Condomnauts Read online

  Evita, Atevi. Obvious, isn’t it? Even a six-year-old girl could figure it out.

  I don’t answer her, just place the cage holding my hopes of victory on the starting line. Across the way, at other end of the galvanized steel tracks, my buddy Abel, who is serving as my helper today, is spreading the sugar to attract my racer and her rival.

  “For the first race: place your bets!” Diosdado bellows, and the roar of the crowd redoubles.

  Yotuel Fullmouth, moving with a dancer’s grace not to dirty his unsullied white clothes, silently takes his place next to Abel. All the other kids point and laugh when he pulls on a pair of long rubber gloves, just in case.

  Yamil’s younger brother has never been able to take these races. It’s almost a phobia with him. He still screams sometimes when one of the creatures gets too close to him. Acting as his brother’s helper in this race is the best proof he could give of his love for him. He’s obsessed with cleanliness: he’s the only person in the neighborhood who bathes two or three times a day and throws off his clothes as soon as they start to stink.

  I understand now that he didn’t do it just to appear attractive to his “clients.” It was because his work made him feel dirty all the time.

  The champ to beat in Rubble City for the past few months, and therefore the first to compete, is Centella, Yamil’s racer. Some say he shares his steroids with her, and maybe it’s true: she’s not as big as my Atevi, but her legs are long and she runs like she’s got fire in her belly.

  “Six CUCs on my Centella!” howls Yamil Check-My-Biceps, proudly tossing his Afro and waving a muscle-bound fist full of old debit cards and subcutaneous chips, stolen or found in the trash, as if they held millions of CUCs and not a few miserable pennies. Six CUCs is a respectable amount in Rubble City, though. People have been killed for less. A lot less. Who will accept his challenge?

  As if he didn’t know. As if he didn’t see Abel standing next to Yamil’s brother. As if I didn’t exist.

  Murmuring. Everybody looks at me; they know what I promised, I can’t take it back now, but…

  “Go ahead, Josué. If you lose, I’ll loan you the money. My papá leaves more than that on his chips when he changes them at the end of every month,” Evita whispers. And from the finish line, Abel smiles and winks at me: Atevi is as ready as she’ll ever be. It’s now or never.

  I swallow hard and say simply, “You’re on.”

  “This little kid? Josué?” Yamil smirks, cocky, as if he hadn’t seen me until now and hadn’t known for weeks about my plan to challenge his supremacy. “A little bleached-out mulatto like you? Such a nobody that even your friends call you Zero? You’re planning to beat my champ with that albino monster of yours?” He laughs, and half the neighborhood laughs with him, starting with his quiet little brother. “Drop it, bro. I don’t have waste to time on your bullshit. Take your white bug and come back here and bet with the men when you and your bug have grown up a little—and gotten some color, too. Zero.”

  Ruthless laughter. Again I swallow hard; it’s true that they call me Zero, but that’s because I got lice when I was five and Diosdado decided to deal with it by shaving me bald, “to cure me healthy.”

  Like so many other kids in the neighborhood, you know. Except with me, the nickname stuck.

  “If I lose, I’ll pay up,” I say in a thin voice, cursing the day I lost the genetic lottery by not being born with a bass baritone like Diosdado’s—or skin as tan as the two brothers with their Afros, not to mention almost everyone else in the neighborhood. “With real money.”

  “Real money?” Yamil Check-My-Biceps continues showing off. His green eyes glint almost maliciously under his implausibly scraggly blond Afro. “I don’t doubt it, Zero. If I had a blue-eyed goose that lays the golden egg like the bird standing by your side, a daddy’s little girl, I’d also have me some real money. But what if I don’t want your CUCs after I beat your albino? What if I want the goose herself?”

  I drape my arm protectively across Evita’s shoulders. No. No way. She isn’t part of the deal. I don’t even want to think about what Yamil might do to her. Fuck, things are spinning out of control.

  According to the pitiless rules of the neighborhood, the champion can decide on the bet, and the challenger can refuse to accept it—up to three times. If he refuses a fourth offer, he’s considered to have lost the challenge without contest.

