He yawned, let his pajamas drop to the floor, and put on the sweater he’d worn the day before, with wisps of hay still on the elbows. It was eleven in the morning, and he had been up past five chatting online with a girl in Seville, a nice set of jugs if the photo was actually her—and if not, whoever was typing in her name had good taste, they’d chosen a very warm, summery photo. Even though now it was winter, the girl in the picture wore a red tank top, the sides open in wide ovals from the shoulder to the waist, with no hint of a bra, the neckline revealing incredible orbs of flesh that lifted the fabric. The best jugs on the market. If they weren’t hers, they must have been chosen by a man or a lesbian. But that didn’t matter, you went online to be altruistic, to find and offer generosity, to forgive from the get-go, to give yourself over to the gratuitousness of a limitless, empty planet devoid of responsibility—created by man, though, and therefore not infinite, just beyond your reach. The Internet didn’t have nature’s independence; tied to humans, it could only be fantasy up to a certain point. And it contained a world of altruism—you could be talking to the scum of the earth, to the worst criminals, serial killers, and terrorists, bad people who, if they caught you in the forest, would crush you without thinking twice—but that’s just how the Internet is, it redeems and purifies them. And how many imposters do we come across every day without even realizing? Who wasn’t covering up their belly, the folds we want to hide even from ourselves, since we can’t go around showing them? But if all you get from the imposters is a sham, what sham are we even talking about? The mask is the truth, they don’t cheat you on the Internet: whores who don’t charge aren’t whores.
He posted different photographs depending on the day, out of generosity. He used the name “Miqui” so he felt more identified with the photos, and he updated them depending on his mood. He had folders full of faces to choose from. The best photo was of an executive with very short blond hair and a gleaming new shirt. Chicks drooled over guys like that. It had taken him months to find a photo that fit his personality so well. Our outsides and our insides never match up. The earth is a chaos of seven billion outer shells and seven billion personalities; faces never perfectly fit their owners, souls and bodies do their own thing; the dead, the living, the young, and the old in a tangle of locations and moments, all chaos and orgy. Who was that blond jerk whose face Miqui’d swiped? What country was he from? What year was the photo taken? Maybe the blond was bald now. And what if that exact blond guy had a personality that matched Miqui’s face? What if the blond guy’s personality—from inside Miqui’s shell—was punching and kicking at the walls of his prison of a face? Who knew what son of a bitch was wearing the blond guy’s façade. Who knows whose boobs those really were or what kind of narcissist hid behind the sweet smile of the waitress at the social club yesterday.
They can do face transplants. They transplant the whole kit and caboodle: the forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, cheeks and lips, moles, chin. They resuscitate the dead face for the blank head of a poor wretch who’s lost his. They take off what’s left of the old face, file down the bones, and slip a new face on like a sock. The transplantee washes it every morning in front of the mirror. He’s the same, he just looks different. His face sweats or is cold like always, it itches or it stings, he feels the sun beating down on it, he feels the rain falling on it. He gets blackheads, inflamed pimples, his beard grows . . . but wait a second: whose beard is that? His hairs and his tears go through someone else’s skin. If it’s a woman who receives the transplant, who does she put her lipstick, eye shadow, foundation, and sunglasses on? More masks atop the mask. Her boyfriend doesn’t know who he’s caressing. Who’s he kissing if he kisses her on the cheek? The flayed skull of a cadaver buried a thousand kilometers away. And when he kisses her on the mouth, whose lips does his tongue slip through?
There’s a whole business around it. They bring faces from far away, just in case, but they can’t bring them from too far off, from some continent with other races; for example, they can’t put an Asian face on a European body. But the faces travel to and fro, there are markets, they organize swaps and fairs on sporting fields, with stands filled with faces, butcher shops of masks, wholesale or retail—How many would you like, doctor? That makes a kilo—and right now trucks like his, filled with faces, drive down the streets, roads, and expressways. There are stockpiles of faces traveling on planes, trains, and boats. In portside warehouses, containers filled with faces wait for a semi to come pick them up. Flesh masks hang on hooks in refrigerated rooms beneath clinics and hospitals, surgeons handle them with surgical gloves, spin them on two fingers like pizza dough to air them out so they’ll give a bit as they’re sewn on the head. There are catalogues of masks, categories, supply, demand, swaps . . . You like this one? It’ll suit you perfectly. Would you like to see the photo of its previous owner to get an idea of what you’ll look like?
