Whenever he actually made the effort, something of the images called up through his art would transfer into reality. During the show, the smell of the dead pig and the rotten mangos on the patio stuck in his nose. His creation pounded the stage with nineties steps to the beat of “Rhythm Nation.” The creature was far from anything you’d see in a typical drag show, but the audience of foreigners, Cuban artists, and queers of all types clapped to the beat of the song. In spite of the enthusiasm, the atmosphere was charged. What forces were that dark death’s mask drawing to it? A man’s hand broke through the wall of smoke surrounding the stage to approach the dancer with a few dollars, putting the bills in the horror of a mouth. The devil bit the money violently, as if it wanted to pull off the fingers of his fan, whom Argenis recognized when one of the spotlights illuminated his face. It was Bebo Conde, a Dominican and a former classmate at Altos de Chavón, where Bebo had studied graphic design and Argenis fine art. Back then Bebo hadn’t yet come out of the closet, and he’d fucked all the women Argenis dreamed of having. Years later, after the divorce, his expulsion from school, the loss of his scholarship, the whole debacle, it was Bebo who had gotten him to try heroin for the first time, one morning after they left a rave at Playa Caribe, as they watched the sun rise while lying on the hood of an old Honda CRX. The unrepeatable intensity of that first pleasure was the yardstick against which he measured everything in life. His addiction was really an eternal pursuit of that momentary abolition of guilt, need, responsibility, and introspection.

‌

Bebo Conde’s apartment was dark, except for the lighting kit Bebo had taken without permission from the film school at San Antonio de los Baños, where he’d come to study. The spotlights illuminated the back of the living room, where he had hung a green cloth that smoothed all the angles of the wall and the floor. In front of the improvised green screen, an Asian girl in a bikini and a Vietcong rice farmer’s hat danced provocatively, without music. Samanta wore a straight-haired blonde wig and fake eyelashes in the same color, which opened like the teeth of a carnivorous plant around her eyes. Bebo was directing her from behind a fat German who manned the camera and Argenis wondered what the girl’s little yellow tits would taste like. He walked to the kitchen, without greeting a couple of students involved in various production details, opened the refrigerator just as he would have in Bebo’s Santo Domingo home, and took out a bottle of Perrier. He had to do some acrobatics to avoid tripping over the boxes full of cans of beans, toilet paper, and Barilla toothpaste Bebo brought every other month from Santo Domingo, which he used to pay his classmates for their work on the improvised set.