She was also worried about moving. She didn’t have the money to rent another apartment, she hadn’t saved—her salary hadn’t permitted it—so she would have to go back to live with her parents. She’d already checked with them, and they seemed delighted at her return. She was sorry to leave her apartment. It had a beautiful tub that she’d never used because she needed to fix a leak, and hadn’t found the time or motivation to call someone to do the work. Any other time, the owner, who was very fussy, surely would have grumbled about the deterioration of the place, which Mechi had been renting for almost two years: the holes in the walls, from the balcony to the bedroom, drilled so she could install cable and watch TV lying in bed. The gray stain on the white wall above the computer, which someone had explained was normal—the heat from the machine, the fan, something like that—but that looked awful, and that she’d only made worse by trying to clean it with water. Another stain was a real disaster: the remains of red wine vomit in the hallway on the way to the bedroom, the result of an early morning of drunkenness and blackout. Mechi remembered a guy had walked her to the front door of the building but she hadn’t let him up, and even that she’d gone to the kiosk and bought Migral for her headache and a Coca-Cola for her hangover, but she’d never been able to remember that vomit she found when she woke up the next morning, with a radiant migraine and all her clothes on, even her boots. She found the vomit there, stinking, and her keys still in the lock. Luckily, no one had taken them; luckily, none of her neighbors had noticed, because they would have gotten paranoid and called the cops.
But now it was possible the owner wouldn’t say a thing. It was even possible he wouldn’t charge her the last months of rent. People were behaving very strangely since the kids had come back, with a depressive indolence that was clear in the vacant stares of the kiosk vendors who apathetically let people run off with candy, or the subway employees who, if you didn’t have change, would let you through for free. There was a deafening calm everywhere, a vast silence on the buses, fewer phone calls, the TV kept on until late in apartments. Not many people went out, and no one went near the parks where the kids lived. The kids still didn’t do anything, they were just there. Months after the first return, one thing had become clear: the kids didn’t eat. At first, people brought them fruit and pizza and baked chicken, and the kids accepted it all with a smile, but they never ate in front of the cameras or the neighbors who brought them meals. Over time, a more daring cameraman, plus a few people with their own cameras, had started filming the kids’ daily habits. They did sleep, but they never ate or drank. They didn’t seem to need water for washing, either, or at least they never bathed, they just played with the water in the public fountains and ponds in the parks. No one wanted to talk about that, because it was unspeakable that the kids didn’t need nourishment. There was even a sense of calm that descended when a storekeeper near Avellaneda Park declared that the kids had broken into his supermarket at night and stolen a bunch of canned goods and dairy products. But then it turned out to be a common robbery, and the kids responsible lived in the nearby housing projects. When the story about the supermarket was disproved, the city went back to holding its breath, back to its insomniac waiting.
Pedro arrived on time: they’d agreed on ten o’clock, and he was there at ten. That was strange, not just because he wasn’t a punctual person, but because the newspaper usually kept him working on last-minute issues. No more: the paper was in suspended animation, like nearly everything else. Another example was the delivery boy who brought their pizza: he rang the doorbells of other apartments before reaching Mechi’s, muttering an apology and saying he’d lost the paper where he’d written down the apartment number. He nearly left without giving them change, not in an attempt to keep the money, but because he wasn’t paying attention.
Mechi commented on the delivery boy’s attitude to Pedro while she sliced the pizza—there was that too: they never came cut into portions anymore—and Pedro shook his head and opened a bottle of wine. He seemed firmly determined to get drunk, hoping for anesthesia and oblivion.
“Mechi, mamita, what the fuck is all this?” he asked after the first sip of wine. “I swear, I had information on the traffickers, on the pimps, and all of a sudden these kids turn up like nothing happened, and it all falls apart. They ruined years of work. As if it wasn’t real. But I swear to you that my investigation is real—dammit, not only mine! You see how far the prosecutor got!”
“Did she quit?”
“She’s in the process.”
“And the video of Vanadis?”
“That devil child. I’m going to sell it to a TV show. They give me the money and I swear I’m off to live in Montevideo, or Brazil, that’s it, that’s it. Come with me, Mechi, this is some mandinga shit, as my grandmother used to say.”
“The other day I read something online that I thought…I don’t know, it’s dumb.”
“Don’t spend too much time online, it’ll drive you crazy. But tell me.”
“I don’t remember well, but it’s something like this. The Japanese believe that after people die, their souls go to a place that has, so to speak, limited space. And when all the places are taken, when there’s no room for any more souls, they’re going to start coming back to this world. And that return heralds the beginning of the end of the world, really.”
Pedro was silent. Mechi thought of the photo she’d seen of Buckaroo with his chest stuck to the pavement and his legs cut in three places.
“The Japanese sure have a real-estate-focused idea of the great beyond,” Pedro finally said.
“A lot of people in a small country.”
“But yeah, Mechi, it could be. It could be that they’re coming back. It could be anything, I don’t know what to believe anymore. Last night I went to the Death House, the Caseros Prison.”