The young widow from yesterday. The fiancée of one of the accident victims. She goes abroad on vacation. Walking alone down a street, she sees a familiar face. It can’t be. Her heart skips a beat. It can’t be. The face smiles at her. Her lover’s face on a stranger’s body. Surprised to see her looking at him like that, the boy comes over and speaks to her in English.
Who do the faces belong to? And the bodies? Whose are they?
The blond executive’s mug was the best one he had, but he changed it as easily as—depending on his mood—he changed the picture in his mind of the person whose fingers typed the words that appeared on his screen from some corner of cyberspace. Quick replies filled with good intentions and good vibes emerged on the luminous pond of the screen amid an exasperating chaos of multicolored ads and last-minute offers for porn sites and online sex shops, cyber casinos, airlines, shops that sold tires and spare truck parts, antivirus programs, video games . . . In the midst of that mess of invasive little pop-up windows, there was an oasis of altruism and warmth, of serenity and trust, a tear in the fabric of selfish demands.
What’s wrong, Miqui?
You really think so?
Do you want me to explain what happened to me?
I understand, Miqui.
I’m so sorry, Miqui.
Life’s a bitch.
We all have our moments.
Tell me, Miqui, I want to know.
Words climbing out of the abyss, company. The screen flickered like a star at the heart of a dark room in an apartment on a carless street in Sils, a fading star, around which the room’s furnishings slowly revolved, the unmade bed whose skirt dragged on the ground, the chair with a mountain of clothes to iron and fold, sleeves and pant legs hanging between chair legs, the cardboard box with the empty cans from the beers he occasionally got up to get from the kitchen . . . the cylindrical basket with the overflowing bag of dirty laundry. . .
The small table was another orbiting planet, with the unplugged clock radio, green lamp with a burnt-out bulb, and little drawers that he never opened filled with coins, cards, pens, maps of cities he’d traveled to a thousand years ago, papers, photographs, and torn concert tickets . . . There was a poster the mechanic had given him, pinned up right beside the window with its blinds drawn, a blown-up photo of the latest model of a Mercedes Atego, red like his, and with a crane and a cargo bed, but his was already twenty years old. The mechanic must have thought he could buy it, that he’d fall in love and do anything to have it; he must have taken him for a truck nut, crazy for engines. Miqui knew a few guys like that. The mechanic must have thought he’d ask for a loan—not that they’d give it to him—because his Atego was a wreck. He was always having to fix it, one patch over the next, and the mechanic had told him he could buy a new one with all he spent on repairs. Sure, he had thought. In my next life. The Atego’s nose stuck out from the middle of the stretch of wall, through a frame of white thumbtacks . . . The poster was curling slowly, puffing out slightly like a shifting sail, a carefully maneuvering truck . . .
The closet’s open door was like a dissected wing, lined with photographs of top models, the most attractive faces of ten years past, which had yellowed in the photographs; they’d dried out on paper just as they’d dried out in real life, expired models, past their sell-by date . . . And on the top shelf of the closet there was a case with a shotgun inside, above the bar of empty hangers—he only had two shirts hung up, two ridiculous shirts he never wore—the case was half hidden amid a pile of notebooks and textbooks from high school, a dinged trophy he had won in a school literary contest, and a racket . . .
When he was feeling good he would post the photo of a tennis player with curly hair, a guy younger than him, damp with sweat after winning a game, with two days of beard growth, clean, smiling, sporty. In his best moments, Miqui felt like that. It was like pulling back a curtain and discovering himself improved. He would confess after an endless chat session, once the chick convinced him to meet up to have a coffee or go to bed together. Then it was time to say, “I’m not the guy in the photo,” but the conversation had already gone too far for her to really mind, and she would convince herself that she didn’t really care; anyway, the photo she’d posted wasn’t her, either. Or it was her but twenty years ago, or looking taller and more attractive, or with longer hair. On the web, everyone was very generous.
