Maybe both things are true, thought Gaspar. There was no reason they should be incompatible. It wasn’t a cerebral lesion that haunted his father. And Adela’s disappearance was no delusion. It was soothing to think of illness as an answer and disorder as an explanation. But the truth had a way of rising to the surface, of scratching at the skin, of kicking you in the back of the neck.
Gowers’ book included many stories of depersonalization. That happened to Gaspar, too. He knew he was in his room with his uncle or his friends, but he felt like he was somewhere else, and everything was familiar and unknown at the same time. It only lasted seconds. But during those seconds, if one of those stranger-friends were to touch him, he could go on the defensive. At one wedding reception he had filmed, he’d felt dissociated after drinking a glass of champagne: sometimes alcohol unleashed his symptoms. For him, alcohol loosened something that was tightly fastened, a chain whose lock he’d been trying for years to find. The bride’s godfather had approached to ask him to film a few words he wanted to dedicate to the groom, and Gaspar heard him, understood him, but could not answer. In his private reality, he was in a hotel room, someone was sleeping in the other bed, and the reclining figure was enormous but unthreatening. What he was afraid of was a pregnant woman, naked and bald, who was in one corner of the hotel room. And the godfather, whom Gaspar recognized but who at the same time seemed a stranger, was clearly saying to him, let’s go outside, I want it to be a surprise. The man was a little drunk, and he took Gaspar by the arm. Gaspar shook him off violently with a disproportionate shove, and the man stumbled into a table and yanked off the tablecloth; though he was able to catch his balance before he hit the floor, the dishes and glasses all shattered, and the floral arrangements were spoiled. The crash dispelled Gaspar’s vision of the hotel room, the figure in the bed, and the naked woman. The godfather recovered, and Gaspar stammered out an apology: a group of men had formed a circle around them and seemed ready to beat him up. Amazingly, the bride’s godfather had believed his lie: It was clumsy, I was about to drop the camera and I tried to shake you off so I could grab it with both hands, but I didn’t calculate my strength well. I don’t know my own strength either, said the godfather, I’ve got a heavy hand. He was smiling. Maybe he didn’t want to ruin the party. It’s okay, he told the other men, and Gaspar followed him to the reception hall’s patio and filmed his words for the groom. Things hadn’t gotten out of hand. A shove. The man wouldn’t remember it as anything more than an accident and a misunderstanding, if he remembered it at all.
Gaspar had had a very clear déjà vu, only it was real. The memory of something true. He knew the figure in the bed was his father.
Pablo stretched out in bed with his arms behind his head, and he let Andrés use some of the goodies （that’s what he called the massage oils, “goodies”） that he’d brought back from Thailand. He closed his eyes and tried to think about someone other than Gaspar, but he couldn’t, and the frustration reached his erection, which disappeared despite the seductive scent of coconut. It didn’t matter. They’d spent the previous night with an employee at his father’s gas station. The guy had talked to them about a taxi driver from Quilmes, married with two daughters, who went crazy for a ménage à trois. Next time, they’d told him. Andrés was much more enthusiastic than Pablo, who was more careful. He knew straight guys like that could get violent. That’s why you should never pay. Andrés got turned on by paying. He was forty-three years old and was practically the only survivor among his group of friends. And he was rich. He’d always been rich—his family owned a chain of car dealerships. His boyfriend had died two years before and there were photos of him all over the apartment. Sometimes, when he was really high, Andrés cried because his boyfriend hadn’t gotten the pills in time, another year and he would have had the cocktail, you understand, you know. Pablo said yes but he didn’t understand: two years was a really long time. In that period, Pablo could think of at least five friends and acquaintances who had died. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t infected himself. Vicky had foretold it in one of her monstrous intuitions: you’re never going to catch it. Some people are like that. I think they should be studied, maybe they already are. Cases of immunity. Still, you should always be careful. Over and over he’d heard it, and Pablo, naturally obedient as he was, had been careful. And now he was healthy and alone. He and Andrés were alone: one missed his dead boyfriend, the other was in love with his heterosexual friend. Together they were a playbook for dissatisfaction, and maybe that’s why they got along so well.
Pablo was planning a show at Andrés’s gallery. Sure, it was in La Plata, but it was every bit as prestigious as a Buenos Aires gallery, partly because it was Andrés’s, partly because the periphery held a kind of suburban glamour, like some kind of discovery. Andrés knew it and that’s why, though he had a lot of money, he didn’t open a second site in Buenos Aires. That would have been the obvious thing, but then he’d lose all that snobby charm, which in the art world is worth more than anything. Andrés had a lot of ideas for the title of the show, but Pablo didn’t like any of them. Andrés is kind of tacky, you know I can’t call the show The Survivor, that’s straight out of the seventies, he’d said to Gaspar. Can you think of anything? And Gaspar had suggested The Plague Years. No way. You’re so tragic. For the moment, Pablo had a tentative title: This one died, that one got pills, the other one left. Or something like that. He hadn’t told Andrés his idea, but he would surely accept it. He wasn’t a picky person. They hadn’t been lovers for long. There was a twenty-year age difference between them and they would never have said they were boyfriends. Nor did Andrés know Pablo was in love with Gaspar. He would often tell him to bring me that spectacular friend of yours. I mean please, it’s diabolical, no one should be that beautiful. Are you sure we can’t convince him? He certainly is comfortable around fags. Makes me suspicious.
I’m sure, Pablo always said. And he thought: plus, I wouldn’t let you have him even if you tortured me.
The only unpleasant thing about his time with Andrés was the return of the ghost hand that grabbed his arm. He felt it, clearly and with each of its fingers, one night when he was going to the bathroom in Andrés’s apartment. The same situation as when he was a kid. Bathroom, night, hallway. But he was different now. He closed his eyes and didn’t shake it off, didn’t run, didn’t lock himself scared in the bathroom. He let the hand touch him. He felt it squeeze him, felt its heat, its contained violence. And then the hand let go. Later, trembling, he looked down at his arm: there were no marks from the ghost hand. He no longer believed it was all in his head. He had realized the hand was also lost in the darkness, like the forgotten remnant of an incomplete memory that was on a mission to touch, to surround with its fingers, to squeeze, to weakly push, and after that it didn’t know what to do. The hand was a residue left by the house, another of its side effects, like the socks Vicky used when she slept or her terror of the darkness; right now, for example, she was about to buy a used generator. He himself still felt repulsion and at times terror of dark places where bodies touched—he avoided having sex in pitch blackness—and he didn’t like hands that were too hot, because they reminded him of that fevered squeeze. Maybe the hand had been a warning. Maybe Vicky was wrong when she said he was immune, or at least she was wrong from a scientific point of view. In the years before the cocktail, he had seen so many people get sick and die, his friends, his lovers, that he’d often thought his survival was antinatural, as if something wanted to prolong his life so that, in the future, it could give him some kind of task. Or because, in the future, someone was going to need him.