  “Yamil, that’s enough,” my black brother Abel quietly says from the other side of the tracks, his voice low but firm, so everyone can hear him. “Six CUCs aren’t worth one of Evita’s snot balls. Ask for something else.”

  “Something else? Okay, let’s see.” He pretends to think it over, ostentatiously running his fingers through his bushy, blond, exuberant Afro. “Let’s see. How about, if his bleached bug loses, little Josué Zero will have to fuck whoever I choose?”

  “Sounds fair—so long as the other person wants it, too,” Abel snarls, apparently more certain of our victory than I am, and everybody laughs.

  My friend, always so good at manipulating people, has worked his miracle again with just a few words. Now the crowd doesn’t want to watch Check-My-Biceps humiliate me again; they’re on my side, rooting for the underdog, siding with David against Goliath. That’s always the story of my island.

  For all the good it’ll do me. Even with everybody cheering him on, David wouldn’t have brought down Goliath if he had left his sling at home. Is my cheering section going to help Atevi run faster? Or, if I lose (hope not! but it’s a possibility, for sure), will their tears keep me safe from Yamil?

  And what does Check-My-Biceps have in mind for me, anyway? I’ve been here before. I already know where this dream is heading, but I still can’t believe he’d want me to…

  Better not think about it, if you don’t want it to happen, Diosdado always says.

  “Sure,” Yamil agrees, biting his lips in spite. It isn’t what he had hoped for, but he knows the rules of the race give him no choice. “Otherwise it would be rape, and I don’t think our little friend Zero could rape his own shadow. We gonna race, then?”

  “Let’s race,” I say, sounding as sure of myself as I can, and I place my cage with Atevi on the starting line.

  All Check-My-Biceps can do is imitate me, and there we stand, eager, staring at each other, eyes ablaze. But the bodybuilder’s almost adult hatred is nothing compared to the pure uncut rancor silently throbbing in the green pupils of his little brother at the other end of the tracks.

  Oh, there’s no hate like childhood hate.

  I wonder what happened to little Yotuel later on. For some reason, no one knows why, he will blame me when Yamil dies. Highway boy prostitute at the age of eight, no brawny big brother to protect him; his life must have gotten pretty hard. And then he disappeared from the neighborhood.

  Never to return, I suspect. Maybe he died shortly thereafter, like so many other kids of my generation in Rubble City, orphans or not. I can’t picture him as an adult, obsessed as he was with cleanliness but having to live surrounded by shit.

  But my dream keeps moving ahead, giving me no time for my pessimistic reflections.

  “On your mark! Set! Release your bugs, idiots!” Diosdado shouts in his bass baritone.

  And off go the racers, to the frenzied shouts of the crowd.

  The regulation racing tracks are gutters made of smooth galvanized steel, fifteen centimeters deep, walls highly polished so the racers can’t climb out. They’re eight meters long, with two curves and three hills and valleys bent into them.

  They are easy to scrounge from the garbage dumps in Rubble City. Years later, I’ll figure out that they’re made from the scrapped exhaust pipes of old Chinese-manufactured rocket engines, cut in half lengthwise.

  My Atevi is better trained than Yamil’s Centella. While her rival, the reigning champion, wastes a couple of precious seconds exploring the starting gate and getting her bearings in time and space, my challenger has already smelled the sugar at the oth
er end of the track and, waving her long antennae aloft, run almost half a meter, moving as fast as her six spiny, chitinous legs can carry her.

  Abel winks at me. Yotuel and Yamil look like shit; I’m all smiles, listening to Evita laugh uproariously by my side, literally jumping up and down in excitement. Bravo, Atevi! I didn’t go wrong when I picked you from all the others in your brood. You’re a natural competitor.

  Right. Though I clipped her wings like we always do before we start training racers, she even raises her milky-white elytra as if to release her flying apparatus. Oh, if only she could fly—then there’d be no doubt she’d get there first, long before Centella.

  Maybe someday they’ll figure out how to do flying races, and then they won’t have to continue mutilating the finest mutant cockroaches in the neighborhood.

