Joaquin looked out the window of the SUV at this city of scars, of sad expressionless buildings. Where was the famed City of Palaces, the flower-filled capital of gardens and majestic structures? Maybe the Mexico City of his memories had never really existed: a childhood fantasy that had accreted over the years, finally achieving mythic proportions. This disappointed him, devastated him even. But given his current condition, there were more important things to worry about.
Just as he’d spent every moment in the hospital trying to devise a way to escape, now he considered the question of how he could jump out of the moving vehicle—or should he wait until they reached a street with heavy traffic, get out at a light, and lose himself in the throng? He wondered if the driver would fire into a crowd. Then he remembered the hospital, and his doubts evaporated. These people were capable of anything.
They drove past avenues that looked familiar. Gradually, in spite of the traffic, the atrocious pollution, the kids who cleaned off windshields at the street corners, he began to feel like he was back in his city. As they approached the downtown area, the Alameda, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Mining Palace, and all the other postcard attractions, the wounded megalopolis recovered its mystique and charm. Joaquin felt a wave of optimism. Nothing bad could happen to him there; not even a cartel of drug lords and murderers could harm him in these streets. This was his city. Here he could be a king. These thoughts encouraged him and helped him keep his cool even as the SUV started winding through the narrow streets near Garibaldi Plaza.
Suddenly the driver stopped the car. He turned off the motor and lit another cigarette.
“We’re here.”
Joaquin looked at him, trying not to give himself away. He nodded his head as if he knew what the man was talking about.
“You’re going to go to that hotel over there. Lie low for a few days, maybe weeks. Don’t call any attention to yourself. It’s most likely that in a little while, they’ll stop looking for you. After all, you’re lucky: they don’t know anything about you.”
“That’s it?” Joaquin finally asked, unable to restrain himself from speaking any longer.
“Don’t worry,” the driver said through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Someone’s watching your back.”
Joaquin wanted to ask what he meant, but he had already started up the SUV’s motor. His stare made Joaquin understand that he didn’t have any more time for him.
“They’re expecting you at the hotel.”
Joaquin got out, knowing that he could go wherever he wanted now. He weighed his options. As he moved away from the vehicle, he thought about looking up the house of some friend or relative, but no one came to mind, so he walked toward the hotel. The driver yelled a few parting words:
“He’ll be in touch when the time is right.”
He closed the windows and took off.
Joaquin went in and found the front desk of the hotel. An old man gave him a key.
“Room 303. They told me you needed some rest.”
“Yes, I’ve got to lie down. But first I’d like some food,” he said. Then he remembered he had no money.
As if he could read minds, the man handed him a fat envelope. “They left this for you,” he said.
Joaquin opened it discreetly and saw a bundle of crisp pesos secured with a fat rubber band. There was also a note. It read:
Take it. You’ll pay me back later.
No signature. But he couldn’t shake the nagging, inexplicable feeling that Gabriel somehow had something to do with all this. Now, though, he was tired and hungry. Without wasting another thought on it, he put the money in his pocket, took the key, and headed for the restaurant.
chapter 32
QUANTUM FLUX
“Reality isn’t my friend.”
“What a great way to begin a call,” said Joaquin, chuckling.
“Perhaps…but it’s not a great way to live a life,” the caller said, a note of controlled desperation in his voice.
Joaquin recognized the tone.
“That was a laugh of commiseration. Reality isn’t my friend either,” he said, hoping to relax the caller.
“I can’t seem to get a handle on it. Most of the time I just accept that I’m crazy, dreaming of the day the insanity takes over, obliterating everything.”
“What exactly is happening?”
“It began with my furniture. Each day I’d wake up to find it had changed. One day I have a leather sofa. The next day it’s some ratty cloth job from the Goodwill. The tables, chairs, pictures on the walls, everything would change. One day I had no furniture at all: just a mattress on the floor of my bedroom and a few old lamps in some of the other rooms. And no matter what furniture I found in the morning, it always looked familiar. I could remember its history. A friend helping me pick it out. Or lugging it up the stairs. Or whatever.”
Joaquin liked the caller’s voice: a cool baritone. Perfect for radio. He wished more callers had good radio voices.
“But I also remember the old furniture. Even right now I have more than six hundred distinct memories of decorating this apartment, all memories from the same week: the week I moved in.”
“And then what happened?”
“It began spreading to other areas of my life. First with friends, I’d wake and have a completely different circle of friends. And sometimes friends that were dead one day would be alive the next. Some days I was married, some single. Some days I was even gay. And all of these facts were tied to distinct memories…to lives I’d clearly lived…but hadn’t. Then it was everything: jobs, family, even the city I called home. Everything changed. Everything. Every day I woke to an entirely different life, and went to sleep knowing I’d find a new one in the morning. One day last week I was on Death Row.”
A man who lived in a state of pure quantum flux. Joaquin had never encountered a person like this. He’d never had a call like this. It always made him happy when he found a treat for his listeners. Even if this guy was lying, it was still a great story. It was also great radio.
