Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“Parking lot number three,” she says. “Row twelve. Spot number eighty. It's a white van.” She pauses and her gaze wanders toward the stands where Manta is sitting. The rolled-up comic book that sticks out of his coat pocket looks kind of like an antenna. Manta doesn't wave. Iris turns toward Travers's men. “Enjoy your visit,” she says to them.

Mr. Fleck and Mr. Downey stare at her with blank faces. With their plastic menthol inhalers between their lips. Iris has the sudden sensation that there's something in the general structure of their faces that looks like it's about to disintegrate. As if that something had precariously withstood all the negotiations and meetings in safe spots and only had enough ontological resistance to hold out until the end of the exchange. As if Travers's two employees that she had met in his palace in Paris were nothing more than some sort of transitory identity limited to this sale. Iris stares at the two men's faces while one of them picks up her envelope and puts it in the pocket of his suit jacket. Their faces are definitely much more freckled than the first time she saw them. Their hair seems blonder and thinner. Their eyelids seem to be trembling due to some sort of malfunctioning in their nervous systems. Iris stares at them through her Versace sunglasses as they head off toward the exit. The public-address system requests that the parents of a boy who has exceeded his flotation time come by the security area to pick him up. Iris takes the menthol inhaler out of her purse and takes a thoughtful drag on it. Then she starts walking toward the exit.

When she is approaching the lines for the exit she feels the soft but firm pressure of an enormous hand on her arm. She looks up. Her gaze travels the long and mostly suit-covered path from the enormous hairy hand to the face of Aníbal Manta. Who is looking at her with a frown. With all of his features wrinkled into that expression of intense intellectual effort that he makes when he is at all suspicious of the person in front of him. As if he were watching real surgery on TV. Or as if he had to go to the bathroom and had been holding it in too long. For a fraction of a second they both just look into each other's eyes.

“Not so fast, pretty lady.” Manta lets go of her arm. He clears his throat. He watches as Iris raises a hand instinctively to where he had been grabbing her arm. “What you've got in that purse is for me.”

And that's when it happens. The kick Iris gives Aníbal's knee is enough to throw him off balance and a reflex makes him fold his leg. The push she then gives him with her entire body propels him backward and over the railing of the security strip. Into which he falls backward. Impelled by his own weight. And of course, without the chance to extend his arms to protect himself from the fall, since he is grabbing his leg with both hands. The sound that comes out of his mouth as his back hits the ground on the edge of the Zero Gravity area is somewhere between heavy breathing and a horse snorting. Something like the sound of an air chamber emptying abruptly.

Manta lies on the floor on his back for a moment, his face very red. And all of a sudden, before he can get up or even get his breath back, his butt is no longer touching the ground. His shoes are no longer touching the ground. Most of his back is no longer touching the ground at the edge of the Zero Gravity area. A Palace of Gravity monitor starts to blow his whistle to sound the alarm. Iris Gonzalvo watches wide-eyed for a moment as Aníbal Manta rises, floating slowly above her head. Looking at her with an expression that blends rage with horror. With the tails of his coat rising like two flaccid wings. His comic book comes out of his coat pocket and starts its own, completely independent, journey. Iris Gonzalvo runs away.

As she leaves the Palace of Gravity and runs through the crowd of park visitors, beneath the warm winter sun, Iris thinks of all the climactic movie scenes set in amusement parks that she's seen throughout her life. Those scenes of adrenaline-filled exchanges of hostages and briefcases full of cash. Where villains with evil grimaces put guns to the temples of innocent women and children. Somehow she no longer feels like herself. Somehow she has the feeling that it's someone else running through the crowd, bumping into people and knocking them down. It's not a feeling of inner transformation. Or of split personality, although it is true that one part of her brain is imagining her race through the park from outside of her own head. Like movie directors supposedly imagine things. In an epic panoramic shot. Or maybe an overhead view. Now she runs past the Sustainable Agriculture Pavilion, where several groups of kids are throwing stones and soda cans at actors playing traditional farmworkers. The silhouette of the shack that holds the coat check appears in her visual field. Still tiny but already magnificent. Shining in the distance like some kind of magnificent palace. Somehow, Iris feels that her strides through the crowd are taking her along the path she always wanted to travel, but could never find.

Inside the shack, with her hair sweaty and stuck to her forehead, Iris tears open the envelope and unlocks locker number fifty-two with the key she finds inside it. The briefcase inside isn't a briefcase. It's a bottle green Puma sports bag. She opens it and takes a look inside and then sticks her Prada high heels into it before turning and running off toward the parking lot. The camera inside her head follows her from a cinematographic point located somewhere above the roofs of the pavilions. Maybe from the peak of the Evolution roller coaster.

In the parking lot, Iris runs barefoot through the apparently infinite rows of parked cars. With the Puma bag hanging from her shoulder. Stopping every once in a while to wipe her hair out of her face and look around and check the maps printed on informative panels distributed throughout the parking lot at regular intervals. After many wrong turns and backtracking filmed in her imagination by cameras in helicopters, she finally sees her brick red Alfa Romeo wedged between several rows of family cars. She is already at its door, feeling around in her purse for her keys, when she realizes that the keys aren't in her purse. That the keys must still be in Manta's pants pocket, since Manta parked the car and then put them there. Desperate, she looks around. Her desperation is filmed in her imagination by a circular crane that revolves around her slender, desperate frame. And then she sees him. Limping in the distance. Enraged. Manta approaches limping through the rows of parked cars. Some of the park visitors have stopped to watch Aníbal Manta approaching, his face red with fury. Like a large mammal seething in its quest for revenge.

Iris takes a few steps back, scared. Everywhere you look, there are only hundreds and hundreds of parked cars. Cars as far as the eye can see. Epically filmed by cameras installed into small aircraft. Manta is already close enough for Iris to be able to see his tightly clenched fists with their white knuckles. His crew cut somehow messy. The slightly reddened whites of his eyes. And in that precise moment, one of the parked cars starts suddenly and hits Manta. Manta goes flying and lands on the hood of a family car parked in the row in front. Setting off the car's alarm.

The car that has just hit Manta turns abruptly. It makes a U-turn, hitting the fenders of several parked cars and stopping with a screech of its brakes beside Iris. Iris recognizes the maneuver as something she saw Eric Yanel do in a car commercial a year earlier. One of those commercials where Eric would do a spectacular maneuver and then emerge with a helmet under his arm, filmed by an aerial camera, into the company of a pair of models in bikinis. The car window opens. Eric Yanel sticks an arm through the open window.