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  It was the car: a 1990 Ford Taurus. Color: metallic green.

  Fleetingly, he wondered why a taxi service would use such an old car. But this thought was quickly pushed aside by a crush of memories about a car just like this, and a trip so long ago.

  He could smell the upholstery, see the back of his father’s neck, and feel the ground bumping beneath him. The memory was so vivid it almost hurt. He could even remember how the volume knob felt on his beat-up Sony Walkman.

  “Joaquin, c’mon!”

  Joaquin took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.

  chapter 4

  1990 METALLIC GREEN FORD TAURUS

  Joaquin stared out the car window, listening to a mix tape on his run-down Walkman. The sun, suspended in a bright cloudless sky, swept the highway with a harsh, blinding light. He found it hard to keep from blinking.

  He maxed the volume.

  Another sunny day, he thought, squinting at the passing vehicles through the insect graveyard on the windshield.

  The sun had shone this way before. It would shine this way again. A forgettable day, an anonymous day.

  But Joaquin welcomed this.

  He wanted this day—this trip—to be over as soon as possible. He wanted to return to Mexico unaffected, unmarked. So much had gone right in the last few weeks: things that had never gone right for him before. Things that made a difference. Things that made him happy.

  He prayed that nothing on this trip would change that.

  A lot of fifteen-year-olds say prayers like this. They’re rarely answered.

  This one wouldn’t be either.

  Up to this point, the trip from Mexico City with his parents had been uneventful. Airport to airport with no delay. Through customs without a hitch. Their luggage among the first off the carousel. And there wasn’t even a line at the car-rental place.

  They grabbed a quick bite at a roadside steak joint, and then headed for downtown Houston and their hotel.

  Joaquin hoped it would continue this way. Then his father opened his mouth.

  “What do you say we take a tour through the skyline district before hitting the hotel, Joaquin? I really want you to see that Dubuffet.”

  Joaquin cringed. Dad and his art lessons. Why was it that adults always wanted to teach you boring stuff?

  “Dad, I’m actually kinda tired,” Joaquin said, hoping that would be enough.

  It wasn’t.

  “This Dubuffet changed my life. You’re gonna look at it.”

  Joaquin sighed, resigned to his fate.

  At fifteen, the idea of a family trip felt ludicrous to him. His differences with his parents, more now than ever before, seemed as vast and impassable as the empty, silent reaches of outer space.

  His father tried to nurture in him a taste for modern art, but Joaquin never paid much attention. He had his own ideas.

  He flipped the tape and hit play. The mix of punk, metal, classic rock, and electronic music crushed reality—hurtling him into a world of aural bliss.

  As Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra came on, his father stopped the car in front of 1100 Louisiana Street. Joaquin looked up and saw Dubuffet’s Monument au Fantôme.

  Without a word, he got out of the car and walked up to the sculpture. Strange irregular shapes outlined in thick black lines, suggesting human and animal forms. Christopher Franke’s Moog synthesizer caressed these irregular forms while the amber light of sunset gentled against the rough edges.

  He was captivated by the sculpture. He moved into the center of the piece and sat cross-legged on the ground. He looked up, watching clouds roll overhead through Dubuffet’s embracing forms.

  As he unhurriedly slouched back to the car, he felt a strange sensation, as if he’d spied the corner of some immense, hidden object. It sent a tiny bat-squeak of recognition through his body. Had his father’s lessons finally sunk in? If true, he wouldn’t let on…ever.

  “What do you think about Dubuffet?” asked his father.

  “Like him. Already knew his work,” mumbled Joaquin, and then he was silent.

  Those were the last words Joaquin spoke till they arrived at the hotel. His parents were accustomed to these long silences. Joaquin often milked the silences, hoping they might read his teenage angst act as something more profound. Not today. He wasn’t thinking about them. Something else occupied his thoughts.

  Her name was Claudia Guerrero.

