienced ballerinas, her mind darting and all of her shaking, thinking it was coming, and could she scream loud enough, long enough, if they lunged at her?

What had gotten into her? This was a ridiculous idea. She would be a headline. Like the brave girl assaulted by dozens on a bus in India. Like the reporter, raped by hundreds in Cairo while people chanted for freedom all around her. Like the little Miami girls asphyxiated with plastic by their mother’s boyfriend and raped after dead. Like so many, she thought, trembling uncontrollably from fear and paranoia but still looking straight at that sword, knowing he could sense it. Her terror.

He was smiling now, his pupils shining as the length of a toothpick emerged from his mouth and was held there by the triangle his lips had formed. Behind him, his friends were not smiling.

“People are calling the police right now,” she said over the loudspeaker then, surprised to finally hear something resembling her voice, wanting to believe it was the megaphone talking for her. “I’m sure more than one person is recording all of this on their phone,” she added, raising her voice like a preacher even though it wasn’t true and it had made her sad that another woman had tried to shout her down.

Her words echoed down the street, as if knocking on the doors of those who lay asleep. Please, please wake up. You don’t have to do anything. Just wake up.

“Forget that bitch, bro. She ain’t worth it,” said one of the others, all four of them starting to withdraw.

But the one with the toothpick on his lips and the sword handle on his chin didn’t move. Kept watching her even after two more bright lights came on behind her.

“See? There’s the sign. Those lights? Means they have it all on video,” she said, looking at him for every year of fear she had lived without yet turning thirty. And continuing to look into those empty eyes until they were blacker than dirt holes and he turned away without a word, running to catch up with the others in his quartet.

Then she watched them all walk away, laughing as if they’d won, turning back to look at her still standing there.

By the time she’d turned off the loudspeaker, the flashlight, and walked slowly into her home, they were long gone.

That night before bed, she drank her glass of cold milk watching an episode of an American sitcom she had seen at least fifty times. In it, a group of friends live together in a poor neighborhood in New York and pass the time making silly jokes and falling in love with each other, and she watched until she fell asleep.

The next morning, she drove to the animal shelter and adopted a small female mutt who never stopped trembling. Named her Carmen.