By Roberto Bayeto
Translated by Monica Louzon
Earlier that morning, George had awakened feeling as though he were in someone else's body. He vaguely remembered belonging to a middle-class social circle, attending an all-boys high school when he was young, being divorced, living with his paternal grandmother, and working eight hours a day in an office at the city center.
And I write. I want to be a writer, but I'm already an old-timer, and I still haven't finished a single story, novel, or article, George mused as he walked toward the Golf Club, another place he remembered as if from a dream.
*
"Are you heading to the Club?" his neighbor Gabriel had asked. They'd been friends since childhood but hadn't see much of one another until lately, when George returned to the neighborhood where they'd grown up together. Now, they were closer. Gabriel had two sons. One was always meandering around, as if he were some kind of satellite orbiting his father. An erratic, aimless satellite.
"Yeah, I don't have anything else to do," George said. "I'm on leave, I think. I woke up feeling really strange. Everything seemed like a dream to me."
"Me, too, but that's every day." Gabriel laughed hoarsely.
Turbines rumbled in the sky. Another passenger airliner was starting its slow plunge toward the ground.
"Another one." Gabriel scratched his head. "I don't know how people go up in those things. They aren't safe. Judging from the way it's twirling, I'd say it'll take more than a week to fall, don't you think?"
George observed the Boeing's enormous body sliding slowly through the air, like a moribund whale that couldn't resist being pulled by the current toward the sands of an unknown beach.
"The pilot is trying hard, but he's not going to win," said Gabriel. "With any luck, the plane will land like all the others in that field behind the cemetery, and the people from the red zone will go and scrap it with their tools in less than an hour."
Like ants on a fallen beetle. That's what the scrappers remind me of. It's like the mala vida forces their minds into a primitive state, making them act like insects hoarding food and collecting fragments from an existence alien to their own.
Aloud, George replied, "A week, yes. I think a week is the longest that they can stay up in the air."
The friends said their goodbyes and went on their way as the giant white-and-blue apparatus fought between the pink-tinged clouds, buzzing with an irregular almost-snarl.
*
George walked some five hundred meters down a dirt-and-gravel road that wound through a forest of eucalyptus and pine. The Golf Club was in the middle of the trees, a solitary structure always filled with men who drank and ate bocadillos. Some of them even traveled over an hour by car just to be there. The drinks were abundant, the music pleasant, and the snacks exquisite. Not to mention the quasi-familial attention from the place's servers and owner who knew each client by name. George thought the most important feature of the Golf Club was the always-present, appetizing aroma of homemade food. It was primordial for the men who were simple beings with a three-step instruction manual.
The building was large—fifty by twenty-five meters—and constructed with solid stones and a dark, well-pressed straw roof. Inside were bars, tables and chairs, and music in various styles, like British or alternative rock.
When George entered, people he remembered only vaguely greeted him though they seemed to know him quite well.
"When will you go back to work?" asked a dark man with an indulgent smile.
"Next week, I think."
I asked for ten more days. I'm going to see if I can enroll in a literary workshop. If you'd like, I can vouch for you with the professor. He's a famous writer who has already published three books."
"Oh yeah? About what?" George asked, intrigued.
"Two about breeding dogs and one about a man who goes to a mountain to die, but he never makes it and he has a bow without any string! The bow is a metaphor for his life: he could have gone far, but without the cord... do you get it?"
George wavered for a couple moments and then said courteously, "Yes, I understand. Without the string, the arrow can't go anywhere. But yes, you're right. That workshop would be great for me. I've got writer's block. I have several stories I want to finish, but I don't know where to go with them."
He excused himself and left the man, going to sit at one of the bars.
The bartender placed a cold can of Budweiser beer next to a napkin and a bowl of peanuts. "How are you, George? I had the nerve to serve your usual."
"It wasn't nerve," George said, nodding. "You read my mind!"
The bartender smiled and retreated, satisfied.
George drank the beer slowly, enjoying it while "Eyes Without a Face" by Billy Idol played through the speakers hidden throughout the room.
He drank two more beers, ate two sandwiches—white bread with ham, cheese, and creamed choclo—paid, and rose from his seat.
Today was an unusually animated day at the Golf Club. George spotted a peculiar group of young people who appeared to be between sixteen and eighteen years old and weren't regulars. There were ten of them, seven guys and three girls dressed in an exaggerated fashion: expensive clothes reminiscent of a retro gang, paired with styled hair and expressions of disgust toward all the other diners who were at least thirty-five years their senior.
One boy with blonde hair deliberately bumped into George with his chest and then just stood there, watching him.
George looked at him, indifferent. "Excuse me," he said, trying to ignore the young man.
The youth wore a '50s-style jopo, a Gucci jacket with rolled-up sleeves, a blood-red shirt, jeans, and snakeskin boots.
"Be more careful next time, you stupid viejo." He almost spat on George's face.
George had been about to head to the door but froze. "What did you say?"
The guy flew at him, trying to hit him.
George didn't realize what had happened next, until the waiters pried him away from the almost-suffocated young man in his arms.
