Three Messages and a Warning (5 page)

For seven years, these people and I met from Monday to Friday in Murillo Park, sleeping thirty minutes on each occasion. Therefore we must have shared some 1,800 hours of sleep: 75 days! Sleep is the most intimate of all acts, the one that requires the most trust in others. A sleeping human is a vulnerable creature who has voluntarily abandoned himself to the mercy of others. Young Ramiro was the first to desert; he found a better job, in another part of the city. The couple retired, yet for a while they kept coming to take their siesta with us out of habit. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Others took their place: an ex-alcoholic or “dry drunk,” as he called himself, a neighborhood vendor who suffered from gout, a divorced woman full of resentment.

I never discovered anything more about Jorge. Then one day, as I interpret the event, she said farewell to me. Here’s what happened: feeling that I was too old to be a novice in matters of women, and since I couldn’t find anyone to keep me company, I overcame my embarrassment and called a house of prostitution that advertised in the newspaper. I asked if among the girls there might be one of around fifty years. They told me no, that all were less than twenty-four, but that they could give me the telephone number of another house where I would find what I was looking for. I wrote down the number. It took me two weeks to bring myself to call, and finally I made an appointment, a gratuitous act, and took a taxi to the establishment. Embarrassed that the driver would know where I was going, it wasn’t easy for me to give him the address.

It turned out to be a run-down place. There was a rose-colored parlor with a sofa covered in plastic where one sat down to see the women presented one at a time. As they came down, I looked around the place, trying to keep calm. I noticed that in the back there was a large radio in a console on top of which there was a photograph of Pedro Infante in a wooden picture frame, chipped at the edges. I told myself, “There’s something of her here.” And when the girls had all come down, I felt happy. They were all mature; the youngest must have been over forty. Suddenly, I wasn’t nervous anymore; I just felt anxious to choose. The woman who led me upstairs to her room looked like Jorge. The likeness was very close, but it wasn’t her. She possessed neither her skin, warmed by the two o’clock sun, nor her perfume, nor her velvety voice. I paid a lot, and I tried to get the most out of it.

When I came down the stairs on my way out the women had turned on the radio. I noticed that it was tuned to XEW, “The Intimate Hour with Agustín Lara.” Just then a woman whose voice was the same as Jorge’s called the station and said:

“I want to request the song Impossible, dedicated to Ducky, from a friend.”

She didn’t have to say her name. I knew it was she, and I even forgave her the “Ducky,” although I couldn’t help wondering how she knew about my ridiculous nickname.

Her message gave me back my peace of mind. I knew that there was no such program on XEW, nor any other station. I knew that Agustín Lara had died in 1970 and that the Montecarlo, the Smyrna Club, and all those places ceased to exist a long time ago; but sometimes, all of a sudden, as I passed by one of those businesses that still had an old radio, “The Intimate Hour with Agustín Lara” would come on and almost without static. I would stop for a few minutes to hear the people calling in asking for dedicated songs. When I hear that velvety voice that calls me “Ducky” I close my eyes and once again breathe in the freshness of the poplars and the jacarandas while I hold Jorge’s age-spotted, nicotine-stained hands in mine.

An insignificant biological defect?

Imagine how it feels to see your fingernails glow in the dark, to discover that you are the result of an attempt at extermination that supposedly never happened. Having to remember night after night the years that your grandparents, along with another six million idealists, invested in collecting from garbage dumps recordings buried in the shells of old computers, all in order to manufacture a damned map of human memory, which in the end only left behind nursery rhymes for producing insomniac children.

After predicting the attacks of 7/12, the group of data collectors was pursued and captured by the authorities. Someone had to be blamed for what happened on July twelfth. The prisoners were classified as conspirators and their names added to the list of subjects for experimentation, along with the demented, the freaks, the handicapped, criminals, and the homeless. The cities involved in the war among corporations contented themselves with having a scapegoat to blame. Nobody ever pointed a finger at those people who’d done nothing to prevent the dispute from exploding in the first place. Of the caged prisoners, only one group managed to escape when the laboratories became the enemy’s preferred targets. According to my grandpa, this group included those who, during the incarceration, had envisioned a plan for the future. What this plan was, my grandpa never told us—although I’ve harbored my own suspicions for a long time. To be exact, for nineteen years, four months, and nine days. That is to say, since the last time any of the people closest to the survivors heard anything from them. For the rest of the city’s inhabitants, it was only a week in which the tabloid headlines focused on profiting from the series of blackouts and strange visions experienced by city dwellers one Tuesday the nineteenth at nightfall.

