The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  EPILOGUE

  Chicho arrived at the border at El Paso, Texas, in a pale red secondhand car he had bought a number of days earlier in Cancún, and didn’t mind when the border agent signaled for him to pull over.

  “Anything to declare?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Right, out of the car and open your trunk.”

  He became aware of the film of sweat beneath his beige, rumpled, tieless suit. 34°C, according to the thermometer on the side of the agent’s hut.

  The most important thing in these moments was your face, he knew that: the border guards make all their decisions based on how you arrange your face. Your expression will either be the ruin of you or your salvation.

  Just a sports bag and a suitcase fastened with a leather belt bearing the words Souvenir of Mexico.

  “All right, on you go.”

  * * *

  Chicho, 6 feet tall, athletic looking, fair-haired; like Robert Palmer but with a beard. Approximately 55 years old but he could pass for younger.

  He skirts San Diego and stops a little farther on in Santa Ana to fill up the tank and drink some fizzy water, and, when he arrives in Los Angeles, sets up in Palm Beach, on the first [and top] floor of a building, an apartment he had a verbal contract on before arriving. A series of avenues at the front, marked with yellow lines, creates a large grid between the low buildings and chalets, down as far as the superfluity of the beach. He turns on the air-conditioning. With the television as a theme tune he takes a shower and, accustomed as he is to the profusion of colors on the houses in Mexico, does not find the olive-green shower curtain a shock, or the pink bathroom units, or the wallpaper in the living room with its pastel-blue geometric shapes like Mayan pyramids seen from the sky.

  He opens the suitcase, empties out the clothes, and takes a container full of worms from the false bottom; the worms, a bundled mass, are each around 4 inches long and almost transparent except for a thin gray line, the primitive digestive system that connects mouth to anus. He takes down the flowerpots hanging on the balcony and empties the soil into a large glass jar, also the destination for the worms. He digs a thermometer and a moisture gauge into the soil and waters it with a mineral solution prepared in a measuring jug that he brought along expressly for the task. He takes the jar and places it carefully down on the balcony floor.

  He pours himself some fizzy water. Sitting out on the small balcony, he watches families coming back from the beach in overflowing cars, sees them beep their horns as they pass the advertising billboard, NIKE, JUST DO IT, over on a very sharp bend in the road.

  His Bermuda shorts are tight around the crotch. He shuts his eyes as night begins to fall and does not move from this position.

  The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords. Being carried away by surging waves. Being thrown into the midst of a great fire. Being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake. Falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease, or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.

  Pasadena, Los Angeles County, Jack works 6 nights a week as the MC at a roadside club called One Way Love. Monday, his night off, he goes out to the trailer he keeps on a small plot in the Mojave Desert, acquired with money inherited following the death of his wife, Carol. To be clear, he bought both with the money that came to him when his wife, Carol, died, the trailer and the plot. His work consists, basically, of announcing the girls through the megaphone when they come out to dance, and then embellishing the moves with a few choice, synthetic words to magnify the already erotic emanations. After the show one night as Carol was getting dressed backstage, she said to him, If I die one day, promise me you’ll use the money I leave to buy a wooden house on Palm Beach, right up there on the shore, and that you won’t keep my ashes, I want them thrown in the sea. And Jack said, Of course, Carol, that’s what I’ll do.

  It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is called a Way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all ways and be more and more in accord with his own.

  The first thing Chicho did the morning after arriving in Palm Beach was to go and buy a calculator. Rather than television, radio, or the sports pages, his mania was this: to calculate everything. For instance, being someone with size-9 shoes, to determine the exact amount of floor space he had walked upon in any given day. Or, how many 5-centavo coins would be needed to entirely cover a body, things of this nature. He chose one made by Texas Instruments, oversized and very reliable, with digits in a basic-looking script; just the way he liked it. Only after that did he walk to Benny Harper’s shop to buy a gun; if memory served, it was on the corner of 87th and Easy Road. But when he got there he found it had been replaced by a travel agency, so he thought, Well, since I’m here … and went in and bought 2 tickets to Milan, Italy. As he was leaving, the girl working there said:

  “Know who you look like?”

  And he:

  “Yes, I know, I know! Robert Palmer!”

  * * *

  He loosened his tie and shut the door gently behind him.

  Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall, there was this one: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master Ittei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”

  Carol and Jack met in One Way Love when she took a job there washing dishes. But she was very attractive and, in spite of a problem with her eyes that meant she looked constantly unhappy, she soon decided she’d make a good stripper. One morning, with the owner, his wife, and Jack as the jury, she performed a topless dance to Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible,” passing the test with flying colors. That same morning the pair, Carol and Jack, went for breakfast, and ended up back at her house, in between Pink Panther bedsheets. It was there she confessed that her highest aspiration was to be a model.

  “Catwalks?” he said.

