Read Online Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos - Free Book Online Page B

to make you kill yourself. And I would have done so if my sadness had been of a more romantic bent, if it hadn’t been that grey sadness that neither drove me over the edge nor allowed me simply to resign myself to life. It would have been so easy to cut myself an acacia branch, one with long, thick thorns; so comforting to have the balls to slit my veins and bleed to death in that maddening dust. Unfortunately, as well as guts I needed imagination – I would have needed to have read lots and lots of books for such a thing to occur to me, and I’d only ever read schoolbooks, which never glorified suicide as a way of solving the problem of existence. Religious education was rather selfishly biased in favour of preserving life.
    Before we could faint and grant the wishes of the vultures circling above us, we sat down in the shade of – what else? – an acacia tree.
    From our rucksacks we took oranges, bread, tins of tuna, juice. That day I learned that the invention of the tin-opener was a reactionary moment in the history of mankind’s progress, an essential response to the invention of tinned food. We used sharp stones, like anachronistic Neanderthals, and managed to fill the tins’ contents with dust. If this was the life that awaited us, biting the dust as we ate, it would be better to go back to the comfort of our paltry quesadillas. Running away had forced us to step down a rung in the class struggle and now we were skulking around in the marginal sector of people who eat dirt in handfuls.
    ‘There are three kinds of aliens.’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘I’m just letting you know so you can prepare yourself. I don’t know what kind we’re going to see.’
    It was the perfect conversation to accompany the consumption of tuna with dust.
    ‘They might be lizards, arthropods or humanoids. The lizards and the arthropods come from planets where evolution followed a different path from here on Earth. Imagine that instead of monkeys winning the war of the species, there it was crocodiles or spiders. The humanoids are like us, just shorter. Their heads are bigger, their eyes stick out more, they’ve got no hair and they’re all grey.’
    Other than their features, the fundamental difference between us and them lay in the digestive system, the way in which the aliens obtained nourishment, using all kinds of resources to generate energy, not just food. Would they eat soil? Aristotle explained it to me as if, in addition to knowing the contents of Epi’s magazines off by heart, he also understood the functioning of the human digestive system. It seemed that in the boredom championships my brother was in the lead, absolutely shitloads of points ahead of me.
    ‘Now pay attention; this is very important. If there are any problems, if we’re in danger, you have to press here. Don’t be scared, but remember, if we need help you have to press here.’
    He was showing me his friend’s little gadget for epileptic fits, which now turned out to have alternative uses in the case of encounters with hostile species. He handed it to me so I could get a good look at it. It was a little black plastic square with a red button, nothing more, but Aristotle wanted me to study it so as to be sure I’d know how to use it if the situation arose.
    ‘How can it save us if it’s only got a reach of twenty metres?’
    The whole school knew this; one day they’d tested just how far Epi could move from the headmaster’s office, which was where the receiver was kept.
    ‘Don’t be stupid. We’ve rigged it.’
    ‘What’s the headmaster meant to do? Guess where we are and figure out that the aliens are fucking with us?’
    ‘Epi knows everything. He’ll send help.’
    I looked at the little device, pretending I was studying its complicated mechanisms, but really I was thinking about my parents. Typical. I’d finally managed to run away from home and now I was having pangs of guilt. Those lousy priests really had done a fantastic job. But