Even before he’d enrolled in the School of Architecture, changes to Older Brother’s medication had left him more alert, and they were now close. They’d discuss current affairs, family matters—although the rest of the family rarely visited—friendships with other patients, and even the possibility of leaving the clinic. That closeness, which felt amazing after missing it for so long, merged with Older Brother’s delusions, and it was in fact those delusions that lay behind the trips they began to make together. Older Brother was no longer content to see him only on Saturdays, so now he often swung by the clinic after class. His brother was convinced that he could hear the voices of the dead, so they visited all the cemeteries in Madrid because, he said, the connection was purer in those places. They walked in La Almudena, the Civil, the Hebrew and English Cemeteries, in La Florida, the Norte, the Sacramental de San Lorenzo y San Pedro, the Santa María, the San Pedro, and the San Sebastián. There, Older Brother seemed to recover his wits—he was less tongue-tied, the imbecilic look of remote stupefaction disappeared from his eyes—enough to say that he’d gotten the job at the Ministry of Defense because of his powers as a medium and awareness of where conspiracies were being hatched. The excursions from the clinic became more capricious, more eccentric. At his brother’s insistence, they made it as far as a large house in the town of Guadarrama, near the La Jarosa reservoir. In the garden they came across a girl who was crying; she told them that her mother was dying. Older Brother remained silent for some time, as if in meditation, then stroked the girl’s hair. On another occasion, he demanded to be smuggled out of the clinic late at night and driven to an industrial estate in Vicálvaro, where Older Brother broke into a warehouse. He’d waited in the car, expecting the police to catch his brother stealing some ridiculous piece of junk, but nothing happened. Older Brother refused to offer any explanation and, once again, was abnormally lucid, seemingly without a trace of mental illness. He stopped asking questions in case his brother became suspicious, started thinking that he was one of those censors who had hung a sign around his brother’s neck saying “disturbed.” For Older Brother, the illness was the world’s long, vengeful lack of comprehension. “They are afraid of what I know,” he’d say, but sometimes he spoke with shame about his derangement, and was pained to have lost everything. Those moments of intense nostalgia, with their level of normality, were few and far between. What his brother usually displayed was a tangle of overlapping strata and an inability to remember what his life had been like before his illness. He, for his part, attempted to immerse himself in that hodgepodge, to understand rather than discount it, and even to superimpose it on his own, to find fun in it. One day he made a joke about the firebird his brother claimed to see every morning on his bed. Older Brother had laughed, but then looked at him in sullen confusion before running off.