A man in filthy pants and the paper shirt that relief workers hand out sat with his back against a yellow wall, his jaw working in silent but passionate conversation with himself. Another ran down the street shouting after a woman that he hadn’t meant to spend it all, and that there would be more next week, and why was she so angry when there was going to be more next week? An old woman swept the street outside her little bodega while the ads in her windows painted her face with blue and pink and blue again.
Basic income had come to Malasaña five years before, freeing it from want, but not, it seemed, from wanting.
I stopped to ask the old woman if I was going the right way and showed her the map on my cell. “I am looking for Julia Paraiis.”
She made a sour face, but pointed me down a side street even narrower than the main thoroughfare. “Five down, blue building. Third floor.”
I followed her directions, wondering whether it had been wise for me to come so far unaccompanied. But when I knocked at the door on the third floor of the blue building, the woman who answered looked like the one I’d seen on the net.
“What?” she said.
“We talked on the forum,” I said.
“You’ve come about Héctor?” she said.
In answer, I held out my hand, the roll of cash in my palm like an apple. She plucked it from me, her eyes softening.
“You’ve been saving,” she said.
“It’s everything I have.”
“You have more coming,” she said dismissively. “I’ll call for you the day after tomorrow.”
And like that, it was done. She closed the door, I walked away, turning back toward the street, and my room, and the hope that this time I would find him.
We were a community of a sort. The hunters after Héctor. There were more theories of who and where he was than I could count. I’d looked for him in Rome and Nice. Évora. I’d worked cleaning out brambles and hauling contaminated gravel from an old power plant for extra money to fund my dream of sitting across from the man, of telling him how much his words meant to me. Of breathing the same air.
Malasaña had always been one of the possibilities, but never the most likely. I had shared neither my growing suspicions of it nor of my searches outside of the community on the forums. Or my discovery of a woman who claimed she could arrange my introduction, if I was ready to pay for it.
My host had described my quarters as a studio, but it was less than that: an adobe shed that shared one wall with the house proper and just large enough for a cot. It was clean, painted a bright and cheerful pink. A sprig of rosemary tied with a white ribbon hung against the wall as a decoration, and it gave the small space a pleasant scent. The pillow was flat. The blanket, rough. If I wanted to use the bathroom or shower, I had to go to the main house and risk another hour or two of my host’s rumba music. The sounds of voices and guitars—and once a man’s enraged shout—mixed with songs of crickets and cicadas.
I opened my book, its screen my only light.
When I stopped with the heroin—this was, God, thirty years ago—I expected the aches, the illness, the craving deep as bones. Everyone knows how that comes. You anticipate it. Brace against it. Get ready. The thing I didn’t look for was how empty I felt when I was clean. Everyone, always, we are looking for our lives to have meaning. What did the one man say? The Jew? “Those with a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’” I think that’s right. When I was a junkie, I had my why. Always my why was to get more junk, and I endured terrors for it.
This age, this generation, traded its demons for the void. When I was young we were poor, and we are poor again now, but differently. When I was young, we were afraid to starve, to be without medicines or homes, and the teeth of it gave us meaning. Now we fear being less important than our neighbors. We lost our junkie’s need and we don’t know what to put in its place. So we make art or food or music or sport and scream for someone to notice us. We invent new gods and cajole each other into worshiping. All the vapid things that the wealthy did—the surgeries and the fashions and pretension—we understand them now. We are doing all the same things, but not as well, because we have less and we’re still new at it.
This? It’s the emptiness of our time, and the only thing worse is everything that came before it.
I let my eyes drift closed.
The death of an extreme alpinist team dominated the mid-morning news cycle. Images of the mountain range they had been climbing appeared on the newsfeeds like blossoms in springtime, overlaid by swaths of color to track their intended path through the area with the most landslides. The woman whose father died on the mountain—dark-haired and fighting back tears as she stood before the cameras—spoke the customary phrases. Climbing meant everything to him. He died doing what he loved. I curled under the rough blanket, listening to the sounds of Malasaña’s streets, and feeling the same uncomfortable mix of schadenfreude and envy that usually traveled in the wake of these optional tragedies. The romance of death by adventure.
I faced a less newsworthy ordeal. Three long weeks stretched out before the next disbursement, leaving a gap of fourteen days with nowhere to sleep, no ticket back to my flat in Nove Mesto, no way to buy my own food, and only water from public fountains.
I knew tricks of course. Ever since the rolls began, poor had meant poor management. Not everyone possessed the skills to shepherd their allotment all the way to the next one. The temptation to buy a cigar or a steak in the first days after the money came translated itself into missed meals and fasting in the long, brutal last days before the next payment, and sympathy came thin on the ground. The ancient lie that the blame for poverty belonged wholly to the poor had changed to truth now.
Experience taught me that the need to be more important than our neighbors could be exploited to sustain someone through the thinnest times. If I was careful. I strolled through the evening streets much as before, accepting the offered tidbits only here and there. Every third one. Or less. I smiled and nodded to the men and girls that haunted the little restaurants and family kitchens, encouraging but not too encouraging. And never grateful.
We exchanged the ragged sustenance I needed for the illusion they needed: that someone cared what they did. Will feed for applause. If I didn’t convince them I was enjoying their rice cake or stew more than whatever their neighbors offered up, my end of our unspoken bargain failed. And that led quickly to the samples shifting out of my reach. Everyone wanted to feel desired. No one cared about someone who came only out of need. And so, like a con artist, I pretended not to need. Pretended to appreciate what they gave me.
It thrilled me.
I could have been safe in Nove Mesto with food enough, water enough, warmth enough. Instead, I lived by my wits, and savored the suspense, the metal-sharp taste of not knowing how exactly I would survive. Of the moment just before the revelation. This Julia Paraiis who claimed to have the information I sought could as easily be a grifter preying on my credulity. Or I might leave Malasaña with a secret. An experience I’d been searching for over the course of years.
The dead alpinists, the people offering food in the corners, the bands coaxing us all to come dance to their music, my host and his awful rumba, and me. All of us struggled against the same void, and Héctor Prima sang our longing like a siren.
I passed one day and then the next, each hour feeling longer than the one before. And more charged with promise. With the lengthening evening of the second day, my anticipation stuttered, shifted, and grew darker. I lay on my rented cot, afraid to sleep in case I missed Julia Paraiis or some agent of hers. No one came.