634 Hudson Street Chapter 1 & 2

To Sonia, for always being there.

To Lou Reed, for discovering rock music for me. R.I.P.

1.

Black. White.

Black. White.

That was all that I was able to see. Not even see, because my eyes couldn’t do anything but stay shut. It was as if my eyelids had turned transparent so I could see the fluorescent lights that, blinking each half-second, cast their bright white beam, trying to draw me to it. Weak. No strength to give a miserable moan. Cold throughout my body. And hot in my head.

I couldn’t move a single muscle. Yet through my back I felt the weak, rattling jolts from going from one tile to another. As if it were coming from inside my head, I could hear the high-pitched, piercing screech of the rubber wheel that rolled quickly a few feet under my left ear. From the right there was only silence. As if death were to come from that side.

Once in a while a sweet voice, feminine, worried, came over the strident sound.

“Make room, make room! Let us through!”

Other times, during the luminous white, a blurry figure came between the light and me.

Cold. Always getting colder. Hot. Always getting hotter.

They say that when you are about to cross the line that separates life and death your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t think that was my case. Of course it wasn’t the first time I found myself on a hospital bed struggling between life and death, either. Maybe I had already gone through that moment. Anyhow, I don’t remember it now.

Four times. This was the fourth time that death had come for me, and I thought she was going to get away with it this time. I hadn’t felt that coldness before on any of the three other times. Each one of which came about in a different way.

“Make room, make room! Let us through!”

The third time happened in the same city I am in now, and took place a little over a year ago. It was a sunny day. Not a single cloud. The sky blue. It hadn’t rained in a while and you could feel the pollution when you breathed. I could definitely feel my strange and recently-discovered allergy in my throat. Scratchiness and coughing. I’d never had this allergy before.

I was leisurely walking down one of the avenues that led up to the park. The rock music of the American duo, Local-H, was blaring in my earphones. I was so immersed in my music that, without realizing it, I was singing aloud. I remember that now. Now as I go back to see the faces of the people I passed moments earlier. They smiled like we do when we pass someone who, lost in his own world, is not aware of what he’s doing. I remember up until the beginning of the song.

“You’re lucky, I’m lucky too.”

The music prevented me from hearing anything else. My thoughts were lost in themselves. Nothing was going on around me. Yes, I remember seeing that, at one point, someone ducked beside me and gestured for me to the same. But as the song that was playing in my ears said, I was lucky and nothing was going to stop my luck. Until something hit me in the left arm. Fuck, that hurt! When I looked down to place my hand on the point of impact I froze. My arm was gushing blood, the floral shirt that I was wearing for the first time that morning, an imitation of the ones that Hendrix used to wear, soaked. Lucky?

I had the morning off and I’d gotten up with the idea to lie out in the sun for a few hours. The blood descended to my hand and leaped from the tips of my fingers to the ground, where a small puddle of dense reddish liquid was beginning to form.

Cold. Hot. The cold took over me, leaving me petrified. Then I came back to reality. On each side of me, hidden behind some cars, police officers and citizens were having a shootout in blasts. I was lucky and the song ended.

“On the ground! On the ground!”

I ended up on the ground. Not because I was obeying, but because I fainted. For a few minutes I was out. Tons of caps jumped around me. Some fell on my body.

When I woke up it had all finished. From my gurney, my third gurney, I could see the gunshot, lifeless bodies of four men dressed in dark, elegant suits. A few yards away from them several weapons glimmered in the sun that bathed the whole street. The rivers of blood that came from each body had joined together on the asphalt to form a small lake that, thanks to the golden sunshine, took on a violet color.

Two paramedics pushed my gurney. The sun struck my face. The earphones, on my chest at that point, continued blaring their music. I couldn’t tell what was making that sound, so with my right hand I took one of the earphones and brought it to my ear. It was the next song on the Local-H album. That confirmed that between three and five minutes had passed since I fainted. I got dizzy again. I left the earphone back on my chest. The paramedics sped up.

“Move, let us through!”

Through my back I felt the bumpiness of the asphalt.

The next thing I heard, my eyes still closed, was a feminine voice.

“By an inch. A little more to the left and he wouldn't live to tell the tale. Discharge him. In a few days all of this will be over for him. He’ll even be able to jerk off again.”

I found that last sentence funny. It could’ve made me angry. Instead it gave me the strength to open my eyes and see who had been talking like that about a person who was about to cross over. I could only catch a glimpse of her through the curtains that separated the partitions in the hospital. She had her back to me. Dark hair. A white lab coat covered her whole body. For a second, while she attended to one of the other people injured, in this case a cop, she let me see her face.

“This guy hasn’t had such good luck.”

Dark eyes, dark complexion and…a medical mask that covered half her face. I tried to see her chest, but she disappeared before I could get my eyes on it.

Days later, days of complete rest at home, I felt the need to see her again. I returned to the hospital and asked for her. Angela Gilmore. That was the name she had signed on the medical report. I wanted to thank her for having helped me, but she had quit her job. Nobody knew where I could find her. I guess they were just protecting her. I lost track of her there and I never saw her again.

The first time my body lay on a gurney was several years ago. Twenty to be exact. Around then I still lived in my birth city, Madrid, and I had just turned twenty-five. An age well old enough to have left my youth of excesses in drugs, alcohol and casual sex behind but young enough to surrender to death. The excesses of the past and worries about the future took their toll, giving me a long period of anxiety and panic. My head came and went, from one second to the next. I had changed joints of weed and hash, cocaine, acid, and speed for Xanax and Ativan. For my head to be out of place was to be expected. That was what I thought, so I ended up getting used to it. Until a bad headache made me visit my doctor. His reaction on the telephone was immediate and worrying.