“You went to look for Vanadis’s friend?”
“Yeah, well…I don’t know why I went. It’s pointless to find her now, right? I went to see what’s up. And you know what’s there? No one.”
“How can there be no one? It was full of cracked-out kids, I went near there several times, there were druggies everywhere.”
“Everyone in the neighborhood says the same thing, and I tell them to go look, like I did. There’s no one left. I went in during the day, because I’m crazy but not that crazy, and there are clothes everywhere, cardboard, mattresses, even a couple of tents—check out the orphans with tents, one was a Doite, some fucked-up middle-class runaway. But no people. I heard something, I saw a shadow moving fast, then I freaked out and left.”
“Must’ve been a dog.”
“What do I know, it could have been anything. Seriously, there’s no one there anymore. It’s like they all ran away.”
They were silent. They’d barely touched the pizza.
“You’re really going to leave Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t want to be in this city full of ghosts with everyone going crazy, I can’t take it, Mechi. Why are you staying?”
“I don’t have a cent to my name.”
“But I do and I’ll lend you money….Let’s leave for a while, until something happens. I can’t stand this waiting—have you realized everyone’s waiting for something? They’re going to set the kids on fire. They’re going to gas them, set the cops on them, I don’t want to see any of that. Or else the kids are going to start attacking people.”
“Sounds like you’ve been spending a lot of time online too.”
“Well yeah, that’s how I know it’ll drive a person nuts. I’m getting out of here until whatever has to happen has happened, and it would be good if you came with me.”
Mechi was quiet as she looked at Pedro. His right leg was shaking like it was on a spring. He touched his hair so much it was greasy. No, she wasn’t going anywhere with Pedro. Plus, she wanted to stick around and see what it was that had to happen.
/> “Will you come with me, dear?”
“No.”
“Damn, you’re stubborn.”
“How do you know it’s only here?”
“Because it is! It’s only in Buenos Aires, you know it’s here. Go to Mar del Plata and there’s nothing like this, don’t play dumb.”
“No, I mean, how do you know it’s not going to start happening in other places?”
“You’re diabolical, Mechi. What are you imagining, some kind of apocalypse with walking dead? A lot of these kids weren’t dead, let’s start there. Quit it with the internet.”
They said goodbye with a long hug when Pedro left in the early morning. He’d decided to go to Brazil, to stay with a friend who worked at a newspaper in São Paulo and who would love to have a journalist from Buenos Aires who’d witnessed the children’s return—because, of course, the case was already known internationally. Before leaving, he told her his boss had authorized the long, four-week vacation without blinking, almost relieved. Pedro told Mechi he felt like his boss didn’t want him around. Like the guy was afraid of him.
* * *
…
Mechi noticed right away that her parents were a little checked out, like most people she came in contact with, but also that, while they helped her settle her things into her room—the one that had been hers ever since she was little—they were very curious to find out more, learn details, ask questions. She could feel their disappointment and a trace of disbelief when she told them she didn’t know anything, that she really was just as disconcerted as everyone else. The movers finished unloading her few pieces of furniture into a storage shed in back; her parents’ house was in a good neighborhood, Villa Devoto, with a lot of space, even a small swimming pool. Now that she was there, Mechi felt like it was a good place to rest.
And it was far away from the parks, and that was good, too. Very good.
Quitting her job had started out quite normal, with the council’s director assuring her that he understood perfectly. He was a reasonable man and he seemed sincerely shaken; there were circles under his eyes and a broken blood vessel in the left one. When she went to the office to get her things, the situation got a bit more strange. Graciela wasn’t there, for starters. Maria Laura, the other front-office employee, told her, with an ire she couldn’t contain, that Graciela had requested psychiatric leave, who knew if she was going to come back, that she was having serious panic attacks and couldn’t get out of bed. “Poor Graciela,” said Mechi. And then Maria Laura threw a paperweight at her. Mechi barely had time to duck, and then she stood staring: Maria Laura, with her hair dyed an ugly, wine-colored shade, her face furious, her buck teeth, tensed neck—a gargoyle in an office under the highway.
“Get out of here before I kill you!”
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong with you?”
And Maria Laura started screaming at her uncontrollably that it was all Mechi’s fault, she was the one who’d brought that little whore, that piece of trash, she was the one who’d brought her from the park that morning, Graciela was crazy and it was Mechi’s fault, and she, Maria Laura, was going to end up sick because of her too, and then you have the nerve to come here for your things, we should have burned them, you should be in jail, I don’t know, you started all this with that trashy whore, they should have killed you both but this shitty government won’t do anything, nothing nothing….
Mechi ran out with the few things she’d managed to gather stuffed into her purse. In any case, she didn’t keep too much in her desk drawers. She was sorry to leave the archive, but she couldn’t have taken it with her, it wasn’t hers, and anyway Pedro had left her his copies of some of the files, including Vanadis’s, before he got on the plane to Brazil.