  Considered the prettiest girl in school, she had filled his thoughts for months. Even before they started dating. They had intended to spend the weekend together…unsupervised. Every teenage boy’s dream: a weekend, alone, with the hottest girl in school. But this trip had blown that out of the water.

  He tried to convince his parents to let him stay. But they wouldn’t budge.

  “Your grandmother is very sick. Who knows how much more time she has?” his mother said.

  Just the same, he didn’t know how long his relationship with Claudia would last, and to lose that precious time was devastating—doubly so because Claudia’s parents had kept her under close watch after finding a pile of Polaroids of a dick (Ernesto Meyer’s, they later learned) in their daughter’s mouth. It didn’t help when she explained that all of her friends had pictures just like those.

  Joaquin’s argument did gain him something. His mother agreed to buy him an inexpensive electric guitar. The bribe worked. He stopped resisting the trip.

  Immediately afterward, he regretted it. Why did he give in for so little? He should have insisted on a vintage ’62 Stratocaster. Or at least a Fender.

  At the hotel, while his parents were out, Joaquin called Claudia. She picked up on the second ring.

  He immediately launched into a rant. He told her that he was fed up, that he hated the food and the hotel. There was nothing that disgusted him more than hospitals; he would have to spend the entire next day in one. When he tried to tell her about the Dubuffet sculpture, he couldn’t find the right words to describe it, and ended up changing the subject. He was too embarrassed to tell her that he loved her or missed her, or that he wanted to touch her breasts, so he said good-bye with a cold ciao.

  “Ciao”—excellent move, he thought.

  The conversation frustrated him.

  For a while, he lay in bed and watched TV. He wasn’t enjoying it at all. He couldn’t believe the caravan of imbeciles that paraded around, submitting to the most ridiculous stunts imaginable. He fell asleep numbly contemplating the decomposing wasteland of late-night television.

  The next day, after a bland hotel breakfast, they got into the rented Ford and went to the hospital. Joaquin listened to the Dead Kennedys.

  Efficiency and progress is ours once more

  Now that we have the Neutron bomb

  It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done.

  His parents listened to the radio. Some talk program. Under Biafra’s growl, he heard a voice say: You really should listen. He rewound the tape and played it again. It wasn’t there. Weird, he thought, must have been my imagination. But somewhere deep in his brain, nestled in the limbic system, a preternatural fear arose.

  Danger was near.

  chapter 5

  1990 BLACK VOLVO MODEL 740

  Gabriel stretched out in the backseat, but the minute sneakers met leather…

  “If you lay down back there, take your sneakers off.”

  Gabriel moved his legs slightly, so his feet just dangled over the edge.

  “Gabriel, I’m serious.”

  “Dad, they’re not touching the leather.”

  “Gabriel.”

  With a grumpy sigh, Gabriel sat up.

  Dad and his pristine leather seats, fuck him. What’s with him and this car? Gabriel thought as he stared out the window. It was all so boring. Another day with his parents. Another drive in the “fantastic Swedish machine.” Tedium.

  This would have been a great day for jamming with his band or just hanging out in his room listening to records and smoking a little we
ed. But once again he was forced to endure the unbearable ritual of the drive.

  It was just a pretext for taking a spin in his Dad’s brand new Volvo Turbo. Fuck him. And fuck pristine leather. And fuck Swedish engineering too.

  Gabriel was so sick of hearing this crap.

  The only thing that excited Gabriel about his father’s new car was the sound of its engine. He liked that. He imagined recording it in all different ways. How would it sound, he wondered, if he poured two pounds of sugar into the gas tank? What if it blew up, or was showered with a powerful acid? How would it sound then? Gabriel imagined amplifying and replaying, in slow motion, the sputter of gasoline as it combusted inside the pistons. Gabriel had no love of cars. Music and sound were his passions…his obsessions, they were what he knew best.

