The Unstable Order of Things

Chapter 1: “TOWN”

The damp carpets on the floor smelled of cigarettes. It was early, and I hadn’t slept a wink—hadn’t even closed my eyes or touched the bed.

I always wondered why they didn’t change the carpet when they decided to convert an office building into a student residence. Nancy, the owner, would probably tell me she didn’t know that we university students were never going to pick up a vacuum cleaner—simply because many of us had never even been near one. Or that she didn’t know we’d cover it in cigarette burns, chewing gum, and mud from the dirty soles of our sneakers. How expensive could it have been to rip the carpet out? I’m not saying put in porcelain tile; just leave the old, ruined parquet underneath. That’s it. No one would have cared in the slightest, and we would’ve been spared years of breathing in that stench—a mix between roadkill and wet dog. But there I was, sitting on the carpet of a hallway that only escaped being a descent into hell thanks to the sunlight streaming through the skylight above my head.

Patricio and Néstor came down to pick me up. They were laughing at—I’m willing to bet—the least funny idiocy on the face of the earth. They were the first familiar faces I’d seen in months, and I sighed in relief. They had spent the entire summer break in Trelew, where they’d gone to high school and where they were from. It was our first day of classes for the semester. This was the year, supposedly, that we were going to graduate.

“Hey, Elías,” Néstor said. “Everything good?”

“What’d you do over the break?” Patricio followed up.

“I stayed here,” I told them.

They looked at me, uncomprehending. I could tell, even though I avoided eye contact at all costs. “Didn’t you rent out your room?” they asked almost in unison. They were confused, sure. But I was more so.

“I had to come back early,” I said.

With Patricio and Néstor, you always had to be cautious when choosing words to string a sentence together. Nothing escaped them. I was always laconic, even more so in their company. A simple brooding thought, a tilt of the head, a mere twitch of the mouth could put you in danger. The fact that they’d known each other since high school made them capable of conspiring to try and decode me. Patricio had a crystal ball for a head; it felt like he could read your thoughts and he never shut up, not for a second. Néstor was sharper and more guarded; he chose the moments he opened his mouth with wisdom. After three years of classes together and living in the same residence, we thought we knew each other well enough.

Consequently, I couldn’t take them for fools. They knew my answer had a subtext, and they also knew that even if they tried until their dying breath, it was easier to raise the dead than to wring a word out of me.

Back then, I believed that incomprehension itself had no bottom; rather, you created it yourself, and if you had the courage, you stepped through it. That brief analogy sometimes worked—it would process and reveal itself to you—and sometimes it didn’t. I still don’t know why.

It was 2006; I was twenty-one. I didn’t yet know even a quarter of what the world was or could become, though that summer I began to understand.

I wanted to buy myself something—I don’t even remember what because it’s irrelevant now—but it was expensive and I needed money. So, I had the “brilliant” idea of subletting my room at the residence, one of the few singles with decent ventilation. That’s how a classmate of Néstor’s from English class rented the room and moved in instantly. He said he didn’t plan on paying me until he left, so I folded some clothes, stuffed them into a fairly ruined bag, and headed to the room Patricio and Néstor shared with the intention of borrowing it—only to find out that my idea had seemed fantastic to them too, and they had also decided to rent theirs out.

Thinking back, I could have looked for a job. A few days earlier, I’d seen a “help wanted” sign for the night shift at the 24-hour kiosk downstairs. I should have talked to the owner, a fat, dirty old metalhead who was always eating a cold-cut sandwich while serving you and who would light my cigarette when I went down for school and forgot my lighter. I was sure he would have said yes. I would have worked and gotten that money I needed, and Lili—a nice girl in my classes who lived in a beautiful duplex a few blocks away—would have hosted me while I clandestinely rented out my room. I would have saved myself, among other things, these absurd words on the computer.

It wasn’t in my plans to go back to the town. I hadn’t returned since I’d settled in the city. Going back was always the very last of my options. I didn’t go back for elections, or to see the friends who had stayed behind and vanished over time. And if I’d gotten the job at the kiosk, if I’d talked to Lili, if I’d given up on the money and the thing I wanted to buy and kicked out the guy who rented my room, I wouldn’t have even had to consider it. But then, that night, I believed I had no other options. So I slumped down in the hallway in front of what had been my door until that morning, on the stinking carpet, using my bag as a pillow, and squinted my eyes. The bus left at eleven-thirty.