“Prepare the machine! We have an emergency MRI!”

The words “brain tumor” hadn’t been said, but I could read them in his mind. Do you know the effect that those words can have on someone who suffers from panic attacks? Balconies and bridges seem to call to you. Fear, making you multiply the doses of the drug that gets rid of it. At some point, you become friends with death. You don’t meet her, but it doesn’t matter. You want to be her friend and you plead with her that no, it’s not your time yet. You promise her that you will always have a special place for her in your heart, but you’re not ready to head her way yet.

Why me? No. Not yet. I have so much to live for and a lot of girls to fuck. Blondes, brunettes, redheads…

You start to wonder what the hell you’ve been doing all this time. Why you wasted it studying and working. You feel like calling a few luxury prostitutes, those that go around the nice, fancy hotels and clubs, and spend your savings to get them to do to you what no one has dared. Carpe Diem.

White. Everything is white when you are on the gurney that, as if it were a huge penis, goes into the cave with walls white like heaven. Your head is stuck, held still, as if it were yoked. Eyes wide open, trying to see past the mask that covers your face. Arms extended. Hands sweaty with fear. The emergency button in your restless fingers. Squeeze, give up! Don’t squeeze, hold on! You have to hold on! The thoughts run faster than the electrons that you are made of. An image, and another and another and another and the first, and the last and the first again. You feel like getting up and destroying that crazy expensive machine. Like running. Like not stopping. Like jumping. Like dying. You hold on. You are strong and you hold on. I don’t know, but I’m sure there are a lot of people who can’t handle that fear and push the button, the panic button. There are those who are lucky and are calm during the twenty, twenty-five minutes that the test lasts. There are even those who fall asleep. Lucky them.

The strange sounds stay with you the whole time. To me, these weren’t scary. Hearing them hitting my brain was like listening to a song from Sigur Ros. But I needed to move. Move my head so I could stop my restless thoughts and relax my mind and fight my anxiety.

Finally you hear the door open. You close your eyes. You open them again. The test is over. The machine stops. Someone pulls on the table to take you out of the celestial tunnel, to bring you back to life. Or that’s what you’re hoping. Still sitting on the table and recovering from your trip to hell, the irises of your eyes regain their normal size but without losing that shine that comes with Xanax. You look at your doctor, who is taking his time to speak.

Come on, you son of a bitch, tell me I’m fine and that I don’t have anything.

Those are your thoughts. You’re about to make them spoken words. You’re going to say it. You’re…

“Well? How was it? Give me good news.” You don’t have the balls. True. But is this guy, who is only trying to help me, the bad guy? A small smile.

What the hell are you smiling about, jackass? You’d better give me good news because if it’s bad and you tell me with that smile I’m going to fuck you up and bash your head against the machine.

“What? Does that mean that…?”

“Uh…”

He didn’t know my name. He didn’t know who I was.

“Edward.”

“Right. Edward. That means no abnormalities were found in the signals or in the morphology in the brain stem or the cerebellar hemispheres. The fourth ventricle is of normal size, morphology and shape.”

Then a small smile gets out of you. You want to understand that everything has gone well and that there is nothing to worry about.

“Everything up there is okay.”

A long sigh. Another long sigh, even longer than the first. A tear or two tries to get out in search of oxygen. Shit! Holy shit! Fuck you, death! But then you think, I was so close. Thank you. You tell Death, as if she were listening (and she is), thank you for giving me more time.

From that point on Death becomes your best friend. You don’t go out drinking with her, or take her to work, or let her come with you when you have a new one-night stand, but each time you talk to her you don’t do it like you used to anymore. Now you show her respect and even sympathy. As if by behaving with her, next time, she might let you escape again.

“However, it does seem you have suffered a small stroke. That’s why you had the headache. You were lucky it was small. But don’t worry. It’s over now. Next time, if your head hurts, come earlier.”

“Yeah, but…” Migraines and anxiety were frequent for me. I thought it was just more of the same.

Without a doubt, the second time I found myself on a gurney was the most important of all. I can still feel Death jumping on my chest. Trying everything possible to make me accompany her on her trip back to wherever.

The nurses tried to revive me, to get me to stay conscious. But I was losing too much blood. It had been twenty years since my first MRI with Doctor X. (I’d forgotten what his name was.) I was still in Madrid, which reminded me that this second brush with death was only two years ago. The passing of time and treatment had made my continuous state of anxiety disappear. I had work, but writing had become my passion. Another passion. The other two were cooking and rock music. I cooked for some friends, and once in a while, I DJ-ed in various rock clubs.

During those almost twenty years I had written several books, but none had seen much luck and these only made it to a few bookstores in the city. Science fiction, travel literature, erotic novel, theatre, psychological thriller. I had tried several genres but making a place for yourself in literature in Spain was right near impossible. It’s like trying to do cinema or music. Either you have a sponsor that takes you in or it’s mission impossible. But I trusted in my creative abilities because there had also been a lot who said they’d liked my books.

It’s a lot easier to sell if you write in English, I told myself constantly.

Then came the financial crisis and the cutbacks. When I was about to publish one of my novels the publisher stopped all publications and the book went back to the store room. But things got worse. The government that was going to provide a solution only made the situation worse. Massive dismissals. Tax hikes. Aid for the banks that had ruined us. More and more unemployment. People went hungry and many of them wound up in the streets because they couldn’t pay the mortgages on their homes. But the people didn’t do anything. There were more people at the soccer fields than at the protests. The people who were strangling us kept winning elections. I couldn’t allow it. I couldn’t allow it. I couldn’t kill anybody, even if I felt like it, but I could use my pen to wake up the sleeping people.

