Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  One night, when we were on our way back from Buenos Aires earlier than usual, a girl got up from one of the seats in front of us, went up to the driver, and asked him to stop so she could get off. The driver braked in surprise and told her there was no bus stop there. We were going through Parque Pereyra: an enormous park halfway between Buenos Aires and our town. It had once been an estate of over ten thousand hectares that Perón expropriated from its millionaire owners. Now, it’s a nature reserve, a damp, sinister little forest where the sun barely enters. The road cuts it right in half. The girl insisted. The passengers started waking up and one man said, “But where do you want to go at this hour, dear?” The girl, who was our age and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, looked at him with such intense hatred he was struck dumb. She looked at him like a witch, like an assassin, like she had evil powers. The driver let her off and she ran toward the trees; when the bus started up again she disappeared in a cloud of dust. One woman complained aloud: “But how can you leave her out there alone at this hour? Who knows what could happen to her.” She and the driver argued almost until we reached the terminal.

  We never forgot that girl or her evil look. No one could ever hurt her, we were sure about that; if anyone was going to do harm, it was her. She wasn’t carrying a bag or a backpack, we remembered, and her clothes were too light for the coolness of the autumn night.

  Once, we went looking for her. Andrea’s boyfriend, the one with the van, had disappeared from our lives, but there was another boy, Paula’s brother, who by then could drive his father’s car. We didn’t know exactly where the girl had gotten off the bus, just that it wasn’t too far from the windmill—the park has a Dutch-style windmill that doesn’t produce anything, it’s just a chocolate shop for tourists. Walking among the trees, we discovered paths and a house that had maybe once been part of the estate. These days it’s been refurbished; you can visit it like a museum and they even hold exclusive wedding receptions there. But back then there was just a park ranger who took care of the place, and it seemed to be holding its breath among the pines, secret and empty.

  Maybe she’s the park ranger’s daughter, Paula’s brother said, and he brought us home laughing at us, the silly girls who thought they’d seen a ghost.

  But I know that girl wasn’t anyone’s daughter.

  1991

  High school was never-ending. We started hiding bottles of whiskey in our backpacks and sneaking to the bathroom to drink from them. We also stole Emotival from my mother; Emotival was a pill she took because she was depressed, et cetera. It didn’t do anything much to us, just brought on a terrible fatigue, an exhaustion that made us fall asleep in class with our mouths open, snoring. They called in our parents, who thought that since we went to bed very late, our morning comas were caused by a lack of sleep. They were just as stupid as ever, although now they were less nervous about inflation and the lack of money: the government had passed a new law declaring that one peso was equal to a dollar, and although no one entirely believed it, hearing dollar dollar dollar filled my parents and all the other adults with happiness.

  We were still poor, though. My family rented and Paula’s family had a half-finished house, with old-fashioned, interconnected bedrooms. It was disgusting: her brothers were older and she had to walk through their rooms to go to the bathroom; sometimes she saw them masturbating. Andrea’s apartment belonged to her family, but they could never pay their bills on time, and when their electricity wasn’t getting cut off, their phone was. Her mother couldn’t find any work except as an old people’s nurse, and her drunk father went on throwing money away on wine and cigarettes.

