A few hours later, Cassio and Leni rebooted their friendship at the house of some friends of Leni’s—Noelia and Ailín. They are the resistance, he’d murmured as he introduced them to Cassio. Ailín had dark hair, thin lips, a multicolor wool vest. Both she and Noelia painted their faces with black and white lines, disfiguring their features so they could go outside without being recognized by the ubiquitous cameras.

“The people of Bariloche are asleep,” said Noelia. “Totally. Don’t you realize that?”

Mossad, the black cat of the house, lifted an inquiring gaze.

Cassio had heard the same story over lunch: the previous day, the authorities had discovered the rat-eaten body of a climber who’d gotten lost on his way down from Laguna Negra. The rats had caught him alone. His face was still recognizable, but they had burrowed into his body with unusual voracity and thoroughness. He’d died of internal bleeding.

This type of event always incited Noelia to return to her obsession with moral decadence: the Earth was tired of our presence, and had certain strategies for dealing with us. The rats were one of those strategies. Didn’t we see that all these calamities, all these crises, held messages for us?

“Guys, I can’t explain the messages to you. Either you see them or you don’t. They don’t show themselves to just anyone.”

Bovine and tranquil, Leni listened, pretending to be precisely the incisive, timid, visionary observer that he wasn’t. Noelia went to the kitchen, brought back mugs of tea. She raised her mug toward Cassio, who returned the gesture. She invited them to try the gluten-free, salt-free food; she recycled everything, and you could smell the compost pile from the living room. Now she was telling Leni about the UFO she’d seen the previous night.

“You truly do have to keep your mind and heart open. Because the aliens are tired. Tired of us.”

She offered him a bowl of garbanzo paste. Mossad swung his weight over against Cassio, who caressed him compassionately; Leni and Noelia exchanged glances and grimaces. Ailín looked at Cassio, smiled, blinked several times. Completely at ease, as if his pristine intentions had finally yielded some respect, Leni decided he was ready to assume a more masculine role: he offered to make more chai, and to bring in wood for a fire. The firewood proposal caused streamers of good humor in Noelia, though his plan had a serious flaw—the fireplace formed part of Mossad’s feng shui circuit, the series of mysterious urinary mandalas with which he fought against alterity.

Noelia’s mode of conversation dug its own tunnels without ever slowing down. Suddenly, it dove into her past as a puppeteer, back when she was studying arts and letters in the capital; moody Mossad had already become her companion.

“Were you in Buenos Aires in 2015?” she asked Cassio.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Where did you live?”

“Caballito.”

“Near Puán?”

“Not too close. Where the J line comes through.”

Her face lit up.

“So you must have seen it!”

“Seen what?”

“We’re the ones who did it.”

Leni interrupted:

“Noelia was part of the group that burned all those cars.”

“. . .”

“La Paternal, Caballito . . . You didn’t read about it?”

Noelia seemed disappointed. Ailín stared at them, looking a bit like a rabbit.

“No, I never heard anything about it,” said Cassio, fondly remembering his moped. “I guess I just didn’t notice—maybe because I didn’t have a car, or any emotional attachment to cars.”

Noelia couldn’t hold herself back any longer, stretched out her arms and recited:

“A public, visible attack: burning cars as an offering to the ecosystem. You burn, but will you spurn? Will you spurn if you burn? Burn once and you’ll yearn to burn! Alienated car owners, people the streets with your armed potential. Survive the catastrophe! Salvation through outrage, armor, and abandonment. We’re betting on the madness of both flames and flamettes. Fear is the only thing that doesn’t burn. We are our own fury, the fury of the universe set alight: we are the motor of the astral plane!”

Mossad snuggled right up against Cassio and gave a soft, lost mew. Leni, on the other hand, still felt completely at ease. Sprawled out in the cane armchair, he winked at Noelia emphatically, but she was stirring pollen into her tea and didn’t notice. He waited patiently as the fire monologue dissolved into a short elegy to water, which became a description of the Lagos del Sur aquifer, where the women would soon be headed—the location of earthly salvation. He was sure that this discourse on the humidity of things would end in some nondescript anarcho-ecologist cul-de-sac—the logos of nature, the reproductive cycle, the body as the giver of life and light. Then, perhaps, the metaphors would be replaced by what they represented; Noelia would take off her clothes and Leni would close his eyes and lick her body uninterruptedly until the time came to insert himself. He lifted his mug:

“To anarchist prose-poetry!”

Cassio looked down at where Ailín’s concave organs lurked silently beneath her thick clothes. Just then there was a murmur, a damp clacking sound, air passing like a spirit from one end of her body to the other. Her heartbeat, his, those of Leni and Noelia as well; spoons trembling on the table, hands fanning like the wings of butterflies.

So this was the resistance. Noelia’s speech hadn’t impressed him. These women were just hippie luddites, and there was nothing particularly specific about their hatred. He wanted to ask Leni if the women knew what he and Leni did for a living, wanted to know to what degree they considered the men their enemies. How much information about the center’s activities had filtered through to the outside world? It seemed absurd to him, the women’s belief that by obscuring their features with paint they became invisible to the state; there were so many means of obtaining data now that facial recognition was practically trivial. The only way to hide was to become another species, to transform oneself into something else.

Mossad squinted as music came on—a Luis Alberto Spinetta song from 1988.

 

Everything lasts an instant,

It’s better to be the wind,

Everything lasts an instant

All life long.

 

Ailín laid her head to rest next to the computer. Suddenly, Ailín and Noelia and Leni ceased to exist, and Cassio took up his lambskin jacket and petted Mossad, who meowed like a hoarse mockingbird. Cassio waved a liminal goodbye and was jettisoned out of the house. Violet glimmerings descended from the peak of the sky, covering everything, sliding down the side of the frozen mountain. Suddenly, his own trajectory painted itself sharply against the world.