I had been walking in the desert for weeks, if I lay on my back the sun would feed me, at the same time I would get hard and my crow's feet, a product of the road traveled, would dry. If I kept walking through that desert, I would never be a mother; my ovaries were drying up and my breasts were toasting. I felt anguish for the zipper that separated my west from my east. I began to doubt if I was a good man or an ambitious woman. I had a rubber handle and it cut a lot, maybe it was a solid machete.
Since childhood, before I killed the first milkman in the neighborhood and when I hadn't yet lived in Siberia, I thought the desert was a good place to die thinking about oneself, far from hateful New York. How nice it would be to die warm and hugging a cactus! With a golden, hairless chest, stealing rays from that Galician lady who owns the sun.
A regression pretended to do me good; everything accelerated when the empty glass reminded me that it had once been full. Something was on its way, and it wasn't the daughter of the unfortunate milkman from the neighborhood. Hours were spent tearing at my nails for not having patience among the stones and dry herbs that set the scene for my footsteps, wondering what I was looking for, without the anxiety of reaching my goal allowing me a transparent and reassuring answer. I had to find them before the drug stopped resting in my industrial uniform pant pocket.
Digging in the sand with an old steel shovel, I looked for dead children with mustaches; before killing them, I would paint mustaches on them. That guy was not clean living; wheat is not good, it kills you slowly. I still didn't understand who was talking to me. If I was half man and half woman, who was he?
The desert gained ground on me; it was much more constant than I was. It drank everything but water, and everything with alcohol. I was dehydrating while images of the daughter of the first milkman I murdered came to me. My father served my sentences; I couldn't continue my path like any other child. I quickly developed a taste for soy milk, and that was my first flirtation with drugs. I worked for the Rushmontiel Police and did a lot of drugs during working hours. I collected women's phone numbers from incident reports to harass them off duty. On the other side of the moon, I felt well hidden; it was very daytime and I writhed in pain thinking of those children killed by that murderer, called to fame for his great creativity. A talented guy, with art and a desire to play his cards well in that world that I pursued through that dense desert.
The trail of my dog Poya, along with the deceased commissioner's folder and a damaged Slayer vinyl, made me think of the mission: to find the creative killer alive or one-eyed. If I didn't kill him, I would leave him one-eyed in protest for painting those mustaches on his young victims. Children with mustaches, what cruelty.
After days in the desert, I decided to go home in my car with white velvet upholstery, listening to Lovely Orgasm. On the way, I suffered the amputation of my little finger. It has nothing to do with the desert or the killer; I cut it with a cigar cutter made in China while driving. Once I left the local clinic, I immersed myself in a bar with lights called "Bocado Delicado." My dog Poya and I wanted some good mambo; I bought him some fish sausages (made from sole bones and grouper eyes) and I went off to find prostitutes.
I requested a woman who didn't talk much, to think about another who wasn't there, granting myself the concentration that drunken sex demands. A long drink of virgin jungle juice and a few drops of Ukrainian vodka would make me feel like a marine coming home with medals. A woman approached; the woman was a cheese but her breasts betrayed her early maternal age. Her daughter approached, laughed, and undressed me with her gaze. Like in that movie, I slept with both without knowing who was the mother or who was the daughter she gave birth to.
I had drunk for myself and for all my colleagues, so ejaculating was like advancing across the Texas border with an army of monkeys armed with Colombian flags. It couldn't be; they sucked my amputated finger and I told them my dog was Poya, they didn't understand the pun, deciding to take a path far from mine.
It was daytime again, the desert was waiting for me. I wanted to be as efficient as cowboys, like CVS cashiers, similar to what a German does with his coins earned in the rain. My Poya, the woman who lives in me, and even I myself, were starting to get tired. I couldn't keep assenting every day that passed blankly as if nothing was happening; that killer was still at large and the victims were in the desert.
The police budget had a ceiling. I opted for something new; I didn't know who the killer was, so I violently kidnapped a family man at the doors of a hot dog stand. I forced him to engage in violent sex with a series of supermarket foods. I explained to him that I didn't really know who I was, that I was a woman sometimes a man who served the police.
I insisted that he was guilty, that his penis was his machete, and that all those fruits were young, mustachioed victims he had killed. I had to warn him that I no longer gave Christmas presents.
Text: Jaji Iglesias from cerveza salada
Photos: Alvaro Pastor
