T (part two)(Monica Euen) 15

Absolute black. There were no sounds; nothing to be seen. After a few seconds, a strong breathing started to be heard, very loud in contrast with the absence of any other noise. Then, from below, came a slight glare. Ana looked down and saw her feet on the edge of a step. She was on a faintly lit, rather steep, staircase, whose ends were undistinguishable. Everything else was total and utter darkness. She began to feel dizzy and tried to lean her back on a wall, but there wasn’t one. The only solid things were the stairs.
She became more and more sick and scared. The void surrounding her was claustrophobic. She passed her hand over her forehead and the sound of the friction against her skin bothered her. The only noises were the ones she unwittingly made and, in such emptiness, even they were unpleasant.
Ana felt like crying.
“Is…,” her voice was so loud and reverberating. The echo was unbearable and she didn’t finish her question.
-Darío!

16

A beautiful sunset in the country. A vast, bucolic prairie. Four o five trucks of alfalfa and, next to them, Darío and Ana. Romantic background music. Ana, with her back to Darío, seemed to be filming something with her camera, even though, besides the landscape, there was nothing else to shoot. He got closer and took off her cap. She turned around, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Darío, eyes closed, kissing Ana, suddenly heard her voice.
-Darío!
He opened his eyes. He was in Ana’s apartment’s bathroom, sitting on the floor, between the washstand and the bathtub. His hands were tied up and his mouth was covered with surgical tape. A tight rope went from his right foot, passing behind the washstand, to Ana´s left foot. She was unconscious opposite him, squashed against the toilet; her head resting on the lid.
-Ana, Ana, listen to me. I’m here, at your side. Look at me.

17

Standing on the staircase, in the darkness, Ana was sobbing in silence.
- I can’t see you.
- On your left, Ana. Forget about everything else and think of me. Of course you can see me –I’m right here, beside you.
She closed her eyes for two seconds and opened them again. Still, she could see only darkness. She desperately shed some more tears. Then, she clenched her jaw and closed her eyes tight. She opened them again: Nothing.
-Ana, your father asked me to take care of you. Do you think I will abandon you now?
Ana closed her eyes one more time, a little calmer. She opened them and saw Darío next to her in the bathroom.

18

Ana’s mouth was covered with surgical tape too. She tried to sit up. She had a pain in her neck and ear after the awkward position she’d been in.
- Are you all right?
- I have a crick in my neck, but I’m fine.
- We have to get out of here.
- What was all that? Where’s my sister?
- Probably not very far away, with Iván. He’s programmed a session for us.
- What does that mean?
- Iván is a Veek. How can I have not realized before? He must have suspected your family. He’s led our unconsciousness to the dreams we were going to have tonight. It’s complicated. The thing is we may have only been sleeping for half an hour.
- So it’s complicated, you say? I’m beginning to be a little tired of this. Don’t you have some kind of handbook I can cram to understand this mess once and for all?
By the way, what was your dream about?
- I… don’t really remember that well. Hey, we’ve got to get out of here now. Any suggestion?
- How far does our telepathy reach?
Darío looked at her without understanding.
-Distance. How far can we go?
- You can contact another telepathist that’s thousands of miles away. With someone simple, about four hundred yards.
- We’ll make my neighbours rescue us.
- Good idea. You’ll put cries for help in their heads so they’ll think they really hear them.
- What about you?
- I don’t know them. You can’t get into somebody’s mind unless you think of them and visualize them.
- I only know her. The man, her husband, I’ve never seen him.

19

Ana’s neighbours were a married couple in their sixties. At the moment, the man was lying on his stomach on the sofa, with his face buried in a cushion and his pants down. His wife, sitting next to him on the sofa, was about to insert a suppository into him.
-Help! Get me out of here, Esther! Help, please!
The lady pushed the suppository a bit abruptly and her husband couldn’t help but howl in pain.
“Did you hear that?” she asked, ignoring his groan. “It’s the girl next door. She needs help.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” said the angry, aching man.
-Help! I got locked in the bathroom!
The good neighbour began to hurriedly dress her husband.
“Get up, Ignacio. We must go and help her.”
“Help who? What are you talking about?”
“C’mon. Hurry up!” she insisted, already going for the door.
Her husband stood up as well as he could. The suppository was not fully inside and he walked awkwardly, very uncomfortable.
They went out into the landing and Esther tried to open the door to Ana’s apartment, but it was locked.
The woman heard the girl’s voice in her head.
-The super has a key. Call him.
“Now I remember,” Esther told her husband, “that the superintendent’s got a copy of the key. I’ll go and find him.”
Ignacio stayed there, puzzled, agonizing in pain, the fly on his pants down. Moments later, he saw his wife coming up the stairs with the super, who was holding a key in his hand.

