Carla opens the door for you, her skin white, incongruous dark circles under her eyes, wearing a yellow sweatshirt with an enormous white C on it, a blue miniskirt, and running shoes: she is dressed as a University of California cheerleader. She lets you in. "Good evening, darling, good evening." Her short blond hair, her full lips, her smile so wide it is threatening, the soft, experienced curve of her breasts, the miniskirt revealing her thighs. She has perfected the requirements of your none-too-original fantasy of a California girl. The ruined beauty of her face, her red eyes, and the intense blue veins on her pale cheeks contrast with the apparent image of health and vigor that her body projects. Some things cannot be hidden.
You sit on the round bed and let yourself be reflected in the mirror on the ceiling. The room is dark, making the furniture look faded in the ash-colored light. At last, a few minutes for you to relax. Will you be able to? You look at Carla again and tremble. If her hair were brown and she were to wear it like Flavia, they could be sisters. Perhaps the resemblance is in her lips. You try to banish the thought from your mind. Your daughter has the sweetest face, not yet marked by excesses.
You close your eyes.
You open them again. When she's not smiling, Carla's similarity to Flavia becomes indisputable. It's her age, you tell yourself; it's because you love your daughter so much that you see her everywhere you go.
You had the same feeling the first time you saw Carla. It was lunchtime and you were leaving McDonald's with a bag of French fries in your hand. Sitting at a table near the door, her elbows resting on a plastic tray full of napkins and what was left of a hamburger, she looked at you through teary eyes. She was wearing a red dress with a mustard stain on it, hoop earrings, and a necklace made of brilliant green stones. Something made you stop. You asked if you could help her. "My parents just kicked me out," she replied, sniffing and pointing to a bag of clothes on the floor. You had to get back to work, but she was almost the same age as Flavia, and there was something about her face that awakened your paternal instinct. "If you want to help, you could pay for a night in a hotel," she said, her tone firm all of a sudden. "I have ways of thanking you."
On the walls are two somber lithographs by someone who digitally combined Klimt and Schiele. The gold-framed mirrors, the Jacuzzi that has been broken for a month now, the blood-red bedspread, the television mounted in a corner of the room. The El Dorado tries to go unnoticed and not publicize what business it's in, but one look at any of the rooms is enough to tell you that it's an hourly-rate motel. Even though your relationship with Carla is now stable and you could meet elsewhere, you use the El Dorado so she can pay off her debt to the owners. They have helped her out of more than one difficult situation. Carla has room 492 every day from five until ten o'clock; you try to use at least two of those hours. You have never asked her if she sees other men after that; you would rather not know.
"You seem pensive, darling."
"Iam."
You remember the message you received that morning. Murderer, your hands are stained with blood. What murderer? What hands? What blood? Who could have sent it to you? How had they managed to get into the Black Chamber's secret communication network? You couldn't evaluate how important that message was and had decided to ignore it. You don't know whether you did the right thing. Nor do you care. You are tired of your boss and his paranoia about security.
Carla hands you a glass of whiskey and sits down next to you. Hastened by her determined look, by the eloquent expression of desire on her face, you put a hand on her left thigh, pliant and speckled with red blemishes. She places her lips on yours; her warm, inquisitive tongue skillfully parts them. Frightened and trembling, you let yourself be led. That's how it happened the first time. You took her to a hotel, paid for her room, and helped her to get settled. You were about to leave when you were surprised by the urgency of her kiss, when she pulled you onto the bed, her hands hurriedly undressing you. Only afterward, when she told you to meet her the next day at the El Dorado, did you realize how she made her living and begin to understand her parents a little. But it was too late.
"Is this how you like it? You're so tense, darling."
Your time with Carla is your great escape to a way of being that has led you to see a psychologist on more than one occasion. Still, it's only a partial escape. Carla may caress and make love to you dressed as one of your wildest fantasies, but your mind is still elsewhere. You should let yourself go, let your mind take part in the experience as much as your body, but you can't be something you're not. In photos, you are always to one side, looking down at the floor, trying not to be noticed, never looking into the lens of the camera.
