We Only Go Out at Night

(…)

We fly over the wet asphalt. The Cadillac is a blood-red metal bubble cutting through a city dissolving in the drizzle. We pass under concrete bridges, cathedrals of soot stained with illegible graffiti that look like the sigils of a forgotten god. The engine roars, a damned soul, and the chrome shines with a ghostly light. But inside the car, the only sound is my suction. I continue with my milkshake. Vanilla.

It is a contradictory addiction. The chemical sweetness is a tiny echo, a promise of innocence that is already dust on my dead tongue. But the texture... the texture is a blasphemy. It is a sludge of frozen sugar that refuses to flow, a dense paste clinging to the straw like flesh to bone. It is a grotesque parody of nutrition, an insult to the blood. Each sip is a conscious effort. A void I must force into my useless lungs, a suction that tenses my jaw and makes me feel the pull in my throat. It is a physical tension, an almost perfect imitation of the anticipation before the bite. But it is an empty climax. Pure promise, without the glorious, hot, metallic reward of the end. Not even the coagulated blood of a recent corpse is so thick to swallow. But I am a sucker for anything drunk through a straw. A stupid vice. A small anchor to humanity, fraying with every passing decade.

—Hey, Caleb, do they die of fright or from bleeding out?

Silas’s voice breaks the engine’s hypnosis. It is a raspy whisper, the echo of the hunt still vibrating in him. His question falls into the car with dead weight. The tedio becomes solid, palpable. It is a third presence between us, sitting in the back seat.

—I don’t know, Silas. —I sigh. The frozen vapor of the milkshake escapes my lips—. You’ve asked me that same idiocy hundreds of times. Fifteen, twenty years? Who the hell cares?

I finish the milkshake. The last sip is frozen sugar burning my dead throat. I throw the cup out the window. We see the white cardboard tumbling against the gray asphalt, a small act of vandalism in a city that is already a monument to chaos. Silence again. Only the roar of the V8. One must grant Silas his taste in cars. This Cadillac is a work of art, a luxury coffin for two specters.

—I dig this city —I say just to say something, to push against the weight of boredom. I watch the building lights. Blurred neon stains, a river of corrupt stars flowing into nothingness—. So many people piled up. An anthill of tepid souls. No one notices if a couple disappear.

—But the weather is shit —Silas replies. Always the counterpoint. His boredom is sour; mine is heavy.

—So what? We don’t feel those things like they do anymore.

—It’s not even hot anymore. It’s always raining, dammit. —He turns his head, his pale profile against the flow of streetlights—. This humidity rots my bones.

Ninety years in this same asphalt hell and now he complains about the weather. Fuck him.

I reach into the glove compartment and pull out a cassette. I insert it with a satisfying clack. Nirvana. Cobain’s torn scream fills the car. A noise that at least has a soul. A broken, tormented soul, but alive in its agony. It is an honest sound amidst our eternal farce. Silas snorts but says nothing. He knows I prefer listening to the pain of a dead mortal than listening to the echo of our own nothingness.

We cover the distance from Tacubaya to Xochimilco in a sigh. It is a blur of wet asphalt and melting neon lights. The air coming through the window is a corrupt perfume: the smell of burnt diesel from cargo trucks, the greasy vapor of suadero stands refusing to die, and the sweet stench of deep drainage. Everything mixes and slides off us. Silas brakes hard next to the canoeing tracks.

The Cadillac leaves a signature of burnt tires on the pavement, a smell of rubber and despair floating over the dark canal water. The concrete stands of the Olympic Track rise in the gloom like the broken teeth of a dead giant. The place reeks of rotting lily and stagnant water.

I see nostalgia in Silas’s dead eyes, a wet shine that isn’t tears, as he stares into the blackness.

—Fifty years ago this was all fields. Cows, Caleb, cows! —he says, his voice tinged with a melancholy that almost seems human—. You could smell clean earth. When the fuck did this concrete stain grow?

—Nineteen seventy-one —I answer with sarcasm, looking at a used condom floating near the edge—. Progress, Silas. Unstoppable. Like us.

—I’m serious. We’re getting old, Caleb. Older than the grime we step on.

I let out a laugh that sounds like rust, like forced crypt hinges.

—Silas, don’t fuck around. You should be used to being this echo, this carrion with style.

He starts the car furiously. The V8 roars, spitting gravel.

We return to the Periférico. His eternal fun begins: driving the ring from south to north at maximum speed. It is a suicidal game for anyone who still had something to lose. We pass Viaducto, then San Antonio; the lights of Barranca del Muerto are just a tunnel of white light. The Cadillac glides between other cars like a shark among sleeping fish. Bubbles of metal and warm flesh, their occupants oblivious to the predators grazing them at two hundred kilometers per hour.

Sometimes, Silas does it. He seeks the graze, the impact. He has broken cars and, sometimes, our own bones. We do it to feel the regeneration. That obscene crunch of cartilage reconfiguring itself, a cold, slow, disgusting pain that is almost a pleasure. It is the only reminder that this flesh, although dead, obeys some law. I hope today is just routine.
(…)