by Javier Calvo
“Listen,” says the head of production. He makes a weary face designed to show that he is willing to be patient and agreeable beyond the requirements of his position. “It's fine to be ambitious, and if you feel young, that's great. That means you are on the inside. But you have to be realistic. We both know why you're here. You're here because your boyfriend hooks me up with coke and does a little job for me once in a while. Even though it's not nice to say that.” He shrugs his shoulders in a self-exonerating gesture. “So okay. If I see some change in your attitude, I don't see why we can't stay in touch. In spite of the fact that your boyfriend hasn't answered my calls this week and owes me money. But you and I are another story. The only thing I ask is a small gesture on your part.” He separates his thumb and index finger a little to make the universal sign of things small in size. Then he looks at his wristwatch. “I think we have one of the sets downstairs free.”
There is a moment of silence.
“After all, no one's going to know,” adds the head of production. “I mean it's like nothing ever happened.”
Iris Gonzalvo stands up purposefully. She leans forward a bit, above the low-budget table comprised of two sawhorses and an unvarnished top, and before the boss has time to say anything she puts out her cigarette on his cheek. With a skillful wrist movement that is both energetic and vaguely circular.
The head of production's scream echoes through the entire industrial building.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 13
Apartment 13
The same day that Aníbal Manta and Saudade arrive in Rome, Lucas Giraut waits for closing time at the offices of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. He waits for all the workers to leave the building. Then he takes off the jacket of his cobalt blue Lino Rossi suit and loosens his tie and begins unscrewing one by one all the lightbulbs in his office on the mezzanine. The only lamp that he leaves on is the one right above the Italian Louis XV–style cartonnier that he uses as a desk. He puts the lightbulbs away in a cardboard box and puts the box in one of the not-secret drawers of the cartonnier. All the employees have gone and the security gates that look like bars on a medieval castle have been lowered, giving the building its ferociously protected off-hours look. The alarms are turned on. The lights are turned off except for the pilot lights connected to an independent generator and the sole lightbulb that Lucas Giraut has left on in his office. The circumstances, decides Lucas Giraut as he sticks a flashlight into his pants pocket, are propitious to begin his Filial Investigation of Apartment 13.
Lucas Giraut goes up the stairs that lead from the mezzanine to the upper floor of the headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. A bulge in the shape of a flashlight can be seen in his pocket. During the last twenty years barely anything has been changed in this part of the building. The doors have been repainted several dozen times. The walls have been replastered and have changed color. The technological advances in terms of alarms are visible in the increasingly weaponlike look of the alarm box models. Increasingly more alarming. The locks on the metal doors have been replaced by numerical code readers with tiny little red and green lights to signal, respectively, the introduction of erroneous or correct codes.
Giraut arrives at the top of the stairs and the hallway lights up automatically in response to a movement sensor. He looks up and makes a distracted gesture with his hand toward the camera that's filming his movements from the roof. The hallway of the upper floor is one of those hallways you find in industrial warehouses. With concrete walls and floor. With numbered metal doors on both sides and with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The last door of the concrete hallway, around the last bend, is the door to Apartment 13. Vague images of endless hallways and rooms crossed by fleeting silhouettes come to Giraut's mind. Memories of childhood notebooks filled with sketches of movable panels that open onto secret passageways between the walls. Finally he stops in front of the door marked with the number thirteen. He introduces the numerical code and waits for the tiny green light that means that the right code has been entered.
The Filial Investigation Operation has begun.
Lucas Giraut turns on the flashlight and the beam of light runs over the inside of Apartment 13. Dust covers the floor and all the furniture. He closes the door behind him. The apartment consists of a room with a double bed stuck to the wall, a television, a built-in closet, and a couple of dressers. A door at the back of the room leads to a tiny bathroom with a shower that barely has room for one person. There are no windows. None of his father's secret places ever have any windows. Due to an undiagnosed pathology that was referred to within the family as his window problem. The air in the room comes from a few vents by the ceiling that are different from the rest of the building's vents and which vaguely resemble half-open mouths.
Lucas Giraut sits on the bed and runs a hand along the dusty bedspread. Sitting in this space without any natural light or windows somehow comforts him. In a certain way, he has always believed that he understood what was happening to his father. The secret inner mechanics of his difficulty with windows and daylight. What lay hidden behind his so-called window problem. The feeling of calm. That feeling of power you get from locking the world out completely.
Seated on the dusty bed, Lucas Giraut moves the flashlight beam over the room's walls and furniture. It's strange that he spent his whole childhood filling notebooks with drawings and notes about Apartment 13. Recording his recurring dreams about that apartment. Perfectly detailed dreams accompanied by all sorts of explanations and diagrams. The first phase of drawings, from his preteen years, depicted Apartment 13 as a complex system of rooms and hallways with varying layouts. According to the annotations, the apartment had no windows and the walls were covered with red velvet curtains. The annotations indicated that most of the rooms had crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. And wing chairs with extensions that folded out to rest your feet on and free-standing gold ashtrays beside the arms. The large majority of butts in said ashtrays were cigar butts. There also seemed to be coatracks all around, filled with jackets and coats. Hundreds of coats, both women's and men's. Coats accompanied by hats and by canes and by other old-fashioned garments that Lucas Giraut as a child was unable to identify. Nor could he understand why there were so many coats and jackets.