“In the last few days, it has gotten worse. It used to be that one reality would maintain itself through an entire day. That was a small comfort. But a few days ago, that changed. Now the shifts occur suddenly. I barely know from minute to minute who I am, where I am. And yet part of me knows it all.”
Joaquin sighed. This was getting tedious.
“Jack, we like your story. But you can’t keep calling and telling it. You’ve already called three times this month with the same story.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But when I began this call, I’d never called before; I’d never even listened to Ghost Radio before tonight.”
“That’s a nice spin. But it’s not going to fly. Call back when something new happens, Jack.”
“I didn’t even give my name.”
The line went dead.
Joaquin took a pull off his coffee and smiled. He liked Sam’s calls and his weekly reports about his shifting reality. Joaquin hoped he would call again. Ghost Radio needed more callers like Bert. He hoped the next time Tim called he’d put his wife, Phyllis, on the line. Sarah made for good radio too. He hoped she’d never call again.
chapter 33
MISS WIKIPEDIA AND THE URBAN LEGENDS
There were nights when, no matter how insistent the calls, how heated the debates, and how tearful the confessions, I had a tough time maintaining my focus on my callers’ voices. I drifted, losing my concentration. My mind wandered, filling with thoughts unrelated to the show: thoughts of women I’d slept with, great meals I’d eaten, and cool summer evenings on the beaches of Chiapas. What kind of life was it, to grow old in some decrepit broadcasting booth? To become a radio institution, or, more likely, one more disgusting old goat who stays on the air until he’s dead? When this happened, I drank dozens of cups of coffee, splashed water on my face; all the tricks one uses to stay alert. But nothing worked.
Well, that’s not true. One thing always worked: a great call. A call that electrif
ied the entire studio. That night I felt a bit dizzy; I thought maybe I was coming down with a cold.
A call came in. Not great. Not electrifying.
He told a story about a “friend of a friend” who’d met a gorgeous blonde, taken her to a club, and after a few hours of passion toasted her with champagne in which she’d dissolved some kind of narcotic. The next morning—
“He woke up in pain with a strange scar on his side. Right?” I said, cutting him off.
“No way. Yeah.”
“Because they’d removed one of his kidneys to sell on the black market,” I continued impatiently.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what we call an ‘urban legend,’ a story passed down orally through the naive complicity of people who believe the phrase ‘it happened to the friend of a friend of mine,’” I said, emphasizing the last few words.
“No, it’s true. It really happened to my friend’s friend.”
“Anything can happen to that mysterious friend of a friend, because it always happens far away from us and there’s never any way of proving it. It’s the folklore of our era, the constant reappropriation of grotesque anecdotes.”
“No, I’m telling you, it really happened. You don’t believe me?”
“What I can’t believe is that there’s still someone out there who believes this crap. I’ve heard this one before, with a couple of variations. In one, the gorgeous woman writes a message to the friend of a friend on the hotel mirror that reads ‘Welcome to the world of AIDS’ or something along those lines. In others, like the one about your friend’s friend, it’s all about organ trafficking. If one percent of these stories were true, this blonde of yours would not only be an active threat but an authentic serial offender. So, I guess I have no choice but to warn our listeners to never, never trust a gorgeous blonde who is ready to hop in the sack with you. Fortunately, in the real world, at least the one I live in, the danger of that happening is extremely low.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Jeez.”
“I’d make fun of anyone who believes this crap. Because if you buy those stories, I can’t imagine the other kinds of bullshit your friend and your friend’s friend are gonna make you swallow. And people like me might suffer the blowback. People who aren’t total morons.”
“To some extent, these stories have a lot in common with jokes,” Alondra interjected, trying to lighten the mood. “They’re passed around and we can repeat what we’ve heard without necessarily having to cite our sources. The objective is to trigger a reaction. In both cases, there’s often a moral, a twist; in jokes, obviously, it’s comical, and in urban legends, horrific.”
But Alondra’s interruption did not change my mood. I entered what she called the “Annoying Spiral”: an intensifying state of fury, in which the whole planet conspires against Joaquin to drive him up the wall. Or so I think.
“Bullshit, bullshit. It’s for real, it really happened. And Miss Wikipedia can just keep out of this,” the caller said.
“Miss Wikipedia?” Alondra repeated in a low voice, her finger on the “cough button.”
“I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve been conned. In fact, now that you mention it, it might not be a bad idea for you to consult Wikipedia before calling. And by the way, my colleague Alondra has a Ph.D. in urban folklore.”
Alondra grimaced. She didn’t like to be defended when she could do it herself, nor did she like her credentials to be flaunted as if they were medals.
“Goddamn stupid broad!” the caller exclaimed.
“In other words, in addition to suffering from a pitiful, childlike gullibility, you also hate women. Tell us how it all began,” I said. “Your mommy didn’t nurse you?”
