Álvaro Bisama - Dead Stars

She said: I went into a hospital bathroom, drank some syrup, and went out into the street. I walked to Plaza Victoria. I sat down on a bench. I tried to picture what the boy was doing at the hospital. I wondered what he'd seen, that boy, wandering around the hospital wards unnoticed, like a ghost. I imagined he had witnessed operations, births, bullet extractions. Watched old people die connected to peeling tanks of oxygen, heard conversations between the nurses about their private lives. The boy had seen the urgency and fear of the waiting rooms, that tense silence that traverses the hallways. Perhaps the boy had found other children and teenagers like him, orphans or soon-to-be orphans, living inside time borrowed from the sickness of others, she said. I was paranoid, I hallucinated: the borrowed time turned them into a brotherhood, it made them act like a cult. I imagined them all dressed the same, like mourners at an Asian funeral. I hallucinated: all of them turned into phantoms in white, waiting for their relatives to die, getting through the in-between time as if they were ghost brides and ghost grooms who only knew a life of drifting from one end of the hospital to another, with steps like an ice-cold breeze that stands your hair on end. I hallucinated, she said, that those children had stopped speaking by choice, that their steps didn't make any noise on the surface of the tiles, that they didn't cast any shadows.

What do you think about that? she asked. Not much. Or a lot. That winter a teenager got lost in the hills on the outskirts of my town. I think I told you about it. I knew her, sort of. Really, I knew her older sister. I'd seen this chick, the one who got lost, at parties. She didn't drink. She didn't talk much. She was straight edge. She'd drawn an "X" on the back of her hand. Nothing more pathetic than being straight edge in the asshole of the world. Nothing braver than being straight edge in a place where no one even knows what that is. What happened: she ran away from home one night, crossed the train tracks, and continued through the north side of town until she got to the statue of the Virgin. She went up the hill, but then she kept on going. She went down the other side. I had always thought of the top of that hill as an inviolable border. But she went past it. It's not hard to explain why she did it. I've heard a few stories where the devil speaks to someone and calls him into his fold. That voice is inescapable; it overpowers your own conscience. You can't do anything but listen to it and follow its orders and wander off. Well, it could have been that voice, or voices, or something else, but the girl walked several kilometers in the dark through the hills at night. Her parents and her sister didn't realize she was gone until the next day. They called the school. No one knew anything. The girl went on walking all day. She hadn't taken any food with her. That winter temperatures dropped below zero. She was wearing a jean jacket, a black T-shirt, and some canvas tennis shoes. She didn't find the devil. She didn't find anything. The case never made the news. At some point she collapsed out there in the hills. The family didn't have any money; nobody cared. That whole drama played out in silence. It was just the case of a young country girl who disappeared in the valley. Things like that happen every day. She didn't leave a note, she didn't tell anyone. Two days later, a police helicopter spotted the body and called it in. She'd walked fifteen kilometers among the weeds and rabbit holes without getting anywhere. We went to her funeral. We weren't straight edge or anything, but we went. We knew her sister. So, while you were seeing shadowless children in a public hospital, people in my town were getting lost in the hills, and maybe the devil was talking to them, I said, biting my upper lip.

I would've liked to disappear like that too, but I didn't; I was never brave enough, she said. By the time I got up the courage, it was too late. I just stayed here, trapped between Valparaíso and Viña, she said. Then that desire passed. You came along.