  Even so, we three believed we could be rich. We thought that being rich was something that lay in our future. Until we met Ximena. A new classmate, she came from Patagonia and her parents had something to do with oil. When she invited us over we ran all through the house, bumping into each other as we tried to take it all in at once; we would have taken pictures if we could. The living room had a little bridge over an indoor pond with floating plants, water lilies, algae. None of the rooms had tile floors; they were all made of wood, and paintings hung on the white walls. The backyard had a pool, rosebushes, and white-pebbled paths. Seen from the street the house didn’t look all that pretty, but inside it was madness, all those nice things, the scent of perfume in the air, armchairs of colored velveteen and rugs that were neither frayed nor worn. We detested Ximena immediately. She was ugly and had a vertical scar on her chin, and at school they called her buttface because of it. We convinced her to steal money from her mother—it was so easy for her!—and we used it to buy drugs, sometimes pills from the pharmacy. These days they’re really strict, but back then if you just told the pharmacist you had an autistic brother or a psychotic father, they would sell you medication without a prescription. We knew the names of some medicines for psychosis, because we wrote them down whenever someone mentioned them. When we took the blue pills that we avoided forever after, poor Ximena went so nuts she tried to set the fine wooden floor of her room on fire, and she went on and on about all the eyes she saw floating around the house. We weren’t impressed. The year before, one of the hippies at the artisan market had been put away after he’d eaten too many mushrooms. He said there were tiny men only a few centimeters tall who were shooting little arrows into his neck. He wanted to pull out the imaginary arrows so bad that he scratched at his neck until he almost slashed his jugular with his nails. He’d always wanted to be Paula’s boyfriend—he called her his “spiritual companion.” Paula stole acid from him to take on our birthdays. He had only a few teeth, and his friends called him Jeremiah. They took him to the psychiatric ward in Romero and nothing more was ever heard from him.

  Ximena had to have her stomach pumped and everyone blamed us. We didn’t care, except that we’d miss her money. That was when we started hating rich people.

  1992

  Luckily, we met Roxana, the new girl on our street. She was eighteen and lived alone. Her place was at the end of an alley, and we were so skinny we could fit through the bars of the gate if it was locked. Roxana never had food in the house; her empty cupboards were crisscrossed by bugs dying of hunger as they searched for nonexistent crumbs, and her fridge kept one Coca-Cola and some eggs cold. The lack of food was good; we had promised each other to eat as little as possible. We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls. “We don’t want to leave footprints in the snow,” we’d say, even though in our town it never snowed.

  One time we went into Roxana’s house and saw, on the kitchen table and next to the thermos—she always had yerba mate—what looked to us like an enormous white orb, the kind a fortune-teller would use, a crystal ball, a mirror of the future. But no: it was cocaine. It belonged to one of her friends. She wanted to do a little before she sold the rest; she thought the buyers wouldn’t notice what was missing.

  She let us scrape the magic ball with a razor and taught us to snort it off of a ceramic plate, heated with a lighter. That way it wouldn’t get damp from the humidity, she explained; it wouldn’t stick and went down great. It was great and we were great with the white light in our heads and our tongues numb. We did it at the table and also off the mirror in Roxana’s bedroom; she placed it right in the middle and we all sat around it, as if the mirror were a lake where we lowered our heads to drink, and the stained walls with their peeling paint were our forest. We took some with us when we went out, storing the cocaine in the silvered paper of cigarette packs, and sometimes in little plastic bags. I used pens, Paula had her own metal straw, and Andrea preferred to smoke pot because she couldn’t stand the racing of her heart; Roxana used rolled-up bills and told lies. She said her cousin had disappeared while exploring the Nazca Lines in Mexico. None of us told her that the Lines were in Peru. She said she had been in an amusement park where every door led to a different room, room after room until you found the right one. There could have been hundreds of rooms—the game took up acres. We didn’t tell her we’d read s
omething like that in a kids’ book called The Museum of Dreams. She said that witches gathered in Parque Pereyra, that they held ceremonies and worshipped a man made of straw, and though we were startled to hear about rituals in the park, we didn’t tell her that what she described was a lot like a movie we’d seen on TV one Saturday afternoon, a really great horror movie about killing little girls to bring fertility back to a British island.

  Sometimes we didn’t do cocaine and instead took a little acid with alcohol. We’d turn off all the lights and play with lit sticks of incense in the darkness; they looked like fireflies and made me cry. They reminded me of a tiled house in a park with a pond where frogs played and lightning bugs flew among the trees.

  One afternoon when we were playing with incense, we put on an album, Ummagumma by Pink Floyd, and we felt like something was chasing us through the house, maybe a bull or a wild boar with teeth for horns, and we ran and crashed into each other, hurting ourselves. It was like being back in the van again, but this time in a nightmare.

