The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

the gray-black sky, blurred further by his faulty wipers, so that the concrete blocks of houses, the shiny metal of cars, and the sharp straightness of trees become patternless streaks of green and brown.
    As Gabriel passes through the prison gates, he begins to discard thoughts of Sessina, Pedro, the news on the television. He begins to think of his rounds, the fifteen-minute breaks he will have as the night progresses, how he will have to speak with the janitors about cleaning the third-floor catwalk. He knows that the ceiling leaks and that moisture will bleed through the walls, bringing with it lizards and cockroaches.
    In the administrative offices, Gabriel passes the secret policemen. They are frozen in the same positions as the night before, only now three of them smoke and one man gazes out a window at the cliff face and the downpour falling onto the black sand beach below. The sea bellows and shrieks against the rock.
    These men always look the same — outwardly relaxed, but posed so exactly that Gabriel believes them guilty of a hidden tension, as if, full to bursting with secrets and mystery, they must sit just so, their clothes pressed perfectly so they resemble figures in a wax museum.
    What new secrets do they possess that they did not know yesterday? Gabriel thinks as he checks in at the front desk.
    Administrative work awaits Gabriel and he spends six hours sorting and filing various forms in a ten-by-ten room with flickering fluorescent lights. He can feel the pressure of the sea colliding against the impervious rock: the crunch of waves, maddened beyond reason, so compressed and thick that something, somewhere, must give way, the entire world unmoored.
    His friend Alberto — short and swarthy and enjoyably foul-mouthed — enters three or four times to share a joke and a cigarette, but for the most part Gabriel is alone with his aching leg and the red tape of El Toreador’s bureaucracy. As Gabriel places one file atop the next, one piece of paper atop another, he thinks of D’Souza’s face pressed up against the bars, and then of his father’s face.
    Gabriel cannot remember many times that his father was not in prison, pressed up against those bars. The wane smile. The sad eyes. Gabriel can remember the feel of his mother’s hand in his during those visits, the hand progressively thinner and more bony, until it seemed she was only made of bone, and then even less substantial: a gossamer strand, a dress blowing, empty, in the wind. She had survived her husband by less than three months and Gabriel knew that his father’s incarceration, his death in jail, had diminished her, so that she had died not so much from a broken heart as from a sense of shame that burrowed beneath the skin and poisoned her every action.
    The sheets of paper he collates seem as thin as his family history, the only depth provided by Pedro, who once caroused with him around a Merida traffic circle and crashed joyously into oncoming cars. Lucky Pedro, well fed in Mexico.
    At last, Gabriel has filed the last file and he begins his rounds with the common prisoners on the first and second floors: the murderers and rapists and bank robbers.
    The wind buffets the prison walls; Gabriel thinks he can almost feel the floor shift beneath his feet as if moved by that wind. Or perhaps he is just tired and afraid. Afraid of what?
    Lightning strikes nearby, followed by thunder, and the lights flutter violently. The beach will be drowning in water soon and only the cliff will stop the water from rising farther and flooding the interior. The rush of water is almost a second pulse.
    When Gabriel reaches the third floor, he is out of breath, in darkness lit by the bare bulbs. They swing like low-strung stars, blinding him with their glare. The janitors have yet to clean the mess and he moves through it cautiously.
    The guard at the entrance to the political prisoners’ section is not on his stool.
    The hairs on Gabriel’s arms rise in