The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  “How’s it going, Mechita my dear. The video’s really intense. It looks like shit, all pixelated, and it doesn’t help me at all, because you can’t see the plates on the truck they put the girl into, all the guys have their faces covered like with ski masks, the house could be any house and the street is just any awful street in Greater Buenos Aires, it could be anywhere. But you can see the girl perfectly. They toss her around like they want to show her; I don’t know if the guy with the phone films her on purpose, because there’s no audio, but they move her a little from here to there, the blanket falls and you can see her whole face. Then it’s like a close-up, the sick sons of bitches, and one arm falls, really floppy, like this, across her chest.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She looks bad, but she’s not stiff, and her face isn’t beaten up. She could be high, drunk, asleep. I think I got ripped off. But yeah, she could also be dead. The video lasts thirty seconds, and you can see her face for about ten, there’s no way to know. A divine kid, that’s for sure. Beautiful, she looks like a model.”

  Mechi felt herself start to sweat now too, felt her stomach harden and her cheeks burn, like when she realized she was stupidly crossing a street on a red light because she was wearing headphones and not paying attention. She hadn’t told Pedro about her obsession with Vanadis. She didn’t want to ask herself why, but she knew she felt ashamed, or guilty. So now, she couldn’t show him how sure she was and how much it affected her. She turned around so Pedro couldn’t see her face as she pulled out Vanadis’s file, opened it, and asked Pedro if that was the girl. “It’s her,” he replied without hesitation, and he dove into the file, saying it was one of the bulkiest he’d seen. But after turning three pages, he looked up.

  “How’d you know this was the girl from the video? I mean, you didn’t doubt for a second, you handed me the file immediately!”

  “It’s a coincidence.”

  “What’s a coincidence? Mechi, don’t act all mysterious, girl, tell me.”

  “I was looking through that file the other day, sometimes I get bored….And, well, I’d just read one of the interviews in there, with a street friend of Vanadis’s—the girl’s name is Vanadis—where she talks about how two guys filmed her, two of her johns. It’s all there, the girl turned tricks in Constitución.”

  Pedro was somewhere between openmouthed and contented. Who’s the friend? he wanted to know, and then Mechi told him about the Caseros ex-prison. Pedro seemed ever more pleased, and she felt a twinge of anger as always when her friend got excited at the opportunity for a new investigation that would help his career. And this one was unbeatable: the Death House, the lesbian addict, the beautiful teen who liked zombies. Mechi let her bad mood dissipate: she knew it was impossible to ask any other reaction of Pedro. Then she gave him the MySpace address, told him about the tattoo artist, and, after he begged for a couple minutes, she let him photocopy Vanadis’s whole file, start to finish; they stayed after closing time to do it, as the cars passed overhead and night fell outside. Before leaving, Pedro asked her one more time if she wanted to see the video. She said no, and she also told him, with what remained of her anger, that he should bring it to the prosecutor the next morning. But he wasn’t so sure. He knew it wasn’t right to keep it, but he wanted to investigate more. Plus, he had so much material now. The video alone proved almost nothing, but if he got more information—which he planned to, from his informant and maybe some of Vanadis’s friends, if he could track them down from the file—he could put together a better article and offer something more solid to the prosecutor. Mechi listened to his justifications without a word. She thought it was wrong for Pedro not to turn the video over to the authorities immediately, it was what he should do. But she couldn’t pretend to be some kind of pure soul: she really did want to see that cellphone video, she was dying to see it, and that morbid curiosity wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. Pedro didn’t repeat his offer to show her, and she didn’t ask him to see it, either. She could hold out. Pedro said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek at the subway stairs; he’d call her the next day. His plan was to look for Loli in the ruins of the Caseros prison in the early evening, then chat with some of the transvestites who would only come out to work once the sun went down, and maybe he’d even contact the infatuated tattoo artist. She said she’d wait for his call the next night, that she always left her phone on. But that night she turned it off and also disconnected the landline, so she could sleep better. It didn’t work: she woke with a start several times, her chest sweating. In the morning over coffee, she couldn’t remember what her nightmares were about, but she did vaguely recall the figure of a naked girl whose back was covered in blood, a kind of little angel whose wings had been torn off.