After half an hour of Lucas's rummaging around, all the contents of Apartment 13's closet and drawers are carefully laid out on the dusty bedspread. Lucas Giraut has separated out to one side and classified into three groups those objects that he judges most relevant to his search:
1. A dozen cassette tapes of old British rock from the seventies. In Search of Space and Space Ritual by Hawkwind. Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes, The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and Islands by King Crimson.
2. A postcard showing the Brighton Marine Palace and Pier with the strange domes and towers of its amusement park. Writ ten on the back it says: “COMMEMORATIVE ACTS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY. ENGLAND (WE THINK), 1970.” And another postcard, which shows a pink hot-air pig floating over an industrial sky, which says: “THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY PROMISES TO PARTY EVERY NIGHT AND SLEEP ALL DAY FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. DOWN WITH THE SUN. SIGNED: THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY.” The two postcards are written in large, loopy script surrounded by drawings of flowers, planets, and moons.
3. An obviously old black-and-white photograph showing three young men about twenty years old with long hair, various styles of facial hair, and clothing that's predominately denim, suede, and leather. The three young men have their arms around each other's shoulders in a gesture of male camaraderie.
Seated on the dusty bedspread, Lucas Giraut takes a cigarette out of his gold cigarette case embossed with his initials and lights it with a pensive expression. The young man on the left side of the photograph is his father. A barely postadolescent version of his father, with a strangely skinny and long version of his father's face with splotches on both cheeks that look like acne outbreaks. The
young man in the middle of the photograph wears a leopard-print fur coat that looks strikingly feminine next to the leather and denim jackets of the other two. His face doesn't yet show any signs of balding or of a mustache, but it does show the same ineffable element of cruelty that Lucas Giraut recognizes as Mr. Bocanegra's. The young man to the right of the photograph must be the same age as the other two and also wears his hair long. His, however, is curly as opposed to Lorenzo Giraut's exaggeratedly straight hair and not-yet-balding Mr. Bocanegra's wavy hair. His face is strangely attractive despite not having a particularly harmonious set of features. Lucas turns the photograph over to examine the back. It is blank.
Lucas Giraut's first childhood drawings of Apartment 13 included marks on the apartment's shifting internal geography indicating possible sightings of people. The sightings were never clear enough for him to be sure that they weren't just optical illusions. The most conducive places for those types of sightings were the mirrors and the doorways.
Holding the back end of the flashlight between his teeth, Giraut puts the photograph into his pocket. There is something about the Filial Investigation Operation that gives him an indescribable feeling of indecisiveness. Like the feeling of sitting in front of a magic desk for the first time. Contemplating the apparently normal knobs of its drawers and its apparently normal surfaces and mentally gauging the measurements in search of ghostly spaces. He looks up and examines the walls. The paint that camouflages the plaster that camouflages the concrete. The vents that are different from the other vents in the building, more like defiant mouths. Giraut stands up on the bed and works the vent above it until it comes loose. He places it carefully on the bed and sticks his arm through the ventilation shaft. Feeling around. With his gaze lost in the distance. In that way that people look out into the distance when they are blindly feeling around in something whose inside they can't see. Finally he pulls something out of the hole. Some kind of book. He pulls it out in a small cloud of dust and he stares at it. In that precise moment the cell phone in his pocket rings.
“Lucas?” says his mother's voice when he answers. In a tone that indicates she's in one of her Moods. A tone of voice like the crunch of a solid roof splitting beneath the weight of a hundred-year-old tree. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Behind her rhetorical pause, Lucas Giraut can feel her crackling fury in the form of an electric tingling that raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. “You're my son. What I am supposed to do with you?”
In Lucas Giraut's later childhood drawings of Apartment 13, its internal geography became even more complex. The apartment grew in size and for the first time the annotations suggested that it could have several levels, or at least one additional level, located between the ceiling of the apartment and the building's roof. That hypothetical space, based on certain differences between the measurements that Lucas had made on the outside and on the inside of the building, was dubbed the Highly Secret Level.
“Mom?” Lucas blows on the book to get the dust off and examines its black cover. He opens it and looks at the first few pages and recognizes his father's handwriting. The book consists of a succession of accounting entries, with their corresponding dates and amounts. The first dates are from the late seventies. “I'm the president of my father's company. I'm the primary stockholder. And that means I decide what the strategies are for the International Division.” He blinks while still turning the pages of the accounting ledger. “Or for any other division, of course.”
“Don't be stupid.” Estefanía Giraut's tone of voice during her Moods is powerfully reminiscent of the sound a hundred-year-old tree makes in splitting a solid roof in half and then splitting the floor of the house's upper story, causing the entire structure to collapse. “You're going to meet with Fonseca in your office on Tuesday. And neither of you is coming out of that damn office until you've signed the documents for the restructuring plan.”
