Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“The invisible house is what paid for this trip,” explains Lorenzo Giraut. Looking at his son with a kind smile. Lorenzo Giraut's arm is resting on the shoulders of the inhumanly tall figure covered in bloody bandages the way young men lean on their girlfriends' shoulders. “Which isn't really an invisible house. It's just a house that doesn't exist. We sold a house that doesn't exist. That is how the Down With The Sun Society was born. We sold an invisible house and took a vacation to London with the money.”

Lucas recognizes something of his own vaguely namby-pamby seriousness in the way his father talks. That sort of namby-pamby seriousness that often causes people to get easily distracted and stop listening. Lucas changes position on the sofa with a pensive face and his feet splash in an enormous puddle that he could swear wasn't there a moment ago. He examines the floor planks near their table. Obviously there must be a pipe broken somewhere in the bar, because water is coming from somewhere and flooding the room. Koldo Cruz has taken a bag of marijuana out of one of the inside pockets of his denim jacket and is rolling another joint with the same lethargic face. Bocanegra leans in toward Lucas to whisper in his ear.

“Don't even ask.” He points with his pint of beer to the figure covered in bloody bandages. “We don't talk about that at this table.”

“Is that why everyone's so quiet?” Lucas Giraut looks at Bocanegra, who has abruptly moved away and now seems to be acting like he hadn't said anything, his eyes fixed on the legs of some terrified-looking girls at the next table. “Is that why it looks like everyone is afraid? Because of this…? Because of the one with the bandages?”

“Listen.” Lorenzo Giraut stops kissing the bloody cheek of the bandaged figure and looks at his son with a namby-pamby serious expression. “You're here for a reason. This is the night it all began. And not only for obvious reasons. This is the real beginning of the story. If you want to understand it, pay attention. What happens between us three tonight is the real beginning of everything.”

“It's like that story about the butterfly that flutters its wings in China,” says Koldo Cruz. With a lethargic expression. His long hair is curly while Bocanegra's is wavy and Giraut's is straight and blond.

Lucas Giraut can't help noticing that his father and the bandaged figure of inhuman proportions are seated at an interpersonal distance normally reserved for people who are physically intimate. The bandaged figure's hand, Lucas notices with a slightly disgusted expression, is quite close to his father's crotch. Koldo Cruz finishes lighting his joint and begins to perform some sort of undulating, vaguely snakelike dance with his arms and neck to the beat of the song playing on the wooden speakers by the bar. Bocanegra and Giraut move their heads rhythmically in acknowledgment of the song. The guy singing through the wooden speakers sings that when the moon eclipses the sun one can't technically speak of a dark side of the moon since, technically speaking, both sides are dark.

“That doesn't make sense,” says Lucas Giraut finally. Looking at his father and the other figures around the table. “That's not how dreams work. Dreams are made of memories. But I was never here. I wasn't even born. I've never seen this man.” He points to Koldo Cruz. “And no one's ever told me any of this. So how could I remember it?”

Bocanegra stares at Lorenzo Giraut with a theatrical expression of shock. The cruel smile that Lucas knows so well in the real-life Bocanegra is already there in the face of the Bocanegra in the dream. In an embryonic stage, if you will.

“Oh, shit,” says Bocanegra. “Who has the Temporal Paradox Survival Manual? Because I forgot mine.” He pats down his pockets mockingly.

Everyone at the table starts to laugh, except for Lucas Giraut. The figure wrapped in bloody bandages doesn't laugh, either. It just looks at Lucas out of the corner of his eye. With those points of yellow light.

“Listen.” Lorenzo Giraut once again takes on his namby-pamby serious tone. “We don't have much time. Not to mention the water level.” He points to the floor. Where the level of the water waterlogging the floorboards has now risen an inch or so and forces the pub regulars to walk on tiptoe and lift up the hems of their long skirts. “Your mission is to discover what happened between us. You have until eleven approximately.” He quickly checks his wristwatch and then looks at his son with a kind expression. “IDT, of course.”

“IDT?” Lucas furrows his brow.

“Internal Dream Time,” says Bocanegra. He empties his pint in one gulp and bangs noisily against the table's wooden surface with the base of the empty glass. “Anyway, around here everything closes at eleven.”

The pub's back room has been clearing out and now the only other people left are a little man with a corduroy suit reading a British newspaper and two sinister-looking guys with leather jackets and bowl cuts. They all have their pants rolled up. Lucas takes a sip of his beer and tries to determine what it is about this scene of the Down With The Sun Dream that seems so powerfully familiar. Bocanegra lifts a leather bag off the flooded floor and places it on the table. It is a bottle green Puma sports bag. He unzips the bag and gestures to Lucas, inviting him to look inside.

“This is our new business project,” says Bocanegra.

Lucas extends his neck to see what's inside the bag. Inside the bag there's a pile of female body parts. An arm filled with bracelets and a perfectly manicured hand. A torso with small, slightly wrinkled breasts. A foot here and knee there. Bocanegra rummages around inside the bag until he finds what he's looking for and holds it up for Lucas to see: it's the face of Estefanía “Fanny” Giraut, with lips bruised by silicone injections and skin pulled horribly taut from behind the ears. With a nose so surgically reconstructed that it no longer looks like a nose. Just a strange cartilaginous protuberance. Something that makes one think of vestigial tails and appendages with teeth. Fanny Giraut's face looks irritated as Bocanegra, grabbing it by the ears without the slightest consideration, sticks it back in the bag.

“We think we can get almost a million for this. It was Lorenzo's idea. Getting into the antiques business. He thought of it after visiting that museum with the mummies here in London. We set up a bogus company. To send out fake invoices. On a little British island with a special tax regimen.”

“The island is a center of telluric energies.” Koldo Cruz brings his joint to his glitter-covered face. His long curly hair falls onto his sparkly face and red eyes. “The druids have always known it. That's why our plans can't fail.”

Lucas Giraut pulls his feet up out of the water and puts them on the sofa. The water that keeps coming must be about eight inches above floor level by now, forcing everyone to get up on chairs. The waiters have their pants rolled up to the knees and are having trouble moving through the water, holding their trays filled with pints of beer precariously and sometimes dropping them when a wave hits them from the side or from behind. Of course, thinks Giraut. That is exactly what's familiar to him about the scene. When he was a boy, in his childhood bedroom in the North Wing of the Giraut family house in the Ampurdan, he had a recurring dream in which the Mediterranean rose, flooding the beach and reaching the house in a question of minutes. Covering the first floor and then the second, where the Fishing Trophy Room is. In his dream, Lucas would watch the water level rise until the furniture and the lamps and the paintings on the walls started floating. Finally the house flooded completely, the water reaching the ceiling. The fish overran the hallways and the rooms. The only thing that little Lucas could do in the face of the rising water was go farther up the house's marble staircase. First he got trapped in the attic and then, when the water flooded that part, too, he pushed open the trap door and went out onto the roof. Where the same landscape always awaited him. The Ampurdan coast had disappeared. The sea covered everything. The rocky hills of the northern coast had become little dwindling islands. There was no trace of terra firma. Minutes later, Lucas was floating in the water, grabbing a plank of wood or some other remains of the flood.