The joint passes from hand to hand and mouth to mouth.
“Inga needs us to rescue her,” Pedro says.
“Where is she?” La Murciélaga asks.
“She says some aliens kidnapped her.”
“Who’s Inga?” Julieth asks.
“The Swedish chick,” La Murciélaga replies.
“You don’t know her?” Pedro asks. “The Swedish chick who came to Medellín to learn Spanish.”
“So has she learned it?” Julieth asks.
“Not much, but she did learn to do coke.”
Julieth expels the smoke with a laugh. Her laughter is still beautiful, like when we used to laugh together in bed.
“So let’s rescue her,” La Murciélaga says.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You? Smoke,” says Julieth. She blows smoke in my face and sticks the joint between my lips. The three of them look at me like I’m about to perform an amazing somersault. I toke, and they keep watching me to see if I inhale. I expel the smoke, and Julieth smiles at me. She passes the joint up to the front.
Oh, oh, oh, we’re gonna get down, get down, get down, we’re gonna get down.
We drive past the old airport. People used to say that if you jumped real high there, you could touch the airplanes’ wheels as they took off.
“Is it still in operation?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes during the day, no at night,” Pedro says.
“I’ve seen planes landing at night,” La Murciélaga says.
“That must be when you’re tripping,” Julieth says.
“The runway doesn’t have any lights,” Pedro says.
“No plane could fly tonight with all this smoke,” I tell them.
And I’m flying low, only a few inches off the ground. La Murciélaga starts another round. This time I snatch the joint and take a drag.
To my left is Nutibara Hill. As a boy I used to imagine that the restaurant at the top was a flying saucer. As soon as we found out that the restaurant rotated, we begged Libardo to take us. And it did rotate, but very slowly. Julio and I were disappointed. What did you expect, Libardo asked us, that we were going to be eating on a merry-go-round?
“Is there still a restaurant up there?” I ask.
“Where?” Julieth asks, looking up at the sky.
“On the hill.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I think it closed,” says Pedro. “I never went.”
“I did,” says Julieth. “It spun.”
It doesn’t look like a flying saucer now. It doesn’t even look like a restaurant.
La Murciélaga laughs. I don’t know why she’s laughing. Well, I know why but I don’t know at what. People are setting off fireworks on top of the hill too. It looks like a volcano spitting out its first sparks. I remember the other hill, farther north, the one people said was a dormant volcano. I don’t remember what it was called, but I do remember you could see it from our high school, and we used to fantasize that it might wake up. I would imagine Medellín filling with lava and everybody fleeing toward the mountains. The lava catching up with us, lapping at our heels, in this city that looks like a mug of nasty soup.
“What’s the name of that hill that was a dormant volcano?”
The three of them look at me, Pedro in the rearview mirror.
“What’s up with you, Larry?” he asks.
“There’s a volcano here in Medellín?” Julieth asks. “If there is, I’m going to go live somewhere else.”
“No more of this stuff for now,” La Murciélaga says and snuffs out the joint in the ashtray.
To my left I see the spiral of cars trying to climb Nutibara Hill. Everybody wants to watch La Alborada from a high place. We’re all getting high too.
Get down, get down, the song says, and we’re going up, up, up.
14
What is it about nighttime that focuses pain when a person is grieving, or uncertain, or in an airplane seat? What is this fear of opening our eyes and admitting to sleeplessness in the eternity of a nocturnal flight? Were Charlie and Larry sleeping? Or were they pretending to sleep, like pretty much everybody else? She’d laid her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her breath on his ear. He could just see her eyelashes and the tip of her nose out of the corner of his eye. His neck hurt from sitting in the same position for so long, motionless as a doll out of fear of waking her, if she was actually sleeping, since he didn’t dare ask. Sometimes Charlie started the way you do when you dream you’re falling, and her eyes moved restlessly under her eyelids as if she were looking for something in her dream. She must have been looking for her father among the living, who else, to refuse him his death.
A flight attendant emerged from the shadows and walked slowly down the aisle. She was smiling, perhaps out of habit or, why not, malice. She’d be looking for the passenger with a hand fondling their private parts. Two people groping each other under a single blanket, a couple attempting a bit of gymnastics to suck each other off, a man with a substantial erection as he slept. Smiling and stealthy, she slipped past them, and when she saw Larry her smile disappeared.
She’s going to catch me sneaking into first class . . .
He stroked Charlie’s hair, barely grazing it to avoid waking her. The flight attendant kept going, apparently buying Larry’s pretense that he was traveling with his girlfriend. He felt the pain, rising from his big toe to his head, more strongly, but his soul was brimming over.
What is life playing at when it introduces a man to a sad, beautiful woman and, within an hour of his meeting her, has her snoozing on his shoulder like the sleeping beauty from a fairy tale?
15
The bank statements arrived, and Libardo discovered that Fernanda had been disobeying his order not to go to the casino by herself. She tried to cover her gambling with cash, but if she lost a bundle, she’d use the credit card. What Libardo didn’t know was how she was getting out without the bodyguards noticing. One night she didn’t come home at the usual time, and he decided to go ask the head bodyguard, a former police captain known as Dengue, where she was.
“We dropped her off at Margarita’s house at 3:30 this afternoon, just like we do every day, and we wait for her there until she comes out,” Dengue told Libardo.