"If you don't want our time to slip away, you should stop thinking about your wife."
Your: the unbearable lightness of an r pronounced by a California girl, at least in that word. She is taking the imitation very seriously.
"I haven't thought about her in years."
It's strange but true. You have been meeting Carla on a regular basis for two months now, and you don't feel like you're being unfaithful to Ruth. Devoid of desire, your marriage has become a quiet friendship. She lives her life and you live yours. You have stimulating conversations, the product of an affinity for the same topics, but sleeping together has ceased to be an adventure and is instead a tolerable inconvenience.
The way Carla unbuttons your shirt or plays with the zipper on your pants is evidence of her skill. Your socks fall to the floor in the shape of an x. You are naked and your reflection in the mirror on the ceiling is deformed. Those can't be your chubby legs, nor that disproportionate torso. And all those wrinkles on that face ... The years take their toll.
She is about to slip off her miniskirt when you stop her.
"The idea is for you to leave your clothes on. That's why I asked you to dress that way."
Her gaze is vacant. There are three moles on her left cheek, and the way she speaks is slightly annoying. Darling this and darling that. Fucking darling. She crouches on the bed and begins to play with you. Nibbling, her tongue slippery. You are going to surprise her by lasting a long time, because while she does her work you will distract yourself by thinking about the man who deciphered Purple, about Bacon's anagrams in Shakespeare's work. As Carla goes about her business, you focus your mind. If the letter a is added to the last two lines of the epilogue of The Tempest—"As you from crimes would pardon'd be / Let your indulgence set me free"—the following anagram can be formed: "'Tempest' of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam / Do ye ne'er divulge me ye words."
Have you fallen in love, or is it need that brings you to her? You don't know. What you do know is that in your office in the archives you began to miss your time with Carla, long to be reunited with her body. You took money out of your savings account to pay for her lodging, to buy her clothes, so that she doesn't have to see other men (but you suspect you don't have enough money to buy her exclusivity). Once, without Ruth's knowledge, you let her sleep in the Toyota. Your visits to the El Dorado after work are now daily; you had to find excuses to explain your late arrivals to Ruth. And you didn't leave Carla even after you found marks on her right forearm one afternoon: the smiling prostitute did drugs. How naive you were not to have realized that from the beginning. No wonder her moods changed so quickly, her eyes were so vacant, her jaw sometimes trembled faintly.
You asked her. Kneeling in front of you, she stayed perfectly still and seemed to vacillate between whether to tell you the truth or not. All of a sudden she began to cry. In between sobs, she told you that a friend had got her addicted to heroin. She had done everything she could to stop, including a methadone treatment program. She was now hooked on methadone and worked as a prostitute to pay her debts.
"Please, help me," Carla had implored. Only ghostly similarities with your daughter remained. You stroked her tear-stained cheeks. You wondered exactly what methadone was, what its effects were. You now knew where the majority of the money you gave her went. The marks on her forear
m were in the shape of a cross; you weren't religious, but you knew to pay attention to the world when it spoke to you. You held her, pitied her. You would help her, you wouldn't abandon her.
Your Ericsson rings. You are tempted not to answer. You are even more tempted to answer. Carla continues to devote herself to your member, her expression becoming annoyed when you interrupt her. You see the number on the screen—a call from your house—and turn off your phone.
Chapter 8
FLAVIA AND HER MOM are eating dinner in faint, flickering candlelight. Dad, who is always late these days, says he has to work overtime. Obviously the rules can be changed when it suits him. There had been times when she wanted to take her dinner to her room, but Dad had forbidden it. The only rule that had to be respected at home was the one regarding dinner—everyone had to be together and the abundant wires that connected them to the world had to be disconnected.
Ruth spills her glass of red wine on the white tablecloth. She watches the dark stain spread, making no effort to stop it. On the rug at Flavia's feet, Clancy lifts his head, startled, then goes back to sleep.