I regained my leftist passion and rage and wrote a sixty-page pamphlet that sarcastically and openly criticized the disastrous politics of the government. Sixty pages that ridiculed and accused the Right and encouraged the left sympathizers to recover their ideals to fuck those who were keeping us down “up the ass.” Of course, I posted the book, the pamphlet, on the Internet for free and this quickly caught on like wildfire. The success I had never had before with my novels was finding itself a place in the space between the hundreds of thousands of computers, cell phones, tablets, paper copies…

My Revolution 5.0 became the reference point for the leftist ideal. The impact it had on both sides (Those on the left were encouraged to throw out the government and those on the right were demoralized at seeing the disastrous effect on their ranks.) was so great that one happy, autumn morning, when I was leaving my house to go for a walk, an ultra-right sympathizer approached me, and without saying a word, took out a gun and shot me three times. Luckily, two teenagers who were riding their mountain bikes threw themselves on him, making him fall and preventing him from emptying his weapon on me.

Two streets down was one of the city’s ambulatory centers. Like nearly always, its emergency service ambulance was parked in their lot. Within three minutes two nurses were attending to me and took me to the hospital at break speed.

Black. White.

Black. White.

It was the first time that I had that vision that was playing again then. Two weeks between life and death and another two in the hospital. When they discharged me, I decided to leave it all. I would quit work and quit writing. As soon as I regained my strength I would leave the city. I needed to change things up, start over again. I had been reborn and needed to grow up in a different place. It seemed like Death lived in Madrid and she was determined to take me over to her side. I didn’t have a choice, I had to change residence. I’d been thinking about doing it for years, but it had to be a book that got me to do it. My Revolution 5.0 was who brought me to New York and who brought me to know that crazy woman.

2.

March 21, the first day of spring 2012. It was a sunny morning. A strange temperature, higher than normal for that time of year. The low sun bathed the streets from east to west, from the East River to the Hudson. Since it’d been nice out for a few days I decided to go for a walk. Fourteenth Street, Union Square, Twenty-Third, and Park Avenue, until I made it to the place where I usually got my first coffee (always decaf).

The walk down Fourteenth Street was wonderful. The sun in front of me blinded my eyes and made me squint. At street number twenty-five I made an obligatory stop. My love for rock music made me stop in front of the display at Guitar Center and check it out for a few minutes while my ears were warped by the latest from Sonic Youth, or the always-present Led Zeppelin, The Black Keys or Foo Fighters. When the song playing finished I moved on. In Union Square I crossed the park by the walkways that led to the gardens. I liked to smell the scent of blossoming trees. I made a little bow to President George Washington and continued on my way toward the ultra-famous Broadway, where the clothing and souvenir shops were getting ready to open their doors. When I got to the intersection with Twenty-Third Street, right where it divides between east and west, I faced the sun again. It was already a little higher and its rays felt stronger. It was nine in the morning, give or take a minute, when I immersed myself back into the shade that opened up the way all along the unending Park Avenue.

In the distance, rising like a giant, I could see the towers that crowned Central Station. Little by little, at a leisurely pace, I was leaving behind some banks, restaurants, delis and small grocers’ that were already displaying their fruits and vegetables in their street stands. Carts offering coffee, juice, doughnuts, and bagels were already serving the lines of clients, mostly office executives who, hounded by hurry and stress, stopped just long enough to get breakfast to go.

On the corner of Twenty-Eighth I had to dive out of the way of the leagues of citizens that came from the suburban subway out to the surface. Women. Men. Blacks. Whites. Caucasians. South Americans. Chicanos… A multitude that spread in all directions: north, south, east, and west. Even up, toward the hives of offices that extended all along the avenue and the adjacent streets.

My destination was one more street up: the Starbucks on Park Avenue and Twenty-Ninth Street. It was my base camp on my way up to Central Station. Well, more specifically on my way up to Thirty-Eighth and Park, where a trio of Yorkshire terriers was waiting for me to take them on their daily morning walk. From ten to twelve, Loni, Yuri, and Susi had to stretch their little legs and empty their tiny bladders. And also share some barks with their friends, Alabama and Nebraska, the two bulldogs that Flavio, my dog-walking buddy, took down to Peter Detmold Park at the same time as me.

New York is a difficult city for new arrivals and it’s expensive for most wallets. Walking dogs has become one of the most sought-after jobs and to be honest, it pays pretty well. Besides, if you’re like me and you like canine pets, it’s quite a pleasant job. You go walking casually around here, around there. You stop for a moment to chat and you continue on your way. It’s a good way to make friends. Dogs and children bring people together. Really, they bring their caregivers together. I would definitely venture to say that it was not a job I didn’t like. Just like the other jobs that I balanced.

While Coexist from The XX played in my ears, something soft and tranquil for breakfast, I checked my e-mail on my phone. The Wi-Fi at the Starbucks on Twenty-Ninth Street and Park Avenue had become my first ally of the day. The scorching cardboard cup sat on my small, individual, wooden table by the big window that looked out at the converging avenue. The yellow of the taxis flooded the asphalt. Some carried passengers. Others, empty, jumped from one lane to the next to beat their colleagues and hunt their first, second, third, or last client, given many drivers’ faces said they’d spent all night at the wheel.

