The Fire Hazards of Chasing Perfection - 4. 4. Papá

It was 3:21 am when Lucas Valverde arrived at his small studio apartment in the Almagro district of Buenos Aires.

He downed half a carton of Termidor as he waited for the bathtub to fill up; the other half, he finished in the tub.

He woke up at 8:39 am, still in the tub, the water long gone cold. With weak, wobbly limbs, he wrapped himself up in a towel and stumbled into his bed, where he slept until 1:05 pm.

He had hard-boiled eggs and a liter of water for lunch. Then, he opened a bottle of Syrah.

Ex·tra·ter·ri·to·ri·al·i·ty: the applicability or exercise of a sovereign's laws outside its territory.

Example given: how Lucas’s apartment became a separate entity, well outside the jurisdiction of the passage of time.

Lucas would wake up, eat, drink, and go back to sleep. Wake up, eat, drink, and go back to sleep. Wake up, throw up, down a bottle of water, go back to sleep. Wake up, piss, drink, order takeout—he’d never had Thai before, why on Earth did he order Thai?—, go back to sleep.

At some point, looking for that tuna can he was sure he’d seen in the back of his pantry, he found the tiniest little ziploc bag, and remembered how back in freshman year he’d treat himself to the club on weekends after scoring tens on the last tests of each season.

The cycle renewed again. Take half of the (most definitely expired) molly, drink, put on a sick techno mix, dance, dance, dance, sweat, drink—when had he bought all this vodka?—dance, dance. His phone went off, and the words on the screen were dancing too. There was a loud crash, and then he was laughing, and dancing, and dancing some more. Take the other half of the pill—fuck it—God, he was thirsty.

His head was spinning, the whole room was spinning, he was spinning, and spinning, and spinning, and then he was tripping, and falling, falling, falling

The lights went out.

***

Lucas Valverde woke up in a pool of his own vomit.

Finding the motivation to peel himself off the floor of his bleak studio apartment was harder still than actually doing so, even with the vertigo and the migraine and the urge to barf up another coat to the drying puddle on the linoleum floor.

Tired dark eyes stared back at him in the mirror. He was still wearing his button-up, once pristine white but now stained in all sorts of colors—yellow, grey, and an angry splatter of burgundy red—. He ran a hand through his short brown hair, only to find it had not escaped the scope of the puke, either.

He needed a shower.

It wasn't until after he'd stumbled back from the bathroom that he noticed the buzzing of his phone on the table, rattling aggressively with a cascade of incoming messages, the noise amplified by the clinking of empty bottles beside it.

He tried to remember what day it was.

Sunday.

And it was still early in the morning, from what little he could see from his meager window.

He was never needed on Sundays, not with this much insistence, at least.

With sluggish steps he made his way to the phone, the screen of which he was unpleasantly surprised to find cracked all across.

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the kaleidoscope-like filter of the broken screen. Over ten missed calls and a bombardment of unread messages from classmates, colleagues and even Jose all jumped at him with menacing urgency.

In the end, he found out from a sterile mail notice from the university's institutional newsletter.

"It is with deep sorrow that the University of Buenos Aires School of Law announces the unexpected passing of our beloved colleague, Prof. Pascual Octavio Di Falco, on September 29th."

Lucas put the phone face-down on the table again, his knees suddenly weaker than before. Instinctively, his right hand went to the watch on his wrist.

Everything had crashed down.

***

You’ve got some nerve showing your face around here again after everything you’ve

I built this house with my own two hands, Mariela, you can’t just throw me out like

Watch me

I know I fucked up but

And you’ve been drinking again! After everything you’ve done, you son of

Don’t raise your voice at me, woman

Go and stay with that whor

The sound of the slap had probably been worse than the actual hit, echoing against the tiled kitchen walls. Lucas shuddered behind the door.

A hand on his shoulder nearly made him yelp.

Jose’s voice came in a whisper: “Let’s go back to your room.”

But the walls and bed covers were paper-thin, and all the screeching of all the crickets in the garden could never drown out the echo of that terrible sound.

***

Pascual Di Falco died of a sudden heart attack on September 29th, 2019, aged 62. He was alone in his office.

The renowned professor had a long and thoroughly detailed medical history dealing with a persistent heart condition he’d inherited from his father (the elder Di Falco had also died of a cardiac arrest at an early age). Gratuitous drinking and smoking had done little to lower the risks for the professor.

It was sudden, but it shouldn’t have been surprising.

And yet…

“Right,” Jose said as she entered the apartment again, wiping her hands on the sides of her coat. “That was the last bag.”

Lucas nodded with as much emphasis as he could muster.

A restless sigh escaped Jose’s mouth as she knelt before him. She took his hands in hers, and in her eyes he found an intimate kindness he didn’t know just how much he’d been needing.

“I know you’re hurting right now, but this–” she gestured towards the now clean apartment, “–has to stop. You can’t drink the pain away.”

He looked into her eyes, dark brown, just as his. It was the only thing they had in common.

That, and far too many childhood memories they would never, ever speak of.

“He’s gone. He's dead.”

