I wake in pain during the night, lying in the yellow-tube bed. I remember practically nothing about yesterday, except for Conejo’s bursts of laughter, Señor Bertini’s white cane by the door of his office, a conversation about contaminated water and brainwashing. Then walking back to my parents’ house along streets with no sidewalks. But I don’t know what happened after that, if I had dinner, or what time I turned in.

I don’t want to think about her, about my ex-wife. I don’t want to think of her name and use that horrible term ex-wife simply as a means of imposing a distance, of saving myself from a memory that’s threatening to exacerbate all my pains. There are words like that, words that don’t signal or refer, but separate and protect you—from reality, its craggy zones—and are used to avoid saying a name, to avoid giving voice, body, face, and emotion to the tight knot in your throat.

But there are times, like now, when I trip up: I say “Lucía” in the night, barely voicing the three syllables. Lu-cí-a, like a spell that can send me to hell all over again.

I slept on my left side, turning my back to the outside wall, to the world. As a consequence, my left shoulder is exploding, throbbing with pain. Was it my left side that hurt yesterday, that will hurt tomorrow? I consult the blotch on the ceiling and the notebook where I sometimes make telegraphic jottings about symptoms. I can’t remember, he can’t remember: the last entry is from days ago and is only “hand, elbow, legs.” Who wrote that?

Maybe the pain is running through my body systematically, making a detailed inventory of what I am, of what’s still alive in me. I feel as though someone operated on me while I was asleep, cutting into my skin and then the muscle with a scalpel right to the center of the joint; it’s like someone, that midnight surgeon, put a pellet—maybe made of steel—in the center of the joint, or perhaps a stone, a porous pebble; like someone then sutured the wound, neatly, almost with loving care, sewing my muscle and skin, leaving no trace. Now, in my left shoulder, I have a piece of volcanic rock, a lunar stone that scrapes, chips, messes up, and destroys the internal tissues of my arm at the least movement. I feel my arm and it’s hot.

I try turning over to sleep on my other side, on my right arm, but can’t get comfortable. Then I try sleeping on my front, on my back, I try propping myself up on an extra pillow, but nothing works. With each new position, another nuance of the same pain surfaces, reveals itself.

The predominant sensation is that my body is crushing me—or crushing itself, I don’t know how to put it. If I lie on my left side, gravity plagues the painful arm: the whole mass of my body presses down on, crushes, compresses my arm and my side, and even my left hip and leg, plus my left knee, and my jaw too. If I turn onto my right side, it’s the same: the natural force with which the earth attracts all bodies in my case becomes a destructive, or at least—let’s not exaggerate—uncomfortable force. Lying on my back, I feel the mere weight of my chest—its contents: the heart, lungs, digestive tract; but also the things I resent and repent—is hurting and damaging my spine. And it seems like the total mass of my head, including the almost liquid mass of my eyeballs, is weighing on my neck, wearing it down, annihilating it.

The only places I’d be able to really sleep are in a zerogravity simulator, or in space. I’d sleep like a baby in a spacecraft, free from all attachments, suspended in the air, in the center of the vessel. Or in a sensory deprivation chamber, in a tank filled with salt water that would allow me to experience that void, that extreme lightness that gravity and surfaces snatch from me.

There was a time, in another life, when on special occasions I used to go to a spa on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City to spend an hour floating in one of those salt-water tanks. In there, everything was dark and silent, and when I closed my eyes, my memories and future expectations would get mixed up and mingle—a miasma of nonlinear, stagnating time that I’d contemplate with the placid distance of the angels. I was obsessed with that apparently simple therapy, capable of reigniting a spark of enthusiasm for life. I found out as much as I could about the inventor of those tanks, a sort of mad scientist named John C. Lilly, who devoted his life to exploring psychoactive drugs and interspecies communication: he wrote papers on the language of dolphins, took high doses of LSD while swimming with them, and invented that form of fetal, suspended meditation that has become known as the sensory deprivation tank. But the twentieth century’s talent for converting any invention into a weapon of war played against him: the CIA appropriated his theories and used them in interrogations. They put dissidents in those tanks after giving them dangerously high doses of LSD and forced them to float in the salty water until their skin dried out and cracked, with a background of bad-tripping music that was paused only for questioning. Sensory deprivation chambers, initially designed as an aid to transcendental meditation and consciousness expansion, became a form of torture that was later used in MKUltra, the infamous mental control program the United States government set up during the sixties.

