The Gym in Chapinero

Chapinero, Bogota. 10:25 p.m. One million three hundred thousand pesos. Sixty-two minutes on camera.

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

I was twenty six, night shift, and I had a sister in Medellin who thought I was doing fine. The gym closed at ten and I locked the front door at ten past, and the last of them were always the same four men who did not believe a closing announcement applied to them. When the lights went down to the night setting, half the machines and the mirror wall at the back, I did my round with the clipboard and the torch and found the man in the good jacket sitting on the bench press with his hands on his knees.

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

"Senor. We are closed."

"I know." He looked at the clipboard. "The door, the camera, the cash. The rest is between us and the mirrors." "How much do they pay you?"

"What?"

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

"A month. How much."

There were stories about the Angel of Bogota that went round the night shift, and I had listened to all of them the way you listen to a radio in another room. A man who paid in advance. A man whose face was never in the picture. A man who left before you could ask him anything.

I told him, because there was no reason not to and because he had a way of asking that made not answering feel stupid. "One million three hundred thousand, before deductions."

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

"And after?"

"One million one hundred and forty. More or less."

"And the rent?"

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

"Four hundred and fifty."

"And your brother's books?"

I looked at him. "How do you know about my brother?"

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

"You have a photograph taped inside the clipboard." He did not smile. "Answer the question."

"Sixty thousand, maybe. In the semester."

He took an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and set it on the bench beside him. It was fat. He did not open it. He said, "That is one month. It is yours now, in your hand, before anything happens. In exchange I want one hour in this room after the door is locked, with you, and I want to film it."

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

I looked at the envelope for a long time. I had been on nights for eight months and I had a mother in Kennedy and a brother who needed books.

"The camera," I said.

"On the machine there. Pointed at the bench. I will not be in the frame. My face is never in the frame." He said it as if it were the first line of something he had said many times. "The door stays locked. You keep your keys. If you want it to stop, it stops and the money is still yours."

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

"And if I say no?"

"Then I put the envelope back in my pocket and I walk out and you lock the door behind me and we are both embarrassed." He shrugged. "I have been turned down. It is not fatal."

I said yes. I want that in the file plainly, because it is the only part of the story that people will try to take away from me later: I said yes to the money first and to the man second, and by the end of the hour the order had reversed, and that is not a thing I can explain to my mother.

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

He put the phone on the leg press with a folded towel under it. I turned off the main lights and left the strip over the mirror wall, and the room went blue and silver and very quiet. In the mirror I could see the whole place, the treadmills in a row like something waiting, and myself standing there in the uniform polo with the logo on the chest, and him behind me taking off his jacket.

"Shirt off," he said. "Keep the trousers. Keep the shoes."

I took the shirt off. He came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face the mirror, and then he stood behind me with his chin almost on my shoulder and looked at us both in the glass, and I understood that the mirror was the point. Not the camera. The mirror.

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

"Look at yourself," he said. "You are going to want to look away. Do not."

He undid my belt from behind. His hands came around and he took me in one fist and worked me slowly while I watched, and his other arm was across my chest, and I could feel him hard against the small of my back through his trousers. In the mirror his face was right there beside mine, close enough to touch, and the camera behind us saw none of it. It was like being watched by two different people at once.

"On the bench," he said. "On your back."

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

The bench was cold and the padding stuck to my skin. He pushed my knees up and apart and stood at the end of it, and the strip light put a hard white line down the middle of him. He was thick, thicker than I had any frame of reference for, and it curved up toward his stomach, and I remember thinking, with the strange calm of a man who has already been paid, that there was no way, and then he used his fingers and a bottle from the briefcase and took his time, and there was a way.

"Breathe out when I push," he said. "Not in. Out."

I breathed out. It hurt and then it opened and then it was not pain at all but a kind of pressure that made my eyes water and my hands go to the bar above my head and hold on. He went in to the base and stopped and looked down at me with his hand flat on my stomach.

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

"Still with me?"

"Si, senor."

"Say it in English."

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

"I am with you," I said, and he almost smiled.

Then he fucked me on the bench press in a gym in Chapinero with the shutter down and the city going on outside, and the bench creaked, and I stopped caring about the creaking. My legs were over his arms. The mirror showed me things I did not know about my own body. He was not rough, but he was not careful either, and at some point I got loud and he put two fingers in my mouth to shut me up, and I sucked on them because it was something to do with my mouth, and he said, "Good," and then, "Again," and I did it again.

I came on my own stomach without being touched, and he pulled out and finished over my chest and my throat, and then he stood there breathing for a moment with his hand on the bench.

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

We cleaned up with the towels from the trolley and I mopped the bench twice. He dressed and put the phone away and folded the tripod down, and then he did something I did not expect. He took a card out of his wallet and put it on the machine beside the envelope.

"If your brother needs books," he said, "call that number. Not for this. For the books."

"You are not what they say you are."

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

"What do they say?"

"That the Angel of Bogota is a story. That he does not exist."

"Then the story is right about the important part."

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

"How do you know about my brother?"

"You told me. Ten minutes ago. You have been talking the whole time." He buttoned his jacket. "You should know that about yourself."

He waited while I unlocked the door, and stepped out into the street, and the shutter came down behind him. I stood in the blue light with a month of my salary in my hand and the whole room smelling of disinfectant and something else, and I did the last round with the clipboard. Everything was in order. Nothing was missing.

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

In the morning the day manager asked me why the bench press smelled of bleach. I said a client had spilled a shake.

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