Night Bus to the Valley

Bogota to Girardot. 10:50 p.m. One hundred and fifty thousand pesos. Seventy-one minutes on camera.

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

My mother put me on the eleven o'clock bus every second Friday of the semester, and the ticket was always for the window seat on the left, because she said the left side had the better view of the valley when the sun came up. The bus left the terminal at ten fifty and it was never full. That was the whole reason I took it. A full bus is a place where you cannot stretch out. An empty one is a place where anything can happen and nobody lifts their head.

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

He got on at the last door before the driver pulled out, with a black briefcase and a jacket that did not belong on a bus to Girardot, and he walked down the aisle looking at the seats and not at the people. There were maybe nine of us. He stopped at my row.

"This one?" he said.

"Libre, senor."

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He put the briefcase in the overhead rack and sat down beside me, on the aisle side, which I thought was strange, because a man who wants to sleep takes the window. The bus pulled out and the lights of the terminal slid away and the man said nothing for forty minutes. I know it was forty because I was watching the clock on my phone and pretending to read.

Then he said, "You are going home."

"Si. My mother."

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

"University?"

"Engineering. Third semester."

The name had gone round the terminal once, from a porter who had been paid to carry a black briefcase down to the platform and had been paid again to forget it. The Angel of Bogota, he called him, and would not say why.

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"You are not from Girardot," I said.

"No."

"Then why the bus?"

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"Because a car can be followed and a bus cannot. And because the back row is empty at this hour." He looked at me. "You are wondering if I am police."

"I was wondering."

"Police do not pay in advance." He nodded. The bus turned onto the autopista and the lights got sparse. He reached up and pulled the curtain across my window, and then he leaned across me and pulled the one on the other side, so that we were in a small dark box with a blanket on the seat back and the sound of the engine.

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"I will be direct," he said. "I have a hundred and fifty thousand pesos and an hour. The back row is empty. You will be filmed from up there, from the luggage rack, and my face will not be in it. Nobody will know. If you say no, I get off at the next toll and you keep your Friday."

I should have been frightened. I have thought about that a lot, about why I was not. It was the way he said it, I think. Like a man reading out a bus timetable. There was nothing in his voice that needed me to say yes, and somehow that was the thing that made me say it.

"The camera," I said. "Where."

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

"On the rack. Pointed down. The blanket covers us to the shoulders." He looked at me. "You are twenty-two?"

"Twenty-two."

"Then we understand each other." He took an envelope out of his jacket and put it in my hand, and it was thick and folded twice, and I put it in my sock without counting it, which I have never done before or since.

See what the camera actually caught → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

We moved to the back row. He set the phone up in the luggage rack with the lens angled down and the little red light came on, and I saw him check the frame twice, and then he sat down and pulled the blanket over both of us. Under the blanket it was warm and smelled of dust and of him, cardamom and something sweet and cheap, rum maybe, and the engine made the whole row vibrate.

"Take your shoes off," he said. "Nothing else. Not yet."

I took my shoes off. He put his hand on my knee and left it there, and we sat like that while the bus went down through the dark and the driver played a radio station from Fusagasuga at low volume. Then his hand moved up.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

He was in no hurry. That is what I remember. He touched me under the blanket for what felt like half an hour, the flat of his hand and then his fingers, and every time I made a sound he stopped and waited until the sound was gone, and then started again. I had my forehead against the seat back and my hand gripping the armrest and I was trying to breathe through my nose like a man in a dentist's chair.

"Quiet," he said. "The woman in row nine is awake."

"I cannot."

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"You can. Think of something dull. Think of the toll road."

"I am trying."

"Try harder. If she turns around I stop and you keep the money and we both sit here for two hours like strangers."

The video behind this story → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

"She will not turn around."

"No. She will not."

"You can. You will." His mouth was at my ear, his voice almost nothing. "Turn toward the window."

See the hour the camera kept → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

I turned. He came up behind me and pressed me against the seat back, one arm across my chest, and the blanket fell half off and he pulled it back up over my shoulder with a patience that made me want to cry. His hand worked between us and I felt him, thick and hot and curved, and then the head of it pressing, and I bit down on my own wrist.

He went in slow. So slow that I thought he had stopped, and then he was all the way in and I heard myself make a noise like a door opening, and he put his hand over my mouth and did not move for a long time, just held me there, breathing against the back of my head.

"Now you may be quiet," he said, "or you may not, and I will keep my hand here either way."

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

He fucked me against the seat back while the bus went down the mountain. The road curves and the engine and the radio covered most of it. The man in row nine coughed once and shifted and I nearly died. Angel did not stop. He held the rhythm, deep and slow, and every time the bus took a curve his weight shifted and the angle changed and I had to press my mouth into the blanket.

Somewhere past Fusagasuga I came, without warning, without a hand on me, and he felt it and said, "Good boy," in that voice, and then his hand tightened on my chest and he finished inside me with his forehead against my neck.

He was off me and dressed before the lights of the valley came up. He wiped the seat with something from the briefcase, put the phone away, and sat down beside me again in the aisle seat as if nothing at all had occurred, and the woman in row nine was still asleep.

See what the camera actually caught → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

At the Girardot terminal he stood up and took his briefcase down and looked at me once.

Down the aisle, he stopped at my row and looked at me for the last time.

"Your mother will be at the stop," he said. "Wash your face in the terminal before you go out."

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

"Senor." I did not know what I wanted to ask.

"Do not ask." He stepped into the aisle. "The Angel of Bogota gets off before the questions start. It is the only way he keeps getting on."

The driver opened the doors and the hot valley air came in, and he was gone across the lot before I had my shoes on. I washed my face. My mother said I looked tired from the semester.

Stream the uncut version (18+) → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

File closed. Subject paid in full. Camera card retained.