"Calm down, George. You almost strangled the guy," one of the staff said.
"I'm sorry. I don't really know what happened to me," George replied.
The guy George had almost strangled moments earlier recovered, and his friends helped him to his feet. Without any warning, one of them whipped out a cell phone and took several photos of George, who stood there not knowing what to do until the boy, almost panting, adjusted his jacket and growled.
"This was the worst and last mistake that you've committed in your life, viejo. The last one. From now on, everything's going to go to hell for you. I've seen you in this place for a while, pretending to be something that you aren't. I always told myself that when I could, I was going to punch that man."
"But I've never seen you in here before!" George said, confused.
"Not like this, not at this age, but I'll grow up again and come back for you."
The other young people clapped for their defeated friend, then departed as if they'd just accomplished some great task.
George watched them go, feeling out of place. His own actions had been unusual. I'm a peaceful man who can't even defend himself in other circumstances.
He bid an apologetic farewell to the other witnesses and retreated, noticing that many of them were either watching him with worried expressions or avoiding eye contact altogether.
*
George stopped in the doorway and noticed the group of young people leaving in a miniature replica of a London bus. This minibus had the same shape as a Routemaster 1958, but its upper floor was merely decorative, with painted wooden dolls simulating passengers in the upper windows.
Seeing George's bewilderment, they honked at him and laughed to tears. The youth who had attacked him made a rude gesture with his right index finger before the minibus set off down the road toward the neighborhood's exit. Perhaps they were heading toward the city center.
George walked slowly, realizing the possibility that the group might be waiting for him further along in the middle of the road. Worse, they could be armed. It was the most likely scenario: when someone with as much pride as his attacker had been humiliated like that, they always tried to avenge themselves.
Knives or firearms? George was scared. He wasn't used to violence, so he couldn't understand his own earlier reaction to the young man's aggression. Perhaps he awakened some base instinct in me, or maybe it was a visceral reaction to his insult and disgusted expression. I hope I'm not going crazy. Anything but that...
He remembered his father's own vacant face in the mental hospital, when George went to visit him and bring him cigarettes and caramels. Those same odors permeated everything there, especially the latter.
And there was always a chained monkey jumping on the patio. An exotic pet meant to calm down the crazies, but it was useless. Anything but that...
Cold discomfort settled in his chest.
George walked a few meters more, and then, luckily, the blue ómnibus appeared on its way from the club to the neighborhood. He flagged it down and boarded, relieved. The ómnibus was almost empty. He paid for his ticket while greeting the driver, then sat in the back.
The youths' red minibus wasn't waiting for him anywhere along any part of the route.
When he reached his neighborhood, night was already falling. He didn't understand how, because the trip had been so short.
*
George rose with the sun and made breakfast: mocha-flavored coffee, toasted bread, and crème chiboust. His grandmother had gone to her friend Beba's house for a few days on an improvised vacation. He was happy within his limited circle of existence. Having the house to himself filled George with peace.
Together with his coffee cup, he made himself comfortable in front of his old Remington and began to type. Two hours later, he had a mountain of scraps that went nowhere. He couldn't start a story, much less finish the ones he'd already started.
George felt like his life was an absolute disaster.
His cell phone rang. It was his ex-wife.
"Come to the house as soon as possible. We need to talk." That was all she said before cutting off the connection.
George took his time as a vain form of rebellion. He finished his breakfast and washed the cup and spoon. Then, he took off the frayed boxers that he wore when he was alone and put on some light-washed jeans, a brown jacket with suede elbow pads, and some loafers of the same leather and color.
He set out into the morning with its blue sky and pink clouds, imagining that his ex might be waiting for him to ask if they could get back together, which he knew, deep down, was absurd.
*
The Boeing 767 continued falling.
George still believed it would take over a week for its gigantic body to hit the ground and burst open, like a box of dolls tossed from the highest floor of a building. He imagined that, in the two ghettos, the residents were already organizing, preparing to ransack the remains before the arrival of the authorities, who would delay longer than necessary so the people might have some kind subsistence that the neo-liberal state didn't grant them.
Hypocrisy reigned around him, while the almost-imperceptible contrails from the Boeing's engines circled the sky. The plane's pilots were fighting against a hopeless destiny. He observed its slow rotations for more than ten minutes, only to find that when he lowered his eyes, he felt nauseous. His head spun, keeping time with the moribund machine.
George's ex-wife was beautiful, with eyes as blue as the autumn sky, curly blond hair, and a contagious smile. Her only flaw was that she'd married an idiot. Even worse, she'd left him for that idiot.
George referred to his ex-wife's new husband as "Cosmo Kramer.” The man was just like the Seinfeld character played by Michael Richards: skinny, tall, hysterical, and crowned with woolly hair. The Cosmo in George's continuum was always coming up with ridiculous ideas, and when he talked about them, he trembled and stuttered, fussing with his hands.
