The phantom body

 The phantom body VIDEO

The corpse lying at her feet wasn’t hers, but it had her face, and that was enough to make Marta forget how to breathe as the pier’s neon lights flickered like the tired eyes of a god that no longer watched. the smell of ozone and rotting fish seeped into her days, into her childhood memories that now seemed to belong to someone else, to another life filmed in black and white with the sound out of sync. she stepped back, her heels echoing against the damp wood, and her right hand fumbled for the revolver she knew she didn’t have, because she had never learned to shoot. because her father had always told her that fears were faced with words, not with lead. but her father had been dead for three winters now and the current winter slipped through the holes in her wool coat like spectral fingers trying to drag her toward the black water of the harbor. The corpse’s face was tilted to one side, its eyes open, staring at the horizon where the gray sky merged with the gray sea, and in that empty gaze Marta thought she saw a flicker of recognition, a last spark of awareness screaming from beyond that she shouldn’t be there. That time had broken somewhere between her waking and this moment, between the steaming morning coffee and this scene pulled from a nightmare she didn’t remember dreaming. She crouched, her knees creaking, and touched the body’s cold cheek, hoping the skin would dissolve like ash, hoping to discover it was all a hallucination caused by the pills Dr. Varela prescribed for her insomnia. But the skin was real, damp, still warm on the surface even if inside it had already surrendered to eternal cold. Then she heard the gunshot, distant but precise, and the echo bounced among the rusted steel containers as if the entire port were an out-of-tune piano played by invisible hands. She didn’t think, she just ran, her lungs burning as the cutting wind tore tears from her eyes that she didn’t feel falling. And as she ran she realized she didn’t remember how she had gotten to this damn pier, that her last coherent memory was the distorted reflection of her face in the bathroom mirror of her apartment. The cracked mirror her ex-husband never wanted to fix, and now that face was dead on the ground, watching her from eternity with a grimace that could be surprise or warning. The containers formed a maze of stretched shadows where every corner held the promise of a bullet or the threat of a truth she didn’t want to know. And her heart pounded so hard she thought anyone chasing her could find her just by following that runaway drum, that primitive rhythm of survival her ancestors carried in their veins when they fled predators across the savanna. A drop of sweat slipped into her left eye, burning, and when she blinked she thought she saw a figure at the end of the corridor between containers, a tall silhouette wrapped in a yellow raincoat that shone like a beacon in the dimness. But when she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand the figure had disappeared, leaving only the smell of cheap tobacco and something sweeter, like burnt syrup, like memories of Sundays at her grandmother’s house before the fire swallowed that house and her grandmother with it. She kept running, turning left, then right, losing all sense of direction, and suddenly the maze ended, opening before her into an empty expanse where rain began to fall diagonally, silver under the moon that timidly peeked through storm clouds. There, in the center of that bare space, was a wooden chair, and on the chair a white envelope that seemed to float, immaculate, unaware of the mud around it. Marta stopped, gasping, aware that every second she lost was a second her pursuer gained, but the chair hypnotized her, called to her with the arrogant silence of objects that know more than they should. she took three steps, the mud sucking at her shoes like hungry mouths, and picked up the envelope with fingers trembling so much she nearly dropped it three times before managing to open it. Inside was a photograph, and in the photograph was her. Marta, smiling beside a man she didn’t recognize, a man with graying beard and kind eyes who held her with the familiarity of someone who shares decades of secrets. in the bottom right corner, a date written in firm handwriting. March fifteenth, two thousand forty-three. The paper slipped from her hands, carried by the wind, and she tried to scream but her throat had turned into sand, into broken glass, into the driest desert in the world. Because today was March fifteenth, two thousand twenty-three, because that man did not yet exist in her life, because the corpse on the pier was wearing the same clothes she had on now, the same faded blue blouse, the same jeans torn at the right knee. The world spun, the stars fell from the sky like silver dust, and when Marta managed to stay on her feet, leaning on the chair that now seemed like a throne of condemnation, she understood that she wasn’t fleeing a killer, but herself, a future version that had come to warn her or to replace her, or perhaps