  Years later, as a respected condomnaut in Nu Barsa, when I have the time and the means to learn about these and many other things, when I round out my feeble education by reading everything that falls into my hands, I’ll find out that her scientific name is Periplaneta americana mutantis. And that her species has lived among humans since time immemorial, being almost universally considered the most disgusting insect and one of the most repugnant creatures in the world, to the point that some psychologists believe our rejection of her kind is fixed in our genes at birth.

  But they’re wrong. Or perhaps it’s that human beings can adapt to practically anything. Back then—right now, in my dream—Yotuel is the exception to the rule; for me, and for almost all the Valdés orphans, they’re not pests, they’re just cockroaches, giant bugs, racers. We don’t see them as repulsive monsters. Instead, we respect them as natural survivors that appeared along with lots of other mutant creatures after background radiation spiked with the Five Minute War.

  Nor do they stink. If you raise them in a clean environment from the time they’re tiny, they just have a faint spicy smell. Like my Atevi.

  At just under five inches long, my racer would be a perfect specimen of her highly resistant species, if not for the fact that something twisted her genes and she lost her pigmentation. If you hold her up against the light, you can see through her chitin and watch her rapid heartbeat, the gastric juices moving in her intestine when she eats, her muscles flexing and extending.

  A lovely show. Or a disgusting display, depending on whether it’s Abel or me or finicky Yotuel observing her.

  Of course, Atevi is far from the largest cockroach we’ve ever found in Rubble City. I myself have seen some that measure eight inches. Bugs that fight with dogs over bones in the street. Diosdado swears that once when he was young, he saw one half a meter long, meowing like a cat. But we all think that’s just a tall tale, like the ones about the titanic meter-long insects that were supposedly exterminated in Rot Town.

  Later on I’ll find out we were right to be skeptical. Like all insects, cockroaches lack lungs. They breathe through their trachea, an efficient system—for small animals. An insect as big as Diosdado’s would simply asphyxiate. Not to mention that exoskeletons, a lightweight and efficient support system for tiny creatures, also become inefficient and cumbersome when bugs grow beyond a certain size, until at last they cannot even support their own weight.

  As kids in Rubble City, maybe we intuitively guessed something of the sort. We all knew that when racers are six inches or longer, they get so heavy they can barely fly or run.

  The best racers are long-legged ones, like Centella, who’s a little under five inches, but with her long shanks she looks like my Atevi’s little sister on stilts.

  Oh, damn those long legs. By meter two of the steel race track, she’s making up for lost ground. The bitch is a natural runner. By meter four, she’s left Atevi behind. Afro Boy gets his sarcastic, arrogant smile back. God, I hate him. Evita falls silent and stops jumping up and down, watching me in dismay, as if she can’t believe what’s happening.

  But for an insect, even one five inches long, eight meters of race track with three hills to climb up and down is almost like a marathon for a human. Speed isn’t the only decisive factor; in the end, it also takes endurance.

  I’ve trained my Atevi by making her run up to fifteen meters without a rest, using gentle electric shocks. Though later, on the coldest nights, I also let her snuggle up to me for warmth when she sleeps, while I enjoy the smell of her. Velvet glove on an iron fist.

  Apparently, whether or not he shares his steroids with her, Yamil hasn’t bothered to do anything of the kind with his racer. In the final meter, Centella flags again, her rhythm slows, and my translucent beauty closes the gap once more.

  The roar of the crowd grows deafening. Pandemonium: everybody around me is jumping and screaming. Evita squeezes my hand, hard. All I can look at is my supercockroach, and less than half a meter from the finish line she catches up to the champion… passes her… No! Centella puts on a last spurt, her spindly legs squeal along the galvanized steel. Now it’s antenna and antenna.

  But Yamil’s long-legged racer raises her elytra, lets out a pair of sloppily clipped wings (it seems that caring for animals, despite all the money he gets from them, isn’t Afro Boy’s strong suit), and though she can’t quite manage flight, the extra push from her clumsy flapping gets her to the sugar prize first. Just by a couple of millimeters, but she has definitely won the race.

  Yamil Check-My-Biceps falls to his knees, raises his brawny arms to the sky and howls in victory. His quiet brother runs over to hug him, enjoying his share of triumph (though all the while keeping a prudent distance from the repugnant Centella). Abel and I run to Diosdado to protest, gesticulating wildly. “It has wings, it has wings, invalidate the race, that’s cheating!”

