ONE DAY MY FATHER ANNOUNCED that he’d be later than usual getting back from work. He went into unnecessary detail about the reason for this, speaking of the many implications of the signing of NAFTA. I had no idea then what NAFTA was, but I did know that anything that needed signing was never going to be either fun or interesting. Life had already taught me that lesson. One of the most feared moments of the whole of any year was when Teresa had to sign off on my report card. After her sixteenth birthday, Mariana had spent two weeks practicing what would be her new and definitive signature: her name written in a hand that seemed illegible to me. One day she even practiced that signature on some important document that Teresa had left by the telephone and received a severe reprimand. The previous year, at a school bazaar, I’d had to sign my marriage certificate: my wife—a girl in my class whose name, Karime, seemed mysterious and seductive—teased me about my signature and decided that our marriage was over, only seconds after it had begun. Signatures, in short, belonged to the murkiest areas of the adult world, so I assumed that my father’s late return from work that August evening was attributable to some evil force, and I was a little worried.
Mariana, on the other hand, seemed to cheer up when she heard that my father would be delayed; that gave her more leeway in terms of smoking cigarettes with Rat, drinking beer with Citlali, or breaking the unspoken rules of our home in some other way. For my part, I found that need to transgress incomprehensible; not because I had any particular liking for established authority or the rules Teresa imposed on us, but because I loved repetition, patterns, the way the days always divided along the same axis, like a square piece of paper retaining the memory of its previous folds. Transgression, my sister’s ultimate aim in life and almost obsessive desire, was for me like folding a piece of paper in the opposite direction to the crease, like ignoring all the clues that seemed to be shouting out for you to choose a given adventure. Since then I’ve learned that a piece of paper can be folded down the middle only so many times, and that the adventures that lead you to the most satisfactory ending of a story aren’t the ones you choose by rationally weighing the significance of the clues, but those undertaken in the heat of the moment—that sheet of paper without folds, that eternal square with no memory.
That day, Rat turned up, as was usual, at about three in the afternoon, accompanied by one of his bodyguards and carrying a paper bag containing cans of beer. He looked cleaner than usual, as if he’d showered before leaving home. I wondered if his escort had waited in the street until he’d completed his ablutions. That’s the way it would work. With his friends, Rat behaved like a hardened criminal, although his actual record included, at very most, petty theft from local grocery stores and perhaps the occasional use of soft drugs. His freshly showered appearance humanized him even further in my eyes, as if he’d finally fallen from the Olympian heights of neighborhood legend on which I had set him one day when I saw him from afar in the Rec. If Rat took showers, he probably also had a mom who made him take them. For the moment, I had no mom, so the bottom line was that I could do whatever I wanted, at least until the end of the vacation. That realization suddenly made me feel a little more grown-up—more grown-up than Rat, which was saying something.
Mariana shouted at me to go to my bedroom and close the door. She’d gradually become more confident in her “responsible adult” role and by that time could no longer be intimidated by the threat of snitching: she ordered me around with self-assurance.
Rat ruffled my hair as I passed him on my way to the stairs. “What a crackbrain,” he said, and his bodyguard—the boy with the eyebrow stud—responded with an idiotic laugh that didn’t sound natural to me. The hair ruffling didn’t bother me; there was something companionable in the way Rat treated me, as if he’d been converted into a medium and was channeling the fraternal feelings my sister—a much colder individual—never dared express.
In my bedroom, I tried to read my Choose Your Own Adventure novel but couldn’t concentrate and soon set it aside. I discovered that I had a loose tooth. My upper and lower central milk teeth had all already fallen out, but one upper canine and three molars were refusing to go, despite my habit of constantly poking them with my tongue. That loose tooth heralded good things to come: not that I believed in the tooth fairy (my mother had decided to bring us up in a strict form of atheism that excluded Santa Claus and other such chimeras), but whenever one of my teeth fell out, I was taken to a bookstore in Coyoacán to choose something from the stock. Thanks to that ritual, my bedroom shelf had been gradually populated by vampire stories, books with three-dimensional optical illusions or pictures of dinosaurs, and children’s novels of every variety. I liked Coyoacán: it seemed a much more cheerful neighborhood than Educación, had books and pigeons and carts selling chicharrones.
Given the imminent loss of a tooth, my dilemma was now whether to ask for a new title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series or the book about samurais I’d seen on my last visit to the store. I thought that the samurai book, being about Japan, might help me develop my skills as an origamist. But I also needed to hone my detective skills if I wanted to work out exactly where in Chiapas Teresa had gone camping and how long she was going to spend there before coming home. Her prolonged absence was beginning to cause me a certain amount of distress, and the image of the Bogeyman dropping me into his bottomless sack, which haunted my dreams each night, with more or less sinister variants, was obviously the result of that distress.