20

They opened the bathroom door and saw Ana and Darío tied up, with the surgical tape on their mouths.
-Thank you very, very much.
Esther, her husband and the super got rigid and pale. They’d clearly heard her thank them, when they hadn’t ripped the tape of her mouth yet.
Ignacio tried to rest his shock on a chair in the corridor, but, when he sat, he felt an acute pain.
“Ahh!”

21

Ana and Darío came running into Laura and Ivan’s house, whose door they found open, and went directly into the bedroom, where they saw her sleeping.
“Where’s Iván?” Ana asked Darío.
“We won’t be seeing him again,” he answered. “He found out what he wanted. His job is finished.”
“What about Laura? Why doesn’t she wake up? Is she having her appointed dream, like us?”
Darío checked Laura’s pulse on her neck.
“No. She’s resting. There aren’t any images on her mind. Iván must have had feelings for her after all this time and didn’t want to hurt her. She’ll wake up in a couple of hours.”
“And what are we going to do?”
“We’ll go to Marta’s place,” Darío suggested. “We’ll spend the night there and tomorrow we’ll go to Castellana, like we planned.”
Ana pursed her lips.
“Marta, your second cousin? The one who idolizes you?”
“Well, not everyone is immune to my charms, so it seems.”
“Yeah, OK. Will it be safe for us there?”
“Absolutely,” he answered, taking Laura in his arms. “Don’t worry.”

22

Marta’s house was small. In the living-room, the hostess helped Ana lay Laura, still asleep, on the sofa with a pillow and two thin blankets.
“So now what?” sighed Ana. “Shall we all go to bed?”
“No,” said Darío. “It’s turned out to be a rather intense night and I don’t think you’d be able to sleep. We’ll make the most of our time if I give you as much information as possible.” Then he took her by the elbows and added: “Close your eyes.”
She looked at him, unconvinced. Finally, she closed them.

23

Ana opened her eyes. Darío was still holding her by the elbows, but they were not in Marta’s house anymore. The place they were in now had no walls, or floor or ceiling, and everything around them was of a light peach color. There were lots of people, chatting casually as in a cafeteria.
“What just happened?” she asked.
“We’re at the Lobby.”
“Oh, well… Say no more.”
“It’s a safe space where we get together. Only your mind is here. Physically, you’re still with your sister at Marta’s.”
Ana looked around her. No one seemed bothered at all by her arrival.
“Come, I want you to meet my mentor.”
She held her hand and took her in front of a dark, not very tall, forty-five-year-old man.
“Ana, this is Joaquín Almoneda.”
“Nice to meet you,” said the girl, shaking hands.
“The pleasure is all mine, Ana. Darío has told me about you. Welcome.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Darío’s face gain colour.
“I met your parents a long time ago,” Joaquín told her. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ana thanked him and Darío broke in.
“If you’ll excuse us… I’m taking her to the Gym.”
“To the Gym?” Ana asked, surprised, while they turned away from Joaquín.
“Come.”
They walked a few steps and bumped into a young man and a girl who were in a sort of wrestling fight.
Ana watched them for some moments and then turned to look at Darío, expecting an explanation.
“That is how you erase a Veek. Maybe, tomorrow, you’ll eventually find yourself in the need to.”
“Are you kidding me!!! Mental powers, telepathy… And now I’m gonna have to beat a guy’s ass?”
“It’s not a physical fight,” answered Darío. “You’ll erase your opponent’s telepathy with your mind, but you need a sort of graphic image to orientate yourself. It’ll seem like you’re fighting with your hands and legs, but you’ll be actually doing it with your neurons.”
“Haven’t I seen this in some movie…?”
“We’re looking for a familiar image, easy to relate to the confrontation in which two telepathists find themselves when they’re trying to cancel each other out. Unfortunately, a physical fight is the easiest simile to understand and, therefore, the most useful.”
“And who wins?”
“To erase a Veek,” continued Darío, “you must touch their forehead with your index finger. If you can do that, you’ll have fully reached his mind and you’ll erase his telepathy. It’s really that simple.”
“Yeah, very simple,” said Ana in the most helpful humorous tone.
“Those people you see now are training. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough time for you to practice. Dreams can take just seconds or minutes, but these connections in common take a great deal of time. We feel like we’ve spent a quarter of an hour here, but in the real time, it’s been six and a half hours. So, now, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. The meeting is scheduled at nine. We have to get going.”