  And she, looking up at the ceiling:

  “You crazy? No one watches that. I’m talking about the shopping channel.”

  * * *

  That same day they took the car and drove a long way inland until they reached the Mojave Desert. The road came to a stop in front of a reservoir with leftover concrete around the edges and a half-empty aqueduct at the far end: a cement conduit that was quite deep but whose sides were sufficiently gently sloped that you could walk almost down to the edge of the watercourse, itself no more than 2 handspans deep. The desert proper began beyond the aqueduct. They saw a poster advertising land for sale, and Jack thought how cool it would be to live there. Carol was thinking that she would like to have a child with this man.

  Just after the sun has gone down over the Pacific, Chicho takes up position on the balcony deck chair to drink fizzy water and watch the people coming back from the beach and beeping at NIKE, JUST DO IT. He observes the worms stirring in the glass jar on the floor, moving with their habitual summer-night sluggishness. Unbuttoning his shirt, he takes a sip of water. His mobile phone vibrates in his pocket:

  “Hi, honey, how are you?”

  “Good, good. Got through fine, the guys at the border didn’t have a clue.”

  “Well, you know already, stay on your toes.”

  “Yes, dear, don’t worry. Know what? It’s pretty much exactly as I remember it. I went by those big department stores we used to go to with Maria, do you remember?”

  “Of course I do. She went crazy for all those toys. Remember those binoculars you got for her?”

  “Yeah, of course, she used to use them to look at the TV, said she could see more things on the screen that way.”

  “And if there was a forest, she’d call you in, make
you use the binoculars to look for bears in the undergrowth.”

  “Well, the stores are still there.”

  “Okay, well, it’s a pretty expensive time to be calling. Take care, you hear?”

  “And you take it easy. I’ll call soon and give you an update. Kiss. Love you.”

  “Me, too.”

  It’s good to have some makeup about your person. It can be that, after drinking, or upon waking, the complexion of the samurai is not so good. In these moments, apply makeup.

  Jack goes inside the trailer. It’s silver and with rounded contours, and he bought it because it reminded him of Carol, who was also strong and soft at the same time. Opening the small windows and the door, he lets in a shaft of light, something to keep him company as he sits with the lights off. Next to the foldable table he has a few things from the set of One from the Heart, the Francis Ford Coppola movie, which he got at auction in Palo Alto: a tattered piece of papier-mâché depicting a car from the 1970s and a desert horizon in pastel shades with a gigantic swan flying across it, and then a broken bicycle wheel and a neon fountain that is endlessly spouting water. The wiring was frayed but he fixed it. Now he turns on the radio, cleans the kitchen a little, tidies up, and reads Moby-Dick for a while—the only book he owns. Later, when the sun sets, he goes and sits outside. His thoughts often turn to Carol in such moments and how, when she disappeared from planet earth, some friendly entity up above must have calculated all the good she had dispensed in her life and judged it to be equal to the amount of bad she had inflicted on her fellow human beings, and how this summed up the meaning of life: it was about coming out even. On other occasions, also at night, he turns on the endlessly producing neon fountain, and sits outside to watch the light it gives off. After that he will usually fall asleep nursing a whiskey.

  It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

  On Chicho’s fifth day in Palm Beach he took a clump of earth from the jar, extracted a bolus of worms from it, and checked them on some small weighing scales before putting them in a plastic bag with some moist earth. Knotting the handles together, he placed the bag inside the suitcase, which was otherwise empty.

  The car flew along and he kept going until he reached the Pasadena sign at the city limits. There was a burger food truck there at that time, with tables and umbrellas, and he took a seat and ordered a fizzy water, a cold one, and asked for a road map of the city. He loosened his tie. He had not been to Pasadena in many years, but had little difficulty finding the place his contact, Daniel The Boy, had moved to.

  * * *

  You came in through uptown, then through the ground floor of a house and into an old garden that had devolved into little more than patches of soil now, arriving at a small building where a man might or might not allow you to pass.

  “I’m Chicho from Cancún, I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Boy.”

  And Chicho was admitted to a room with no ventilation except for the air coming through the door itself. He could not see anyone inside, but then Daniel The Boy emerged from behind a table.

  “Chicho, my man! Haven’t seen you in years! Hold on a moment, I’ve lost my badge…” And he crouched down again for a few seconds. “Found it! What do you think?” He pinned it to his lapel.

  “Yeah, I like it. PIXIE, right?”

  “Hell, no, it’s DIXIE.”

  “My bad!”

  “Birthday present from my granddaughter. Great girl, beautiful like my daughter, she’s got all her teeth now, so she can bite.” Then, laughing: “Just like her grandpa! Anyway, let’s get to it, what have you got for me?”

  “Twenty grams, give or take.”

  “No such thing as ‘give or take’ in this business, Chicho. Forgotten already?”

