I slowly opened the closet door. Once outside, I did the pre-competition warm-up exercises the PE teacher had taught us. I sat on the floor with my legs straight and tried to touch my forehead to my right and then left knee. When I did this with my eyes closed I experienced a fresh outburst of the colored shapes I’d seen just before falling asleep, but this time they were less intense, as if the Zero Luminosity Capsule had amplified their effect, clarity, and complexity.
A languid early evening light was filtering through the curtains of my bedroom window. At that age, I used to find the speed of the evening dizzying. It disturbed me to watch the advance of the shadows, the way they became elongated and crept across the tiled floor of my bedroom like hungry reptiles and then disappeared into the unbounded darkness of night. But that evening was different: it was an evening on pause, as if the enormous floodlights of a sports stadium or spots of a film set were illuminating the street, generating an unreal atmosphere, an exaggeratedly dramatic light, a manufactured dusk. I wondered how long I’d spent in the closet, thought that maybe it wasn’t dusk but dawn the next day. That would explain the prevailing calm, the sense of newness that seemed to cloak the world.
I’d never before been completely awake at dawn. Once, when we left home very early to go to Acapulco on vacation, my father carried me, still asleep in my pajamas, to the back seat of the car, and in that drowsy state, I’d had a glimpse of something like this piercing, almost false light that was weighing down on the sheets of colored origami paper scattered haphazardly across the floor.
In the hallway, I noticed that both my sister’s and my father’s doors were open, and inside each room reigned the same calm and dwindling light: there was no one upstairs.
I rubbed my eyes with the backs of my hands (new, still tenuous shapes exploded behind my eyelids) and went down to the living room to check the clock. I was disoriented; the Zero Luminosity Capsule had functioned all too well on this occasion, isolating me from the world, from noise and the passing of time. Perhaps several years had gone by; perhaps I’d woken in a future world where my father and sister were dead, along with my friend Guillermo and everyone one else I knew.
I mulled over this possibility as I made my cautious way downstairs (the Bogeyman might have been in the house), feeling the cold floor under my bare feet. At the turn in the stairs, by peering stealthily over the bannister rails, I was able to see the living room clock: the hour hand was pointing to seven. Probably seven in the evening: at that time in the morning we’d usually be leaving for school—when it wasn’t vacation—and the light never looked anything like what was in my bedroom at that moment. But there was still no way to be sure of what day, month, or year it was. Perhaps Teresa had returned from Chiapas, bringing with her the man with the pipe and balaclava, plus a bag of presents for me. Deep in that improbable fantasy, I jumped the last three steps, suddenly excited.
But the living room was empty. And of course Teresa wasn’t there, nor was the man with the pipe and balaclava. Mariana wasn’t there either, nor my father. The TV was on but with the volume turned down, and the images on the screen seemed really weird, otherworldly, as if the programming had also been infected by the strange aura floating between things.
As I turned toward the kitchen, a voice shook me from my dreamy lethargy, giving me such a shock that I almost wet my pants: “Where the hell have you been?”
Against all the odds, that voice belonged to Rat, who was stretched out on the couch. I thought it odd that I hadn’t spotted him before. Perhaps he had the power of making himself invisible. Perhaps the use of poor-quality temporary tattoos had given him that power, like some kind of abnormal superhero. I didn’t reply because I wasn’t sure how to address him; it occurred to me that I’d never actually spoken to him before: I’d only ever talked to my sister in his presence, never directly to him. My father had often told me that I should never address older people I didn’t know well by their first names, but that didn’t quite seem to fit for Rat. I didn’t even know his real name. Should I call him Señor Rat? That didn’t seem right either. Moreover, he might be under the influence of temporary tattoos. He might even have killed my father and sister while high and locked them in a Zero Luminosity Capsule or in the garage among the boxes where Teresa stored her university books (“We can’t have them in the living room,” my father had once said. “They gather dust.”).
“Mariana asked me to stay here in case you came back. She thought you’d run away and went out to find you before your old man gets back. You killed the party, kid.” I had absolutely no idea what Rat was talking about. What party could I have killed when all I’d done was fall asleep in the closet? I looked around carefully for any sign of a party. Had Citlali been there with her reedy voice and smell of bubblegum?
Rat noted my confusion and added a little more information: “Mariana was real worried, she almost burst out crying when we found your room empty. Where the fuck have you been?”
I suddenly understood that Rat was something like my sister’s boyfriend, and I felt dumb for not having realized this earlier: all the clues were there, but I’d passed them over. What other truths was I missing? My detective skills had let me down. I was a bad detective,
