Even before he was admitted to the psychiatric clinic in Mexico, during that whole year Older Brother was missing, he’d lived out a fantasy that put a positive slant on his brother’s absence. At the time of his birth, Older Brother had been a senior official in the Ministry of Defense, and was then later appointed director of NASA’s Apollo tracking station in Fresnedillas de la Olivia. Although he was still just a small child when his brother worked at the ministry, he remembered the grave expressions of certain visitors, and also the ban on talking about his brother’s job. (“Just say he’s in business.” But he never took any notice of that; all the kids in his class knew that he had a brother who was much older and very important.) There were nights when Older Brother didn’t come home and their mother slept by the telephone, which rang every time the radio gave the hour, as if announcing the outbreak of war or an attack by enemy nations. That was the time of the official car, the black Mercedes with a driver that turned up on weekdays, which was a great source of speculation about just what his brother’s exceptional responsibilities might be. When he began to work for NASA, he compensated for not being able to discuss his job with stories about other planets, astronauts, and flying saucers, like the unidentified object that crashed to earth on a farm in New Mexico—Older Brother had shown him a photo of it in a UFO magazine—and the two hundred students who’d seen a spaceship descend onto a hayfield in Australia. The move from there to connecting his absence to some investigation he was in charge of and that required his complete attention was very simple for a child, and desirable to the extent that it exempted his beloved brother from the blame for the long evenings of mute renunciation. What’s more, that disappearance coincided with a UFO phenomenon that was so widely reported in the press and on television he became a news-bulletin junky. And, for the first time, he began to read newspapers. He searched for more information about the sightings that had the whole country on tenterhooks, on the verge of religious mania, since there were people who asserted that it was angels not Martians landing on earth. It was so lovely to imagine his brother beneath the four round lights that, night after night, hovered like birds over the bell tower of a village church. The locals had been evacuated and the zone cordoned off; on the television you could watch soldiers—still in black and white—pointing their weapons at reporters and gawkers who traveled there from all points of the peninsula. The papers printed daily statements by UFO experts. He remembered one individual from Valladolid who claimed to have traveled the world following sightings, and said that the glowing spheres were triangular spacecraft with white jet streams.