Fede lit a cigarette. “Josefa,” he said very seriously, “I’m not going to lie to you. I would love it if we saw one together, but that’s not a UFO, it’s a satellite. See how it’s moving? It’s an artificial satellite that circles Earth. There are lots of them. Some are old and don’t even work, they just orbit without a purpose. They’re what’s called space debris. There’s another one, see it?”

Josefa saw it.

“Are they like Laika?” she asked, pointing at the sky.

“Oh!” Fede said approvingly. “You know about Laika! I always said you weren’t just another pretty kid.” He kissed her on the nose, and she smelled his tobacco breath. Josefa laughed shyly. If she knew about Laika it was only because of the song by Mecano that her mother listened to. She loved that song. It seemed so mysterious, and when she listened to it she was filled with questions. What had become of Laika? Where was she now? Did she know she was famous, and there was a song in her honor? There were a lot of things that seemed mysterious to her; the world held secrets that no one knew or understood: ships and planes that got lost in the Bermuda Triangle. The Egyptian pyramids. The disappearance of the Mayans and the dinosaurs. Fire. Ants. Rasputin surviving poison and bullets. Marylin’s murder. Michael Jackson’s skin. Josefa believed that when she died and went to heaven, God, or one of his angels, would clear up all of these great enigmas, and sometimes her wish to know was so great that she wanted to be dead, to die just for a little while.

“You know what the spaceship they sent Laika up in was called?” asked Fede, exhaling smoke.

Josefa shook her head. She worried that Fede would realize that she really didn’t know much more about Laika.