C4 antho - Chamber Four

The Affliction ~135~
the Los Angeles area. He had never gone anywhere except to
work at the body shop and to work at LAX and, eventually, to
the town in the Valley where Javier Castillo had been living.
He could not picture any other place at all.
The recollection of the first time Javier Castillo disappeared
stayed with Ricardo. How could it not? He returned
to that story over and over. He couldn’t help it. He could hear
Javier Castillo describing what had happened to him; hear
his voice in his head. He replayed the situation over and over
of opening one’s eyes and seeing not one’s bedroom but a
square in Mexico City. But it was not because of the oddity of
what had happened―the disappearance, the reappearance―but
because Javier Castillo had not been afraid. Ricardo
knew that if such a thing had happened to him as a
young boy, he would have been terrified. He knew that he
would have sat in the Old Square crying and wondering how
he would ever find his way back to his family in Los Angeles.
He knew he was not the kind of man that Javier Castillo was,
that he was afraid of being alone. And being in another city
surrounded by people you didn’t know was essentially being
alone. Ricardo needed people, and he needed to know things.
And, apparently, this was not something Javier Castillo cared
about, not even remotely. Even then, thirty years after his
first disappearance, Javier Castillo had no understanding of
his affliction. He could not explain how it happened. He simply
knew he could do it. And this knowledge was enough for
him. It was, after all, his affliction, and he knew he had no
other choice than to live with it.
Ricardo had married the girl next door, or so he liked to
tell people. His parents had him marry the daughter of their
best friends. She was beautiful, but she was not gorgeous.
There was no better way of describing her. To describe her
black hair or the color of her skin would be pointless. To describe
the softness of her voice and compare it to water was