When the mind is fragile, the will becomes unstable and struggles to navigate the paths of sanity. And deep down, I know why I did it. It’s hard for me to admit for fear of disappointing myself again, but I stopped questioning it when I understood that that boy, in his naivety, still had hope. He wanted to know if they’d fixed the pool pump, if the downstairs bathroom was usable yet, if Mom had solved all her problems, if my brothers had set aside their pride and come back to see her, if they had helped her, if Dad had returned home, if she would smile upon seeing him arrive.

My mom was watching through the window, camouflaged behind the sheer curtain, when I stepped off the remis that dawn. She stared at me for a moment; the curtain moved, and she vanished. She had unlocked the door for me, but she wasn’t waiting in the foyer. I barely saw her the next morning when I went out to read in the yard while she ran the vacuum over the pool. The pump worked. From the black shadow of the porch, I raised my hand. “Hi, Mom.” She looked at me again, from a distance—a great distance—but didn’t even respond with a grimace. The shadow of the cap she wore prevented me from deciphering her gaze.

The house in the town was worse than I remembered. They had turned a mansion into a dilapidated ruin. Void of light, silent, wrapped in an uncomfortable and depressing aura. Cold, vast, shadowed. Everything was still; not even the flies flew, and the wind chimes at the entrance didn’t ring with the breeze. Stillness lurked around every corner and followed you to the room, which was no longer a room but a dumping ground for junk. The large window facing the yard had its curtains removed, and the glass was filthy, coated in a thin layer of sticky dust. They had sold almost all the furniture, and it smelled worse than ever—of damp wood, humid cold, mold, and mothballs. A thin mattress was spread on the floor, right next to a couple of black bags which, I assumed, held the few things I’d left behind before moving to the city. On the nightstand, there was nothing but an empty deodorant and two one-peso coins. I wasn’t expected; I wasn’t welcome either.

I looked for a set of sheets, stole a curtain from the laundry room, and grabbed a cushion from the sofa. My mom, I assumed, was hiding in her room. I went back up. I opened the window; I needed to soothe the stillness, for the wind to make something move, to make the bags rustle, to swirl my hair. For something to distract me. Anything. But nothing moved, and I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t even try. My stomach churned every time I blinked and everything went black, because it reminded me of being in that room—where that bed used to be—three, five, ten, fifteen years ago, with the same fear I felt then. And I felt everything still again: the half-open door still, the curtains still, the darkness still, imperturbable; myself still, motionless, as if that way they couldn’t see me.

During those days, I never saw my old man, which confirmed my suspicions. The rest of the days, before going to bed, I would stop on the stair landing and watch her. I even came to pity her. On the sofa in front of the TV, half-drunk, having not bathed for days. I wasn’t the only one who was alone, and yet, our lonelinesses weren’t even close to being the same.

The faint murmur of commercials and the flickering lights of the screen invaded the house, climbed the stairs, and reverberated off every wall until they reached my room. I diagnosed myself with perpetual insomnia. It was five in the morning and the TV was still going, though my mother probably wasn’t. Eyes fixed on the high ceiling. Hands clasped over my stomach. Sheets tangled around my legs. Heat, cold, humidity, mothballs. Out of the corner of my eye, the curtains I’d found and hung; the wind inhaled them toward the quiet night of the town and exhaled them toward that still room that shook me so much inside.

I endured, barely, five days in the town. I overdosed on pills in my mom’s bathroom. Why in her bathroom? I asked myself for a long time. And for a long time, the answer was the same: because the pills were there, in the bottom drawer of the shelf in her bathroom. Why didn’t I lock the door? Why didn’t I even bother to close it? Why didn’t I take the pills and go to another bathroom, another room, where they would have taken longer to find me? Until I dared to step through the bottom of the incomprehension and knew it was because I wanted her to see me. I wanted her, upon returning from the supermarket, when she went upstairs to change her sandals for flip-flops, to see my legs stretched out, already inert, resting against the toilet. And I wanted her, when she pushed the ajar door, to be struck by the image of my body—choked on its own vomit, pale, well and truly dead, already on another plane, far from her, from the empty, still, and horrible house. I wanted her to never be able to forget what her silence broke inside of me.

Yes, I was in Córdoba. But not at the residence, not on vacation. I was hospitalized until mid-February, when I requested a voluntary discharge. My mom went to pick me up because someone had to. She gripped my arm and dragged me out of the clinic, shoved me like a criminal into her silver SUV, and drove for nearly an hour without saying a word. After driving for almost an hour through the burning city, she turned on her hazards at Caseros and Cañada and got out of the car. She opened the trunk and, with all the spite in the world, threw my bag to the ground, where it landed in a murky puddle evaporating by the curb.

