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the hood of his car. He and his kid had waited quietly inside until the storm passed and then run to the school, which by then had had its doors ripped off and windows shattered, and was missing part of its roof. He kept saying that he didn’t know what he was going to do: he had just bought a house, and his insurance wouldn’t pay for the car because he hadn’t gotten any coverage for Acts of God. It took some effort to snap him out of it so that he could give me some more pertinent details: everyone at the school had been evacuated, they were in the women’s locker room down on the lowest level. It was pretty dark down there, he said, and really hot, so he was looking for someplace to buy his son a cold drink.
    I headed downstairs, leaving him to his monologue about the irrationality of a culture that attributes natural phenomena to God, as if he were chief clerk in charge of the weather. Past the fifth level it grew noticeably darker: only a few lights were on, and the red emergency lights gave the place a twilight atmosphere. The heat was so intense that there were only a few students still moving around.
    As I stepped off the spiral stairway on the seventh level I discovered all the university students—male and female—stripped down to their underwear, seated on benches, and chatting away as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Down here there was no adult supervision. The sheen of their bare shoulders, stomachs, and legs made me realize that I was completely soaked in sweat.
    I hurried to one of the locker rooms, bolting through the door with all the violence of my mounting desperation. Inside, the dense, acrid air reeked with a purely human decay. As I moved along the hallway leading to the lockers and showers, I thought it was an absolute disgrace to have banished the nursery children down here; they should have been upstairs where there was fresh air. The light, too, was awful, with only those sinister red emergency lights glowing on the tiles.
    I reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, but instead of children and their teachers I found dozens of naked bodies, all intertwined, pulsing and grinding together on the floor and benches, and even propped up next to the lockers. Like some divine beast gestating and multiplying, it writhed and flowed in slow motion, some part of each body gripping and being gripped by the hands, mouth, sex, or ass of another. Their pale torsos in the red light reminded me of the tin cans filled with earthworms that we used to collect in my grandmother’s garden in Autlán before going fishing.
    I stood there paralyzed by the liquid mass of bodies, completely absolved for a moment of my personality and private anguishes. One of the young men whom I had seen chatting outside came walking past me. He was just about to lose himself inside the soft, pulpy turmoil when I came to my senses and ran to grab his arm: I asked him about the nursery school kids. He told me he didn’t know, he had just been on the tennis courts at the fifth level; there were no kids there. Let me ask, he said at last. He gestured for me to wait and approached a nearby group of bodies, all molded tightly together. They spoke among themselves without stopping work on each others’ interlocking parts. At last one young woman slipped a penis out of her mouth and told me that all the kids were in the women’s locker room, which was on the other side of the stairs.
    Feeling drowsy and overwhelmed by the poor lighting, lack of oxygen, and the accumulated shocks I’d suffered, I walked toward the women’s locker room with the lassitude of a man resigned to his fate. I had to knock on the door and identify myself before they would open up and let me in. Once inside, one of the teachers apologized, saying that they’d had to lock themselves in. When all the students began stripping off their clothes, they’d sent a father and his son to find help, but they hadn’t returned. I didn’t tell her