simply to die in her place. another gunshot rang out, closer this time, and the rain intensified, striking her face like thousands of cold needles. she began to walk toward the edge of the pier, where the black water waited like a liquid mirror that promised to show her the truth if she dared to look down, and as she walked, memories that were not hers began to invade her, images of a wedding she had never celebrated, of a child she had never borne, of a laugh she had never released, all blending with her own memories like two films projected simultaneously onto the same shattered screen. she reached the edge, the water licking the pilings with the tongue of a hungry animal, and in that instant a hand rested on her shoulder, heavy, inevitable, and a voice she recognized as her own but deeper, tired, marked by years she had not yet lived, whispered in her ear not to look back, that the jump would be useless, that time was a snake biting its own tail and that both of them, the hunter and the prey, the living and the dead, were just two points on the infinite circle. Marta closed her eyes, feeling the familiar breath against her neck, and asked, in a voice that sounded strangely calm amid the chaos, whether the past could be changed when the past was already the future, and the voice answered no, that she could only choose in which direction of the circle she wanted to run, toward the life she knew or toward the death waiting for her on the pier of broken mirrors. Then, with a slowness that seemed to last centuries, Marta turned to face her other self, the woman in the yellow raincoat she now saw clearly, the woman with the graying beard who was in fact herself twenty years older and with a soul worn down by loves she had not yet known. But when she completed the turn, when her eyes met eyes identical to hers but lined with wrinkles of pain and cruel wisdom, the square was empty, only the chair remained, the envelope now soaked by the rain, and the distant sound of a ship’s siren announcing the arrival of something that should not exist. Marta stood still, the rain soaking her to the bone, and understood that the corpse from the beginning was neither her future nor her past, but her split present, a possibility she had killed simply by realizing it existed, and that now, with nowhere to go, no one to chase or flee from, time had stopped for her on that cursed pier where all versions of Marta converged and canceled each other out. She sat on the chair, drenched, trembling, and looked at the envelope floating in a puddle at her feet, the ink running into shapes that resembled maps of unknown constellations. The sound of footsteps echoed behind her, firm, deliberate, and this time she did not turn, because she knew it no longer mattered who arrived, whether it was the police or the killer or herself coming to complete the circle. The only thing she knew for certain, as she closed her eyes and let the darkness wrap around her like a damp blanket, was that when she opened them again, if she opened them at all, the pier would be empty, the corpse gone, and she would be standing in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, with the reflection smiling at her with a smile she had not drawn, ready to begin again, to run again, to die again, because time was not a line but a spiral, and somewhere in that spiral, the real Marta, the original one, the one who had never dared to jump, was still waiting for the exact moment when the mirror would finally shatter and reveal what lay on the other side. But that moment, like the next step of whoever was approaching from behind, like the last word of a story that did not want to end, remained suspended in the damp air of the harbor, waiting for her to decide whether this time, unlike all the other times she had lived and forgotten, she would stay seated long enough to discover who was walking with those steps, who carried the weight of the revolver she had never learned to use, and why, in the depths of her closed eyes, the mirror’s reflection kept smiling with a joy that bordered on madness, like someone who already knows the ending but enjoys the suspense too much to reveal it. The rain intensified, erasing footprints in the mud, blurring the boundaries between water and land, between yesterday and tomorrow, and Marta, or the woman who believed she was Marta, or the shadow that had once been Marta, let out a sigh that dissolved into the salty wind, while somewhere in the port, far yet ever closer, a second siren began to howl in response to the first, and between both sounds, in that perfect and terrifying harmony, she knew the circle was not closing but opening like a wound that never stops bleeding, like a door that cracks open just enough to reveal not light at the end of the tunnel, but another darkness even denser, older, hungrier, where other Martas ran, other Martas fell, and other Martas, seated on wooden chairs under the eternal rain, waited for the final shot that never came, or that came again and again, endlessly, in the heartbeat between two seconds that lasted an entire lifetime.