She pulled him in for a hug. It’d been a while since he’d last hugged his sister. It’d been a while since he’d last hugged anyone but a man who was now dead.

“I know, Luquitas. And I’m sorry. But you’re alive. Please, try to stay that way.”

***

The morning alarm was a portent of calamity.

Lucas had spent enough time dreading the dawn of this day to be reminded of what was to take place before dusk. And yet, upon going through his notifications, he still willingly subjected himself to the torturous task of reading the institutional newsletter’s arid reminder.

A few of the other professors in the chair office—all of them unaware of what had been going down those months, of course—had asked Lucas if he would be attending Pascual’s funeral, but he had plenty of excuses ready beforehand. Being there had never been an option.

Not if it meant having to face Beatriz and Pascual’s children. Not knowing that they knew.

He skipped class that day. Truth be told, he was skipping class a lot, but at least he felt like he could justify this absence to himself.

Why had he set up the alarm so goddamn early?

The hours went by at a glacial pace, each minute a small eternity in purgatory—if “purgatory” was a good name for staying in bed watching TV, eating cold leftovers, trying (and failing) to take a nap, ignoring the sultry call of the convenience store down the block, gnawing at his ear, all reminding him of the fact there was a black hole at the pit of his stomach swallowing everything he ever thought mattered to him in life—.

It really was a shame Jose had made him promise.

Lucas hated making promises he couldn’t keep.

At least he tried not to start too early.

***

It was as if someone had fast forwarded the movie to this exact moment: Lucas on his knees, hands holding onto the rim of the toilet, and what felt like his entire digestive tract retching out of his mouth.

The excess ethanol in his system and the primal beats of some impossibly loud music playing in the background were conspiring to make his head an uninhabitable place. Having found no success in throwing up, he propped himself up by holding the sticky walls of the cubicle, and slowly made his way back to the dancefloor.

He must’ve been there for a while already. He’d been before, but the name of the place turned to smoke the second the question popped into his head.

It didn’t matter.

Faceless silhouettes formed a sticky, dense brush, through which walking was proving to be heavy work. Lucas slid through the moving bodies as neon lights flashed on and off in improbable directions, the beat of the music drilling deeper and deeper into his insides.

Shouldn’t he just have gone home?

He felt a hand catching him, a figure—another faceless silhouette—. In the flickering lights he saw what he thought was the rim of glasses, the length of a luscious beard. He clung onto the figure and let it move him as it wished, a Lucas-marionette for the not-Pascual.

Because this was not Pascual. He couldn’t be, Pascual was–

Kissing him. The figure was kissing him, and Lucas let it, and tried to kiss back with as much vigor as he could gather. Something cold, slipping under his jeans; something warm, blowing into his ear.

Talking. Not-Pascual was talking to him; but their languages were mutually unintelligible. So he nodded. Whatever it was he wanted, yes was the answer.

You’re beautiful.

Lucas was no longer in the club, but somehow the beat of the music kept digging into his ears. That, and the soft lull of a moving engine that was slowly dragging him back to sleep. He felt the warmth of another beside him, the scent of cologne—something way cheaper than Armani—and the light caress of a hand on his lower back.

“Pascual?”

The other man spoke, but words are meaningless to the ear if there is nothing to process them behind it. Lucas buried himself in that embrace, and let the vodka make him forget, even if for just an instant, that it wasn’t Armani cologne.

You’re beautiful.

The comfort of clean sheets had never felt so foreign. Encompassing, but uncanny. A place without light.

“Papá?”

Something painful, and incisive, and wet.

And wrong.

Everything was wrong.

He meant to say “I want to go home”, but surely those exact words couldn’t have come out of his mouth.

It didn’t matter.

He stood up. He stood up and somehow, miraculously, he managed to stay up. Long enough to walk outside, long enough to call a cab, long enough to get into the car and blurt out the first address that came to mind.

Cold, biting past flesh and sawing right into the bone. Lucas Valverde had always preferred the cold, but right then, right there, he would’ve killed for the slightest bit of warmth.

“We’re here.”

His eyes opened with the force of a shot. The hammer at his head was relentless; no longer following the beat of a wordless tune but the rhythmic flow of blood pumping into his brain.

“That’ll be 750.”

The number alone was enough to sober him up to a manageable degree. Begrudgingly, he paid the cab driver and stumbled out.

He found himself at an eerily familiar street of tranquil single-storey homes lined with evergreen trees. Above him, the sky was painted in a palette of opaque dawn.

He looked down, only to find he’d lost his coat somewhere along the way here.

It didn’t matter.

Each step felt like the most ambitious undertaking of his life. His hand stopped before the doorbell. Then he rang.

And he rang.

And he rang again.

The sound of footsteps on the other side of the door briefly served as earthly tether, as did the flurry of insults in that voice he’d once feared and hated so much.

He could’ve sworn he heard the once-familiar cry of crickets in the garden.

Why was he here?

The door opened.

“Lucas?”

A breeze made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

He was here because this place had once been home.

Lucas looked up at the man at the door, and said:

“Hi, dad.”