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In a little refrigerator, beneath a red tungsten gleam, a brain-versus-heart poster floated above the fliers and chewy candy. The caption read: The Thing inspires respect, and perspiration—the Thing is Queen. The Thing—that which shall heretofore be known as the Thing—is the Sublime Attractor of Pure Sensibilities. (The email invitation had chanted Zarpe Diem. Cumbia Loonática vs. Chancho Malo and Organitos back-2-back. ArteRadix, Q’lo negro, Choris Cósmicos Kalenchus. Special Guests: Tumitumi + Gadortxa Full.) The illustration was of a geronto-masculine profile whose curly beard formed a political map of South America. Andy confirmed that the proceedings in question would not include a poetry reading. (The laissez faire, laissez passer attitude of contemporary Buenos Aires obliged one to tread warily; there was always the chance that young women would venture onto the stage to share free-verse intimacies, pornographic outbursts, scattered rhymes in the local dialect.) And Kamtchowsky wanted to dance. She had always thought highly of the solvent rhythms and corpuscular-undulatory character of cumbia music; in the end, the eye of progress (its acritical, Phoenician voracity) drew near for a sybaritic feast, as if the phenomenon of spontaneous regeneration had suddenly sprung into existence, its very spontaneity consisting of a chic degeneration of the inadmissible.

Zarpe Diem took place in a synagogue that was clearly in the process of collapsing. Strings of tiny Felliniesque lights and colorful streamers dangled down from a ceiling pocked with mildew and grime. The walls were covered with florescent arrows pointing at the cracks that ran in all directions. A green-and-red sign warned that there were no emergency exits—it was of course completely natural for a synagogue to advise against diaspora. Another sign annotated the scene with the order to “Eat your partner.”

An insidious, rhythmic bass line peppered with cosmic sound effects could be heard—the rhythm was explosive and disconcerting. A kid wearing only underpants and a soaking wet bowler hat was pounding away at a little toy piano; nearby were several laptops and metal boxes covered with phosphorescent decals. On stage, a kid with a tie around his neck and a feather headdress was acting out the role of a native—olive-colored skin, highland facial features, the feathers themselves. On the screen behind him, images appeared of this same kid, his hair slicked back with gel, using a garden hose to water the animal innards that filled the engine compartment of a car. A girl was squeezing a tube of red tempera all over the viscera and the open hood, a theatrically robotic expression on her face. Behind the stage, a young Carmen Miranda (with the requisite headpiece of bananas and cucumbers, the dark hair and exuberantly crimson mouth) crouched down to check the cables.

Otto and Pebeteen donned motorcycle helmets and walked up on stage. Each had a keytar strung across his chest—a common cumbia instrument. Pebeteen wore a zarzuela-style polka dot dress; he was short, thin, white-skinned. Otto on the other hand was tall, well-proportioned, shirtless in black sweatpants. Together they lip-synched the Satanist version of a Kraftwerk song. After a while, Otto smashed his keytar across Pebeteen’s helmet; Pebeteen, not the least bit intimidated, raised his own instrument and hammered Otto’s thought-dome in turn. They went back and forth like this for some time.

The choris cósmicos were for sale at a stand in back, watched over by a friendly local fat guy and his brood. Little Kamtchowsky wolfed down her grilled sausage to the catchy rhythm of “La bomba” as sung by Carmen Miranda, who tapped her foot but was otherwise motionless. Then all the lights went out except for a few flickering yellow beams accompanied by a low frequency pedal effect, amorphous. The stage filled with mysterious figures dressed in black, wearing black helmets, brandishing machine guns that fired brilliant red beams of light.

ON THE FLOOR! EVERYBODY ON THE FLOOR! HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!

Everyone obeyed, hiding their heads in their hands. The commandos walked amongst the prostrate bodies. They repeated the orders, shouted them over and over, swinging their weapons expressively left and right. Some of the people on the floor covered their plastic cups with their hands to keep from spilling. The noise grew deafening. ON THE FUCKING FLOOR! And now a police siren. Contagious laughter revealed that with this simulation of a simulation of a massacre, the show had come to its climax. The bodies of the dead crawled over one another, their arms and legs tangling, a mass of trembling tentacles. The shouted order changed to “Hands in the air!” just as the Pibes Chorros song of the same name started to play, and at the back wall a ritual took place—a poster was set on fire, some guy with a Leibnizian wig.

Llegamos los pibes chorros

queremos las manos de todos arriba

porque al primero que se haga el ortiba

por pancho y careta le vamos a dar.xi

After a while Kamtchowsky had had enough of being alternately astonished and bored, and went to look for a bathroom. Such trips were intimately connected to the core of her personality, linked as they were to general notions of female camaraderie and volubility. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, whenever Kamtchowsky and her friends had announced that they were going to the bathroom, they were in fact about to “take a walk around,” a tactical euphemism for getting a sense of the lay of the land, discovering who had come and where they could be found. Nothing memorable ever occurred, but the ritual kept them alert to possible interactions with the opposite sex.

