* * *
TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO LIFE. And just when I think I’ve finished, when it seems there’s nothing left to put away in this strange and empty room where until a few hours ago I used to do my work, and read, and listen to music, one of the movers carelessly picks up a drawer of my disassembled desk and a box falls to the floor. When I open it, I find things inside that I hadn’t seen or even remembered in over a decade. Memory betrays us. I recognize my father’s wristwatch, his last ID card, his driver’s license, a lottery ticket, things of his that I kept after he died, surfacing now as if by sheer chance from an archeological site, the watch especially with its big face, the glass a little cloudy and scratched, the steel strap that used to go around his wrist, which was always much stronger than mine. Looking at the watch hands, I suddenly find myself wondering if they could be pointing to the exact time of his death.
ENJOY IT AT YOUR NEAREST BURGER KING.
“Peaches, niña, look at these peaches from Aragón; good peaches, niña, for cheap. Look at these peaches from Aragón.”
“If there’s no government there’s no order, which means there is disorder.”
* * *
HELP US CUSTOMIZE YOUR MORTGAGE.
“When I was little you promised you would take me to the river and you never did. You promised you would take me on the cable car and you never did.”
“Niñas, guapas, don’t miss out, just look at all these apricots and peaches.”
* * *
HI, I’M A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD BLIND GIRL AND I’M OUT OF WORK.
“He calls me up at ten at night and says, where are you, and I say, I’m at home, where else would I be?”
“Take some home with you, niña, good peaches, fresh peaches, cheap as they come.”
* * *
CUSTOMIZE YOUR SHOPPING CART HERE.
“Have you ever been to the Ice Palace?”
* * *
NOW YOU CAN DRIVE THE CAR OF YOUR DREAMS.
“As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, I thank God because He gives me whatever I ask for.”
“When I get out. After I see the oncologist, which is at five.”
* * *
JESUS THIRSTS FOR YOU.
“Just go to the website. I’m telling you, by November you’ll have a boyfriend.”
* * *
A WIDE SELECTION OF KNIVES AND MEDIEVAL WEAPONS IN TOLEDO STEEL.
“Guapas, here’s your chance, try what you like, look at these peaches and apricots, nena, the freshest, the best, just wait till you taste them.”
* * *
DON’T SETTLE WHEN YOU FLY.
“The problem is, you’ve lost that person, and now you can’t get them out of your head no matter how you try.”
* * *
IT’S TIME TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
“These are the best peaches, nena, the best apricots, try them before you buy them.”
* * *
BORN WILD, RAISED IN THE CITY.
“Okay, okay, you’ll let me know. Or you can send me a WhatsApp. Okay.”
“Sweet summer peaches niña, from Aragón, give them a try, don’t buy them if you don’t like them.”
* * *
OUR OFFERS ARE AS AMAZING AS YOU.
“You’re wondering why she went back to live with her parents? Because her husband used to beat her to a pulp, that’s why.”
MURDER VICTIM’S FINGERS PRINTED IN 3D. There was an underwater quality to the Café Comercial, a twilight brightness shot through with shadow. The morning light of Madrid poured in through faintly frosted windows and fused with the inner dusk as in the deep recess of an old warehouse. The gray-black marble-top tables and wood chairs absorbed the light and softened its sharpness. There were crisp echoes, like the clicking of dominos, even if no one was playing. A wisp of tobacco seemed to hang in the air from all the ghostly cigarettes once smoked by generations of vanished patrons. I usually took the Metro there. I would come out opposite the roundabout of the Glorieta de Bilbao, stop at the newsstand, buy a paper or two as well as some obscure and fortuitous DVD, then walk happily into the great inner space of the café as if entering a parallel Madrid or a different region of time; not a portion of the past, somehow pooled or preserved as in a sanctuary, but a present time whose ties to the past had not been severed. There was a particular atmosphere that is rare in Spain, as of a place where dignified and well-worn things endure and are cared for. It seemed more Portuguese than Spanish. This feeling was confirmed by the waiters’ crisp white jackets, even if only to be instantly dispelled when those same waiters, in all their faded Portuguese elegance, opened their mouths to list the spartan offerings of the café in the harsh accent of Madrid. They were as gruff as old school proctors, seeming to take pleasure in informing customers that they were out of churros or of any of those fancy sodas with elaborate names like Nestea or Aquarius. They had Pepsi and Fanta and that was plenty, as one of them might have said.
* * *
ARE YOU SOMEONE LOOKING FOR NEW EXPERIENCES? Once, on a different day, when I went in and walked to the banquette by the window, I thought I recognized the man with the satchel whom I had seen peering into the café. I realized that I had felt a sense of familiarity even on that first occasion. I must have recognized him by the satchel, which lay next to him on the banquette. He made a gesture inviting me to join him. It was clear that he was not very good at preambles or that he simply didn’t care for them. He only knew how to get straight to the point. The voice was the same I’d heard a few days or a few weeks earlier: deep, a little raspy, with an accent that was impossible to place. Spanish seemed to be his native language, but it was a Spanish unlike any I had ever heard. It seemed to come from far away, either in space or in time.
