Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  She says stuff like that, connect to life, forge ahead, we have to be strong: she’s a stupid woman. I always ask her why she thinks I’ll be able to get Marco out of his room—because she often asks me to knock on the door and beg. Sometimes I do it, and later on at night he finds me on chat and writes: Don’t be dumb. Just ignore her.

  “Why do you think I can get him out?” I ask her, and she pours milk into her coffee until it’s ruined, turned into a hot cream. “The last time I saw him happy was when you two were together,” she says, and she lowers her head. She uses bad-quality dye and the tips of her hair are always too light, and the roots gray. What she says is not true; Marco and I lived in silence and impotence. I’d ask him, “What’s wrong with you?” and he’d reply that nothing was wrong, or he’d sit in bed and scream that he was a soulless shell. “The soap opera” was my name for those tantrums that always ended in crying fits and drunken binges. Maybe he told his mother we were happy. Maybe she simply decided to believe it. Maybe he decided that his sadness was going to be my companion forever, for as long as he wanted, because sad people are merciless.

  —

  “Today I read an article about people like you,” I wrote to him one morning at dawn. “You’re a hikikomori. You know about them, right? They’re Japanese people who lock themselves in their rooms and their families support them. They don’t have any mental problems, it’s just that things are unbearable for them: the pressure of university, having a social life, those kinds of things. Their parents never kick them out. It’s an epidemic in Japan. It almost doesn’t exist in other countries. Sometimes they come out, especially at night, alone. To find food, for example. They don’t make their mothers cook for them like you do.”

  “I come out sometimes,” he answered.

  I hesitated before answering.

  “When?”

  “When my mother goes to work. Or early in the morning. She doesn’t hear me, she takes sleeping pills.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You know the best thing about the Japanese? They classify ghosts.”

  “Tell me what time you come out and we’ll meet.”

  “The ghosts of children are called zashiki-warashi and supposedly they aren’t evil. The evil ones are the ghosts of women. They have a lot of spirits that are girls cut in half, for example. They drag themselves over the floor, they’re just torsos, and if you catch sight of them they kill you. There’s a kind of mother ghost called ubume, and they’re women who died in childbirth. They steal children or bring them candy. They also classify the ghosts of people who died at sea.”

  “Tell me what time you come out and I’ll visit you.”

  “I was lying about coming out.”

  I angrily closed the chat window, though he didn’t disconnect, he stayed green. I am not going to go stand in front of his house for the six hours his mother is at work, I swore to myself, and I kept my promise.

  —

  Internet in the nineties was a white cable that went from my computer to the phone jack on the other side of the house. My Internet friends felt real, and I got anxious when the connection or the electricity went out and I couldn’t meet them to talk about symbolism, glam rock, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Manic Street Preachers, English occultists, Latin American dictatorships. One of my friends was locked in, I remember. She was Swedish, and her English was perfect—I had almost no Argentine friends online. She had a social phobia, she said. I can’t recover her emails; they’re backed up on an old computer that won’t turn on. I deleted the account years ago. She used to send me documentaries on VHS and CDs that were impossible to get outside Europe. Back then I didn’t wonder how she managed to get to the post office since she supposedly couldn’t go out. Maybe she was lying. But the packages came from Sweden: she wasn’t lying about where she was. I still have the stamps, although the videotapes got moldy and the CDs stopped working and she in turn disappeared forever, a ghost of the net, and I can’t look for her because I don’t remember her name. I remember other names. Rhias, for example, from Portland, fan of the decadent movement and of superheroes. We had a kind of romance, and she sent me poems by Anne Sexton. Heather, from England, who still exists and who, she says, will always be grateful to me for introducing her to Johnny Thunders. Keeper, who fell in love with young boys. Another girl who wrote beautiful poems that I can’t remember either, except for the occasional bad line. “My blue someone,” for example, mi alguien triste. Marco offered to get them all back for me. All my lost friends. He says being locked in turned him into a hacker. But I’d rather forget them because forgetting people you only knew in words is odd; when they existed they were more intense than people in real life, and now they’re more distant than strangers. Plus, I’m a little scared of them. I found Rhias on Facebook. She accepted my friend request and I wrote to her happily, but she never answered and we never spoke again. I think she doesn’t remember me or she only remembers me a little, vaguely, as if she’d met me in a dream.

