The days fly past but months stretch out forever. When I had a job, a routine, and a savings account it was just the opposite: days as slow as dripping honey and years that lasted less time than the domestic arguments. That was before all this.

Dad is concerned about my physical health, though it’s his own he should be worried about. He says I’m thinner than usual, that I’m all skin and bones and, with my hair mussed up, l look like a sucked mango. He opens a beer and stands looking at the dry grass in his small garden. There’s been no rain for ages and the little water left in the tank is for essentials only. Dad puts a hand under his shirt to pat his belly and asks me to go to the market to buy the things on the list they keep by the phone: Your mom can’t do everything, he adds with a frown—as a child, his frowns inspired me with almost mythic terror. An expression that means, “You’re standing on a cliff edge and I’m just longing to give you a push.” Every man I know has a variant on that facial expression: nostrils suddenly flared, carotid artery visible in the neck, the corners of the mouth pursed in a slightly menacing smile. Every man except Conejo.

We enjoyed making out when we were young. At first, we didn’t dare unless alcohol or drugs were involved, or in situations that in some way justified the display of affection: a rave in Temixco, a night on the tiles in Mexico City, the day his dad didn’t recognize him in the street and we drank a two-liter bottle of pulque sitting on a rock in the ravine. Then we began to do it in a quieter way, on his bedroom floor, on nights when we were talking about what we wanted to do when we were fully fledged adults.

After a session of touching and exchanging saliva, I’d always have the bad taste to tell him that I wasn’t interested in men. Conejo would look away, hurt, and lock himself in the bathroom for a while. When he came out, he’d be more composed, distant, ready to go along with the ridiculous fiction that we weren’t in love. Neither of us ever said anything about it to Natalia, or at least he swore he hadn’t.

When Natalia and I split up, the sexual tension I experienced with Conejo also eased a little. For some strange reason that neither of us understood, our love was linked to the catalytic presence of Natalia, who somehow made us gentler, more sensitive. When she distanced herself from us, she took with her—in my case, permanently—that state of grace that used to run through my body on libidinous summer evenings, when it was raining outdoors and inside, in whoever’s room, it was all skin, curiosity, and tongues.

Later, in Mexico City, I had sex with several women and the occasional man but never again experienced that total dissolution of the dermal frontier I’d had with Natalia and Conejo at the age of seventeen. I sometimes think that the pain, or at least its seed, began then, when I detached myself from the three-way union that made us all luminous.

But the true germ of that pain and its rapid development could in fact be charted from the register of symptoms I began to keep a few months ago. (It’s a pity that log isn’t more accurate: some nights I note where the pain has been during the day, but others I forget to do it.)

It began as a sort of presentiment: the sudden awareness that some part of my body existed, as though it had previously been hidden from me. I attributed it to the stress of those days: the divorce, unemployment, the thought that I might have to return to Cuernavaca and get my life back on track from my parents’ house. Then that presentiment became more intrusive. Like a sugar cube in contact with black coffee, the pain gained increasingly more ground at a constant rate. The larger joints were affected. At night the world dissolved and the solipsism of pain would have me howling until first light.

Now, in contrast, it’s a sort of dance: a daimon that alights with variable intensity on a different part of my body every few hours, causing me to contract certain muscles, grimace, touch my arm, and contort my body in the middle of the street, under a flamboyant tree, as I walk through downtown Cuernavaca.

The simple act of advancing, of putting one foot in front of the other, becomes a battle for territory, the attempt to retake the fortified tower ceded to the enemy. Every order from the brain is a vanguard, a campaign to reclaim my natural rights over that leg, that elbow, that finger joint. I sometimes win the battle: the pain retreats for a few moments and I once again feel in charge. Then comes the counterattack. After a step, the pulsing tremor: the ankle surrenders to its own doubts and I limp slightly.

A voice unexpectedly interrupts my ruminations on possessive pain: Erre, what the fuck! Is that really you? Followed by a hug, the scent of cardamom, and a lock of curly black hair brushing my face. The woman takes a step back and says: What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you for centuries. It seems an effort for her to smile: you can see she’s gotten out of the habit and only recently decided to force herself back into it, but there’s a profound sadness behind her teeth.

Don’t you remember me? I’m Claudia, she says on noticing my blank expression. I look at her again, more carefully. A memory begins to stir, but doesn’t quite take shape. Claudia, of course. How are you? I’m making a poor show of recognizing her and feel a stab of pain in my jaw, like a punishment for lying. Her sad, forced laughter says she knows I don’t remember her.

But Claudia is very good-looking, I think; I really should remember a face like that. She has a few premature crow’s feet, but they highlight her eyes, the pupils dilating and contracting with the changes of light when she passes under a tree.

