Sea Monsters. Chloe Aridjis

the cold, blue shadows of the stairwell. I was eager to return to the street but Tomás insisted we have a quick look at the patio at the back, an outdoor space enclosed by four high walls, home to a Cal-o-Rex boiler and a black door lying horizontal. It wasn’t the original from 1951 but one of many reincarnations, Tomás explained; the past ten doors had been documented over the years by a fan. Up above I glimpsed a patch of blue beyond the hanging laundry and walls of blistered plaster, beyond the pleated curtains flapping in the windows like women’s nightgowns pressed against the sills, restless and billowing and ready to leap out into this domestic void of the inner courtyard. In silence we headed back toward the street, through the corridor where light bled around the rim of the front door and pooled into long white bars on the floor tiles, and it was there, in these communal spaces, that one felt captive to the building.

      Once back on the street the Americans handed Tomás a fifty-peso bill and disappeared into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle taxi. The last time he’d gone to the apartment, he told me with a note of disappointment, there’d been three sisters living there with their five parrots, as you can imagine it was a bit noisier … Well, anyway, thanks for coming, he added, he had to get back to work but I knew where to find him, and off he went, hands in pockets, reverting to a black streak.

      Yes, he was intriguing, but he wasn’t the only one. Later in my room I ran through my list. From nights out there’d been Tiburcio Pérez, an artist from La Quiñonera with long hair and amber jewelry who attached reddish brown scorpions, our city’s native Vaejovis mexicanus Koch, to thickly painted canvases. La Quiñonera was an artist’s colony in La Candelaria, through the rusted gate you’d step into a vast unruly garden and there, at the end, beckoned a large stone house with four entrances. It was always cold at night and many of the artists wore ponchos, ponchos and some manner of pendant, often a silver cross or an animal tooth. And of course there was pulque, a lot of pulque, buckets brought fresh from a faraway town, and we’d gather round and dip in our cups, the air pungent with the heady scent of copal, and the copal would merge with the smell of unfiltered Alas and Faros and Delicados, those were the cigarettes of choice at La Quiñonera. Someone would always be painting while someone else would be playing the guitar, others would be arguing over politics or philosophy in the kitchen, and there were dogs, dogs everywhere. After Tiburcio came Alfonso, an anesthetist by day and drummer by night. My father’s greatest fear was that I would end up with a rockero, so this one time I stepped out with a musician set his hair on end, especially when I accompanied Alfonso to concerts to see howling monkeys, that’s what my father called them, howling monkeys, although my drummer would never howl, he’d sit serious and tight-lipped, sweating profusely as he banged out his rhythms. I’d also liked one of the Swedes on the bus, by the name of Lars Karlsson. There were probably 100,000 Lars Karlssons in Sweden but only one, or a few, in Mexico. Lars appeared gentler and more approachable than the other Swedes yet I found it impossible to speak to him, and on the few occasions he ended up sitting beside me I’d spent the entire ride trying to think of something to say. And then there was Andrés, who liked kicking boxes, he’d kick any box he found lying on the street; because of his deranged expression my mother had him drive her around the block a few times before allowing him to take me to the movies. There would also be the random boy from school I would dream about and the next day in class feel a connection to; after all, if he had gatecrashed my dream there must be a reason, especially when I’d hardly noticed him before. It would always be an individual from whom I would never have expected interest in either direction, usually preppy, with brown loafers and light pink button-up shirts; whereas I dressed almost entirely in black and would pin up my hair in extravagant ways. Yes, it would’ve been a shock if one of them had turned around and asked me out, indeed shattered all preconceptions, and yet my dream, so vivid, had introduced a thin crack in an otherwise impenetrable surface, and at first I’d wait for some sign of acknowledgment. But no, there’d be none, not even a glance, and over time I would have to accept that the dream bore no message, there was no connection, and once more the random boy would fade into the background, to become simply another face in the classroom.

      As for Tomás, yes, he had been a snag in the composition, somehow inserting himself in the picture in a way the others had not.

      ON DAYS OF LESS POLLUTION ONE COULD SEE THE volcanoes there on the edges of our city, taunting and majestic, their contours carved by light, their slopes scaled by countless imaginations, even mine, especially at moments when I felt hemmed in. Needless to say, there were still plenty of scenes and vistas of which Tomás did not form part. Not even as an idea. It was important to have those too, and the most successful of these intermissions was an evening spent at the home of my friend Diego Deán, punk rock singer, draftsman, and occasional shaman.

      A small gathering, he’d called it, which it was in size but not tenor, our festivities conducted under the gaze of his three iguanas, who blinked warily each time a new guest arrived. Diego had produced hundreds of sketches, from all angles and perspectives, of his companions: frontal, profile, rear. He drew their prehistoric eyes, their lazy lids, their heavy blinks. These sketches hung on the walls between the bookshelves, and it was hard to tell where his pride lay most, with the drawings or the pets.

      That night the creatures had watched us from their enclosures, tall glass tanks that loomed over the furniture in the living room. Someone put on a Klaus Nomi record while a large spiral of white powder was prepared on the coffee table, cards angled left and right creating whorls so thick it looked like the ghost of an ammonite, a logarithmic spiral like the ones from last year’s geometry class. Once the spiral was completed Diego rolled a fifty-peso note into a cylinder and helped himself to approximately two centimeters of powder. After inhaling he passed the note to the guy next to him, who repeated the action before passing it on. Eventually the rolled-up banknote reached me, its paper warm from so many fingers, and what could I do but join in the ritual.

      The bold hum of voices, mostly male, rose and fell around me, everyone talking and thought-walking like Cantinflas, their voices expansive, compulsive, filling every inch of air. And soon I too felt charged, charged and restive and impervious to everything, and after two lines I rose from the sofa and marched over to one of the iguana tanks and stuck in my arm. But scarcely had my fingers touched the top of the scaly head than Diego rushed over and yanked my sleeve, saying I’d clearly never experienced the dinosaur teeth or dinosaur scratch or dorsal thwack of their tails, not to mention one should never approach an iguana from above, only from the side, otherwise they think they are under attack, and furthermore, it takes years to gain an iguana’s trust, he said with pride as the creature looked up at us with an indifferent eye.

      Diego returned to the table, circling the spiral like a sinister jester. Someone turned up Klaus Nomi and for a moment the living room was transformed into an opera set and in my mind Diego Deán and Klaus Nomi became one. Diego could be Nomi without the makeup, it occurred to me, they had the same arched eyebrows and beaky nose and rosebud mouth. Then again, Nomi had recently died of AIDS in solitary conditions in New York, I remembered reading, people too scared of the new disease to even visit. Dark thoughts began to wash over me, the shadow side of drugs, which was why I didn’t venture there often, and I tried to sink into the sofa despite being too wired to properly sink, observing the dwindling spiral as every few minutes another whorl vanished, every guest part of the anti-helical operation that slowed down as we neared the center.