What we are left with are broken families, blind or aging parents, the resigned company of the people who gave life to us and then got fed up with us, but who tolerate us the way you tolerate a bad leg that hurts when it rains. We’re their twisted offshoots, their walking, talking extensions, their bothersome shadows.

On certain evenings, darkened by smoke, in a sort of Marxist sequel, Dad recovers a form of blind optimism based on the belief that, due to its dialectic structure, history is advancing without fail in the right direction toward its own dissolution in a workers’ paradise. All this, he tells me—with a gesture that takes in the neighborhood, the city, the whole world—is basically a backward step necessary for advancement: conflict will bring about progress. But his conviction falters on the final syllable of each word, spoken more quietly, as though at heart he were embarrassed by his short outburst. After those rare episodes of optimism, he slowly returns to his habitual fatalism. A few hours of silence in the half-light of the living room, drinking one cup of coffee after another, bring him back to the anguish of the present, which merges with the disdain of the prophet who sees—or in this case, hears—the world go up in flames, just as he’d predicted.

Today I’ve witnessed him moving along that route from blind confidence in the working class’s success in the struggle to desolate eight-o’clock weariness, when he’s overcome by hunger for his dinner and the certainty that it’s all going to blazes.

But now, without warning, he’s emerging from that pool of caffeine-fueled anguish with a smile lighting up his face and a redemptive idea: We have to take a trip, he tells me, almost shouting. First thing tomorrow. He says he wants to go to the coast, to hear the sea. I reply that there’s no need to go anywhere: I can play the sound of the sea through those good-quality speakers I gave him a few years back, the last time I had a steady job. It’ll sound better through the speakers than in person, I tell him, and you won’t have to put up with all that sand in your butt crack or the stink of coconut-oil sunblock, or have to listen to Chilangos playing flag football and throwing up by the palm-leaf beach umbrella. And anyway, I add, I don’t think the car is up to it: we’ll be left high and dry in some one-horse town in Chilpancingo with two OXXOs and forty Lobo pickups, at the mercy of the sun and organized crime. But Dad isn’t giving up that easily: I want to say goodbye, I don’t have much time left; I don’t think I’ll ever visit the sea again. We can go tomorrow and come back on Monday, I’ll pay, I’ve got a little stash tucked away. And, he rounds off, Cuernavaca is awful these days, with all these wildfires, and anyway, you don’t do a fucking thing except lounge about in your bedroom smoking pot. I might be blind but I’m not stupid. His insistence has me tearing my hair out so, to get him off my back, I say we can go to the coast for a couple of days but I can’t do that weekend: it’s the first night of Natalia’s performance and she’ll never forgive me if I miss it.

To my surprise, Dad quits talking about the sea and asks about my friend. Is she still living with that man? Yes, I reply, she’s still with Argoitia: he’s a schmuck (I read the word in a colloquial translation yesterday and have been wanting to use it all day). But I have the feeling she’s going to ditch him; she doesn’t seem as head over heels as she was at first. Plus, Erre’s back and I’m hoping those two will make up; I mean, it’s been years. Then, in a tone I want to sound hopeful, I add: Who knows, they might get together again and have a kid. Dad laughs and I find his coffee-stained teeth slightly repulsive. He says: You ought to be on the lookout for a woman for yourself, not for your friend. A woman or a man, I quip, but he pretends not to hear. We sit in silence for a time and I wonder how Natalia’s doing. It’s just one day until her performance and she still hasn’t told me much about it. When I call, she seems distracted; she hangs up abruptly without even saying goodbye, my SMSs appear to be read but either she doesn’t reply or sends quotations from whatever she’s reading just then: long paragraphs about a proto-hippy choreographer and a German psychiatrist who lived a century ago.

Erre, for his part, arranged to come around today after lunch but stood me up. Not that we had any big plans: I’d put three beers in the fridge and I wanted to play him an album by a group from Yautepec with a girl shouting herself hoarse rapping poems about ovarian pain.

I’m a bit worried about Erre. He was a mess the last time he came here. In addition to his confusion about what day it is, I’ve noticed that he forgets lots of other things. He asked if Dad was still teaching, when he knows well he retired years ago.

There’s something depressing about hanging out with people who’ve known you forever. They always expect you to be the same as you were before, to embody that person preserved in the formaldehyde of the memory, to whom they have an inalienable lifetime right. Erre disappeared off the scene for years, only popping up in my life for the occasional phone call or short visit, and now he’s back and comes around whenever he feels like it, expecting me to be here and ready to listen to him talking over and over about his pain and his divorce, as though he’s never left. And, to be honest, I expect a degree of coherence from him too: I expect that he never changes beyond recognition, that he laughs at the same jokes and allows the same caresses with the awkward reluctance of his hard-ons when I run my fingers through his tousled hair, with that mix of tenderness and irony that characterizes the love of childhood friendships. But maybe it would be better not to know him, to ask more often about his fears and traumas, as if we’d never danced until dawn in some cantina with a sticky floor.