C4 antho - Chamber Four

~134~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
he reappeared. I cannot be certain when he first demonstrated
to Ricardo his “affliction,” but I can piece together
that it must have been early, some time within a few days of
their first meeting. Did he demonstrate it? Or did Ricardo
simply catch him in the act? I’ll never really know. What I
know is that Javier Castillo had explained to Ricardo that as
a child he had moved from Mexico City to Los Angeles, how
one night, as he lay in bed, he wanted to be back in Mexico
City so badly he closed his eyes and tried to imagine being
there. He thought, for a minute, that he could actually see
the City, the Old Square. And when he opened his eyes, he
was lying on a ledge. He was lying on the lip of the fountain
in the center of the Old Square, the fountain cascading over
the flowering tree of sculpted concrete down into the shallow
pool next to him. He thought the warm night was a dream.
He thought he was having a spectacular dream. But he was
not dreaming. He was there in the Old Square, the old men
strolling around smoking and talking slowly, others leaning
against walls beside doorframes like awkward flamingos, one
leg firmly planted on the ground, the other leg bent at the
knee so that the bottom of the shoe was affixed to the wall
behind them. And when he sat up, when Javier Castillo sat
up, nothing changed. It wasn’t a dream at all. It was anything
but a dream.
Ricardo recounted how when he first heard this story he
had closed his own eyes trying to imagine another town. But
all Ricardo saw when he closed his eyes was the bluish white
glow of the light bulb he had been staring at before he closed
his eyes. There was the ring or impression of the bulb on the
inside of his eyelids, but nothing more. He could see no other
place. The round bluish-white mark on the inside of his eyelids
was not even perfectly round. It was hazy and indistinct.
It seemed to be disappearing. The light bulb was disappearing,
but nothing else was. Ricardo had never been outside of