The Sun Smells Too Loud

Saul often chooses to listen to a song (and to love it) based on the punch of its beat, its capacity to transport him away from his ‘me.’ Music that keeps him at the same place, the same time, it's like, if it doesn’t move the needle in his chest cavity, it doesn’t go on repeat. Now, no way, is not where he wants to be; the now shouldn’t exist, not while there’s music and the world is sick. The beat as a new birth.

And Saul almost escapes it, this time, too. Being sixteen, on the couch, looking at the eternal now on social media, but disengaging; nothing except angst burning like a fuel, away from reality, cause it just seems cruel, unbearable.

The song is broken. He keeps forgetting to turn off the autoplay settings, and his feed – and earbuds – explode with the sound of bombs, of people coughing and crying from smoke and trying to run away from rubber bullets, of panic. Non-lethal bullets, the police always say. His Father usually says, it’s sad that it’s non-lethal. There’s a protest going on, and though his friends are there protesting and he should also be there to protest, with his friends, and for his own sake, too, he's got reasons to complain, to protest, he'd like to be there too, though he doesn't want to be there at the protest now cause he'd be in panic right now and not just in anguish alone at his room, though at least he wouldn't be alone, but he chose not to go to be a good son.

He wants to start the song he was listening to back again, but there's a live video feed showing the protest, right now. A police officer pushes a protester to the ground, and the man’s head hits the pavement. The cop turns him – face down on the ground, open wound to the sky – to kneel over him and cuff him. There’s blood pouring from the protester’s mouth and nose. The protester is convulsing, the police officer keeps beating at him like he’s trying to resist the arrest.

That man looks like Saul’s dad. Not the protester, the police officer, the one who’s kneeling on the protester, the who looks like an animal…

Saul throws his phone against the wall, it falls next to his bed. The screen on his phone is now broken, too.

Saul remembers a time when he was maybe nine or eight, and his Mother and Father were always fighting over things.

His Mother kept arguing with his Father. For years, she worked to pay all the bills, as well as raise Saul almost on her own, she’d say, so his Father could study for a bunch of exams to try to get a job as a public servant.

Eventually the only exam Father passed was exactly the one Mother had asked him not to take. And then Father became a police officer, and then he was spending the family money like the money was only his, and Mother would say she was still struggling to pay for the household bills with her salary as a schoolteacher, she'd say, and Saul was always listening. But Father wasn't, or so it seemed.

Sometimes Father would push Saul away from the kitchen, and then he couldn't understand the rest of their argument, he could only hear them screaming at one another from the other side of the wall. That's how Saul learned to enjoy being locked inside his room.

At some point, Father and Mother's constant yelling at each other stopped happening. Saul remembers this one night as the last time his parents argued in front of him.

Since then, Saul got used to finding his Mother sitting alone in the kitchen. Every time, as he approached her, she'd wipe the tears from her eyes and smile at him, she'd pretend like it was nothing that mattered, that she wasn't hurt. Since then, Saul knew Mother had started to lie to him, to protect him.

From that point on, too, Saul learned that if he ever needs anything, if he has to ask his Father for something, he has to somehow feed his dad’s ego. Saul learned that his Father’s ego is constantly getting bigger and bigger, like everything else in the world exists just to revolve around it.

So Saul managed to ask his Father the most important birthday present he ever got: earphones.

There’s not much left of Saul's Mother when she finally manages to divorce from his Father. She looks like she’s already dead, just waiting to be buried.

“If it all goes away,” Father says, “people know I do my job like I’m supposed to. If it doesn’t, I still keep my salary, so it’s like I’m retired.” Father smiles, “and the public recognizes me now, so I’m thinking about going into politics. Don’t you think I have a shoot?”

Saul nods yes. He doesn't want to think about the protester; he's trying to erase the images of Father bashing the protester's head and killing him from his brain. Saul got a new phone, to replace the one he broke when he threw it against the wall because of that video of his Father and the protester, because of the video he's trying to forget. But he can't.

These past few days, Saul has been listening to even more music than usual, but it’s becoming more difficult to find the right song to take his mind off things.

He’s looking for a new track, doesn’t know how to find it.

“I don’t wanna travel with him,” Saul says to Mother.

He’s going to travel with his Father for a week, the same week he turns seventeen.

“He’s your father. You gotta be his son, you don't have a choice; be a good son, Saul,” Mother says. “If you lose him, you don’t get another dad. But he can make another son, with another woman, and shut you out.”

If Saul had a say in it, he’d choose this year's birthday to be the one he vanishes from Earth, forever.

The wind hitting on his face, and the car trembling, on the road; a song beaming, so loud, banging on his eardrums; Saul dreams.

Since the pandemic started, it’s the first time sunlight hits him straight in the face and he’s not wearing a mask.

The warmth on his mouth, the glow on his closed eyelids.

He dreams, and there’s music.

In his dream, he’s not traveling with his Father. He’s not going anywhere.

The beat becomes violence, which shakes him awake.

“Were you dreaming about a girl, Saul?” Father asks.

“I don’t talk about these things with you,” he says.

“If we don’t talk about it, we got nothing else to talk about,” Father says.

“If you say so.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a virgin, son,” Father looks at him, and the man’s acting like there’s no road ahead of them and he isn’t the one driving – Father is just staring at him.

Saul takes a deep breath, “I done things, some of which I regret,” he says to his Father.

Father slaps him in the arm; now Father’s the one who’s beaming, not the song, not the sun. “That’s my boy,” Father says.