My mom, among many things, was shrewd; she wasn’t going to let herself be consumed by guilt. She was going to pay for my residence; she was going to keep sending me money. But she would do whatever it took so that I wouldn’t appear, ever again, through that door as a reminder of the years of remorse she carried on her back—of guilt, of fear that I might speak. Of what she saw, and which then continued to play like a constant film on her infarcted retinas.

That week I had to kick out Néstor’s friend. He cursed me out and didn’t pay. He left my room a disaster; filthy, disorganized. The desk, to one side of the bed, was covered in greasy potato chip bags and crumpled, crossed-out papers. The ashtray overflowed with old butts. He forgot an English dictionary of synonyms and antonyms on top of the TV and had left twenty pesos inside a drawer. The uretic scent of his sweat had soaked into the carpet, as had the smell of cigarette smoke, dirty clothes, and sex.

Despite being used to the summer loneliness of the residence, the days passed slower than usual. I didn’t do much; I went out little. Perhaps I wasn’t conscious of how bad off I still was. Time was immortal, and I was tired of being patient with it. I needed to keep my mind occupied—to study, to go get photocopies, to change my pens. I needed to stop spending hours and hours re-reading the same books, having the same views from the window, hearing the same voice on the same radio program. I needed to see Patricio and Néstor, to have them laugh at some nonsense, to hear them tell more stories on the way to the faculty and back, to run for the bus, to have them tell me about what they’d done in Trelew; I needed us to eat mortadella and cheese sandwiches on the rooftop at night while we waved and whistled at people passing by on the street. I needed to forget everything that had happened to me a few kilometers away, just a few days ago, back there in the town.

The night before the day classes started again, I sat in the hallway from very late until very early. Anxiety prevented me from even thinking about sleep. I was there long before Patricio and Néstor found me. I sat smoking, watching the demise of time on the wall clock, whose second hand moved slowly—so slowly it seemed the batteries would run out at any moment. But no. It moved, and thus murdered the minutes, the hours, and the night that was slipping through my hands and leaving.

The residence was fairly large, four floors. On the ground floor, there was a co-ed bathroom, a communal kitchen, and a living room with some desks, small tables, sofas, and beanbags. The second and third floors had once been large offices separated into cubicles or by glass partitions; the marks were still on the carpet. However, the new owner had decided to maximize the space and build about six bedrooms on each floor. Some were larger and could be shared. Néstor and Patricio shared and never had problems. But mine was a single, separated from the others by a sheet of drywall and thin, cheap insulation that didn’t serve its purpose at all. Privacy was a non-existent quality.

I saw the girls returning to those rooms. Most shared; they didn’t like being alone. Some were new, others I’d known for quite a while. I heard the laughter of those who shared and the melody of music accompanying the lonelier ones, the boys rearranging their furniture and talking nonsense. They walked past me, shuffling their feet, dragging bags, kicking boxes. I went up and sat in that spot again—my portion of space beside the bedroom door, against the wall, under the skylight that, at that hour of the morning, highlighted the dark circles under my eyes, the grime on my glasses, and the grease in my hair. I thought of my house, the porch, the summer. I missed sinking my toes into the tall grass.

After a while, as I was trying to lace up my sneakers, a door opened without closing again. I looked up. The light coming from above blinded me a bit, and the abruptness of the movement made me dizzy. A boy with arched eyebrows looked at me from the same height as that light source. He was standing in front of a half-open door—a thin door, almost cardboard—that shared a threshold with mine.

“Can’t you go smoke somewhere else?” His efforts to sound nice were almost nil. “All the smoke is coming in.”

“You’re going to have to get used to it.”

“The sidewalk is right there. You can go there.”

“‘Right there’ is like fifty meters.”

“Go somewhere else then.” His tone was insistent but calm.

He made a move to go back into his room.

“You’re going to have to get used to it,” I repeated before he closed the door. “And not just because of me.”

Barefoot, I stood up. I had my sneakers in my hand, held by the ends of the laces. I crushed the half-smoked cigarette against the sole of one of them. I didn’t take a single step, but I stared at him because even though his back was turned, his hand on the knob and his body practically inside, I knew he was trying to spot me out of the corner of his eye.

