Syzygy
We are all aware of it now: Chela has a problem.
Chela’s name is not really Chela, but that is how we know her. We each have our own private nickname for her, which we say only in our head, in the solitary dark of our apartment, or with other girls who are not Chela and whose bodies we pay for, never inside La Luna, and never with each other. To do so would be a breach of etiquette, of the blurry demarcations of privacy we have charted among ourselves.
Chela says she cannot remember her Christian name, and we do not dispute this claim. Instead, we gently suggest that it might be better if she referred to her Christian name as her first name, or given name. We are atheists for the most part, although some of us hold eclectic and contradictory spiritual beliefs. She is Catholic, like the majority of people from this country. None of us are from here, and none of us are Catholic, at least not anymore.
We often offer Chela gentle suggestions like this, bits of advice and wisdom wrought from our lifetime of experience around the globe. While we know she handles her liquor well, whenever we buy her a drink, we still like to throw in a cautionary word or two, as if our example were not a tale in itself. Sometimes we feel like a flock of crows cawing into the wind.
Chela tends the bar here at La Luna. The door is kept shut and locked at all times, and when we knock, she opens, greeting us with a huge smile and a kiss on the cheek, as if she’d been waiting all night just for us. In anticipation of her welcome, we bathe and daub ourselves with cologne before we seek entry; we use breath spray or chew a handful of mints just before we knock, even though none of us care how we smell once we are inside, after innumerable drinks and endless cigarettes. Those of us with eclectic and contradictory spiritual beliefs might call this ritual holy, the kiss of Chela a sacred rite of admittance.
Chela has a beautiful laugh, and she laughs often. We don’t know if it’s faked or not, or if sometimes it’s faked and sometimes it’s real. We discuss this frequently and can never reach a consensus.
Aside from her laughter, we can reach a consensus on many things about Chela. We all agree that she is a very strong young woman, that she demonstrates grace under pressure, a quality we admire more than any other. We respect her, we say, and it is not easy for us to admit that we respect someone. To say we respect someone is the highest compliment we are capable of giving.
Some nights, when we are sniffing cocaine in the bathroom, we hear her crying in one of the other stalls. We want to console her, to tell her that we know, that we understand, but we say nothing. We wipe our nose of white traces, she wipes her eyes of wet tears, and once we leave the bathroom, we pretend.
While we think of La Luna as our bar, it is not ours in any legal or tangible way. The real owner is a native of the Andean city we live in, a big woman named María. She works alongside Chela on busy nights, and on slow nights she sits and drinks with us. She has an enormous bosom, and we fantasize about burying our face in it and sobbing while she rocks us back and forth, stroking our hair and murmuring sweet monosyllables into our ears. Despite María being younger than our median age, to us she represents all things maternal. She is the matriarch of La Luna, and we are her children.
We are an incestuous family. Several of us have slept with María; she is attractive for a woman of her years and size, and she can pick and choose as she likes, but mostly we just want to sob platonically into the soothing enormity of her bosom. There are those among us who sleep with one another as well, though we would never use such phrasing as sleep with to talk about these encounters, if we talked about them at all. Even when we are alone in our room with another man, our language remains acrobatically euphemistic, our words reaching out toward each other’s as they twist past without touching through the dark.
If María is our maternal figure, Chela might be said to represent the daughter of the family, but we all know it is much more complicated than that.
We struggle to describe the way we feel about Chela. We would never say the word love aloud; to do so would cross one of those lines we have drawn. On Monday nights, which she has off, we sometimes try to find the words to describe our feelings for her. One of us brings up great works of literature and other art as an analogy for how we feel about Chela, but the rest of us think this is a completely inaccurate comparison, even those of us who have strong feelings for great works of literature and other art.
Collectively, we know a great deal about literature and art. We also know about history, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics; we’re even versed in mathematics and several of the harder sciences. Some of us might have truly loved these things, but what once were passions have become symbols of symbols, hollowed out representations of what used to be dear to us. We hold them to our heart like lovers made of ash; our embrace anticipates the wind.
We agree that Chela represents the opposite of the past, which to us is not the future, but not the present either. It could be that she represents a future born of a different past, a past that never was. One of us proposes that she represents the paradox of simultaneous possibility and impossibility, but our reception of this notion is lukewarm at best, possibly because we are very drunk at the time of its proposal, around four in the morning, when some of us have already reached our limit of lucidity and will soon surpass it, as we inevitably do. In this sense we are limitless.
