Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Jimmie rattled out his anecdote for a while longer. As he was moving toward the finale, there was a knock, and Velásquez made the superhuman effort of detaching himself from his chair to open the door to Marcelo, who delayed his greetings and stood by his chair so as not to interrupt the gringo’s monologue. Finally, Jimmie came to the end his story. Marcelo greeted, in this order, Rodrigo, Micaela, and the gringo — he had already absentmindedly clasped hands with Velásquez — and Micaela stood up — an eddy of more potent smells around Rodrigo, who followed her with his eyes — to attend to the visitors and fetch drinks, as was dictated by the rigorous patriarchy in which they lived.

It’s unimportant to mention how much they drank. Suffice it to say that tequila, once again, was the liquor selected to prepare for the coming ritual. Rather than hypnosis, they spoke of everyday matters for a few hours until a chance silence fell on the room, and Jimmie took advantage of it to ask, in a commanding tone, if they should begin. Velásquez was the only one to give a clear answer, in the affirmative, while Marcelo and Rodrigo nodded rather unconvincingly, and Micaela remained, as ever, silent.

9

It’s hard to say if the following morning’s hangover was the result of the hypnosis, the tequila, the imbibing of adolescent urine, or all of the above. To tell the truth, he had, up until the last minute, been fairly skeptical about the real possibilities of the project. He didn’t believe hypnosis was substantially different from, for example, the sleep that followed a bad migraine. He imagined it as a certain misting of consciousness and, at best, an exacerbated imaginary state directed by the words of an invisible guru. But the technique stolen from E-Sight Enterprises was much more complex; in this version, the process for attaining a hypnotic state seemed more like a satanic ritual than guided meditation.

First, as a warm-up, they drank Micaela’s urine. Rodrigo observed with a fascination bordering on psychosis how the beautiful girl pulled up her dress in front of them and moved a wide-lipped glass to her vagina, the humid, rosy lips of which he thought he glimpsed for a brief moment. Desire then installed itself throughout his whole body. He wanted to believe that sooner or later he would manage to eat that cunt, slowly, for hours, but there was no element of reason he could cling to in order to imagine this would happen. Luckily, the taste of the urine dissipated those turbid thoughts. It was, without a doubt, an unexpected sensorial experience; the initial disgust at the smell rapidly gave way to an eagerness to down the drink in one gulp and, afterwards, a sensation of heat down the length of his throat. It tasted like an exotic cocktail, a kind of dirty martini with some top-secret ingredient that made the drink burn.

After that, Jimmie ordered them to perform a strange series of vaguely military exercises. With exaggerated effort, Marcelo and Velásquez copied the movements the gringo carried out more flexibly, as if he were already used to them. Rodrigo and Micaela, in contrast, had little difficulty replicating the gringo’s extremely strange routine. Once that stage was over, Jimmie handed each of them a different object. Objects dragged from the dusty corners of his studio but that, in the hands of those involved, seemed so special it was odd they had not been noticed earlier. Rodrigo, for example, received a small toy truck, made of plastic, with an impressive level of detail. In the driver’s seat a man in a cap could be made out, brutally killed, his shirt stained with blood, his mouth covered with electrical tape. The cargo space could be opened by operating a tiny plastic lever, revealing its disturbing contents: a shipment of doll heads.

Rodrigo accepted his toy and the instruction to examine it carefully. He wondered about the origin of that strange but realistic national souvenir. It was like a narco version of a Playmobil; probably, thought Rodrigo, some artist had constructed the piece for counterpropaganda purposes. He noted that Micaela had also received an object alluding to violence: a tequila shot glass in the interior of which stood the translucent shape of an AK-47 rather than the obligatory cactus of the glasses normally found in airport stores.

The objects allotted to Velásquez, Marcelo, and Jimmie himself had no such reference. They were, respectively, a large marble of the variety known as “cloverleaf,” with twisted abstract figures in its interior, a carved stone scepter, and a pair of women’s panties with a floral print that Jimmie sniffed in an unpleasant way, and which Rodrigo thought might belong to Micaela.

Rodrigo’s was, by far, the most complex and detailed object. It immediately made him think, by free association, of the super market bag he had discovered in the waste ground, what was now a long time ago. He remembered his repulsion, his gloomy suspicions about the origins of those viscera, his fear of seeing them again on his second, and last, incursion into the lot.

Those images, in turn, transported him to the early days of his marriage and that disturbing episode, still unresolved, of the turd found exactly in the center of his bed, on the tiger-striped bedspread Cecilia had been so fond of. And as he was making a detailed reconstruction of the events, searching for some clue he might have overlooked, he gradually sank into the memory, like someone who finds himself trapped in quicksand — if quicksands still exist in spite of the zeal for explaining everything humanity has adopted without reservation.

The small toy truck was melting in his hands, or so it seemed to Rodrigo, and taking different forms: a hen, a handful of tea bags, a newspaper open at the classified pages. When Rodrigo attempted to halt the metamorphosis by looking around him, he discovered that it was, in fact, nothing other than hypnosis. Everything appeared to have been literally rubbed out, as if it were possible to pass an eraser over the things we see, leaving only blurred vestiges, colors, and lights in their place, but swathed in a myopia that veiled the limits of all things.

He was reluctant to believe that by drinking urine and doing a little exercise he had entered into such a deep state of hypnosis. Rodrigo suspected he had been drugged. Maybe Micaela’s urine was psychotropic, and the only function of the frigging sinister truck was to distract him while the drug took effect. He had already, during his lysergic adolescence, experienced similar states of consciousness. Although what he knew about taking acid had prepared him for anything, what was disturbing here was the sudden, unforeseen nature of the thing.

The session, luckily, was short. It hardly gave him time to be frightened, and before he could be assailed by the desire to get out of that trance at any cost, he heard the distant voice of the gringo, deeper than usual, giving very precise instructions on how to terminate the exercise. Once he had “woken,” had recovered the clarity of his senses, he was incapable of reproducing in his memory the instructions he had followed. He feared the possibility of being “trapped in the trip” if he repeated the experience, but Jimmie convinced him that this was unlikely.

His head was now throbbing, and his eyes felt sunken. He had been tossing in his bed in Puerta del Aire for over an hour, attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night. When he thought of Micaela, a surge of lust took complete hold of him, and he had to masturbate quite aggressively, as if guided by the desire to rid his imagination of those images. He had always found it surprising how the world changed before and after ejaculation. Everything he believed, longed for, expected from life was transformed between one state and the other. Preorgasmic anxiety dissolved into a placid drowsiness; his desire to excel in some area faded into a discreet background shot. This time, when he had finished, he thought of Cecilia. He was still a married man, after all, and it now seemed like he had been away from his spouse for an eternity, although in reality it was little more than a month and a half. Marriage was, however you looked at it, an indelible stain: its reality couldn’t be avoided by the fact of being far away. He felt more isolated than usual, as if the simple truth of being married, even when it might not involve a particularly intense relationship with his wife, was enough to raise a wall between Rodrigo and the rest of mankind. A wall that seemed to get thicker by the day.