Yamil Check-My-Biceps falls to his knees, raises his brawny arms to the sky and howls in victory. His quiet brother runs over to hug him, enjoying his share of triumph (though all the while keeping a prudent distance from the repugnant Centella). Abel and I run to Diosdado to protest, gesticulating wildly. “It has wings, it has wings, invalidate the race, that’s cheating!”
“I’m not invalidating a goddamn thing,” the old babalawo pronounces stonily in his incontrovertible bass voice. “It didn’t fly, so it’s not disqualified. Josué, you have to pay up.”
Abel sighs, looks at me, and nods. There’s no way out. I sigh.
Afro Boy gives me that sarcastic look, then calls out, delighting in his authority, “Karlita, Tub, slut, sweet thing, come over here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
The obese mutant approaches with her potbellied waddle, sweaty and lubricious, licking her lips and reaching out to me with her eager hands, which look like bunches of overstuffed sausages.
“Shit, I’d ten times rather fuck Damián’s old dog Rita than that fat lardbucket,” Abel admits in his thin voice, whispering into my ear, perhaps to encourage me.
And this is where the real nightmare begins.
In real life, nobody but me could hear Abel’s comment, so I had to put on a brave face, be a good loser, and act like a man: at the age of eight, try to get up a regular erection while faced with Karlita’s kilos upon kilos of naked, quivering flesh and her pungent, acrid odor. And do it in front of everybody, pumping her to the sound of their cheers and jeers, thinking about Yamy and Evita for several interminably long minutes, until Check-My-Biceps declared himself satisfied with the pathetic spectacle.
Screw cockroaches, this is what repugnant really means. Of course I don’t have an orgasm.
Worse: from that day on, I’ve never been able to get excited in the presence of a completely human woman.
Yes, completely human, because whatever other people might say, that’s what Karlita was, all two hundred kilos of her. Fat girls have feelings, too, damn it. Not her fault she was born that way.
I mean, I’m not a total idiot. I don’t blame her. I blame that fucking Yamil. But knowing that Check-My-Biceps and his sick brain engineered it all doesn’t help me get over my complexes.
In fact, as sorry as it sounds, if I found myself stranded on a classic desert island alone with the most beautiful woman in the universe and that asshole Yamil—much as I hate him, I’d rather go with him than with the goddess.
Worse, I’d rather screw the inevitable lonesome palm tree that all those desert isles have than a woman. And if my attack on her self-esteem drove her to suicide—tough luck.
Pity I’ve never made Contact with a vegetable species, isn’t it? So far.
Strictly speaking, then, I should be grateful to that bastard Yamil for giving me a profession along with a dose of trauma. Though he restricted my choice of partners to males and, platonic relationships such as my obsession over the Gaudí’s hypernavigator Gisela aside, to fairly non-human phenotypes, such as the second-generation condomnaut Nerys, with her mermaid fins and gills.
Anyhow, if Nerys asks me to go all the way with her someday, I’m afraid I’ll vomit.
But in my recurrent nightly dream, things turn out different: green-eyed Afro Boy hears my friend’s comment and offers me an unexpected alternative.
“That’s okay, Zero, I’ll let you have a try at it. Don’t like the fatty? Well, there’s Legs Damián’s skinny dog Rita—take her! Right here, in front of everybody!”
So I suddenly find my raggedy shorts, the only clothing I ever wear, down around my ankles, while I’m holding on to a muscular back, the short rough hairs bristling with pleasure, and humping my hips against the Doberman’s moist hindquarters.
The worst thing every night is that, with the typical illogic of nightmares, each time I move my hips the dog seems to grow and transform around my childish genitals, gradually turning into a strange hybrid of mutant dog and fat human female, of Rita and Karlita, who turns her head to look at me with her three sardonic eyes; her mouth half-open, she lets her tongue loll luxuriantly between her sharp canines and whispers to me, “Like that, Josué, give it to me hard, harder… ”
And I can’t wake up until, after a long struggle against the horrid nightmare, I emerge from the depths of sleep with a shriek, drenched in sweat.
What I hate is that every night I can stand it for a little bit longer.
Just now, for example, the horrifying dog-woman chimera is telling me, for the first time since I’ve had this recurring nightmare, “Cojons, Josué, get up and open for me, bastard! I didn’t exactly come here to talk to you about colorful fish.”
Talk to me about colorful fish? What?
And cojons? I think that’s Catalan.
Stop right there. Karlita never would have said that. Tubs didn’t speak Catalan.
That had to be… that is… Narcís. Yes. Narcís Puigcorbé. A sight for sore eyes.
I’m not eight, I’m twenty-three. This isn’t Rubble City, it’s Nu Barsa.
I got you, subconscious. Dream’s over for today.
I emerge from my deep slumber with a long groan of relief. I wake up, as I always have for the past few years, on my stomach, my hands clenched as if grasping something. If I didn’t sleep floating naked on an antigrav board, my fingers would now be tightening around my bedclothes as if to strangle them.
I had to buy this overpriced Algolese bed to keep from spending a fortune constantly replacing the mattresses, pillows, sheets, and covers I shredded night after night. And to keep from waking up drenched in my own sweat. Now the droplets float weightlessly around me. Nice.
But I think there’s a lot fewer drops today than other nights. That’s progress.
Enough to raise my hopes I may get over it in the near future.
Let’s say, optimistically, at some point in the next two thousand years.
A few centimeters from my face, my Catalan condomnaut friend’s enormous humanity is squeezed into a twenty-inch hologram. I watch him gesticulating impatiently at my door.
It’s just nine in the morning. Disgusting.
The AI that controls my home has instructions to wake me at this ridiculous hour only if one of three people is calling or visiting: Nerys, my mermaid girlfriend; Miquel Llul, the feared head of the Nu Barsa Department of Contacts; and this fat fellow with the heart of gold, or his wife, Sonya.
“Coming, damn it, you elephantine early riser,” I grumble. Then I yawn, lazily turning over to enjoy the effect of the gesture in weightlessness. “Whatever you’re bringing better be really important.”
“Cojons, Josué, don’t be such a fucking narcissist. Wrap up your damn exercises. At this rate, you won’t get to the Central del Govern till the day after tomorrow,” Narcís says while stuffing his face, as he does whenever he has half a chance.