In the course of this current expedition, she rubbed more or less lasciviously against twenty people or so; the spatial rhetoric of the hallway encouraged such flirting. The tightly packed bodies slowed her forward motion, and the low light turned everything red—not just her thoughts. At the end of the hallway she saw a half-open door and an old sink; once inside she noticed two boys smiling at her. One had curly red hair, was twenty-two or so, and quite cute; the other wore a checkered beanie and was extremely pale, infantile, disfigured, as if a very weak acid produced by some morbid form of maternal love had subtly corroded his features.

Kamtchowsky smiled back at them, and realized that she was mimicking Mara’s seductive little gestures. The boys stood there, wordless. They look like imbeciles, she thought. She saw that on the toilet seat cover there was a swastika drawn in white powder; it made her feel dangerous. She gave a little hop, went to her knees, hunched forward and inhaled through her lucky dollar bill. Under the sweet gaze of her new friends, Kamtchowsky’s bodily organism took in about two grams of ketamine, a general anesthetic often used on animals. The drug selectively diminishes the power of association in the cortex and thalamus, producing a dissociative phenomenon similar to an “out of body” experience. Kamtchowsky gasped for air—the chemical had gone in like a punch. The kid in the beanie drew near. He opened her left eye with his fingers and observed the behavior of her pupil. Kamtchowsky opened her mouth to speak; three seconds passed, and now she’d lost all control of her body. This discovery occurred just as she was formulating a desire: she wanted to make her way back to that packed hallway where acceptance came freely, but her legs would not respond.

Montaigne theorized that handicapped people make the best sexual partners, because the nutrients that would have served a given extremity are rerouted to the genitalia. Kamtchowsky had never heard of this, but mysteriously enough, she was in a position to provide corroboration of a sort. His name was Miguel; professionally speaking, he was the first differently-abled young man ever to be chosen Employee of the Month.

One afternoon back in April, at a McDonald’s in the Belgrano district, she had ordered a McFiesta, and noticed that Miguel wanted to look her in the eyes as he handled her order, but couldn’t quite manage it. Someone less romantic than Kamtchowsky would have admitted to herself that this was just because he was totally cross-eyed. Miguel, with all the aplomb that the scene required, invited her to join the McTour that was just beginning. Kamtchowsky, french fries and small soft drink in hand, couldn’t bring herself to say no.

A dark-haired young man with a name tag reading “Germán” and a Mickey, two Minnies and a Ronald pinned to his tie—the equivalent of a condestable in the Napoleonic army—introduced himself as their guide, and led them down the line of cash registers. The other McTour guests were five eleven-year-olds in private school uniforms; they looked Kamtchowsky slowly up and down to make it clear that she didn’t belong. Germán appeared not to have noticed the polarities that were destabilizing the group of humans under his command, concentrated as he was on more basic issues. He spoke about the unique qualities of cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce, about maintaining the integrity of the cold chain, about the division of labor and the importance of creating value in order to build a better world: the very pillars of the McDonald’s philosophy. Kamtchowsky listened carefully, calmly eating her French fries; from time to time she slipped in sarcastic questions of cryptic relevance, such as, Where exactly does Ronald McDonald live? and, What are the earliest symptoms of an Escherichia coli infection? Then out of nowhere, Miguel pressed his incandescent organ up against the Kamtchowskyan rearguard.

The indulgence often employed to mitigate the frenzy of such desire—the danger implicit in this type of lust—is downright legendary. Kamtchowsky turned to him in slow motion, but before she could raise a hand to slap him across the face, his bionic lips clamped on to her upper arm, and he began rubbing himself rhythmically against her near leg. The McTour had left them behind; even the slowest of the children had turned the far corner toward the refrigeration units that kept the chicken-based foodstuffs in optimum condition. Kamtchowsky brought her hands down, trying to protect herself, to parry his desperation. Miguel whipped out his private parts; seconds later he ejaculated onto Kamtchowsky’s palms. Then, seeing that the McTour and its host of children were coming back, Miguel flew like a meteorite to the soft-serve ice cream machine, pushed the red button, and came back with a vanilla cone; realizing that he hadn’t brought her any napkins with which to tidy up, he lowered his little pink mouth to her sticky hands and sucked them clean. Kamtchowsky was reminded of Proposition IX, Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics: Desire is “appetite accompanied by the consciousness thereof.” Unable to exit the lane of pseudo-erudite mental associations down which she’d been swept, she also recalled an homage to Spinoza: the Borges sonnet about the Jewish hands. Miguel’s gesture had been both ironic and protective, and she accepted the vanilla cone.