At the very least, we are certain that Chela does not represent ash, although we are quite fond of ash as well. There is always an ashtray set in front of each of us at the bar. If we shared, the ashtray would overflow every five minutes. Many of our favorite dreams are made up of ashes. Even when we are awake, we fantasize about the world blistering bright like the tip of a cigarette, then going grey, blowing away. We daydream of immense solar flares arcing toward us through the dark of space.
Our love of ash is not at all the same as our love for Chela. Most especially it is not the same for one of us, who does not love ash at all. In his native country, about ten years ago, his house burned down while he was out drinking with friends. He doesn’t remember pushing past the first responders, but by the time they mustered enough men to wrest him from the ruins, his hair was singed away, his clothes smoldering, his hands blistered raw from clawing through the coals. His wife survived, was on a ventilator, in an induced coma. Their daughter didn’t. Smoke: asphyxia. He did not visit the hospital; he visited only the morgue. His clearest memory from that night, he always tells us, always with the same freshly astonished look on his face, is the deafening buzz of the fluorescents overhead, the way the whole room vibrated at their precise frequency as he identified the body.
He divorced his wife, or she divorced him; he cannot keep his story straight when he is drunk, and he only tells this story when he is very drunk. He has this in common with the rest of us when we tell our most terrible stories. We have many, and his is not the worst of them.
It might be expected that with our background we would be more prepared to cope with Chela’s problem, but coping with other people’s problems does not come naturally to us. We have our hands full with our own, and it is usually Chela who helps us cope with them. Sometimes, if the confidence we’re sharing is particularly grim, she reaches out to touch our hands, presses them warmly between her own. She has a darker complexion than all of ours, something we often forget until we see her smooth brown skin contrasted with our own pale, hairy, problem-filled fists. We prefer this touch to any words, in any language.
Though she gives us her conversation and the occasional dance, Chela never goes home with any of us. We know that, on occasion, she goes with handsome young backpackers, tourists, interlopers. We don’t like this, but we have come to terms with it, because those men are not like us. It would be very different if she went home with one of us. The equilibrium of La Luna would be skewed, its axis unsteadied, and it would spin ever more erratically until it flew off into the nether regions of space. For this reason, we have always been glad she never goes home with us. Now that we know about her problem, we are glad for an additional, very different reason, one which we would never admit, for fear it would make us look cowardly.
We never use the words courage or bravery, but we do take some pride in putting ourselves in harm’s way. The city we live in is not a safe one, so we have ample opportunity to do so, especially in the hours we keep. We have been robbed at knifepoint, at gunpoint, and at the point of other, more innovative weapons, such as meat hooks and 2x4s embedded with huge nails. We have been strangled with chains, had our cheekbones broken by brass knuckles, our head bashed by bricks and lead pipes. We have been kidnapped and held captive while our checking account was emptied over a period of weeks. We have endured this violence numerous times and in myriad variations, and we relish the retelling of each act. With every embellishment and embroidery of truth, it becomes a little easier to pretend that we are not really living in fear.
In addition to the fairly standard brutalities of this city, one of our number claims to have been raped here, but we don’t believe him. There are a few of us who have actually been raped, but it happened elsewhere, a long time ago, and we don’t talk about it.
Chela has been raped. She only mentioned the incident once when she was very drunk, laughingly and with a slight embarrassment, like we might admit to locking our keys in the car, if any of us still owned a car. She did not go into detail, but we have filled in the details ourselves, meticulously. When we talk about the things we would do to the rapist if we found him, we grow flushed with righteous rage and nauseate ourselves with the depths of our sadistic innovation. In this way, talk of vengeance is much like a shot of whiskey.
Chela’s rape is not her most pressing problem, though some of us speculate there is a correlation. In spite of her problem’s severity, the news of it has taken a surprisingly long time to circulate among us, inveterate gossips that we are. Passed along in the strictest of confidence, its recipient always sworn to secrecy, the news that spread with such whispered reticence is this: Chela is not only HIV-positive, but she has full-blown AIDS. One of those dreadlocked backpacker types she fancies decided to stick around, and he convinced her that they should get tested together. They did, and the young backpacker did not stick around for much longer after the results came back.
