A Zero-Sum Game. Eduardo Rabasa

before falling exhausted into a deep sleep.

      The following morning Mauricio went on a spree with his unexpected earnings. He went to the public baths to wash for the first time in weeks: the crusts of grime were stubborn, and without his coating of filth, the woman at the cash register didn’t recognize the brown-skinned, wily kid who came out. He bought a pirated T-shirt with the circular logo of a famous punk band and spent his last coins on a breakfast consisting of a chocolate-flavored concha soaked in atole.

      Maso decided it was time to become independent of his guild and start working on his own, even if it meant renouncing his daily ration of glue. He sought out a stretch of the metro system far from the monopoly of his previous organization and, at night, went back to sleep among the trash in Villa Miserias. With his savings he bought a blanket, which he carefully hid each morning before sneaking out to work

      Juana Mecha suspected something was going on when she began to find bloodied T-shirts in the trash. One day she arrived earlier than usual and managed to grab the arm of the frightened Mauricio before he could make a run for it. Vigorously shaking her broom as she walked, she spat out: “Better to eat humble pie than live like this.” Maso agreed to work as her assistant. His task consisted of separating out the trash for recycling before the truck arrived to mix it all up again. Mecha lent him a thin mattress and a pillowslip stuffed with a green housecoat; she regularly came by to take him to the leftovers canteen. In the afternoon, before setting out on her long journey home, she would give the kid a pat on the head, saying nothing more than: “Behave yourself.”

      That was when Mauricio Maso’s second shift began. With increasing frequency, the youths began to return to request more supplies. The first time, it took him a few days to find what turned out to be oregano. When the unwary kids smoked it, none of them wanted to be the only one to own up to its lack of effect, so they pretended to be high as kites. Mauricio had kept some back for himself and on realizing he’d been conned, he changed his supplier. His clients congratulated him of the potency of his new crop. They were soon requesting powders and pills. His efficiency produced a rapid expansion of his client base: anorexic models bought amphetamines from him; hangover hippies danced to the beat of the sledgehammers on his acid. As part of his transformation into a businessman, Maso set himself the rule of only consuming his own merchandise.

      His appearance was the first thing to change. He smartened up and acquired the first pair of the iguana skin boots that would become his trademark style. He took his rest on a real mattress and bought a portable, battery operated television set. Every night he went to bed in the narrow space between two garbage containers, watching the late-night repeats of primetime cartoons. He got hold of a sheet of acrylic and suspended it like a roof when it rained. He’d never before lived in such comfort.

      One night, he was woken by a slight tug on his gray tweed pants. The light of his torch showed a female client kneeling beside his mattress. A few days before, she’d bought supplies from Mauricio for a party her bosses—advertising executives—were throwing to celebrate a lucrative contract for snack commercials. Speaking at full speed, her jaw juddering, she told him they had run out of supplies. And the party was just getting going. Did he have any more? The thing was that they had run out of cash. What could they do? Still sleepy, Mauricio had hardly had time to process the situation when he felt an electric charge rising toward his crotch. The torch went out at the same moment as his zipper came down, liberating his hard-on. He felt a hand skillfully exploring. Then the moistness of a mouth initiating him. Overwhelmed by pleasure, he rummaged in the garbage until he found the sack where he kept his stock. He extracted a few small bags without counting them and the girl left triumphantly. A new method of payment had just been set up.

      There was one obstacle in the way of his frenetic business career: Joel Taimado became aware of the activity, at strange hours, around the trash. When he saw Maso going out on an order, Taimado took a look around his territory. He was about to admit defeat when he noticed an anomaly: in one of the overflowing containers there was a slight bulge. He dug around in the bags, smearing his uniform in the thick liquid pouring from them, until he met with a diagonally placed plank, camouflaged to match the color of the receptacle. As soon as he raised it, his jaw dropped with the excitement of his find. Maso’s cache contained his merchandise, his savings bound in rubber bands, his television, radio, and torch, his growing wardrobe, and the old photo of Juana Mecha he placed under his pillow each night. All this under the protection of a heavy-duty pickaxe and a Swiss army knife. Taimado closed the lid of the container and treated himself to a first fix right there. As a finishing touch, to leave no doubt about the person responsible for the confiscation, he pissed on the photo of the sweeping woman.

      When Maso returned from his chore, he heard singing coming from the room—known informally as the Chamber of Murmurs—where the security squad kept their things. In a melancholy mood, Taimado and his colleagues were singing along, out of tune, to his old radio. The Black Paunches were showing the effects of several hours of drinking cheap liquor, with the addition of the white avenues of cocaine snorted from their truncheons: they were vying to see who could do the whole line in one go. One of them was out for the count in a corner, having attempted to organize a bit of fun. It was a homespun version of those games where the participants hold hands and a machine administers mild electric shocks, causing the muscles to contract, until someone can’t bear it any longer and drops out. As he didn’t have the appropriate equipment, once the circle had been formed, he asked one of his companions to use his electric prod to administer a shock to the back of his neck, thinking that the effect would be shared equally between them all. This obedient colleague happily let leash the fury of the prod, intending to stop when the chain was broken. The recipient of the shock—his brains nearly burnt to a crisp—writhed to the sound of the guffaws from the others, who were soon able to attest to his body’s zero capacity as a conductor of energy. The entertainment came to an end when he stopped moving. The people holding his hands let go and he fell face down on the table, smoke coming from his ears. Between tears and laughter, they slapped his back in appreciation of the show and dragged him to the corner to sleep it off. Every so often Taimado asked them to check he was still breathing. Some pranksters shaved his eyebrows and made up his face, without it even occurring to anyone to wonder why a member of the security squad would have the necessary cosmetics among his personal belongings.

      With enviable calm, Maso turned and left to check out what he already suspected. He discovered trash scattered on his bed. When he opened up his cache, he found just a transparent piece of card lying in a pool of multicolored liquid: the image on the photo had washed out. He had no desire to throw it out or replace it with another. Nor even to rinse it to get rid of Taimado’s acrid smell. He would continue to put it under his pillow each night.

      16

      Max Michels had imagined the journey to complete his self-appointed mission would be less protracted. When, for the third time, he passed the security booth where the Black Paunch on duty was sleeping with his feet on the table, he realized that he’d been walking around in circles for some time. The booth and its occupant, the barrier marking the boundary between Villa Miserias and the outside world, the howling of the dogs in the charge of a professional walker about the cross through that boundary, the blaring horn vainly trying to wake the guard, and anything else his eyes and ears were capable of attracting to the attention of his conscious mind, suddenly seemed like incomprehensible elements, completely alien to him. He knew they formed part of a specific configuration, produced by forces—as intangible as they were real—that for centuries had been laughing uproariously at anyone who dedicated his life to explaining them.

      “Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable,” the fat man who signed his book with the name of the mythological navigator had written. How right he was, thought Max Michels, or at least the everyday habits of the majority would seem to attest to its truth. Few people grappled with the unendurable without the temporary escape valve of some form of external assistance, anything capable of extricating them for a few moments from the limitations of the body. Hey, smartass, look at the shitty state your drug’s gotten you into: you’re blind and you still keep going back for more. Say when you’ve had enough. We’d be delighted to go on fucking your head.

      When the Many were in the right, Max was the first to admit it. But he couldn’t