It was hard to resist the temptation to get together with someone. He had to offset the gravity of the bodies behind these conversations. Bodies have gravity, without gravity people would float off the planet, only rooted plants would be left on Earth, the sea’s water would scatter throughout the universe, and the fish would float, dead, among the planets. He had printed out a red stop sign with the words MEETING up underneath, and taped it to his keyboard. The girls he chatted with were far away, in Barcelona at least, and he did short-haul transport, when he had work. But even if he did drive long distances, he wouldn’t have listened to the other truckers who suggested he get in touch with chicks in the places where he was headed; he didn’t want to pay for a hotel or sex. They insisted, but he wasn’t convinced. The real angels lived in Guatemala or Galicia. He ruled out chatting with anyone under twenty-five, and he chose them by their location, always at least five hundred kilometers away. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to meet up, they confused the generosity of the web with the self-serving generosity of the world outside; they brought the virus of their miserable lives to the Internet.
There was no need to take it all the way. Approach your prey, follow her tracks, get a sense of her, sniff her out, just play. He could have written manuals. There are shy victims and clever victims, bold ones and enigmatic ones, it was different every time: there could be a camera and virtual sex, but never a get-together. People got together out of laziness. It wasn’t that he had a problem hooking up. Miqui didn’t look too out of his element at a nightclub, the hunting ground whose only ruses were dim lights and alcohol, among teenagers with wide foreheads, like bulls. It was in one of those large rooms with dark ceilings, fake clouds, and music that he had met Cèlia, ten years ago. But it was different in chat rooms. Chatting was altruistic. The chat was a haven. The layers of idealization you wrapped the other person in would always ruin any later get-together.
He met Marga and Cloe via their little show one morning. He was chatting with one of those understanding souls—her photograph was of a fuckable teenager, although the chat said 30+—when a window with a red frame opened up beside an ad for bargain trucks, and there were the two girls in blue lingerie looking at him through a camera and waving to attract his attention. Could they be watching him? He had no way of being sure. He hadn’t poked out the camera above his laptop screen, and he hadn’t taped it over. Then he heard them through the speakers.
“Can you hear us? Hello? Do you hear us?” they asked in Spanish.
Did they want to know if he, specifically, could hear them, or was it a message they sent out to thousands of men like him, typing in thousands of dark rooms? They were stuck behind the plastic screen, making troubling gestures toward him, as if they were drowning, as if they needed him or had an important message to convey to him, as if the bed they were on was a hospital bed where they were spending the final hours of their lives—or: We’ve been held hostage in this garage for three years, forced to do this, now we have a quick chance to talk, they’ve gone out, please, help us!
He typed “perfectly” and then added “loud and clear.” One girl was hugging the other from behind and had a tattoo of ivy and was wearing wings. It wasn’t recorded. They started talking to him. They were Internet whores. He kept chatting with the teenage-photo woman as he watched the girls in the little side window out of the corner of his eye. He could place an order for any of the dirty thoughts running through his head just by sending text messages. Opportunists. They had caught him horny and distracted. Finally, he got rid of the chat, unbuttoned his pants, and when he was at his most defenseless, Marga suggested they meet up. They were much closer than he’d realized, they worked out of Lloret.
He opened the other door of the closet and pulled the case off the shelf. It was a wooden case with a leather strap and inside was a shotgun, in pieces. What’s a shotgun worth? It made no sense to pawn it for clothes; you have to really be scraping bottom before clothes are more useful to you than a shotgun.
He put the case on the bed, opened it, and studied the pieces. They smelled of gunpowder and grease. They looked new considering their age, dark, shiny, and anesthetized by the padded interior: the black barrel, the varnished wood of the butt, the cylindrical cartridges with their purplish shells and golden caps, the white instruction pamphlet with the Beretta logo he’d used to learn to put it together years ago. Without Ahmed, he could now carry it under the seat in his truck, feel its energy in his balls, or, even better, hang it from the ceiling: a cascade of firepower over his skull, a radiation shower of wood, iron, and gunpowder. A man on foot wasn’t the same as a man in a truck. A man with his hands in his pockets wasn’t the same as a man with a shotgun.
He thought about Cindy again. Maybe he was falling in love; he really wanted to see her again. And it wasn’t even springtime. He had met three fuckable chicks in just one day: Cindy, the widow—with the morbid appeal of that black dress against her milky skin—and that little whore with the ringlets. She wouldn’t last long where she was. He’d have to hurry if he wanted a taste of her. Have her come up into the cab, sit her down on top of him, and ask her to glance up at the ceiling while he was screwing her. Why? she would ask. What’s there?
