And what was this?

“‘Progress’: a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”

And what was the next thing?

Around every corner something incendiary might lurk. Something personal. But also something searching for a polemic to leap into. To give it a body, a voice.

My point is that, in looking at everything I had about the Vilcapampa family, my initial analysis was the usual story of a daughter’s rebellion from a tyrannical father and a weak mother. That Silvina decided to become the opposite of them. To an extreme.

But even if I had already begun to create a version of Silvina, I still didn’t really have enough data points. This veil. This descent into speculation. As if the systems that I used, and that used me, deformed her. Kept changing her.

And me.

[31]

In the past, I had slept with strangers at conferences. Never knew the last names. As anonymous as I could be, to set the expectations.

Or, once upon a time, I did those things. I liked the idea of meeting strangers at conferences. I liked the bar, and maybe for the same kind of calm as the flight in, and the soft clunk and crunch of the ice in bronze-brown drinks that fooled me with a sophistication I thought I couldn’t find elsewhere. Sudden flood of mint or basil from the bartender’s stand. Rosemary. A kind of shock, an infiltration. Yet kept the job at bay. That fuzzy golden aura enveloping me. The glow pushing from the inside to the outside until I shone like the sun.

Most hotels had more than one conference going, so I would hang out near attendees for the other conference. Textiles. Medical. Pharmaceuticals. Entomology. Who would I be this time? A homicide detective? A veterinarian. A flight attendant.

The other main conference was construction, with an emphasis on innovative use of drywall, textures, and roofing. Perhaps I was in that business instead. This wasn’t me out of control. This was me in control.

I’d describe the hotel bar, except it was the usual. What I preferred. Dark-lit, not stools but high seats with backs. Some of the security conference attendees, gleaned from their lanyards, sat in the surrounding gloom at tables like murky islands with little flickering butter-white candles. Nothing much droned on, music-wise, beneath it. Like something flat moving around under the sparkly blue bad idea that was the carpet.

Even from the bar, I could hear their murmurs spiked with drunken exultations. The usual banter, among mostly men, with what I called “an appreciative audience.” They could swing their dicks around as much as they wanted back there. I wasn’t going to enter that fray.