Ch. 01
April 5
The plan was simple. Find the CD, buy the CD, go home.
Diego had been thinking about it all week. Another April without Kurt, and he still didn't own MTV Unplugged in New York. He'd heard it at Bruno's place back in November, the whole album from start to finish, sitting on that broken couch with a beer getting warm in his hand. The version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" had wrecked him — that last note where Kurt's voice just gives out, like he used up whatever he had left.
Now it was April 5th, and the rain hadn't stopped since morning.
He grabbed his jacket, the flannel-lined denim, and walked to the bus stop on Mitre. The 159 was late — el blanquito, Quilmes to Correo Central and back, every day since before he was born. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching the wet street reflect the traffic lights in long red and green smears.
A woman at the bus stop was reading a newspaper. The headline said something about a bus in Israel, more dead. Diego didn't read the rest. He was tired of news.
Across the street, stapled to a telephone pole, a flyer was getting destroyed by the rain. Most of the text had bled into nothing:
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░░░░ ABR░░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░░ COMUNIDAD ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░░░░░░░░░ QLM-0405 ░░░░░░░░ DON'T ALLOW 30y TO BE 60y
The last line was in thick black marker, handwritten, not printed, someone had added it after. The rain kept falling. The ink was starting to bleed at the edges, the letters softening, and he knew that by morning there would be nothing left on that pole but wet paper and staples.
He read it again. Thirty years. Sixty years. The 159 turned the corner.
Now he went alone, mostly.
The guy behind the counter — Phil, always Phil — nodded when Diego walked in.
"Nirvana section's been picked over," Phil said, not even waiting for the question. "The anniversary, you know. Everybody wants a piece of Kurt today."
"You got Unplugged at least?"
Phil tilted his head toward the back wall. "Maybe one copy left. Check under U, someone probably misfiled it."
Diego walked past the rows of CDs organized by genre, past the handwritten signs that said ALTERNATIVO and GRUNGE and NOVEDADES. His fingers moved through the cases: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains. He could have found any of them blindfolded.
He found it. Last copy, plastic still sealed. The cover photo: Kurt sitting among flowers and candles, that unreadable expression on his face. Diego held it for a moment before walking to the counter.
"Eighteen ninety-nine," Phil said.
Diego pulled a crumpled bill from his jacket. "You'd think they'd drop the price after a while."
"They raised it, actually. Demand." Phil shrugged. "Dead guys sell records."
Phil turned to the dot-matrix printer behind the counter and tore off the receipt. The paper was thin, the perforated edges still attached. Diego glanced at it while Phil counted change:
o ································· o o o o 5-ABR-1996 o o FELIPE ERNESTO GUTIERREZ o o SPINNERS DISCOS o o o o MTV UNPLUGGED o o IN NEW YORK NIRVANA $18.99 o o o o o o TOTAL $18.99 o o o o o o ································· o
Diego folded it into the CD case. He'd never met a Felipe Ernesto in his life. Just Phil.
He passed the old video store, Mondo Video, with its faded awning and the handwritten ABIERTO sign that was always crooked. A cardboard cutout near the entrance showed Macaulay Culkin with that face, hands on cheeks, mouth open. The store was almost empty now.
The house was on Brandsen, half a block from the tracks. Tile floor, iron gate, a doorbell that hadn't worked in years. Diego just pushed the gate, it was never locked, and walked through the narrow courtyard to the front door. The hallway smelled like someone had been cooking something with too much garlic, maybe days ago, maybe always.
He knocked twice.
"It's open."
Bruno was on the couch, exactly where Diego expected him. TV on, a basketball game playing to nobody. Bruno was wearing sweatpants and a Soundgarden T-shirt that had a small hole near the collar. His hair was longer than it should have been.
"Got it," Diego said, holding up the CD.
"Unplugged?"
"Last copy."
Bruno sat up a little. "Put it on." He stretched, cracked his neck. "My folks have been gone all week. I finished Monkey Island again."
Diego sighed. "Which one?"
"The first one. From the beginning. The whole thing."
"Of course you did."
"I'm telling you, that game is —"
"Bruno."
"Fine."
Diego walked to the stereo, a decent Aiwa system Bruno's old man had bought years ago, the kind with the three-disc changer that nobody ever used for three discs — and opened the case. The disc went in. He pressed play.
The first notes of "About a Girl" filled the living room. Just a guitar and Kurt's voice. Diego was on one end of the couch, Bruno on the other. He wasn't sure when they'd stopped sitting in the middle.
"Hard to believe it's another year," Bruno said.
"I know."
"Feels longer every time."
