The Iliac Crest. Cristina Rivera Garza

windowpanes. But she continued, her low voice a faded painting in an abandoned house.

      “And the mobs afterward, always out for blood, always ready to strike. Mean little people. Mean and lonely people.” She looked at me but saw something else, a void she filled with hatred and resentment. “Their teeth. Their knives. Look, look at this.” She lifted her bare arms and pointed to something near her right elbow that I couldn’t quite make out.

      For a moment I felt sorry for her. But once again, I remembered who she was and how she had taken over my home, and my frustration returned. And my rage. I did not know her well—I did not know her at all—but I instinctively knew she would not break her silence. Regardless, I wasn’t really interested in the story of her disappearance. And I believed her even less. Without saying goodbye, almost without looking back at her, I left the house, and, upon opening my car door, I began to think of the public hospital as a refuge. Nothing of this sort had ever occurred to me before. I drove quickly that morning. I turned on the radio, and I was pleased to hear a violin sonata, which surprisingly helped calm me. For the entire journey to the institution, I entertained myself by watching out of the corners of my eyes the ash-colored shrubs running along the right side of the road and the ocean waters on the left. With peeling paint, the arch of the entrance read MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL: SERENITY SHORES SANATORIUM—even though barely any medicine was administered there and nothing about the site could be called serene. It was really, I must confess, an establishment for the terminally ill—the incurables, the migrants, the dregs—only operational thanks to nominal funding from the central government. The hospital was nothing more than a cemetery with open tombs. A strange sort of limbo where those with fatal wounds arrived and, nevertheless, could not die. Well, at least not yet. My hatred, you must understand, could do no more harm than that which already lived inside those beings, destined to live out the rest of their meager lives in that far-flung corner of the world, that last border.

      That morning, then, because of work, I was able to escape the routine that Amparo had imposed on my household. And though my achievement only lasted eight hours a day, five days a week, I celebrated it with a secret and silent pride. Amparo Dávila, I had decided, would not make me disappear. She would never be able to.

      DISAPPEARANCE IS CONTAGIOUS. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS. IN the past it was believed to be caused by something external, something that a much more powerful agent imposed on an innocent victim, often brutally. But with scientific and technological advances, we now know that to become a disappeared person, previous contact with another such person is necessary. Mechanisms triggering the disease vary quite a bit—a greater or lesser degree of violence, more or less isolation, a little or a lot of silence—but the common element among all of them is contact. Physical contact. Skin. Saliva. Touch. This is why so few people confess their condition or admit how horrid the nature of disappearance truly is. This is why my fear of Amparo increased exponentially when, as if it were nothing, as if it were of little to no importance, she confessed she was writing about her own disappearance. For a few days I thought about the possibility of asking for a vacation, so that I could get away from her during this critical phase, in the early stages of infection, but I quickly reconsidered. I remembered the Betrayed was also in my house, at the mercy of the Ex-Writer, and I was filled with a sense of dread. I feared for my ex-lover. I felt an absurd compassion for her, but in the end that was not the reason why I decided to stay. I had known for a long time—I could not leave the sea.

      The ocean soothes me. Its massive presence makes me think, believe even, that the world is quite small. Dull. Insignificant. Without it, the weight of existence proves fatal to me. I had lived in a solitude that the hospital-provided house helped me preserve for so long, and the ocean stretching out before me had saved my life. But all that, all those years of sacrifice, all those long minutes of discipline and deaf unease around the people I had abandoned in order to be next to the sea, began to collapse.

      I would like to blame Amparo Dávila for this, but I could not do so without betraying my sense of honesty. I suppose everything came to a head when, irrationally, I agreed to meet with the Betrayed. When I irresponsibly accepted a collect call on my office phone and when, completely delirious, I gave her directions to my place on the coast. Maybe Amparo had tapped the line. Maybe she had been spying on my ex-lover and, while pretending to be waiting to use the pay phone, positioned herself as close as possible behind her so as to hear the information. Maybe the Betrayed, who was always so negligent when it came to papers, wrote the information down on note cards that she then left out for anyone to see. Anything was possible and, whatever it was, it had worked perfectly. Amparo Dávila arrived only a few hours early to write the story of a disappearance that she, without any evidence, associated in a truly disturbing way with the Serenity Shores Sanatorium. That is what she told me the third morning.

      “You know you could help me with this, right?” she asked, but really it was just an order thrown in my face. I laughed because I was nervous, because I knew exactly what she wanted. An accomplice. An assistant. A confessor.

      “How?” I asked, unable to stop the question from leaving my lips, as much as I tried.

      Instead of answering immediately, Amparo was silent. Her tactics were always quite sophisticated. I am certain that she knew a quick response would result in outright refusal or, worse, mockery. Her silence, accompanied with a raised right eyebrow, had the hoped-for effect: she compelled me to ask. I needed her response. But, again, instead of giving in, she hid, and her silence made her even stronger. She didn’t speak of it again for days.

      Meanwhile, she acted as if nothing had happened. In this, her routine saved and protected her. She continued to wake up early to prepare tea and coffee, bringing the hot liquid upstairs to the Betrayed, who had begun to show signs of slight improvement. Notebook in hand, she’d return downstairs and, with increasingly curt and monosyllabic interactions, prepare to continue writing the story of her disappearance just as I’d leave for the hospital. This is how those nervous days passed, full of expectation as the winter continued to roll in.

      “How long have you been working at the hospital?” she asked me casually one day. Outside, the rain was altering the color of the ocean waters.

      “Twenty-five years,” I told her, not realizing the risk I was taking.

      “And do you have records for the whole time?”

      Her question made me turn and face her expansive eyes. I was alone, absolutely alone, and without a voice. At that moment I realized my suspicions were correct. Amparo Dávila wanted access to my institution’s records for reasons unbeknownst to me and that, surely, she would not share.

      “I don’t know,” I said calmly, as if I hadn’t caught on to her game. “You would have to ask the Director.”

      She smiled as if she really believed what I was saying. Then she went back upstairs and, to my surprise, shut herself in the Betrayed’s room. That was how I learned that they had begun to sleep in the same quarters. And again, irrationally, I feared for my ex-lover’s well-being. She would disappear, too—at that moment, I was as sure as a man could be. Then, almost immediately, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I remembered the place where I lived: its wild isolation, how our supplies arrived every week in cardboard boxes from either North or South City, the absence of the post, the limited number of telephones. I became aware, perhaps like never before, that this community formed around a handful of failing souls was, in fact, disappeared. And disappeared were our voices, our smells, our desires. We lived, if you will, in the in-between. Or rather, we lived with one foot in the grave and the other on terrain that held only a remote resemblance to life. Very few knew about us and even fewer worried about our fate. I was almost melancholic, but instead I looked out to the sea, her nocturnal silence, her immense mass. I served myself, from all the available liquors, a glass of anisette and reconsidered: our irreality and our lack of evidence not only constituted a prison but also a radical form of freedom. How many people from neighboring cities had the luxury of continuously feasting their eyes on this marine animal? How many could enjoy this relaxation, this tremendous rest made possible by the scarcity of a local history, by the absence of records? How many among them could live their own death day after day, hour after hour, punctually? How many of them knew the ocean so intimately, savoring her without resentment, gradually learning