  A penchant for sonic experimentation awakened in him when he discovered Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio, the Dadaist musicians of the early twentieth century, industrial bands from the eighties like Throbbing Gristle and Coil, and the synth-pop groups Art of Noise and OMD. After diving deep into numerous avant-garde bands and immersing himself in the entire musical spectrum, inch by inch he formed his own concept of what music should be. One of his first compositions was based on a Diana Ross record played backward.

  Sound fascinated him, from the crackle of static electricity to the brutal, sordid, macabre, and raw qualities of Einstürzende Neubauten. He was also fascinated by playful compositions, elegant sound collages, and smart paraphrases of the Pixies, Bad Brains, and even the Carpenters. His taste was eclectic. He enjoyed Stravinsky and folkloric jarocho songs from Veracruz. He liked listening to pop, he loved the most demented virtuoso performances, and he could fall into a virtual trance surrounded by the loud and ferocious sound of prog-metal. He didn’t have a favorite genre. He believed that styles should merge and fuse in order to produce something more vital. He knew that was what he wanted to do.

  He had no doubt that he was meant to be a musician. The only reason he hadn’t already quit school was that it was the best place to meet girls. Of course, there was the little detail that his parents would never, in a million years, allow that, even though they generally supported his musical adventures. Their support was no small matter; his acoustic arrangements were loud, incoherent cacophonies of incongruous sounds that would drive anybody crazy—and frequently did. They always encouraged his desire to be a musician, as long as he finished high school and got into the conservatory first. Likewise, if he continued with photography, he would have to take it seriously and probably go to art school. This, they said, would allow him time to give it careful consideration, to avoid making a decision he’d regret.

  “Imagine what it would be like if you realized at forty that you chose the wrong profession. Just think about how hard it would be to change your direction at that stage,” his father always said.

  Gabriel knew he was right. The life of a musician could be difficult. Most ended up doing menial jobs just to put food on the table. On one occasion he had even answered his father by saying: “I don’t plan on living that long.”

  Because of this offhand remark, Gabriel’s parents sent him to a psychologist. Dr. Krauss. Right out of central casting, he was bald and bearded, with a stern mouth and soft, considerate eyes. By the second session Gabriel had the doctor snowed. He made Krauss believe that he had religious hallucinations, homosexual desires, parricidal instincts, and later, as he improved his routine, bulimia and attention deficit disorder.

  Gabriel read psychiatry books to better craft his imaginary conditions. He studied Freud, quoting cases verbatim, leaving Dr. Krauss confused and frustrated. After six months he resigned from treatment. A final admission that Gabriel was immune to his methods and techniques.

  To the untrained ear, Gabriel’s music sounded chaotic, an auditory jumble. Yet a patient, educated ear heard form and structure. Gabriel had a natural aptitude for composition. He created strangely elaborate soundscapes: canons, fugues, exceptional paraphrases and interpretations of a variety of musical forms, both classical and popular. Of course, few people understood what he was trying to do. Since he didn’t have any formal training, he could only write rudimentary music, which often didn’t fully express what he intended.

  But it didn’t matter. He felt music. It was his language. He could say things with tone, note, and meter that he could never have done with words.

  While Gabriel listened to the engine, his father fiddled with the car’s numerous gadgets, turning handles, pushing buttons, changing the radio station. He switched quickly from classical music to an interview with an astronomer discussing radio telescopes, and then to “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. He looked back at Gabriel:

  “Do you want to hear the real masters?”

  “Stop fooling around and focus on the road. I don’t like the way that van is driving in front of us,” said his mother. She had been very quiet up to now.

  “Not crazy about the Stones,” said Gabriel.

  “What do you mean? The Stones started everything.”

  “Yeah,” answered Gabriel without any interest.

  “Okay, your loss,” said his father, and he changed the station again.

  Then Gabriel noticed the gray van that had worried his mother. It swerved wildly.

  A deep voice came over the radio: You really should listen…

  chapter 6

  12:34 P.M.

