I wake during the night, in pain, lying in the yellow-tube bed. I float in the darkness of my bedroom as though it were a sensory deprivation tank, wondering if what I’m doing is meditation or torture, consciousness raising or scratching the sores of my guilty conscience, inner illumination or self-inflicted grilling. “Isolated in the inner domains,” writes John C. Lilly about his chambers, “the observer-agent can transform into, be transformed into any form.” I close my eyes and try to change myself into an African tulip tree, like the one outside my window, but, predictably, it doesn’t work.

I don’t want to think about her.

For an instant I think I hear rain outside, but it’s only the wind. For the last week dust devils have blown up overnight, fanning the flames of the wildfires in the forests and filling the city with ash and garbage. In the mornings, pools in the richer neighborhoods are filled with dirt and dry leaves; sickly trees, brought down by the strong winds, fall into the streets with no sidewalks.

I think about my life six months ago: a covertly endangered ordinariness, like a wooden table whose termite-infested legs are about to crumple under its own weight. I don’t want to think about her, my ex-wife: the way she handled the car on the highway with the confidence of a racing driver; the nightstand at her side of the bed, always piled with books that she sometimes attempted to explain to me before switching off the lights. I don’t want to speak her name, but, once again, I relapse: Lucía. And when I say it, I also remember that other person I was while I was with her: a likable, smart kind of guy with no pain, who made breakfast every morning because she always slept in. The kind of guy who doesn’t know his own luck.

I look at my phone but forget to check the time and instead scroll through the news and my social media. For the last few days, information has been posted about the wildfires and their health effects. All sorts of information: advice, official bulletins, rumors, infographics, memes. Graphs explaining the damage to the lungs caused by inhalation of PM 2.5 particles, stories of strange phenomena in certain towns, reports of people passing out from smoke inhalation. Anyone who can has left for Mexico City, where, paradoxically, the air is cleaner, or for the Guerrero coast, beyond the officially designated emergency zone. But escape isn’t easy either. There are fresh reports every day of highways closed due to the heat of ongoing fires; cars breaking down when ash gets in their engines. There’s no way of knowing which reports are true and which are exaggerations, or just plain inventions spontaneously thought up by the collective.

In the streets of Cuernavaca, the sense of something abnormal in the climate is heightened by the open-air evangelical services with top-quality production values. Heat seems to be issuing straight from the asphalt, but there are also dust storms in the evenings, when the wind is cooler, even if it still causes damage.

Dad invited me to have coffee this morning. He’s been overweight for the last few years—it’s a taboo subject: he himself is the elephant in the room nobody mentions—and sweats like someone on death row in the desert. The perspiration streaming down from his armpits makes his checkered Costco shirt stick to his sides.

We left the house on foot; in the distance, I spotted the vagrant who’s always hanging around here and considered saying something about him to my father, but then I thought he probably didn’t even see the man, as if he’s a personalized mirage, materializing for my eyes alone each time I leave the house.

We walked for forty meters along the sidewalk and, when I turned to look, my father was panting and sweating like he’d just run the Mexicali marathon. He said he wanted to go back home and take the car, which has AC.

Once in the vehicle, he waited for his breathing to return to normal and, before setting off again, asked what I was intending to do with my life now. His expression was grave, and I understood that he wanted to have a real man-to-man talk with me. I felt a twinge in my jaw and regretted not having taken an extra pill before leaving home. The AC smelled dusty (my father rarely drives, he hardly ever goes out). It might be worse than breathing the polluted air outside, those damned suspended particles.

I don’t know what I intend to do with my life now, I tell him, repeating his words with ironic emphasis. I guess I’ll stay in Cuernavaca for a few months before returning to D.F. to look for a job. (When I’m with him, I still call Mexico City the Distrito Federal because my father hates the change of name.) Or I might look for something to do here and stay longer, I added after a pause. He made no reply, just continued cruising with no fixed destination, his eyes half closed, the sweat now drying on his forehead. We entered a residential neighborhood with steep inclines and large, empty houses whose owners—I hypothesized—had escaped to Houston or the Caribbean. My father was accelerating and then braking abruptly at each intersection, as if someone were chasing us, as if he were lost in a city where he’s lived his whole life. Where are you headed? I asked nervously. Don’t know, he admitted in a defeated tone. And with a sadness that seemed to come from somewhere very deep inside, he added: Let’s go back home, I don’t feel like doing anything. To save the situation, it occurred to me to ask him to drop me off downtown on his way. You shouldn’t spend so much time outdoors in all that smoke, he said, but began driving toward the center, finally having a destination in mind. He looked relieved. Although he hadn’t managed to have a real man-to-man talk with me or make me reflect on the course my life was taking, he was at least driving in some fixed direction, and he clung to that direction as he did to his pension and his marriage.