  * * *

  …

  Mechi was anxious all morning, glancing sideways at her cellphone even though she wasn’t expecting Pedro’s call until that night. She went out for lunch a little earlier than usual, and she decided to go to a bar that was on the other side of the park for a change, to distract herself. But she never made it there. When she was going up the steps of Chacabuco Park’s main fountain, which wasn’t turned on that day, Mechi saw Vanadis sitting on one of the steps. No doubt about it. It was her, dressed the same as in one of the photos on her MySpace page, the only one that showed her whole body. That was precisely why Mechi recognized her, because of her clothes: it was like seeing the photo brought to life. The medium-length boots, the denim skirt, the black tights, the dark, heavy hair. She thought she must be imagining things, but it was just a passing thought, because she was absolutely sure, the nausea in her stomach and her shaking hands made that clear. She approached slowly: Vanadis didn’t look at her. Finally, she planted herself right in front of the girl, so she’d have to pay attention.

  “Vanadis? Are you Vanadis?”

  “Yeah, hi, what’s up?” replied the girl, who was clearly not dead, who couldn’t be the girl in the video Pedro had bought, because here she was smiling in the sun and very much alive. Her smile displayed crooked, yellow teeth, the only thing that disturbed her beauty; Mechi had never seen them in photos, perhaps because Vanadis didn’t laugh much and rarely opened her mouth.

  Mechi didn’t know what to say. The girl didn’t speak to her. She was afraid Vanadis would stand up and leave, that she’d slip through her fingers. So she asked Vanadis to please come with her, and the girl complied. She couldn’t question her in their first meeting, she just made sure the girl followed her to the office, where they were met by howls of delight and surprise from Graciela and Maria Laura, who went mad with joy when they found out who this girl was. They offered Vanadis a cappuccino from the machine, and they did see fit to hound her with questions that she answered mostly with inclinations of her head and a lot of “I don’t remembers.” “She’s in shock,” said Graciela as she dialed the prosecutor and then Vanadis’s mother. In twenty minutes the office was jam-packed, and Vanadis’s family were all fainting, sobbing, and shouting in a reunion of demential celebration. Strange, thought Mechi, because during the whole year Vanadis was missing they never even called, and before that, when she was at reform school, they didn’t visit her. Not to mention the fact that they hadn’t gotten her off the street when she was turning tricks at fourteen years old. She mentioned this to Graciela, who looked at her with an expression that said, Well, aren’t you ignorant and soulless. Then she said, didactically: “People react to trauma and loss in different ways. Some families get obsessed and never stop searching; others act like nothing happened. That doesn’t mean they don’t love their kids.” Graciela, always with her style of permanently indignant social psychologist, and her simple but arrogant explanations. Once again, Mechi was glad that she worked separately from the other two women, that she’d never tried to make friends with them, and especially that she wasn’t one of the poor family members who had to sit across from Graciela and listen to her talk.

 
In all the commotion, she forgot to call Pedro. She finally did it once Vanadis and her family drove off toward the courthouse to file what they needed to for the case.

  “You can’t even guess what happened,” Mechi told him.

  “Ha! You can’t guess what happened here. I couldn’t go to Constitución to see about Vanadis, or to the prison or anything. My editor called me all worked up to send me here….”

  “Where’s here? Wait, Pedro, this is more—”

  “I’m at Rivadavia Park, in Caballito. A woman recognized a disappeared kid, he was looking at movies at one of the stalls. A certain Juan Miguel González, thirteen years old…”

  “Pedro, why—”

  “No, let me finish, this is insane! I can’t believe you haven’t heard.”

