Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  He locked the door and called the police. He shouted hysterically into the telephone. With an astuteness that was not wholly his own but rather dictated by urgency and instinct, he realized that it would be imprudent to go into too much detail, which would only lead to an interpretation based on his hard-earned fame as a drunk. It was enough to report the bare minimum and let his shouts and desperation speak for themselves. Moreover, a minimum of information—as minimum as possible—would instill more curiosity and help would arrive sooner. Still holding the phone, he began to hear the banging on the door. The bulk of the dead hoard kept going straight ahead—he heard the large iron gates swing open and crash to the ground. Apparently, no door could stop them. The one protecting him bulged and cracked; it wasn’t mere physical strength they used to force it open, but rather a kind of destructive will. The dead bolt flew off and in they came: tall, resolute, looking at him, and groaning. There were several of them; they seemed to be racing to reach him—his terrified and infinite paralysis. They moved like insects or ostriches. More than groans, the sounds they emitted were like the snorting of a dog sniffing his prey. One of them, the winner, fell on him with an expression on its face that suddenly (his last “suddenly”) looked like a smile of triumph. It took his head in both hands—bones poorly gloved with strips of purple flesh—and brought its horrendous mug up to his right temple. It handled him with ease; either terror had paralyzed the victim or the attacker emanated some magnetic substance of fatalism and surrender; in either case resistance was futile. In one mouthful it removed a chunk of the man’s skull—which broke off with an ominous “clack” and was left to hang off his right shoulder—then sunk its teeth into his brain. But it didn’t eat the brain, though it could have, and it seemed like it was going to. With one slurping action both delicate and very strong, it consumed the endorphins in the cortex and the brain stem to the very last drop. After which, it pulled away its face—if you could call that a face—and raised it toward the ceiling, letting out a super-shrill snort as it released the guard’s body, which fell lifeless to the ground. The others had already left: they must have known that this thirsty beast would not leave them even one endorphin. Once it had had its fill, it followed the others out.

  The living dead continued to pour through the iron gate, spilling out onto the road leading toward town. Always pressing forward, their goose steps modified by a thousand limps, they were drawn in a tremendous hurry to the yellowish light in the sky above Pringles. The column remained compact during the first stretch, with some platoon leaders out in front and others fanning out in the rear; it looked more like a column than a triangle, the point of the arrow aimed at a Pringles oblivious to the danger, celebrating its Saturday night.

  But the formation did not hold beyond the immediate access road to the Cemetery, where there was open country on either side. As soon as they reached the first houses, eager platoons turned off to one side or the other. The inhabitants of these modest houses were sleeping, many of whom didn’t even wake up when their doors and windows came crashing down, and those who did only had time to see, or to guess at through the darkness, the nightmarish bogeymen who leaned over their beds and opened their skulls with one bite. No house was spared, nor a single occupant therein, not even the babies in their cribs. Immediately after completing the cerebral suction, the corpses left and rejoined the cadaverous march, always in the direction of town.

  As they advanced, the terrain became more densely populated. Neighborhoods alternated with clusters of ranches and solitary houses, which the detachments swept through exhaustively. Although the populated areas also stretched out laterally, the dead were satisfied with what they found right next to the road, to which they returned once their attacks were accomplished. They didn’t spend too much time on what they must have considered mere distractions. The important objective was the town, where the density of human material promised a much easier and readier harvest.

  Not everyone was sleeping in all the houses they attacked. In some, they were still sitting around the dinner table when they were paid the unexpected “visit.” In those cases, screams and horrified expressions were plentiful, as were escape attempts that were never successful because the intruders came in through all the doors and windows at the same time. Nor did it do them any good to lock themselves in a room, but at least it gave some of them time to make an interrupted call to the police, calls that grew more and more frequent as the minutes passed and that finally convinced the forces of law and order that ”something” was happening.

  But before the police decided to dispatch a patrol car, the lethal march had covered about half the distance, and there they really scored. It was at the local school, Primary School #7, where that night the School Association was holding a dance, which they did every month to raise funds for building repairs and school supplies. These dances were well-attended, and included a buffet dinner and a disc jockey. At that hour, just past midnight, things were winding down, but nobody had left yet. It was curtains for everybody, and first of all the children.

  In the buffet room next to the auditorium where the dance was being held, two ladies were sitting alone at a table, chatting away. When the screams started, neither paid much attention, thinking that the piñata had been broken, or something like that. Each woman was criticizing her respective husband, benevolently, for their opposite approaches to one of the most popular local pastimes: going for a drive. The tradition started in the days when automobiles were a novelty and gasoline was cheap, and had continued. Families or couples would get in the car on Sunday afternoons or any day after dinner and cruise around the streets in all directions. This was called “taking a spin.”

  “When we take a spin,” one of the ladies started, then continued, referring to her husband, “José drives so fast! As if he were in a hurry to get somewhere. I tell him: ‘We’re just driving around,’ but he doesn’t listen.”