George was never going to understand the true reason why Vanessa had left him for the guy. She swore Cosmo was an attentive person who made her feel special, but George was sure that couldn't be the whole story. George thought that the root cause behind everything that had happened with her was his temporary rejection of the idea of having children and Cosmo’s willingness. His theory was further substantiated when his Vanessa got pregnant two months after their divorce and married Cosmo during the third.
George knocked on the door. Although he felt the anguish of loss every time he went to Vanessa and Cosmo's house, there was no other option for him at this point in his life but to indulge himself in her smile—even if only for a few minutes each week—and to be secretly grateful that his ex-wife's new husband wasn't hostile toward him. Perhaps his amicability was because he wouldn't have met Vanessa if he hadn't been the mechanic George had sent her to when her car broke down.
Vanessa opened the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "We need to talk..."
"Cosmo's not around?"
"You know I don't like when you call him that. And no, Alex is not here. That's why I wanted to talk to you. Earlier today, some kids came by claiming to be your friends. I explained that you don't live in this house, so they left, but they sat in a convertible watching the house for over an hour. They were unsettling. Their faces looked like they belonged to very old, cruel people, even though the kids couldn't have been more than sixteen years old. I don't know if you understand..." She looked him in the eyes with an expression that he knew so well and added: "You didn't have anything to do with them, right?"
"I had a problem in the Golf Club," he murmured.
"George!" she exclaimed, worried. "What happened?"
"One of those kids assaulted me. I defended myself. I'm not proud of what I've done, but it wasn't something I could control."
"How strange, George. You're such a sweet, understanding person. The kid may have unbalanced you inside, triggered something that made you lose control, but you have to be careful! I hope this situation where we're separated but still friends isn't changing you. If you feel like it's affecting you, just tell me and we'll try cutting off contact."
"No, no, it's not that! It was something unexpected. The situation surprised me, and the place was full of people I know. And I don't want to stop seeing you! I swear what's happening between us isn't affecting me on that level."
"I hope not, but I don't want us to hurt one another. If I see you're not doing well, I'm going to feel unwell, too."
George looked Vanessa in the eye. He felt at peace for the first time in months, but he restrained himself. The person he loved would never be his again. He knew her, and he also knew that if she had a child with someone, she'd stay with that person forever, so long as the man respected her. Cosmo wasn't as stupid as he seemed. He had to know that a woman like Vanessa was way out of his league. Not to mention, Cosmo would soon be caring for his second greatest achievement: Cosmito.
"Let me tell you something anyway," she said. "You seem strange. You don't seem like yourself, but maybe that's just my impression."
He considered her for a few moments, then responded. "You might be onto something. I've been like this since yesterday. When I got up, I felt like I was dreaming, and I still do. I feel like I'm in a stranger's body, like everything's imaginary except for you, Vaney. You're the only constant in my life."
She smiled sweetly at him. "I love you very much, George. What we had didn't work, but that doesn't mean that you weren't my best friend for years. That isn't going to change. You might not have had the capacity to commit yourself to me to the degree I needed, but that doesn't mean I've stopped feeling the care and tenderness I've had for you ever since we first met."
Care and tenderness, but no romantic love. George realized that he was an idiot, which would never change. "Perhaps it was the age difference."
"Alex is your age, George. It wasn't that, and you know it."
The smell of mocha coffee invaded the room. Vanessa rose, went to the kitchen, and returned with two cups of coffee and a plate of sugar cookies with chocolate chips in them. "The kind you like."
He thanked her, smiling. They're my favorite, he thought. She's the only person on the planet who knows everything about me. Every taste, every desire, every single dream and aspiration.
George took a sip of the hot coffee, then asked, "What do you think of the falling planes?"
"What does that have to do with what we're talking about?"
"I dunno. I thought I'd ask you something different."
She half-closed her eyes. "I don't know what to think. They're already something normal. It's normal to look up at the sky every morning and see a plane plummeting for days on end. I won't deny that, in the beginning, they made me feel anxiety mixed with sadness. I don't remember when they first started falling but seeing them is normal now.
"What I still don't understand is why people pay so much money to go up in those planes if they know that they're going to die. And why the government allows those flights. The president and his ministers are under public scrutiny. They should make a formal statement, especially with the government in transition."
"My thoughts exactly. After the war, so many things happened that I can't explain, but the planes are up there, in the sky, and no one seems to care about them. They don't hurt us. They all fall in the same place every time. It seems like they're giving a hidden part of our society work, a new means to survive," George philosophized, surreptitiously peeking at the sky through a corner of the closest window.
"At the cost of others' lives," Vanessa interrupted.
"We all live at the expense of others," he added hastily.
She thought for a few moments, looking at him sadly. "Now I remember why we got divorced. Pessimist George always found something negative about every idea I had. 'No, Vaney. Having a child in this fallen, post-apocalyptic world? That would be nuts, Vaney. The war, Vaney. We're all going to die and a child? That would be bringing another human being into the world only for it to suffer certain death. Two pandemics, Vaney. Millions already dead. Why would you want to have a child in these conditions? It's risky, Vaney. Sheer masochism.'"