  “I’m not invalidating a goddamn thing,” the old babalawo pronounces stonily in his incontrovertible bass voice. “It didn’t fly, so it’s not disqualified. Josué, you have to pay up.”

  Abel sighs, looks at me, and nods. There’s no way out. I sigh.

  Afro Boy gives me that sarcastic look, then calls out, delighting in his authority, “Karlita, Tub, slut, sweet thing, come over here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  The obese mutant approaches with her potbellied waddle, sweaty and lubricious, licking her lips and reaching out to me with her eager hands, which look like bunches of overstuffed sausages.

  “Shit, I’d ten times rather fuck Damián’s old dog Rita than that fat lardbucket,” Abel admits in his thin voice, whispering into my ear, perhaps to encourage me.

  And this is where the real nightmare begins.

  In real life, nobody but me could hear Abel’s comment, so I had to put on a brave face, be a good loser, and act like a man: at the age of eight, try to get up a regular erection while faced with Karlita’s kilos upon kilos of naked, quivering flesh and her pungent, acrid odor. And do it in front of everybody, pumping her to the sound of their cheers and jeers, thinking about Yamy and Evita for several interminably long minutes, until Check-My-Biceps declared himself satisfied with the pathetic spectacle.

  Screw cockroaches, this is what repugnant really means. Of course I don’t have an orgasm.

  Worse: from that day on, I’ve never been able to get excited in the presence of a completely human woman.

  Yes, completely human, because whatever other people might say, that’s what Karlita was, all two hundred kilos of her. Fat girls have feelings, too, damn it. Not her fault she was born that way.

  I mean, I’m not a total idiot. I don’t blame her. I blame that fucking Yamil. But knowing that Check-My-Biceps and his sick brain engineered it all doesn’t help me get over my complexes.

  In fact, as sorry as it sounds, if I found myself stranded on a classic desert island alone with the most beautiful woman in the universe and that asshole Yamil—much as I hate him, I’d rather go with him than with the goddess.

  Worse, I’d rather screw the inevitable lonesome palm tree that all those desert isles have than a woman. And if my attack on her self-esteem drove her to suicide—tough luck.
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br />   Pity I’ve never made Contact with a vegetable species, isn’t it? So far.

  Strictly speaking, then, I should be grateful to that bastard Yamil for giving me a profession along with a dose of trauma. Though he restricted my choice of partners to males and, platonic relationships such as my obsession over the Gaudí’s hypernavigator Gisela aside, to fairly non-human phenotypes, such as the second-generation condomnaut Nerys, with her mermaid fins and gills.

  Anyhow, if Nerys asks me to go all the way with her someday, I’m afraid I’ll vomit.

  But in my recurrent nightly dream, things turn out different: green-eyed Afro Boy hears my friend’s comment and offers me an unexpected alternative.

  “That’s okay, Zero, I’ll let you have a try at it. Don’t like the fatty? Well, there’s Legs Damián’s skinny dog Rita—take her! Right here, in front of everybody!”

  So I suddenly find my raggedy shorts, the only clothing I ever wear, down around my ankles, while I’m holding on to a muscular back, the short rough hairs bristling with pleasure, and humping my hips against the Doberman’s moist hindquarters.

  The worst thing every night is that, with the typical illogic of nightmares, each time I move my hips the dog seems to grow and transform around my childish genitals, gradually turning into a strange hybrid of mutant dog and fat human female, of Rita and Karlita, who turns her head to look at me with her three sardonic eyes; her mouth half-open, she lets her tongue loll luxuriantly between her sharp canines and whispers to me, “Like that, Josué, give it to me hard, harder… ”

  And I can’t wake up until, after a long struggle against the horrid nightmare, I emerge from the depths of sleep with a shriek, drenched in sweat.

  What I hate is that every night I can stand it for a little bit longer.

  Just now, for example, the horrifying dog-woman chimera is telling me, for the first time since I’ve had this recurring nightmare, “Cojons, Josué, get up and open for me, bastard! I didn’t exactly come here to talk to you about colorful fish.”