The feel of the hot, flattened grass in the circle that had been occupied by an inflatable pool. The mild night fever after a day spent lying in the sun like vulture fodder, with sweat gathering in the fine hairs of the back of the neck, or burning in the corner of an eye, or descending slowly, thick as lava, down bronzed temples. The fullness of the body, its stubborn being-there, among other bodies, like a lump that does nothing besides cast a shadow; whose only function is to cast a shadow.

Another memory: that slight, subtle intoxication of adolescence, when the alcohol—whatever the quality—would make me feel freer, more in my skin than ever. Dancing without consideration for others, limbs following the instructions of some invisible being, as if guided by an intuition I’ve never since been able to channel. The sensation that even saliva has a taste loaded with meaning, that a smile or the blink of an eye are communicating every nuance of my desire to a person on the other side of the dance floor.

Or something close to sadness after fucking, both still lying there—a hand draped languidly over the bed base, the clothes heaped up in a corner, the fresh stains on the sheets—staring at the ceiling, but also at something beyond: a possible sky, an ephemeral paradise reached via weariness, with leg muscles slightly cramped, lips swollen from kissing and sucking and receiving bites; the light breeze on the skin of the thigh, on the skin of the chest rising and falling unevenly to the rhythm of still uneven breathing. I miss all those ways of being myself, of being fully, unquestionably inside myself without pain commandeering me, without the reminder that I’m dying, waning, falling headfirst into nothing, like a picnic left for the ants.

Natalia said I looked pale, ill. I made an awkward attempt to kiss her and she pushed me away gently. We sat on the couch in the study and she extracted the tequila flask from its hiding place in the bookshelves. (The same flask she took out the last time, a few—I’m not sure how many—days before, when I ran into her outside the Cine Morelos and came home with her, and it seemed like everything was going to go back to the way it was when we were kids, but then I lost my erection and any sense of where I was headed.)

Take a swig, she said, it’ll do you good. For a moment I thought of the Permutal and ibuprofen I’d taken over the last days, of the multiple pills my liver had still to process. I only took a small sip, just wetting my lips, so as not to seem rude, but the tequila still burned on my tongue.

I told Natalia that I’d been walking around the city without recognizing it, that I’d gone to the lot where, as teenagers, we used to smoke poor-quality pot amid the bamboo, with the smell of sewage everywhere. Nowadays, I said, that plot is a shopping center with a ramshackle McDonald’s and two budget pharmacies.

But Natalia wasn’t listening; she was looking at me as though we spoke different languages. She interrupted to say she had to water her plants. I looked out the study window and saw the adobe wall with around ten epiphytes nailed to it like BDSM fairies. Natalia filled a mister with water and four drops of something or other, then went outside to water them, leaving me sitting there. I took advantage of the pause to place a Permutal tablet on a book (something about the art made by people with mental illnesses) and grind it with a stone ashtray that was on the coffee table. That blind spot between my shoulder and jaw was beginning to hurt again. I took out the same twenty-peso bill I’d used at Conejo’s house—Benito Juárez’s stern face seemed to be judging me from the polymer surface—took a deep snort, and when I raised my eyes, Natalia was staring at me in astonishment from outside the window. I had the sensation that she was moving in slow motion or maybe it was me slowing down as I melted into the dirty upholstery of the couch.

I don’t know how or when I got here.

I’m back in my room, my childhood bedroom with the same old bed, the blotch on the ceiling that has changed shape again: from my viewpoint, it looks like a wedding cake with two ducks emerging from it. (What kind of sinister celebration is encoded in that image? What sect practicing avian perversions conceived such an object?) I’m a little worried that the blotch is changing shape more often. My perceptual instability must be a symptom of a deeper imbalance. Looking at the ceiling now is like scrolling on the dark feed of the unconscious, like looking at a series of cards with Rorschach inkblots. I can’t fix the image: the garden of my dreams has refused me entry.

I listen to the noise of the television filtering through the door—my deduction is that my parents are watching an action movie: there’s that repeated sound of punches; a sound that doesn’t exist in the real world, but that we’ve all agreed to associate with fistfights. The bedroom door is ajar but I can’t be bothered to get up to close it. I haven’t felt any pain in the last few hours, yet I know that’s an illusion: the pain is still there, behind the analgesics, like a crouching Bengal tiger, camouflaged in the long grass.