  1993

  In our last year of high school Andrea found a new boyfriend, the singer of a punk band. She changed. She wore a dog collar around her neck, she tattooed her arms with stars and skulls, and she didn’t spend Friday nights with us anymore.

  I knew she had slept with him. She smelled different, and sometimes she looked at us with contempt and fake smiles. I told her she was a traitor. I reminded her of Celina, a girl from our school who was a little older than us, and who had died after her fourth abortion, bleeding out in the street as she tried to get to the hospital. Abortion was illegal and the women who performed them kicked the girls right out to the street afterward. There were dogs in the clinics; supposedly the animals ate the fetuses so there would be no trace left behind. She looked at us angrily and said she didn’t care if she died. We left her crying in the plaza.

  Paula and I were furious, and we decided to take the bus to Parque Pereyra. We were going to look for the girl from the forest again. Could she be our third friend if Andrea abandoned us? By then they’d built the highway and only the worst buses still circulated through the park: the ones with decades of grime stuck to the seats, the ones that smelled of gasoline and sweat, had floors sticky from spilled soda and possibly urine. We got off in the park at sunset. At that hour there were still families there, kids running over the grass, some boys playing football. “What a pain in the ass,” said Paula, and we sat down under a pine tree to wait for nightfall. A caretaker came by with a flashlight and asked us if we were leaving.

  “Yes,” we told him.

  “The next bus comes in half an hour,” he said. “You’d better go wait by the road.”

  “We’re going,” we told him, and I smiled. Paula didn’t smile because she was so thin that when she showed her teeth she looked like a skull.

  “Be careful of scorpions,” he said. “If you feel one bite you, just yell, I’ll hear you.”

  More smiling.

  That September, which was exceptionally hot, there was an invasion of scorpions. I thought maybe I could let one of them bite me so I’d die. Maybe that way we’d be remembered like Celina, dead in the street with her bloody fetus between her legs. I lay back on the grass and thought about venom. Paula, meanwhile, walked among the trees asking in a low voice, “Are you there?” She came to get me when she heard a rustling in the trees and saw a white shadow. “Shadows aren’t white,” I told her. “This one was white,” she assured me. We walked until we were exhausted. The lack of energy was the worst thing about quitting eating. It was worth it except for now, when we wanted to find our friend, the girl with eyes full of hate.

  We didn’t find her. Nor did we get lost; the light from the moon was bright enough to make out the paths leading to the road. Paula found a white ribbon that, she thought, could belong to our friend from Parque Pereyra. “Maybe she left it for us as a message,” Paula said. I don’t think so, I thought. Surely someone who’d been picnicking in the park had lost it, but I didn’t say anything because I could see she was convinced, happy with her new amulet, sure it was a sign. I felt a stabbing in my leg that was neither a scorpion nor death; it was a nettle that burned my skin and covered it in bloody red spots.

  1994

  Paula celebrated her birthday at Roxana’s house. For the party we scored some acid that, we’d been told, had been recently smuggled over from Holland. They called it Little Dragon. Was imported acid stronger? Since we didn’t know, just to be safe, we took a little less than usual—just a fourth. We put on a Led Zeppelin album. We knew it was going to piss off Andrea’s boyfriend, and that’s what we wanted: to piss him off. He arrived when the record was ending. We were still listening to vinyl then, although we could have bought CDs. All electronics were cheap—TVs and stereos, photo and video cameras. It couldn’t last long, said my parents, it couldn’t be true that an Argentine peso had the same worth as a dollar. But we were so sick of everything they said: my parents, the other parents, always announcing the end, the catastrophe, the imminent return to blackouts and all the pathetic hardships. Now they didn’t cry over inflation; they cried because they didn’t have jobs. They cried as if they weren’t to blame for any of it. We hated innocent people.

