Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘What’s it like today?’ I took a sip, wrinkling my nose, from my glass.

He pulled a face:

‘A downer. Cristian’s singing some slowies. But then James is performing something with … oh, I forget. With that one.’ He pointed to a group talking enthusiastically over the table and passing round a bottle of Chandon Extra Brut. I made a gesture of interrogation that, in this place, could only mean one thing.

‘There,’ he pointed out

Silent, a full glass in his right hand, a smoking cigarette in his left, dark glasses and broad-brimmed black hat covering what his beard couldn’t conceal, leaning on the sink, which brimmed with towers of unwashed glasses, stood Moisés.

‘At this time of night?’ he replied, looking straight ahead like a blind man, barely moving his lips. ‘Acid, only thing,’ he said and pointed to the dance floor. We went out.

He held out a tab wrapped in cellophane for me to examine. I don’t know if it was the drink or the combination of the darkness, black light and stroboscopic flashes, but what I saw on the tiny cardboard square was the outline of the Islands.

‘What is it?’ I asked, looking at him in terror.

‘Butterfly. Why?’

‘No, nothing.’ My heart pulsed in my neck. ‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Deal.’

Anything, begged my mind, to split my head in four and chuck it in a corner so I’d forget to pick it up on my way out. I couldn’t stand any more reality on an empty brain.

To kill time before it took effect I borrowed a pair of 3D specs from three girls dancing on their own by the VIP curtains, and started moving my head up and down to see how everything became disjointed like a Cubist painting, flattening the disco into a mosaic of hanging fabrics, flat-flamed candles, faceted mouldings and sweating blue-and-red faces. I danced for a while with a braless brunette in a fishnet top, but as she was wearing specs too I didn’t know whether she was smiling invitingly or because I looked so ridiculous, and then she was gone. I downed my drink and got myself another, then checked my watch to see how much time had gone by. Shouldn’t it have begun by now? It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been fobbed off with a dud. My fears were allayed when one of the eddies on the dance floor made me brush up against a circle of ten, shouting ‘Freak out! Freak out!’ and flipping in perfect acid-choreographed synch. I snatched a couple of tokes of Jamaican sense in the DJ’s booth and ran downstairs (it felt like I was on a slide) to dance to a Prince number that had just started. They don’t exist, they don’t exist any more, dance and shake them all out, all those inconceivable monsters of the last week, that knot of parasites that invaded your body, get them out, now that was a ride on the ghost train. My relief wilted a little, however, when I sensed something odd about the two identical-looking chubbies in black and white dancing next to me and, giving them a proper look, I saw they’d grown these long beaks, and I let out a cackle. A colour stirred within me, like a cloud of Indian ink in water and, expanding my chest as it went, it climbed in a long stalk to the holes of my head and unfurled like a flower above the heads of the Corybants. It had begun. I danced to four or five numbers, delving deeper and deeper into the giant intestine that coiled and writhed in its erratic disco peristalsis, until I suddenly started to feel dizzy, as if I were in a ship on choppy seas. For all the holes in my tank-top, the superheated atmosphere, electric with the evaporated sweat and genital lubricants in a permanent state of high excitement, was beginning to suffocate me. Just like that taxi driver who was in Malvinas. I couldn’t adapt to the climate and sought relief under the fan that hung like a giant bat high in one corner. In the roaring wind, a pouting girl in a black PVC top and matching shorts that dug into her labia minora was drying her hair, raking her fingers through it again and again.

‘How’s it hanging?’

‘There are fleas,’ she answered me. We both stared in silence for a second at the fake Persian carpet.

‘Can’t see them.’

‘One bit me twice: once on the waist, once between my legs. Here, feel. Weird, isn’t it,’ she replied to my probing hand, which lingered incredulous over the two lumps.

‘It was doing its best to dance the lambada with you.’

She didn’t get it. Hanging from her hand was a small fake white leopard-skin purse, which gleamed phosphorescent in the black light. I asked her if I could stroke it.

‘Geroff! What’s wrong with you?’ She switched hands, probably thinking I was going to snatch it, or to protect me from its feline zipper teeth. There were animals. A good moth, the size of a Boeing, piloted by two little Japanese girls wrapped in cellophane, was fighting to save the city from a clumsy, rubbery dinosaur that spat blowtorch fire from its drooling jaws. Thousands of Japanese fled in horror before the wind wafting from the moth’s wings, ripping off rooftops and toppling trees onto pagodas in its eagerness to drag the monster by the tail, airlift it Chinook-style away from the city and drop it into the open mouth of a volcano. I wept tears of grief for the moth in its death throes on the plain, moribund and seared by the flames — the tragic lot of all moths — expelling its death rattle and an egg from which would emerge the next saviour of humanity, and when the screen turned to a dead-mouse grey, I looked around in confusion, without recognising the place. I touched my face and it poured over my fingers, my mouth had widened as if stretched either side with hooked forefingers: I caught my reflection in the mirror and I had zebra teeth, striated and yellow, and pink gums two centimetres high. I felt like running, leaving my grimace behind. How had this happened? I was so happy a few minutes ago … I sat down and, once seated, I committed the irreversible mistake of closing my eyes and the darkness was ripped up into slaughterhouse colours as the butcher carved and tossed the bleeding cuts on the counter. I felt hot and cold at the same time, like a deep-frozen chicken in the sun.

‘You feeling alright?’

A hand on my shoulder. Human eyes before mine.

‘No,’ I said with some difficulty. ‘Far from fine.’

‘Little butterfly fluttering about in your head perhaps?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but the egg … the egg.’

‘Moisés bought a batch of five thousand past their sell-by. Everybody’s flipping. You’re Felipe, aren’t you? Love your clothes. Who designed them for you, Beto Bora?’

‘No. Mario Menéndez.’

He laughed with delight and more teeth than usual. I shook my head as if I were mixing a cocktail in it. The floor was crawling with fleas as big as chihuahuas running between people’s legs.

‘There are fleas,’ I pointed out, because no one seemed to realise.

‘Don’t tell me. We have the place fumigated once a week.’

I clicked my fingers to call one, but it merely growled at me, its hair standing on end, sheltering between two black army boots. A Gurkha! I sensed in horror, but when I looked up all I found was a teenager in a virginal white dress. I could see her cunt through the material. It smiled at me.

‘I want to play hopscotch,’ I told my companion. He laughed again, rakishly. We weren’t communicating. My fault, as usual.

‘Drink?’

‘Water. Cold.’

I ran an ice cube over my forehead till it hurt. ‘What am I doing?’ I managed to form the thought in the seconds of cold. ‘What is this?’ But I was no longer alone. A hand was holding mine, an arm curling around my back. ‘Glad you’re looking after me,’ I stammered. I was naked and cold, everything was bad and fine at the same time. ‘I’ve been hurt,’ I entreated, ‘they broke my …’