Vanessa was mocking him.
George sighed. I'm sorry for everything I said to you, for not giving you the child you wanted. You don't know how sorry I am, Vaney, but it's already too late.
Instead of saying what he was thinking, he curtly replied, "Yes, that's me." Then he rose. "I'm going. If anything happens, if those stupid kids show up, call me. I'll take care of them."
"It'd be better to call the police."
"They're rich kids, Vaney. You know that the police always listen to rich people."
"All right, George the Over-Paranoid. I'll call you if they show up, George the Socially-Resentful Pessimist."
He said goodbye, giving her a kiss on the cheek and brushing her belly affectionately. Cosmito, he thought, and he felt like an idiot for doing so. Not because of Cosmo, but because he realized that he didn't have the respect of the woman he loved. She'd chosen someone better for herself.
As he walked, he looked over his shoulder, checking the streets and nearby corners, but the kids he'd had the altercation with earlier were nowhere to be found. He decided to return home, to have another coffee, to try to finish something—a short story, at least—so he might feel like his life was taking a different path or wrapping up.
*
The plane flew increasingly closer to the ground. George wondered again what kind of engines the vessel had. They kept it running for so long on the same fuel, although he remembered Gabriel commenting that one night he'd seen a supply plane approach one of the 767s in flight. The sight had been so fleeting that Gabriel never knew whether it was real or an optical illusion.
George didn't see the sense in going through such logistics, not when a plane falling slowly for several days would inevitably end up smashed to pieces in a neighborhood of people living on the margins of society. Besides, why would there be a hidden supply chain network giving the planes entiretanks of fuel to keep them in the air?
It would be a good plot for a novel about a stupid conspiracy theory, he thought, but he wouldn't even know how to start it.
*
George hadn't managed to write anything, which led him to the conclusion that writing wasn't his talent. And also, that he lacked any talent for anything whatsoever.
Not even for being a good husband, seeing as how Cosmo ended up with my woman...
He grabbed his jacket and decided to go for a walk. He wasn't seeking inspiration to write, but rather anything that might make him feel alive.
George wandered through a neighborhood that was half a kilometer from the red zone, the Zona Marginal.
Over the past two days, those strange youths had been patrolling a loop between his house and Vanessa’s in one of their odd vehicles, but he'd never managed to confront them. Whenever he crossed the threshold leading to the sidewalk, they swiftly departed every time, but not without shouting things at him in what sounded like German and then launching into over-exaggerated laughter.
They seem like trashy beatniks from some bad '70s movie. For a second, George imagined opening a wormhole to that era, capturing them, and launching some beatniks into the present.
He headed toward the new neighborhood at the periphery of the plane cemetery, remembering something Gabriel had mentioned while being orbited by his satellite son.
"The other day, a coworker told me that they've built a bunch of luxury mansions in a neighborhood just ten blocks from the Zona Marginal where the planes fall," Gabriel had told him. "Turns out a construction conglomerate bought everything, knocked down the old houses, and built an upper-class neighborhood in less than two years. Strange, isn't it?"
George decided to go there. His life was already insignificant. Why not get himself involved in something that would distract him from his routine of drinking coffee or beer, eating, and then begging at his ex-wife's house for a taste of the happy past that he'd so skillfully sabotaged?
*
Tall, colored brick walls, lots of green, high screens, and gardens full of flowers characterized the wealthy neighborhood too exclusive for the marginalized people living in Zona. There was also a police patrol that slid through the quiet every half hour, most likely to prevent the suburb's fringes from entering and corrupting the neighborhood's order and tomb-like silence.
There has to be a reason why these ricachones live so close to a red zone, but it eludes. George inhaled the aroma of expensive perfumes wafting on the warm air.
A police vehicle passed by slowly, and the two agents inside observed him for a few seconds. Seeing that he didn't seem like a misfit, they moved on and continued their search for hypothetical intruders.
George walked down each street, watched by the moving cameras on motion sensors over the mansions' gates. Several times, he thought something was approaching him or that around some corners, several kids had just disappeared behind a wall as if they were hiding from him.
It was getting dark, and he felt thirsty. There was a minimercado next to a gas station, and he bought himself a lemon soda and a bag of potato chips seasoned with herbs.
He sat in a small plaza near the entrance to a tunnel that sank into the depths of the earth. High-end cars and a suburban ómnibus decorated with replicas of abstract paintings disappeared into it.
Reclining on a white marble bench with feet carved to look like faun faces, George began to eat and drink, noticing how some of the houses rose into the sky like enormous dovecotes of wood and iron. They peeked out from behind walls that must have been over four meters high. Everything in this place seemed unattainable, cold, and distant.
The only familiar thing he could see was the falling Boeing 767, spinning slowly, still fighting against time, gravity, and inevitable death.
Not finding what he'd been looking for—specifically, the group of teens with vibes of a gang from a post-apocalyptic film—George returned to his grandmother's house around dusk and sat on the porch.
