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Instead of a nose he had a trunk. A disgusting, bleeding trunk. That’s why it smelled like blood. Or vomit. A Pepto-Bismol-colored glue with which they’d stuck him to the floor. They had fused his eyelashes to the bronze of the art nouveau railing. When the next thief showed up to rip off a piece with a hacksaw, he was going to get a surprise. A man had been fused to the stairway railing. That, or the line for rice came this far. Old sidecars without motorcycles came this far. Pregnant guerrilla fighters, with their throats slit.

Something like the torment of a crown of thorns pressed into his temples. This was no Bible, this was pre-revolutionary architecture. Dr. Bengoa read his thoughts; he was his mother’s gynaecologist. A glimmer of actual light made him notice the makeup of the images: they were made of air, like music. They shook him about. He had fallen asleep in front of the TV watching Rocky III and his dad had carried him to bed. His dad wearing lipstick. Vantroi wasn’t his dad. Vantroi was Vantroi was Vantroi was Vantroi and he was Argenis, being funneled to wakefulness, to the unfamiliar bedroom where he had awoken, naked between white sheets.

He felt relief, no nausea, no pain, and sat up on a bed with a backboard of laurel-shaped metal leaves. The world had stopped spinning. He looked at his hand, his arm full of old track marks, swollen like ant bites, staring at the incredible length of his fingernails. The memory of what had happened during the days when sickness had him bound and gagged came to him from far away, as if through an IV. Someone had set the cleaned and folded Police T-shirt and jean shorts on a green plastic chair. At the foot of the chair sat the Adidas sneakers, inviting him to put them on. He opened the door, covering himself with the sheet, and confirmed he was at Vantroi’s place when he saw the TV and the tower of VHS tapes. The apartment was empty. He went into the bathroom. Photos cut from black-and-white magazines completely covered the walls. As he peed, Mickey Mouse, Fred Astaire, Sônia Braga, Boy George, Marcello Mastroianni, and of course Janet Jackson, fixed their famous eyes on him. He got into the shower. The morning sun had warmed the water in the tank. He stood under the stream of water with his eyes open, as if to clean them from the inside. Not even if he yanked his eyes from his head could he ever forget Bengoa’s penis entering Susana.

The soap bar was almost used up and it was full of kinky hair. He pulled the hairs out with his nails, cursing Bengoa and marveling again at how his nails had grown, at this raucous biological drive, immune to human disappointment. Nothing stops nails, he thought, scrubbing himself violently. He washed his armpits, his ass, his balls, rinsed his mouth, turned off the shower and dried himself with a wine-colored rag that had once been a towel. He remembered the blue towel he had shared with Susana during their time together. She would bathe in the morning so that it would be dry when it was his turn in the afternoon. He tried to remember a Lezama Lima poem about Havana’s corrosive power as he dried off. Returning to the bedroom he put on his T-shirt and shorts, but not the shoes, and went out on the balcony.