Chapter 24 The Hippie Night
The Hippie Night
Coco
We’ve flown through four bottles of wine.
Gus is opening the fifth with skill I didn’t think he had, standing beside the table.
Next to him, Marín is cracking up because Gus is reminiscing about one of his readings in Madrid, where he got so nervous that he forgot to zip up his fly after he went to the bathroom.
Even Aroa momentarily abandoned her moody silence to laugh with us.
Loren can’t stop giggling, and Blanca is covering her face with a napkin because tears are spilling down her cheeks.
“And I’m sitting there, reading my heart out with part of my boxers peeking out through my fly. You bastards!”
“Checkered! They were checkered boxers!” I pipe up, dying of laughter.
“We were trying to give you signs!” Marín defends us. “But you just kept going.”
“Come on, man. That’s because it was super confusing! Your friends come to see you at a reading, and every time you make eye contact with them, they’re touching their nether regions like a bunch of lunatics. I thought you were all making fun of me!”
It wasn’t that long ago, but suddenly it occurs to me how different we all are now.
It was pouring rain that day, which had been pretty habitual that spring.
It was Friday, and some of us met up beforehand to toast him and wish him luck.
Blanca showed up soaked; she came straight from work, dressed in a suit and her heels splattered with dirty water, but she didn’t seem to care.
Loren brought Damian. They had been in a silly spat about choosing the couch for their new apartment, and things were a little tense between them.
We always thought their relationship would be plagued by explosive arguments until Judgment Day, but around Easter, not long after that reading, everything seemed to change: They decided to break up…
for twelve hours. Now their relationship is completely different: Even Loren, who doesn’t like cuddling (not even when he’s the little spoon), is affectionate.
You really don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Back then, Marín and Aroa were already broken up, but it wasn’t this tense.
She kept saying it was just a bump in the road, that they’d get back together when everyone least expects it.
I suspected they were still sleeping together because it was easy to catch them in a wink or a complicit look.
I figured they’d get back together too and be even more intense when they did.
I remember I didn’t even want to think about it.
I avoided any reflection on the matter because I was scared that when they reconciled, I’d be out of my mind and our apartment and the family I’ve always considered us would break up.
Now, a few glasses of wine deep, in the middle of this calm and velvet-dark night, I’m sure Aroa thought about it, but she didn’t care.
I wonder if Aroa has ever worried about my role in this story, if she’s ever wondered what would happen to me when she got her wish and they went off to live together.
Did she think we’d be three’s company forever?
She doesn’t live in the clouds that much.
“What was that beautiful poem you read at the end?”
Blanca’s question brings me back to the present.
We’ve cleared the table of all the dinner detritus, leaving only the plastic cups full of wine, an empty soda can, another full one, and an ashtray full of butts that Blanca and Loren have filled to the brim without needing any help.
It’s the blackest night we’ve ever seen.
There’s no moon, there are no streetlights, and since the beach bar closed, there hasn’t been any light except the candles, flashlights, and dim pools of light spilling out from the campers.
Marín is leaning back in his chair with his legs stretched out and his elbows perched on the back.
He needs a haircut, and the jeans he’s wearing have seen better days, but he looks amazing.
I have to peel my eyes off him and force myself to look at Gus, who’s pulling his phone out of his pocket.
“I think you’re talking about ‘Now That Everything Is Lost,’” he replies.
I furrow my brow because he suddenly sounds so tremendously sad.
A few looks are exchanged across the table. I try to catch Gus’s, but it gets tangled in the look Marín and Loren are giving each other. Blanca’s looking at Marín too. Something happened there.
I turn back to Gus, who’s sitting on the steps of the RV. He rubs his mouth and starts to read:
Tonight is the last night I’ll search for you inside me
frantically
only to find nothing.
Today the crumbs I tricked you with
are no longer enough.
Today, when everything has been said,
there’s nowhere left to hide.
I’ve been weathering the grief like a champ,
using excuses, hopes, fear and bluster.
I’ve been reconstructing the city under your feet,
suspicion dawning that you destroy everything you step on,
and I didn’t even realize I was the one breaking shit.
Memories
pile up in the room at the bottom of my chest,
they fall, they slip, they slide and they roll,
until there’s no present that’s worth anything,
until the past is the only thing that makes sense,
until I convince myself that I stole your future.
