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Cassie June walked into the restaurant. She must have been about one meter seventy tall. She shivered from the cold while speaking to someone out of sight. She took off her coat, letting snowflakes slip from her shoulders. Cassie’s husband came in with their two daughters—a bright-eyed twenty-one-year-old and a lanky thirteen-year-old—crowding together in the narrow entry. The twenty-one-year-old unzipped her jacket and removed it, revealing a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. The thirteen-year-old’s eye shadow ringed her eyes dramatically like she’d colored them in with charcoal. A waiter approached the family and guided them to a free table in the opposite corner of the restaurant.

While they ate, I kept glancing away from my plates on the sly. Anyone who glanced my way might have caught me studying Cassie’s face—those wide, lively eyes, that distinctive mouth set a little higher than most. As Cassie listened to her husband and daughters, she nodded and smiled, and when she laughed, her silver earrings swung gently.

When they finished eating, the family rose and drifted apart. Her husband and the twenty-one-year-old waited by the entrance. Glancing around for Cassie, I spotted her weaving between the tables in the middle of the restaurant toward the exit, followed by her thirteen-year-old. I lowered my head like a schoolboy caught staring at the pretty girl.

In my mind, an image lingered of the woman noticing me, but that vision dissolved. It was replaced by a picture of her as a child, seated in the back seat of a rental car that would have been scrapped or crushed into a cube years ago. Cassie was crying. The face that had glanced in my direction at the restaurant looked like a caricature time had drawn in mockery.

The family regrouped in the foyer. They retrieved their coats and jackets. Cassie spoke while pointing at the street, and she laughed at some joke.

I wanted to say something. Anything.

They went out into the night then walked away along the sidewalk, huddled in their coats with their hands thrust in their pockets. They passed under arcs of light flickering yellow, red, and white—bulbs glowing in the darkness like milky vapor.

At eleven, I took my laptop down to the hotel bar and searched online for albums to download. Modest Mouse had never released Good News. They put out an album in 2003 and then retired. The first album by The Restless was a hit, and the band stayed together, including their original keyboardist. Eddie Ingram’s girlfriend had avoided the accident, so he never composed his masterpiece. Thom Yorke’s Facebook profile suggested he was working as an orderly in a mental institution. The present adored a band called Beasts of Downtown, which burst onto the scene in 2002 and redefined rock. On the album Reckoning, released in 1984, R.E.M. included a track called “Girl on Skates,” alluding to how for years Cassie June had claimed that a stranger—the one appearing beside her in the famous photo—had saved her from being killed by the Southern California Prowler. A stranger whose DNA belonged to no one. Joanna Newsom’s albums were missing. I searched for an hour and a half, but any proof that she had ever been born had vanished.

At three in the morning, I went to the hotel gym. The echo of my footsteps spread as though I were entering an abandoned building where the lights had been left on. I worked my back and chest; the pain of my tearing fibers anchored me. I ran for half an hour in front of the glass wall, where my doubled reflection overlapped a sea of ink lit only by a streetlamp at the end of the road.

The next afternoon, the snow had stopped, and I strolled beneath a leaden sky. I browsed the shop windows. I bought whatever I fancied and piled the shopping bags in my hotel room.

I had dinner at the restaurant. Every five minutes, I looked toward the foyer, imagining Cassie would walk in. Why would she come?

That night, I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my laptop and read the news. In Sweden, a jihadist had boarded a train with an AK-47 and mowed down eleven people. My body froze; my numb fingers lost feeling on the keys. I closed the laptop.

I swallowed four sleeping pills and got into bed. The black tide rose. I grabbed my portable music player, played Roy Harper’s “The Same Old Rock,” and jammed the earbuds into my ears. I pulled the covers up to my forehead and curled into a ball. As my consciousness faded to the sound of the guitars, images appeared in the darkness of my mind as if carved from obsidian. Scenes trapped inside. The family who visited me every night when loneliness overwhelmed me, and who would always be there.

