The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Mechi works at the Chacabuco Park Development and Participation Center, managing Buenos Aires’s archive of missing children. Two other women, Graciela and Maria Laura, deal with the public, such as speaking with the families of missing children when they come to search the archive, while Mechi attends to the archive itself, fetching files and organizing information. The work is solitary, but Mechi is good at it and enjoys her job. Most of the children in the file cabinet are teenage girls, who perhaps ran off with boyfriends, fled abusive home lives, or were kidnapped and “disappeared in prostitution rings, never to resurface, or to resurface dead” (122). In moments when Mechi has the office to herself, she sometimes “daydream[s] about the children” (121), and she keeps files for children who have been found in a separate file cabinet.

Part of the reason for Mechi’s interest in and dedication to her job comes from her friend Pedro, whom she met five years earlier when she went out for a drink after work. She didn’t fit in with the rest of the after-office crowd, but the lack of attention from “the clean-shaven guys wearing suits and cologne” never bothered her (123). One night, however, she was reading alone at a table when Pedro sat beside her. He was a police reporter at a local newspaper and talked to her animatedly. Mechi was surprised when he asked for her phone number and even more surprised when he called the next day and invited her for another drink. They went back to his apartment afterward, where they had sex that confirmed what both had already suspected: “they weren’t attracted to each other” (124). However, this was the start of their friendship. After years of covering Mafia crimes, Pedro began writing lengthy essays investigating cases of missing children. Shortly after, “[a]lmost like a strange coincidence” (126), Mechi took over the archive, transforming it from “a pile of messy papers that no one paid much attention to […] into a treasure” (126) that quickly became Pedro’s “obligatory consultation.”

When Pedro’s investigations helped the police arrest one of the men behind a prominent sex trafficking ring, Pedro became well-known across the country, appearing on news programs and talk shows. He often mentioned Mechi in interviews, but she was never called on for television appearances.

When Mechi peruses the files of missing children, she often notices that the photos families provide are “almost always terrible,” making their children look “ugly” or “deformed” (127). The one exception is a girl named Vanadis, who is “almost the only real beauty in the whole archive” with her “dark hair and almond eyes” (129). The girl was caught performing sex work and sent to a reform school, from which she ran away. She hasn’t been seen since, but a variety of people stop by the office with information about her or notes and tokens to pass on to her if the girl is ever found. Mechi’s interest in Vanadis’s case borders on an obsession. One afternoon, Mechi is carrying the file and a photo of Vanadis falls out and is caught by the wind. Seeing her face on the sidewalk for a moment, Mechi is sure the girl is okay.

One day, a girl called Loli, one of the “addict kids” who lives in the ruins of the Caseros Prison, comes to make a report about Vanadis. Loli explains that she went to the Constitución Station late one night in desperate need of money. She saw no possible targets for mugging until Vanadis walked by. Loli brandished a broken bottle, but the other girl gave her 30 pesos without a fight, telling her not to be “lame” and to ask her for more money again. Loli felt “strange,” as if she hadn’t actually stolen from Vanadis. Some time later, she ran into Vanadis again. The girl reminded her that she wasn’t allowed to rob her again, and when Vanadis smiled at Loli, she fell in love with her. They begin spending time together, and Loli imagined that she might get off drugs if Vanadis loved her back. Vanadis worked a lot, mostly in Constitución. The trans sex workers in the area generally didn’t appreciate competition, but they left Vanadis alone. Loli wanted to report a pair of “weird” johns who took Vanadis to a hotel room and filmed while she had sex with them. When she asked what they were going to do with the videos, they threatened to kill her. Loli thinks that maybe the men took Vanadis, and she wants to report it. Loli thinks that she will die of her addiction now that Vanadis is gone.

Vanadis’s beauty is commented on frequently, and Mechi often visits the girl’s MySpace page, where she receives messages from friends and admirers almost daily. One commenter, a tattoo artist called Negative Zero, often leaves messages that seem truly heartbroken. Mechi is curious to learn more about him, but she worries about giving Vanadis too much “special attention” and forgetting about the other lost kids.