"Are you OK?" Flavia asks, taking a sip of her guarana juice, trailing her fork through her pasta from side to side.
"I had a bad day. Don't ever teach. Learn everything you possibly can, but don't teach it to anyone. Ingrates. It just gets worse and worse. What a waste of time."
"You're right. I don't know how our teachers put up with us."
Flavia knows that her mom's problems are not just today's. Her laughter has been absent for a long while now, laughter that used to cause glass to rattle (she recalls a scene from the frantic movie Run Lola Run, one of her favorites). And she is drinking more and more, behind everyone's back. The maid has shown Flavia the empty vodka bottles in the garage—that clear alcohol, which lets Miguel think she is drinking water. How can Flavia tell her mom that she might understand, that she's willing to listen if her mom feels comfortable confiding in her? She can't. It's impossible to break down those barriers. The same with Dad. Adults live in another world, where things are done differently. Would that be her fate too? Would she one day cross the border separating that strange land from her own? Would she become just another adult, unable to understand adolescents?
"I keep getting nosebleeds," Ruth says. "At first it didn't worry me, but it's happened several times. I went to the doctor today for a checkup. They did a few tests, an endoscopy. They think it's a vein in my nose that's giving me problems. I'll have the results soon."
"Does Dad know?" Flavia's tone is unworried. She should pretend to be a little more interested, knowing what a hypochondriac her mom is.
"He doesn't have a clue what's going on around here. I don't think he cares."
"That's not true."
"Right. You're his darling daughter. It started to bleed after an incident in class today. It happens when I'm stressed. Frustrated. Which is most of the time lately."
"You're frustrated?"
"Don't ever teach."
She lights a cigarette and gives Flavia permission to leave the table. Flavia stands up. Mom smokes a lot, a pack a day—it might be that. She'd better not mention it ... or she'll get that into her head. Black tobacco. The pungent odor adheres to clothes, the curtains, the furniture. It took possession of the house a long time ago, will never leave. It's in the pictures in the living room, in the family photos on the walls, on the lamps in the rooms that for months have been at half light to save energy: you have no idea what's going to happen with the electricity bill, whether it will continue to rise exorbitantly or whether the government will freeze rates.
Clancy has woken up and follows her to her room, his nails clicking loudly on the parquet floor; they need to be cut. Without turning the light on, Flavia walks barefoot past her desk with its two humming computers, the walls covered in posters of Japanese movies, pink sheets on the bed, and shelves overflowing with her collection of board games (Life, Clue, Risk, Monopoly—intolerable memories of a childhood and early adolescence lived far away from any type of monitor; it seems impossible to her, but there was such a time).
A hacker would laugh at her tidy room, at the childish, feminine touches. At one time she considered herself a hacker, when she was fourteen. She had just discovered the power of computers and enjoyed having fun at the expense of her few friends who had them. She would access their Compaqs and Macs and make the mouse move strangely or turn the screen on and off—harmless things like that. Then the next day in class her friends would tell her that it was as if their computers had been possessed by some strange force, and Flavia would laugh to herself at their innocence and jokingly offer to perform black magic to break the spell.
She helps Clancy up onto the bed. She'd better not let Mom see. She complains about the smell he leaves on the blankets.
In the darkness, the menacing shapes of trees and neighboring houses are silhouetted clearly against the window. She is a shadow looking out at other shadows. All the houses are the same, symmetrical, lined up facing one another; all the walls are painted the same cream color, the shingles an intense red, the balcony with its gothic metal railing, the fake chimney. The neatly cut grass along the sidewalk, the carnations, the hibiscus, the rubber trees. It makes her uneasy.
She looks out at the windows illuminated in other houses, portals to other worlds, so similar to and different from her own. Someone is watching a soccer game on TV, logging on to Playground, printing porn photos from sexo.com, visiting Subcommander Marcos's Web site, reading in bed, hacking a virtual casino, calling her boyfriend on her cell phone, writing a poem on a laptop, burning a CD, looking sadly at a postcard from New York where the Twin Towers can be seen in the distance, listening to a concert on rollingstone.com.
