I’ve hardly slept these last five days. Sometimes, around noon, I doze at the table and Dad just sits there, silently keeping me company, until I wake after a few minutes. Then later, in my bedroom, with my laptop on my knees, I drop off again for a while until the sound of a gunshot nearby wakes me, and I quickly open another tab to check for the latest news on TV or social media, as if some radical change could have occurred in the past five minutes. But everything is pretty much the same as before I fell asleep: there’s a state of emergency and people are throwing themselves down in the street and suddenly can’t stop prancing about and writhing until a) they die, b) they are killed, or c) their families pay a psychiatric response team to tackle them to the ground and administer an intramuscular sedative in the ass.

Natalia reemerged on the second day: she called our landline—I’d forgotten we had one—to say she was fine and had gone to stay with her mother in Tepoztlán until things calmed down. I asked about Argoitia, but she didn’t reply. Then, after a pause, she said: You know the outbreak had nothing to do with me, don’t you? And I said: Yes, I know; it’s a public health issue. She, again, made no reply, as though she were trying to figure out what I was referring to, so I added by way of explanation: It’s an unpleasant coincidence that your dance performance and the start of this mayhem happened at the same time.

Naturally, to avoid mortifying her, I didn’t say what I really thought: that her nasty trick of setting people to dance in the street had been the match that ignited the fire; that the collective psychosis in the city had been waiting for that spark to go off with a bang.

She asked after my dad and wanted to know if we had food in the house so we wouldn’t need to go out. I told her we were okay, and that I’d gone to the OXXO that morning for groceries and to buy a disposable cell phone, and would try to stay indoors until the weekend now: You wouldn’t believe how crazy people are acting, Natalia; right here in Tlaltenango, there are vigilante groups cracking down violently on any outbreak. They’re armed with sticks and hammers and using them if you so much as scratch your shoulder because, they say, that’s how it starts and then people begin jumping and kicking; seems to me there are as many victims of the cure as the illness itself.

Yeah, I saw that on the news, says Natalia in an absent tone, like her mind is on other things. We’ve had five days of this madness and she sounds as if she’s bored with the whole affair, already knows the end of the story. She even goes so far as to change the subject, telling me she’s glad she got out before the highways were closed because she wants to see if she can manage to go to Europe, where a foundation has offered her a half scholarship—the email had just arrived.

She asks—not getting her hopes up—if I have any spare dough to lend her for the flight, but I say no, tell her my dad is blind and I’m a freelancer; I still haven’t been paid for several jobs and there have been a minimum of forty-seven deaths in Cuernavaca, plus the general panic and National Guard detachments patrolling the streets with high-caliber firearms. Natalia butts in: High-caliber fire charms? I love it. Firearms! I shout, and my voice sounds shriller than I expected. Firearms, I repeat more calmly. Doesn’t sound like it bothers you much.

Natalia apologizes and explains that she’s very tired, she hasn’t been able to sleep for checking her phone constantly: she had to leave the bromeliads at Argoitia’s and she’s trying to hire someone to bring them to Tepoztlán, walking through the ravine to avoid the control posts. In a resigned voice—I’m assuming that it’s impossible to talk to her about what’s happening because the attraction her navel exercises on her eyes exceeds any other concern—I ask what she intends to do with the plants if she goes to Europe. I don’t know, maybe take them with me, she responds, and I understand that she, too, must be a little overwhelmed by this end-of-the-world stuff. It gets to us all in different ways.

Dad, for his part, is melancholic. He keeps asking me to read him the news but then waves a hand to stop me: The truth is, I don’t care, he says and descends into silence. I haven’t heard him putting on music or laughing at his Braille children’s books for days; he spends the evening like that, sitting silently in his armchair in the living room or in the comfortable chair in his office, with the lights out—of course, he never switches them on—like a shaman or a shadow fern.

Erre, on the other hand, hasn’t gotten in touch.

I searched for his name in the lists of hospitalized people and deaths, but he must be among the disappeared; that list is always incomplete and has never been digitized. When I rang his parents’ house, nobody picked up: I evaluated the risk of walking there but am afraid to go that far with all the episodes of police violence that are still being talked about, so I’ve done my best not to think any more about him for the moment. It will most likely turn out that he left the city with his parents as soon as he saw the scale of the ruckus. There are people who shelled out for a helicopter ride, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Erre’s father had dipped into his savings to get out of the mess.

I haven’t even tried. I refuse to leave Cuernavaca for this. If I didn’t go during the worst years of the war on drugs—assuming those years have now passed, as is so often claimed—I’m not leaving because a couple of hundred people have started dancing spasmodically in the street. Anyway, my bedroom window has bars: no one’s going to dive in amid a hail of broken glass, with contorted features and kicking everything in sight, as they say happened in a house in Palmira due to an outbreak.