That was when he first got the feeling, as he was packing his suitcase. Initially like a vague sort of irritation, one with no real object, and then cold, full of genuine rage — they’d deceived him. Not his parents specifically — all of them. He’d been deceived. He raised a hand and held it out before him; he’d been staring at the thought like a lunatic. Sometimes he felt ashamed not to have seen it sooner. But what was it that he’d seen, exactly? He didn’t know… the deceit. A sort of wind that swept over everything, brushing it all into a corner of the world. He felt a strange urge to be violent, impetuous, voracious, as if something were about to rise up from those effulgent dunes and swallow everything, even him, the way it had Aunt Eli. Summer was over. The next day they’d take the train home, and he’d be back in the city. Was that how it was all going to end? It couldn’t end like that. He texted, Leaving tomorrow meet up tonight, and sent it to Rivero. On his cell phone’s tiny screen, a miniature envelope sealed itself and darted off. Message sent. And ten seconds later, Sure, princess. He felt like getting drunk, and high, like something had grabbed him by one arm and roughly thrust him forward. The way his parents expressed their grief got on his nerves for the next three hours until he went out; it was both mawkish and cautious, an emotion half expressed and half restrained, as though they were horrified at the thought of perhaps being too explicit. His father wept alone for a time, on the balcony, and he watched his back, contracting in rhythmic little spasms, from his bedroom window. Even without seeing his face, he could see the way his lips were turning down, the way his nose was running, the way he was staring off at the dunes — with the same stunned look he’d had at the cemetery — and spilling something soft and warm over them. His own state of mind made him no less uneasy. He saw himself as cold, as though he’d been injected with a virus that inhibited emotional reaction. Actually, he felt nothing, and not feeling anything was a state in and of itself, an uneasiness perceived precisely due to its absence. He remembered it as if something had, for those three hours, been growing — a disposition perhaps — as if something inside him had flipped a lever that enabled certain things to occur, things up to that point only imagined. He remembered, too, that during the course of those hours he felt open contempt for the naïveté with which he’d lived his life up until then and that he sensed what would later turn into the cold courage (because, ironically, the experience of courage was a cold one) of someone determined to be intransigent. He was fascinated by the sentiment; it floated like a soft mist as the afternoon faded away, and it penetrated him — spent — the way Aunt Eli’s dead face had penetrated him when they opened her casket on the way out of the funeral home.
“But — you’re not going out, are you?” (Mamá)
“Yes.”
“Oh, how could you?”
He still had childlike reactions; suddenly he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed.
“Just for a little while.”
“Let him go, let him do what he wants.” (Papá)
And when he got outside, the feeling intensified; the esplanade with its huge, white tiles was a giant skating rink. Anita had accompanied him to the door and asked if she could come too. Without a word, he’d pushed her out of the way, as if she were some bothersome angel who’d approached him extending a gentle, knowing arm.
“At least tell me where you’re going.”
“Move.”
When he met up with them, it was already dark, and since it was a Saturday, the bars were packed. All along the esplanade, sidewalk cafés and snack bars formed a refulgent wake, as though a luminous ship, tall and elegant, had sailed through town from one end to the other, as though the houses were actually aquatic, enormous buoys bobbing in the water.
“A kid drowned here last summer,” Rivero said.
They hadn’t even smartened up to go out. He had, and therefore looked slightly ridiculous, as if it were his first communion and he were still dressed as a little sailor when everyone else had already changed into more comfortable clothes. The comment precluded most all conversation, so no one said anything.
“So you’re leaving tomorrow?”
“Yeah, tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to give you a proper sendoff.”
“No need.”
“Oh, we have to have a sendoff for the princess who wanted to break our noses with a rock.”
They laughed. In other circumstances he might have felt obliged to smile, a little humiliated, maybe. Deep down, he’d been so trained to please, to be liked by everyone, that fear of not being liked was the one thing that had most notably formed his character. He saw, now, that almost everything he’d done his whole life he’d done specifically to be liked, or for fear of not being liked, and that that had now changed. Since Aunt Eli died, he’d had not a single purely considerate thought — not even about himself, and certainly not about Pablo, Marcos, Tejas, and Rivero. In fact, he felt like he held them in contempt a little now, or like his rage had slid a sort of film of discontent, or violence, between them and him.
They bought a few bottles of booze at a Chinese corner store and sat by the estuary. They took the meth Tejas had brought. The violence actually began there, timidly, like a blood transfusion from his veins to theirs. The alcohol and the meth interfered with one another, throwing things into and out of balance, but he didn’t feel heavy, he felt instead cold and lucid, like a hunter polishing the barrel of his gun with controlled intoxication.
“What about Frani? Aren’t you going to say goodbye to her?”
“Leave him alone, man. Can’t you see he’s a total virgin? Like a five-year-old. For now all he does is eat pussy. Frani wouldn’t know where to start with this kid.”
It was working. A sort of fervor was being roused in them, too; they, too, were caught in its talons. They were no longer sitting as they talked by the estuary but had stood, restless; the meth had worked its mysterious effects and now hit them, rising like liquid in a test tube held over a flame. Icy, blue liquid. Marcos threw a bottle into the water and picked up another.
“See that boat there?”
And he threw it, hard. The bottle shattered against the hull.
“You couldn’t do that again if you tried.”
“But that’s going to end tonight,” he suddenly blurted.
His response had been a bit delayed. It had traveled the entire length of his nerves, his stomach, his brain. More than an idea or even a response, it was a messianic vision on a night moving inexorably forward, its minutes dropping off into the darkness. It was going to end that very night.
“What’s going to end?”
“I’m going to fuck tonight.”
“Frani?”
“Or whoever.”
It was like standing majestically before an army that was whipping itself into a frenzy. He needed a little death, a little nobility around him, something to attest to the grandiosity of the idea, something to keep him from being alone with it. The idea suddenly overrode all other sensations. For a few minutes it wasn’t even attached to the desire to have sex, but to possess or explode. Its slightly hazy contours, slowly sharpening into a concrete image, made it even grander, more powerful if anything, as though his mind were crowded with hundreds of bodies floating blindly, uncontrollable.
“We’ll have to go find the girls.” (Pablo)
“They were outside at that café, I think.”
“Let’s go.”
The distance between the boys and their destination was covered in silence. Determination had dripped down inside them. The town’s physical reality, too, had become altered. He looked around, and it was as if all the people sitting at outdoor bars and cafés, all the people strolling along the esplanade and moving behind well-lit windows were possessed by that same sentiment, too; they were servile, tormented by it, no matter what they said, whether the poses they struck were more restrained or less, they were all possessed by the same nervous impatience. When he turned back to them, he got, for the first time, the strange feeling that he was their leader, as if his body were channeling their fury. Marcos laughed nervously, and Rivero put a hand on his shoulder. Rivero’s hand, like a taut cable.