I heard the metal gate to the street closing and deduced that the boy with the eyebrow stud had left. It wasn’t unusual for Rat to turn up with someone else, pretending they had planned the visit together, and for that person to then mysteriously disappear, leaving him and Mariana alone. As I’ve said, all that subterfuge went over my head, although in hindsight it seems perfectly clear proof of Rat’s intentions.
As usual, horrible music was issuing from my sister’s bedroom, occasionally punctuated by Rat’s booming, almost aggressive laughter.
I entered my Zero Luminosity Capsule. The noise was slightly muffled in there, as if coming from a far-off galaxy. It occurred to me that if he was in the mood, the Bogeyman might also steal teenagers; that one of these days he’d come to the house and put Rat and Mariana into his bottomless sack, and they would laugh and pretend to be having a good time (I couldn’t believe they were ever actually having a good time). But he’d never find me: I was beyond all that, in an empty, unreachable—really comfortable and radically dark—space where the only things to be seen were the explosions of colors that occur when you shut your eyes tight. I concentrated on those shapes for some time. If I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, the shapes danced in interesting ways, like the New Year’s fireworks display Teresa had made us watch from the roof on a couple occasions.
The minutes, perhaps hours, passed. The explosions of colors on my closed eyelids started to organize themselves into perfect origami pagodas, cranes, frogs, and balloons. Then, little by little, the shapes and characters began to weave themselves into stories. The transition to sleep was smooth, painless. I dreamed of fractal structures: origami figures with midribs folded over like a boy doubled up in the Bogeyman’s sack. I dreamed I was doing origami with newspapers from the previous eight months: newspapers with photos of balaclavas and political killings, and Brazilian goals in the soccer World Cup.
Toward the end of my REM sleep, when my body was beginning to feel the effects of being doubled up on the floor of my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I dreamed that I stole the letter Teresa had written telling my father she was in Chiapas, and made it into an incredibly complex origami figure that included various species of animals, multitudes of people crowded together in the middle of the jungle, and a castle with over forty bedrooms, behind whose doors mysterious, narrow, inescapable labyrinths awaited me.
When I woke, sweaty and aching, the house was silent. Mariana’s music seemed to have stopped, as had Rat’s booming laughter. I remained in the capsule for a few minutes, incapable of moving my legs. I’d spent too long in the same position. I wondered if it was dark or still light outside; if my father had come back from work; if there were any leftovers in the kitchen to alleviate the pangs of hunger I was suddenly conscious of.
I slowly opened the closet door. Once outside, I did the pre-competition warm-up exercises the PE teacher had taught us. I sat on the floor with my legs straight and tried to touch my forehead to my right and then left knee. When I did this with my eyes closed I experienced a fresh outburst of the colored shapes I’d seen just before falling asleep, but this time they were less intense, as if the Zero Luminosity Capsule had amplified their effect, clarity, and complexity.
A languid early evening light was filtering through the curtains of my bedroom window. At that age, I used to find the speed of the evening dizzying. It disturbed me to watch the advance of the shadows, the way they became elongated and crept across the tiled floor of my bedroom like hungry reptiles and then disappeared into the unbounded darkness of night. But that evening was different: it was an evening on pause, as if the enormous floodlights of a sports stadium or spots of a film set were illuminating the street, generating an unreal atmosphere, an exaggeratedly dramatic light, a manufactured dusk. I wondered how long I’d spent in the closet, thought that maybe it wasn’t dusk but dawn the next day. That would explain the prevailing calm, the sense of newness that seemed to cloak the world.
I’d never before been completely awake at dawn. Once, when we left home very early to go to Acapulco on vacation, my father carried me, still asleep in my pajamas, to the back seat of the car, and in that drowsy state, I’d had a glimpse of something like this piercing, almost false light that was weighing down on the sheets of colored origami paper scattered haphazardly across the floor.
In the hallway, I noticed that both my sister’s and my father’s doors were open, and inside each room reigned the same calm and dwindling light: there was no one upstairs.
I rubbed my eyes with the backs of my hands (new, still tenuous shapes exploded behind my eyelids) and went down to the living room to check the clock. I was disoriented; the Zero Luminosity Capsule had functioned all too well on this occasion, isolating me from the world, from noise and the passing of time. Perhaps several years had gone by; perhaps I’d woken in a future world where my father and sister were dead, along with my friend Guillermo and everyone one else I knew.
I mulled over this possibility as I made my cautious way downstairs (the Bogeyman might have been in the house), feeling the cold floor under my bare feet. At the turn in the stairs, by peering stealthily over the bannister rails, I was able to see the living room clock: the hour hand was pointing to seven. Probably seven in the evening: at that time in the morning we’d usually be leaving for school—when it wasn’t vacation—and the light never looked anything like what was in my bedroom at that moment. But there was still no way to be sure of what day, month, or year it was. Perhaps Teresa had returned from Chiapas, bringing with her the man with the pipe and balaclava, plus a bag of presents for me. Deep in that improbable fantasy, I jumped the last three steps, suddenly excited.
