Mariana lingered outside my cell in the castle’s moist, dark and nigh-abandoned dungeon. A centipede and several spiders were my excited public as I sang once and again the songs of Nino Bravo. The centipede, in particular, pole danced on the rusty metal bars, like the dream stripper of foot fetishists. The room was only a few meters wide, enough to pace around and avoid falling further into madness.
But the prison was not the material room that kept me away from the world. It was, rather, the beautiful, manly voice of a man who had died in a car accident in his late 20’s, and his immortal words. To avoid spreading the illness to Mateo, I had quarantined myself.
While I intoned “Flor de invernadero”, Mariana kept guard by scaring away any invader with her ferocious snores. They echoed through the dungeon, like an entity with a life of its own in need of escaping. Now and then, she casted a weak fireball in a random direction and telepathically mumbled some nonsense along the lines of “Perish, you nut-chasing treehuahua.”
I didn’t hear Florencia’s sandals against the cobblestone when she approached with a tray filled with Mariana-safe foodstuff: fruits, some white rice, and a salad. It was imperative to not bring meat or dairy products near her, as it would cause her to shift state from “asleep” to “whining and begging” in about half a Planck time.
“How is the dress going?”
“Better than your dancing practice sessions. How long will it take for you to heal?”
“Nino Bravo’s songs can cause self-contagion, I’d need to be unable to ear my own voice for it to go away on any sensible amount of time,” I explained, devastated by the urge to sing “Te acuerdas, María”.
“Dad told me that, maybe, you could expose yourself to a song completely antagonistic to those you are singing. Sabrina agrees that it would work: dad wrote the lyrics in English for her to translate into Spanish and analyze. The songs are literally memetic entities here, and they could be eliminated by assuring mutual destruction with an incompatible earworm of similar power level,” she explained, and she seemed excited about it. Probably because I was suffering.
I grabbed a pear and chewed it twice.
“Did your father suggest any such earworm? If the cure is Ricardo Arjona, I choose exile to the densest rainforest you may imagine. One with mosquitos the size of a Great Dane,” I’d have suggested death, but I had to be a responsible dog owner and consult it with Mariana if I ever planned to get killed.
“No, it isn’t that.”
“God bless him.”
She looked confused for a second. Then snatched one of the apples and took a bite out of it.
“I thought you were a nonbeliever.”
“I was. Coming here, it’s obvious there is a thing like the soul or god, but I still don’t buy into a religion. I respect them, even think them necessary for some folk.” I grabbed the metal bars and rested my head upon them, “I cannot believe in your god, it’s not something you can brute force. But your family believes, and so, it has meaning if told to you. It’s also a cultural thing back where we are from, only edgy teens refrain from saying it once in a while.”
“I see. Mother always says dad’s God is nonsense. I tried to teach her about Jesus many times, but she just wouldn’t listen, dismiss it as mere fairytales,” she narrated like it was a funny anecdote, with cheer, with the tone one uses to mock menial problems out of relevance.
“I understand how important it is for Christians to convert the people that they love. Do you pray for her to get the gift of belief?”
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“Every day, and so I do for you and…” she turned towards the snoring, self-aware carpet, “…her.”
“Praying for a dog, that would ruffle some feathers back on Earth. Your father’s lies would also ruffle some feathers, by the way.”
She straightened her back and grimaced. “My father’s lies?”
“He told me only Lucía and I had come here since his arrival. He clearly lied to win me over, hiding the existence of the Escapists and the true nature of the situation. All because I have a dog with retriever ancestry. He also told me you didn’t know about his plans to go back to earth, which, by your attitude towards him and me, is clearly a lie. Some of you, however, may be a spy for the Escapists, or could be in any other situation. But they have Phaela. They need no spies. Spies are redundant, traitors that could put a spanner in the works… not so much.”
She started laughing like a maniac.
“I am not going to betray my father. I love him as much as daughter is allowed to.”
“Did you know your sisters fuck him?”
She laughed again and dismissed that information with a gesture of her right hand.
“People cannot have sex with their parents, silly. That doesn’t work.”
“Why can dogs then?”
“Dogs are dogs. They can. People can only have legitimate sex after they marry the love of their life, didn’t you know? And parents can’t marry their children.”
She was so pure I was impressed by the fact my body wasn’t bursting in flames like a vampire exposed to the midday sun while taking a bath of holy garlic sauce.
“Guess you are right, it would be absurd. Do you know that your dad plans on blowing the world up and that this will kill you, right?”
She nodded excitedly. Golden Retrieverness seemed to be contagious between dumb blonde beings.
“What right do we have to keep the children of God captive in this mockery of a world? Dad told me about Earth.” She smiled, blushed and her eyes seemed to shine against the gloomy atmosphere. “How there are no health points, how death there is not left to the determinism of a cold numeric system, but to the whims of an unforeseeable destiny. I want to experience Earth, Walter. I want to go to Sea World and see the dolphins jumping without people killing them for XP. I want to read Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov. I want to watch movies, use the internet, attend church, and be discriminated for having feathers instead of hair. I want to go to fashion pageants and collect Shrek paraphernalia.”
“Of all the pieces of media that exist, your father told you about Shrek? “I shook my head to scare away that line of thought, “Earth is not a good place to visit, Florencia. It’s unfair, it’s corrupt, It’s ridden with war and greed. It’s contaminated, it’s plagued with willfully ignorant folk that don’t have an intelligence stat to tell them how fucking dumb they are. “
“And why do you want to go back, then?” she shoved my shoulder playfully.
I returned the gesture by pushing hers. “They need someone to insult the mentally disadvantaged, don’t they?” I laughed between my teeth and shook my head again. I had to resist the impulse to let “America, America” free on the room. “No, seriously, the thing is as it follows: One’s homeland lives in the memory, as a parasite or a mutualist, and that world —that doesn’t exist, that could never exist because there is no man alive whose head tells the truth instead of stories— is one that promises to be found only there where you left it last time. From the dawn of time men have died for that illusion, and until the dusk they will. Moths to a flame. And, girl: I, too, feel the desire to burn.”
She flung the apple core away, and I tossed the one of my pear in the same direction.
“No, fuck you and your enantiomers!” Mariana woke up suddenly, in a bout of confusion, with her eyes full of Good-Girl-Fire and garnering pity stares from the both of us, “What?”
“Were you dreaming of organic chemistry?” I asked.
“That was a dad-word if I have ever heard one,” said Florencia, getting on her feet.
I reached through the bars for her linen pants. “Wait, Flor, you need to tell me what is the cure for my condition!”
“Ah, sorry. Dad says the cure is Abba.”
I spat to my side.
“Arrange my execution at once. Or, given I am already in a dark, small cell, burn my vocal chords with bright red iron, for I am no Prince of Amber, and I can assure you: they will not grow back.”
“Where in that soup of words did you include common sense as an ingredient?”
“My cuisine is apt to be consumed by men and women who send love letters to serial killers.”
After that, she went away and Mariana back to sleep. Half an hour later, I got betrayed by Mariana, that, ordered by Florencia and Sabrina, reproduced Abba’s biggest hits in my presence. I will spare you, my friends, the description of my contorting, foaming at the mouth self as the foul, happy-yappy pop purged the ballads from my system.