Things hadn’t always been that way. My father used to have long periods of proverbial lightheartedness, of unbounded optimism. He was a cheerful, loving father when I was little. (The whole family predicted great things for me, and it never entered their heads to think that brilliant future would slip through my hands as naturally as it did.) From the age of ten, he used to encourage me to take any extracurricular class that occurred to me, and he himself went through a stage of sport fads that he channeled into such areas as mountain climbing or adventure tourism.

Once, when I was twelve, Dad decided that we weren’t spending enough time together and organized a camping trip, just for the two of us, over a long weekend or a short school vacation. The week before we were due to go was dedicated to preparations: we went to Plaza Cuernavaca to buy a tent, two sleeping bags, a thermos, and a propane stove. I dreamed of the forest every night and couldn’t concentrate in class for thinking of everything that trip held in store.

My father had an enormous orange rucksack, the sort people used in the eighties, with a tubular structure at the bottom for stowing the tent. I’d take my school backpack, which was large enough to hold three changes of clothes, a Game Boy, and a compass—a Christmas present from some aunt that I didn’t know how to use, but that seemed appropriate.

On the Friday, we got up at 6:00 a.m. and, while my father was having his coffee, the two of us made a heap of sandwiches and packed them in the Bimbo bread bag. Mom woke a little later and, still drowsy, prepared a couple of liters of flavored water with those sachets of powder that didn’t taste of any real fruit, poured the liquid into two large bottles, and put them in the orange rucksack.

I don’t know why we didn’t take the car; it would have been simpler and more sensible. I guess my father wanted me to get a closer view of the country; to travel, just like anyone else, in a rusty bus with no suspension along the potholed state highways. It wasn’t, at heart, just a simple adventure, but a journey with educational undertones; an opportunity to coexist with that Real World from which an excess of care—sporadically lamented by my father—distanced me.

My mother dropped us outside the downtown bus terminal. In contrast to the terminal in Casino de la Selva, which we used more frequently, the one in the center evoked journeys to undiscovered places, women with baskets containing live chickens, buses belonging to unknown lines, and a general smell of earth and food that had me in a state of nervous anticipation. Before going to buy the tickets, Dad suggested we have breakfast at a cart across the street. My dad has always liked eating street food, but Mom would see ameba and salmonella in every sauce, typhoid in every sandwich, and unhealthy fats in the filthy oil where the suadero sizzled. Taking advantage of being out of sight of his wife’s reproving eye, Dad ordered two gordas de chicharrón with everything for himself and for me a tlacoyo de frijoles, which I wolfed down after removing the nopal.

The campsite was in El Chico, forty minutes from Pachuca. Or maybe it was the Los Azufres area of Michoacán with its thermal pools; I don’t remember. The thing is that you couldn’t get there directly from Cuernavaca, so we had to go to Mexico City and wait thirty minutes before boarding a packed, beat-up local bus that would stop at several small towns en route. On the first leg of the journey, I slept almost the whole way, waking every so often to ask if we’d arrived yet and where that horrible smell was coming from (“no” and “from the restroom, I think the toilet’s blocked” were my father’s answers on each occasion). At Taxqueña terminal, Dad left me, half asleep, in charge of our belongings while he went to make some inquiry at a ticket office. When he returned, carrying our tickets and a can of Coca-Cola, the orange rucksack had disappeared.

We could have gone back to Cuernavaca and called off the trip, but I suspect my father wanted to avoid the humiliation of returning early and defeated, so we decided to continue on our way. Before boarding the second bus, Dad bought himself some clothes and two blankets at a stand in Taxqueña metro station and said we could rent a log cabin instead of camping, as we’d planned (our tent had disappeared along with the rucksack). I remember with a pain as piercing as the one now paralyzing my jaw just how guilty I felt about having ruined our trip: my only responsibility had been to keep an eye on our things, and I hadn’t even been able to do that. I apologized over and over, but nothing he said could erase the disappointment I thought I discerned in my father’s embittered smile, in the way he said, without believing it for an instant: Don’t worry, it’s not important.

