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that it was I, however, who found myself in such a fix, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had fallen by the wayside, sick and sapped of strength for any further adventures for the time being. All the same, the old urge to take flight was triggered, the same one that had led me to drive hour after hour down Spain’s highways every summer, aimless and heading nowhere in particular, listening to country records, stopping to rest at gas stations, and jotting down vague musings in a small notepad. Only this time it was triggered in a much more scattershot, painful way, for this now had nothing to do with that old affectation of scribbling on maps or looking for hotels as desolate and cinematographic as possible in which to spend the night, with a broken down ice machine, tattered blinds, and desolation in the form of damp patches on the wallpaper if possible. All that had before amounted to little more than a gentle gloom had now become spiderwebs and trembling. Those thousand-mile getaways bore about as much resemblance to this flight that had now begun as a child pretending to be killed by a shot to the chest does to one dying for real on the sidewalk, the whites of his eyes showing.
    Yet there is a dark pleasure to be had in setting fire to ships and watching as any hope of return goes up in flames on the water, a mile from the shore. Once the thought has crossed your mind, it’s hard to resist the temptation to make a clean break, the longing to give in to the black vortex that seeks to swallow you whole from inside an abyss, like a giant claw grabbing you by the ankles and dragging you in; it’s tough to give up on the idea of cutting the ropes and turning off the lights, unplugging everything so that all that remains is to toss portraits, bouquets, and ashes overboard. You know you shouldn’t yet are powerless to do otherwise. Just like when, as a child, you strike a younger brother just because you feel like it, or dump the girl of your dreams for no reason she or anyone else can grasp, leaving her, just like that, weeping on a park bench.
    A few days after having officially left, I had to return to my former apartment to fetch a few of my belongings when I spotted a pair of my shoes—dirty, somewhat the worse for wear, in need of a lick of polish—lying forlornly on the bedroom floor. For some obscure reason, a pair of shoes always makes my thoughts turn to death. At some point in my childhood, perhaps not as hazy in my nightmares as I might like to think in my waking hours, I must have been taken aback on entering the room of a dead relative, one of those distant family members who would pass away in provinces as lost as they themselves were, forcing me to travel all night long and miss a day of school among the cypresses, the black-clad women brewing endless pots of coffee, and all manner of friends and in-laws trying on the deceased man’s overcoats for size, almost out of eyeshot. And I’d swear that after the funeral, I spotted a pair of black shoes on the floor and understood death on sensing, for the very first time, the absence of any legs rising up toward the bedroom ceiling, forming a human being along the way, with his gestures and his white shirt; the void left behind by the dead man was right there, in the air above the shoes. And, stricken with horror, I also sensed the prospect of widowed footsteps roaming the hallways in the nights to come. The shoes lay a few short yards from the bed that, though it might now smell only of fever, and though pictures of the Virgin Mary had been pinned to the headboard, had no doubt in the not too distant past been privy to laughter and desire—the door locked from the inside entirely by design and the children horsing around on the other side of it, hovering dangerously close, the sweet fear of being caught in the act, the mischief of urgent lovemaking. I knew, as soon as I clapped eyes on those discarded shoes of mine, that I was a dead man in that house. In