* * *
NOW IS THE TIME TO RECOVER THOSE LOST MOMENTS. “You may not remember, but we met once, in Granada, more than thirty years ago. You came a few times to the house where I lived in the Albaicín. Or I should rather say the carmen where I lived, to use the local word. It is an Arabic word. You used to say that the house was so hidden away, the only way to find it was by getting lost. I am not surprised that you do not remember. It was a very small house, narrow and steep, like a spiral staircase. A cubist carmen, if you will allow the comparison, a kind of Moorish, three-dimensional Juan Gris. Not a Picasso or a Braque. You understand what I mean. Juan Gris is “the man,” as those jazz musicians you like so much might have said. There was a garden with a well, and a small balcony. You still don’t remember? From the balcony you could see the Alhambra, long and low, like a whale, on the other side of the Darro. The reason you do not remember is not that so much time has passed, but that you have lived several different lives since then.”
* * *
ENTER A NEW DIMENSION. “What people refer to, though in my view with a regrettable lack of precision, as the ‘transmigration of souls’ is in fact a perfectly common occurrence. Reincarnation could be studied as easily as a change of address. It is a change of address, to some degree. I, too, have lived a few lives since, though perhaps not as many as you. Of course, if we go back farther, I may be ahead. The possibility of rebirth as an animal or as another human being is a metaphor. Primarily a Tibetan or a Hindu metaphor. It would be as mistaken to take it literally as to think that you and I believe the Earth is at the center of the universe because we say the sun rises in the morning. We say the walls have ears, but as far as we know there are no actual ears embedded in them, though occasionally they happen to be bugged. You are in fact reincarnated into someone who turns out to be yourself, though substantially altered. Some of our past lives leave memories behind, while others, most, do not. In severe cases a complete loss of memory is advisable and of course welcome. A clean slate, one might say. Yet another metaphor. Memories remain but we do not realize they are memories. They appear most clearly in dreams that vanish without a trace as soon as you wake up. Like the tape in the old TV show that would self-destruct five seconds after relayi
ng its secret message. You think you are inventing a story when you are in fact remembering. You think you are imagining something that takes place in the future when in fact what your mind is picturing is a lost memory.”
NIGHT OF THE BEASTS.
Man bludgeons his elderly mother to death with a hammer in Madrid.
Dirty war returns to the skies over Colombia.
More than a hundred dead in Nigerian church collapse.
Police officers are poisoned by the body of a man who committed suicide with toxic agents.
Eighty dolphins die in the sun on a Florida beach.
Patrons flee as a large deer enters a restaurant.
Faceless assassins cornered in Mosul.
Woman is found chained like a dog.
At least twenty dead after a car-bomb attack in Mogadishu.
Two girls set off suicide vests in a Nigerian market.
Security guard punches a young woman outside a nightclub.
Teacher arrested after putting a student in a garbage can.
Hottest summer on record.
Twelve-year-old girl dies from alcohol overdose.
Plastic surgeon arrested for fraud as he was operating on his own penis.
Wave of terror in the Near East.
Girl slept with rags around her neck so as not to be eaten by rats.
Brightest supernova in History was actually a cosmic cataclysm.
Death of Japanese flamenco singer.
Terrorism strikes at the heart of the Christian Copt community in Cairo.
Twenty-three dead after a bomb explodes in a crowded church during Sunday mass.
Woman bites off the nose of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend at a nightclub.
Kurdistan Freedom Hawks claim responsibility following suicide attack that killed thirty-nine people last Saturday outside an Istanbul soccer stadium.
Egypt begins to export crocodiles.
Temple to an Aztec wind-god found in Tlatelolco.
Largest organ-trafficking network in the world dismantled.
Forty-five whales die on Indian beaches.
Large cities are flooded in trash.
City of nine million evacuated by orders of the Chinese government.
Thousands of geese die, poisoned by toxic lake in Montana.
Norwegian scientists find sixty pounds of plastic bags in the stomach of a dead whale.
Days on Earth are growing longer.
Will the sexual future of mankind involve carnal relations with robots?
Why are there winged ants in the fall?
What would you do if you knew the love of your life was guilty of murder?