We sidestep the subject, we tiptoe around it, we dodge, we circle, we leap, but it remains inescapably present, a shameful reminder of our impotence in the face of it. To offset our feelings of impotence and shame, we make displays of inner strength, of resilience, of world-weary wisdom and grace under pressure. We often talk about death. We do not fear it, we tell each other. A few of us are quite certain we will die in this country. One of us had a stroke last month. It was a mild stroke, but he has lost all feeling in his left foot. He refuses to go to the doctor. None of us ever go to the doctor. We hate doctors. We welcome death. Viva la muerte! we proclaim.
Alone, we feel differently about death. We imagine what horrors could be proliferating in our own blood, what limitless ills might befall our body, all the intricate parts already in the process of failing. We know that at our age there is only so much we can get away with, and in the breathless, tachycardic afternoons that follow a long night at La Luna, shivering in our darkened, unheated apartment, our hands trembling as we reach for a bottle of beer or whiskey to wash down tablets of aspirin or codeine, we are afraid. When the pains come, in our chest, our kidneys, our stomach, or stabbing us in the liver with such intensity that we scream involuntarily; when our limbs tingle and our vision blurs and our head spins like a malevolent carousel; when we wake up with blood clotted in our nostrils, dried and flaking on our face, or warm and fresh and soaking our pillow; when we are overcome by a diabetic fit with such sudden intensity that we can’t make it to the chocolate bars we keep atop the minifridge; when our chronic shortness of breath precipitates a panic attack and we pace back and forth gasping and wheezing as we gulp at the empty air, convinced that it is not only thin but entirely devoid of oxygen, and that we are suffocating to death in the cold of our solitary apartment; when these things happen, we are very afraid.
But then we come to La Luna, and we pretend. We chain-smoke and drink whiskey and snort coke (one of us mainlines, but he has a real problem), and we are not afraid anymore. In La Luna, at least, we are free of fear.
Playing pretend in La Luna frees us of many things: inhibitions, anxieties, demons. Its smoky, womb-like interior can be the most liberating place in the world, preferable by far to the majestic mountains that surround the city and the breathtaking views that abound here. This type of beauty, with its vast open skies and distant snow-capped peaks, does not impress us, and it certainly does not make us feel free. It makes us feel anxious, claustrophobic, depressed, suicidal. Those panoptic vistas where lovers go to kiss have marvelously steep ledges that plunge a very long way down. We have ended many a night discussing the best leaping spots around the city. This too makes us feel free. We would be very surprised if any of us ended up making the leap, but it is invigorating to have so many options.
One of us is Chela’s fellow barkeep. We assume that he was the first to know about her problem, and we respect him all the more for his silence on the matter. He is at the pinnacle of our social pyramid, though we profess to have done away with hierarchies and we are sick of pyramids in general. If he is too drunk and exhausted to make it home, he gets to sleep in the same room upstairs that Chela sleeps in, but they do not sleep together. He would never touch Chela in that way, no more than any of us would. She does dance with him more frequently than the rest of us, but we do not begrudge him this. He has earned his position in life, because he cuts most of the filter off his cigarettes with the knife he uses to slice limes behind the bar, because he is even more vigilant than most of us about keeping the alcohol content level of his blood high and steady, because last month when he turned fifty—an age just a few years over our median—he dyed his shaggy, shoulder-length grey hair black and brought in a local rock group for his party. Because he is the one who had the stroke, the day after his birthday, whose left foot has no feeling and who now walks with a limp. We admire this newest war wound of his, or at least we say we do, and we are unsure if our admiration is real or pretend. While we respect his grace under pressure more than ever, at the end of the day, we would prefer the use of both our feet.
We often pretend. That sums up much of our life here in La Luna, we all conclude in one of the rare moments when pretenses are genuinely dropped. One of us is drunk and tactless enough to point out that this new consensus is in fact just another pretense, given that it ignores the most glaring game of make-believe we are engaged in.
In spite of our attempts to maneuver around it, we begin to crack, unable to maintain the charade, and Chela’s problem inevitably surfaces. We hear many versions of what the doctor told her, but after much debate, we narrow the possibilities down to these:
1) Señorita, you’re awfully pretty for the viral load you’ve got. This helpful comment courtesy of a leering male doctor even older than we are.