“What about Christmas dinner?” Lucas Giraut turns the pages faster and faster. “You should let me arrange Christmas dinner, Mom. I think I can get fifty guests.”
Some of the transactions recorded in the accounting ledger he holds in his hands have the initials K.C. written beside them. The initials are repeated several times on each page and appear on every one of the pages. Some of the amounts that appear beside the initials K.C. are so high that Lucas Giraut feels a touch of vertigo, as if he were looking over the edge of a very deep well and watching as little bits of rubble fall to the bottom.
“I know exactly what you're doing,” says Estefanía Giraut. In a tone of voice that makes one think of pieces of broken jet fuselage cleanly splitting solid roofs. “You can't hide anything from me. And I warn you that things always turn out the way I want them to. It's never been any other way. So don't even bother trying,” she says conclusively, and the loud crash he hears right before the line is cut off allows Lucas to clearly visualize his mother violently slamming down her office phone.
In his later childhood drawings of Apartment 13, the map of its shifting internal geography began to include discoveries of a different nature. By that point the map took up many pages of childhood notebooks. According to the explanations accompanying the drawings, several movable wall panels, covered by curtains and various furnishing elements, hide secret doors that open onto a secondary system of tunnels located inside the walls. The secondary tunnels, according to the conclusions recorded at the end of that second phase, were the true means of transportation between the various levels and rooms of Apartment 13. A second map superimposed on the first. In none of young Lucas Giraut's dreams, according to the annotations, was there any sighting of Lorenzo Giraut inside Apartment 13. Signs of his presence, however, were extensively catalogued in the drawings, mainly in the form of cigar butts and coats hanging on the coatracks.
In his final drawings, which were much more complex and barely intelligible, it was suggested that the tunnels of Apartment 13 could lead far beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 14
Raymond Panakian
“You're a fat fuck and a retard,” says Juan de la Cruz Saudade from the door of the corner store in downtown Rome where Aníbal Manta is flipping through Marvel superhero comics translated into Italian. Looking closely at the panels and trying to decipher the accompanying dialogue. “What kind of forty-year-old man reads comic books? What does your wife think about you reading comic books all day?” Saudade pauses and eats a spoonful from the cup of vanilla and strawberry ice cream in his hands, leaning on the doorjamb of the store's door and blocking the entrance with his back. “And what does she think of that potbelly so big you can't even see your own cock? Doesn't she complain when you can't find it? But I guess it doesn't matter. She's probably busy screwing the neighbors while you read comic books. She still screwing the neighbors?” He makes a taunting face while brandishing the little ice cream spoon. “What kind of a man are you?”
Aníbal Manta continues turning pages at top speed. The reason he's gone into the store and is trying to speed-read all the latest issues of the Marvel superhero comic book collections is his casual discovery that the Italian Marvel collections are several months ahead of the Spanish Marvel collections. Spider-Man, X-Men, the Fantastic Four. In Italy they're doing all the things they'll be doing in Spain several months from now. The idea is almost too enormous. Aníbal Manta's gaze tries to capture all the information he can in the least possible time. How did Peter Parker get a new job at a television station? And how is it possible that the Incredible Hulk has managed to neutralize the radiation that makes him turn green in moments of emotional stress? As hard as he tries, Aníbal Manta can't understand a single line of the Italian dialogue. The owner of the store, a tiny sour-faced Chinese woman, watches Aníbal Manta and Saudade with the same expression she'd have if she were looking at a couple of giant rats that had come into her store and started chowing down on the magazines.
&
nbsp; “I guess I'd do the same thing.” Saudade finishes his cup of vanilla and strawberry ice cream and throws the empty cup and the little spoon to the ground with a distracted expression. “If my husband was a fat retard that couldn't find his cock and spent all his time reading comic books.”
Manta is still trying to find clues as to how Wolverine ended up in a high-security government prison when Saudade snatches the comic from his hands. Manta looks up, surprised. Saudade grabs the recent issues of all the collections on the rack of Marvel comic books and puts them all on the store counter along with a fifty-euro note. The Chinese woman picks up the bill with a look of disgust. Saudade takes the change and the comic books and leaves the store.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Manta feels that flush coming to his face, the one that always comes to his face moments before the desire to break someone's nose springs to his mind. “I thought we'd already discussed you treating my things with respect. And my feelings about my things.”
Saudade heads off down the Roman street jammed with people under the midmorning summer sun. Manta manages to follow him by searching out the powder blue and white colors of Saudade's Umbro sweat suit. Occasionally bumping into groups of tourists equipped with sophisticated filming devices and provoking irritated reactions in several languages. The desire to break someone's nose begins to spring to his mind. Aníbal Manta knows perfectly well, since it is one of the main themes of his therapy, that the violence that he employs against others during his fits of rage is actually violence against himself. It's the same idea of oneself-as-one's-worst-enemy that characterizes many of Marvel's tormented superheroes, except that his personal case seems to lack all epic or admirable connotations.