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taste meat again. No, the thing that pierced me like a poison arrow was that word: “incurable.”
    “Never again.”
    I realized I had treated my body as if it were unchanging, and every slight malfunction as reversible; I was sure I could overcome anything with the power of my charm. The problem wasn’t that my youthful vigor had dissipated. Sure, I’ve never been one to spend hours running laps under polluted skies, but soon (as soon as I found an opponent who would pay for the court) I’d be playing tennis again, and no one could stop me from buying a set of dumbbells to turn those (slight) lumps of fat into high-quality muscles. The problem is I’ve started to notice bodily phenomena I never paid attention to before: I look for broken capillaries, I monitor the texture of my skin that yields in lax folds in places that can’t be exercised (cheeks, nape of the neck), the wrinkles that accumulate in the corners overworked by my expressions, the little white spots that spoil my easily tanned complexion…It’s as if youth and vigor were just matter’s fever dreams.
    I began to think seriously about things I thought I’d outgrown in adolescence: I spent hours searching online for a way to preserve my mind—all those impressions accumulated over forty-something years of observations and hormone fluctuations—once my organism fell apart. I wore my eyes out staring at the screen for entire nights. It’s a disgrace they still can’t download consciousness to a machine, where it can be preserved until those shady guys doing stem cell research finally figure out how to cultivate host bodies. Surely my unique point of view is worth something, even though the birth rate keeps going up and up year after year. Consciousness is stuck to the cerebral jelly—you can’t separate the two—and it’s lights out once the brain is used up. All this goddamn progress and we still have to break down and die.
    “Never again.”
    The point is, I didn’t update my Facebook profile so I could contact survivors from a shared past I couldn’t care less about. It was just the first idea I’d had of a way to distract myself from my waning future. And since finding a buddy is less exhausting than looking for a girlfriend, I started prowling through my “friends,” and the “friends” of my “friends.” I was embarrassed to put anything on my wall; unless you run a nightclub or work as a spy, what kind of news can guys like us really come up with? Most had posted photographs full of incipient jowls, those hair implants that only advertise the baldness they’re trying to disguise, age spots, and misshapen blubber. It would have been more elegant if they’d simply vanished after finishing their senior year. Girlfriends, children, wives—it was disheartening to think that by now all my classmates (for the love of God, mere boys) had been baptized in sexual waters.
    Pedro-María was divorced, lived in the city, worked for himself, and had free time—it all sounded good. It took us three e-mails to set things up. I boldly proposed a vegan restaurant, but some people just can’t get past the idea of wilted spinach on a plate. He proposed a brasserie in Poblenou and I didn’t protest; my courtesy was stronger than my sense of responsibility as an invalid. I was going to give myself a break.
    I spent two days rehearsing speeches that would give the impression of a successful man going through a rough patch—I didn’t have the audacity to hide that—but it got harder and harder as more details of my “temporary” hard time came to light: economic, emotional, health-related. If I was honest about my circumstances, it was easy to confuse me with a newly divorced guy exploiting social networks to vent about his problems. Pedro-María would realize I was at the end of my tether, the kind of guy to be avoided like the plague—that’s me. I couldn’t let that loser humiliate me. If he thought I was going to be his doormat, he was