Free Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán Page A

giving me problems. I'll have the results soon."
    "Does Dad know?" Flavia's tone is unworried. She should pretend to be a little more interested, knowing what a hypochondriac her mom is.
    "He doesn't have a clue what's going on around here. I don't think he cares."
    "That's not true."
    "Right. You're his darling daughter. It started to bleed after an incident in class today. It happens when I'm stressed. Frustrated. Which is most of the time lately."
    "You're frustrated?"
    "Don't ever teach."
    She lights a cigarette and gives Flavia permission to leave the table. Flavia stands up. Mom smokes a lot, a pack a day—it might be that. She'd better not mention it ... or she'll get that into her head. Black tobacco. The pungent odor adheres to clothes, the curtains, the furniture. It took possession of the house a long time ago, will never leave. It's in the pictures in the living room, in the family photos on the walls, on the lamps in the rooms that for months have been at half light to save energy: you have no idea what's going to happen with the electricity bill, whether it will continue to rise exorbitantly or whether the government will freeze rates.
    Clancy has woken up and follows her to her room, his nails clicking loudly on the parquet floor; they need to be cut. Without turning the light on, Flavia walks barefoot past her desk with its two humming computers, the walls covered in posters of Japanese movies, pink sheets on the bed, and shelves overflowing with her collection of board games (Life, Clue, Risk, Monopoly—intolerable memories of a childhood and early adolescence lived far away from any type of monitor; it seems impossible to her, but there was such a time).
    A hacker would laugh at her tidy room, at the childish, feminine touches. At one time she considered herself a hacker, when she was fourteen. She had just discovered the power of computers and enjoyed having fun at the expense of her few friends who had them. She would access their Compaqs and Macs and make the mouse move strangely or turn the screen on and off—harmless things like that. Then the next day in class her friends would tell her that it was as if their computers had been possessed by some strange force, and Flavia would laugh to herself at their innocence and jokingly offer to perform black magic to break the spell.
    She helps Clancy up onto the bed. She'd better not let Mom see. She complains about the smell he leaves on the blankets.
    In the darkness, the menacing shapes of trees and neighboring houses are silhouetted clearly against the window. She is a shadow looking out at other shadows. All the houses are the same, symmetrical, lined up facing one another; all the walls are painted the same cream color, the shingles an intense red, the balcony with its gothic metal railing, the fake chimney. The neatly cut grass along the sidewalk, the carnations, the hibiscus, the rubber trees. It makes her uneasy.
    She looks out at the windows illuminated in other houses, portals to other worlds, so similar to and different from her own. Someone is watching a soccer game on TV, logging on to Playground, printing porn photos from sexo.com , visiting Subcommander Marcos's Web site, reading in bed, hacking a virtual casino, calling her boyfriend on her cell phone, writing a poem on a laptop, burning a CD, looking sadly at a postcard from New York where the Twin Towers can be seen in the distance, listening to a concert on rollingstone.com.
    Someone, with no lights on in the room, is trying to forget the world outside and create a quiet space for introspection.
    But the world keeps intruding. Flavia pictures herself getting off the bus and that guy approaching her. Rafael's thick eyebrows are hard to forget, and his cell phone is yellow, even though the image in her mind is blurry and in black and white. The way he spoke was curious, as if he wanted to say something without actually voicing it.
    She thinks he must be connected to the Resistance