  Andrea and her punk boyfriend arrived when the most hippie song on the album was playing, the one about going to California with flowers in your hair, and Andrea’s boyfriend scrunched up his face and said, “This sucks, fuckin’ stoners.” Paula’s brother, who was always friendly, offered him a little acid, just a fourth because he didn’t want to waste it on the punk. “Acid’s hippie, too,” Paula’s brother said, and the punk said that was true, but since it was chemical and artificial, he liked it. He preferred all things chemical, he said: powdered juices, pills, nylon.

  We were in Roxana’s room. The mirror was hanging on the wall. There were a lot of people in the house, lots of strangers, as tends to be the case in drug houses: those people whose faces are half seen in a dream as they take beer from the fridge and vomit into the toilet and sometimes steal the key or make some generous gesture, like springing for more drinks when the party is about to end. The acid was like a delicate electric charge. Our fingers trembled; we put our hands in front of our eyes and our nails looked blue. Andrea was back with us, and when we put on Led Zeppelin III she wanted to dance, she shouted about lands of ice and snow and about the hammer of the gods, and only in “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” maybe because it was a blues song about love, did she turn around to look at her punk boyfriend. He was sitting in a corner and he looked scared to death. He was pointing at something and repeating who knows what, the music drowned it out. I thought it was funny; there was nothing left of that arrogant, twisted upper lip of his, and he’d taken off his sunglasses too. His pupils were so dilated his eyes were almost black.

  I walked slowly over to him and tried to imitate the look of hatred in the eyes of the girl in Parque Pereyra. The electricity made my hair stand on end; I felt like it had turned into wires, or as if it were weightless, like when a TV that’s just been turned off attracts your hair so it sticks to the screen.

  “Are you scared?” I asked him, and he answered with a confused look. He was cute; that was why Andrea had abandoned us. He was cute and he was innocent. I grabbed his chin and with my other hand I hit him in the face; I punched him right near his temple. His hair, styled so carefully with gel, became a tangled mess hanging over his forehead. Paula, laughing behind me, threw at his head the scissors we’d used to cut strips of acid. Only then did I notice she had the forest girl’s white ribbon tied in her hair. It was pure bad luck the scissors hit the punk boyfriend just above his eyebrow, a part of the face that bleeds a lot. We knew this because once in the van we’d cut our foreheads after an especially violent slamming of the brakes. He got scared then, the punk, he got really scared with the blood dripping down over his white shirt, and he must have seen the same thing we did, or something similar distorted by the acid: his hands covered in blood, the
stained walls, the three of us surrounding him and holding knives. He tried to run out of the house but he couldn’t find the door. Andrea followed him, tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t understand her. When he made it out to the patio, the punk boyfriend tripped over a flowerpot, and once on the ground he started to shake—I don’t know if he was afraid or having a seizure. The album finished playing but there was no silence; we heard shouting and laughter. Someone was hallucinating scorpions, or maybe they had really infested the house.

  We circled the punk boyfriend, looming over him. Lying on the ground with his eyes half closed and his chest covered in blood, he seemed insignificant. He didn’t move. Paula slid her knife into her jeans pocket; it was practically a toy, a little knife for spreading jam on bread. “We’re not going to need it,” she said.

  “Is he dead?” asked Andrea, and her eyes shone.

  Someone put a new record on back in the house, which seemed so far away. Paula took the ribbon from her hair and tied it around her wrist. Together, she and I went back into the house to dance. We were waiting for Andrea to leave the boy on the ground and come back to us, so the three of us could be together once again, waving our blue fingernails, intoxicated, dancing before the mirror that reflected no one else.

  Adela’s House

  I think about Adela every day. And if during the day her memory doesn’t visit me—her freckles and her yellow teeth; her blond, too-fine hair; the stump of her shoulder; her little suede boots—she comes to me at night in dreams. My dreams of Adela vary, but there is always the rain and my brother and I, both in our yellow raincoats, standing in front of the empty house and watching the police in the yard as they talk in low voices with our parents.