Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Pavel looks around him with a frown. It doesn't seem to him that either the place or the situation are appropriate for any type of interrogation or official police conversation. Taking into account the risk that he now runs outside of his cell, given the circumstances. An hour ago, after they took him out of the police station and had him handcuffed on the sidewalk waiting for the car that would take him to the racetrack, a motorcycle pizza delivery guy had stopped in front of him and opened the pizza compartment on his motorcycle and Pavel had thrown himself to the ground and rolled about ten feet away to cover.

“Why have you bring me here?” Pavel talks with his cheek full of half-chewed peanuts. He swallows them and brings another handful to his mouth. “You can't fool me. I know you have scheme. I don't like it.” He shakes his head, making his dreadlocks shake. “I want to go back in jail.”

Commissioner Farina stands up again as the drivers make their way around the start of the third lap. Car number two has gotten ahead of one of its opponents and is now in third place. Commissioner Farina has lit a cigarette and is now alternating nervous drags with sporadic chewing on the cuticles of the hand that holds the cigarette. In the audience there are a good number of fathers on their feet and shouting to cheer their sons on or to protest the unsporting tactics of other people's sons. Farina pats down the inner pocket of the suit jacket he wears over a sport shirt and jeans. His jeans don't have the aerodynamic, second-skin cut of jeans popular with teens. And the hems have obviously been taken up. As is the case with the jeans of many married men over forty-five. Farina takes a wrinkled envelope out of the pocket of his jacket, gives it to Pavel and then returns to his paternal combination of cheers and cuticle biting and whistles of protest.

Pavel opens the envelope with his handcuffed hands still partially covered by the jacket. He pulls out the document inside and reads it. It is a ticket to Kingston with a layover in London for the plane leaving the next morning. In about twenty hours.

“You're basically a free man.” Farina speaks without looking at Pavel. Standing up and ignoring the petitions of the spectators behind him who ask him to sit down. Smoking nervously and bringing his hand to his forehead in some sort of imprecise military salute meant to protect his eyes from the sun that falls directly onto the track. “Thank the Spanish police system. We're like that here. We have a long tradition of letting criminals go free. Almost everyone in business or politics is a criminal. And I personally don't see anyone bothering them.” He pauses and whistles at the track again. The cars in second and third place seem to have closed in on the first, turning the race into what is technically referred to as hotly contested. “As for you.” He shrugs his shoulders. “You're free, too. You're free to decide who orphans your sister of a brother. That's how you say it, right? You're free to decide if you want your friend Bocanegra to take you out or if you want it to be your Russian friends. In the end, it's an admirable situation. I mean it's admirable that you've managed to get everyone gunning for you. You must feel important. I can almost hear them sharpening their knives.” He puts a hand near his ear as if he were listening carefully. “That's why I've brought you here, Bob Marley. So you can tell me some amusing story to brighten my day and make me a happy commissioner. Tell me a story or I'll set you free. And if you make it to the mailbox on the corner, I'll climb Montserrat in bare feet.”

The sun falls directly on the unprotected stands of the amateur racetrack for cars built for, or adapted to, children. Cars that are like larvae of cars. Like arthropod cars. Pavel doesn't understand why the hell there are tons of tires everywhere. Pavel, by the way, doesn't give a shit about this race or any other kind of car race. He couldn't care less about a ton of people going around and around a cement island filled with tons of tires. In fact, he thinks, as he finishes the peanuts and throws the empty plastic bag to the ground and considers the possibility of bumming a cigarette from that idiot Farina, during the last few weeks he has gradually been discovering that most of the things that used to matter to him now mean nothing to him. Not his books of Rastafarian philosophy and his collection of music magazines with colored Post-its on the most relevant pages. Not his dresser filled with combat pants and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. Not the pornographic novels that he buys at a bookstore in the Raval. Not his wonderful dreadlocks that have finally reached the approximate length of Marley's dreads on the cover of Legend. Not the extra money that he earns by ripping off Bocanegra and Leon and playing both sides. During the last few weeks Pavel has been thinking about going to live in the jungle. With the snakes and the bears. He's been thinking about building a house up in a tree so the Jamaican bears can't attack him at night, and building his own weapons out of wood and learning to hunt and fish. With a woman. With a black woman. Both of them naked all day long. Fucking all day long in his house up in a tree. And once in a while going down to Kingston, Jamaica. On weekends, maybe. To sell the fish and the game and exchange them for condoms and some bear traps, or something like that.

“Do you need a pen and paper?” Commissioner Farina hands him a notebook that doesn't look very official and a pen. “Let the ink flow, son. And the pen is just a loaner.”

Pavel opens up the notebook to a blank page and pushes the button that makes the pen point appear. All kinds of pre-urban and pre-civilized images are running through his head. Pavel naked and up to his knees in a jungle river. Throwing a homemade spear with that same twist of his body that the Soviet javelin tossers used. With a twist that makes his waist-length dreads ripple in slow motion. And Pavel walking through the streets of Kingston on one of his highly awaited visits. With a string of bananas and fish over his shoulder. Wearing a loincloth and an old T-shirt where Bob Marley's face is now nothing more than a faded splotch. A souvenir from a much more confused period in his life. And all his Rastafarian brothers and sisters waving to him from the hammocks in front of their multicolored houses. Coming over to shake his hand in complicated ways reserved only for spiritual brothers. Offering him spliffs and hugging him. And the women's lascivious gazes running over his body, and him turning toward his ample-assed jungle concubine and shrugging his shoulders. With a resigned smile on his face. Tired but always high-spirited. Suddenly shouts are heard. Openly insulting shouts. Pavel looks up from his notebook. Now everyone is standing and Commissioner Farina and all the other fathers are shouting and waving their fists in the air. The amateur cars are rounding the final stretch. Behind him, two fathers appear to be fistfighting amidst the screams of their family members. Car number six comes in at first place followed closely by Commissioner Farina's son's car, number two. Pavel takes a sip of his soda through the straw as Farina shouts at his son, threatening to break open his stupid fat spoiled head. The rest of the cars cross the finish line in rapid succession under the glaring sun. Frowning, Pavel starts to write in the notebook in hesitant Latin letters.

“She's obviously gotten worse,” says the medical intern at the renowned children's psychiatric center where Valentina Parini is hospitalized. With serious professional consternation. “And all in the last two weeks. Paranoid attacks. Delusions. We've noticed an increase in the aggression that began before she came here. It seems there are security problems here at the center. We think she's been reading that book again. The Stephen King book. Which is where most of her delusions stem from. And yet”—he looks out of the corner of his eye at the table where Valentina is drawing with a box of colored pencils—“we don't understand how she could have gotten a copy. We strictly control everything that comes in or out of the center. We regularly search their rooms. Our committee reads all the books that come in. It's quite a mystery.”