Mariana shouted at me to go to my bedroom and close the door. She’d gradually become more confident in her “responsible adult” role and by that time could no longer be intimidated by the threat of snitching: she ordered me around with self-assurance.
Rat ruffled my hair as I passed him on my way to the stairs. “What a crackbrain,” he said, and his bodyguard—the boy with the eyebrow stud—responded with an idiotic laugh that didn’t sound natural to me. The hair ruffling didn’t bother me; there was something companionable in the way Rat treated me, as if he’d been converted into a medium and was channeling the fraternal feelings my sister—a much colder individual—never dared express.
In my bedroom, I tried to read my Choose Your Own Adventure novel but couldn’t concentrate and soon set it aside. I discovered that I had a loose tooth. My upper and lower central milk teeth had all already fallen out, but one upper canine and three molars were refusing to go, despite my habit of constantly poking them with my tongue. That loose tooth heralded good things to come: not that I believed in the tooth fairy (my mother had decided to bring us up in a strict form of atheism that excluded Santa Claus and other such chimeras), but whenever one of my teeth fell out, I was taken to a bookstore in Coyoacán to choose something from the stock. Thanks to that ritual, my bedroom shelf had been gradually populated by vampire stories, books with three-dimensional optical illusions or pictures of dinosaurs, and children’s novels of every variety. I liked Coyoacán: it seemed a much more cheerful neighborhood than Educación, had books and pigeons and carts selling chicharrones.
Given the imminent loss of a tooth, my dilemma was now whether to ask for a new title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series or the book about samurais I’d seen on my last visit to the store. I thought that the samurai book, being about Japan, might help me develop my skills as an origamist. But I also needed to hone my detective skills if I wanted to work out exactly where in Chiapas Teresa had gone camping and how long she was going to spend there before coming home. Her prolonged absence was beginning to cause me a certain amount of distress, and the image of the Bogeyman dropping me into his bottomless sack, which haunted my dreams each night, with more or less sinister variants, was obviously the result of that distress.
I heard the metal gate to the street closing and deduced that the boy with the eyebrow stud had left. It wasn’t unusual for Rat to turn up with someone else, pretending they had planned the visit together, and for that person to then mysteriously disappear, leaving him and Mariana alone. As I’ve said, all that subterfuge went over my head, although in hindsight it seems perfectly clear proof of Rat’s intentions.
As usual, horrible music was issuing from my sister’s bedroom, occasionally punctuated by Rat’s booming, almost aggressive laughter.
I entered my Zero Luminosity Capsule. The noise was slightly muffled in there, as if coming from a far-off galaxy. It occurred to me that if he was in the mood, the Bogeyman might also steal teenagers; that one of these days he’d come to the house and put Rat and Mariana into his bottomless sack, and they would laugh and pretend to be having a good time (I couldn’t believe they were ever actually having a good time). But he’d never find me: I was beyond all that, in an empty, unreachable—really comfortable and radically dark—space where the only things to be seen were the explosions of colors that occur when you shut your eyes tight. I concentrated on those shapes for some time. If I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, the shapes danced in interesting ways, like the New Year’s fireworks display Teresa had made us watch from the roof on a couple occasions.
The minutes, perhaps hours, passed. The explosions of colors on my closed eyelids started to organize themselves into perfect origami pagodas, cranes, frogs, and balloons. Then, little by little, the shapes and characters began to weave themselves into stories. The transition to sleep was smooth, painless. I dreamed of fractal structures: origami figures with midribs folded over like a boy doubled up in the Bogeyman’s sack. I dreamed I was doing origami with newspapers from the previous eight months: newspapers with photos of balaclavas and political killings, and Brazilian goals in the soccer World Cup.
Toward the end of my REM sleep, when my body was beginning to feel the effects of being doubled up on the floor of my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I dreamed that I stole the letter Teresa had written telling my father she was in Chiapas, and made it into an incredibly complex origami figure that included various species of animals, multitudes of people crowded together in the middle of the jungle, and a castle with over forty bedrooms, behind whose doors mysterious, narrow, inescapable labyrinths awaited me.
When I woke, sweaty and aching, the house was silent. Mariana’s music seemed to have stopped, as had Rat’s booming laughter. I remained in the capsule for a few minutes, incapable of moving my legs. I’d spent too long in the same position. I wondered if it was dark or still light outside; if my father had come back from work; if there were any leftovers in the kitchen to alleviate the pangs of hunger I
