This Thing Between Us

Thiago Alvarez is the novel’s first-person narrator and protagonist, and this narrative point of view brings readers closer to him, encouraging greater empathy for him than for any other character. This is crucial for Thiago’s characterization. In the narrative present, Thiago is mostly alone; that his thoughts and feelings—even concerning basic exposition—emerge primarily in his narration rather than in dialogue underscores the depth of his isolation. For example, the novel frames the history of weird happenings with the Alvarezes’ Itza and their condo as knowledge that Thiago and Vera shared only with one another. Likewise, Thiago wants to choose only “the fight[s] [that are] actually worth it” with Diane (9), implying weariness with human interaction. Most explicitly, Thiago discusses the reasons he doesn’t want to be around people, a feeling he never voices to anyone but Vera but even calls the “silver lining to [Vera’s] death”: the fact that he no longer has to “feel things anymore” and his relief that this “part of [his] life is over” (16). The first-person narrative voice thus reinforces the depth of Thiago’s solitude.

This solitude is related but not reducible to his bereavement. Thiago’s irritation with other people is demonstrated early on when he describes the way, “Everyone waited for [him] to do something [after the funeral]. Standing around like cows in a field” (4). His simile, comparing the other mourners to livestock, shows how little they mean to him as individuals, his exasperation and anger that they expect him to know how to navigate these moments, and his low estimation of their intelligence and empathy. His description of Diane’s response to Vera’s wish to be buried in a tree pod—“[S]he took it like [he] suggested [they] take [Vera] to a taxidermist and have him glue leaves to [Vera’s] fingers” (8)—suggests that she is less concerned about her daughter’s wishes than she is about satisfying her own religious beliefs, but the mocking tone also characterizes Thiago as impatient and condescending in his interactions with others—tendencies implied to stem from his traumatic childhood. 

Vera is a rare exception to Thiago’s general aloofness, making her loss all the more isolating. Of their relationship, he says, “[W]e […] worked together somehow, like two different animals that learned to hunt as a team. You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us” (14). The significance of this simile, comparing them to unlikely animal partners who realize that life is easier when they work together, is compounded by its association with the phrase that constitutes the novel’s title: this thing between us. Just as a cooperative relationship between two animals of different species is unexpected and hard to define, so was the love shared by Thiago and Vera. It might have been surprising or even bewildering to others, but it worked for them.

That Thiago’s response to Vera’s death similarly resists description contributes to one of the novel’s central themes: The Indescribable Intensity of Grief. In the absence of words that accurately express the multitude of emotions and experiences that comprise “grief,” he often uses figurative language that evokes some other experience. He says that “[w]ith every moment the floor shifted under [his] feet” (15), comparing grief to an earthquake or an unstable foundation. He also describes grief as a “gulf” because of “[h]ow much had been scooped out of [his] life” (60). Here, grief is an absence, the lack of something crucial that was once there. Still later, he compares it to the “phantom” pain and sensations experienced by someone who has had a limb amputated, comparing grief to sensations that “shouldn’t” logically exist and yet somehow are; the metaphor hints at another theme, The Limits of Rational Control, which grief tests because it evades easy explanation. Overall, the novel suggests that grief feels both like too much and not enough, as though it should compel him to some action, but there’s nothing to be done. 

A motif of movies and movie lines develops these ideas. On the one hand, they provide a framework with which to understand grief. Early on, for example, Thiago realizes how common grief is, asking, “When haven’t men collapsed to their knees on crisp cemetery grass and belted out big throaty Godfather III sobs?” (14). This question refers to Michael Corleone’s emotional breakdown after his daughter, Mary, is killed by an assassin who targeted him; the intense moment emphasizes the crushing weight of Corleone’s guilt and loss and thus points to Thiago’s sense that he is somehow at fault for Vera’s death. Similarly, Thiago calls Vera his “Sarah Connor girl” (39), alluding to the protagonist of The Terminator franchise, a character who dies in almost every timeline. The particular references illuminate aspects of Thiago’s experience—e.g., his sense of Vera’s death as inevitable—but collectively, they also normalize an experience that feels abnormal. 

At the same time, this framing of grief underscores that real life does not follow narrative logic. Thiago notes, for instance, that in the movie version of his life, Vera would die first because she would have sensed something was wrong. This is not true of reality, however; her death appears senseless and unconnected to the strange happenings in the condo. The references to film thus reinforce Thiago’s sense of being unmoored; he has “no story to follow [because his] favorite character [is] gone” (15). He compares his life to a film in which his favorite “character” was Vera; thus, when she dies, he no longer cares about the story. 

The allusion to The Exorcist, a movie about demonic possession, embodies the tension between movies as vehicles for meaning and movies as reminders of life’s irrationality. In the part of the movie Thiago is forced to watch at Vera’s bedside, one priest says to the other that “the point” of possession is “to make us despair […]. To see ourselves as […] animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us” (58). The line speaks to Thiago’s experiences: His grief does prompt despair and make him feel very alone. Thus, he wonders if Vera is using the movie to warn him about something. However, this interpretation of events defies rationality even as it imposes structure on a series of apparently random circumstances—Vera’s coma, the television’s malfunctioning, etc.

Likewise, the entity that seems to inhabit the Alvarezes’ Itza speaks in movie lines that frequently reference the limits of rationality. When Thiago says, “Itza, off,” it responds, “You keep using that word […]. I do not think it means what you think it means” (80), quoting from The Princess Bride. This suggests that his choice of the word “off” is somehow incongruous with the nature of the device—that the Itza (or whatever is inhabiting it) will not be silenced—and that Thiago does not yet understand this. When Thiago asks where the line comes from, Itza says, “You can’t handle the truth” (80), a line uttered by a character in A Few Good Men; once again, the line suggests that Thiago doesn’t understand the nature of whatever is manipulating the device. In the silence that follows, the Itza quotes Morpheus, from The Matrix, saying, “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes” (81). This movie is about a man who discovers that humanity is trapped in a simulated reality that is created by intelligent machines that won a war against humanity and now harvest humans for energy, thus highlighting the tension between reality and perception/belief while also foreshadowing the novel’s interest in The Horror of Technology and Surveillance. 

Moreno’s descriptions of the Itza use figurative language and connotation to manipulate the novel’s mood and further establish this theme. Thiago describes the noise the Itza would make in the middle of the night, saying, “The noise would reverberate like a scream” (28), a simile that suggests both suffering and sentience. Later, when the Itza plays an eerie song that was not requested, he feels that “[h]er words trudged through an atmospheric mud, warping the song into something not her voice, not human” (41). Using personification, he gives the device’s voice the ability to “trudge,” and his metaphor compares the sound of this voice to something dragging itself through mud. The intentionality he ascribes to the Itza is intensified by his referring to the smart speaker as “her” rather than “it.” The device’s voice isn’t, in fact, human, but it is meant to approximate one, and Thiago’s linguistic confusion reveals his suspicions about the device’s capabilities.