I located Erre’s parents, but they were unwilling to tell me much. They say their son disappeared before the kick dance and had nothing to do with it. They’re afraid he’s been kidnapped or that his body will turn up in some mass grave in ten years’ time, with nobody knowing how it got there or why. They haven’t reported him missing because it’s said to be dangerous, and I guess that’s true. I assume they are pulling strings or investigating on their own account, and their secrecy must, to some extent, be due to that.

But, for my part, I’ve managed to reconstruct the events through my own inquiries. Claudia, a former high school classmate I contacted via social media, told me she’d seen Erre and had a mezcal with him the day before Natalia’s performance. She said Erre seemed to get drunk very quickly, but she didn’t think it was anything worse than that: mezcal hits us all harder now we’re past thirty.

That night, Erre didn’t return to his parents’ home but, according to one of the videos going around that document the events, two days later he was somehow mixed up in the Santa María episode: you only get a glimpse of him, standing, one hand touching his painful shoulder, staring in astonishment at a boy writhing on the ground. That’s my only clue, but it’s enough to tell me that Erre’s parents have gotten it wrong: their son disappeared during the kick dance.

The obvious deduction is that he was on his way to see Natalia. He may well have found her home and gone with her to Tepoztlán, and Natalia didn’t want to tell me because at times she can be mysterious and evasive, not to say an asshole. They may be living together in some shack in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, hiding out from Argoitia’s fury, from the outbreak of dance and its repercussions. They probably think I’d be jealous if I found out they were loving up without me, that they’d excluded me from the amorous holy trinity that marked our adolescence.

But it’s also possible—and this is a thought I find more frightening because it rings true—that Erre started dancing and was one of those rash souls who went up the flaming hillside and never came down. There’s no way of knowing.

The highways have finally been reopened. A whole heap of Cuernavaca residents immediately took to the road for fear the dancing would start again or the smoke and looting return. But it’s dawn now, and I don’t think there will be much traffic.

Dad is packing a bag for the long-awaited trip to Acapulco to say farewell to the sea—as we should have done before all this started. He’s wearing the sky-blue guayabera he loaned me that day but it’s kind of big on him: he’s been losing weight lately. He’s mostly lost interest in hearing the sea for the last time, but when I suggested the trip, he meekly acquiesced. I told him I was willing to drive the Chevy only if we set out at six in the morning to avoid the hordes of fleeing Morelenses.

During the outbreak, Dad sometimes listened to the radio. He used to tune into a local news station because he said the big nationals were just sensation seeking. But his favorite Morelos station didn’t check its facts: it had a single journalist assigned to the job and the poor man was trudging the streets of the city, audio recorder in hand, interviewing a very diverse range of people: sociologists and juice vendors, doctors and housewives. The resulting mosaic of incompatible voices formed a grisly tableau of what was going on.

Magical explanations sprinkled with hard facts were given preference, but at times it was like listening to the commentary on a rugby game or an incomprehensible dithyramb about people being hunted with tranquilizing darts. Like a painting by Bosch described by someone who’s taken magic mushrooms.

I spent the first days in a state of anomie, as though the scrap of the brain that determines and orchestrates emotional reactions had been surgically removed. Then I began seeking out friends, acquaintances, exes. I sent generic messages to all my contacts asking for reports, and received replies that ranged from memes to biblical commentary until I put all the conversations on hold and sought refuge in the solitude of marijuana. My dealer took full advantage of the situation, offering edible products capable of knocking you senseless for six hours. Those of us who value the subconscious enough to want to protect it from the news occasionally allowed ourselves to fall into the arms of narcosis.

Only the sounds of ambulances—hanging in the air like a warning—shook me out of my induced stupor from time to time, and when that happened I’d leave my bedroom and try to persuade my silly father to turn off the radio and share a bowl of pureed potatoes with habanero sauce (a dish of my own invention that I was proud of, and which my father bore with ill grace). He’d give way eventually and sit with me at the table, where we’d attempt to talk about something, anything, else. I’d ask him about the Tlatoque, who ruled the Tierra Caliente before the conquest; the obsidian brought from Xochicalco that was exchanged for feathers gathered in the southeast; the tunnels where the Red Bishop stashed weapons in the seventies; the aplomb with which Ivan Ilyich bore his cancer, without recourse to the pharmaceutical industry. And my father would respond to all my prompts with well-chewed anecdotes, spoken in a quiet tone, with no trace of his former fervor, almost robotically—a professor giving a lecture he knows by heart.

One evening, my mother called. Dad answered the phone in the living room, but as I was mooching around not far away, I was able to get close enough to hear the voice on the other end of the line. She told him she was in Minnesota, living in the suburbs with the ophthalmologist, and had seen the news, but didn’t have any idea what was going on. She wanted to check we were still alive, nothing more, and as soon as Dad had confirmed that I was fine, she put down the phone without another word.