When his mother went into her room to cry and his father drove away at a furious speed, Pablo decided to go and find Gaspar. It was always complicated because he couldn’t just call him. He could knock on the door, but sometimes—Pablo didn’t really know why—he was afraid to. Juan Peterson rarely responded if he was home: sometimes he looked out the upstairs window, and if he saw it was Pablo, he might let Gaspar know, but most of the time he just went on with what he was doing and ignored the interruption. He wasn’t afraid Gaspar’s father would open the door, because that never happened. He couldn’t say exactly what it was that scared him.

It was cold, so Pablo put on a sweater and a down jacket and ran all the way to Gaspar’s house to warm up. There was no one in the street, and the closed windows of the houses he passed blocked all but a faint murmur from the TVs, though their flickering lights were clearly on display, more brilliant when they came from a color set.

When he arrived, he froze in surprise on the sidewalk. Both doors were open, the one leading into the withered front yard and the main front door of the house. What could have happened? Pablo peered in: the house was very dark and seemed empty, but that was normal. Sometimes the only light came from Gaspar’s room, which looked out on to the street.

Pablo went inside soundlessly; the wooden door let him enter in perfect silence, without a creak when pushed it open. But as soon as he set foot in the spacious entrance hall (“foyer,” Gaspar had called it once, an odd word he had surely copied from his father), Pablo knew something strange was happening. He hadn’t been inside that house enough times to know its sounds or its movements, but he could hear something hitting the wooden floor upstairs, and he could feel that the air inside the house was muggy, like at an indoor pool. Even the little noise there was, the knocking from above, reached him as if through water, and he couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. Maybe from the connected bedrooms Gaspar’s father used upstairs, the ones no one else was allowed to enter, or from the giant room on the first floor that was like an empty ballroom. Pablo walked around the ground floor that was lit only by the streetlights; the shutter on one of the living-room windows was open, another oversight. No one was there. The door to Gaspar’s room was open and it was empty; so was the kitchen. And the living room, which changed color every time a car went by on the street, frightened him. The best thing, he thought, would be to go back outside and wait. Gaspar must be at Vicky’s, or at another friend’s house, or running errands. If he came home he would turn on the light, and Pablo would see it from outside and get his attention the way he always did, by throwing a pebble or a stick at his window. But his heart was pounding, he was dying of curiosity, and the sounds from upstairs didn’t sound threatening. Occasionally he could hear voices, distant, filtered through that weird watery buffer. He realized he was sweating: the heat in the house reminded him of the steam in the bathroom after a very hot shower, or the kind his mom used to relieve his cough when he got sick. But there was no humidity in the air or on the walls; Pablo touched them and found them perfectly dry.