It amused her, the wisdom with which everything returned to normal. Thanks very much, she murmured, still shocked by what had happened. Then Miguel asked for her telephone number.

Kamtchowsky’s hand was twisted brutally up behind her back, all the way to her shoulder blade; the rest of her body slipped off the toilet seat cover. She couldn’t control her movements. She imagined that she was dead at the medullar level, that her body was being held hostage, captive to an optical nightmare, her eyes bisected by a plane that distorted her vision, as if she were watching the scene from two meters behind herself. She instinctively wanted to cover up, to protect her intimate parts; at the same time, something in the lower half of her body seemed to enjoy being exposed to the elements. Beanie, his pants down around his knees, worked his penis this way and that, trying to fit it into one or another of Kamtchowsky’s holes. Curls, more pragmatically, took her by the hips and flipped her around, then drew her toward him. Suddenly Kamtchowsky’s thoughts began to see themselves spatially: a burst of mental gunfire sprayed against a vortex where Curls had one eye open wide and was gasping, his teeth bared. Hidden in the glowing fist of her very selfhood, she watched out of the corner of her eye. There was something sweet and triumphant in all this. She couldn’t move. A strange peace came over her, a protothought in italics: They are like bears, and I am the honey. The door had been left half open, and here come even more kids unbuckling their belts (italics Kamtchowsky’s). It was her body that attracted and distributed these vectors of manhood: this certainty lit her up inside. The fact that they were so desperate to intersect with the geometry of her flesh, that the vectors might crisscross in and toward her, that she might be the center of projection—all this made them in some way subordinate to her. One of those who’d just entered took out his cellphone and started recording; a few days later a video labeled somegirl.avi could be downloaded from any number of blogs and webpages.

Over at the bar, Mara and Pabst took their time eating their choripanes. It was the first time they’d ever found themselves alone together against the masses. Andy had wandered off to buy drugs or sell them, they weren’t sure which; Kamtchowsky, they thought, was standing in line for the bathroom, which is why she was taking so long. Now there were shrieks, people running, others perking up their ears—a performance was about to start. The stage lights spun until they were shining directly into the audience’s faces. Pabst instinctively closed his eyes; he found people expressing themselves enormously troubling.

On stage, the light came to rest on a young guy, his face decorated with glitter and brightly colored paint, his naked torso lined with lengths of Scotch tape. He began rubbing his chest with a piece of paper, muttering, “Text, text,” louder and louder. Then five guys in yellow raincoats came to stand in a row facing the audience, unmoving. At the command “Gesture, gesture!” they opened their raincoats wide, showing bikini briefs hung with black ribbons. The Text guy shouted orders and the Gesture guys obeyed, throwing themselves to the floor, spitting on one another, biting each other, playing dead.

Pabst thought he recognized a certain Gallimardian odor coming off one of the texts, and said:

–At certain times of crisis, all myopic dwarves can be swapped out for priests who read Céline.

The kid in the bowler hat walked across the platform in his underwear, laughing. He tested the microphone that hung down over an array of soft drink bottles, fifteen of them or so. The stage lights made the bottles glow. A fat guy from Holland supervised the action; he wore a black T-shirt with a white skeleton on it, and a piano tie. Pabst took advantage of the pause to slide a few xenophobic notes into Mara’s ear:

–These poorly educated Europeans emigrate in search of a culturally backward paradise where they can display whatever leadership qualities they possess against a background of urban third-worldness. They’re just neighborhood demagogues pretending to be part of the vanguard here where it’s easier to be such a thing, and then bragging about how cheap the rent is to their supermarket manager friends in Münster or Riga or Rouen. This is how they propagate the private mythology according to which the crest of their lives still hasn’t completely passed them by.

Mara agreed delightedly.

The cap on every bottle had been tightened to a different degree, such that the gas escaping from each hissed out at a different frequency. The Dutch guy placed a little plastic chair in amongst the bottles; he took a seat, and very calmly removed his T-shirt. The kid dressed as a native stuck a number of sensors to the Dutch guy’s belly, highly sensitive microphones that caught the sounds emanating from his intestinal domains.

The fat guy’s stomach began to emit a series of subtle alien complaints; minor chords, meek at times, like someone doubting something, or asking a question. The thesis statement of his message to the human masses curled its way around to their delicate eardrums. On an electric signboard the little red lights spelled out:

oh come, board the train of consciousness of the inanimate. oh, can’t you see that people and personalities are only fallacies? completely overvalued fallacies! you are nothing more than an organ, an organ inside a pure sentence, an organizational chart. feel the organicness of the organizational chart, the public-private hymn that speaks within you.