2) Señorita, with a CD4 count like yours, the common cold could kill you in the time it’ll take me to get home in this traffic. This from a doctor who lives in a high-class, low-altitude suburb of the city as he gazes out his office window at the congested street below.
3) Señorita, I could count your T cells on one hand. In this version, the doctor holds up his right hand and wiggles his plump fingers at her, flashing his gold wedding band as if to show that he’s not up for any attempts at seduction, that doing so would not change these test results.
In every variation of the story, the doctor delivering the news is invariably villainous. We are not so irrational as to hold him responsible—we know about messengers, how you shouldn’t shoot them—but we blame him nonetheless. We get angry, and it feels good; it feels like doing something. Angry, we are able to talk about Chela’s problem without being overwhelmed by impotence and shame. But like a coke buzz, our anger fades all too quickly, and soon even the most irate among us fall into dismal silence.
Despite our intimate acquaintance with calamity, we still do not feel prepared to face Chela’s, so instead we discuss calamity in the abstract. We are not pessimists, we murmur, our voice hoarse from angry outbursts. We are simply realists. We say this in spite of our rejection of reality. We are experts at holding incongruous beliefs. We do not believe in belief, we aver, even those of us who maintain eclectic and contradictory spiritual ones. We believe firmly in this absence. We hang its vacancy around our neck and count its dearth of beads in times of strife and turmoil. We cling to the void, to what isn’t. Only in our most sober moments, which for us are often those just before the blackout, do we recognize that we are clinging not to the void, but to the void’s edge, the sheer cliffs that surround it.
It is in one of these moments of clarity that we reach a decision on what to do about Chela’s problem. We decide to be proactive. Uncharacteristically, and hangover notwithstanding, we follow through on this decision. We put aside our hatred of doctors and look up specialists, scrutinize their credentials. We do our research, learn about CD4 cells and cytokines, the acronyms, the jargon, the latest on protease inhibitors and ARVs. We start a collection, a fund to pay for Chela’s treatment, and we put together far more money than we thought we would.
We keep our preparations clandestine as they progress; we want to wait until we have everything arranged before we let Chela in on our plans. More importantly, we don’t want her to know that all of us know about her problem, not until we are ready to present a solution, one which demonstrates our understanding, our empathy, our usefulness.
Although she must notice the change in our behavior—our whispered conversations and furtive glances in her direction, the scarcely muffled excitement of those planning a surprise party—she asks no questions and makes no comments, and her laughter is the same as always.
We settle on a team of doctors at a small private hospital, normally used only by the wealthiest locals and expatriates, in addition to regular consultations with an immunologist from North America who teaches at the city’s best medical university. With his help, we develop contingency plans in case she does not react well to her initial ARVs, if her ADRs are too severe. We calculate the cost of her treatment, and we have the next five years covered easily. We are all prepared to donate more, to do whatever is necessary to make sure Chela gets the best treatment available in this country. We feel genuinely good about ourselves, even when we are more or less sober. All that’s left to do is figure out how to tell her that we know about her problem, and voilà: the unveiling of our collective masterwork.
Then there comes a night when Chela is not at work, and a young man is behind the bar in her place. He is a foreigner whom none of us have ever seen before. He is handsome, young, and healthy-looking. He says his name is Jake. He asks what he can get for us with a smile. He sets about making our drinks in a painstaking fashion that is not how drinks should be made in La Luna.
We do not sit at the bar; we sit at the big table in the back, fidgeting, chain-smoking, awaiting an explanation. Our bartender shows up, his eyes redder than usual, his limp more pronounced. When we try to ask him, he just shakes his shaggy head and goes upstairs, where the rest of us are not allowed. Finally María arrives. She takes her position behind the bar and helps Jake the way she usually helps Chela, as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Jake comes to wait on our table, as if ours were a table like any other. By the time we have fortified ourselves to ask María where Chela is, Jake has made many trips between the bar and our table.
María explains in a slow, even tone, as if addressing a group of especially dim-witted schoolchildren, that Chela has been fired for stealing money from the register. It has been going on for a while; she was simply waiting to catch Chela red-handed, which last night she finally did.
We are furious with María. We raise our voice against her as we have never before considered doing. We demand answers. Doesn’t she know how sick Chela is? How could she fire a girl who’s practically dying? Has she no heart? No compassion? No soul?