  “Juan, on the other hand,” the other said, “drives so slowly when we go for a spin, that he makes me nervous. I tell him: ‘Speed up a little, you’re going to put me to sleep.’ But he just keeps driving like a snail.”

  “I wish José would go a little slower. He drives so fast I can’t see anything. If we drive past somebody we know, I can’t even say hi before we’re already shooting past them.”

  “I’d rather go a little faster. It’s unbearable to go so slowly, the car seems to be standing still, and it takes forever just to get to the corner . . .”

  They were both exaggerating (and it was their last exaggerations), but the “meaning” of their complaints, and the satisfying symmetry they created, must have been the reason their conversation so fully absorbed their attention, expressing their personalities and demonstrating the quality of the endorphins they were producing. These passed, after the brutal opening of their skulls, into the systems of the two corpses who attacked them from behind and emptied their brains. They were the last candies in the great sweetshop the school had become, and once the invaders had gorged themselves, they departed the way they had come, leaving behind some three hundred lifeless bodies where only minutes before merriment had prevailed.

  There was something diabolically efficient in their timing. If what they wanted were endorphins, the little drops of happiness and hope secreted by the brains of the living, there was no more propitious time than Saturday night, when the worries of life are set aside and people temporarily indulge in gratifying their need for socializing, sex, food, and drink, which they abstain from during the rest of the week. In their depressing existence in the afterlife, the dead had developed a true addiction to endorphins. What a glaring paradox that Cemetery Road had become Endorphin Road.

  On the way from the Cemetery, the town started at about the halfway point. And that spot was marked by Primary School #7, where the invading army had had its first real banquet of the night, especially because of the number of children whose brains were teeming with happiness matter. From then on, there were almost no empty s
pots in the urban weave. The compact herd of corpses spread to the right, through the grid of dirt streets and onto the first paved ones. They entered every house, lit up and dark, rich and poor, but the bigger and more agile ones went on to the wealthier houses, knowing that the rich were happier. They ran over the rooftops to get to the adjacent streets, their grotesque shapes, silhouetted against the light of the moon, took inhuman leaps, crashing through a skylight with a burst of broken glass. Competition among them made them faster and more dangerous.

  They left “scorched earth” in their wake: the only ones who saw them and managed to escape were a few people in cars who didn’t stop out of curiosity and sped away. There weren’t many (most cars were surrounded, the windows broken, and the people “slurped”), but there were enough of them to carry the news downtown. A white police van didn’t have such luck.

  Be that as it may, Pringles had been put on alert. Even though the information was spreading quickly, panic was building up slowly. The movies and, before the movies, the ancestral legends those stories are based on, had produced in the population a basic state of incredulity; at the same time it prepared them for an emergency (they had only to remember what the protagonists of those movies had done); it also prevented them from reacting because everybody knew, or thought they knew, that fiction was not reality. They had to see with their own eyes somebody who had seen them (with their own eyes) to be convinced of the terror of reality, and even then they weren’t convinced. It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future.

  And while oscillations of belief continued, the hunt didn’t let up for a minute in the neighborhoods behind the Plaza, always gaining ground toward downtown. The metaphor of the hunt didn’t actually fit very well; it was more like a flower tasting, or a tasting of juicy statues immobilized by terror and surprise. The element of surprise began to diminish as events developed. Terror increased in indirect proportion, and spread more quickly than the living dead, who moved slowly because of their appetite for endorphins, which prevented them from leaving a single head unturned. That’s when some escaped. The first was a seven-year-old girl who leapt out of bed screaming and scrambled through the giraffe legs of the corpse that had burst into her bedroom, making his loose tibias knock together like castanets and seriously challenging his balance. Two things saved her: her big family, which kept the other intruders busy, and how small she was; she was the size of a three-year-old, but her real age gave her disproportionate agility and speed. She ran down a glass-enclosed corridor. The reflection of the moon through the green diamond-shaped windows lit up the comings and goings of the ragged ghouls to and from the skulls of her family members. The operation included a bloodcurdling slurp, which she fortunately didn’t hear. She dodged two who tried to stop her and slipped through the hole where the door to the patio had been. One of the corpses was already chasing her, as one chases a sugarplum that has rolled off a cake. Outside another, who was roaming around the property, spotted her and leaped in front of her to cut her off. Without slowing down, the girl veered off toward the chicken coop and jumped inside. She sought the protection of the darkness, under the roosts; her friends the chickens were asleep, brooding; she knew her way to the very back corner, which was her favorite hiding place, and she didn’t wake them. But the two corpses who burst in did. This unleashed a phenomenal uproar of flapping and squawking in the phosphorescent-streaked darkness; the whiteness of their bones was mirrored in the feathers of the Leghorns, making the darkness even more confusing. The corpses, too big for the small chicken coop, got tangled up in the poles, and when they spread out their arms to shoo away the chickens, they got tangled up in each other and fell on their backs, as if they were doing acrobatics with feathered balls, all to the sounds of frantic clucking. Hens are not aggressive animals, on the contrary, but their shyness, as well as their limited intelligence, worked in their favor in this instance; their irrational fear made them unmanageable, and in the midst of the confusion, the little girl escaped again.

