The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

‘Do they?’ Amelia replied. She was not keeping track, did not care for champurrado and tamales.

‘Sure. We gonna go bounce around the city, or what?’

‘Depends if I have any dough.’

‘Shit, you don’t need no dough for a posada. That’s the whole point. We’ll crash one or two or three.’

Amelia smiled, but she felt no mirth. She thought of snot-nosed children breaking piñatas while she tried to drink a beer in peace.

Before they separated, Pili promised to pay Amelia back the money. This swapping of funds was erratic and pointless; they both simply kept deferring their financial woes, but Amelia nodded and tried to put up a pleasant façade because Pili had just had a rough day.

Once Amelia was alone, all the things she hadn’t wanted to think about returned to her like the tide. Thoughts of cash flow issues, the vague notion that she should visit the blood clinic, her musings on Mars.

She wanted to visit Elías without any warning, just crash on his couch.

She wanted to go to a bar and buy over-priced cocktails instead of sipping Pili’s counterfeit booze.

She wanted to look for an apartment for herself and never answer her sister’s voicemails.

She wanted so many things. She wanted the Mare Erythraeum laid before her feet.

Between one and the other – between Scylla and Charybdis like Sting had sung in an old, old song she’d heard at a club in Monterrey, a club she’d visited with Elías in the heady, early days when the world seemed overflowing with possibilities – between those options, she picked Elías.

She had not dialed him, but now she pressed the phone against her ear and waited.

The phone rang two times and then a female voice answered. ‘Hello?’

Amelia, sitting in the subway, her hand on a bit of graffiti depicting a rather anatomically incorrect penis painted on the window pane, managed a cough but no words.

‘Hello?’ said the woman again.

‘I was looking for Elías Bertoliat,’ she said.

‘He’s in the shower. Do you want to leave a message?’

‘It’s about his Friendrr account,’ Amelia lied. ‘We’ve closed it down, as he requested.’

She hung up and lifted her legs, gathering them against her chest. Across the aisle, a homeless kid, his hands blackened with soot, chewed gum. A woman selling biopets – lizards with three tails – hawked her wares in a high-pitched voice. Amelia let three stations go by before switching trains, back-tracking and getting off at the right spot.

*

Only narcissists and Heroes stood unwavering against the odds. Most rational people got a clue and found their bearings. Amelia found the blood clinic. She’d been putting it off, fabricating excuses, but truth was, she needed cash. Not the drip-drip cash of her Friendrr gigs, something more substantial.

The clinic was tucked around the corner from a subway station. The counter was a monstrous green, with a sturdy partition and posters all-round of smiling, happy people.

‘Who’s poking us today? It’s not Armando, is it?’ the man ahead of Amelia asked. He must have known all the technicians by name, who was good with a needle and who sucked.

The employee manning the reception desk asked for Amelia’s ID and eyed her carefully. She was told to sit in front of a screen and answer twenty-five questions, part of the health profile. Next time, she could just walk in, show a card, and forget the questions.

Afterward, a technician talked to Amelia for three short minutes, then handed her a number and directed her to sit and wait in an adjacent room.

Amelia sat down, sandwiched between a young woman playing a game on her cell phone and a man who rocked back and forth, muttering under his breath.

When they called her number, Amelia went into a room where they pricked her finger to do a few quick tests, measuring her iron levels. Then it was time to draw the blood. She lay on a recliner, staring at the ceiling. There was nothing to do, so she tried to nap, but it proved impossible. The whirring of a machine nearby wouldn’t allow her to close her eyes.

Space flights were merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself. Or so Carl Jung said. But lying on the recliner, thinking she could listen to the sloshing of her blood through her veins, Amelia could envision no escape. She could not picture Mars right that second and her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

On the way out, Amelia glanced at a young man waiting in the reception area, noticing the slight indentation on his arm, the tell-tale mark that showed he was a frequent donor. Pili had it too. They crossed glances and pretended they had not seen each other.

Walking back to her apartment, Amelia realized the courtyard kids were in full festive mode: they had built a bonfire. They were dragging a plastic Christmas tree into the flames. Several of them had wreaths of tinsel wrapped around their necks. One had Christmas ornaments tied to his long hair. They greeted her as they always did: with hoots and jeers. This time, rather than slipping away, Amelia slipped closer to them, closer to the flames, intent on watching the conflagration. It seemed something akin to a pagan ritual, but then, the kids wouldn’t have known anything about this. It was simple mayhem to them, their own version of a posada.

A young man looped an arm around Amelia’s shoulders and offered a swig of his bottle. Amelia pressed the bottle against her lips and drank. It tasted of putrid oranges and alcohol. After a couple of minutes, the boy slid away from her, called away, and Amelia stood there, holding the bottle in her left hand.

She stepped back, sitting by the entrance of her building, her eyes still on the fire as she sipped the booze. Sparks were shooting in the air and the tree was melting.

She knew she shouldn’t be drinking, especially whatever was in the bottle, but the night was cold.

At the clinic, they’d told her plasma was 90 percent water and