There, he drank several cans of Budweiser, observing the lights from the plane overhead. It seemed to follow him all the time, like one of those close friends only seen in movies who definitely didn’t exist in the real world.
*
George rose at dawn with a bit of a hangover. Like a dry leaf falling into a creek, he didn't know where his life was going. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to know for sure or whether he merely wanted to grow old as quickly as possible and die in absolute peace.
He went outside to find the sky full of pink clouds and interrupted by the now-reddish plane. It would again turn white with a fringe of blue once the sun climbed high enough toward its zenith. The air smelled of oven-fresh bread, coffee, chocolate, and smoke from burning leaves.
George paused and inhaled deeply. A brisk breeze ruffled his hair and cleared his mind. Until then, he'd still been a bit confused by the nightmare he'd last night: Cosmo and Cosmito had been laughing at him as his ex-wife told him how her had life finally made sense once she'd met the “so well-endowed” mechanic, how when she'd been with George she'd been enduring their routine and the anxiety that comes from living with a small, sad penis.
In the dream, Cosmito had hair on his chest, the hint of a beard, and was speaking Albanian while drinking beer from his bottle as his diaper fell down. Each time that George looked at him, Cosmito rudely gave him the middle finger while hitting his bicep with the palm of his other hand.
Perhaps for another dreamer, all of this would have seemed stupid and insignificant, but for George, who was navigating the failure of a relationship into which he'd poured his whole self, it was more than that. It wasmuch, much more. The nightmare had filled him with anguish and anxiety that made his knees go weak and his eyes grow damp.
Failure, he called himself and paused for a few seconds to meditate.
Then he headed toward the place he always went when his life found itself at a dead-end: the lagoon.
*
Ever since he was a boy, George headed to the lagoon every time he had a problem or doubts. No one knew its true origins, as it had already been there when they constructed the buildings in the Zona Comercial. The lagoon was about thirty meters in diameter, two meters deep, and it was surrounded by what appeared to be bricks—but there were no indications in the records that an archaic village had once stood there.
From childhood on, George would sit there and observe the transparent water with its muddy bottom and swimming creatures, all of which were several meters long: xenacanthuses, rays, and crested sea serpents. According to an old wives' tale, one time some children fell into the water and were rapidly devoured by armored fish. No one wanted to challenge this gossip or even raise the idea of draining the lagoon. Nor did anyone ever try to fish for the predators. Teens who sometimes threw hooks in the water only brought up small yellow fish or brightly colored turtles that served as food for the aquatic monsters.
George bought himself a dozen bizcochos in the bakery and made himself comfortable on a stone bench by the lagoon. The bizcochos were delicious: croissants filled with pastry cream, chocolate, dulce de leche, and others filled with cheese, ham, and pepperoni. The bakery was only half a block from the lagoon, next to a supermarket, three toy stores, various fast-food businesses, and half a dozen delis. The area was like a paseo, with the abnormal lagoon situated at the center of everything. It was somewhere a neglected person could sit and fall in, paying the annual blood quota to the fish, which were even more strange and archaic than the mysterious construction they inhabited.
From this spot, George could see the Boeing 767, which was now a resplendent white with a stripe even bluer than the sky itself. He realized that the plane was much closer to the ground now. It didn't have much time left in the air—maybe two or three days, if its passengers were lucky.
His life would be much emptier when the plane completed its journey. This particular Boeing had been a constant companion, above him like a guardian angel keeping watch, reminding him that he was important to someone or something.
George was conscious of his solitude. The woman he'd loved most was carrying the child of another man in her womb. As they all grew older with time, Cosmo would have Cosmito to carry on his hairy genes. George would go on getting older and agonizing in complete solitude, until the day he had the bone-deep revelation that his entire existence had been insignificant, useless. That his ancestors were cursing him from the deepest part of his own genes for wiping their successes and memories off the face of the planet.
The noise from the Boeing's turbines shook George out of his ominous thoughts. The last thing he wanted was to end up like that, so he tried to do something different, something that would lift him out of the constant anodyne route his life was currently following toward the end of the road.
He looked up and noticed how the plane's ailerons fought against some blast of descending wind that was trying to force the machine to fall at once. In that moment, George knew he had to be there to witness the plane's end when it would be dashed to pieces.
*
An increasing noise from the 767's engines woke George as Friday dawned. He got out of bed and dressed as he hurried to the bedroom window, bumping into furniture as he did. He opened the curtain and found himself paralyzed by a feeling of insignificance before the gigantic vessel moving in slow spirals less than three hundred meters overhead, omniscient in its size and shape, and now the color of blood.
He went to the kitchen and put a scoop of Yemeni mocha coffee in the coffee maker. He'd been saving it for a special occasion. After the crisis that came with the war, no store carried any merchandise from the other side of the ocean anymore. It was quite difficult to cross the sea, and impossible to do so by air because any planes that went up into the sky all spun like leaves on the wind before they inevitably crashed into the surface with deafening explosions.
George opened the windows and pulled back the curtains. Every five minutes, he checked on the curved form of the plane passing over his house, overshadowing it for a few seconds.