24

Early in the morning, in the street, in front of the main entrance to the Castellana-Valenç building, Ana and Darío were in his car.
“Do you really have to go?” Ana felt her impromptu mission was too big to be faced alone.
“That’s why I needed you in the first place. This morning there is another important matter to be solved elsewhere.”
“I don’t even know what I must do exactly.”
“Go into the boardroom and watch that nothing happens to any of the members. And if you identify any Veeks, all the better. And if you manage to erase any of them… Wow, that would be awesome. But you should only do that if you have no other choice. It would be much better if you let us take care of that later. And, the most important thing: don’t let them recognize you.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? You haven’t taught me yet,” she protested.
“You’re a chameleon!” exclaimed Darío, adopting a rather paternalist tone. “It’s in your blood! Just don’t let your mind wander about. Don’t get distracted and you won’t get caught.”
“Iván caught us.”
“Iván must be a half-chameleon or he wouldn’t have been able to hide from me for so long.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s what Laura and Iván’s kids would have been if they’d had any.” He paused. “OK, off you go now. Good luck!”
Ana got out of the car, unwillingly, shut the door and began to head for the building, when she suddenly turned back and stuck her head through the car window.
“Wait, wait, wait… How will I get into the meeting? I’m not a board member. Are they just going to let me in?”
“Do you remember what you did to your neighbour?” said Darío. “You put something in her head and made her believe it was a memory. Now do the same thing. See you!”
He quickly drove off, leaving Ana very annoyed, but after a few minutes of doubt, she went through the glass doors and into the spacious lobby of the building.

25

She went towards the reception desk. She had to wait a bit until the receptionist finished speaking on the phone. When she finally got her attention, she concentrated to transmit a message to her, without talking:
-She is Ms. Barceló, a Board Member. I must tell her where the meeting is taking place.
It worked.
“Boardroom, twenty-second floor, the corridor on the left, Ms. Barceló.”
Ana smiled and strode purposefully towards the elevators.

26

Inside the elevator were four other people. Ana surreptitiously took a tiny envelope out of her pocket and smelled the alfalfa. Two men did see her and gave her a disapproving look.

27

When she stepped out of the elevator, she headed left. There was no one else in the corridor. The boardroom door was ajar. She pushed it softly and went in.
In the room, there were around twenty people. Some of them glanced at her warily. She looked around.
-She’s Lourdes Barceló, a board member for three years. We were expecting her.
Then, the nearest people smiled at her and offered her a chair. Once they were all seated, the man who was at the other side of the table, Manuel Laredo -whom she, of course, couldn’t recognize as her brother-in-law’s partner- suddenly stared at her and asked directly:
“Who are you?”
Ana only blinked.

28

The scene had changed. She and Manuel were alone in an empty purple environment.
“Is this what you want?” he asked, grinning. “Let’s have some fun, then.”
They suddenly found themselves in a huge medieval castle, standing on a paved floor. Behind her, there was a staircase, which went up to an elevated platform. Manuel kicked her in the stomach, throwing her high in the air until she landed on top of it, standing up, on the verge of falling off the edge. Right beneath it, there was a huge round iron lamp, which was hanging from the ceiling, with many candles and sharp metal stakes pointing upwards. She lost her balance and fell onto the lamp. Just when her body was about to touch it, she screamed “No!!!” The lamp then turned into a woolen mattress held to the ceiling by four thick chains, like the one that had been holding the lamp a fraction of a second before.
When she landed on the mattress, it turned over enough to make her fall and tumble violently onto the ground.
She stood up painfully. The man remained on the same spot, many feet away from her. Ana looked at him, she concentrated on his face and suddenly appeared right opposite him. He stared at her and made a gesture as if to position his hand in order to hit her on the neck. She kept on looking at him, this time lying on the floor underneath him. An instant later, she was behind him. He turned around. Their faces were almost touching. She placed her index finger on his forehead and, suddenly, they were left in the dark.

29

Ana opened her eyes and saw that she was again in the boardroom. A woman was fanning her with a piece of paper and there were several other board members around her. She also saw Manuel, sitting at the other side of the table, just like he was before, being kindly slapped to make him regain consciousness.
He opened his eyes and looked angrily at Ana. He pushed the man’s hand away and it was then that the man who was trying to help him realized that he did not know him.
“Who are you?”
Manuel swiftly stood up and left the room furious.
Ana smiled, feeling proud of herself.

30

She wasn’t wearing her cap that day on the set. When the band finished their performance, Ana left the camera and took a small bottle of water out of her bag. While she was drinking, she heard someone stop beside her.
“Everything OK?” she asked.
Darío smiled and nodded.
“You’re one of us now.” He took the bottle from her hand and drank. Then, he gave it back to her and added: “Would you have dinner with me tonight… to celebrate?”
Ana gave him a playful look. She averted her eyes towards a big artificial daisy, which adorned the desk where the presenters usually sat. Quickly, without anyone else noticing, the flower flew across the set and made it to Ana’s hand. She offered it to her companion.
Darío, holding the daisy, raised an eyebrow.
“Unbelievable!”

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