The door of the café didn’t stop opening and closing. Some came in. Some went out. Some came for their first coffee. Others took theirs out the door in their hands, sipping it before pushing the door open and walking to their office or store. The LED screen that hung from one of the walls showed information on the music that was playing in the shop. CANDY, LEE MORGAN: JAZZ.

Most of the tables were full. The bigger ones were shared by several clients. The smaller ones took in the solitary types. Tablets and laptops were on all the tables, with chats and e-mails on all the screens. Some clients spoke on their phones. A few read the books in their hands intently. It smelled like coffee, like coffee of all types: sweet, bitter, fruity, mild, intense, sweeter, bitterer. Once in a while you could also sense the heat and scent of the pastries.

I was never a coffee drinker, but in New York I gotten used to it. Here, not drinking coffee is like saying you don’t have anything to do. I sipped my decaf cappuccino and saw that I’d received a message requesting my services as a cook for that night.

Personal chef: another of my jobs. Spanish cuisine had become fashionable and a lot of people hired chefs to cook for them. Friends, businesses, or just families. Two, four, six, or eight dinner guests. No more. That was my first rule. Cooking for more than eight was no longer “cooking,” it was “food preparation” and I was not good at that, nor did I like it. I answered with an “available” and my rate. Two hundred dollars if there were between two and four dinner guests and three hundred dollars for between five and eight. There was no set rate for this. It depended on each person. I knew a French cook whose reservation didn’t go for lower than five hundred dollars. Then I just had to wait for the confirmation, attendees, address, and the time.

I took another sip of my coffee and looked up toward the door that had just opened. There she was. Punctual, as always. Punctual, like most of the inhabitants of this city. As long as traffic permitted it, which almost never happened. Her telephone at her ear and speaking louder than normal for an American. Maybe that was because of her Latin blood. Because there was no doubt that one of her ancestors came from south of the border. Her dark complexion and her jet black eyes revealed that about her.

That morning she was beautiful, just like every other morning, just like the four mornings in a row that I’d seen her. A tight black dress made her appear thinner, not that she needed it, of course. Black hose covered her legs and some heels that could give you vertigo lifted her butt, which was hidden under a long fur coat of some kind. (I am not an expert on furs.) Her black hair, wavy, fell to both shoulders. She ordered a coffee that was large, but she herself wasn’t. I don’t think she even measured five foot seven. She sat at another individual table that had opened up right in front of mine.

We faced each other. I glued my eyes on her. Hers, although they looked straight at me, had not noticed me. Her mind hadn’t either. Me and nothing, we were the same. Me and everyone else at the café, we were all the same.

Lipstick shone on her thick lips. Her nose was perfect, just as I imagined her breasts to be, which just peaked out of the open neckline of her dress. I stayed on them a few seconds. Their firmness could only mean two things: Either that dark angel wasn’t over twenty or her round breasts were the work of the best scalpel artist in the city, or the country. I looked at her again to study her age. The beginnings of crow’s feet at the edge of her eyes gave me my answer. She was around forty-five, same as me. Anyway, she was definitely very interesting. On top of that, things didn’t seem to be going badly for her at all.

I think unconsciously, without wanting to, without even realizing that I didn’t take my eyes off her, she smiled with a little funny face. Discretely, I turned around to see if there was anyone behind me she might’ve been smiling at, but there wasn’t. That timid smile could only be for me, if she really had intended to smile. A moment later, she made the same funny face. But then it came with a look straight at my eyes. Her smile then turned into a frown. This didn’t seem to be aimed at me either. For her, I still didn’t exist. Still, something caught my attention. Her lips. The way they spoke. I had just read them, read her words and they were not in English, but in Spanish.

I stopped my music to try to listen to her conversation. Yeah, no doubt, she spoke my language. That could make my conquest easier because I could flirt better in Spanish than in English. I was already thinking about how to start a conversation when I heard something that halted my plan of attack.

“Your book is good, that’s why we published it. There are many Spanish-speakers here, but translated into English it will have many more readers.”

For the first time in a long time, in those fifteen months since my arrival in New York, I thought about my books again. What if I was looking at my potential publisher? I always dreamed about publishing my books in America because I thought it was the only country where a writer could start to be successful. If my writing was successful here, then it would be successful anywhere.

“You’ll see. We’ll turn your book into a bestseller. This afternoon, be punctual at six o’clock at the bookstore. There will be some reporters who will interview you and cover your book signing… Yes, exactly, five hundred fifty-five on Fifth….Yes, with Forty-Sixth.”

She was referring to Barnes & Noble. I knew exactly where it was. I had been inside a few times and had walked past its door with Jane and Lucio, the poodle and the Labrador owned by my favorite gay couple, who lived on West Forty-Fourth right in front of The Mansfield Hotel.

That woman could be the key to my future as a writer. I could approach her telling her that I also wrote novels, or I could wait until that very afternoon and at six, show up at the bookstore with a printed copy of my only novel that I had had translated into English. But after the frown I had just seen before my constant gaze, the best thing to do was opt for a new tactic. I would let a few days pass and take a copy to the publishing house itself. Of course….which publishing house was it? There were plenty of publishers in New York, but which was the one that, as she’d said, wanted to launch a collection by authors of erotic novels? At six I would stop by the bookstore and see which publisher it was. There was no other way. So with the hope that my beloved sponsor wouldn’t remember my face, I turned around and put my back to her. She wouldn’t see my face again until I showed up at her office and personally gave her a copy of my The Lover of Time.

Thinking about seeing my book in the country’s bookstores had me excited. I needed something upbeat in my mind. I opened the library on my iPhone, chose an album from Nude Beach, coincidentally from Brooklyn themselves, and continued drinking my coffee.

