I started to run as soon as the club wielder turned to face me. His wide cheeks grimy with stubble, afloat in the white light, adrift in the white light, aloft in the white light. A face I almost, in fact, recognized. I ran southeast on Iturri, so they would have to pull the van around if they wanted to chase me in it, I thought, and ran along Concepción Arenal toward the Parque Los Andes. There I could hide myself among Paraná pines, jacaranda, bryophytes, and the underbrush my namesake wrote about with such diarrheal eloquence. The empty streets aided me here. I was able to run with tremendous speed and ease because I faced no human obstructions, no hate-filled primate stare. The few dogs not already on Newbery paid me no mind; they either ate and drank or trotted on, their breathing velvety and punctuated by the modest chiming of tags. I wanted to warn them — but dogs do not speak and do not understand (or so I thought then). I said nothing. The wide-faced club wielder kept shouting behind me: Hey asshole! Hey asshole, get back here! His breath more and more ragged between each cry and his footsteps slowing, as if sleep were descending upon him. Victor, let him go, a female voice shouted. Fuck you, Victor shouted back, it’s our job. Yet I heard only his footsteps. I realized these were the footsteps of a drunken man. The light, inconsequent stagger that expresses drunken inquiry. By the time I reached the lip of the park, I heard nothing at all behind me except for dimming shouts. He’s just some asshole, let him run, I won’t report you, and you have to admit he’ll probably end up with us anyway. Under these circumstances this Victor ended his pursuit and I stumbled across a high, cracked curb into the park.
A car’s ignition coughed and coughed, its motor wheezed and thrummed, but the sound faded. Heading westward, I thought. I had almost regained my breath when two loud, at-hand, penitential sounds broke the leafy silence. Or rather the enleafed silence. Nine or ten yards from the ombu stand I was concealed in, near a crushed Quilmes can coated with oblique streetlamp glow, two brown mutts copulated vigorously. They kept up countermelodic howls, answered from near and far by howls and cries of their fellows. The night calling out to itself.
11.
MY RETREAT TO THE Parque Los Andes lasted for hours, until I was absolutely sure no University police remained nearby. I got back to the Pensión Vermesser exhausted, but I did not sleep. As morning arrived, gray and gold, I planned my return to campus. I called a taxi after I showered. The shower did nothing to alleviate my exhaustion. I greeted the impassive, deep-eyed driver with a stony nod. The distance between my head and feet seemed to increase and decrease without warning. My visual field fishbowled as I dragged the sandy detritus of another sleepless night from the corners of my eyes.
There was an official reason for my visit. The conference was proceeding at its normal pace, indifferent to my inane and hard-to-understand difficulties. I was due to participate in a session taking as its theme — here I also saw Ana’s arranging hand — a subject that had fascinated me since I first entered my profession: the prison system of ancient Mongolia. Our most primal prison, our most supreme and invisible prison. Nothing but pits dug out of the Scythian earth supervised by a jailer on horseback. This system contained many surprising intricacies, more than enough material to keep a conference in vivid and rebarbative argument all day.
But I had no intention of showing up, no intention of running into the boy who looked like Che or a new set of student agitators. No, I went back to campus because I planned to enter Ana’s office, to batter its door down if necessary, to break its chiropractic glass. Like all second-rate thinkers I played out two opposing scenes in my head.
The first: Ana alive and well, dressed in her simple and opulent clothing, laughing her hoarse, proleptic laugh at my concerns. You are adrift, Boris Leonidovich. Her normal rebuke. Thereupon I would chastise her, demand explanations for her absence, for the night dogs, for Sanchis Mira, for the Department itself, for Luxemburg, for the vans and for the occluded night I had plunged into.
The second: pure void.
Students flowed through the first floor of the social sciences faculty, the divisions between the tag wearers and those with naked necks yet more evident. Among them, security officers ambled and strutted, laughing and calling to each other. They held up their right hands and tapped their rigid fingers against the thumb, like a maw opening and closing, in time with the drumbeats of the Dog Symphony, now playing openly from radios students carried. The tag wearers mimicked this gesture, and I did as well. One officer caught me in his gaze. Not malicious, just curious.
The elevator door opened on eight and revealed a pristine wall, painted delicate blue. The floors no longer puce tile but sealed concrete, brutally gleaming (and tinted a deep night blue). Cool, sweet air moved lightly around me. The ventilation system had been improved as well. The blues, like sea and sky, accompanied me. The reception area was painted in the same two shades; the desk was new, it looked like ebony, and the visitor seats were Barcelona chairs, crisscrossed by leather straps. They lacked the golden, rabbit-shaped label. I knelt on the cold floor to check. The east wing of the department, which did not contain Ana’s office, stretched openly to my right. All the piled boxes, all the ossification, the shoes and laces, the spectacles, all these had gone. The hallway was vacant and utterly still. The doors, white, all stood open, and the odor of drying paint came from them. The black-and-gold names gone, though the rippling glass itself remained.
The west wing was under construction. Opaque plastic drop cloths hung from the ceiling, covering whole sections of wall. Here, the blue sealed concrete flooring had not been completely installed. A black seam divided it from the old puce tiling. Wooden sawhorses (stenciled DSP in sky blue) stood poised in their obscene manner along the walls. The air stank of ozone, fresh sheetrock, sawdust. The corridor stretched and stretched, growing dimmer and then fading into complete darkness: I passed through the hall, holding my lighter up as a torch. Either no electricity flowed here or the light fixtures had not been connected. Thuds and sawing noises, filtered by distance, colluded. The hall stretched much farther than I would have thought possible given the size of the building. Then again, I was suffering from a lack of sleep and a more general disorientation.
This corridor ended in a false wall made of sky-blue duvetyn and black metal struts; a door, also of cloth, was set into it. I opened it halfway, and the duvetyn door revealed more puce linoleum and planted upon it two legs in sky-blue pants with silver piping. I pushed harder, the panel swung fully outward. There, diagonally across this improvised exit, was Ana’s office. Its door now stood ajar. Beyond, the room itself was empty, empty of everything except its old desk and faint squares on the walls. I knew from a photograph she’d sent me what had once concealed these whiter patches: her own photographs of Juan Filloy, the only Argentine writer she respected (I always pretended I knew who he was to oblige her). The names on the doors to either side — Zinny and de Gandia — gone. Ana’s name still remained. In part. A lackey in sky-blue coveralls was effacing it with a rag and a glass beaker of solvent. The lackey wore a silver badge like those I’d seen flashing on the chests of the University police, but he was a lackey and nothing else, I could tell from his loose lower lip and dull stare. A short silver whistle on a leather thong hung from his loose-skinned neck. To the thong was affixed a golden labeclass="underline" GENUINE PAMPAS HARE. The silver whistle beat time against his concave chest as he spread solvent, rubbed, and clucked.