“You’re giving me the truck but not the shotgun?” Miqui had complained to his father.
“It was a present from my mother. It was my grandfather’s.”
“That was so you could defend us. You don’t have to do that anymore.”
But he didn’t really know what his great-grandfather was doing with a shotgun, or why it had been in his father’s room for so many years. He only knew about its existence after his mother died. Every evening, after locking the truck in the lumber warehouse, his father picked him up at his Aunt Marta’s house. Aunt Marta would get Miqui from school at five and give him a snack. His father arrived later and walked him home down streets that smelled of fried food, carrying a basket filled with the dinner his aunt had prepared for them.
One night, his father was late. His aunt sat by the phone, but his father didn’t call. He ate dinner with her. Later, on the way home, his father’s hand was trembling and sweaty, and when they arrived he asked him to wait in the dining room instead of going to bed. He came out of his bedroom with the wooden case. It was the first time Miqui saw it. His father placed it on the table and had the shotgun assembled in five seconds—it would take him five minutes now, if he could do it at all.
“When you’re scared,” he said, “remember this.”
It was he who had been scared that night, more than his father. He was a twelve-year-old boy, and he liked the world better without shotguns. A decade and a half later, when, after the accident, his father gave him the truck, Miqui asked him for the shotgun too. The world was better but more complicated than when he was a child.
Now he put it together, placed the cartridges in his pocket, put the case away again, and took the gun to the dining room. Yesterday’s dinner plates were still on the table. He took aim at a bottle. Then he slowly shifted the barrel and aimed at the pile of dirty plates in the sink. The shotgun wasn’t loaded. He fired. He took aim, fired, and cocked it again without ammunition. When he got tired of playing, he leaned it against the table with the barrel toward the ceiling. He cleared the table and swept the breadcrumbs up off the floor. A while back they had fired the cleaning lady, a short, stocky Bolivian woman, with the same sort of body he’d expect to find under Cindy’s clothes—South American chicks came in packages with short expiration dates. She’d vanished from town just like Ahmed, and now the house was filled with dirty clothes, they were everywhere. His father just lay about all day. If he hadn’t let himself get ripped off, they’d be able to hire someone to clean and cook once in a while, or he could live in a nursing home. But the banks worked together to prey on the weakest, the most helpless, on people who felt they were protected, people who had grown trusting over the course of their lives. And when they had them where they wanted them, they gave them what they deserved. There were about twenty people in town who’d been fleeced; every once in a while they held meetings, but Miqui and his father never went, why bother, when it mortified his father and he already knew there was nothing they could do.
There was a bit of milk left in the carton, but he wasn’t sure if it was sour, so he put it in his coffee along with four teaspoons of sugar. He picked up the shotgun again and laid it on the table. The old man was on the other side of the door, awake on the double bed. Every morning he turned on the TV and waited in his room until Miqui cleared out. His son didn’t return home until the night or early morning. He spent his days watching the same programs: talk shows and news programs that confirmed it was best not to go out. On the days when Miqui stayed home, he made his father get out of bed. He would shout at him, and soon the man would stick his head out of his room, his pajamas bloated by his diaper. He’d drag himself to the bathroom like the skeleton of a frightened rabbit. The smell of piss wafting through the house. He washed and changed his own diaper, for the moment, but that was a ticking time bomb.