The worst part is the desire
that won’t leave,
that says that one day I’ll laugh about all of this,
but tell me, what am I supposed to do with all the desire?
The kind that makes me yearn for your perfume,
that makes me believe in you blindly,
makes me swell with pride for the woman you are,
fighting with you and for you,
begging, pleading, crying.
the desire for everything you told me,
you denied me,
that I wanted,
but didn’t ask for,
and you won’t give me.
Now that everything is lost,
now that even the dream is dead,
I think about the nights when I could sleep without thinking of you,
the day I’ll see you and it won’t hurt,
when I have no desire left,
and I don’t hate the memories
that are left with you.
Silence hovers over the table. We listen to the waves breaking on the shore, some distant chatter, and a far-off song that sounds like “Turnedo” by Ivan Ferreiro. We’re all staring at Gus, who’s looking at his phone, silent, licking his lips, blinking slowly.
A tiny sound breaks the moment open. The whole scene could have been torn from a dramatic film. Everything is broken, not just the silence. It’s Blanca’s phone.
“Hi, Ruben,” she answers, smoothing down one eyebrow.
“Seriously? And I have to look at it right now? Fine…I’ll check tomorrow.
” She pauses, stands up, and rolls her eyes.
I guess she wasn’t expecting a work call from her almost-husband at this hour.
“I sent you all the documents in an email, but if you can’t find it, I think I have it archived and… ”
Her voice drifts away and melts into the blackness of the night.
When she comes back, everything seems to be the same as before the poem.
Aroa’s still silent but pretending she’s fine, like she’s not watching Marín like a hawk.
Everyone else is talking happily, but…it’s not one of those nights.
It’s not an all-nighter filled with nostalgia and laughter.
Maybe it’s the darkness, the quiet, the light drawing us inside like moths.
Maybe it’s because of something else, personal and nontransferable.
I don’t know. All I do know is that today is a day of retreat.
It’s pretty obvious at this point that we each have a rabid dog inside us, growling, chained up.
* * *
The boys have gone to the bathroom. It’s midnight, and Aroa has started yawning.
She wants us to do the bed lottery because she’s going to bed soon, she says.
Earlier she said she didn’t mind sleeping alone in the bed in the living room, but I get the feeling she’s changed her mind. Blanca faces the problem head-on.
“We don’t need a lottery. Marín and Gus can sleep in the double bed, Loren on one of the bunks, you take the other one, and Coco and I can share the one in the living room.”
“You won’t both fit there,” she says tersely, but she doesn’t offer to sleep there herself.
“What’s going on?” Loren asks when he’s the first to appear back under the lights of the RV.
“We’re figuring out the bed sitch. I told Aroa you two could have the bunks, Coco and I in the living room, and Marín and Gus in the double bed.”
“No need. I’ll sleep in the car,” Marín declares.
“We don’t bite, you know?” Aroa snaps at him.
“Fine, then you come up with a solution.”
Marín crosses his arms over his chest. He’s radiating a slow-burning hostility.
I know him; he’s about to explode. He doesn’t do it very often; he usually has enough patience to restrain himself.
But we’ve all spent too many hours together with no chance for him to decompress by himself.
Marín is super stressed. Even Gus, who’s zipping up his fly as he walks up, winces a little when he sees him like this.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Aroa’s choosing beds for everyone.”
“Fine then.” She doesn’t hold back, and as she stands up calmly from her seat, she rattles off, “Loren and Marín in the bed up top. Blanca in the one in the living room. Coco in the top bunk, and Gus and me in the bottom one.”
I was completely convinced that Gus wouldn’t just be happy with his lot; he’d want to go to bed as soon as possible.
But that’s not the vibe I get from the face he just made.
He stares at me and then at everyone else, his gaze slowly sweeping around the table before he shoves his hands in pockets and leans back glumly on the Imperial Boozer Cruiser.
“Those bunks are pretty tight, blondie. I don’t know if we know each other well enough.”
“I’m sure we do. Are they that narrow, Marín? Did you and Coco manage to get any sleep the other night?”
“I’m not going to answer anything you say in that passive aggressive tone.”