The blotch on the ceiling has changed shape again. I plummet into senseless absurdity.

There used to be rainstorms that lasted several days, accompanied by frequent lightning and fallen trees. Real storms that transformed Cuernavaca’s ravines into death traps for the neighborhoods clustered precariously on the slopes. The whole city would turn into a shambles, streets that overnight became rivers carrying rocks the size of dogs, vehicles with flooded engines, swamped tunnels, trees that suddenly looked taller, as though they alone separated the sky from the earth. For two or three months a year, rains would slash the city, the state, the whole country. News bulletins reported hurricanes with names like Ruby and Selene, which endangered ports and washed away whole stretches of coastline. At home, there were power outages; Dad would light candles and Mom would take out a deck of cards or tell horror stories with weird details, which were in fact laughable but stuck in my mind (a severed hand dancing tango, a curse that turned people into sleepwalkers). In the morning, branches would be strewn around the garden, as if the trees had lowered their guard and spread out to take a rest. At school, during recess, we kids would search for slugs in the planters and poke them with twigs—a muddy uniform and the threat of fresh rainstorms looming on the horizon.

It’s been years since anything like that happened. The glorious downpours were replaced by drizzle that made only a slight impression between two dry periods. And then, this year, nothing. Wildfires broke out: at first they were attributed to cuts in the forestry commission budget, to potheads smoking in the hills, to tourists dropping glass bottles; the government attempted to put the blame on the opposition, who, in their version, set fires in the forest to generate instability and alarm. But the terror of those early days soon wore off and street vendors of face masks with ash filters began to offer new models without anything really changing. Children holding tight to their mothers’ hands on the way to school looked up at the dull sky as if it had always been that way, and politicians entered the arena, creating new, juicier scandals for the media to vent their outrage on.

At the beginning of May, when wildfires devastated three communities minutes after they had been evacuated, it was mentioned only on page five of the newspapers, alongside a note about a robbery in a hardware store. In contrast, Don Profeta was in the headlines, urging his faithful followers to come together again in public squares to pray for salvation and the imminent ascent of their souls. The governor was at his side, handing him a bronze figurine in recognition of his work; he said that he himself was loyal to the state policy of laicism, but had to maintain a dialogue with the ecumenical community as a whole. And that was why he appeared each week in photographs with someone else. Catholic priests, faith healers, and pastors, all well-groomed, proudly displaying their crucifixes, silk ties, and gold teeth. Some had TV channels; others, former theaters converted into spectacular cult venues. But none were as famous or sinister as Don Profeta, who shouted poor paraphrases of the Apocalypse from his pulpit.

With the wildfires adorning the four points of the compass, certain members of the clergy also jumped on the bandwagon of apportioning blame; it was the sodomites, the feminists, Darwinism, or a combination of all those heresies plus the exasperation of God, who was amusing himself painting miniature hells in the most modest of plots on the outskirts of Cuernavaca just so we knew what was in store for us.

Some animal species, the ones that survived, escaped the flames by coming down into outlying areas of the city, particularly to the north. In Monte Casino, a notary shot a coyote from his window. In Santa María, very near where Natalia was living, a woman swore she’d spotted a stag. The same day, several people reported seeing a flock of more than twenty sparrow hawks flying at various points between Huitzilac and Temixco. But there were fires in other places too, so I guess all those creatures eventually found refuge, or were hunted, or fell exhausted on the roof of one of the two hundred shopping malls opened in the city in the past ten years.

All this happened over a period of months. I initially followed the events from Mexico City, while I was selling the last of my furniture and waiting for my severance pay to come through so I could afford the divorce lawyer’s fee. Dad used to send me news via WhatsApp—photos with the top half cropped, inaccurate data, but also solid reports detailing an equally fucked-up reality—as though alerting me that it wasn’t the best moment to return home.

Home. That single syllable contains so much and so little. A blotch I didn’t remember in the paint; the sound of the TV heard from down the hallway; the bright, roomy kitchen with grease stains on the walls; the small garden with dried-out grass no one has watered since December; the bathroom mirror with rounded corners that reflects back to me features relaxed by the effects of Permutal but also tired or worn out: a face with a deep frown; a face with unsettling bags under the eyes and sallow skin, with a suddenly graying, receding hairline—the forehead progressively broader and emptier: a helipad where mild happiness and clear images no longer land, where there is nothing but shadow, fear, and a pained grimace.