Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“Fuck it,” says Manta after a minute of contemplation. His stomach lets out an enthusiastic growl. “I could give two shits.”

Panakian doesn't look up from his work when he hears Manta cursing. Manta grabs him by the shoulder and shakes him. Panakian stares at him with his glasses that look like they should be on a pianist or a political refugee chess player. Like those glasses devoid of any traces of style that the state gave out free to the citizens of socialist countries.

“Let's go find some grub.” Manta brings together all the fingertips of one hand and points to his mouth several times with the joined fingertips. Then he rubs his belly. Then he points at Panakian. That should be enough, he thinks. It's possible that he's incapable of saying, “You're an asshole and when we finish this job I'm going to beat you so hard your own mother won't even recognize you” using just his hands, but if there's one thing Manta is an expert in it's the Universal Sign Language for food. “Both of us. Come on. You're coming with me. And no funny stuff. At the first sign of anything funny, I bring you back here and break your leg. As far as I know, you don't need two legs to paint that eyesore.”

Manta pushes Panakian out of the warehouse and locks its metal shutter and stares at Panakian in the middle of the parking lot. He opens his jacket to show Panakian a pistol and waits for Panakian to nod. Then he pushes him to the sidewalk.

The fresh winter air on the street fills Manta with optimism and a generic will to live. Next to him, Panakian shivers and his teeth chatter. They walk a couple of blocks and go into one of those supermarkets bathed in a fluorescent glow from above that makes you think of the light paradise must be bathed in. Manta grabs a plastic basket and pushes Panakian through the aisle that leads to the canned goods section.

“Take a good look, asshole.” Manta sticks two bags of crinkle-cut potato chips with monosodium glutamate into his shopping basket. “The wonders of capitalism. I bet you don't have places like this in the piece of shit country you come from.”

Manta pulls on Panakian's arm and pushes him through the aisles of the different sections of the supermarket bathed in heavenly light. For a moment, and without really knowing why, the idea comes into his head that the supermarket light from above is the opposite of the black of the painting's black sky. Next to the crinkle-cut chips he puts six cans of beer into his basket, and a package of boiled ham slices, bread with six kinds of seeds, blue cheese, green olives stuffed with anchovies, a family-size bottle of Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, a bag of freshly made muffins and, after some hesitation, a precooked roast chicken wrapped in some sort of very taut plastic second skin. The plastic basket threatens to overflow. In the canned goods section, Manta turns and looks at Panakian with an expression of theatrical adoration and a can of cockles in his hand.

“Look at this, loser.” He brings the can of cockles less than two inches from Panakian's face. “Cockles. The best invention in the history of mankind. I take my hat off to the fucking genius who thought up taking these guys out of the sea and sticking them in a can.”

Panakian looks at the can of cockles and then looks at Manta. Manta gives him another push toward an even better-lit section of the store, where an employee dressed in white is serving cuts of meat and imported cheeses. Manta gets in line and points to a spot on the floor for Panakian to stay there.

“You stay still, right here,” he says. “Where I can see you.”

Standing in the line for the deli section, with his overflowing basket in one hand and the other hand in his pocket, Manta decides that in the end there's no reason why this has to be a bad day. He has a couple of comics left in the warehouse to reread and, besides, one of them is an issue from a limited-edition series that Marvel devoted to Wolverine. Manta's favorite superhero of all time. Sometimes, when he reads comics in bed while his wife is chatting with one of the neighbor ladies or borrowing a cup of sugar or watching TV in the upstairs neighbor's apartment, Manta imagines that he has an unbreakable skeleton and a miraculous capacity to cure his own wounds through mutant tissue regeneration. Not to mention the retractable and completely unbreakable claws. Claws that sink into Saudade's stomach, or into the stomach of any of the male neighbors in the building. Now he sighs in the supermarket line. The image is so beautiful it often dazzles him.

The line advances quickly until the tiny old woman in front of Manta gets to the head of it. The old woman speaks very softly and her wrinkled finger trembles so much when she points to the products on display that the employee has to stick half of his body out above the counter. Manta starts to get impatient. In his opinion, the glut of senior citizens is one of contemporary society's biggest problems. To the point of jeopardizing the system of social benefits for taxpayers. He doesn't even want to imagine what it must be like to pay taxes. The old woman shakes her head every time the employee shows her a different hunk of meat and looks around her with a disoriented expression. It seems to Manta that she is crying a little bit. The people behind Manta in the line seem to have spontaneously divided themselves into those who feel sorry for the old woman and those who find her irritating. After a minute of confused glances and indecisive pointing with her wrinkled finger, Manta puts the basket down on the floor and punches the counter.

“Goddamn it, ma'am.” He lowers his head to speak very close to the old woman's face. The old woman looks at him in terror. “Don't you have an Ecuadorian to do your fucking shopping? And what about the rest of us? We don't have all night, you know?” He turns toward the employee dressed in corporate white and points at him with an enormous threatening finger. “You, give her a fucking steak and send her on her way, goddamn it.”

There is a moment of silence. The trembling of the old woman's finger has spread to her entire arm and a good part of her mouth. Manta straightens up with his hands on his hips and looks at the place where Panakian is. Or better put, where Panakian is not. Because Panakian is not in the exact place where Manta told him he had to wait until he finished shopping. In fact, Panakian does not appear to be in the Deli Section. Manta starts running down the closest aisle. His speed and the poor visibility at the supermarket aisle intersections cause him to crash into several customers. Three intersections later, Manta makes out the distant figure of Panakian running toward the exit with a bottle of whiskey under his arm.

“Motherfucker,” says Manta, and starts running toward the exit.

Once he's out in the street, Manta stops on the sidewalk. There is no trace of Panakian in either direction. Panakian's running out on him awakens staggering waves of emotional stress in Manta. That feeling of stress has definitely been Manta's cross to bear, his whole life. Like when he puts up with Saudade's digs. Like when he put up with the teasing at school, how people laughed at him and called him The Thing. The same emotional stress that, according to his psychologist, has kept him from achieving satisfactory levels of personal growth and has held him back, trapped in a painful crossroads of anxiety and violence. In the words of his therapist.

Manta takes the pistol from the holster beneath his jacket, cocks it and starts aiming in every direction. Screams are heard on the street. Some passersby walking along the facing sidewalk throw themselves to the ground.

It gives Hannah Linus a particularly comforting feeling when the gallery offices empty out. In general she has always felt comforted by any kind of empty corporate spaces. They give her a feeling of power, sweet and calm, mixed with a certain very subtly tragic atmosphere. And that's why she's now eating alone in her office in the deserted office area, while the gallery office staff is out, like every day, on their lunch break. With her shoes tossed any which way beneath her desk and her feet up on top. Listening to music in her portable MP3 player and chewing the strictly vegetarian salad from the plastic container she holds in her hands.