When I arrived with my three terriers at the dog park, Alabama and Nebraska weren’t there. Obviously, my friend Flavio wasn’t there either. Then I remembered he had told me that he had a runway show for a line of clothing that morning. I was glad he wasn’t there, because my brain had gotten stuck on the situation that I’d just experienced in the café.

The Yorkies had already emptied their mini bladders and defecated their teeny, smelly balls of excrement. Loni and Susi played, biting each other’s tails, but Yuri stared at me, as if he knew that I couldn’t get something off my mind. Maybe he just wanted to ask me where Alabama was. I think he liked her, and that she liked him too, since every time we met up, while his sisters and Nebraska (the macho of the pair) didn’t stop biting and running after one another, they stayed off to the side, looking at each other calmly, rubbing their backs against each other and shook their heads a bit as if saying “look at those fools.”

There were times, when I was worried about something, that I talked to Yuri. He never said anything, but he answered me in his own way. Either he turned his back to me, showing me his little butt, which I understood to mean “I don’t care,” or he approached my feet and rubbed himself against them like he were a cat, meaning “I think that’s what you should do.” But right then I didn’t see one thing or the other. He just looked at me, making it clear he didn’t understand what was wrong with me. After all, he was still just a dog.

It had been fifteen months since I’d arrived in the city. A year of my writing, my speaking side, forgotten. Because when one writes, what he’s really doing is speaking. Speaking to a lot. The more the better. There are people who settle for speaking with their wives, or husbands, or friends, but writers are non-conformists. They are never satisfied with the number of people that read them. They always want more and more. And not for the money, but for the satisfaction of being heard.

For a writer, a year without speaking is a long time. Too long. Maybe it was because of this that during the past few weeks an unpleasant state of anxiety had awoken in my interior. I’d promised myself to leave it, to not take up the pen again for anything but making the shopping list or signing the obligatory contracts and insurance papers that took over the daily life of the New Yorker and the American, but if I wanted to have my own head under control, I had to recover the literary part of my life. Besides, I was living in New York by then and every day I saw things happen that gave me a lot of material for new stories. New York is the city of cities. The Sodom of hell. The paradise of the kingdom. New York is singular.

I’d convinced myself. I would resume writing. And I must’ve made a good decision because Yuri leaned against me and rubbed against my feet over and over, giving me his approval.

By then in the building, back at their place, I went up the service elevator with the three dogs. I opened the door to the enormous apartment and I headed to the three creatures’ bedroom. The terriers were well trained and as soon as they stepped onto the wooden floor of their home they never raised their “voices” or whined in the slightest. They knew that Jennifer, their adoptive mom, was sleeping. She was an actor and lately she was rehearsing until late to prepare the premiere of her new musical, which would take place that very Friday on Broadway.

I said “goodbye” to the dogs, giving them each a last pat and left, closing the door with care. I gave the apartment key to the building’s doorman, who kept guard outside under green porch, number sixty-six, and went on my way home. By then I’d received the dinner confirmation and I needed to do some shopping. I wanted to buy the groceries before going to the bookstore. I had to leave everything ready so I could head out quick. Without a moment’s delay, at six o’clock in the afternoon, not a moment later, I had to be at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth.

The corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street wasn’t far from my house. There were plenty of days that I doubled or tripled that distance on a leisurely walk, getting so far as the great lake of Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, or even Harlem. But that afternoon I didn’t have time to walk casually, letting the happenings of the city take place before my eyes.

Hours before, while I ate a dish of pasta with pesto sauce and saw an episode of Castle, my favorite show at the moment, I received a message saying that dinner had been upped to nine o’clock. That changed my plans. I wouldn’t go to the bookstore and pick up my equipment, my work tools: set of knives (fluted for soft products; straight, sharpened, and large for slicing and dicing; and another, sharpened, straight, and small), small set of spatulas, U-shaped steel peeler, metal beater, frother, wooden spoons and ladle, thongs, colander, grater, plastic cutting board, and the food that I had bought beforehand to cook. I would take everything with me. I would get a taxi in front of my house, I’d stop at the bookstore just long enough to see the publisher’s name, and I’d continue my journey until the Upper West Side, the area that was just west of Central Park, between the park and the Hudson River, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods of the city and the place of residence of many of the rich and famous.

Rush hour begins (if it ever stops) at six o’clock in Manhattan, so I left fifteen minutes early. In the Village the usual bustle of every afternoon was beginning. The day had stayed sunny and with an envious temperature of around twenty-one degrees Celsius, seventy in Fahrenheit (although I was not getting used to the American system). At least, that was what my telephone said. The bars and restaurants of the neighborhood had taken some tables outside and the people went about taking their positions to have some wine and later have dinner with their partners and friends. That was one of the good things that this city has: You can have dinner at any time, be it six in the afternoon or three in the morning.

As soon as I lifted my hand a taxi stopped beside me. I put my cart of tools (along with the food) between the copilot seat and the dashboard and I sat in the back. The driver, an old Pakistani Sikh with a green scarf covering his hair, started the counter and started driving again. He went straight until Fourteenth Street and there he turned left to take Eighth Avenue north. Perfect. He’d taken the best route. We’d go straight until West Forty-Sixth and there we would turn to the east to arrive in front of the bookstore. I focused my vision on the small television screen that showed the latest news and the weather that was coming in the next few days and I concentrated my thoughts on preparing myself on how to act if “my” publisher saw and recognized me.