A year passes, and Mechi’s work generally follows “its usual rhythm, distressing but routine” (137). Pedro visits every couple of weeks to gather information, but he is drinking more than usual, and Mechi often feels “embarrassed” by his shouting and loud laughter. One day, however, Pedro calls Mechi to report a tip: a grainy cellphone video showing a girl’s body being loaded into a truck. When he tells Mechi that the girl “looks like a model” (139), she immediately shows him Vanadis’s file. She hasn’t mentioned her obsession with the missing girl and brushes off Pedro’s curiosity when he wonders how she pulled out the right file so quickly. She fills him in on Vanadis’s story and lets him copy the file. She insists that she doesn’t want to see the video, despite being filled with “morbid curiosity.”

Mechi waits anxiously for Pedro to update her on the case. The next day, she goes for an early lunch as a distraction, but crossing the park, she sees Vanadis sitting on the steps of the fountain. Mechi recognizes the girl immediately; she is dressed exactly like one of her photographs, as if the picture were “brought to life” (142). Vanadis smiles at her when Mechi says her name, revealing “crooked, yellow teeth” that are “the only thing that disturbed her beauty” (143). Afraid of losing her again, Mechi brings Vanadis back to the office. Graciela and Maria Laura are shocked and delighted to see Vanadis. They bring the girl a coffee and ask her questions, but her responses are noncommittal. Soon, Vanadis’s family arrives, “fainting, sobbing, and shouting in a reunion of demential celebration” that Mechi finds “strange” because they hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about the missing girl before (143).

As the excitement dies down, Mechi remembers to call Pedro. She tries to tell him about Vanadis, but he immediately interrupts with a story of his own. His editor sent him to Rivadavia Park in the Caballito neighborhood, where a woman recognized a missing boy called Juan Miguel González. Three months ago, the boy had been found dead after being run over by a train. The mother had a panic attack when she heard the news and refused to see the child. Pedro tells Mechi he is “scared shitless” and finally stops talking long enough for her to tell him about Vanadis. He can’t believe this new piece of information, but Mechi insists the girl “seems a little weird” but is undoubtedly Vanadis (146).

Things soon escalate to “an unprecedented level of hysteria” as missing children reappear in four parks scattered across Buenos Aires (146). Some of the children are mere babies, unable to speak about their ordeal, but even the older kids are mostly silent. The children don’t seem to recognize the families that come to retrieve them, but they go with them anyway “with a meekness that was somehow even more disturbing” (146). A number of “crazy theories” are offered to explain the sudden mass reappearances, but none of them are satisfactory. In the case of Juan Miguel, the media pass his parents off as “poor drunks” who misidentified the boy who had been hit by the train as their son. The rest of the cases are “normal,” and the reunions with their families are “practically happy endings” (147).

In the second week of reappearances, the sense of “euphoric bewilderment” is replaced by “a muffled dread” (147). One girl, Victoria Caride, appears in Avellaneda Park after five years, looking exactly the same as the day she vanished, down to her hairclip; however, no one “dare[s] to mention” this lack of change (148). Another girl, Lorena López, was five months pregnant when she disappeared, but she turns up a year and a half later, still five months pregnant with her first child. Two weeks after her family takes her home, they “return” Lorena, insisting that she is not really their daughter. While the family waits for the results of a court-ordered DNA test, a boy known as Buckaroo appears in Rivadavia Park. Buckaroo was a well-known runaway and was seen frequently picking pockets on Avenida 9 de Julio. However, he had been hit by a bus a year before. The bus had crushed his chest but left his face intact, leaving no doubt that it was the same boy. Another boy was eight when he disappeared, and he reappears five years later, still eight years old. Mechi decides “she [can’t] take any more” (150).

Mechi has Pedro over for dinner to tell him her plans to quit. Leaving her job will mean moving back in with her parents, but they are delighted at the prospect. Mechi suspects that the apartment’s owner won’t harass her over the damage she has done to the place or even the last months of rent she owes. A “depressive indolence” has seized many since the kids began returning, and “[p]eople [are] behaving very strangely” (152). The city is quiet, and people rarely go out. They especially avoid the four parks where the returned children live. At first, the people would bring the children food, which they accepted happily. However, it soon became clear that they never ate or drank, but “[n]o one wanted to talk about that” (152).