  A van skidded out of control…wheels lifting off concrete…flipping.

  Joaquin saw a woman flailing inside the van, her eyes wide with horror. He thought he could smell the sparks flying off the vehicle as it scraped across the concrete. Then he heard a squeal, and turned to see a Volvo hurtling toward them.

  “Gonna kill kill kill kill kill the poor: Tonight,” Biafra howled in his ears.

  His voice made everything seem like it was happening in slow motion. A strange apathy overcame him. He found himself studying the Volvo driver’s face as it careened toward him. It was a pleasant face, only slightly marred by the rictus of fear. It looked familiar. Did he know this person? he wondered. No, he told himself, it must be some kind of “future memory” without really knowing what that meant.

  In this expanded moment he thought about a lot of odd things. He realized the accident meant they wouldn’t get to the hospital in time to visit his grandmother. This would delay them for hours. Bummer. Then he thought about telling this story to Claudia. She was deadly afraid of car accidents. She would be scared as he described it, then he could console her…console her with sex. It would work, he knew it.

  Oh, right, he thought, I’m about to be in an accident. The notion seemed distant, remote. I could be disfigured. Would Claudia still love me? Would she still want me with a face full of scars?

  Could she be that superficial? Maybe. Joaquin had no idea how she’d react. What if he injured his hands or fingers? How long would it be before he could stroke a female body, or his guitar? What if he never could? He hoped the accident wouldn’t affect his mother’s promise to buy him a guitar, even if it was just a cheap one. In Guitar Player magazine he’d seen an ad for a store in suburban Houston where they sold used Fenders at unbelievable prices. He’d written the address down on a piece of paper that he put in his pocket.

  Maybe he’d at least get a Fender. Not the cheap Japanese job he’d almost settled on.

  He’d forgotten about writing down that address.

  Why had he forgotten?

  The moment this thought crossed his mind, a sound like a thousand power chords filled his ears. Bits of twisted metal flew at him from every direction.

  Oh, right, he remembered, I’m about to be in an accident.

  What’s happened to gravity? he wondered.

  Everything went black.

  chapter 7

  12:51 P.M.

  Gabriel opened his eyes. Through a chrysalis of jagged metal, he saw a woman in the distance, covering her face and repeating, “Shit, shit! My skin’s burning, my skin�
�s burning! Come quick, Roger, it burns!”

  He wanted to see what was wrong. He turned.

  Searing pain.

  Blackness.

  Fourteen minutes later, Joaquin awoke on a stretcher with an oxygen mask strapped over his face. He could only see rough shapes, and he heard voices, distant, garbled.

  “Front seat…killed instantly…meat wagon…”

  Another voice mixed with his, complaining:

  “Can you imagine? What would you do if your boss said something like that?”

  The first voice again, clearer:

  “You did the right thing, but you got to think about how this is gonna affect your retirement. Pass me the scissors—thanks. There’s nothing more we can do here. How long before the meat wagon arrives?”

  He couldn’t understand what they were talking about. It was as if they were referring to strangers. For a moment he thought he was hearing a medical show. He continued to listen.

  “If we can’t stop the hemorrhaging, this one’s gonna code on us,” said another voice farther away.

  I don’t like these shows, Gabriel thought. I’m going to change the channel.

  “Where’s the remote? Will someone pass the remote?”

  He heard laughing and a joke about couch potatoes that he didn’t understand. Then he sank back into the blackness.

  Wonderful, welcoming blackness.

  chapter 8

  A VOICE AT THIRTY THOUSAND FEET

  Blackness…

  The lights flickered several times and then sprang back to life, filling the plane’s cabin with a warm glow.

  Joaquin glanced at Alondra. She was asleep. He brushed a strand of hair from her face, and she let out a peaceful sigh.

  Sleeping, she looked like a different person: a calmer, more centered soul. Joaquin wished he could join her. But he always had difficulty with this, and on planes it was virtually impossible.