Lucio’s wife and daughter are asleep upstairs and he is nodding off in front of Heat, alone on the couch where he sleeps, when his daughter’s teacher, Yael, texts him for the first time since she ended their affair.
– Hey, are you busy? she writes.He doesn’t know what to tell her. The thrill of her name on the screen fades instantaneously. He’s been happily settled on the couch, the crick in his back slowly opening, the tired ache leaking out. He was even thinking of having a bowl of his daughter’s Coco Pops, if there’s enough in the box.
– Hi, he says. Long time.
– Hi, yeah. Listen. Sorry. Little emergency.
On the screen, a black tar of burst eardrum leaks from the side of a dazed-looking bank guard’s head.
He loves this film.
Michael Mann really did his homework. The steam rising from the bullet holes in Robert De Niro’s chest, the thing about eyeballs turning black when people are shot in the head – he loves those bits. Sometimes it feels like nobody cares enough about bodies to know things like this. But Michael Mann does. He gets it. If they met, he thinks they’d get on, talking about stuff like that. Lucio cares about the bodies, too. He has to. He’s a forensic cleaner, sterilising the homes of people who have been murdered, or have died in destitution. Not even the police had wanted to know what his job entailed when he’d started out, dropping off his business card at the precincts.
The cursor pulses at the bottom of the WhatsApp window on Lucio’s phone. While he is trying to pick words out of the big wad of everything he’s never been able to say to Yael, she calls him.
– Are you there? says Yael.
– Little? he says. Little emergency? How’s that?