  “Over here we’ve got—”

  “Wait! So the woman goes up to the kid, she knew him from before, and she says, ‘Juan Miguel, is that you?’ And the kid says yes. Then the woman calls the family on the phone, from right there in the park, and the kid’s mother starts screaming, saying they already found her son, but they found him dead, three months ago! You remember this case? It was famous, it was on TV, a total mess! The one with the kid who fell under the train. Listen to this: The mother didn’t want to come see the kid who turned up in the park, she had a panic attack. The father was tougher, and he came. They had the kid at the police station, by the way, that’s where my editor sent me, the cops called him directly. So the father comes, and he says it’s his kid! My head is spinning and I’m not going to lie to you, I’m scared shitless, I mean shitless, that kid was dead, the train cut off his legs but didn’t touch his face, it’s the same face, the same kid.”

  “Pedro—”

  “And on top of the video I saw yesterday, this is all insane!”

  “Pedro, we found Vanadis, she was here, in Chacabuco Park.”

  “Say what?”

  “Vanadis, the girl from the video.”

  “I know who Vanadis is, woman, especially with that weird-as-shit name! What do you mean you found her?”

  “I was the one who found her, on some steps in the park, the ones near the fountain.”

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “Why would I fuck with you, don’t be an ass.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “They went to the courthouse, she’s with her family.”

  “And it’s her?”

  “Yeah. She’s seems a little weird, but it’s her.”

  “It can’t be, it can’t be. Wait, I’m getting another call, let me call you back, are you gonna be there?”

  * * *

  …

  In the following weeks things reached an unprecedented level of hysteria, and then got a little worse. Kids who’d gone missing from their houses began to turn up, but not just anywhere: they appeared in one of four of the city’s parks, Chacabuco, Avellaneda, Sarmiento, and Rivadavia. They stayed there, sleeping at night one beside another, and they seemed to have no intention of going anywhere. There were even babies, presumably those victims of parental kidnapping, though they could have also been stolen from hospital maternity wards. Their frantic families came to get them without thinking too much about how odd the case was, how unsettling it was that the children should come back all at the same time. The first ones to leave the parks were, obviously, the babies. Among the older kids, silence reigned. None of them said much, or seemed to want to talk about where they had been. Nor did they seem to recognize their families, though they left with the people who came to pick them up with a meekness that was somehow even more disturbing.

  No one else knew what to say, either, and crazy theories started to fly. Since the kids wouldn’t talk, it couldn’t be proven that some criminal organization had set them all free at once, for example, but that was the claim a few newspapers put forth. There were even police raids, and people were arrested as they shouted their innocence into the cameras—most likely they were telling the truth. There was no evidence to support charging them with anything in the case of the returned kids. But not many of the investigators, functionaries, and journalists had the honesty of Mechi or Pedro, who sincerely had no idea what was happening and couldn’t explain it; they only knew that they were very afraid.

  After the euphoric bewilderment of the first week, a chill began to spread. It turned out that the “recovered” kids of that first week were the normal cases. Except, of course, for the case of Juan Miguel, the boy who’d been hit by a train. The media had decided that Juan Miguel’s mother and father were poor drunks, and as such they were unreliable: they’d identified the wrong kid. The public accepted that story with relief. For the rest of that first week, then, everything happened relatively normally: boys and girls who had disappeared recently, from more or less stable families, with no signs of violence. Practically happy endings. But toward the middle of the second week, a muffled dread started to settle in that no one dared put into words for fear that their echoes would never end. One of its triggers was the case of Victoria Caride. An economics student, one of the few upper-middle-class kids who’d disappeared. It was said she could have been kidnapped by human traffickers, or suffered a psychotic break when she stopped taking her antidepressants, or else she’d taken off with a married man. Victoria’s case was a mystery, in sum, a girl who had gone out to buy cookies and never come back; a meticulous girl, with friends, money, university studies, and moral scruples that she channeled into volunteer work at a soup kitchen. It had been five years since she’d disappeared, and almost no hope of finding her remained. But now she’d appeared in Avellaneda Park, near the station of the decrepit little train that wound around the property; she was sitting on a bench and looking off toward the mansion that had once been an estate house. Her family was elated, and no sooner did they see her on TV—there was a mobile news unit in every park, day and night—than they came for her and whisked her away, squeezing her in an embrace of tears and runny noses.