  —

  Marco never scares me except when he talks about the deep web. He says he needs to learn about it. That’s how he puts it: it’s a need. The deep web is all the sites that aren’t indexed in search engines. It’s much bigger than the superficial web that we all use. Five thousand times bigger. I don’t understand it and I get bored when he explains how to find it, but he assures me it’s not that hard. “What’s there?” I ask him.

  “They sell drugs, weapons, sex,” he tells me. “I’m not interested in most of it,” he says, “but there are some things I want to see. Like the Red Room. It’s a chat room you pay to get into. People talk about a tortured girl whose breasts are beaten to a pulp by a thin black man who kicks them. Then they rape her until they kill her. The video of the torture is for sale, and so is an archive of her screams that don’t sound like anything human and are unforgettable. And I want to learn about the RRC,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “The Real Rape Community. They have no rules. They starve kids to death. They force them to have sex with animals. They strangle them and of course, they rape them. It’s the most perverse place on the web, or it was. Now there’s a place for sex with corpses.”

  “Having sex with children is much worse than with corpses,” I write.

  “Sure,” replies Marco.

  “I wonder where they get the kids’ corpses.”

  “Anywhere. I don’t know why you all think that kids are cared for and loved.”

  “Did someone do something to you when you were little?”

  “Never. You always ask me the same thing, you always want explanations.”

  “I think this whole thing about the deep web is a lie. Who is ‘you all’?”

  “It’s not a lie, there are articles in serious newspapers. Look them up. They mostly talk about sites where you can hire murderers and buy drugs. You all, people like you.”

  —

  In my second year of high school I dyed my hair black with henna, a temporary and supposedly non-damaging dye that left my scalp stained while locks of my hair fell out like I was in chemo. In school no one said anything about it; they were used to girls going a little crazy, it’s what a girl that age does. The history teacher was particularly nice to me, even though I wasn’t a good student. One afternoon as we were leaving she asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. She was shaking, I remember, and smoking: these days if a teacher smokes in front of a student it’s vaguely shameful, but twenty years ago it went unnoticed. Before I could answer her, she took out a binder with black covers and showed it to me. It had spiral-bound pages and they were covered with drawings and notes. The drawings were of a woman with black hair and a black dress, and she was sitting among autumn leaves, or graves, or entering a forest. A beautiful and tall witch, drawn in pencil. There was also a drawing of a girl covered in a veil, like for a wedding or an old-fashioned First Communion, who was carrying spiders in her hands. The writing was something between diary entries
and poems. I remember one line clearly; it said, I want you to slice my gums.

  “It’s my daughter’s,” the teacher said. “She doesn’t leave the house, and I think you two could be friends.”

  I remember, I thought, that the girl drew very well. Also that a girl who drew like that wouldn’t have any interest in me. At first I didn’t answer the teacher. I didn’t know what to tell her, and then I muttered that my parents were waiting for me. It wasn’t true—I walked home alone. But when I got there, I told my mother. She didn’t say anything either, but later on she disappeared into her bedroom to talk on the phone.

  The teacher never came back to school. My mother had talked to the principal. The teacher didn’t have any children; she didn’t have a daughter who drew witches, not alive or dead. She had lied. I found this out only years later. At the time, my mother told me that the teacher had taken a leave of absence to care for her sick daughter. She’d maintained the existence of the ghost daughter. The principal did too. I believed in the locked-in girl for years, and I even tried to reproduce those drawings of forests, graves, and black dresses, which had been drawn by the hand of a lonely adult.