100,000. 99,999. 99,998. 99,997. 99,996...
George served himself a cup of strong coffee with two spoons of sugar.
99,980. 99,979. 99,978.
He tried to calculate how many seconds it would take for the Boeing to fall to the ground. It was a completely futile effort because the machine would resist until the overwhelmed pilots decided to let it fall. The battle was already lost.
Who would go up in those planes and why?
He finished his coffee. That was the leitmotif of everything: Why?
And, more importantly: Who?
George thought about going to Vanessa's house, but he preferred to distance himself from his past as he sought an explanation for his present, and so he could attend to the Boeing in its agony. It had accompanied him through all these days of his solitude and despair. Like a colophon to his decision not to visit Vanessa, the refrain from "Can We Still Be Friends?" by Todd Rundgren played in his head. He laughed, realizing sometimes life was ironic.
George raised his gaze. He thought he saw the Boeing give him a complicit wink as a ray of sunlight glinted off one of its cockpit windows.
*
He caught the Blue Line 808 ómnibus to the new neighborhood. The bus line itself was also new. The vehicle's cleanliness surprised him, for it was only carrying a group of teens with frozen, cruel faces.
One of the youths was staring at him.
"Hello, niño-anciano," the boy said.
George didn't understand this greeting.
"What are you?" he asked, trying to figure out why this boy with eyes full of twisted wisdom would call him a boy-man.
The teen smiled and shook his head, paying George no more heed. The other teens continued talking.
Two stops before the end of the route, they all disembarked, staring at George disquietingly before they disappeared into a fast-food joint.
The ómnibus reached its destination, and the driver opened its three doors. George rose from his seat and descended from the vehicle.
The Boeing would be below three hundred meters now, as if it were making a bumpy landing past an abandoned air control tower at the end of the world. An end of the world that happened a few years ago and changed everything for the humans who survived it.
Before and after the end of the world...
George headed toward the edge of the neighborhood, toward the edge of opulence that went almost unnoticed in a society still emerging from chaos.
He reached an exit—or an entrance—protected by two uniformed guards who studied him for a few seconds and then ignored him. Beyond the half-open gate was the Zona Marginal, a neighborhood where groups of people wearing pilot and stewardess uniforms—most of them ripped and stained with dried, dark blood—were organizing themselves in houses constructed from fragments of wrecked planes.
He walked through the remains and their inhabitants, who paid him even less attention than the guards at the border separating the two completely equidistant universes.
The Boeing was already showing off its grooved belly. Its landing gear lowered in an attempt to taxi on the enormous field covered in skeletons of twisted metal that were picked clean: dead birds tossed onto an anthill by cruel, idiot children.
George approached one of the women dressed like a stewardess. "How long do you think it will take to fall?"
The woman looked at him as if he were crazy. After reflecting for over a minute whether she should respond, she said, "Not long."
"Sorry to be a bother, but are you—are any of you—survivors from the other planes' crews?"
The woman shook her head. "I live here. The people they save from the crashes go to that place." She gestured at the aristocratic neighborhood less than five hundred meters away.
"I don't understand. Do they walk there? Don't ambulances come here? Firefighters?"
"They come later. The malicious, cruel kids go over there. Their souls leave them as the years pass, but they already didn't have much of their souls left when they decided to go up into the sky. It's not when you need to go, but they go when they want to go."
The woman seemed to grow bored and left, joining the rest of the anthill people waiting for the great Boeing beetle to be overthrown once and for all, so they could trap its broken wings and dismember it.
"It can't take anymore! It's going to fall!" shouted a tall skinny man wearing a pilot's uniform that was stained with black blood and too short for him. His feet were covered by two pieces of leather tied with cords—possibly salvaged from one of the many seats that were everywhere, situated in patterns reminiscent of ancient megaliths or never-ending spirals.
George looked up when heard shouting. Hundreds of "neighbors" from the neighborhood-cemetery had appeared to the west and were insulting the group near him from afar. Those who appeared to be the bosses of each clan dressed like pilots and wore captain's hats. They lifted iron lances and defied one another, shouting and threatening to throw their lances until the Boeing's turbines emitted a long and deafening whistle, then blew out.
Chaos reigned. Shouts, screams, and torrents of objects flew from one side to the other.
The moribund monster overhead concluded its spiraling descent that had lasted dozens of hours with a thunderous blast that rebounded against their stomachs. It continued advancing, spinning like a top for about three hundred meters, then tilted to one side and began emitting smoke and one last death rattle from its engines.
George started walking toward the machine, but he stopped when he realized, surprised, that neither of the two groups had moved. They should have been running to be the first to arrive at the wreck, to take the best parts of the spoils, but instead there was only silence. It was a silence reminiscent of the night setting on a television channel that only transmits daytime programming.
The inhabitants of the Zona Marginal who, only moments earlier had been shouting and throwing things like jealous baboons, now looked like they belonged to a ginormous post-apocalyptic mural. In the background, George heard small explosions and the slow turning of the dying turbines, which had definitively concluded their titanic, heroic task.