He never went out. He never saw anyone. He didn’t talk to Miqui. Just television. It was his way of complaining, letting himself drop, depressed, upon his son. Old people are selfish, their weakness makes them distrusting, like the old man with the cane in Vidreres the day before, wanting to look pitiful, still milking a war he’d seen from afar as a schoolboy. What more could young people today ask for than a war and at least the hope of winning it? They consoled themselves by massacring soldiers on a PlayStation or Wii. They couldn’t prove themselves out in the world, they weren’t like him, who had known how to make a life for himself, they were penned in like industrial pigs or hens or cows; today, housing developments were warehouses for young people, buildings to store them in, stalls with the lights on twenty-four hours a day, each with their girl or boy or group of siblings inside, facing a screen like lambs at the trough. He knew a ton of people like that, always connected when he got online, always available on the Internet but only on the Internet, he had friends from high school who ended up settling in to live in the virtual world instead of the physical, gravitational one—exiled to the hidden world, all tangled up together in a mess of circuits, chained by Wi-Fi to their computers, tablets, and cell phones, hypnotized, captured by the spider who lived with them. These millennials, young people who didn’t study or work, who couldn’t do either. They’re born already knowing, the mutation has occurred, the youngest ones have adapted. Sometimes he envied them. He had to struggle with the truck to make ends meet. He was part of a hinge generation between the old people who had everything and the young who had nothing, but because they had nothing, they were spared from anxiety. There were still girls in the chat rooms who tried to get together with him. They asked to see him. They wanted to meet. They wanted to go out. They wanted to extricate themselves. But how could they survive out there, when there’s nothing left for them?
It was the fault of sons of bitches like his father. Who had brand-new Ategos like the one in the poster? When he passed by a restaurant—a date-night restaurant, not like the cheap one on the side of the highway he went to the day before—and looked through the window, he only saw old people inside, big-bellied guys like the banker from Vidreres. How far was that guy, Ernest, from retirement? He could settle into a little house overlooking the sea to live out the rest of his years. But old folks don’t retire anymore. They had extended the retirement age. Why should they retire, when everything was hunky-dory? The old folks had good jobs and salaries, they had the dough, they had gotten there first. There are old people who are dirt poor, scum of the earth like his father, and there always will be, but what was over for good was young people with money or the possibility of making any. Everything was taken, starting with the illegal businesses. Sure, chicks could still be whores, being young was a definite advantage there, and the clever ones worked in secret like Marga and Cloe. But the restaurants he used to go to with his father every Sunday before the recession, had suddenly disappeared, the restaurants filled with young couples celebrating the signing of their forty-year mortgages, with tables reserved weeks in advance, the triumph of all that culinary crap, the chefs who were on TV every day, those bastards that served up mind-boggling dishes, who brought on mass poisoning with their white surgeons’ uniforms and Santoku knives, their cleavers and hands soaking wet from rummaging around in the guts of young people, their raw material, the base of their dishes, yes, the chefs were in on it, they were a key piece of the scam, they helped to cook the books. Until, all of a sudden, there were no more enology courses, no more silicone breast and lip implants for teenagers, no more trips to New York and the Caribbean for the kids, no more bricklayers’ assistants with 4x4s, no more everyone having a second home. The property that was supposed to ensure your future, in the end turned into a life sentence, the scam of the century. Everything was over for the young, just like that. They were as confident as their parents, but ended up being the butt of the joke—last one’s a rotten egg—and now the good cars were for the old, the cruises were for the old, the expensive clothing shops, the jewels, the spas, the massages, the high-class whores were for the old. The old folks had had their youth, but they’d had such a good time they’d come back for seconds, and thirds, and keep coming back for more. They were living their thousandth youth; they were bombproof, they’d aged well but hadn’t done anything more, squandering money like the young—they were role models in that—but the properties, the businesses, the companies, the posts, and the banks were theirs. They were living it up right in front of the noses of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Because they could. They’d leave their bones as an inheritance. Farewell and good-bye. You can have this piece-of-shit world, here’s your embezzlement, your ruined country, the political system we turned into a fucking cage, ten thousand Fukushimas, and a hundred thousand warehouses of mortal remains. You can keep it, enjoy! Farewell and screw you! Those two poor kids from the car wreck had gotten out in time. There was that. Old folks who would launch a nuclear holocaust if they knew they had to die tomorrow. Die. Them? No fucking way were they gonna die. They wouldn’t die tomorrow. They wouldn’t ever die, the kings of the world would survive like roaches and rats, you’d find them everywhere; two kids cash in their chips against a tree on the side of the road, and who do you find there the next