I was still drinking syrup. Javiera was still with Donoso. She forgave him. They left the apartment in Playa Ancha and moved to a boarding house, just one room. She finally got kicked out of the university. She failed all her classes for the third time. The students' union tried to appeal, but to no avail. Javiera claimed she was being persecuted. Donoso went to talk with some of the professors. He told them what had happened. It was no use. No one took pity on them. The university refused to honor Javiera's course credits. I remember signing a petition, but nothing happened. In those months, everything was coming apart, everything was dissolving. Javiera kept on going to the university. She recovered from the beating. If you'd seen her with Donoso, you might think nothing had happened and they were still the same as before. That spring the police arrested some guys I knew who were with the MIR. They weren't my friends, but I had seen them at parties. We knew they were involved in something, but we didn't know what. At that point in the decade, everything was already over, everyone was defeated. Lots of groups had sputtered out, they'd splintered into ever smaller groups, taking their differences to such extremes that they became something arcane. Except for the communists and a couple of anarchists, there wasn't much left; it was a wasteland. Everyone was preoccupied with their own business. Because of that, we were surprised when they arrested the guys from the MIR who were still active. The report said they had placed some cherry bombs under some benches on Calle Prat and sprayed some graffiti, but that was it. They were sent to a high security prison under the Arms Control Act. They'd had some explosives and a few pistols left over from when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. They were in for three or four years. I remember seeing it on the news when they got arrested; they were in handcuffs, and they looked defeated. My father asked me if I knew them. I said I didn't. I said they studied at another campus. Then I went to the bathroom and downed a bottle of syrup. My fix. I felt panicked. I thought the whole city was about to come apart, turn into a bunch of icebergs floating in a frozen sea. That night I lay awake: I felt like my body was falling into the sheets as if into an abyss, as if I was stuffed full of earth and dry leaves. The next day I got my period, she said.

I spent that New Year's alone. I watched the fireworks from the stairs on Bellavista Hill. I drank a bottle of champagne. A few meters above me on the same stairs, an entire family embraced one another. An hour later, I walked back to Viña along Avenida España, which was full of confetti, empty and broken bottles, garbage, and a celebrating crowd. Along the water, large groups were dancing to cumbia. It took me an hour to get home. My parents had gone to Limanche to spend the holiday with an aunt. That night I called my ex-boyfriend, who I hadn't seen in two years; I was going to ask him to come over, but no one answered the phone. I fell asleep at five in the morning watching a vampire movie.

That was the year they lost their minds. They got kicked out of the boarding house after six months. Because of the noise. They were always either screwing or throwing dishes at each other. Or Javiera would cry nonstop for hours. Or Donoso would cry and bang his head against the wall. People would hear that noise: Donoso hitting his head against the wall to keep himself from laying a hand on her. I remember they'd left half their things behind in their old apartment because they didn't fit in the room. Eventually, they got rid of almost everything: the furniture, books, music, their clothes. Their life together was wringing them out. Suffocating them. Also, Javiera claimed she'd been cursed. That somebody had cast a spell on her, and she'd gone to a shaman to break it. I didn't know what to believe. Donoso didn't show anything: he still had that same half-smile that always faded into a grimace, that same fake expression of peace or resignation. He would walk into class right under the wire and disappear immediately afterward. Somebody told me he was selling marijuana, but I never dared to ask him about it. Sometimes Javiera would work the photocopier in the student union. It had been a long time since she'd gotten a steady income. But in general, she spent practically the whole day at the boarding house. Her only luxury was a small TV left behind by the student who'd lived in their room before, as part of his last month's rent. Javiera watched soaps. She told me that once: I spend the whole day watching soap operas, I know them all by heart. I like the Brazilian ones; the Colombian ones are weird, I don't get them. They're always shouting in the Venezuelan ones. They're always crying in the Argentine ones. I don't watch the Chilean ones. Of course, they started fighting every day. It started over a girl from school — no idea what she was studying — who moved in with them, some little prepubescent chick who, according to Javiera, had her eye on Donoso. Sometimes Javiera would show up at school and say: That bitch wants to fuck me over, she's always hitting on him. She's going to have to get past me first. I never found out if it was true. Once, Javiera locked the girl in the bathroom. Another time, she cornered her in the kitchen and threatened her with a knife. And then another time, Javiera tried to throw hydrochloric acid on the girl's hair. She called the cops. The cops came. Donoso was at the university. Javiera raised her voice with the cops. She said she'd been tortured, she wasn't afraid of them, they were a couple of sad sons of bitches. The cops arrested her. One of them slapped her to calm her down. Donoso went to get her out of holding that night. They went back to the boarding house. The other girl had left. She didn't want to see them again. Javiera and Donoso argued. The next day, the owner came and told them they had to leave.