Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

A minute later Pavel crosses the yard of the three-story house with his shoulders hunched and a tranquilizer dart gun in his hand. A big dog with short hair and erect ears cuts him off. Pavel stops and stares at the dog. The dog stares at Pavel, wagging his tail amicably. With an expression of peaceful curiosity in his canine eyes. Pavel shoots him with a tranquilizer dart anyway.

Strictly speaking, one can't say that Pavel likes his line of work. Or the people he has to work with. Or much less the people that fate has chosen to be the victims of his line of work. Or the city of Barcelona. Although it's true that he didn't like Moscow, either, before he moved to Barcelona. In fact, there aren't many things that he really likes. He himself has never really understood why. As a boy, the only moments in which he can remember having experienced anything close to true satisfaction were the times he filled the old, enormous bathtub of his old, enormous post-Soviet apartment and immersed himself for hours imagining that he was a shark. Until his father or some other adult in the old collective apartment kicked the door open and forced him out of the collective bathtub by beating him with a hanger. Theoretically speaking, Pavel is a firm believer in the teachings of the Rastafarian philosophy. In the idea that the Rastafari have to work spiritually for the redemption of humanity. And yet, he almost never finds practical occasions in which to apply said theoretical concepts.

Pavel goes around the three-story house with his backpack on his shoulder until he finds what he is looking for. French windows that open onto some sort of interior sunroom on the lower floor with a glass door beside them. Pavel cuts the glass around the lock and pushes the door, which opens docilely. A pleasant wave of dry heat from the central heating system welcomes him into the house.

Pavel is exaggeratedly tall in that way in which certain people are so exaggeratedly tall and thin that they almost never manage to stand up completely straight. An essentially gawky way of being exaggeratedly tall. When indoors, Pavel is one of those people that usually have no problem touching the ceiling with an outstretched arm. Now Pavel takes a black ski mask out of his backpack with his exaggeratedly long arms and puts it on his head. He moves his neck from one side to the other to adjust the ski mask so that his mouth and eyes coincide with the openings in the mask. Then he takes an automatic pistol out of his backpack. He puts a silencer on it and checks the chamber before cocking it. He leaves his backpack on the floor and heads up the stairs. With the ski mask on and the gun held high.

Pavel now moves stealthily under the pale, vaguely orangish light that enters through the windows of the three-story house, which smells clean and like something else that it takes Pavel a moment to identify. Marijuana. The herbal and slightly acrid smell of marijuana. Pavel stops suddenly on the second-floor landing. With his heart beating in that controlled, accelerated way that hearts beat in the middle of a job in Pavel's line of work. There is a line of white light beneath a door located on one side of the landing. Only about six feet away from the place where Pavel remains stock-still. Pavel's heartbeat speeds up a bit, while remaining controlled. It doesn't seem possible that anyone has heard him from the other side of the door. Pavel crosses the landing stealthily and puts a hand on the doorknob and raises the pistol with his other hand and opens the door abruptly.

The room on the other side of the door turns out to be a very large bathroom with sky blue wall-to-wall carpeting and tiles. Pavel isn't sure if he's ever seen a sky blue carpet before. On one of the bathroom walls there is a framed poster that reads “PINK FLOYD: THE FINAL CUT.” Pavel looks to one side. Seated on the toilet, looking at him with a stunned face, is a young woman. Of course, Bocanegra, that idiot, hadn't told him there was going to be a woman in the house. He hadn't even mentioned the possibility of there being a woman in the house. The young woman has an elastic band tied around the upper part of her elbow and a hypodermic needle stuck in the inner part of her elbow and is sitting next to a sink with a teaspoon and a lighter and a square of aluminum foil with traces of heroin on it. The only clothes she has on are a promotional T-shirt for the Costa Dorada Biosphere Park theme park and lace panties around her ankles. The young woman lifts up her arms slowly. With a shocked expression. The needle falls to the floor. Pavel immediately identifies the young woman as being of the painfully attractive type. One of those young women with painful sex appeal. Pavel puts his finger in front of the part of the ski mask where his lips are and makes the sign for “silence” in international sign language. Then he grabs her brusquely by an arm and forces her to get up off the toilet. The young woman's pubis is completely shaved except for a tiny unshaved area in the shape of a heart.

Pavel goes back downstairs, preceded by the young woman. Once on the lower floor, he indicates through gestures that she should lie on the sofa and open her legs. The young woman obeys with some sort of lazy resignation. Pavel drops his pants. He manipulates his genitals to the point of a satisfactory erection and penetrates her on the sofa. Then he leans over her. And in that moment he sees something. Something familiar in the young woman's face. Something familiar and at the same time completely improbable. Something that makes him take his penis out of the young woman suddenly and take a few steps back, spooked. He snatches off his ski mask.

“Anya?” he says. In an incredulous tone. Looking at the young woman's face with a frown beneath the tenuous orangish light. “Is that you?”

The young woman now looks at him with the same incredulous expression. With an amplified version of the same incredulous expression. Which quickly transforms into a disgusted expression.

“Pavel?” says the young woman. Sitting up with a start.

Every trace of lazy resignation or shock seems to have evaporated from her face. She lifts a trembling arm and hits him in the face with a smack that echoes throughout the entire lower floor of the three-story house bathed in orangish light. Pavel is paralyzed, the pistol still in his hand. He raises a hand to his face and looks at his bloodstained fingertips.

The moment, thinks Pavel, is one of those moments that makes him lose all his faith in any of the teachings of the Rastafarian philosophy related to spreading the Rastafarian message of spiritual redemption. One of those moments that fills him with a paralyzing contempt for the civilized Western society that surrounds him. One of those moments that intensify his displeasure toward everything that surrounds his life and makes him want to fill bathtubs to the brim and immerse himself in them. Until he is capable of satisfactorily forgetting where he is. Until the bathtub ceases to be a bathtub.

“What a pig!” she shrieks in Russian, her Moscow inflections painfully familiar. “What the fuck are you doing here?” She pauses. Her eyes cross slightly. “And what the fuck happened to your hair?”

“What am I doing here?” Pavel wields his pistol. “What are you doing here? What a whore. You've always been a little whore.” He points toward the stairs with the barrel of his pistol. “Do you have any idea of what kind of guy's fucking you?”

“I'm no whore, idiot.” She lifts a hand with diamonds on the ring finger and puts it in Pavel's face. A diamond ring that looks too big to be worn on any kind of finger without causing muscular injuries. “I'm engaged. And of course I know what kind of guy is fucking me. A rich man. That's the kind of guy he is.”

Pavel stares at her. With an expression of intense despondency and intense lack of faith in the teaching of the Rastafarian philosophy and intense contempt for the world that surrounds him. He pulls up his pants without letting go of the pistol in his hand. He buckles his belt.