A girl was skating toward her home when a serial killer convinced her to get into his car and took her to a dark place, where he raped and sodomized her, then strangled her and crushed her skull with hammer blows. A group of unkempt, bearded men, armed with hammers and machetes, ambushed a tennis player and dragged her toward a van, which minutes later, out of control, ran over one of the men, whose chest imploded. Two men broke into a villa in the early hours of the morning, went up to the bedroom of the elderly couple sleeping, and beat them to death. A naked woman climbed onto the railing of her balcony on the tenth floor, and while humming a tune, she opened her arms in a cross and let herself fall forward. A girl with a bruised face lay half on a filthy floor and a mattress dotted with stains, and her arms were covered with the black marks of needle marks. A woman was walking down a busy street when the man who was stalking her grabbed the woman’s hair and plunged the blade of a dagger into her chest and side again and again, while the rips in the woman’s blouse soaked with blood and her screams escaped along with the air through the slits in her lungs. A drunken woman drove her car across the median line of the road and crashed into another car, whose occupant, a twenty-something girl, was thrown through the windshield, which tore her face apart, and when she hit the asphalt, her head exploded. A woman lay among some rocks, half-buried under rotten leaves, genitals exposed, her legs twisted as if her bones had been broken. A group of teenagers dragged a child into a forest, where they beat him and raped him while recording it on their cell phones. A woman crouched by a bathtub was holding a child’s head under the foam, while the child’s arms flailed and his hands groped the woman’s rolled-up forearm, until the last of the bubbles that clustered on the surface of the water burst. Inside the charred shell of a car, the driver’s seat had melted and fused with the legs of a man whose torso had been charred to a crusty black shell, torn open in breaches that revealed flesh red as a coal, and from the open guts the intestines had spilled like charred sausages. A woman was distracted browsing the frozen foods in a supermarket while a man dragged the woman’s daughter to a car; the man locked the girl in the trunk, drove her to a vacant lot, raped her, and smashed her head with a rock. A five-year-old girl was playing in front of her apartment building when the leader of a group of prepubescent children pressed a knife to the girl’s throat and dragged her to a laundry room, where they stripped her, groped her, and urinated in her mouth while laughing. A woman was hugging her decapitated daughter. A teenager hunched under the crumpled hood of a car was feeling the ruin of her face, which when it had hit the front seat had torn apart like a half-peeled rubber mask, and the globe of her left eye hung loose from its socket. In a forest at the foot of a volcano hung the desiccated corpses of hundreds of suicides. Some men lured a teenager by offering her alcohol to pass her around among themselves and their friends as a prostitute, kept her quiet with threats, and when they got tired, they killed her, dismembered her, and served her flesh as kebabs. On a plastic sheet lay the naked bodies of half a dozen boys and girls, and on their torsos, from the junction of the collarbones to the navel, tortuous sutures closed with staples showed that they had been gutted to sell their organs. A man disguised as a police officer gathered dozens of teenagers and climbed onto a platform to pretend he needed to inform them of some news, but he sprayed them with an assault rifle. Some men burst into a concert hall and machine-gunned the crowd while praising an imaginary character, and the wounded, and those who pretended to be dead, they disfigured, stabbed their eyes, castrated them and stuffed their genitals into their mouths, and ripped the fetuses from the pregnant women. A lion ripped open the belly of a gazelle, tore the fetus from the womb, and devoured it. A cat crossing a highway was sprinting, stopping, and jumping to the side against the hulks of cars, vans, and trucks that charged. In row after row of metal crates two meters by ninety centimeters, hundreds of pigs grew so one day they would be taken to the slaughterhouse. A parrot forgotten in the sun suffered a heat stroke and dehydrated to death. A hamster locked in a forgotten cage ate the plastic from the walls to escape, and the plastic tore the walls of its stomach. A fish caught lay on the grass gasping. A mouse chewed in half dragged its entrails. A fly got tangled in a spider’s web, and the spider injected it with a paralyzing agent and sucked it into a husk. A spider was weaving its web in the corner of a ceiling when a hand crushed it with a napkin. An army of ants scurried around a caterpillar, which wriggled as if dreaming while the ants dragged it toward their colony, pinching it with their tiny jaws. In a drop of water, thousands of microscopic organisms hunted each other or escaped, suffering an endless war.

In the symphony of organic life, each member of every species contributed its note of pain.

I stopped feeling like I was lying in bed, or even inhabiting a body. I shrank to a grain of lead plunging into a swarm of nightmares.

The following afternoon, I wandered through the city in a snowstorm that turned my hair white and covered half my coat. My atoms interacted with dark matter, weighing me down as though I were wading through a swamp. Pedestrians passed by, hunched under their umbrellas. If they weren’t careful, they would walk right through me. A few passersby peered at me from the hollow sockets of their rubber masks.

That night, I went back to the restaurant. They served me my lamb stew. Three spoonfuls into the broth, potatoes, and meat, a hand with rings on two fingers and veins standing out slid a newspaper clipping under my face.

In the center of the yellowed paper was a black-and-white photo. Two paramedics carried a stretcher beneath a plastic cover that outlined a human figure. Behind them, ten-year-old Cassie June watched, eyes wide, her fists pressed to her thighs. Next to her, I had placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder, staring at the stretcher with a calm I had never actually felt. It reminded me of certain Victorian photographs in which families posed with relaxed faces alongside their dead children.

I lifted my eyes to Cassie’s face—her lined forehead, the creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Time had infected every human cell to break them down into dust, and I couldn’t stop it.

Five meters away, her daughters and husband looked on, astonished. Cassie’s irises and her hand trembled like a schoolgirl handing over a poem.

I wanted to burst into tears.

“Come over for a while,” Cassie said. “We live nearby. We’ll have tea, we’ll talk.”

I swallowed hard.

“Tea sounds good.”

THE END

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in my collection titled Los reinos de brea, about ten years ago.

Today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Esme” by Joanna Newsom.