“Did I hurt you?”
She gaped at him, as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, then burst out laughing.
“What planet are you from?” she asked, putting her panties back on, still giggling.
A variety of emotions danced around him like grainy light, like something with different degrees all functioning independently. Humiliation was one of them. He felt as though he’d been submerged in something viscous and was now weak and defenseless, although his initial feeling was still one of incredulity.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said.
“Might help if you took your pants off, don’t you think? And your underwear. .”
So he did, and turned around again just in time to catch sight of her running back toward the bright lights of the fair, twisting around every three steps to check and see if he was following or not. He didn’t even bother trying to chase after her. He just turned back to the beach and slowly pulled up his underwear, and then his pants.
Humiliation, though, had its own particular prosody. What had first been expressed as incredulity soon turned to vexation. His mouth was still sticky from her thing, he was still dazed, and the booze and meth had left him in a heightened state of sensitivity, and cold. It was a state that made him feel as though everyone around him were possessed, filled with strange desires, dancing frantically, whirling like tops, having visions. He walked back to the fair. Pablo, Marcos, Tejas, and Rivero had disappeared with the girls, but he saw the kids from the club. They were all clustered in a little group by one of the rides. It was the first time he’d seen them all summer. He saw himself as older than them, and them as identical to the previous summer — blond or almost blond, well-dressed, pretty girls and good-looking boys — he saw them as frozen, timeless. They recognized him. He walked over. For nearly half an hour he forgot about what had just happened in the dunes. No one attempted conversation with him; they kept talking amongst themselves, and he adopted the reclusive and slightly timorous role he’d played the previous summer, like someone trying on an old costume and finding that it still fits.
It all started when one of the boys — a stocky kid, stronger than him, whose name he couldn’t even recall — snorted and said, “I have to take a piss, I’m about to bust.”
And he turned toward the pine trees and stumbled clumsily off.
“Wait up,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”
They walked fifty or so feet past the rides and started pissing against a tree, in silence. Suddenly he felt a strange rage surge up.
“You know what? I’ve always thought you were assholes. You and the others.”
The boy stood with a smile frozen on his face as he turned to face him, doing up his zipper. He looked fairly drunk but also totally sure of himself. Tomás despised with all his might the cockiness and stupidity that kid seemed to ooze.
“Then we’re even,” he said calmly, “’cause I’ve always thought you were an asshole, too.”
They were silent a moment. He didn’t think he had it in him to really lose his shit, but the kid kept goading him.
“So, what? You going to hit me or what?”
Almost before the kid finished the question, he leapt, trying to punch him in the face, but all he did was cuff his ear. The kid socked him, hard, in the mouth, and he found himself on the ground beside him, feeling like something in his chest was writhing, feeling fragments of things — plans, expectations, anxieties — all chopped up into tiny pieces like shards of glass, dislodging inside him and suddenly making him insecure and vulnerable, the voltage of that fight and the increasingly clear conviction that he was going to lose it. He managed to punch him again, but there was no conviction behind it, and that was what finally unleashed the boy’s fury; he immediately struck back so hard that Tomás almost lost consciousness, and by the time he recovered, the kid was on top of him, gripping his wrists, trembling. He felt — and not for the first time — a strange urge to take a real beating, to be buried by blows, by the fury of another, as though secretly believing that if that were to happen, the world around him would change, everything would be transformed, become something else. Seen from below, the boy’s face was almost monster-like.
“So, what should I do now, asshole? Kill you, or what? Huh, asshole? Should I kill you? What should I do with you?”
Later, standing at the bathroom mirror, before going to bed, he pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of himself. When he got into bed, trying not to make any noise, so as not to wake anyone, he looked at the photo, the light from his phone faintly illuminating the dark room — his face, split lip, eyes open, deranged as a starving animal.
It would happen in the summer, in certain places, at certain times. He and Anita were close, the two of them formed their own private community, one inexistent in the wintertime; though perhaps that was an excuse, to say that it was summer and since it was summer it was acceptable. He would turn to her and suddenly become aware of her admiration — a gaze so steady he got the feeling that his face was being engulfed by hers, even though hers was smaller. He was inside of her, like some farfetched, make-believe character, and when they walked from the house to the beach, he’d slip her his hand, pretending to have done it unawares, and Anita would say nothing, and that was the way they expressed their love. Inexplicably, at those moments, it was as if they were protecting each other from anything unpleasant, as if he threw her something, or she him, and their contact were mitigating the heat, the hot sand on the beach, their parents’ rankling concern (“What do you mean, you fell? How? You left the fair and you fell, just like that?”—Mamá) and tensions and desires; she seemed to lean tenderly and affectionately into him as she walked slightly ahead, as though she wanted them to bump into each other the whole time, and it made him feel an almost violent tenderness for her — her tiny size, her round little legs, her miniature chest and features were a child-size consolation. Later, at the snack bar on the beach, his father said, “Tell me the truth, who did you get in a fight with yesterday?”
“No one, I fell.”
“Right, and when you fell, the only things that hit the ground were the knuckles on your right hand, and your lip?”
He couldn’t help but smile. His father gave him a light, affectionate cuff on the back of the neck. He felt very adult.
“Was it worth it, at least?”
“What?”
“Whatever you fought over.”
“No.”
“It’s never worth it, son.”
And suddenly he seemed weak to him. There was a brief silence. He was pleased with the intimacy they’d established but deep down hoped desperately that it would end there, that his father wouldn’t ask anything else. And he didn’t, because he was in fact thinking about something else and had been absent throughout the entire conversation.
“Your aunt is very sick,” he said. “She’s dying.”
His father looked up from his beer and stared at him fixedly.
“We’re going to bring her back to Madrid with us; I don’t want her to be alone.”
But there was no need to bring her back to Madrid; she was admitted to the hospital the very next day. She’d gotten some test results back, and the doctor insisted that she be admitted immediately. His parents got a call on their cell phone while they were at the beach, and they went straight to the hospital without so much as stopping home to change first. He was struck by an absurd thought: They’re going to get everything all sandy, they’ll go into her room and get it sandy, and the hospital room will get all gross, and Aunt Eli’s bed will get sandy; sand will get everywhere. Perhaps it was easier to think about sand than death, or Aunt Eli, even. Because if sick-Aunt-Eli was still a decontextualized concept — something almost abstract, distended by incredulity despite the fact that he’d watched her deteriorate that summer — then deathbed-Aunt-Eli was a flat-out fiction, like a room with no joists, one that was impossible to enter. He felt a weird harshness in the air, almost like being hit by something inhuman. They sent him to Aunt Eli’s, to get sheets and toiletries and bring them to the hospital. Anita stuck by his side, and when they were on their way to her house, he told her straight-out.