Over twenty minutes passed, but still, nobody moved. Smoke rose from the plane's remains, almost hiding its form.
Feeling nauseous from the soft odor of gasoline mixed with burning plastic, George thought he perceived something moving among the twisted remains. He shaded his eyes with his hand to see better and spotted them: there were two dozen young people, the same age as the ones who'd crossed him in the Golf Club. Their clothing swung loose, too big for their compact bodies. The boys wore tuxedos, and the girls wore gala dresses. They staggered, shocked, toward the group of aerosalvajes—George didn't know what else to call them—that waited in silence, strangely giving the youths space to pass.
Some of the young people took off the too-large clothes so they could walk without tripping and falling. They marched through the heart of the assembled multitude and continued toward the upper-class neighborhood where George could make out several vehicles approaching. They stopped within two hundred meters of the Zona Marginal, seemingly for the survivors of this accident that he had already judged to be deliberate and part of a larger plan that escaped him.
The group of teens continued their laborious advance. Some of them spotted him and smiled.
"Hola, muchacho," said one redheaded guy with big freckles and a gap between his teeth.
"Wake up, Arthur. Now you're the muchacho, not that old guy," a blond girl chided him. She was covered in scraps of a black-sequined dress and carried a smartphone, clutching it as if it were made of gold or a canteen full of water found in the middle of a desert.
George walked a few meters closer to the teens. "Are you part of a school trip? Did somebody from the crew survive so that I can ask them what happened?"
Several of them laughed cruelly.
"This stupid administrator doesn't know. He doesn't know anything, he doesn't understand anything. Even the savages that live here like they're from a post-apocalyptic movie understand, but this guy doesn't," laughed a short teen who was wearing the clothes of a much larger, fatter man. "That's why you were born to serve and why you'll die serving."
That's when George realized what was happening.
A second chance? he thought, horrified.
Aloud, he said, "You were adults. Old decrepit ones, perhaps, but by some inexplicable power, now you're not."
A young woman with skin as dark as a chess piece burst into laughter.
"Eureka!" she shouted. "Clever boy! Once I’ve adjusted to myself, ask for Eldora at GlobalTech. I’ll give you a job at one of my businesses. It’s an honor for a normal person to be right here, right now.
"And before you ask, each spin is one month, one more month. Each spin is yet another month, and a month more is a trip backward.”
The teens kept moving until they reached the border of the Zona Marginal. There, they were received by hundreds of doctors, firefighters, and police officers who put them in emergency vehicles and carried them off.
"With each spin, they lose part of their soul and become bad. Very bad," said a boy maybe ten years old, who carried a club in one hand and sported a captain’s cap on his shaggy head. "They’re bad people with no generosity in their hearts, if they even have hearts at all. I was a pilot, but I didn’t want to go with them. I clung to what I was, I held onto my soul, although I know that it will disappear into infinity anyway."
A whoop from one of the clan leaders rose in the air. Everyone started running toward the Boeing's remnants as if they’d been possessed. They tripped, fell, and struck one another on their race to arrive first.
George turned so that he wouldn’t have to see the results. He could already feel that the Boeing was dead. His lifelong friend had fallen into a river full of piranhas while on an anthropological research trip on the Amazon.
He escaped, leaving behind the Zona Marginal and the neighborhood for soulless rich people, those young-old people who went up in the sky to reclaim the lives they’d lost, trying to take advantage of what they’d wasted the previous time or the time before that. Wasting their first lives to enrich themselves and now able to simply enjoy their second.
But they’re idiots. To enjoy making themselves teenagers and annoying others instead of doing something useful or traveling to some unknown place... Or simply living with all their energy to take advantage of what the end of the world has gifted them so they might be able to pay for a trip to their youth again without aging—or at least, without growing old quickly again...
George felt like he couldn’t breathe before such a vast conspiracy. Only yesterday, he lived in a world full of enigmas with a single-file path between vulgarity and the lack of stimulation. Today, it was a completely different scenario: a giant model where each limit was hidden behind some strange cloud that, in turn, protected fathomless mysteries.
*
In keeping with his social status, George boarded a Yellow Line ómnibus, noticing the broken seats and dirt-stained windows sculpted by raindrops. He traveled for fifteen minutes and disembarked at the corner by Vanessa and Cosmo’s house. When he was only twenty meters away, he saw a group of old people in young skins waiting for him, leaning against a black Porsche.
“Are you coming from the plane cemetery?” asked the one with whom he’d had the altercation in the Golf Club.
“What does it matter to you?” George responded.
The youth laughed and made a horrified face.
“Ohhhh, the veteran has charged his batteries! He seems valiant and all but look what he’s doing: visiting the right place at the right time.”
George stopped next to the teens and asked, “Why don’t you go off and take advantage of your new lives? Is it because when you regain your youth, you proportionally lose your intelligence?”
“We have everything we could possibly want from life," said the boy he’d fought in the Golf Club. "When we’re done with this new one, we’ll go up again and again and again. Thousands of years will pass and we’ll still be here. You’ll just be a mound of dust in a moldy cemetery.”