Andy returned to the environs of the bar accompanied by a pair of enthusiastic drug addicts (“I’m telling you, there isn’t a single party, I promise you, not a single party in the world that is better than this one RIGHT NOW, nowhere in the world!”) A guy who introduced himself as a “self-taught alchemist” offered them homemade absinthe, natural amphetamines, and cocaine made from animal placentas, all of which Mara politely declined. Andy glowed with sweat, which served only to highlight his firm, harmonious musculature. Mara covered his face with kisses, and they both laughed. I hope they don’t start feeling each other up right in front of me, thought Pabst, who was starting to hate Kamtchowsky for leaving him alone so long.

His tongue still inside Mara’s mouth, Andy handed Pabst a little plastic bag. Pabst took a disdainful look, and saw the pills inside.

–This the very coinage of your brain, quoted Andy, radiant. This bodiless creation, ecstasy, is very cunning in.

Pabst groaned something unintelligible; he enjoyed being difficult. A capsule slid into Mara’s mouth while he was still whinging and trying to make up his mind.

–Ecstasy! My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.

Andy closed the little bag, abandoned Hamlet and became more specific:

–I took a tab of ketamine, three pills, smoked two joints, did a little popper, two lines, a shot of grapita, a couple of—

–How can you even fit all that stuff inside?

There was no disdain in Pabst’s words now; nor was their admiration, or even neutrality. Andy put a hand on his shoulder.

–Don’t worry about it. The only neurons that die are the ones that got left behind, the stupidest ones. Drugs are natural selection’s neuro-chemical means of determining the fastest and fittest members of the cerebral ecosystem.

Andy winked, and threw his head back for a drink of water; then he said hello to young Ludwig, who was likewise intoxicated. The kid now standing beside Pabst was panting hard. Everyone called him Woody Woodpecker—he didn’t have red hair, but he did have a very wide forehead, and eyes that were perpetually on the verge of popping out. Pabst briefly imagined him pecking at a tree trunk; it wasn’t pleasant. He was tempted to say Rajá, turrito, rajá but was afraid the kid would think he was quoting Tango feroz (1993) rather than the living-dead Roberto Arlt. He remembered the movie’s plot with a fierce clarity: Tanguito smokes a joint, spends some time in jail, tangoes naked to “Malevaje” while pawing at the backside of his romantic interest, a chica bien, i.e. a rich, blond, treacherous snob. Basically he gets the shit beat out of him for being filthy, a drug addict, and a lover of Argentine rock and roll, all of which are more or less the same thing in this case. Near the end, a home movie shows him surrounded by his gang of filthy friends, and he secretes a posthumous rumination: “Not everything can be bought, and not everything’s for sale.” Cecilia Dopazo’s high boots had caused quite a stir—she waved them around in the air each time they fucked. In addition to being a professional failure for the actors involved, the film was also a macabre premonition of the times to come. Pabst took Woody by the shoulder and let slip a reflection:

–Nothing is as disgusting as the theatrical capitalism developed by the left to sell their products. It’s the kind of banality you often see in victorious sociological models: the practical syllogism according to which the truth is, by definition, on the side of the poor and afflicted for no reason other than that it flatters the reigning “democratic ideal” and a whole string of other euphemisms which must likewise never be interrogated. And the presence of a triumphant left in the cultural realm has consequences that are much worse than just bad movies. We watch bad movies because, as spectators, we’ve been condemned to the role of self-obsessed bourgeois ethnologists; downwardly self-obsessed. The victim’s story is transformed into fable, and the poisonous air that envelops all notions of hierarchy and authority—notions that one so obviously must reject—now enfolds a fresh new operation: being victims protects us from any and all moral or ethical judgments regarding our actions. Police violence erases all previous acts, granting automatic sainthood to the unimpeachably virtuous victim. It’s a good way to lose a war; in return one achieves a moral victory built on a philosophically flawed foundation.

Pabst fell quiet. The monologue had gotten him so worked up that his hands were trembling. Woody looked at him for half a second; Pabst noticed just as the kid was turning away, and kindly started talking again, in case anything hadn’t been clear:

–Actually, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve got their fist in the air (like in the ’70s) or whether they’ve withdrawn all their threats (not that they could have made good on them regardless)—the left’s lack of any real political strategies or texts served as nesting grounds for a Zeitgeist of settling for a stack of mediocrities, which is clearly all they were ever going to have to offer anyway.

And where had Kamtchowsky gone? He didn’t like it when she wandered off alone for so long. She wasn’t with Mara, who was dancing cumbia up near the stage with B. and some girlfriends who taught in the French Department. Woody and Andy headed off to the bathroom for a snort of ketamine, and Pablo followed along behind.