If my intention was to take a printed copy of the book to the publisher’s office, the best thing was for her to not see me or identify me with the creepy idiot who wouldn’t stop looking at her while she ate her chocolate muffin with a nice, hot cappuccino. Besides, if she did recognize me, she was going to think I had been listening to her telephone conversation. She would hate me and I wouldn’t have any possibility of becoming one of her writers. I had to avoid being seen. I had to go into the bookstore, take one of the copies on display at the table farthest from where she and the author, who would be signing copies, were and look for the copyright page to see who had published the book. With that done, I would turn around and jet out.

Going back to the past had been hard. A while earlier, at home, I had been going over my novels. A year and a half without opening the file “Books.” Inside were all the files of my work. Of course, seeing The Lover of Time, the novel that I was going to present to the publisher, had filled me with happiness. But seeing the cause of my “near death by gunfire” also brought memories that I was trying to forget. For ten long seconds I stared at the name of the file. REVOLUTION 5.0 REVOLUTION 5.0 REVOLUTION 5.0 REVOLUTION 5.0. I put my finger on the key to delete the file.

Erase it, I said to myself over and over again.

But something stopped me. Yes, it was true that I had almost died over its content, but they were words. Just words. I hadn’t killed anybody, nor had I done anything bad that I should regret. I had written sixty pages. Die for sixty pages? No! Damn myself for having done it? No! At that moment I was invaded by a force and a joy that made me feel prouder than ever. Why not? I felt like reading the beginning of my work. Remembering my words and the rage that had made me put them to paper.

Then, in the taxi, as I was leaving Chelsea behind, in my mind I went back to my words. One after another, without forgetting a single one of them.

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Yes, that is exactly what I had written in my booklet. But in that moment it was my driver who was screaming it. He was talking to a colleague of his who just made him brake to a stop to avoid hitting him. I came back to the there and then. I was in New York, where taxi drivers drove pretty crazily to arrive as soon as possible at their destinations and get new clients. Were they ever going to escape from the stress of this city?

Looking out, I saw that I was in front of Azuki, one of my favorite Japanese restaurants.

I could cook a little Japanese food, but obviously my specialty was Spanish cuisine. Once in a while I prepared a little sushi or my own variety of maki to which I usually added some Spanish products. Thin strips of salted anchovies, Cornish gaming hen eggs fried so that they exploded when you bit in, a gazpacho for dipping like soy sauce, a mild aioli sauce instead of wasabi…This besides, of course, our beloved Iberian ham, which I received in vacuum-sealed packets in small packages through the mail. A juicy potato omelet, one of the top requests of the New Yorkers, a delicious paella which some would call “not the original from Valencia” or any of my specialties which I called Salmoniyaki or Sirloinyaki, whole filets of salmon or pork stuck in the oven en papillote with the simple dressing of a squirt of teriyaki sauce and some aromatic herbs. I served these with some grilled vegetables, and voilà.

The menu for that night’s dinner was more Spanish-like. A gazpacho I’d already prepared at home. Two plates of Iberian ham received by air. Cod croquettes, the filling which I’d also just prepared and took on a tray ready to cut, bread, and fry. And paella for four that I was going to cook in my paella-pan that I’d brought on the bottom of my suitcase. “Without rabbit and without liver.” Of course, just as my hosts (This is America.) ordered. And no garrafones, Spanish lima beans that were difficult if not impossible to find. For dessert, a walnut flan, of the purest style of the province of León, a delicacy that I also made hours before in my kitchen.

When I looked back outside I found myself in the middle of Times Square, the Puerta del Sol of New York. The bright billboards emitted their dazzling colors and the gigantic screens played their ads for the hundreds of tourists who lifted their cameras and telephones and immortalized their great moment visiting the city in slow, 360 degree panoramas.

Virgin. Samsung. Corona. McDonald’s. Billy Elliot the Musical. Bank of America. Kodak. Disney. Mamma Mia, another musical. The X Factor. Russians. Chinese. Japanese. Latinos. Tee shirts. Rolled up button-up shirts. Long pants. Shorts. Sneakers. Sandals. Design shoes. Blondes. Brunettes. Light skin. Dark skin. Spanish. English. French. Chinese. Japanese. Russian. Taxis. Police cars. Black limos. White limos. Heavy-weight trucks. FedEx. USPS. UPS. Buses. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Delivery vans. Street vendors. Executives. Traffic cops. Groups of friends. People sitting. Pavement in poor conditions. All of this in the barely ten seconds that it had took me to go a hundred feet across the plaza to immerse myself once more on Forty-Sixth Street.

The traffic light made us stop right as we arrived at the corner of Fifth. It was 6:10 pm. From the car I could see that there was a long line to the doors of the book shop for people waiting their turn to get a copy of the book signed by the author. When the light changed I asked my driver to stop where he could and wait for me. I put on a Rolling Stones hat to hide my face and got out of the ramshackle Ford. Before actually going in the bookstore, I tried to find my publisher through the large display window. I saw her seated in front of a table stacked with books. Another woman was at her side. The clients spoke and handed the books they had previously purchased to her. They spoke briefly and after writing something on one of the pages, she returned the books to them. I saw that the book had been set out on several tables. That got me to go in without another thought. I had a taxi waiting and the counter was still running.

The Paradise and the Sun by Katherine Wheels. Or, considering, from forty feet away, the author’s beautiful Latin face, El Paraíso y el Sol by Catalina Ruedas. The book’s cover was as simple as a pretty, abandoned, Caribbean beach with a large, colorful sun beating on a couple who, nude, revel on the coast of the sea. I hadn’t thought to buy it. (I wanted to avoid any and all visual contact.) I just needed to see who published the book, but seeing the cover and the title, I felt obligated to read the short synopsis that, together with a small picture of the author, took up a great portion of the back cover.