George watched the youth for a few seconds. He noticed something he’d missed before, something he felt was an additional perspective he’d earned from watching the spins of the dying plane. “You’re bored, aren’t you? When you lose your souls, you also lose the finality of existence. Each time you go up, you lose more and more of your very selves until you’re dried out, with young, lifeless, graceless bodies. Like raisins. Eternally bored. Living dead. That's what you are: raisins that dry out more and more with each spin of the plane.”
The boy furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. The rest of them shifted uncomfortably.
“You don’t amuse me anymore! You lost something. You’re not funny, you oaf!" The blond youth got in the car. "Let’s go, guys!”
The rest of them followed suit, making obscene gestures at George as they did. They drove off swiftly toward the aristocratic neighborhood of soulless youth.
George stopped himself before he reached Vanessa’s house. He didn’t feel compelled to beg for her love and kindness anymore. From another house, he could hear the radio playing Robert Palmer’s cover of “Can We Still Be Friends?”
Vanessa had chosen another life, and he wasn’t in it.
George turned, walked toward the ómnibus stop, and boarded a lilac-colored bus, returning to his neighborhood while the radio played a different cover of the same song—this time sung by Mandy Moore.
And now, with all of this, I know which path to take.
George laughed sadly to himself, feeling his heart strengthened by the spirit of the Boeing 767 that had stopped falling alongside him.
*
That night, he went to bed early, feeling the void that came from no longer hearing his friend's engines riding through the clouds.
*
Three months later, George sensed the engines of another plane plowing through the sky as it fell in slow circles.
Another one. He was unsurprised.
This time, it was an Airbus—much larger and more impotent than the Boeing 767, with an even bigger cargo of living dead.
George went out front in his pajamas and stood there, making a visor with his hand. The vessel was blood-red traversed by white fringe. The blood-red fuselage against the blood-red sun peeking over the horizon was a convergence of symbols of immortality: blood was the symbol of eternity, as well as the vampirism that the faithful flying machine inspired.
A breeze carrying the aroma of metal and white roses ruffled his hair as he observed the new combatant enter the sky.
George realized his soul swelled with happiness.
He was charging and revitalizing as he watched each spin of the plane as it slipped between the pink clouds. He knew something that nobody else knew, or at least that no one he knew was aware of.
While the people traveling in the Airbus were recouping years of their lives and losing their souls, George felt more alive than ever, and he didn’t have to give up his soul in exchange.
He was more alive than any inhabitant of those dried-out, young-old aristocrats inhabiting that luxurious neighborhood. He had the things that he enjoyed in life, like his coffee in the morning, his memories of Vanessa, and his attempts to write stories that wouldn’t come out of his fingertips. But they were in his head, in his mind alone.
George brought a chair out to the porch and sat down in front of the house that he’d moved into two weeks ago. He had no neighbors. His rent was so low because of the constant noise from the turbines in each sustained fall. He had a privileged view of the fields where the remains of the planes were being reclaimed by nature, and he could smell the salty sea air when the wind blew from the south.
He held his cup of aromatic, steaming coffee in his hands, watching the sky and feeling like his soul was as full as the fuel tank of the Boeing 767 that had taken flight toward the infinite, only to begin falling, spinning slowly, fighting against its inevitable destiny but enjoying the battle as each second transformed into ten thousand years.
Roberto Bayeto (Montevideo, 1964) is a Uruguayan writer whose works have been translated into ten languages, including English, French, Italian, and Portuguese. He founded the first Uruguayan magazine of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Roberto’s story Monstruos was included in the French collection Utopiae 2004, earning him an invitation to the Utopiales convention in Nantes, France. His story El Mercado de las Sombras was a finalist for both the Ignotus Award and the Golden Khan Award (Bulgaria); it also appeared in the magazine Galaxies (France). Roberto’s novella En la Tierra donde Viven los Dragones was selected for the Spanish edition of Asimov’s. Two of his stories, illustrated by Zalozábal, were published in the North American magazine Heavy Metal. Versatile across science fiction, fantasy, horror, police procedurals, and comics. Roberto currently manages the digital magazine Mordedor and shares his creative universe on Youtube.
Monica Louzon (she/her) is a queer USian writer, translator, and editor. Her stories, translations, poems, and essays have appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies throughout the English-speaking world, including After the Storm, Apex Magazine, Oh Reader, The Orange and the Bee, and Paranoid Tree. “A Falling Boeing 767, Spinning Slowly” is her first collaboration with Roberto Bayeto. Monica served as the Acquiring Editor for the dark speculative magazine The Dread Machine, and founded the open access, peer-reviewed MOSF Journal of Science Fiction. Monica’s story “9 Dystopias” was a Best Microfiction 2023 winner. She tends to fill what free time she has with making zines, climbing on things, learning more languages, crocheting ridiculously large blankets, and hanging out with her local murder of crows. To learn more about Monica and her work, please visit https://linktr.ee/molowrites.