  At first, neither Victoria’s family nor anyone else dared to mention that the girl had not changed at all, physically speaking, in the five years she’d been gone. She was wearing the same clothes she had on the day she disappeared, even the same clip holding her curly brown hair back in a ponytail.

  The second case was even trickier to explain: Lorena López, a girl from Villa Soldati who had run away from home with a taxi driver, and had been five months pregnant when she left. She appeared in the rose garden at Chacabuco Park, five months pregnant. She’d been missing for a year and a half. The gynecologists confirmed that it was her first pregnancy. And so? She must not have been pregnant when she left, it must have been a mistake, or maybe the girl had lied—the taxi driver didn’t turn up to confirm or deny anything, and well he didn’t, because he would have gone straight to jail for statutory rape. Or maybe the doctors were wrong—how could they be so sure? Lorena went back to Soldati, but after fifteen days her family “returned her” to the corresponding juvenile court. Pedro had seen them hand her over. He told Mechi how the mother had said to the judge, “I don’t know who this girl is, but she is not my daughter. I was wrong. She looks a lot like her, but she’s not my daughter. I gave birth to Lorena. I would recognize her in the dark, just from her smell. And this is not my daughter.” The judge ordered a DNA test, and they were still waiting for the results when another missing boy appeared, chatting with other kids under the Bolivar monument in Rivadavia Park. He was one of the most famous runaways, nicknamed Buckaroo or Super Buckaroo, real name Jonathan Ledesma. Buckaroo was a chronic runaway and a little thief in the making: at twelve years old he had fled his house in Pompeya ten times, and broken out of two reform schools. People saw him everywhere, because Buckaroo went out in the streets and picked pockets at the Avenida 9 de Julio stoplight, but no one had managed to keep track of him long enough to catch him. Plus, long periods of time passed when absolutely nothing w
as known of his whereabouts.

  Buckaroo’s case, however, was closed. A year before, he’d been run over by a bus on La Noria Bridge. He’d gotten dizzy while snatching purses and collapsed onto the road. The truck’s wheels rolled right over his chest and he couldn’t be saved. But his face had been left intact, same as Juan Miguel’s, the boy from the train. And it was the same as the face in the photos, the same as this Buckaroo who was in Rivadavia Park. Only it was impossible for Buckaroo to be there with the other reappeared children, because Buckaroo was dead.

  Until Buckaroo, Mechi had held on working in the office under the highway, she’d endured being part of the Council on the Rights of Children and Teens. But then the little pickpocket turned up alive and without his ribs stuck into his lungs—she’d seen the photos of the pavement covered in blood and entrails—and then another boy appeared who’d been eight years old when he went missing and was eight when he reappeared, but he’d been gone for six years, so he should have been fourteen. He should have been a teenager, not a child. Then Mechi realized that she couldn’t take any more, no more parents who were overjoyed at first and later grew terrified, no more news about psychiatric hospitalizations, no more staring eyes of kids in the park, sitting on the grass, on the steps, on the jungle gyms, playing with stray cats and even trying to get into the fountain. Mechi organized files, Mechi couldn’t explain this supernatural return, Mechi just wanted to turn back time.

  * * *

  …

  Mechi had made her decision to quit when she invited Pedro to have dinner that night. She’d disconnected the cable because she didn’t want to keep listening to the hysteria on TV about the returned children. Internet was enough: she could spend hours reading news and theories and visiting chat rooms, though she never participated, in an attempt to maintain some shred of sanity. She had gone to Vanadis’s MySpace page several times. The messages had stopped suddenly, all except the ones from Negative Zero, the tattoo artist. His last message, left several days before, said, “I’m coming to see you tonight.”