MARIO, TALL, THIN AND OF ATHLETIC BUILD, IS A YOUNG, SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD MULATTO WHO SELLS HIS BODY ON CARMEN BEACH. NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, HIS SWEET SMILE AND HIS CHARM END UP IN THE BEDS OF FOREIGN WIDOWS AND WIVES LOOKING FOR AN AFFAIR TO TAKE THEM OUT OF THEIR BORING ROUTINES, UNTIL ONE DAY ANNA, A YOUNG, EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD AMERICAN, CROSSES HIS PATH. THAT IS WHEN A TRUE, BUT IMPOSSIBLE, LOVE AFFAIR WILL BEGIN.

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t have time to. A label over the cover and back of the book warned that the content was for over eighteen only. That got me to buy the book. Everything pointed to that it was going to be a hot read, just like my novel.

To pay I went to the farthest cash register.

Then, as expected, the sales clerk made sure to tell me, “The author is signing her book.”

And I made sure to give an excuse. “Yeah, I know. I know her, but I’m in kind of a hurry. She’ll sign it later while we have a beer.” I paid the sixteen dollars and went back to my taxi.

“Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-Seventh!”

We were off again. I took the book from the paper bag they had given me and one by one, I turned the pages until I arrived at the copyright. I skipped over what I wasn’t interested in until…

PUBLISHED BY MOORE BOOKS.

175 FIFTH AVENUE.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10010

Moore Books! Moore. Was that my “publisher’s” surname? I had to find out the answer. I used my cell to search the internet. MOORE BOOKS. In an instant, a list of links appeared. I clicked on the first. It was the home page of the publishing house’s website. There were a bunch of small images with covers of some of their books and their details: title, author, format, number of pages, price. Nothing on the publishing house. I scrolled down to end of the page, where there was a small menu of options. ABOUT US. That was what I wanted to know. I clicked. On one side appeared a picture of my publisher. Beside it, above a text that told the publishing house’s history, was the name HELEN MOORE, CHIEF PUBLISHER. I had it. Helen Moore! Helen! That was the name I’d have to ask for when I showed up at the publishing house’s office.

With the name Helen Moore still in my head, I flipped the pages until the beginning of the novel. I really was intrigued to see what the story of Mario and Anna was about. It started on page eight.

HIS SMILE, WHITE AND PERFECT, HAD CHARMED MARI JANE, A FRENCH WOMAN IN HER UPPER FIFTIES, WHO ASKED HIM TO KEEP KISSING HER AND TO CARESS HER BREASTS…

At midnight I was lying on my couch at home with the book in my hands. A vodka-martini rested on the chair I’d set beside me so I wouldn’t have to sit up every time I wanted a sip. The CD that played was the first disc of the German group Zodiac, A Bit of Devil. It sounded loud in my earphones. What a great combination! Rock music done right, a shot of Zubrowka with the dry touch of martini, and steamy sex in the words of a beautiful Mexican woman. All that on top of the fact that the dinner had been a success foresaw a late night of the kind I hadn’t had in ages.

That very afternoon, before going to the bookstore, while I was in the shower, I decided that after dinner I would call a female friend and go out with her. A few drinks and a little sex would settle my renewed excitement. But the few pages that I had been able to read in the taxi had hooked me so much that I was forced to change plans. If I kept getting more aroused and hornier until I couldn’t contain myself, then I would put myself in the role of Mario and masturbate thinking of my publisher and her sweet voice begging me not to stop licking her bronzed breasts; just like Lola, a compatriot of mine from Seville asked her young lover on page thirty.

What had made the author write that story? Did she know Mario or whatever the real lover’s name was? Had she changed roles and really the lover was a woman? Her?

At four in the morning (That was the last time I saw the time.) with a third vodka-martini and the musical accompaniment of Beach House, I fell asleep, just like the two young lovers after a long, sweaty night of passionate sex. That was on page 180.

When I woke up at half past eight, the time the alarm clock on my phone always went off, I realized I was wet, that my colorful striped pajamas were sticky. I’d fallen asleep before I got to masturbate, but…I started to remember. Yes, once more I could see the images in my head. I came in my dream. I dreamed that I was doing it with Helen (My publisher had a name by that point.) and I went all the way. I had an erotic dream and unloaded all my reserve of sperm on my imaginary and unreal Helen Moore’s body. I couldn’t help but laugh. I couldn’t remember perfectly, but I was sure that it was a wonderful dream that, obviously, I was going to try to make come true.

I sat up on the couch. I stretched my muscles and started the music player so it could be heard through all the speakers. I took off my pajama pants and shirt and put them in the washer. Later, with a set idea, I went to the shower. That day I wasn’t going to have breakfast at Starbucks.

It was another sunny day. Yuri, Loni, and Susi wouldn’t stop staring at me. What the hell is up with this asshat, they must’ve been thinking, while I, not paying them the least bit attention, kept my sight fixed on the steamy pages of the book I had in my hand.

My obsession with finishing the book as soon as possible was such that I had decided to change parks so I wouldn’t meet up with Nebraska and Alabama, or better said, with the Chatty Cathy Flavio. I liked the Italian, we’d even gone out together in search of some girls, but that morning I needed to be alone.

The small, lonely park between Second and First Avenues and East Thirty-Sixth, and the name of which I don’t remember, was perfect for finding the solitude and relaxation that I was looking for. The terriers had never been there, and the place was strange to them. A weak whine reminded me that it was time to take them back to their luxurious den. That definitely wasn’t an area for three little dogs that weren’t nearly a foot tall to be walked around with collars that showed their names and their owner’s telephone number engraved in plaques of forty-eight carat gold.

