Nowhere People by Paulo Scott

lecturers at the Federal University, who has been diagnosed with depression and who has already enrolled at three different universities, each time dropping out in the middle of the first semester, and who supports herself, or kids herself that she is supporting herself, playing in clubs. Wordlessly, he will tell her it’s good to be there having a drink with her, and, still wordlessly, Lugosi will tell him he’s just as complicated as any of these other twenty-something guys who read too much and think too much and believe they know what a girl wants even if in practice they do not. And an hour and a bit from now, when the Enigma’s clientele are starting to fill up the dance floor, she’ll ask if he wants to split a tab of LSD that the boyfriend of a friend sent over from Los Angeles in a box of flick books (not to go into just how square she and her friend think he is for being so unnecessarily scared when it comes to popping a pill from time to time; he won’t even smoke a joint, like a good little doctor, losing out on the chance to understand what’s really missing from this world of ours), and, not hearing her, he’ll be amused when she puts on ‘Relax’, that Frankie Goes to Hollywood song full of double entendres, accepting the little slip of paper that she will put in his mouth.
    They are in NATO, the bar that Passo Fundo has made his favourite. Paulo wants to go home. In the state he’s in, however, it would be a real mistake. His parents are travelling early this morning to Montevideo with friends, that’s less than two hours from now. When that happens (they usually go to Montevideo by car) his mother doesn’t do her packing till shortly before they go, which means that right now she will be awake with almost every light in the house on, chasing after all the accessories and items of clothing that she cannot possibly leave behind under any circumstances. A conversation between the two of them would be a disaster. Paulo is afraid of what he might say, of acting out the scene that reveals the truth of the universe to someone you love, or of being assailed by an attack of paranoia that will make him want to wish he were dead as soon as it all passes. (Paulo does not like losing control.) No, better to stay here and wait for the dawn. Passo Fundo gets up every fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom to snort some of the coke he got earlier from the Colonel. He and Paulo are at Igor and Luciano’s table, two guys who share the same girlfriend, Márcia Boo. She kisses one, then she kisses the other. Cristiane and Magali are there, too, they don’t stop talking. Paulo knows he can have either one of them, but whenever he tries to look closely at them in that dark bluish haze he sees Maína’s face. The cognac he brought in his rucksack is nearly finished, he fills his glass under the table so the manager of the bar doesn’t see him, the waiters aren’t paying any attention at all: each time he does this, the two girls sitting beside him laugh like hyenas. He contemplated inviting the two of them for a threesome, he even started imagining he was fucking them under the table and then while the two of them were sucking his cock he would be going down on Márcia Boo while she kissed Igor and Luciano, Luciano who’s also known as Posh-boy Luciano. This daydream lasted just a few minutes. It passed. He heard someone at the table more than once mention the name David Cooper and the title of the book The Grammar of Living , and (as if he were in a tunnel of psychosis in which the possibilities of reaction are delayed) he gets up, theatrically, saying: ‘Language was invented in order to destroy communication, which in turn has been used to destroy communion. The final strategy ought to be to use what destroys us to destroy the very thing that is destroying us, in such a way as to allow for areas of hope and the conclusive death of cretins.’ He looks around at everyone sitting at the table. ‘Many thanks for