I spent the whole time on that second bus obsessively reconstructing the crucial minutes when our things were stolen, but I never figured out just how it had happened.

We got off the bus at a bend in the road and walked along a path heading into the forest. The camp was on a hillside: a stretch of open ground with a few cabins and the cottage where breakfast was served. The people with tents set up camp in scattered clearings in the forest, with enough space between them to build a fire. We, on the other hand, rented the only available cabin: little more than a wooden roof with a bare light bulb and walls of planks so poorly fitted that the wind entered as if it owned the place.

Luckily, we had the blankets from the stand in Taxqueña station, and they turned out to be as warm as any sleeping bag, although for me they tempered the excitement of the trip as, to be honest, what interested me was all the equipment, the professional side of camping. It would have been four or five in the afternoon, so we left our meager belongings on the cold concrete floor and went out to find coffee with cream (for my father) and hot chocolate (for me). I remember my surprise at seeing pine trees, accustomed as I was to the subtropical flora of Cuernavaca—flamboyants, coral trees, the peeling trunk of the guavas, and the parchment-like bark of the amates. A milky fog descended slowly over the camp and Dad explained—I didn’t believe him—that we were in a cloud.

It rained that night and the cabin turned out to offer insufficient protection: water filtered through the gaps between the planks and the wind shook the whole structure. We wrapped ourselves as best we could in the blankets, but didn’t sleep a wink all night, me from fright, my father trying his hardest to keep me dry.

The next morning, when Dad decided to cut short the trip and travel back to Cuernavaca, I didn’t have the confidence to complain because I was still feeling the weight of guilt on my shoulders: the rucksack had been stolen from me.

Looking back, I think my father changed after that trip. He stopped trying to buddy up to me and became increasingly isolated within himself. He adopted a weird custom of sleeping in the garden, in a hammock strung from a high branch of the tulip tree. “I’m going to meditate outdoors,” he’d say. He’d climb up to his hammock, five feet from the ground, toss a coarse green blanket that my mother hated over himself, and spend most of the night there, until the early morning chill forced him to give up on that eccentricity and return, resignedly, to the marriage bed and the insidious normality of his forty-something years. He spent two or three months like that, addicted to the outdoors, suspended in a hammock, in the dark garden, like an outlaw, ignoring my mother’s reproofs: Come back inside, something will sting you out there.

I guess that sudden love of open skies was the only form of midlife crisis my dad—too shy to have lovers and too poor to buy a Harley-Davidson—allowed himself; his discrete way of distancing himself for a moment from the binary state of marriage in order to be unitary again, defending that—poetic or pre-Socratic—love of looking at the night sky.

I admired my father during his period of alfresco sleeping, but in a way that suggested my admiration was a shamefaced secret. I wasn’t the sort of boy who boasted at school of his father’s exploits, his spending power or dream job. I would, however, sometimes lose focus in class, stare out the window into the yard bathed in harsh sunlight, and think of its contrast to my father’s moonbaths. I’d wonder, without actually putting it into words, what he thought about during those sleepless nights, rocked by the wind and surrounded by the scent of tulip tree blossom past its prime swooning beneath his hammock. For an adult to break the most sacred of conventions—sleeping in a bed when you’re at home—in this way seemed to me an unsolvable mystery, an unknown that made me imagine adult life as a much more complex and nuanced territory than I’d initially supposed.

But the craze for outdoor sleeping passed. He returned to the marital bed and to the fold of norms and decorum. And with time, I too became an adult with more debts than illusions. A divorced adult, racked by pain, in whose memory glows—radioactive material—the recollection of a father who used to gaze at the stars. When I come to think of it, that memory might contain the seed of my interest in sensory deprivation tanks and John C. Lilly. Like my father, Lilly was a scientist who suffered a crisis of faith in the dogma on which science is based. He tried communicating with dolphins and floating in nothingness; for a number of nights, my father floated among the branches of the tulip tree.

Now my dad is an overweight, middle-aged man, anchored to the ground by common sense and a vague resentment. The hammock no longer hangs in the tulip tree and it hasn’t rained for months in Cuernavaca. And I’ve been unable to make my own crisis into a pretext for changing my way of seeing the world.