Warm Cartridge and Cold Oregano

Eloy chewed the rubbery edge of the dough with the mechanical rhythm of someone with neither haste nor hope that the flavor would improve. It was a family-sized four-cheese pizza ordered at ten the previous night, forgotten on the low coffee table in the living room, and by five on Sunday afternoon it already offered the exact consistency of a wet flip-flop sole. With his thumbnail he tried to peel off a crust of toasted mozzarella stuck to the flap of the cardboard, gave up, and wiped his finger on the leg of his jeans.

The twenty-one-inch Sanyo television hummed.

It was neither a metaphorical nor a poetic hum. It was the old fifty-hertz magnetic whistle, that sharp, invisible screeching that tube transformers fire into the air when they have been left on for more than three hours straight, and which only dogs and people who spend too much time alone at home perceive. The screen showed no channel: a curtain of grayish snow boiled half-heartedly, punctuated by a vertical bar of static cutting from left to right every four seconds.

Eloy swallowed the last piece of crust, which slid down his throat like a cold marble.

He leaned forward in the maroon leatherette armchair—the one that creaked with the sound of a deflating balloon every time he shifted his weight from one buttock to the other—and reached his hand toward the black console wedged into the nook of the entertainment unit. The device gave off a dense vapor of overheated integrated circuits, that unmistakable mixture of hot bakelite, scorched dust, and cheap plastic. The gray cartridge, with the sticker of the warrior with a sword half-torn at the top corner, was warm to the touch. It had been stuck on a black screen for ten minutes.

He thought about giving the casing a sharp whack, right over the slot, but—

The hum changed its tone.

It didn't get louder; it simply grew thicker, as if the frequency of the television's copper coil were no longer vibrating in the air of the living room, but inside the cartilage of his jaw. Eloy blinked. The speck of dry oregano dancing between two of his molars seemed to freeze.

The snow on the screen stopped.

It was a clean cut. There was no thunder or dramatic flashes typical of a daytime TV movie. The ochre hallway carpet, that rough carpeting with a faded diamond pattern his mother refused to throw out since 1994, began to stretch into perfectly straight lines, dividing into square tiles whose edges cast no shadow. When Eloy looked down at his legs, the fabric of his denim jacket had lost all organic wrinkles: the sleeves broke into three rigid polygonal planes that brushed his elbows like unpolished acetate sheets.

[Initial inventory: Worn denim jacket (Defense +1, moderately warm), sneakers with the left toe half-peeled off, two hundred and forty pesetas in loose change, and half a pack of crumpled tissues in the right pocket].

"What the hell," he muttered.

His own voice sounded compressed, as if sampled at eight bits and played back through the blown speaker of a boombox.

He stood up because the armchair had simply ceased to exist between one blink and the next. Now he was stepping on a floor of gray tiles that stretched down an endless hallway, flanked by pixelated-textured columns that didn't quite fit right in the corners; the draw distance was ridiculous: beyond ten meters, everything dissolved into a dense fog of desaturated cyan.

He took a clumsy step forward. The lace on his right sneaker was untied and dragged along the floor, tapping against the virtual stone.

Crack.

The crunch was hollow, dry, repulsive. Eloy lifted his sole immediately, fearing he had crushed a cockroach, but what lay beneath his foot was a whitish, knobby cylinder, splintered in the middle. It looked like a strip of pressed leather shaped like a femur, one of those chewable synthetic bones bought at pet shops for next to nothing. It smelled of old slobber and wet dog that had dried too quickly against a rug in the sun.

There were dozens of them, scattered down the hallway like bullet casings after a shootout.

Suddenly, the world stopped with a metallic click. The air acquired a flat, bluish tone, freezing the floating dust into tiny luminous points. Right in the center of his visual field appeared a text box with a white border and a translucent cyan background, without anti-aliasing, written in a pixel font so sharp it almost hurt the eyes.

Two palms off the floor, floating with a slight vertical oscillation of four pixels up and four down, a round pine-wood stool materialized.

Sitting on it was his grandmother Consuelo.

She wore the same quilted robe with a yellow daisy pattern she used to water the patio pots on Saturday mornings, and plaid cloth slippers with worn rubber soles. Between her fingers she held a metal crochet hook that moved by itself, knitting an endless scarf that fell into the void and disappeared before touching the floor.

"I told you to put on an undershirt before getting out of bed, Eloy," she said, without lifting her eyes from her work. Her voice didn't come out of her mouth, but was spelled letter by letter in the dialogue box with a steady typewriter clatter: tac-tac-tac-tac.

"Grandma?" Eloy took a half step back, stumbling over his own loose shoelace. "You're... you can't be here. You died in Cruces Hospital seven years ago."

"And you bought a motorcycle with the money from the savings booklet instead of paying for the decent niche I asked you for, but we're not talking about that now, you scoundrel," Consuelo replied, stopping the crochet hook in mid-air to point at him with its metal tip. "Besides, look at the state of your hair. You look like a county fair scarecrow."

"This is a dream. The cheese didn't agree with me. The oregano was dark green, almost black..."

"Neither dream nor nonsense. This is what you keep in your head, you goofball."

The old woman laid her work in her polygonal lap and rested her gnarled hands on her knees. The stool gave a slight bounce downward, as if cushioning the change in posture, and hung suspended over the cyan void once more.

"Nostalgia is not a sanctuary; it is a dirty room you forgot to sweep twenty years ago," she stated, and for the first time looked him straight in the face with gray eyes that had nothing pixelated about them and everything of the lucid reproach of Sunday mornings. "You think this old piece of junk kept your Saturday afternoons safe from when you were twelve years old, right? The Nocilla sandwich, the afternoons without exams, the rain beating against the glass..."

Eloy did not answer. He scratched the bridge of his nose with his index finger.

"Well, in this room there aren't just the games you didn't finish because you got stuck on the third screen," Consuelo continued, lifting her chin toward the dark end of the hallway, where the cyan fog was beginning to stain a dirty brown. "At the end of the corridor someone is waiting. You haven't even left him a bowl of water all this time."