A bald guy with a long beard, wearing flip-flops and a loose shirt, a prophet of the new era, gives La Murciélaga a long hug. She comes back to the car giving jubilant little skips. She’s finally got that hydroponic weed she was after. We’ve had to come all the way from Las Palmas to Belén to make this woman happy.
“All right, kids, let’s blow this place,” she says as she clambers into the front seat next to Pedro the Dictator. And she adds: “The world can end now.”
The noise of the fireworks is relentless. Some of the explosions are sharp and booming, like a slamming door, like a set of cookpots clattering from a cupboard to the floor. Others announce themselves with a whistle before they detonate, an exhalation in the night before bursting out in lights. There are high ones and low ones, near ones and far ones. No matter what they look like, they’re all money that burns up in seconds, giving boundless pleasure to the person setting them off. The same euphoria that people feel from firing their guns in the air.
I often saw Libardo and his friends riddle the sky with bullets in celebration of something. A successful shipment, a lucrative business deal, a law passed in Congress for their benefit, or the death of somebody who’d been in their way.
“Where to now?” Julieth asks.
“Let’s go back to Las Palmas,” says La Murciélaga.
“It’s nine fifteen p.m.,” says Pedro, as if he were an announcer on Radio Reloj.
“Can you drop me off at my place?” I ask, but they all look at me as if they didn’t understand a word.
“Your mom hasn’t called yet,” Pedro tells me.
“I don’t care. If she’s not there, I’ll wait for her in the foyer. If she isn’t ready to see me, I’ll stay downstairs till she opens the door.”
“All right, whatever you say,” Pedro tells me.
For the first time all night, I feel relief. And also a chill in my abdomen and eddies in my guts. A freefalling void. Fear? Fear, anxiety, joy, respite. Though I know there won’t be silence tonight, at least I won’t be in this SUV anymore with the music blasting, in a smoky haze that smells of fireworks. Pedro’s cell phone rings again, and I try to catch a glimpse of the screen.
“Inga!” yells Pedro.
He’s no longer talking normally but shouting and laughing insults and mockery. He slaps the steering wheel in excitement.
“Can you turn the music down, Murci?” I ask, but she doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t want to.
We’re gonna get down, get down, get down, we’re gonna get down, oh, oh, oh. La Murciélaga sings, and Julieth sways haltingly to the beat. I stretch forward and lower the volume. La Murciélaga slaps my arm.
“What’s your problem?” she scolds me. “Don’t crush my groove.”
“My head’s going to explode,” I tell her.
Julieth ruffles my hair. La Murciélaga turns the volume back up, Pedro keeps yelling like he’s standing next to a waterfall.
“Hang on, I’ve got something for you,” La Murciélaga tells me and rummages in her purse. “Pull over, man,” she says to Pedro. “Let’s stop a minute.”
I thought she was looking for an aspirin, but she pulls out the bag of hydroponic marijuana and starts rolling a joint with impressive skill.
“No, Murci,” I say. “I thought . . .”
But before I can think, the SUV has filled up with smoke and the smell of weed. And when Pedro tells the person he’s talking to, we’re coming to get you, my relief evaporates, and once again my prospects dim.
The joint passes from hand to hand and mouth to mouth.
“Inga needs us to rescue her,” Pedro says.
“Where is she?” La Murciélaga asks.
“She says some aliens kidnapped her.”
“Who’s Inga?” Julieth asks.
“The Swedish chick,” La Murciélaga replies.
“You don’t know her?” Pedro asks. “The Swedish chick who came to Medellín to learn Spanish.”
“So has she learned it?” Julieth asks.
“Not much, but she did learn to do coke.”
Julieth expels the smoke with a laugh. Her laughter is still beautiful, like when we used to laugh together in bed.
“So let’s rescue her,” La Murciélaga says.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You? Smoke,” says Julieth. She blows smoke in my face and sticks the joint between my lips. The three of them look at me like I’m about to perform an amazing somersault. I toke, and they keep watching me to see if I inhale. I expel the smoke, and Julieth smiles at me. She passes the joint up to the front.
Oh, oh, oh, we’re gonna get down, get down, get down, we’re gonna get down.
We drive past the old airport. People used to say that if you jumped real high there, you could touch the airplanes’ wheels as they took off.
“Is it still in operation?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes during the day, no at night,” Pedro says.
“I’ve seen planes landing at night,” La Murciélaga says.
“That must be when you’re tripping,” Julieth says.
“The runway doesn’t have any lights,” Pedro says.
“No plane could fly tonight with all this smoke,” I tell them.
And I’m flying low, only a few inches off the ground. La Murciélaga starts another round. This time I snatch the joint and take a drag.
To my left is Nutibara Hill. As a boy I used to imagine that the restaurant at the top was a flying saucer. As soon as we found out that the restaurant rotated, we begged Libardo to take us. And it did rotate, but very slowly. Julio and I were disappointed. What did you expect, Libardo asked us, that we were going to be eating on a merry-go-round?
“Is there still a restaurant up there?” I ask.
“Where?” Julieth asks, looking up at the sky.
“On the hill.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I think it closed,” says Pedro. “I never went.”
“I did,” says Julieth. “It spun.”
It doesn’t look like a flying saucer now. It doesn’t even look like a restaurant.
La Murciélaga laughs. I don’t know why she’s laughing. Well, I know why but I don’t know at what. People are setting off fireworks on top of the hill too. It looks like a volcano spitting out its first sparks. I remember the other hill, farther north, the one people said was a dormant volcano. I don’t remember what it was called, but I do remember you could see it from our high school, and we used to fantasize that it might wake up. I would imagine Medellín filling with lava and everybody fleeing toward the mountains. The lava catching up with us, lapping at our heels, in this city that looks like a mug of nasty soup.
“What’s the name of that hill that was a dormant volcano?”
The three of them look at me, Pedro in the rearview mirror.
“What’s up with you, Larry?” he asks.
“There’s a volcano here in Medellín?” Julieth asks. “If there is, I’m going to go live somewhere else.”
“No more of this stuff for now,” La Murciélaga says and snuffs out the joint in the ashtray.
To my left I see the spiral of cars trying to climb Nutibara Hill. Everybody wants to watch La Alborada from a high place. We’re all getting high too.
Get down, get down, the song says, and we’re going up, up, up.