“Everyone smokes here.” A bit of ironic spite.

“That’s not an excuse; it’s gross. The smoke comes in and stays all day. The floor is carpeted. You’ll never get the smell out.”

“And you’re going to have to get used to it; it’s the primary scent.” A malicious, clumsy smile. I found a certain satisfaction in getting under people’s skin.

“Tell me, please, that there are secondary scents.”

“Have you ever smoked weed?”

“For fuck’s sake.”

He shook my hand. It was large, soft, white. His knuckles, filled with slightly darker fine wrinkles, turned pale when he squeezed mine. My hand vanished inside his. He squeezed firmly. His index finger against my palm, thumb against the back. Strong. As if wanting to pierce my skin, bore through the muscle, and tear my tendons apart.

“My name is Joaquín. They call me Rosa, but don’t call me that,” he said, introducing himself subtly. “I arrived last night. Sorry, I’m tired.”

“Why do they call you Rosa?” I laughed in his face. His last name was Rosas. “Elías García. They call me Elías. And don’t worry. There’s also the smell of air freshener sometimes, when the girls get tired of our filth.”

“Good news. You sleep here?” He nodded toward my door.

I nodded. I showed him the cigarette I still held between my fingers, crushed, broken, and extinguished. Are you happy? I would have asked him when he laughed. It wasn’t necessary because he was. In fact, he was very happy. The corners of his mouth sank like craters into his freckled cheeks, curving his lips into a sort of rosy, fleshy crescent that was occasionally illuminated by the flash of his front teeth. He gave a thumbs up and shut himself in the room that shared a threshold with mine. The slam made the drywall vibrate. Ten seconds later, I did the same.

I sat on the bed—unmade, disorganized—with my feet clad in the grime they’d collected passing over the hallway carpet. I set about finishing lacing my sneakers. And I got distracted, shortly after, because there was a knock at the door. It was the boy again, standing before me, back to the light streaming through the skylight, shading his tall, sturdy anatomy. His posture was awkward. He was picking at a bit of skin by his fingernail. The eyes he used to look at me and observe my surroundings disturbed those weak shadows because they were yellow, like the sun.

“I promise I’m not smoking,” I said before he could protest again. He laughed again. He searched for the right words while I grew impatient. He remained awkward, somewhat shy. That wasn’t going to last long.

“It’s not that. I need a hammer,” he declared, scratching the back of his neck. “And I have neither the desire nor the money to go buy one. You don’t happen to have one, do you?”

“What do I look like to you?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, though it sounded like an apology. “You look like you’ve been here a long time.”

I did have a hammer, and I gave it to him after searching through my things for a bit. I remembered having it despite never having used it. I had a complete toolbox, actually. A saw, Allen wrenches of various sizes, a screwdriver, nails, screws, wood glue, Super Glue—tools whose names and uses I didn’t know. And a hammer. I already told you that my mom didn’t like to be consumed by guilt.

I shut myself in again to wait impatiently for the deafening mess outside to subside. I finished lacing my sneakers, opened the window, turned on the floor fan, changed the sheets, lit an incense stick. I went out later—a while later, around nine in the morning—when almost everyone had left for part-time jobs or the faculty. And I sat where I usually did, in my portion of space, my spot on the carpet.

I sat waiting for Patricio and Néstor to finish changing. And while I waited, I looked at the door that shared a threshold with mine. And I thought—because it’s the only thing I did frequently—about what was happening inside. What was happening with the freckles, the rigid tendons, the resilient muscles that had yielded under the strength of mine. What was happening with the blonde curls and the yellow eyes. I bet that, despite their singularity, they moved as a whole inside the room, voluntarily chained together. I began to hear the thuds produced by the hammer. I imagined how his warm hand—the same one that had shaken mine—positioned a nail, thin and small, against the surface of the drywall we shared. How it coordinated with the other hand, the one holding the hammer as firmly as I held his wrist. And how that hand coordinated with the muscles of his arm, which flexed and tensed, over and over, rhythmic, hurried, to pierce the wall, to hang a picture, to hang a shelf, so the moment of annoying sounds would end quickly. How his hair moved, how it fell across his yellow eyes, blocking his view, making him hammer his finger.

Patricio and Néstor had just turned into my hallway and were laughing at—I’m willing to bet—the least funny idiocy on the face of the earth.

“Hey, Elías,” they said when they saw me.

“Everything good?” Patricio continued.

“What’d you do over the break?”…

…"

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