I fall asleep at dawn, amid images that already occupy the time of dreams and that are teeth emerging from tiny gums, and that are teeth in the gums of a cockroach or a rat and that are also the teeth of a child. My baby will have teeth, I say out loud, and my sister laughs and lies down next to me, and I sleep peacefully, pressed against her body.

31

THE LAST TIME I got on an airplane I was totally drugged. This time I’m going sober and pregnant. My body protects the fetus. It would be fantastic for the two of us to die on this plane, but I also experience a fear unlike any other. This fear of flying is, deep down, a lack of faith. The plane takes off, and I feel like it won’t be able to, that it won’t be able to get off the ground, it doesn’t have the strength or the ability to fly. The flight attendant gives instructions and I close my eyes, and when the plane hits turbulence, I feel like I’m about to die. It’s a matter of minutes. Seconds, really. And that’s how I spend the trip, gripping the armrests, sweating. How the hell is the guy next to me sleeping, I wonder, if we’ll all be equally conscious in the moment the machine is about to collapse. Obsessive as I am, I’ve listened to dozens of black box recordings and in them people scream at the wrong time, every terror manifests differently, mine will be an airless, soundless scream. Everything that can happen to the plane is what I repeat in my head and that’s about to happen. From takeoff I feel like the plane will fall apart because of a manufacturing failure, then it’s the noise, I’m aware of the noise and at the slightest variation everything will go boom: the machine will fall silent and that’ll be it, it’ll start to fall, yes, it’ll fall in a suspended silence outside of time. I hold myself upright, but the guy next to me keeps sleeping. To see a plane fall: a beautiful image that’s been with me since I was a girl, I’m so loyal to my childhood that I’ll never be able to stop picking at my skin. By looking at the flight attendants every second, given that they fly all the time, I’ll be able to see in their faces when something’s wrong. The turbulence isn’t so bad, they keep laughing back there, sitting as the pilot has ordered, the pilot’s voice, please let him say something, his silence is suspicious, finally the microphone turns on, surely he’s going to say buckle your seat belt, forced landing, or it will be a pigeon that lost its way, that new sound, the body of a pigeon shredded by one of the motors will mean the explosion is imminent, or maybe it’s a failure in the electric system, everything will turn off at the least expected moment, from one second to the next—lack of visibility, plane off course, close to landing, tension cable broken, the man in the control tower is drunk, failure of seconds, an airplane is taking off the moment we arrive, two giants crash in the air and we burn up, we fly off, burning, and everything is flames and screams, and now the voice of a rude pilot says IDs in your pockets, the landing gear isn’t working, and in those eternal seconds I understand that what really happened is that the Bermuda Triangle, that giant magnet hidden in the ocean, is furiously pulling us, and the plane struggles, keeps fighting for minutes until it gives in and we drown and the water enters and each of us, in our asphyxiation, tries to live; the darkness of the ocean swallows us, they’ll never find us, the mystery of a plane that simply disappeared or that a clap of thunder split in two, and I feel and see the plane keep going and me falling, and that vision slits my throat. How can this thing stay in the air, can someone explain it to me, please, the plane didn’t brake, we land but it doesn’t brake and barrels into the city, I tell the man next to me, it didn’t brake! He looks at me like I’m crazy, and I wonder if it will run into the buildings. But no, the plane brakes, and the guy doesn’t say anything, we’re on the ground. The baby and I arrive. Thirteen hours of nonstop, mad, stubborn imagination, imagination with desire and dread, of the accident.