Science magazines still publish articles attempting to correlate rumors about the experiments practiced for years on humans with the appearance of the swarms of electric fireflies that now make our metropolis world famous. Experts qualify this phenomenon as a resultant mutation, similar to what occurred in field mice in Chernobyl, the epicenter of the biggest nuclear disaster in history. Research conducted in the area concluded that the magnitude of evolutionary change experienced by these animals after the accident was greater than that experienced by many species in ten million years. In an analysis of just one shared gene in nine mice collected within a restricted thirty-kilometer radius in Ukraine, forty-six mutations were detected.

The hour of the fireflies has become the city’s major tourist attraction. Visitors from all over the globe pay exorbitant premiums to rent rooms with views of the street. They order room service and wait for nightfall to witness the spectacle of luminous swarms that take over the avenues at that strange hour when daylight fades but it’s not yet night. The glowing insects fly through the streets in one of the most beautiful natural displays on the planet, one which can only be appreciated from behind a car windshield or through an apartment window: a single electrical discharge is sufficient to wipe out three people. The fireflies’ journey always ends at the same point: the entrance to the aging building which in its day housed the laboratories for human experimentation.

You know the first time the swarm of fireflies were seen to appear in the avenues? Nineteen years, four months, and nine days ago. The same late Tuesday afternoon when all the survivors went out on the streets, leaving the doors to their homes open behind them. The few witnesses who have dared to speak swear to have seen them disappear like soap bubbles in the midst of the crowd. I’s an open secret; the hypothesis goes round that the authorities back then paid off columnists in all the major newspapers to insist on how incredible and absurd these testimonies were, in order to avert an outbreak of mass hysteria in the city.

Many times I envied those who latched onto the lack of proof about the existence of the laboratories to theorize that the rumor of human experimentation was only the outlandish notion of someone with too much time on his hands; that people are simply incapable of committing that kind of atrocity against our own species; that in a hyper-connected world, reports of such a brutal circumstance would spread across the planet in minutes and the collective voice would have intervened to put a stop to something so monstrous. Perhaps. My grandpa used to say that the few times he found the strength to relate his experiences to a handful of strangers, he only prompted laughter: nobody ever believed him. The group of survivors was silently reintegrated into society. The transition was discreet; so much so that, after the peace treaty was signed between the corporations, those who were never involved in the experiments put it all down to myth: the evocation of a fluorescent scientific fantasy.

Were it not for the glow of my fingernails beneath the sheets—since I was conceived as a “little accident,” by which name my father sometimes used to call me—maybe I’d have come to the same conclusion.

In front of the doors to the building, nervous laughter assaults me. Against every urban code of survival with which I’ve been indoctrinated, I’ve abandoned everything. In years past, the mere thought of experiencing something like this would have taken my breath away. I know some influential people; if I wanted, they could get me hired tomorrow by another company manufacturing self-seeded digital noise. I’d endure daily shifts of repetitive tasks, I’d collect a biweekly check I could use to hold on to my apartment, I’d complain about my cubicle, and every morning on my way to work, I’d ask myself why it’s so easy to perceive when other people go insane. Last year I witnessed four jumps from the upper stories of this building. That set off my fondness for sugar cookies before bed.

I know a desperate mind is capable of convincing itself of anything, but this is different. For hours I haven’t stopped hearing a determined voice repeating to me that my “biological defect” has a meaning: my purpose is to preserve human memory. Experts call it selective acceptance of reality: if you don’t believe something exists, you can’t see it. But, if you believe it exists. . . .

I only have to get over my fear and go outside. That’s all. Once I’m there, in the middle of the crowd, I’ll disappear like a bubble of soap.