We walk to a mezcal bar because she says she doesn’t want to be outdoors for long: she’s had a bad cough for days because of the wildfires. I use generic questions to try to discover where I know her from: How’s life? Have you been in Cuernavaca all these years? She says no, she’s lived in Mexico City and Barcelona; she had a short-lived career as an actor and is now a life coach. But I figure she doesn’t walk the talk. Apparently, she came back to Cuernavaca because her dad lent her an apartment behind his house (pretty much the same as me, I think). She wants to open a pizzeria, or go to Oaxaca, or maybe study something new, like psychology or acupuncture, she says, as though they were the same professions. Her way of hesitating and changing the subject suddenly seems familiar. The memory struggles to rise to the surface, but something is dragging it back down to the bottom of the lake, eventually leaving only the bubbles of the drowned recollection. Just when I’ve given it up for dead comes a gulp of air, a kicking out in the calm waters of oblivion. Claudia aged fifteen, sitting in the cafeteria of the Instituto Arcadia, holding a pocket mirror to put on lipstick. That’s it: we were in high school together.

The mezcal bar is a narrow cavern with three tables, a basic counter, and a menu of four items. Claudia orders for us both and the waiter returns with two shot glasses and segments of orange. You were my platonic love in high school, she says, and lifts her glass with a look of complicity I attempt to return, but I spill a little of the mezcal and instead of saying salud, what comes out is sorry. We drink in silence for a time, smiling but awkward. It was most probably a bad idea to agree to go to a bar with a person who has just emerged from my distant past. Any form of nostalgia immediately fizzles out, leaving a sort of hangover.

Fortunately, Claudia breaks the silence. She tells me that Natalia and I were the most popular of the nonpopular couples at school. I find that category both amusing and accurate and for a moment forget that my body is possessed, forget the pain lacerating me. She tells me she was friends with us both, and also with Conejo, and that the four of us sometimes went to exhibitions together and we used to dance and declaim poetry in public spaces, to the bewilderment of passersby. That’s news to me, but this time I’m grateful for the memory lapse because I feel slightly ashamed of the things she’s telling me.

Like Natalia, she started to study dance, she explained, but then she changed to drama and “kind of” made a living from that: she appeared in a few commercials and in a foreign movie filmed in Chachalacas, in which she had just one line, “We are luminous creatures.” We laugh, and this time I have the sense that there’s a sweet harmony forming between us, a brief moment of complicity.

She asks about my job and I tell her I’m unemployed. She says she remembers my parents’ house, the exact address, the tulip tree in the garden, my room, the bed with yellow tubes. For a moment I consider asking her if she remembers the blotch on the ceiling over that bed, but I resist the temptation. How can this woman possibly know so much about my life when I’ve almost totally erased any memory of her? (I still have only that image in the cafeteria.) Could it be due to my high levels of drug consumption over various years? Due to the fact that I gave up on Cuernavaca the way you kick a habit, that I extracted myself from the city like an appendectomy? Perhaps my physical pain has a neurological correlate: a silent devastation that is stealing whole parts of my life without my knowledge.

When we leave the bar, the sky is dark, although not completely. The deep blue of late afternoon has been replaced by the dull brown produced by the fires. Just like the day of the evangelical mass, the grackles are making a racket in the tops of the rubber trees. I’m tipsy but, miraculously, pain-free. I grab Claudia’s hand, as if we were lovers, and she laughs again. For a moment I toy with the idea of going with her, of sleeping with the cardamom scent of her hair or fucking the whole night long. But I don’t really want to have sex, and neither does she. At times, it’s easy to confuse any form of sadness or anxiety with desire; I’ve talked about this with friends and it’s happened to us all, particularly the men: we translate more complex feelings into the simplistic language of lust and hunger. I need a body, not sex: need to regain control over my extremities and oust the sprite that’s shattering me internally.

Claudia stops by a neon beer sign and I understand that, true to her profession, she’s chosen the best lighting for saying goodbye: the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles make me wish I were someone else, someone more lighthearted, less fucked up, or at the very least more willing to change. But the truce has come to an end: I’ll return to wandering the downtown streets alone until I make the decision to head back to my parents’ house. We hug and I say I hope we’ll meet again.

On my own now, in solitude, I discover that the mezcal has produced a weird short circuit with the painkillers. I feel as though the insides of my shoes were suddenly softer, lined with velvet. That sensation begins to ascend from my feet to other parts of my body. A sense of lassitude, a pliable drowsiness, accompanied by the auditory hallucination of a major chord played on a church organ. In a moment of clarity (a clarity that’s aware of the threat of the unconscious, that rages against “the dying of the light”), I decide I can’t go back to my parents’ house, not on foot, nor in a cab. It would be dangerous, I think: I could lose consciousness at any moment. Just at that instant I pass a seedy hotel in one of the streets running at right angles to Avenida Morelos in the direction of the Mercado Santos Degollado and go in. I ask for a room and the desk clerk, who has a squint and a lovely mole on her forehead, offers the choice of one with a fan or another with en suite. I ask if there’s a room with both and, as she doesn’t respond, assume that’s too much to hope for, so I say I’ll take the en suite. She smiles as she hands me the key (glued to a piece of wood with the name of the hotel in pyrogravure) and I gaze at her mole like someone looking through a telescope, and getting his first glimpse of an unnamed galaxy.

Five minutes later, still fully dressed except for my tennis shoes, I’m dribbling onto a pistachio-green throw with burn marks.