When, back at sixty-six Park Avenue, I opened the door trying not to make noise so as to not wake up Jennifer and went in to take the three terriers to their room, I saw that on the table in the living room there was another copy of the book I was reading. The Paradise and the Sun. Without being able to help myself, overcome with curiosity to see if she had a dedication, I skimmed through the first few pages. To my surprise, there wasn’t one dedication, but two. One from the author: TO JENNIFER, FROM A FRIEND. And another from Helen, the publisher, who added more explicitly: FROM SOMEONE WHO HASN’T FORGOTTEN YOU. That got me thinking. Thinking so much that I forgot where I was. Then, suddenly, the door to the room opened and there was the actor. She was completely naked and her face looked like she’d just woken up. I froze with the book in my hands.

“I’m sorry” I said somewhat uncomfortably. “I thought you were sleeping.”

But without losing her nerve in the slightest because of my presence, she came over to me.

“Do you want it?” she said, pointing at the book.

I gave a small smile, and opening my satchel, pulled out the copy I’d purchased. “Besides, it’s dedicated,” I said, pointing at hers.

“Yeah,” she added, taking the book from my hands and tossing it off to the side on the floor, where a bunch of papers and newspapers waited to be thrown out with the trash. “How many days do I owe you?”

“Four,” I said, without being able to take my eyes off of hers. I hadn’t since she’d showed up.

“Do you mind if I pay you tomorrow?”

I shook my head.

“Hey, relax! You can look at my tits if you want. After tomorrow, it’s what thousands of members of the audience are going to see. A lot of people are going to pay more than a hundred bucks to be able to see them for fifteen seconds. You were lucky. You’ve seen them for free.”

Not even after that could I muster up the courage to lower my sight. I could only laugh at her nice offer.

“How are my babies?”

“Fine,” I said, gathering courage before satisfying my curiosity. I pointed at the book that was resting on the floor. “Do you know the author?”

“Not really. I know the publisher more.”

That was what I wanted to get at. “Did she do something wrong?”

“Let’s just say she wanted everything for herself,” said Jennifer, letting me see her pretty smile. “Too possessive.”

Possessive, I said to myself. What did that mean exactly?

“I have to shower and go out. If you don’t mind…”

“Oh, right, of course,” I said, heading toward the door. It was clear she was asking me to leave.

“Wait.”

I stopped.

“Tomorrow is the premiere of my new musical. You’d like it. You’ve already seen my tits. You’ll be one of the few people focusing on the actors’ performances.”

Of course I would like to the opening night of a musical on Broadway, but all signs indicated Helen Moore would be there too.

“Tomorrow I can’t,” I said, regretting my words. “I have to cook for a couple, but I would love to go another day.”

“Okay,” she said, giving me another smile. “But give me some notice so I can reserve two seats.”

I nodded. I said “goodbye” again and I left the house.

On my way to Central Park on the subway, where I was going to spend the rest of the morning reading under the sun on one of its terraces, my mind wouldn’t stop going back. Jennifer had confused me by saying that Helen was possessive. It seemed clear what “possessive” meant: possessive, nothing more. But possessive…of who or what? Of her, Jennifer? Did that mean that they had had a relationship? If that were true, they were lesbians. Fuck! Not only was I totally gaga for a lesbian, but I’d even had a more than erotic dream about her. Again, I remembered my dream and how it had ended. After a few disconcerting seconds I laughed again. Discovering her secret, did it make me feel rejected or, to the contrary, did it excite me even more? Jennifer had just said “possessive” not that they had been a couple. So “possessive” could refer to something else. It could also be that Helen liked guys. Besides, I’d seen Jennifer with more than one man. The only thing that was clear was that the actor knew Helen well.

After several hours of reading in the park, at about three in the afternoon, tipped off by hunger, I took a break. I went down to Fifty-First and Ninth, the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, and I ate some burritos that I washed down with a nice, cold Corona.

Arriba Arriba was a restaurant that I liked. Good food, good atmosphere, and a magnificent terrace. But maybe it was the yellow and red on the facade that attracted me most. A subliminal call to the colors of my flag? Could be. Their beef California Burrito, chicken quesadilla, and Margarita Madness were my usual order every time I went around there. A heavy meal that required a stroll afterward.

As soon as I arrived home, I left the book on the low table that was beside the couch and I turned on the computer. I copied the file I had to print onto a pen drive and went out in search of a print shop.

At ten at night, after another long session of reading on my couch at home, I finished reading the last paragraph of the book. Had I liked it? I didn’t know. The only thing that was for sure was that I had been aroused for most of the time.

I went back to the copyright page…MOORE BOOKS. 555 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK…I closed the book again and tossed it to the side. I got up and went to the bathroom to urinate. I had been sitting more than four hours, but I hadn’t wanted to interrupt my reading and had held it like when you’re at a concert and you don’t want to make way among the crowd to go to the bathroom and miss half the show.

It was time for dinner. Remembering the words of Anna, whose musical tastes included the Rolling Stones, I went to my huge shelf of CDs and chose what for me was one of the band’s best albums. I thought their Exile on Main Street was among their top five albums and I had it in vinyl, CD, super audio CD, and digital format. I put the disc on and I made dinner. A healthy salad of lettuce, tomato, and tuna flanks, cans that I received from Spain. Because if I was going to charge for Spanish food, I liked for the containers to say “PRODUCT OF SPAIN.” That always caught people’s eye…