Someone, with no lights on in the room, is trying to forget the world outside and create a quiet space for introspection.
But the world keeps intruding. Flavia pictures herself getting off the bus and that guy approaching her. Rafael's thick eyebrows are hard to forget, and his cell phone is yellow, even though the image in her mind is blurry and in black and white. The way he spoke was curious, as if he wanted to say something without actually voicing it.
She thinks he must be connected to the Resistance and realizes that everything is linked to her obsession.
She goes to her desk and sits in front of her computers. She opens e-mail, reads the latest news. A group of hackers has taken control of various government and private company sites (GlobaLux being one of them). They have also sent a virus to the computer networks at several federal organizations. An e-mail from a cracker friend warned her two days ago that this would happen. The Ministry of the Interior has declared a state of emergency because of "this concerted attack." Flavia reads the information. Even though she tries to maintain her journalistic objectivity, she is dying to know whether the Resistance is a local group. For four years now she has been refining her knowledge of cyber outlaws; she has approximately three thousand files on hackers, from neophytes to big names, most of them Latin American. Her computers search and file their conversations in chatrooms, on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and in Playground. The information has given her files a sophisticated depth. Even though they don't like to admit it, the media and the intelligence service are some of AllHacker's most loyal surfers. Few in Rio Fugitivo know as much as she does.
She reviews her files and prepares a series of Identikits on those who are in the Resistance. They are speculative, since in truth she is unsure of the group's makeup. She isn't even sure if the hackers who wound up dead were part of the Resistance. In fact, she doesn't even know whether Vivas and Padilla were hackers; the information she was given could have been false.
She would like to get her hands on a photo of Kandinsky to put on her site. With a scoop like that, her reputation would be bumped up another few notches. No one knows who he is or what he looks like. Although she would get into trouble if she did publish it. Hadn't her meeting with Rafael been a warning? Two yea
rs ago, when she helped the Black Chamber catch a couple of hackers, she had received death threats and her site had suffered several DoS attacks ("denial of service": a computer is instructed, for example, to bombard a certain address with e-mail, and the flood of traffic hangs the system). Since then she had promised herself that she would be more neutral on the topic, that she would spend her time informing above all. She has a love-hate relationship with hackers. They say they prefer secrecy and anonymity, but they also like to let their pseudonyms be known when they manage to do something that they believe is worthy of admiration. As long as they see that she is independent, they will leave her alone.
Flavia has a hunch: Rafael belongs to Kandinsky's inner circle. He was trusted enough to be in charge of contacting her, to abandon the virtual world in order to send a message to the real world. He may even be Kandinsky himself. It would be incredible if it were true, but why not?
She needs to create a false identity and go into chatrooms and IRC channels, or some of the neighborhoods in Playground, to find out the latest. Hackers live in the shadows, but they can't keep quiet. Sooner or later they need to tell someone about their exploits. Hackers are marvelous storytellers.
She decides to log on to Playground. A little more than a year ago, three recent graduates from San Ignacio High School had borrowed money from their parents in order to acquire the rights to the Playground franchise for Bolivia. Created by a Finnish corporation, Playground was both a virtual game and an online community. There, for a modest monthly fee—twenty dollars, which could grow to much more, depending on the time you spent—anyone could create an avatar or use one of those that Playground put up for sale. The game takes place in the year 2019. Participants try to live in an apocalyptic land governed by the strong arm of a corporation. Playground's success in other countries was replicated in Bolivia. It started out with the young middle class in the country's largest cities and slowly spread to outlying areas, other generations. Flavia spends several hours a day there. She has spent all of her own money and is now in debt to her dad. Time and again she has promised him that she will limit her visits. She has tried, but she lacks willpower. Sociologists refer to the financial problems resulting from abuse of the game as "the Playground effect."
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