I don’t know how John C. Lilly felt about this violent reading of his pacific contribution to the new-age world, but I suspect he didn’t like it much. Perhaps he would have preferred to know that, in contrast, decades later, a Mexican man would find a moment of solace in the artificial womb of the tank while his life was on a slow descent into disaster.

But I don’t have the money for things like that these days. I don’t have any money, period: the last few thousand pesos of my severance pay and savings went to the divorce lawyer’s fee and the three months’ rent I owed to my landlady.

Defeated, I sit on a corner of the bed and check the time on the overly bright screen of my phone. Four in the morning. I look again: five. I blink: it’s six, the sun is about to—threatening to—come up, it’s nearly daytime and the lacerating gravity of night retreats a little, allowing me to see things in the light of reason and breakfast. I get up and go to the bathroom. My throat is clogged with a kind of thick phlegm; it hurts to swallow. After a few minutes standing at the sink, I manage to cough up a dark gob: the fine ash that, I think, is gradually blocking my respiratory tract. Though maybe it’s just dust.

My feet hurt almost as much as my shoulder did earlier. The weight of my whole body, exercising perpendicular pressure on the soles, is close to unbearable. For a moment I think I can feel a lump in my instep, as though something inside my foot has broken and, having slipped out of place, is visible beneath the soft surface of my sleeping skin. Maybe walking all the way to Conejo’s and back yesterday was too much. I’m not used to Cuernavaca’s steep slopes any longer, to the cobbled downtown streets, the pedestrian footbridges with loose metal rails and the steps in lousy condition.

I’ve started the day on the wrong foot.

Still defeated, I sit on the edge of the bed again, my elbows on my knees, chin resting in my palms. I stare at my feet. Something does in fact seem to be out of place in them. They’re someone else’s feet, someone who’s lived two or three years longer than me—those bad years when every day is like a lizard trying to cross the highway, moving very slowly, always in danger of becoming roadkill. In the shadows of my bedroom—in the six, nearly seven o’clock shadows, with light filtering through the branches of the old tulip tree—they suddenly feel like the feet of an old man, the very old man I’ll be if I make it that far: the anticipated future I’d prefer not to glimpse in the early hours (I look at my clock: it’s seven), in the light of day.

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear voices; possibly two drunks walking along the street or a couple having an argument in a garden four or five houses away. A fair amount of the private life of this neighborhood takes place in gardens. Among the bougainvillea, children experience the first flush of sexual attraction; by a guava tree, youths embrace and sway, lulled by alcohol and taco binges; old folk contemplate the flower of the cacaloxóchitl when it opens in early May and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s late August and they’re watching the tree shed its bark. From one garden to another you can hear, you might even say breathe, all that living outflow, that constant bustle of births, dances, and deaths.

Projected onto the curtains, the shadow of the African tulip tree is a ghostly, but at least familiar presence. I remember that when I was small, I enjoyed playing with its dry seedpods, which were like small boats. I’d fill a washbowl with water from the hosepipe in the garden and float the pods in it; I re-created naval battles and shipwrecks, telling the stories of tragedies in that verb tense used only in games that could be called the ludic past: “and then I was sinking and my boat was going down to the seabed with me.” And then I was sinking.

I dress slowly (a black shirt again, the same one: I wear a bad decision like someone hanging a medal around their neck) and leave the bedroom. I walk down the short but dark hallway to the kitchen, where my father offers me a dish of papaya, Mom asks if my shoulder is still hurting, and I ignore them, say goodbye, and go outside again into the gross sunlight, the smoke-laden air to have a Turkish coffee as sludgy as the future of this beleaguered city studded with supermarkets.