REDISCOVER SENSATIONS THAT EVERYDAY LIFE WON’T ALWAYS PROVIDE. For the past few days I have been living in a hotel room in my own city. It makes me feel like I’m doing something secretive or slightly questionable, leading a double life. This morning I gave the house keys to the new owners. Now I no longer carry in my pocket a set of keys that jingles as I walk but a magnetic card that weighs nothing. This adds to my sense of lightness. I walk through the city where I live as if I were just a visitor. I step out of the hotel and find myself in a neighborhood that I only ever knew in passing. I’ve moved out of the house where I used to live, and the house I will move into is not yet ready because of unforeseen delays with the renovation. All of my belongings except for a suitcase and a backpack have been put away in a storage unit. My possessions amount mostly to what I carry with me when I go out on the street: a phone, a computer, some notebooks, a pen, an inkwell, a few pencils, two or three books, and an e-reader. Moving all the things that had piled up at home over the years required a truck. Suddenly all of it seems superfluous, a lead weight that shackled my feet and prevented me from walking as lightly as I do now, on these late days of June when it starts getting hot and a lazy holiday mood begins to slowly spread over the city.
* * *
WE ARE WORKING TO MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE. I make my way across the hotel lobby and am greeted by the doorman. All around me there are voices speaking in English or in Latin American Spanish. I live among travelers now, and some of their foreignness rubs off on me. I push the revolving doors and step out from the air-conditioned coolness of the lobby into the June heat. I’ve walked down this street many times before, but today I am a guest at the hotel and thus a stranger, if not a suspicious impostor. Places I once reached by taxi or by subway, or after a long walk, are now conveniently around the corner. I go out at dusk, freshly showered and in a light clean shirt, my hands in my pockets, a false traveler in my own city yet filled with the real anticipation of someone who has just arrived, and feels, on leaving the hotel, the mysterious promise of night as the windows on the buildings and the shop signs are lit, beacons calling out to him with a siren song. The woman I am meeting for dinner is my own wife. Afterward, when we come back together to our hotel room, the way we move and touch will have the fervent stealth of adultery. Our love is a different love and Madrid turns into a foreign city. Once again, as long ago, your only joint possessions are the few things you bring to the hotel.
TWELVE PEOPLE ARRESTED FOR SPREADING FALSE REPORTS OF CREEPY CLOWNS. Clowns in vans. Clowns in the woods. Clowns lurking in the shadows. Clowns chasing people or committing crimes. Twelve individuals face charges of harassment, spreading false reports, or making criminal threats. Other reports may have been caused by children with overactive imaginations, by mischievous teenagers, or by other individuals impelled by their own motives to stoke the general panic. The hoax of the killer clowns is responsible for at least one death. In Reading, Ohio, public schools were closed last Friday after a woman said she had been attacked by a man dressed as a clown. A teenager had been arrested a day earlier for being allegedly involved in threats that clowns would attack students at his school. The first clown sightings were reported last August in Greenville, South Carolina. Individuals dressed as clowns were luring children into the woods with offers of money, or prowling near people’s homes to frighten them. Subsequent reports spread like an epidemic, with clown sightings taking place in at least six other states: Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. In one incident, in LaGrange, Georgia, four people were detained and charged with making terrorist threats after police received reports that individuals dressed as clowns had threatened to commit violent acts at three different schools. The suspects said they would be dressed as “creepy clowns” and travel in a white van.
SI L’AMOUR POUVAIT ÊTRE TOUJOURS COMME LE PREMIER JOUR. They have all they need to be happy, and perhaps they are, but there is an incipient sense of weariness, an apathy that they perhaps can’t quite perceive. There is affection and trust between them, a complicity that is perhaps a touch excessive, a danger in knowing each other so well, in how it all flows naturally, without a hitch. Nothing is out of place, the apartment is pleasant and of course refined, with its high ceilings and gilt moldings, but modern too, like them, the perfect couple, as their friends must have said when they first saw them together: her passion and sophistication, her big dark eyes and luscious hair, a high-end Carmen, so to speak, or a Penélope Cruz. She’s Spanish and he’s Anglo-Saxon. Yet another perfect combination. She is dark like Carmen, he is blond; her eyes are black and his are blue; she has soft and beautiful skin while his face is rough and masculine, with an attractive stubble that makes him seem adventurous while also delineating the contour of his jaw. But there is something in the air, a secret disquiet between them, or in each of them separately. We see, from the outside, the lights go out in the apartment. But she is changing into different clothes, swiftly, silently putting on a raincoat and slipping a set of car keys in her pocket. Her languor turns into haste, her calm into determination. The car is a Mercedes sports car. She drives through Paris very fast, down avenues and through a tunnel that must lie parallel to the Seine. Beyond the profile of her face we see a luminous red fog. When luxury cars drive through splendid cities or down the highway they always have the road entir
ely to themselves. Behind her, in the tunnel, a motorcycle suddenly appears. For an instant the memory of Princess Diana’s tragic death in a similar chase gives us warning of the frightful closeness between a great passion and a catastrophe. The motorcycle catches up with her. Concealed by his helmet like a medieval knight in armor, the rider turns to look at her as he speeds by, then disappears into the distance.
To Walk Alone in the Crowd Page 8
