The dead man waits dreaming.
Among the people walking quietly, the only sound came from the drums. She tried to move closer to the idol, craning her neck, but the bed was very high, inexplicably high. A woman pushed her when she tried to get too close and Marina recognized her; it was Emanuel’s mother. She tried to stop her but the woman murmured something about the barges and the dark depths of the water, where the house was, and she pushed Marina away from her with a head butt right when the people in the procession began to shout “yo, yo, yo,” and the thing they were carrying on the bed moved a little, enough for one of its gray arms to fall over the side of the bed. It was like the arm of a very sick person, and Marina remembered the fingers in her dream, the fingers falling from the rotten hand, and only then did she start running away with her gun drawn. While she ran she prayed in a low voice like she hadn’t done since she was a child. She ran between the precarious houses, through labyrinthine alleys, searching for the embankment, the shore, trying to ignore the fact that the black water seemed agitated, because it couldn’t be, because that water didn’t breathe, the water was dead, it couldn’t kiss the banks with waves, it couldn’t be ruffled by the wind, it couldn’t have those eddies or the current or that swelling, how could there be a swelling when the water was stagnant? Marina ran toward the bridge and didn’t look back and she covered her ears with her bloody hands to block out the noise of the drums.
Green Red Orange
It’s been almost two years since he became a green or red or orange dot on my screen. I never see him, he won’t let me. He won’t let anyone else, either. Every once in a long while he’ll talk, at least with me, but he doesn’t turn on his camera so I don’t know if he still has long hair and the thinness of a bird. He looked like a bird the last time I saw him, crouched down on the bed, his hands too large and his nails long.
Before he locked his bedroom door from inside, he’d had two weeks of so-called brain shivers. They’re a common side effect when you stop taking antidepressants, and they feel like gentle electrical discharges inside your head. He described them like the painful cramp you feel when you hit your elbow. I never really believed he felt them. I used to visit him in his dark room and listen to him talk about that and twenty other side effects, and it was like he was reciting from a medical book. I knew a lot of people who took or had taken antidepressants and none of their brains short-circuited; they just gained weight or had weird dreams or slept too much.
“You always have to be so special,” I told him one afternoon, and he covered his eyes with his arm. I remember I thought how sick I was of him and his whole soap opera. That day I also remembered the time when, after drinking half a bottle of wine, I’d pulled down his pants and his underwear and I licked and caressed his dick. Then, surprised and a little angry, I wrapped my hand around it and started to stroke it with the rhythm I knew was irresistible until he put a hand on my head and said, “It’s not going to work.” I left, furious, after dumping the rest of the wine over his sheets, and I didn’t go see him again for a week. We never talked about what had happened, and I never saw any red stains. I wasn’t in love with him anymore, I’d just wanted to show him that he was exaggerating that sadness of his for no reason. It was no use, though, just like it was no use getting angry or accusing him of lying.
When he locked himself in for good—his room had its own bathroom, with a shower—his mother thought he was going to kill himself and she called me in tears to ask me to come try and stop him. Of course at the time, neither she nor I knew his seclusion would be permanent. I talked to him through the door, I knocked, I called him on the phone. His psychiatrist did the same. I thought that in a few days he would open the door and start moping around the house as usual. I was wrong, and two years later I wait for him every night—green red orange—and I get scared when he’s gray for too many days. He doesn’t use his name, Marco. He just goes by M.
—
Sad people are merciless. Marco lives in his mother’s house and she cooks his four daily meals, and now she leaves them outside his closed door on a tray. She started doing that because he told her to, by text message. He also told her: Don’t wait for me or try to see me. She didn’t listen, of course. She waited for hours, but he has a freakish resolve. Marco can handle hunger. His mother tried letting him go for days without eating. She also tried, on the psychiatrist’s advice, cutting off his Internet service. Marco managed to steal the neighbor’s Wi-Fi until his mother felt guilty and got the connection back for him. He doesn’t thank her, or ask her for anything. His mother invites me to their house sometimes but I almost never accept—I can’t stand the thought of him listening to our conversation from his room. We go to a café near my apartment and all the conversations are the same. What can she do, he refuses treatment, she can’t kick him out, he’s her son, she feels guilty even though nothing ever happened to Marco, neither she nor her husband abused him, he was never molested, there are photos of seaside vacations and the world’s sweetest boy who dressed up as Batman and collected soccer cards in an album and liked sports. I always tell her that Marco is sick and it’s no one’s fault, it’s his brain, it’s chemical, it’s genetic. “If he had cancer,” I tell her, “you wouldn’t think it’s your fault. It isn’t your fault he’s depressed.”
She asks if he talks to me. I tell her the truth: yes, or more like he chats—because he talks less and less, he’s disappearing into the Internet; Marco is letters that titillate, and sometimes he just disappears without waiting for an answer—but that he never tells me what’s going on, what he’s feeling, what he wants. It’s horribly different from how it was before the lock-in. Before, he talked obsessively about his therapy, his pills, his problems concentrating; about when he’d stopped studying because he couldn’t remember anything of what he read; about his migraines; about not feeling hungry. Now, he talks about whatever he wants. In general, about the deep web and the Red Room and Japanese ghosts. But I don’t tell his mother that part. I lie and say we talk about books and movies that he watches and reads online. “Ah,” she breathes, “I can’t cut off his Internet then, it’s the only thing that connects him to life.”