But the living room was empty. And of course Teresa wasn’t there, nor was the man with the pipe and balaclava. Mariana wasn’t there either, nor my father. The TV was on but with the volume turned down, and the images on the screen seemed really weird, otherworldly, as if the programming had also been infected by the strange aura floating between things.
As I turned toward the kitchen, a voice shook me from my dreamy lethargy, giving me such a shock that I almost wet my pants: “Where the hell have you been?”
Against all the odds, that voice belonged to Rat, who was stretched out on the couch. I thought it odd that I hadn’t spotted him before. Perhaps he had the power of making himself invisible. Perhaps the use of poor-quality temporary tattoos had given him that power, like some kind of abnormal superhero. I didn’t reply because I wasn’t sure how to address him; it occurred to me that I’d never actually spoken to him before: I’d only ever talked to my sister in his presence, never directly to him. My father had often told me that I should never address older people I didn’t know well by their first names, but that didn’t quite seem to fit for Rat. I didn’t even know his real name. Should I call him Señor Rat? That didn’t seem right either. Moreover, he might be under the influence of temporary tattoos. He might even have killed my father and sister while high and locked them in a Zero Luminosity Capsule or in the garage among the boxes where Teresa stored her university books (“We can’t have them in the living room,” my father had once said. “They gather dust.”).
“Mariana asked me to stay here in case you came back. She thought you’d run away and went out to find you before your old man gets back. You killed the party, kid.” I had absolutely no idea what Rat was talking about. What party could I have killed when all I’d done was fall asleep in the closet? I looked around carefully for any sign of a party. Had Citlali been there with her reedy voice and smell of bubblegum?
Rat noted my confusion and added a little more information: “Mariana was real worried, she almost burst out crying when we found your room empty. Where the fuck have you been?”
I suddenly understood that Rat was something like my sister’s boyfriend, and I felt dumb for not having realized this earlier: all the clues were there, but I’d passed them over. What other truths was I missing? My detective skills had let me down. I was a bad detective, a bad origamist, and even a bad brother. Giant cracks were appearing in my megalomania.
The revelation that Rat was in some way part of my extended family was a shock, but I decided to keep my opinion to myself until Teresa came back: she’d never allow such a relationship. My father, on the other hand, was completely unaware of the sort of person Rat was, and had neither the instinct nor intuition needed to understand that the relationship was bad news, that it presaged my sister’s undoing, her addiction to temporary tattoos or membership in a gang of neighborhood lowlifes.
“I was in my Zero Luminosity Capsule,” I proudly replied as if challenging him to believe me.
“Hell, you’re a crazy kid,” he retorted, smiling for the first time.
In the dining room, a slanting light entered through a gap in the window frame. The living room was a little darker. With the exception of my and Mariana’s bedrooms, the house never caught the sun.
I asked Rat what day it was; his response was to light up. The whole house smelled of cigarette smoke. Mariana normally opened the windows when she smoked indoors, and then lit a scented candle before my father returned (he probably noticed anyway, but chose to ignore the problem). On this occasion there had been no escape route for the smoke, and the smell was repulsive. Rat was an anxious smoker; he used to take rapid drags on his cigarettes, seemingly feeling that it would be bad luck to let them burn down on their own.
Teresa used to smoke now and again, but always outside the house, leaning against the wall by the garage door; I remember seeing her there when I came home from school, hunched under the weight of my backpack. Teresa smoking with an absent air, giving me a distracted kiss, looking toward the end of the cul-de-sac (a dead-end street, like her marriage, like the whole country, like the obsession with writing everything down that, twenty-three years later, has me bedbound.)
Rat stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and went to the kitchen to put the butt in the trash. I was surprised by this action, which displayed a level of care I hadn’t thought him capable of. He usually left his butts ground on a plate, and it was my sister or Citlali who collected them up, worried about keeping the house presentable.
In spite of the urgency of the situation (at that very moment, my sister might be finally convinced that the Bogeyman existed and had kidnapped me), Rat was keeping his cool, perhaps—I thought—because at heart he didn’t take it seriously, or maybe it was just that the alcohol he’d consumed had affected his tongue.
“I’m going to my room to do origami,” I said, in no mood for acting friendly. My sister would get tired of looking for me and return home. I was ready to start toward the stairs, but as soon as I’d turned my back on Rat, he detained me, grasping my shoulder with a firm, heavy hand. “No way, knucklehead. You’re coming with me. We’re going to look for your sis.”