"Feels like thirty," Diego said, and laughed.
The rain had mostly stopped. She walked with the bag in one hand, her other hand in the pocket of her denim jacket.
Then the Colegio Alemán. The iron fence dark with rain, the yard empty on a Sunday. She slowed without meaning to. Through the bars she could see the courtyard: the same tiles, the same bench where she used to sit with Diego and Bruno before first period, the three of them talking about what they'd do when they got out. Diego wanted to work with computers somewhere cold. Bruno wanted to make video games. She wanted to read everything ever written and then write something better.
She shifted the bag to her other hand and kept walking. Bruno's gate was half-open.
She was wearing a denim jacket over a floral dress, her hair pulled back, small silver hoops in her ears. The hoops, the way the dress moved, the whole thing. Diego did what he did every time, which was nothing. He'd been not doing something about Lucia since she turned fifteen. It had been going on so long now that doing something would mean explaining all the years he hadn't, and he didn't have an explanation.
"You guys just sitting here listening to Nirvana in the dark?"
"It's not dark," Bruno said. "The lights are just... off."
"He finished Monkey Island again," Diego said.
Lucia closed her eyes. "Which one?"
"The first one."
"God help us."
Lucia turned on the lamp by the door and sat on the floor cross-legged, opening the containers on the coffee table. There was room on the couch. There was always room on the couch. The living room filled with the smell of soy sauce and ginger.
"I tried to go to the movies Saturday," Lucia said between bites. "Stood in front of the Cine Cervantes for five minutes reading the marquee like it was going to change. A dog comedy, a cartoon, and Home Alone 33. Three screens. I walked home."
"What were you hoping for?" Bruno said. "Scorsese?"
"I was hoping for one film made for someone old enough to drive."
Bruno shrugged. "I liked Home Alone."
"That explains a lot about you."
They ate for a while without talking. The album did the work. "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam" filling the room.
Bruno reached for the soy sauce. Lucia moved it before he got there.
"Half," she said.
"I wasn't going to —"
"You were going to pour the whole thing. Like the last three times."
"Twice."
"Diego."
"Every time," Diego said.
Lucia divided the soy sauce between the containers with surgical precision and slid them back without comment. She'd been doing this since they were fifteen. Deciding things nobody asked her to decide.
Bruno started humming along to "The Man Who Sold the World," slightly off-key. Lucia corrected his pitch without looking up from her food. Bruno adjusted. Lucia nodded once, still not looking. They'd been doing this since high school: Bruno getting something almost right, Lucia fixing it with one word or one look, Diego watching the whole thing from the sidelines, his hand tightening around the beer.
"You know what I miss?" Bruno said. "The arcade on Rivadavia. The one with the broken Pac-Man."
"It wasn't broken," Lucia said. "You just couldn't get past the third level."
"The joystick pulled to the left. It was physically broken."
"Diego beat it."
"Diego beat everything. That's not the point."
"What's the point?"
Bruno thought about it. "I don't know. I just miss it."
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Lucia picked a piece of ginger off her plate and flicked it at Bruno's head. It landed in his hair. He didn't notice. Diego noticed.
"The Man Who Sold the World" was playing. He thought about what Lucia said, and he thought about other things, small things that had been bothering him for weeks. His mother on New Year's Eve, saying "Here we go again." Phil at the record store talking about albums as if he'd sold them before, to the same people, in the same order. The whole year feeling not new but rehearsed.
"Do you guys ever feel like we already did this?" Diego asked.
Lucia looked up from her food. "Did what?"
"This. All of this. Like this year already happened."
Bruno pointed at him with a chopstick. "That's called déjà vu, my friend. It means your brain is —"
"I'm serious."
The three of them sat there. Unplugged played on. Outside, a siren passed and faded.
"Sometimes," Lucia said quietly. "Like at Spinners — I'll be flipping through CDs and I already know what comes next before I see it. Not just the genre — the exact album, in the exact slot. And when one's in the wrong place, I know that too. Like I've done that exact sequence before."
Bruno exhaled. "You guys are freaking me out. It's the anniversary. It makes people weird."
Lucia looked at the ceiling, then at both of them. "Do you think we'll be doing this in thirty years? The three of us, this couch, this album?"
Nobody answered.
"Maybe," Diego said.
He didn't push it. He never pushed it.
But later, when the album was over and Lucia had gone to sleep in the back room and Bruno was half-asleep with the TV on, Diego stepped outside for air. He stood on the front steps and looked at the street — the parked cars, the wet pavement, the streetlights making circles of orange on the sidewalk. The rain had stopped. He pulled his jacket tighter and went back inside.