I automatically head through El Túnel toward downtown. Just like yesterday, the same route. I need to visit Conejo, I think.

I’ve lived this day before and will maybe live it again in the future. While the world is coming to an end, it’s important—supremely important—to get into a routine. Cling to a set of rituals, familiar paths, people we can return to in order to recognize ourselves.

Cuernavaca has the appearance of a chain of parking lots: I could cross the whole city, walking from one lot to the next under the blazing sun. In each of them, the same elderly man asks if you can spare some small change and offers to load your supermarket bags into the trunk of the car; the same menacing SUV with tinted windows, whose driver is a narco, a Chilango, or a suburban mom arriving to have her nails done before going for coffee.

I make an attempt to reconstruct the route I took yesterday. To walk along the same streets with no sidewalks and pass the same stinking ravines to reach Tlaltenango, but I don’t remember if I really did walk here or if it’s a false memory. In addition, the pain in my left shoulder, which sometimes extends to my neck and jaw, makes any form of intellectual exercise, however minimal, impossible. Just why did I put on this black shirt? The smell betrays that idiotic repetition—and forebodes others.

The street where Conejo lives brings back memories of more kindly days, when we were studying together at the Arcadia and used to spend a lot of time in his room, lying side by side on the gray rug, our feet on his bed, our blood flowing to our heads, chatting about nothing in particular, imagining futures that were always happier than the long-drawn-out finale in which we now live, plagued by wildfires, shootouts, and thinly veiled totalitarianisms. We’d smoke as we lay there, and the hours would pass, and instead of going to school, we’d stare at the ceiling—just as I stare at the ceiling at night now, in my parents’ home, seeking the blotch that had a different, now forgotten shape; we’d stare at the ceiling and fantasize about going to South America—only rich kids and fools go to Europe—when we finished high school; about meeting men and women and kissing them all and sampling hallucinogenic roots from the Amazonas in a ritual context and, just maybe, finding work in some dream city like Buenos Aires or Rio, where we’d succeed in making our adult lives into a series of epiphanies. Then Conejo’s father—Señor Bertini, who hadn’t yet gone blind, but was seriously shortsighted—would come in to ask why we weren’t at school or doing something productive, but there would be no need to reply because, however hard we tried, there was no satisfactory answer: we were there because we knew how to be totally in a place, the way stones are; like dogs lying motionless in the sun until nightfall beside the dried-out tortillas on the sidewalks of small towns with dirt streets, their eyelids drooping, until evening falls; like children getting sunburned in summer, playing in vacant lots and going back home after dark with their necks on fire and the sense of having spent a whole life wrapped up in games and arguments that seem—are—more important than life itself (more important than the news, homework, chila wasp stings, and even more important than eating). That was us. Two teenagers lying on a rug who had unintentionally disproved Copernicus, because the center of the known universe was that room, that light, Conejo’s booming laugh as he told, for the umpteenth time, the story of some ridiculous event in the Arcadia (one of the teachers invited two Freemasons to speak to us about the history of their lodges in Mexico; a fellow student who set fire to a desk). That was us, and that house, to which I’m now headed on the shady side of the street, was where we could be those people, shutting our eyes to all the wars; a small yellow-painted house (there was more yellow about back then; now it’s close to being an extinct color), in which, in addition to Señor Bertini, lived Señora Bertini—Conejo’s mother—who later left her husband for his ophthalmologist (the son of a bitch of an ophthalmologist who never managed to slow the advance of Señor Bertini’s condition, leaving him at once blind and single). And in that house—to which I’m headed, sweaty and hurting, wearing my stinking black shirt—our friendship was forged, and Natalia also entered the circle of that conflict-proof complicity that has only faded with time, as does everything.

I ring the doorbell.