Dipping my tongue into a delicious juice and feeling it turn to scalding water, sandpaper water, lava water, bad water blazing in my mouth, and it chafes like a stubbly beard, like a thousand thorns, a rough mouth which my tongue glides across, my tongue bleeding as I burn up, set myself on fire with the liquid that looks cold but it burns; you can’t tell, but it burns as it runs down my throat, my windpipe, as harsh as the lights in here, as the splintered rays pricking my eyes, poking my eyes with their long needles, following me out of the bathroom: piss off, leave me alone, and I look at Iquela but she doesn’t see me, she doesn’t see me cos her eyes have dropped to the sky and from there I can’t pin them to their sockets, eyes popped out of their sockets with no pins to hold them in place and so they float and I float, I levitate with the white liquid and rise up towards the light, yeah, the square of light shining above the bar, the light showing ash over Santiago, would you look at Plaza Italia, what a mess, and the lens is dirty and the zoom goes in and out and in again and turns black, because someone switches off the TV, and I switch off too and then the music starts, a shrill song, harsh on the ears, harsh as angles, shrill as those howling dogs, shrill and harsh like the wailing of the ambulance and all those midday thoughts, and the big day is approaching because that dead man was thirty-one, yeah, but there are no dead here and I’m thirsty, that’s the only thing I do have, a reddish thirst, which is why I want more of that bitter liquid, that healing elixir, give me more, Paloma, where are you? don’t be a drag, but the German isn’t here, the German who wanted to cure us has gone again and left me without a drop of antidote, just the little bottle, round and empty, which held the remedy that swirled in a whirlpool, the kind of whirlpool I like because they don’t stop, I hate things that stop, I like the never-ending stories, the enduring stories, yeah, like the rubber trees and weeping figs and the whirlpools of the Mapocho, though in fact the Mapocho doesn’t have any whirlpools, because you can’t even make out the banks or the start of the water, and cos no one wants to take that river seriously, no one except me, I want to stir it up till I’ve made a tornado to twizzle and twirl above a giant cup, all the water in the Mapocho falling in a waterfall I swirl around and around and then drink, boom, I drink the liquid with the corollas and the puppy-eyed mongrels, their dark watery eyes looking up at me and their paws scratching my face, eh, Chileno, you alright there? and I can’t feel my skin or my osso buco bones, just splinters and my chapped lips, hey, give that kid a glass of water, he’s as pale as a ghost, and my throat disappears, and then my windpipe then my stomach and I can’t feel my balls or my thighs, and then my black thoughts and my calculations vanish too, tell that Chileno kid to come over to the bar, here, come on, come on, take a seat, cos I’m drowning in the whirl of dirty water and I’m cured, yeah, and my thoughts turn soft like pink bubblegum, my thoughts stretch and mould to my skull, which is tingling, there’s ants all over the place, bloody hell, everything’s crawling, the whole planet’s shaking because I can’t feel a thing, not the whole or the parts, I can’t feel what’s real or what’s fake, I can’t feel anything and I’m off my head, yeah, cos the German’s potion has taken me to a higher plane and my eyelids are curtains, and inside my black ideas light up, but I want to hide them cos there’s a man at the bar, yeah, a man with ants crawling over his arms and on his top lip, and those black black ants are freaking me out, you OK, Chileno?, and the ants dance and the voices are splinters and the words are buried deep inside my pupils where they clash with my black thoughts sending sparks flying, and I cover my eyes with my hands to hide them and to hide myself and then they explode, yeah, my eyes explode into hundreds and thousands of skies, take a deep breath, that’s it, breathe, Chileno, but I don’t want to breathe, I want to scream, howl as loudly as I can, but my voice has gone, I can’t find it, it’s hiding in the shadow of my tonsils, and it’s blended in with those stupid black night thoughts, fuck, what’s up, I can’t see, I’m off my head, and the water in the glass they bring me is thick and dry and the man touches me, he touches my shoulder and it reappears, deep breath, that’s it, my shoulder is back, it exists, and so do the other parts of my body, and the air is a saw cleaving me, opening me up, thaaat’s it, keep drinking water, Chileno, and the guy looks at me and I draw back the curtains of the hundreds of eyes all over me and I know him, I know I’ve seen this man, yeah, and I take a deep breath and the water is sweet now, sweet and dry and the man is smiling, better, Chileno? you’ve lost that dead-man-walking look you had going there for a while, and his teeth are glow-worms that have gone out, and everything in me goes out, looks like they’ve left you on your lonesome, and it’s true, they’ve left me lonelier than a ghost, cos Iquela isn’t here and the German’s on another planet, she’s lucky to have made it to Santiago at all, how’d you get along with that cargo you were after? and the Argentinian is asking me about some kind of cargo and I don’t know what he means, you know, don’t play dumb, and I shrug my shoulders, cos I’ve got shoulders again, and I furrow my brow, cos I have a brow, and behind it there are thoughts and those thoughts are orange, orange thoughts, orange, orange, orange overalls man from the airport, yeah! I see him and I know it’s him, it’s the guard in front of me, the guard from the barrier, yeah, and the black ants go crazy cos I recognise them, I see them under that hooked nose, I’ve identified them and they no longer scare me, and he asks if I found what I was looking for in the airport and now I know he’s referring to the stiff, to the fugitive, to that stubborn corpse, another round? and this new liquid is made of gold and the dead lady isn’t here, the deceased isn’t here and I have to subtract her, I listen, and I know I’m the one talking, it’s my voice speaking, it’s had enough of playing hide-and-seek, it’s rebelling against the potion, the cure, it comes back to say subtract her, subtract her, I repeat, and the man is talking fast but I don’t hear him, cos it’s his eyelashes and his nostrils speaking to me, he’s speaking from his orange overalls, from his skin and red bones, he’s speaking to me because the ants are scrambling all over his lips, they’re saying sure, Chileno, go and look, people should be buried where they belong, he says, and the glass of gold liquid is suddenly full of black ants, and we sure have our fair share of dead here, he says, too-too-ma-ny, but I can’t be sure if he says this or nothing at all, if he’s telling me to look for her tomorrow, early in the morning, hangar number seven, Chileno, will you remember? and I repeat seven, seven, seven, hangar number seven, yeah, but I say it in my head because it’s gone again, my voice has gone walkabout, crouching in among the hundreds of eyes on my skin and the millions of black ideas, my voice hiding inside my bones and I feel a terrible chill run through me, like a rock-hard river rushing up me from the soles of my feet, a surge of cement rising up from my heels, a tidal wave that numbs my calves and knees and thighs and balls, and the cement climbs up to my stomach and freezes my chest and turns my neck stiff and makes me clench my teeth to stop myself from vomiting, you feeling alright, Chileno?, and I just vomit, yeah, vomit till there’s nothing left, till there’s no thirty-year-old dead man left, no body, no corpse, no stiff, yeah, till there’s no whisky or wine or water, till there are no potions or white liquids, no saliva, no bile or blood, till there are no more corpses or ash, or bars with razor-sharp saws floating around; throw up and purge myself of days as red as my vomit, red like lava should be, the lava that isn’t here, that’s never been here, because we don’t know where it comes from, this bitter, hot liquid, this sharp liquid rising, climbing and crashing against the white bowl of the toilet, or how the hell I got to the toilet or where the hell I am, shit, I just want to sleep, yeah, sleep and wake up without any dead without any rivers without eyes without voices without.