That was, more or less, how Rodrigo remembered it. That was how he recreated it as the clay transformed into a worm in his hands. Following the channel of his thoughts, while he fell deeper and deeper into a hypnotic trance and the world around him faded away, he recalled or began to recall the theory, or rather the example of the evil genius. Descartes let his imagination range too freely with that example, that inkling of a plot. There are some truths, like mathematics, that seem to us impossible to doubt. In order to doubt them and stand alone, triumphant, before the void, Descartes proposes the most delicious theory in the history of philosophy: we have been created by a god who obliges us to be mistaken. An evil genius who is amused by our blunders and laughs at the certainty we assign to the simplest sums. An astute god with the worst of intentions, who made us in the form of his boredom to see us fall into error as Thales of Miletus falls into a well. A god who sows signs in things and sends us out into the world with our faces covered in eyes to search for those signs and be dazzled by our stupid discovery. A bastard of a god, like those in myths that have a better sense of humor than the religious ones.
Rodrigo raised his eyes, forcing himself to defer his reflections, and the shock was so complete that he thought he had lost his wits. He was no longer in Jimmie’s workshop, sitting on the floor next to Micaela, but in his bedroom in the apartment in Mexico City. The bed was made, but the creases in the bedspread—Cecilia’s tiger-striped bedspread—showed evidence of a recent presence. As it seemed impossible to attribute to hypnosis this perfect, detailed recreation of his room, Rodrigo assumed he had fallen asleep and even allowed himself to quietly deride Jimmie, Velásquez, and Marcelo for believing in such an absurd project as the future of art. He didn’t deride Micaela because it wasn’t her conviction that had brought her there, but an irreversible series of events, circumstances somewhere between cruel and ridiculous that made up her distant, melancholy personality.
He decided, since he was there, to enjoy his dream and inhabit that lost moment from the past while he could. He didn’t usually struggle against subconscious promptings, and this would be no exception: he was going to live this dream as if he had gone back in time to those days of unemployment and idleness next to the waste ground.
When he remembered the vacant lot, he naturally decided to look for the hen, his feathered accomplice, who would cluck in the dream as in reality, happily feeding on bugs and seeds. He went to the window and leaned out to get a better view. He saw the hen, walking in her characteristic way among the bushes, and he congratulated himself on the veracity and level of detail of his dream, which was representing the undergrowth and the chiaroscuro of the lot like a photograph. But behind the hen he saw something else: a movement of leaves, a cracking of branches, a glimpse of clothing moving a few yards away. Rodrigo leaned back slightly to avoid being seen, but it was unnecessary: the man who was walking around the lot in search of his feathered friend was himself. He saw him moving thorny branches aside and steadying himself by pushing his foot into the earth to get to the bird. He saw, in a flash of sunlight, his face in profile, in the way mirrors never show it and we are surprised to recognize in photographs. He felt dizzy.
He moved farther away from the window and, letting himself fall backwards onto the tiger-striped bedspread, felt a drop of sweat trickling down from his armpit toward his elbow, and a kind of nausea that made him press his hands to his stomach. As if in a revelation of a mystical nature, he suddenly understood what was happening. He didn’t even struggle against it. He opened his eyes in a gesture of fright in the face of the incomprehensible, but each of his following actions seemed self-evident, without the least need for explanation or exegesis. He stood on the bed, lowered his pants and briefs, the elastic of which stretched over his ankles, then he squatted down and produced a perfect turd in the exact center of the tiger-striped bedspread. He didn’t bother to wipe himself: he raised his pants, jumped off the bed, and contemplated his work. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the same turd. That turd.
He contemplated it in ecstasy during what could have been a long moment: his perception of time was suddenly as malleable as the piece of Cartesian wax. He thought of—or rather imagined in fast-forward—all the events that had occurred since that day, since he came back from the lot with a pain in the back of his head and was disgusted to find that surprise. In some way, he said to himself, his journey toward abandonment, his perdition, his voyage around the void had begun right there. Or before, perhaps: the first time he decided to walk home from work instead of taking the metro. Or even earlier, when he first entered his childhood Thicket, the one this other vacant lot replicated. Or never, and the milestone didn’t exist, just constancy, atoms falling in the void in perfect verticals and monotony.
When his thoughts had reached this point of irreversible abstraction, Rodrigo heard the key turning in the front door of the apartment. It was him, the first person, coming back from his expedition, injured and upset, to discover a piece of shit on the bed. He didn’t give it a second thought: he raised himself up onto the windowsill and dropped down into the lot.
EPILOGUE
He opened his eyes, or they were already open and beginning to see again, he wasn’t completely sure which. The world returned to normal: Micaela sitting a foot or so away on the matting; Marcelo, Jimmie, and Velásquez in their Acapulco chairs. They all looked to be asleep, their eyes closed and muscles relaxed. Velásquez was even snoring.
Rodrigo once more thought, for an instant, that the hypnotism didn’t exist, and Micaela had slipped some strange drug into her urine to sedate them. But he had no time for explanations: he was awake and back in his five senses—fallible though they might be, according to the French philosopher—and after what he had witnessed, what he had done, what he had intuited during that dream, or whatever it might have been, he was in no mood for details. He slowly stretched, loosening the muscles of his legs, and moved toward Micaela. He woke her by touching her shoulder. The girl was, undoubtedly, sleeping less deeply than the other three. Rodrigo wondered what he had looked like from the outside while he was sleeping.
Micaela woke with little effort and smiled on seeing Rodrigo so close. She didn’t appear to be nervous, but rather relieved by the solitude she was unexpectedly sharing with him. Rodrigo indicated, with a gentle squeeze of her arm and a meaningful look, that they should leave. And that is what they did. They stood up, careful not to make any noise, held hands, and walked toward the door of the studio.
Outside, the sun shone down on all things, leaving no shadow.
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LATIN AMERICAN TRANSLATION FROM COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Faces in the Crowd
by Valeria Luiselli
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Sidewalks
by Valeria Luiselli
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
The Story of My Teeth
by Valeria Luiselli
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Camanchaca
by Diego Zúñiga
Translated by Megan McDowell
DANIEL SALDAÑA PARÍS (born Mexico City, 1984) is an essayist, poet, and novelist whose work has been translated into English, French, and Swedish and anthologized, most recently in México20: New Voices, Old Traditions, published in the United Kingdom by Pushkin Press. Among Strange Victims is his first novel to appear in the United States. He lives in Montreal.
This book was composed in Berthold Walbaum Book, designed by Günter Gerhard Lange. Additional embellishments, such as the section numerals and the author’s name, are set in Craw Modern, designed by GroupType. The title, Among Strange Victims, is set in the font Stadt, created by Michael Cina of Associated Typographics.
Among Strange Victims Page 24