  Chicho opened the suitcase and took out the plastic bag. The Boy put on a pair of magnifying goggles and some latex gloves, and began examining it:

  “They real?”

  “Of course, Mr. Boy. Highest quality.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Carefully opening the bag and taking a pair of pincers from his jacket pocket, he extracted one of the worms and placed it on some digital scales. “So we can add it to the overall weight,” he said, then added: “That’s if I’m convinced.”

  Wafting the worm in circles in front of his nose, he put it in his mouth, turned it over on his tongue several times, moving it to the back of his tongue and then to the tip, and, turning it over once more, spat it into an empty detergent box on the side of the table.

  “You’re quite right, Chicho, this is good stuff. Put them down so we can weigh them all. I’m giving you $52 a gram. It’s been bad lately, crossbreeding, the labs all complaining that the stomachs of the new hybrids won’t do for their damned cosmetics.”

  “Me, I take one look at these stomachs, and they’re so fine you can hardly see them. I can’t understand how anyone would question the quality.”

  “Specialist stuff, Chicho. Not my area, not yours, either.”

  “So it is, Mr. Boy. Specialist stuff.”

  If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is, its basis lies first in seriously devoting one’s body and soul to his master.

  There are still nights when Jack stays on late at One Way Love—after all the clients have gone, after the lights have been turned off and the gate is locked—and he has another drink, puts on “Simply Irresistible,” and picks up the microphone: Put your hands together, gentlemen, it’s … Carol! Sweet, sweet Carol, most twisted gal on the whole of the West Coast, just look at those hips sway, she’s fire on ice, yessir, pure fire on ice. Just imagine sweet little Carol getting her hands on you … And so on for hours, drinking. On his way home, he thinks how proud she would be if she could see him now, how well he’s doing.

  The shop, which was in the city center, was empty of customers.

  * * *

  “Don’t you remember me, Harper?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t claim to.”

  “It’s Chicho, Chicho the Mexican. 1968, First Cavalry Division.”

  Benny Harper shut his eyes and thought.

  “Chicho … Chicho … Wait, it’s coming to me … Yes, the Mexican!” They embraced. “It’s been a while, what brings you back around?”

  “I need a pistol. Snub-nosed, if possible.”

  “I thought you weren’t in that line of work anymore.”

  “I’m not, I’m working with the worms now, down in Cancún.”

  “Well, shit, who’d have thought it? Chicho the Mexican, the Robert Palmer of the jungle. Hell if it hasn’t been a long time. Sight for sore eyes. Listen, I’m closing in 10 minutes, I’ve got a couple of calls to make, if you want to wait in the bar across the way, we can catch up there. I’ll bring your piece with me.”

  There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there is nothing left to do, and nothing else to pursue.

  Monday afternoon, Jack sweeps the earth surrounding the trailer, creating a circle that adds to the sensation of the place being his own. He looks at his deformed reflection in the aluminum bodywork: the beginnings of a beard, eyes drawn. Like Carol’s, he says, polyester trousers, pair of secondhand Adidas Saigons on his feet. He goes inside and turns on the radio. A man is talking about his thousand-plus tattoos, Jeez, says Jack, disgusting. When the day grows cooler he often takes a chair up to the aqueduct and fishes in the 2 handspans of water. He sees fish swimming by, large and small alike uninterested in the bait. He usually manages to catch 1 or 2, takes them and puts them on the barbecue beside the trailer—though always staying within the circle he has marked out. While cooking he remembers a story he read a long time ago in Reader’s Digest: if a person is presented with 5 doors and told a “surpri
se tiger” is behind one of them, and this person has to guess which door, he or she will know that the tiger cannot be behind the last door, because by the time it comes to be opened, if the tiger has not been found, it will be the only one the tiger can still be behind, and then it won’t be a “surprise tiger” anymore, so the last door is discarded. Nor can it then be behind the second-to-last door, because, knowing that it cannot be behind the last door, they will also know, with complete certainty, that it has to be behind the second-to-last door, in which case it won’t be a “surprise tiger,” either; the second-to-last door is discarded, too. But the tiger cannot be behind the second-to-second-to-last door, either, because, knowing it cannot be behind the last or the second-to-last door, that means it has to be there, behind the second-to-second-to-last door, and then, again, it wouldn’t be a surprise, and on in this way, discarding all the doors until the person realizes that the tiger cannot be behind any of the doors, and that this was in fact the “surprise,” and to demonstrate it he or she goes ahead and opens all of them, until, opening a certain one, it doesn’t matter which, the tiger is there, and it leaps up at the person and kills them, and it occurs to Jack that this is also how it is in life with making plans and what actually always happens in the end. Not that theories or indeed life are bad, simply that they have nothing to do with one another, in the same way that the thoughts of the fish as it slips downriver are completely unconnected with those of the low-life motherfucker trying to catch it.