Mechi and Pedro order pizza, which doesn’t come sliced anymore ever since the children returned, and Pedro complains about how the children’s reappearance ruined his investigation into trafficking rings, making it seem like it “wasn’t real.” He plans to sell the video of Vanadis’s body to a TV show and use the money to leave the country and escape Buenos Aires. Mechi tells him that she read online about a Japanese belief that only so many souls fit in the afterlife; when it is full, they will start coming back to the world of the living, which “heralds the beginning of the end of the world” (154). Pedro urges Mechi to flee with him, offering to lend her money, but she refuses. She is committed to staying in the city to “see what it was that had to happen” (155).

Mechi’s boss understands her resignation, but when Mechi returns to the office to gather her things, Maria Laura throws a paperweight at her and threatens to kill her, blaming her for bringing Vanadis to the office and starting everything. Graciela is on psychiatric leave, and Maria Laura screams that she is “going to end up sick,” too, all because of Mechi (158). Mechi hurries out with the few things she managed to gather, feeling that “Maria Laura would have been capable of killing her” (158).

Mechi’s parents are “a little checked out” but eager to ask Mechi questions about the returned children (156). They live in the nice neighborhood of Villa Devoto, far from the parks and the returned children, and the distance is a relief for Mechi. However, when her parents turn on the news after dinner, Mechi retreats to her room. All the channels are repeating the story of a mother and father who died by suicide after their daughter, Marisol, returned. Marisol had run away after her father hit her during an argument, and when she returned, three years later, her injuries were still fresh. Even though their fight was laid out in the missing girl’s file, the media ignored these unexplained details in what Mechi saw as an act of “cowardice.” She often became frustrated with the media’s refusal to address the strangeness of the children’s reappearance, but now that the signs were becoming impossible to ignore, “the hysteria was extreme” (160). Marisol’s parents shot themselves in bed, leaving a suicide note that read: “That is not our daughter” (160). Marisol left the house after the gunshots, and the neighbors pursued her “wielding sticks and rocks” (160).

During the day, Mechi thinks it is wrong for parents to refuse to take their children back. The children might be “monsters,” but “it was unfair for them to have to sleep outside like animals” (161). At night, however, she thinks of Vanadis and knows that she, too, would reject one of the strange children. Amid growing tension after Marisol’s parents’ suicide, the returned children begin a “migration.” Over the course of several days, they form “processions” in the middle of the night and march through the city in silence, stopping traffic as they go. Pedro emails Mechi to tell her that the processions reminded him of Parisians moving their cemeteries to the outskirts of the city in the 1900s. They had carted bones across the city by night for years, just as the children seemed to be doing.

Mechi agrees that there is “something religious” about the children’s migration, but their destination—abandoned houses across the city—is “strange.” The kids from Rivadavia Park split into groups of 300, and each group goes to a different house. Vanadis leads a group to a bricked-up house in the middle-class neighborhood of Cafferata, where residents panic, “incapable of comprehending any interruption to their comfortable lives” (166). Despite the house being boarded up, the children enter easily, “as if the bricks didn’t exist” (164). 

Although Mechi is afraid of Vanadis, she feels a strong urge to speak to the girl. Determined to get answers, she takes the bus to Cafferata. The neighborhood is guarded, but the “pale and trembling” police officers let her through without a question (166). She approaches the house and calls Vanadis’s name until the girl comes out of the house. She can see that Vanadis recognizes her, but her heart is pounding so loudly that she struggles to speak. Vanadis tells Mechi that she and the other children have no desire to go back to their families. Looking like “a single organism” (168), the children say together that they will stay in the house until summer comes. Just then, a police officer holds Mechi’s shoulders from behind. Startled, she turns, prepared to hit him, but she sees that he is frightened like herself. He begs her to leave and begins pulling her away. The neighbors also begin shouting at Mechi to leave, and she breaks free of the officer’s grip and begins to run, determined to leave the city before summer; she wants to be gone “before the kids c[o]me down” (168).