Cut scenes from a short story in progress

There’s a problem at the paper with my check. The pay clerk’s cheeks shake when he talks and I can’t make out what he wants. Una factura, he says. He shows me a sheet stapled to a payroll receipt. Una factura, he repeats. He spreads the paper slip apart on his counter, making sure his fingers don’t block any relevant text.
English translations of “factura” I am familiar with: pastry n : a glazed baked good, sometimes filled with cream or fruit. I imagine handing the clerk a cruller in exchange for cash. His tongue works rogue flakes of fried dough from his lips after a big bite, a squirt of filling escapes down his wrist, his sticky hand shoots aloft to bid me happy spending as I turn to descend the office steps. Instead, I shove away from his window and a native takes my place.
This kid doesn’t understand anything, I understand them say.

Even Carl’s superior command of Spanish couldn’t fill his checkless hands this week. He also neglected to hassle with the work visa process and, like me, is technically a “tourist.” He says it’s not that the country is in the throes of a gringo purge or that an argument erupted on the Parliament floor over a bill that damns illegals’ abilities to make a working wage — the company just decided to get legit and demand employees present facturas on payday. My mind drifts to the pay clerk gobbling a frosted croissant. Facturas are tax forms, he explains, ignition switches that keep the public funding engine humming. The ministry tracks you check to check to ensure it gets its proper cut. You and I were duty free, but now we have to pay the piggy.

The brush-fire smoke is in everyone’s lungs. The coughing inside the police station makes it impossible to concentrate. It wheezes at intervals from the crowd in the rows of chairs bolted to the floor, from behind the counter where the paper sorters sort, from the admin offices, the conference pods. It chokes from the vents in the ducts that run between the lobby and where the beatings take place: Cough up the information, chump.
I fill in the parts of the forms I can understand (nombre, appellido, fecha de nacimiento) and hope the rest are optional. This is a Carl lead, and will require plenty of smiling. He said the police will confirm I have a permanent address in an actual residence, then stamp a sheet or sign a slip or teach me a secret handshake I can use in the tax office to get a number with thirteen digits. I present my number at a licensed print shop to receive a stack of facturas so I can give one to the clerk at work for my check and buy a ticket to wherever Doug is alone in a bar and cave his skull in from behind with a thick bottle of hard liquor. As long as the officials here neither notice nor care that I have nothing whatsoever that indicates any right to citizenship status or benefits, I’ll have money in my pocket, a bloody glass bludgeon, and peaceful sleep on a return flight South.
I understand so little of the police teller’s spiel that I’m afraid they’ll arrest me straight out of my seat. Her face and cadence express the boredom of a seasoned military torturer. I hope I can pass this off as confusion — I was trying to buy a cruise ticket. Aren’t these the right forms to fill out for the cathedral tour? Where is the cultural center? The translating part of my brain shorts out and the teller’s lips produce a noise I’m certain begins to mean: The cot mattresses are continually damp with piss and blood, but this won’t affect you at least until Thursday because handsome foreigners attempting to commit citizenship fraud almost always spend their first nights with the lights off on the floor being raped by their guards and cellmates. Breakfast is at seven — mostly gruel and mold — and if you kill someone for drugs you can trade them for lunch. Your embassy knows you’re lying to us and would rather avoid a spectacle, so since you have no prominent family or powerful friends you’ll most likely be denied phone privileges until you hang yourself with your sheet.
Can I take these home to fill out? I ask.
Si, the officer sighs.

++

If there’s one thing Agnes has learned to hate it’s a backpacker. Look, she said to a swarthy blonde one who had approached her in our corner expat bar, I know the mystical beads you got in Quito from a shaman dispel the spirits of conquistadors who in death still insist on ravaging native customs that you in your multicultural grace are hell-bent to preserve, but as soon as your brain adapts to the potency of the local cocaine you’ve been snorting you’ll realize it’s better sooner than later that you end your wild post-collegiate rite of passage abroad and go back to London to trade commodities because every stupid tale of adventure you’ve got to tell me is exactly the same as a thousand others I’ve already daydreamed through.
I carried her out at the behest of the barman after the ensuing scene. It was really just us laughing,