  I don’t remember that teacher’s last name. I know Marco could find her with his hacking skills, but I’d rather forget that sad woman who wanted to take me home with her one day after class, who knows what for.

  —

  Marco is green less and less; he prefers orange, the idle status. He’s connected but distant, the status closest to gray. Gray is silence and death. He hardly writes to me at all. His mother doesn’t know, or rather, I lie to her and say we talk as much as ever. My messages to him build up. Sometimes in the morning I find he’s replied to them.

  When he turns green again one night, he’s the first to talk. “How do you know it’s me?” he says. He can’t see me, so I can cry without shame. These days there are programs, he tells me, that can reproduce someone who has died. They take all the person’s information that’s disseminated throughout the Internet, and they act according to that script. It’s not so different from when they show you personalized ads.

  “If you were a machine you wouldn’t say this to me.”

  “No,” he writes. “But, how will you know once I am a machine?”

  “I’m not going to know,” I reply. “That program doesn’t exist yet; you got that idea from a movie.”

  “It’s a beautiful idea,” he writes.

  I agree and I wait. Now he has nothing more to say, nothing about red rooms or vengeful ghosts. When he stops talking to me for good I’m going to lie to his mother. I’ll invent fabulous conversations; I’ll give her hope. Last night he told me he wants to come out, I’ll tell her while we sip coffee. I hope he decides to run away while she’s sleeping her chemical sleep. I hope the food doesn’t start to accumulate in the hallway. I hope we don’t have to break down the door.

  Things We Lost in the Fire

  The subway girl was first. Some people would dispute that, or at least they would deny that she had the power or influence to instigate the bonfires all alone. And all alone she was: the subway girl preached on the city’s six underground train lines, and no one was ever with her. But she was unforgettable. Her face and arms had been completely disfigured by deep, extensive burns. She talked to the passengers about how long it had taken her to recover, about the months of infections, hospitals, and pain. Her mouth was lipless and her nose had been sloppily reconstructed. She had only one eye left—the other was a hollow of skin—and her whole face, head, and neck were a maroon mask crisscrossed by spiderwebs. On the nape of her neck she still had one lock of long hair left, which emphasized the masklike effect; it was the only part of her head the fire hadn’t touched. Nor had it reached her hands, which were dark and always a little dirty from handling the money she begged for.

  Her method was audacious: she got on the train, and if there weren’t many passengers, if almost everyone had a seat, she greeted each of them with a kiss on the cheek. Some turned their faces away in disgust, even with a muffled shriek; others accepted the kiss and felt good about themselves; some just let the revulsion raise the hair on their arms, and if she saw this, in summer when people’s skin was bare, she’d caress the scared little hairs with her grubby fingers and smile with her mouth that was a slash. Some people even got off the train if they saw her get on. They already knew her routine and wanted to avoid the kiss from that horrible face.

  To make matters worse, the subway girl wore tight jeans, see-through blouses, even high-heeled sandals when it was hot out. She wore bracelets on her wrists, and little gold necklaces hung around her neck. For her to flaunt a sensuous body seemed inexplicably offensive.

  When she begged for money she was very clear: she wasn’t saving up for plastic surgery. There was no use, she would never get her normal face back, and she knew it. She only needed money to cover her expenses, for rent, for food—no one would give her work with a face like that, not even in jobs where the public wouldn’t see her. And always, when she finished telling her audience about her days in the hospital, she named the man who had burned her: Juan Martín Pozzi, her husband. She’d been married to him for three years. They had no children. He thought she was cheating on him and he was right—she’d been about to leave him. To keep that from happening, he ruined her. Decided she would belong to no one else. While she was sleeping, he poured alcohol over her face and held a lighter to it. While she couldn’t talk, when she was in the hospital and everyone was expecting her to die, Pozzi claimed she’d burned herself, that she’d spilled alcohol during a fight and then tried to smoke a cigarette, still wet.

