She says stuff like that, connect to life, forge ahead, we have to be strong: she’s a stupid woman. I always ask her why she thinks I’ll be able to get Marco out of his room—because she often asks me to knock on the door and beg. Sometimes I do it, and later on at night he finds me on chat and writes: Don’t be dumb. Just ignore her.
“Why do you think I can get him out?” I ask her, and she pours milk into her coffee until it’s ruined, turned into a hot cream. “The last time I saw him happy was when you two were together,” she says, and she lowers her head. She uses bad-quality dye and the tips of her hair are always too light, and the roots gray. What she says is not true; Marco and I lived in silence and impotence. I’d ask him, “What’s wrong with you?” and he’d reply that nothing was wrong, or he’d sit in bed and scream that he was a soulless shell. “The soap opera” was my name for those tantrums that always ended in crying fits and drunken binges. Maybe he told his mother we were happy. Maybe she simply decided to believe it. Maybe he decided that his sadness was going to be my companion forever, for as long as he wanted, because sad people are merciless.
—
“Today I read an article about people like you,” I wrote to him one morning at dawn. “You’re a hikikomori. You know about them, right? They’re Japanese people who lock themselves in their rooms and their families support them. They don’t have any mental problems, it’s just that things are unbearable for them: the pressure of university, having a social life, those kinds of things. Their parents never kick them out. It’s an epidemic in Japan. It almost doesn’t exist in other countries. Sometimes they come out, especially at night, alone. To find food, for example. They don’t make their mothers cook for them like you do.”
“I come out sometimes,” he answered.
I hesitated before answering.
“When?”
“When my mother goes to work. Or early in the morning. She doesn’t hear me, she takes sleeping pills.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You know the best thing about the Japanese? They classify ghosts.”
“Tell me what time you come out and we’ll meet.”
“The ghosts of children are called zashiki-warashi and supposedly they aren’t evil. The evil ones are the ghosts of women. They have a lot of spirits that are girls cut in half, for example. They drag themselves over the floor, they’re just torsos, and if you catch sight of them they kill you. There’s a kind of mother ghost called ubume, and they’re women who died in childbirth. They steal children or bring them candy. They also classify the ghosts of people who died at sea.”
“Tell me what time you come out and I’ll visit you.”
“I was lying about coming out.”
I angrily closed the chat window, though he didn’t disconnect, he stayed green. I am not going to go stand in front of his house for the six hours his mother is at work, I swore to myself, and I kept my promise.
—
Internet in the nineties was a white cable that went from my computer to the phone jack on the other side of the house. My Internet friends felt real, and I got anxious when the connection or the electricity went out and I couldn’t meet them to talk about symbolism, glam rock, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Manic Street Preachers, English occultists, Latin American dictatorships. One of my friends was locked in, I remember. She was Swedish, and her English was perfect—I had almost no Argentine friends online. She had a social phobia, she said. I can’t recover her emails; they’re backed up on an old computer that won’t turn on. I deleted the account years ago. She used to send me documentaries on VHS and CDs that were impossible to get outside Europe. Back then I didn’t wonder how she managed to get to the post office since she supposedly couldn’t go out. Maybe she was lying. But the packages came from Sweden: she wasn’t lying about where she was. I still have the stamps, although the videotapes got moldy and the CDs stopped working and she in turn disappeared forever, a ghost of the net, and I can’t look for her because I don’t remember her name. I remember other names. Rhias, for example, from Portland, fan of the decadent movement and of superheroes. We had a kind of romance, and she sent me poems by Anne Sexton. Heather, from England, who still exists and who, she says, will always be grateful to me for introducing her to Johnny Thunders. Keeper, who fell in love with young boys. Another girl who wrote beautiful poems that I can’t remember either, except for the occasional bad line. “My blue someone,” for example, mi alguien triste. Marco offered to get them all back for me. All my lost friends. He says being locked in turned him into a hacker. But I’d rather forget them because forgetting people you only knew in words is odd; when they existed they were more intense than people in real life, and now they’re more distant than strangers. Plus, I’m a little scared of them. I found Rhias on Facebook. She accepted my friend request and I wrote to her happily, but she never answered and we never spoke again. I think she doesn’t remember me or she only remembers me a little, vaguely, as if she’d met me in a dream.
—
Marco never scares me except when he talks about the deep web. He says he needs to learn about it. That’s how he puts it: it’s a need. The deep web is all the sites that aren’t indexed in search engines. It’s much bigger than the superficial web that we all use. Five thousand times bigger. I don’t understand it and I get bored when he explains how to find it, but he assures me it’s not that hard. “What’s there?” I ask him.
“They sell drugs, weapons, sex,” he tells me. “I’m not interested in most of it,” he says, “but there are some things I want to see. Like the Red Room. It’s a chat room you pay to get into. People talk about a tortured girl whose breasts are beaten to a pulp by a thin black man who kicks them. Then they rape her until they kill her. The video of the torture is for sale, and so is an archive of her screams that don’t sound like anything human and are unforgettable. And I want to learn about the RRC,” he says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“The Real Rape Community. They have no rules. They starve kids to death. They force them to have sex with animals. They strangle them and of course, they rape them. It’s the most perverse place on the web, or it was. Now there’s a place for sex with corpses.”
“Having sex with children is much worse than with corpses,” I write.
“Sure,” replies Marco.
“I wonder where they get the kids’ corpses.”
“Anywhere. I don’t know why you all think that kids are cared for and loved.”
“Did someone do something to you when you were little?”
“Never. You always ask me the same thing, you always want explanations.”
“I think this whole thing about the deep web is a lie. Who is ‘you all’?”
“It’s not a lie, there are articles in serious newspapers. Look them up. They mostly talk about sites where you can hire murderers and buy drugs. You all, people like you.”