María replies with an iciness we did not know she was capable of:
You’re like a bunch of kids, she says. You talk and you talk and you talk, and you believe all your own bullshit, because it’s all you know. Chela never had AIDS. You little babies. Pobrecitos. That was just a rumor. Everything you talk about is a rumor. Everything you think is a rumor.
One of us starts to choke on an ice cube, and we slap his back. María regards us with a look of utter contempt, then tells us that she would maintain the right to fire a thief like Chela even if the rumors were true, and she were on her deathbed.
Shocked and confused, we repair to our table to discuss what María has said. We picture Chela on her deathbed, fired. We do not believe María; we cannot. We have invested too much, and we are not the investing type.
We muster our collective conviction, and together we make a stand. We dismiss María’s talk of rumors. We know what we know, we tell her. We do not deal in rumors. We want Chela back immediately, now, tonight. We finish our drinks and storm out of La Luna, swearing not to return until Chela is reinstated.
To all of our surprise, we actually implement the boycott. Our bartender resigns as soon as he wakes up from a long nap. He is designated our ambassador, and when he makes a brief return to pick up his things from the room above the bar, he repeats the single condition upon which our return hinges, but María remains glacial, her bosom protruding threateningly, like an immense iceberg.
We try to contact Chela. Our ex-bartender has her number, but all we get when we call is an automaton telling us that her number is no longer in service. This could signify the ten seconds it takes to switch a SIM card, or something far worse. We all assume the worst. The only thing we know for sure is that she has family somewhere in the vast slums sprawling across the altiplano above this city. There are more than a million people there, and aside from our coke dealer’s contacts, we don’t know any of them. We tell ourselves it is imperative that we not give up, and in the meantime, we drink.
We float between bars at night, like men adrift in space, directionless and divested of gravity. We bump into each other on occasion, then bounce apart. Sometimes, through acts of willpower summoned by the urgency of Chela’s predicament, we arrange meetings at other bars. Organized gatherings are difficult for us, but still we gather. We reaffirm the importance of our efforts, but mostly we just drink, until we get sick of our chosen bar and leave to wander around and look for another one. We used to call this barhopping, something we did a lot of before we found La Luna, but a long time has passed since then, and we feel dazed and disorientated, exposed and anomalous. We feel like a team of astronauts struck by disaster whose communications systems have failed. We speak as loudly as possible through the hermetically sealed helmet of our spacesuit, but it does no good. We wave our bulky, useless arms; we try sign language, but our thickly gloved fingers cannot form signs of any significance. Our oxygen tanks are running low and the bitter cold bites through even the insulated layers of our suits. It is winter in our mountain city; there is a literal element to this frigidity as well.
Gradually, we begin to return to La Luna. The first few to go back are María’s lovers, and we who remain in orbit mock them mercilessly, calling them mama’s boys desperate for the embrace of La Lunática. Still, our resolve is swiftly fading, and soon we begin to follow their example. Some of us hold out longer than others, but one by one we trickle back, our heads hung low in shame. We are better adapted to shame than the purgatorial cold beyond the doors of La Luna, though, doors that Jake opens wide for us when we inevitably come knocking. Jake is so gracious it is sickening, and María welcomes us with a kiss on both of our cheeks, which is not customary in this country and which she has never done before.
Soon, most of us have made the return, and when the stragglers turn up, we greet them with great relief and excessive warmth. Even after our bartender sheepishly resumes his post, though, La Luna is not the same as before. Our inhibitions and anxieties follow us in through the door and they do not leave. Our conversations are stilted, awkward. We bicker, we take things personally. Two of us start a fight over the placement of an ashtray. Bottles are smashed, tables overturned, blood spilled. They are both thrown out and banned, but when they return together the next night, each leaning on the other’s battered body, María pardons them.
We make no mention of Chela’s problem; whether or not it was rumor or truth seems moot at this point. Instead, we drink more than usual so that we can say the things we think we should, making sure to refer to Chela only in the past tense. We talk about how little we actually knew her. The few things that we did know serve only to remind us of all that we did not. We never even knew her real name. She loses dimension, becomes a flat character, a minor part of our unlovely past, individual and collective.
Eventually all but one of us are back. It is María who finds out, María who tells us the news.
Our missing man is in the hospital, in critical condition. He was hit by a car driven by a man probably as drunk as he was, while walking home from a bar that was not La Luna. The doctors are not optimistic about his odds. They are stacked decidedly against him, the doctors say.