  “And they believed him.” The subway girl smiled with her lipless, reptilian mouth. “Even my father believed him.”

  As soon as she could talk, still recovering in the hospital, she told the truth. Now he was in jail.

  When the burned girl left the subway car no one talked about her, but the silence that was left, broken by the shaking as the train moved over the rails, said, How disgusting, how frightening, I’ll never forget her, how can someone live like that?

  Maybe it wasn’t the subway girl who started it all, thought Silvina, but she definitely introduced the idea in my family. It had been a Sunday afternoon, and she and her mother were coming back from the movies—a rare excursion, since they almost never went out together. On the train, the subway girl got into their car, gave kisses to the passengers, and told her story. When she finished, she thanked everyone and got off at the next stop. The usual uncomfortable and ashamed silence didn’t follow. A boy, who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, started saying, “How manipulative, how gross, how desperate.” He also cracked jokes. Silvina remembered how her mother—tall, with short, gray hair, her whole aspect one of authority and power—had walked to the boy, crossing the aisle almost unwaveringly though the train shook as much as always. She’d drawn back her arm and punched the boy in the nose, a decisive and professional blow that made him bleed and cry out, “You old bitch, what’s wrong with you?” But her mother didn’t respond, not to the boy crying in pain nor to the other passengers, who weren’t sure whether to berate her or come to her defense. Silvina remembered the quick look, the silent instruction in her mother’s eyes, and how they’d both shot out of the train as soon as the doors opened, how they’d kept running up the stairs from the platform even though Silvina wasn’t in good shape and she got tired right away—running made her cough—and her mother was over sixty years old. No one followed them, but they didn’t realize it at first. On the busy corner of Corrientes and Pueyrredón they mixed in with the crowd to shake off any guards, or even police, but after two hundred meters they realized they were safe. Silvina couldn’t forget her mother’s elated laughter, so relieved. It had been years since she’d seen her so happy.

  Still, it took Lucila and the epidemic she unleashed for the bonfires to start. Lucila was a model and she was very beautiful, but more than that she had a quirky charm about her. In
TV interviews she seemed distracted and guileless, but she had intelligent and audacious things to say, and she became famous for that, too. Or half famous. True celebrity only came when she announced she was dating Mario Ponte, number 7 on the Unidos de Córdoba team. They were a second-division club that had heroically made it to the first, and they’d remained among the best during two championships thanks to a great squad, but above all thanks to Mario, who was an extraordinary player. He had rejected offers from European clubs out of pure loyalty—although some commentators said that at thirty-two and with the level of competition in Europe, it was better for Mario to become a local legend than a transatlantic failure. Lucila seemed to be in love, and though the couple got a lot of media coverage, no one scrutinized them too closely. They were perfect and happy—quite simply, they lacked drama. She got better modeling contracts and closed out all the fashion shows; he bought himself a very expensive car.

  Drama came one morning at dawn when they carried Lucila on a stretcher out of her and Mario’s apartment: seventy percent of her body was burned, and they said she wouldn’t survive. She survived a week.

  Silvina vaguely remembered the news reports, the gossip around the office. He had burned her during a fight, they said. Just like with the subway girl, he’d poured a bottle of alcohol over her while she was in bed, and then he’d thrown a lit match onto her naked body. He let her burn a few minutes before covering her with the bedspread. Then he called the ambulance. Like the subway girl’s husband, he claimed that she’d done it to herself.

  That’s why, when women started burning themselves for real, no one believed it at first, Silvina thought while she waited for the bus (she didn’t use her own car to visit her mother, since she knew she could be followed). People preferred to believe those women were protecting their men, that they were still afraid of them, in shock and unable to tell the truth. The bonfires were just too hard to comprehend.

  Now that there was another bonfire every week, no one knew what to say or how to stop them, except through the usual measures: inspections, police, surveillance. None of it worked. Once, an anorexic friend of Silvina’s had told her, “They can’t force you to eat.”