In a way, she understood Maria Laura. She needed to blame someone, and Mechi was the one who’d brought Vanadis in, and that was the beginning of the kids coming back. What did disturb her was that she’d felt like she was in danger. Maria Laura would have been capable of killing her. The only thing that stopped her was that Graciela was just a little crazy, and the kids in the parks didn’t do anything, and for better or worse she was still at work. The paperweight, though, had been aimed right at Mechi’s head, and it could have hit her. Quitting had been an excellent idea.
She waited for the 134 bus that would take her to Villa Devoto on a corner across from the park. She could barely see the kids, because that area had an embankment and they never came too close to the edge, they tended to wander around inside. The startling thing was that, in the past, the sidewalk that circled Chacabuco Park had been dotted with dozens of joggers at all hours of the day, and along with the athletes were people headed for the subway entrance near the rose garden across the avenue, and neighbors walking their dogs. Now the sidewalks were deserted, and the subway entrance was closed until further notice. She was the only person waiting for the bus. The driver passed the park going double the speed limit, and only when he left it behind did he start driving at a more reasonable speed. Mechi realized it was a miracle he’d stopped for her.
* * *
…
The first night at her parent’s house was mostly quite pleasant, except that after dinner they headed to the living room sofa and turned on the TV. Mechi didn’t want to stay, and her parents got annoyed. “You can’t avoid reality,” they told her, and she ignored them and locked herself in her room. She knew what they were waiting for: they wanted to see, repeated over and over as the news channels always did, the report about the parents who had committed suicide in El Palomar. The girl had run away three years ago after what was apparently a savage argument: her father had hit her. When she came back—she was one of the girls at Rivadavia Park—she had a swollen eyelid and her lower lip was split and bleeding, as if the beating had occurred twenty-four hours before. She was small, with short blond hair and a nose ring. Mechi knew about the father’s beating from the archive and she figured the journalists must have that information too, but when the girl came back they didn’t include it in their report, they just showed the emotional reencounter and wondered aloud, “I wonder how Marisol fell down?” Then they asked her directly, and she said, “I didn’t fall,” and that was it. They didn’t ask if someone had hit her. To Mechi, that selective silence was proof that they knew about the father’s beating, and they weren’t talking about it because…of course, because the beating had happened three years before. Years during which Marisol had maintained the exact same length and color of her hair as the day she ran away.
Sometimes Mechi trembled with rage at such cowardice, such fatuousness. She wanted someone to start shouting on TV, to howl, to say, “This is weirder than shit, who are these kids, who are they?”
Now she regretted having wished for the dam to break. Because it was happening, and the hysteria was extreme. The mother and father had gotten into bed together, a photo of baby Marisol between them. He had shot himself first, in the temple. Then she took the gun from his hand, put it in her mouth, and blew her brains out. They left a note that said what so many parents had said before them: “That is not our daughter.”
Marisol left after the gunshots. The neighbors saw her come out, and they ran her off wielding sticks and rocks. One of them even shot at her from a distance. Was this the beginning of the hunt that Pedro had hinted at? Until that moment, the parents had simply returned their children, and if they couldn’t manage the bizarre situation, at the most they were checked in to psychiatric hospitals, and the kids went back to the parks. Nor did the parents give details about why cohabitation had been so unbearable. It was known that some TV and radio programs, and even newspapers and magazines, were willing to pay for interviews with these parents who returned their kids, but, remarkably for people as loquacious and media-savvy as porteños, none of them wanted to talk.
The El Palomar suicide hadn’t been the only one. Some days before, Mechi had gone back to Vanadis
’s MySpace page in search of the tattoo artist. And she had found a new message from him, after many days of silence. It said: “i went to see you but you’re not you. You have white vampire teeth remember how we played, the girl I saw didn’t recognize me she’s a copy, she doesn’t have your mouth, I can’t take it I can’t take it. Bye vanadis, maybe we’ll meet again, my love?”
That “maybe we’ll meet again” put Mechi on the alert, and she clicked on Negative Zero’s profile. It wasn’t hard to deduce from the comments of the tattoo artist’s friends that he had killed himself. She left the page when her eyes filled up with tears. She couldn’t allow herself to cry over a thirty-year-old man who had fallen in love with a child of fourteen. She shouldn’t feel pity for him. He cared about the girl, sure, but he was sick. She could, though, cry for herself. Because she had never felt anything remotely like what the tattoo artist felt for Vanadis.
Negative Zero’s suicide went unnoticed. After the couple in Palomar, though, voices started to emerge. The dead parents’ neighbors said that ever since the girl had come home, they could hear the mother wailing all night long, nonstop. A butcher had asked the father about Marisol and he’d said everything was fine, it was just that the girl was very quiet. Everyone mentioned how Marisol never went out. Others accused her, saying the parents never would have killed themselves, they were believers and were very proper, and Marisol must have killed them. Then the floodgates opened. Other parents started to tell their own stories, their justifications for abandoning their children after they’d been reunited. Mechi didn’t want to listen: somehow it seemed unfair to the kids. Maybe they were monsters, who knew what they were, but they deserved shelter, it was unfair for them to have to sleep outside like animals.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Page 13