day, pondering it, musing over it, philosophizing? A banker. Then who shows up, on foot, brimming with life, getting a little exercise like someone going to the gym, with his cane and his stories from the Pleistocene epoch? Some three-hundred-year-old piece of shit. Every new medicine extends old people’s lives, so they have time to find another cure to keep them alive until the next discovery. They run the pharmaceutical industry, they specialize in defeating the cancers of old age, geriatric oncology was making leaps and bounds, eternally healthy prostates, skin, breasts, and colons, replacement parts; soon they’d cure Alzheimer’s; soon the old would watch the young pass them by, soon the young would be the old and the old would be the young—thirty-two-year-old old people, like him, trying to survive by rummaging through the dump, wrinkled by unemployment and bad news, gutted, playing dominoes on the Internet while outside hundred-year-old young people sunbathed all day long, and spent their nights leaping and dancing in the discos—when you see someone with tender skin and impeccable teeth, colorful clothes, long, shiny hair, full of health and joie de vivre, they’ll be old. Everything will be the same as ever, but with the young watching from the margins with their hands out. The old get beauty treatments and operate on their faces and breasts, they go to the gym, they take Viagra, they reproduce on their own—sixty-year-old women with kids, ninety-year-old grandmas buying wombs for hire or even giving birth themselves—they haven’t renounced anything. And the day they discover an immortality pill they can get rid of the young without regrets. They’ll have gotten what they wanted. It’s a fact of life, they will say, the planet has to regulate itself, there isn’t room for everyone, and our font of experience is essential. Then the young will just be in the way; they should have been prepared. It was only a question of time. They’re in charge, and the young are just some poor aliens; they control the governments and they run the system, they would get rid of the young without a second thought.
He picked up the shotgun and aimed it at the bedroom door. His old man was on the other side, lying in bed with his eyes open, waiting for him to finally leave. The music from the television slipped out under the door. His father was slow and silent, every day he walked, shoeless, in pajamas and socks, to the bathroom, before getting dressed. If he opened the door now he’d find a barrel in his face. He would have another heart attack. Would anything really change if he were in a wheelchair? Or would it be worse?
He could play like that with his father and yet didn’t abandon him, didn’t disappear and let him die alone, peacefully. He had the feeling that he wasn’t completely in control of the extremes, that he only had a handle on what was within certain limits. Both kindness and wickedness lay outside of his jurisdiction. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there: they had ways of crossing the border on their own, they knew hidden paths, secret tunnels, they entered him illegally, saints disguised as Adolf Hitler, scorpions among the harmless silverware in the kitchen drawer, and he didn’t realize until it was too late.
His father’s story wouldn’t end well. Knowing the end, why continue? He pulled two shells out of his pocket and loaded the shotgun. The cartridge cap was dented; the gun was at least twenty years old.
You made me and raised me; you are responsible for me.
He kept aiming until his arms got tired. Then he lowered the shotgun and put it back down on the table. There was a bit of thick yellowish sludge at the bottom of his mug, a sweet paste that would have to be poured down the drain.
“Papa,” he said, without raising his voice. “I’m off. I’ll leave this for you on the table.”
He only meant the shotgun, but animals sense danger. It rains and the snails come out of their holes, to save themselves from the water, they climb up plants, little birds chirp nonstop as they fall from their nest, and even a shitty little ant will spin around like a lunatic when it senses death. His father had heard him, he was old not stupid, and the door opened.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing with that?” his father asked. “You can take it with you, alright? You can throw it into the woods, you hear me? I don’t ever want to see it again!”
I was playing with the shotgun. It went off. It would be the prosecutor’s word against mine. And who wants to kill his own father? And why? They would let him off precisely because it was his father.
What difference is there between any old guy and your father? Why should it be any less natural to want to blow your father away? Children have power over their parents, because children are the only ones who know the truth about them. They have a lot of information—not only genetic—they have knowledge, they know better than anyone what’s going on inside their parents. It’s not parents who know their children—parents know their kids through themselves, like a replica, not an original, and anyway, they’ve gotten too old, they’re muddled up, can’t keep things straight—it’s the children who know their parents: they have inherited the secret codes, the incriminating information, the definitive proof.
If he left the shotgun on the table for his father, was there any possibility that he would use it? None. His father had always known where the shotgun was. Miqui put on the safety, covered it with his jacket, and left the apartment. As he went down the stairs —there was still time to go back—an embolism started to form in his brain, the pool of blood that would have emerged from his father’s pajamas; blood that spread over the floor, so clean he could see himself in it, blood of his blood drawn in blood, father and son, each mirroring the other.