We are horrified, we are aghast, but we are not very surprised. We all agree that we should visit him, that we absolutely must visit him, but none of us do. We hate hospitals. We hate the human body in all its wretched frailty. He dies there, alone in the hospital. We don’t know what to do. We hate death; we heap curses upon it. We knew him well enough to know that he has no family who might want to collect his remains, and after plodding through the bureaucracy of death abroad, the embassy of his country confirms this. We use part of what had been our Chela fund to pay for his cremation. No one wants to scatter ashes from mountaintops or anything like that, not even those with eclectic and contradictory spiritual beliefs; we hate mountaintops. We pay a little extra to cover the disposal charges. The funeral home does not call it disposal, but that is the way we think of it. We re-evaluate our feelings about ash. It all turns out to be much cheaper than expected, and we get to keep most of the money that we’d put into the Chela fund. Our bartender was the fund’s accountant, and he returns our cash on a slow night, in the backroom, individually, solemnly. We hate solemnity, even though we are solemn men, but it feels appropriate in this case. More than anything, we hate ourselves.
We try to make a fresh start at La Luna. Of all the many things we are not good at, making fresh starts ranks among the worst, but María helps us. She is pure maternal warmth; it is hard for us to imagine an icy syllable emerging from her smiling lips. Drinking also helps. A bump of cocaine helps too. A line works wonders.
María and the chemicals help, and so do we. We help more than we believe we do. We help simply by being fellow men in the same smoky womb of a bar, by saying words and listening to the words we say, because even if it doesn’t feel like redemption, it at least alludes to the possibility that there is such a thing, and that we may not yet be beyond it.
Slowly, we fall back into our familiar routine, minus the fallen, whose absence we notice less every night. We tolerate Jake, we allow him to serve us. Some of us tip him on rare occasions, and a few might even be starting to like him, but he still has a very long way to go before we would ever consider respecting him.
We gossip, we debate, we discuss the things we once cared about, and the things we pretend to still. We do everything we used to, but we do it with greater delicacy. We are acutely aware of how fragile the world is; even when we’re drunk now we can see the fissures already forming. We shut the doors of taxi cabs with care. We set down our glasses lightly on the bar. We regard the thousands of redbrick buildings clinging precariously to the cliffsides surrounding the city with resignation. Though this is not an area affected by earthquakes, we all await the big one, when the cliffs will collapse and the altiplano will crash over the valley with a roar, swallowing the city and everyone in it. We don’t talk about this, but we share the same crystalline image, and it is spider-webbed with hairline cracks.
Most of all, we humor one another. We even discuss the word itself: humor, or humour. Those of us inclined toward American or British English humor each other by agreeing that neither spelling is in any way superior or preferable to the other. The historically-bent remind us of the ancient Greeks, who believed dysfunctional humors to be the cause of all our bodily and mental ills. The anthropologically-bent compare and contrast the sense of humor in Occidental and Oriental cultures, while the philosophically- and artistically-bent deliver a semi-coherent dissertation on a metaphorical tribe of nomadic cannibal philosophers who represent the humor inherent in the human condition, perhaps because they have ingested a hallucinogenic drink made from dried bark that the rest of us have not.
We accommodate those of every bent among us. We listen studiously to the linguistically-bent discourse on the etymology of the word bend. We laugh when the comically-bent make jokes about getting bent. We nod our appreciation when the spiritually-bent recite Zen koans. We want to bend like willow trees in Zen koans, not like drunks at the bar. We want to bend, not to be bent. But we are not willow trees.
We are all bent by the past; the past is the relentless pressure under which we live. It pursues us, persecutes, strangles and constricts us. It pins us down and helps us up only to keep us in its chokehold. We could not stand without its support, yet it does not allow us to stand up straight. We are constantly at the mercy of its grotesque gravitational pull. Even when we are not aware of it, it is there, dragging at our every thought, motion, and gesture. The past is by far the most present force in our life.
And still we cling to it with the same ferocity as it holds onto us, for fear of what would happen if we were to let go. We hang on tight while the lunar months shift and the solar years swing us toward a future that is, for us, devoid of futurity.
We don’t talk about Chela anymore. She has been consigned to a past that never was, a present that is not, and a future that never will be. We finally reached a unanimous accord on the controversial matter of her beautiful laughter: it was faked all along.