I wake in the night, but this time there’s no blotch—that trigger of my imagination—on the ceiling. In its place is the immaculate ceiling of the hotel room and, where it meets the wall, a cobweb. The light of a streetlamp filters through the threadbare curtains and casts a few shadows, which I momentarily manage to substitute for the blotch. But that scene rapidly changes with the irruption of dawn and, after a while, the morning light fills the room, erasing any fantasy.

I make a quick internal check of my body and conclude that, for the moment, there’s no sign of pain, although I am incredibly hungry: I feel like my intestines have started to consume themselves, dark ouroboros of my belly. The sight of the green blanket brings a moment of remorse: I really should have returned to my parents’ house. But it’s too late for that now.

I try to switch on my phone and discover that the battery is dead. As I’m leaving the hotel, I ask where I can get breakfast and the desk clerk with the mole on her forehead says there’s a café on the corner, but she’s not sure if there will be anybody there because almost all the other businesses have closed. Then she tells me that if I’m not planning to come back, I need to settle up. Given the alcohol and my general state of confusion, I can’t really remember if I paid when I registered so I hand over the bills without argument and silently say goodbye to her lovely mole.

The café is as dirty and suspect as the seedy hotel, but I decide to go in anyway because it’s the only place open within sight: the streets have that lethargic Sunday air.

I order huevos a la mexicana and, while I’m shoveling them down, browse a tabloid newspaper that has been left on the next table. As I read the first headline on the page where the paper has been left open (“They had to dance with the ugliest one!”) I realize for the first time that it’s June 22, not 21.

I’ve somehow lost a day and so have missed Natalia’s performance, which I’d bought a ticket for. My parents must be thinking I’ve either been kidnapped or spent two days drunk at Conejo’s. He, in turn, must be thinking I’ve been taken away on a UFO, or that I was too frightened to attend Natalia’s event because that idiot Argoitia would be there.

I ask the waiter if he has a phone charger, but he quickly says no and disappears through a door. The newspaper article says two people were hit by a vehicle and killed while dancing in the middle of the street. I assume this is poetic license on the part of the journalists, that the people weren’t dancing, but having an argument or brawling: it’s common for that kind of low-life newspaper to use what you might call lyrical language.

I pay for my breakfast at the counter and leave the café, thinking of visiting Natalia in Santa María Ahuacatitlán to ask her forgiveness for missing the performance. I’ll deal with my parents’ worries later (if they are indeed worried: I’m probably just suffering a regression to adolescence).

While I’m waiting for a cab to pass, I attempt to reconstruct what happened. Did I sleep through a whole day in a sleazy hotel? And did I actually meet a past acquaintance called Claudia or was it just an invention of my disordered psyche? I decide the most plausible explanation is that the mix of mezcal and painkillers put me out of action, that I should have read the warning label before pouring three straight shots down my gullet. Never trust mezcal. Whatever the case, I can wave goodbye to the illusion of having a healthy friendship with Natalia: she’ll never forgive me for not turning up.

The cabbie drives like he’s at the end of his tether: he takes a route I don’t recognize, that includes all the underpasses and bridges constructed over recent years. At the same manic speed of his driving, he talks about the news of the road deaths; according to him, the people weren’t dancing; they were having convulsions in the street. The government is covering something up, he says with an air of knowing everything there is to know about what goes on behind the scenes in politics. This has to do with the fires and the contaminated water. People get sick and go crazy. Just look at those evangelists, talking such garbage: saying some of them are going to disappear in a flash and who knows what the fuck else. When someone disappears around here, it’s because they’ve talked too much, and they don’t end up in heaven but in one of those mass graves in Temixco.

While I generally agree with what he says, I don’t give him much encouragement in case it might fuel his ardor. My head is in no state to be thinking of traffic accidents and evangelists. Instead, I try to come up with an excuse to offer Natalia. I’d texted her to say I’d see her at the performance and wasn’t worried about Argoitia being there. She’d texted back: Bet you won’t come, as if daring me, and now fate and pharmaceuticals have proved her right.

Pain returns from its vacation. This time it’s in my hip, where the head of the femur slots into the socket. Sitting in the back of the cab, my knees bent, it isn’t too painful, but I foresee difficulties in walking up the steep streets of Santa María (cabdrivers rarely want to go that far up the hill: they say the cobbles mess up their suspension, or ask for more money and then complain the whole way).

But this cab comes to a halt much sooner than I’d expected, when we’d scarcely arrived in Santa María. There appears to have been an accident or a robbery ahead of us: a Ruta 3 bus has stopped halfway up the hillside and behind it is a long tailback of vehicles with despairing drivers and a general sense of chaos. The cabdriver takes my fare and, after performing a complex, illegal maneuver, proceeds back down the same street.

Every step I take sparks the pain in my hip, as if something inside there is about to dislocate. But there’s no alternative: I want to reach Natalia’s. I have a keen sense of guilt about missing her event, about sleeping through a whole day on the green blanket of a sleazy hotel. I feel that only Natalia can offer me the forgiveness that I’m really begging of the world: forgiveness for breathing this filthy air that could be more use to others and occupying this space that I could just as well cede to the ants. And after Natalia’s house, I think, I’ll walk back down—or go on my knees, like someone on a personal, arbitrary pilgrimage—to Conejo’s, and I’ll ask his forgiveness, too, for standing him up, and for having spent years saying there was nothing between us, pretending to be mature, cool, and straight, when the only thing I really want, have always wanted, is to jump over the fence of a vacant lot to make out with him among the junk like the adolescents we were.

Only love can quench the fires.

Grimacing with pain, I walk as far as the chaotic scene: a group of fifteen or twenty people are watching a smaller group, who are writhing on the ground, leaping and skipping on the cobbles. The first idea that comes into my head on seeing them is that it looks like what I glimpsed at Natalia’s rehearsal, but wilder. I also think that what they are doing must really hurt, but the dancers don’t seem to react to any of the impacts and just continue moving as though they were made of rubber (although in fact at least two of them have bruises and visible wounds; one is bleeding). I consider asking someone what the hell is going on, but the shocked faces of the bystanders lead me to suspect that nobody really knows, so I skirt the group and continue on, bearing my own body with difficulty.

A few blocks up the hill, just before reaching my destination, I feel my stomach contracting and I double over, but nothing comes out. Bent over, looking down, I spot a dead gecko between the stones—the mere skeleton of a gecko neatly cleaned by ants. A fresh bout of retching contracts my stomach, and the spasm causes something in my hip to make a thunderous noise and then settle back into place, with the resulting disappearance of the pain. But I don’t have a chance to enjoy the sense of relief before a third bout of retching leaves me on my knees. And then a fourth and a fifth bring me to my feet and carry me, stumbling and trembling, along the street, past the gate of Natalia’s house, to the edge of the forest known as El Tepeite.