“You’re a major asshole. Go and get yourself—” Bleep. Watt cut off the caller’s last words.
I engaged in conversations like this every night, sometimes several times a night. Usually I’d just let it go, but other times I’d take it personally, as if the caller had picked a fight directly with me and not with my disembodied voice. I wanted to hit, to punch, to kick. I wanted to take something beautiful and make it ugly.
This was how I felt when a call came through on line two.
“Joaquin, I want to tell you about something that happened to me.
My wife and I had our first child, Edward, a year ago. When he was eleven months old, we decided to have him sleep alone in his own bedroom. It’s a transition that’s difficult for all parents; it took us several tries until we were able to stand hearing him cry without rushing in right away to pick him up. At night we’d turn on the baby monitor and we’d listen to him babble, call out to us, and, eventually, fall asleep. One night, I woke up to what sounded like an adult voice on the monitor. I thought my wife had gone in to check on the baby, but there she was, sleeping beside me, and the voice I’d heard didn’t sound like hers. I thought I might have dreamed it, but I went into my son’s room anyway. Edward wasn’t asleep. He was awake, on his knees, grabbing on to one side of his crib. I was a little scared when I saw him wide-awake and motionless like that. Usually when he opened his eyes it wouldn’t be three seconds before he’d start crying or calling out to us. This time was very different. He seemed calm, like he hardly even realized I was there. The episode surprised me, but so many other things surprised and worried me every day: whether he ate or not; whether he walked or crawled; whether he repeated words or played with his toys in a safe way. I brushed the strange voice aside as a single memory among countless others. Until I heard it again.
I was awake this time and heard it very clearly: like a strange gibberish, forming unrecognizable words. I don’t know what language it was, but I can’t forget the rasping, inhuman quality it had. I was immobilized for a few seconds, unable to stand up or even speak. I ran to my son’s room. Before I’d even looked at the crib, I knew something terrible had happened. Then I saw a sort of shadow thing scurrying into the corner. And Edward wasn’t there. I starting screaming, calling for help, completely out of my mind. My wife ran in, and without even knowing what was going on, she started screaming too. We haven’t stopped looking, we haven’t given up. But I know that what I heard was the voice of whoever or whatever took Edward away.
None of us spoke for several seconds. Several long seconds. Any of us could have said this was another urban legend, one more tall tale passed on along “biological vectors” by people who circulated it, enriched it, added credibility by including emotions and an element of spontaneity. But no one said so, because we knew this wasn’t the case.
I offered clumsy words of compassion for the caller’s loss. The caller had already hung up.
The tone of the show changed at that moment. It became darker, more serious, and remained that way for the rest of the night. It felt like a funeral parlor rather than a radio station. The link between the inhuman voice and the child’s disappearance was tenuous, unbelievable, and barely justifiable, and yet, it seemed unquestionable.
It felt true.
chapter 34
CALL 2412, FRIDAY, 2:15 A.M. ICY CLIFF
“I want to tell you about something that happened to me last year. It’s not a ghost story, strictly speaking. Then again, maybe it is.”
“Sounds like fun. Lay it on us,” said Joaquin.
A long sigh came over the speakers, then the caller spoke:
I’ve sailed the seas my whole life. I learned the trade when I was a boy, from my father, as he’d learned from his father. We lived in the icy waters of the North Pole, and from the time I turned sixteen it was my responsibility to steer shipments between enormous icebergs and floes. Nothing thrilled me more; I came to know the most treacherous routes of the Arctic by heart. I was one of the few sailors who’d venture out in small boats, without the considerable advantages provided by satellites and GPS navigation. After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1990, new markets opened up and a lot of unprecedented trade opportunities emerged for
those of us who knew these waters. I stopped working for other people, and I was able to buy one vessel, then another. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Although it wasn’t just luck, it was due to my fearlessness toward the ice and the fact that I’d take routes few others dared to attempt. Everyone in the business considered me an expert in navigating the narrow labyrinth of channels that forms between the arctic floes. But even though I impressed colleagues and clients alike with my dexterity and skill, I could never convince my wife that I knew what I was doing. She tried everything in her power to get me to follow the example of my competitors. She didn’t seem to realize that by doing so, I’d lose my clients and the privileges we enjoyed. She also didn’t understand that, more than any economic incentives, what really motivated me was the excitement of competing against the ice, creating new passages where no one else dared to go, feeling the ship escape the frozen jaws of the icebergs time and time again. Determined to convince her that there was no real danger and also partly, I admit, because I wanted to impress her, I took her along on a voyage. She’d never sailed those waters or set foot in an arctic seaport, and was terrified; I had to resort to every sort of pressure, deception, and blackmail you could imagine to get her on board. Before long, I was showing her how I could knock a day off the trip by traversing a passage between the floes so narrow it looked like a piece of string. The sound of ice rubbing against the ship’s hull always gave me pleasure, but naturally, it filled her with fear. My crew knew me and trusted me, even though they all understood the constant danger of becoming trapped in the ice.
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