He’d even been employed as a teacher for several months at the school in town. He prepared for the classes with great dedication, as though seeking to get away from his cabin for a while, and sometimes he’d stay at Mrs. Ferguson’s guest house in order to be closer to the school. For the children, he translated—and this was surprising to me—the story “Juan Darién” by Horacio Quiroga, another man who’d withdrawn to live in the jungle and had built his own house and survived in difficult conditions with his wife and children, writing some of the finest short stories of all literature in the Spanish language. He used Quiroga’s story to illustrate the cruelty of civilization, the Latin root of which, he said in class, meant domestication, training, and taming.
He once encountered a deer, frozen in a clearing in the woods. At first he thought it was alive and observed it from a shelter among the bushes. Some wild animals stand motionless when they can no longer escape. From what he could tell, it had become separated from its herd. Deer crowded together in winter, but maybe this one had strayed or gotten lost. It looked like a perfect statue of a young deer, captured in the moment as it lifted its head to find its bearings with the sun.
Suddenly he remembered how happy his days had been in the past: waking up in a bed, putting his bare feet down onto carpet, taking a shower, making coffee, sitting down to work in his office at the university. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was a way of observing his past life as though he himself were a deer frozen under the ice.
3
Finally he began his experiments. The first was a trial, or what he called a trial, like someone running a test in a laboratory before the main research. He decided to select an anonymous target, so as not to run any risk. He left his cabin at dusk but first lit his lantern and calculated the time it would take to burn through its oil. As a precaution, he placed the lantern inside a tin pan on the table. If all went well it would last for six hours, and if someone passed by the house, they might imagine that he was working and, like so many times before, hadn’t opened the door because he didn’t want to be interrupted.
No one would see him get into his old pickup and drive up the road to the highway and then keep going until the exit that would take him to Durango. He wasn’t concerned about anything other than his goal (“I don’t think about anything other than the white line of the road and the trees passing”). He’d changed the license plate, put extensions on his shoes to obscure his footprints, and then headed south in disguise. Yet his state of mind wasn’t cool and calm but frenzied, tension turning into euphoria. How was he going to react? He’d spent years in isolation and now wanted to put himself to the test: “It isn’t that crime isolates us, rather we must first isolate ourselves in order to be able to commit the crime.”
He entered the city via the freeway from the north, and at that time of day there was a great deal of movement in the streets. The crowds disturbed him after so many months in solitude. He went over the bridge that crossed the highway and led to the main parking lot of the vast mall. He parked his truck in the staff area and got out resolutely with a parcel in his hand, and then he crouched down to check the wheels of the pickup and in the same motion left the bomb hidden under the engine of a red Honda. Then he calmly drove out of the parking lot and went as far as the edge of the exit road before turning to reenter the parking lot from the opposite end of the mall.
There were parked cars, shopping carts, white lines, signposts, and a gull that was pecking around among oil stains. It seemed to have lost its way, to have confused the gray sheen of the asphalt for the water’s surface. They could fly for miles and miles over the sea but never strayed this far from the coast unless they’d gone mad and lost their orientation. He could see it blundering about, its wings spread, its eyes red, its beak half-open with its little tongue poking out. No one seemed to notice it, and it moved clumsily among the parked cars and oil puddles and muddy remnants of snow on the pavement before finally taking flight and heading off toward the tall lights of nearby buildings.
Based on what he’d ascertained at the Best Computer Co. in Durango, the side door was the mandatory exit for the computer technicians and engineers. All of the large corporations repeated their structures and the functions of their workers, so that if you knew one building well then you knew all of the others. That was proof of the inner weakness of the system: in order to cut down on costs, they tended to repeat the formats and layouts of their facilities. The bathrooms, cash registers, shippers and checkers, packers, offices, and main doors were identical in every company building across every state in the United States. The same was true for hotels and supermarkets and bars that belonged to the same chain, for movie theaters and vast parking lots, and even for police precincts and the interior layouts of prisons. The fixed repetition of places and the functioning of the series allowed for a conservation of motion: it was as if the spatial arrangement had been designed so that a simultaneous, symmetrical multitude of employees and customers and security guards might move around
