Javier Calvo: Wonderful World

“You're going to have to speak more clearly,” she says. “I can't understand you.”

Saudade lifts an arm in a cast to indicate to Hannah Linus to wait a minute. Then he clears his throat. Or something similar. His throat clearing is long and painful, and sounds like he's choking on his own phlegm. Finally he blinks.

“Thanks for coming,” says Saudade. “If you ever need anything, you have my cell number.”

Hannah Linus looks at him with a confused expression.

“That's all?” she says. Her tone seems slightly disappointed. “That's it? You're not going to threaten to kill me? You're not going to come to my house and stab me in the chest?”

Saudade seems to be considering the question. Although it seems difficult to believe, merely thinking hurts the injuries on his head. With the only finger he has out of the cast, he pushes the button that sends painkillers into his vein. He closes his eyes and searches inside himself. And to his surprise, everything he finds is good. The seed of unhappiness, wherever it came from, seems to have withered and died at some point. Probably while they were beating him up. All the asphyxiating feelings of vulnerability and imminent doom and loss of omnipotence have vanished into thin air. Along with the doubly asphyxiating and oppressive sensation of living in a universe marked by injustice and a lack of cosmic meaning. He feels fucking great. Finally he's back to his old self. The complete, fulfilled, vigorous person who Juan de la Cruz Saudade really is. The fact that he's alive fills him with a peaceful, and intensely mature, euphoria. You could almost say he feels affection for his fellow man. Of course, he knows that the very idea of feeling affection for others is an idea that could have only been unnaturally induced in his mind by the painkillers and medicines they're giving him. But he's not angry with Hannah Linus. In fact, Saudade doesn't really understand people who get mad at women. He's never really believed that women are real people. Sure, they talk and all that, but it never occurred to him to stop and listen to what they're saying.

“I'm fine.” Saudade lifts his hand and makes some sort of thumbs-up sign with the only finger that's not in the cast. “Don't worry about me. Good luck with the gallery.”

Hannah Linus stares at him without saying anything. Her face screws up into a disgusted grimace and bit by bit the disgust transforms into rage. An enraged grimace with her mouth screwed up and her forehead trembling.

“And that's it?” she says, raising her voice. “That's how you end our relationship? You're not even going to object?” Now Hannah Linus's screams echo through the room and probably through the rest of the rooms on that hall of the hospital. “That's all I mean to you? That's all I'm worth?”

Lying in his hospital bed with both arms and both legs in casts and a system of straps and harnesses holding up his multiply fractured leg, Saudade struggles to raise his neck to look at Hannah Linus. Suddenly there is a change in the room's lighting. For a minute Saudade thinks that there's been a power outage. Then he realizes that that's not it. It's just that something very large is blocking the overhead light and the lamp. Something the size of a prehistoric animal that would have to be hunted by several prehistoric hunters. The pupil of his eye with less broken blood vessels moves down until it locates the upper part of the mass that is Aníbal Manta. With his closely cropped hair and his hoop earring and his mammoth head and neck. And with his favorite X-Men T-shirt. The one with the original members.

“Aníbal?” says Saudade. In that vaguely tearful tone of someone getting choked up at seeing an old friend or family member that they thought they'd never see again.

Aníbal Manta looks at Hannah Linus. With a slightly uncomfortable expression.

“Oh, don't worry about me,” says Hannah Linus. As she puts on her coat. “I was just leaving. Obviously I have nothing more to do here. It's obvious I shouldn't have come.” She takes a last look at Saudade's hospital bed. “What for? This son of a bitch doesn't care if I'm dead or alive.”

Aníbal Manta watches as Hannah Linus strides out of the hospital room. Then he looks back at Saudade. With his classic expression of intellectual effort. With a look of intellectual effort that could indicate he's planning something or that he's come with something on his mind.

“My old friend,” says Saudade tearfully. He pauses to happily hawk a phlegm ball. “How're things going? How'd the whole painting thing go? I'm really glad to see you,” he says, his eyes filling with tears, and he's surprised to discover that it's almost true.

Aníbal Manta doesn't say anything. He turns toward the threadbare curtain that separates Saudade's bed from the bed of the patient next to him. The patient next to him seems to be dead, or very close to it. Manta grabs one end of the threadbare curtain and pulls it all the way closed. De facto separating Saudade from the rest of the shared room. In addition to smelling like a mix of bleach and excrement, the hospital room has several buckets and bowls on the floor into which leaks from the ceiling fall. Juan de la Cruz Saudade watches carefully as Manta closes the curtain and comes back to the foot of the bed. You could say he would be furrowing his brow if he had any brow left to furrow.

“Aníbal?” repeats Saudade in a suspicious tone.

“Things went bad,” says Manta. “The Dark Side of the Moon got shut down by the police. The money from the sale got stolen by Giraut and that bitch he brought in. And they kept the paintings, too. The van where they were supposed to be was empty. In other words, the buyer is gonna come after us. Bocanegra's disappeared. Giraut's disappeared. And I'm leaving the country tonight.”

Saudade thinks about what Manta has just told him. It's strange, but none of it causes him any kind of pain or emotional stress. Nothing seems able to cloud his new mood. Bocanegra can go to hell. He doesn't even care about Giraut anymore. Let him choke on his millions. And yet, there is something that doesn't fit. He furrows what's left of his brow. Something about this situation he's in. It takes a moment for him to understand what it is. When he finally does, he opens his eyes very wide.

“Hold on,” he says. “What are you doing here? Why did you come visit me?”

But before he can even finish formulating the question he knows the answer. He is struck by a clean, luminous moment of revelation. And in that moment he also understands how serious his situation is. Completely powerless in a hospital bed. He moves the only one of his eyes that he can see out of at all to look at Aníbal Manta's face. And there, in the eyes of his partner of many years, he sees it all. The endless years of humiliation and emotional stress and intense, deep pain. Pain and emotional stress that date back to elementary school and the constant mocking and hurtful nicknames. The internalized shame about his physical appearance. That dates back to school-yard games whose goal was always to torture that absurdly oversized kid. An emotional stress that survived intact the journey into adulthood. Provoking a chronic failure to adapt. Provoking sexual problems. Provoking a chronic inability to achieve satisfactory erections and to successfully use his unsatisfactory ones. Causing his wife to start visiting the neighbors more and more regularly. Causing a life of fruitless therapy. Saudade could now see all of that, crystal clear, in Aníbal Manta's eyes. Who seems to have transformed right before his eyes. Who seems to have become even bigger than he usually is, if that's possible. Bigger and more formidable. More than ever like The Thing from the Fantastic Four. His arms are the arms of a superhero born of mutagenic overexposures to radiation. Of plutonium explosions. Of mad scientists' laser beams. And his face.