  She was one of the few that escaped the cerebral kiss. Block after block, the harvest advanced. The dead grew emboldened by their own efficiency. But because nothing is wholly predictable in human material, they came up against a couple of bizarre situations, which clashed with how bizarre they were. One such situation was at the Chalet de la Virgen, which from the outside looked just like any other house, with a little front yard, a car in the garage, laundry hanging serenely on the clothesline out back, and a welcome mat by the front door. The door as well as the windows exploded and half a dozen robbers from beyond the grave burst in snorting and taking huge disjointed strides that soon lost direction: their zeal fizzled out because there was nobody home. Or, better put, the whole family was where it should be: the parents in their double bed, the children in twin beds, the baby in the crib, and even the grandmother in her bedroom covered with a blanket she’d knit with her own hands. But they were all exactly like the statue of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, stiff and with impassive painted faces, all the same shape as if they had been cast in the same mold. The corpses stamped their feet in confusion, and some would have tried to sink their teeth into a plaster head if it hadn’t been such a disproportionately small head, like a button. They left in a rage. But it was their own fault. You had to have been dead and spent a long time in the Cemetery not to know of the existence of the famous Chalet de la Virgen of Pringles.

  The ones who paid the price were the neighbors, against whom the attackers unleashed their fury. This didn’t slow their advance, on the contrary: they became more hot-headed. They couldn’t get enough to eat thereby confirming the truth of the expression, “Appetite comes with eating.” Moreover, lest we forget, there were thousands of them, and they’d just barely started; legions and legions of them—horrifying waves of limping, spastic corpses that kept spreading chaotically across the nocturnal checkerboard of the town—had still not tasted any happiness drops, and they were sharpening their straws. Those that had partaken of the strange nectar, wanted more; along with their snorts, they burst out in mechanical fits of laughter, something between barks and growls, and they improvised dances in the middle of the street—sarabandes, naked jotas, perforated rumbas—that dissolved the same way they had formed, with stampedes that carried them onto roofs or into the tops of trees.

  The truth is, although they worked quickly (and more and more quickly: it was like a sped-up movie), they had a lot to do, and this gave the living forces in Pringles time to organize their defense. The town had been put on alert. At this point, not even those with the most nay-saying mentality could deny it. But even if they didn’t deny it, they were only accepting it on a guarded level of belief. Nobody likes to be the butt of a joke, that’s how the human soul is; everybody trusts that the mechanism of the joke will have a fallback position in reality, which allows them to switch from being objects to subjects.

  The mayor was already in his office in the Palacio Municipal, meeting with his emergency cabinet and in direct communication with the chief of police, who was manning his battle station at police headquarters. Representatives of the community were constantly arriving there as well as the Palacio, and urgent deliberations resulted in the issuing of the first orders. Telephones were ringing throughout the larger metropolitan area. Fortunately, everybody knew each other in Pringles, and in turn all the people who knew each other knew everyone else, so the web of communications didn’t take long to start buzzing and producing concrete results.

  The first initiative the authorities took was to establish a line of defense at a certain distance from the position of the invasion at that moment, sacrificing a few blocks (whose inhabitants would be evacuated) in order to have time to prepare. The Line was drawn on the map of the City of Pringles that was hanging on a wall: the central section would run along the diagonal, less than a hundred yards long, that went from the police headquarters to the Palacio, pass
ing through the Plaza. It would continue northward along Mitre Street and to the east through the small plaza on the Boulevard, all the way to the Granadero. The idea was to form a line of cars and trucks in front of armed men equipped with all the weapons and ammunition that could be found. And there was plenty of it—a passion for hunting had prevailed in the town since the old days.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . .

  The roar of engines filled the Pringles night, awakening the few who were still asleep. Police and firemen oversaw the formation of the Line, while a police car equipped with loudspeakers drove up and down the streets of No Man’s Land instructing everyone to evacuate immediately. Those concerned did not need to be told twice: they were already running in their nightshirts and slippers to take refuge on the other side of the wall of parked vehicles, which had quickly formed. They didn’t keep going: they stayed there to watch the marksmen take up position, and they were joined by the curious bystanders who had come from downtown, drawn to what they hoped would be an unforgettable spectacle. Most were young people: the nightclubs had emptied out, and the fun-loving gangs of teenagers brought their boisterous happiness to the battlefield. With them, heavily armed hunters kept arriving and were placed at the weakest points along the Line. They were even hailing from the neighborhood beyond Boulevard Cuarenta, after having been informed of the situation by fellow members of the Rifle Club. The arsenal they deployed was impressive. The pretext for buying it had been the geese, the partridges, the hares, and the pretext had been perfected by the far-away and hypothetical deer and wild boar; even so, it would have been difficult to explain—except as the whim of a collector—the presence of Belgian automatic rifles, howitzers, molten aluminum explosive bullets, and even grenades. Many small farmers have more money than they need, and, with so few opportunities in small towns for social or cultural consumerism, they indulge in the purchase of weapons until there’s no place left in their houses to put them.