14

I PICKED HIM and his Argentine friend up from their hostel, and the embrace was long and charged with a strange familiarity enabled by our correspondence. We ate calamari and danced for hours in a salsa bar and then in a downtown bar. We drank tequila. And later, when we ran out of money, we drank vodka so gross that, despite the euphoria, we were forced to leave the bar. We wandered around the city and at some point held hands and walked and the three of us went back to my house euphoric, and listening to music blasting at full volume, we jumped on the mattress and swallowed some blue pills they’d brought. I felt like nothing was missing. Like happiness existed in that moment and like jumping was the manifestation—it always has been—of joy, of that joy that must rise, that must try in its vertical momentum to keep going up, to prolong itself ad infinitum. But bodies fall, ours fall, they always fall. We fell. Drawn like magnets as we are to the ground. Or to the core. Or to a spot that attracts and makes us fragile and fallible material. Now it was just the two of us lying in my bed. The mattress was indented by the jumps but returned slowly, gradually, to its natural state. I was a little afraid my husband would appear, as he sometimes did. M grabbed my hand while I was sleeping, and I felt his delayed, somewhat lost gaze search me. His friend was in the living room. Surely lying down, looking up at the ceiling, maybe wondering what the hell was going on in this room, my room, between the two of us, perhaps wanting to enter, grab my other hand, lie down at my side. While we tried to stay asleep with our hands clasped together, he ran his finger up the back of my hand. I’d always wanted someone to watch me sleep. Or, more so, who would watch me fall asleep. He said go to sleep. The Argentine entered the room, and I kept my eyes closed and felt him sit down next to M, and when I opened them again, he was caressing his friend’s long, black hair. I was turned on and responded to the caress he was still running over my hand, and we stayed like that for a while until I started dreaming about paper cities, and I didn’t know if it was a dream or some hallucination brought on by the pills, because the image was so vivid, the paper cities took on three dimensions while a hand holding a pair of scissors snipped the contours. The cities rose at the rate little silver turtles populated them. Then they all became a single large turtle with an anus into which I stuck my finger, and it got trapped in the elastic orifice. With my finger I caressed a sandy texture, the turtle’s entrails. The dreams or visions rushed in waves while I barely felt their touch, they who were already lying down, one on either side of my body, or at least that’s what I perceived between visions.