The hotel is almost entirely empty. It looks, and feels, like a horror movie.

Before the trip, Saul said to his Father, as many times as he could, in as many different ways as he was able to conceive of, that maybe, just maybe, going on a vacation during a pandemic is careless.

“I’m not scared,” Father said, as he gulped down doses of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, “they won’t be able to convince me that good people, with good health, should be the ones who are locked in. That’s a prison of the mind, Saul. I advise you to listen to the President, and don’t believe the status quo.”

His Father speaks to the receptionist of the hotel and lowers his mask under his chin. The Receptionist takes one small step back – but there’s a wall right behind her.

Saul avoids the receptionist’s eyes while his Father talks to her. Saul believes that nobody wants to be here, not at this time, not inside this hotel, a tall concrete building with central air conditioning and fixed lite windows and a ubiquitous cloud of citrus scented perfume, nobody wants to be here except for his Father.

“Do I know you from somewhere, sir?” the receptionist asks.

“I just have that classic handsomeness,” Father says and blinks at her.

Despite the citrus aroma, Saul tastes the smell of his own puke.

During the afternoon, Father sleeps in their room. Father's snoring is too loud for Saul to be able to listen to some music and gather his thoughts.

He steps outside the room, but he doesn’t have the will to go anywhere and find out if there are other people who are just as crazy as he is, other people who are able to go on vacation and stay at this hotel and pretending like there isn’t a killer disease everywhere. Saul leans on the nearest wall, then he slides down until he’s sitting on the floor. He’s sitting on the same floor that everyone who’s carrying the virus walks over as they come and go and cough, the carpeted floor at the receiving end of all the guests' dirty shoes, down on the ground, is what his Father has been trained to enforce.

But Saul can’t go anywhere but stay here, no matter how much his life might've been training him to move, so far.

Up ahead in the corridor, an echo of loud voices resonates, voices booming with the unmuffled clarity of people who are screaming at one another and not wearing masks.

A door slams open, a Boy who’s about the same age as Saul steps out.

“Fuck you to death, too!” the Boy says.

But the sight of the Boy’s harmonious face, the full notation of someone Saul doesn’t know, of a boy he’s instantly reverberating to; the nakedness of a face that lingers like the sight of a bare body, but you can’t touch it or else, contamination; a Boy’s face that imprints itself in the entrails of his desire, changing his compass, distorting it, and he wants to be plucked out of his mask and strummed out of his forced isolation; a face that infects the tainted orchestration of his hidden lust.

The Boy runs through the corridor, doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s sitting there on the ground, fallen for him. The way the Boy walks, each of those steps changes the tempo of his heart, the beats now syncopated, his whole body readjusting to this new flow that’s running in his veins.

The silence the Boy leaves behind forces him to regain his resolve. A song that bridges to a chorus, and a pause.

Without his Father, who always takes the lead and never asks him where he wants to be, Saul becomes wary of being inside of an elevator. He read online that lifts are true incubators for the virus. He imagines contagious spit floating in the sealed air inside, disease spreading as the door opens, an inverted big bang generating vacuum in people’s lungs, collapsing reality into lifelessness – or, at least, the absence of humanity.

He takes the stairs, the sound of his steps ricochet against the bare concrete walls, a rhythm that highlights the lack of windows and natural lighting, the smell of stale air; he moves faster, his steps a metronome counting down the levels to the ground floor, no time to catch his breath, to wipe the sweat between his face and his mask. He arrives at the first stage.

He finds the Boy sitting at a room the hotel designates as a co-working station, which makes Saul feel like he’s now walking in outer space, his body drifting away from the pull of gravity.

The Boy is drawing, listening to music.

Saul sits down on the other side of the room but across from the boy, at a vacant table; to him, the wooden divisions framing each of the working station seats between them become measures of their divide, a cadence that he wants to fill with notes and no pause, an uninterrupted melody. He grabs his phone and pretends not to look at the Boy while staring at him.

“So you managed to get up from the floor?” the Boy asks.

For the first time since the pandemic started, he feels glad for the mask, because he flushes underneath it.

“What are you drawing?” he asks.

“My grandfather,” the Boy says and shows him the drawing.

“I like it. What are you listening to?” he asks.

“Aphex Twin. To keep me from wanting to die.”

“Oh. My name is Saul, by the way.”

“I’m Jorge. Pleasure to meet you, Saul.”

During the evening, Saul goes up to the room he’s sharing with his Father but finds it empty.

His Father is at the hotel bar, drinking alone.

“Is it time for dinner, already?” Father asks.

The hotel has a buffet restaurant. That gives Saul a pause. Everyone is supposed to clean their hands with hand sanitizer and wear plastic gloves while putting food on their plates. The room is half-filled with people who are eating, and all of those people have their masks off.

Jorge isn’t here.

Saul would rather not eat, but he’s hungry.

“They treat us like kings here!” his Father says.

But Saul feels like he’s a king’s taster, one who’s about to choke.

He spends the rest of the night listening to Aphex Twin, but most of the songs are too strange for him – the music sounds out of tune.

The artworks for the covers are creepy, grinning faces, menacing expressions; one of the covers shows a scrawny woman wearing a bikini, but she has face of a man Saul assumes must be the musician behind that cryptic name. That image bothers him, makes him not want to look at it, or listen to any of those songs, anymore.

At some point, though, he finds a track that he loves.

He falls asleep listening to Girl/Boy Song, over and over.

He meets Jorge at the same room they met the day before. They’re alone again.

Jorge talks to Saul about his grandfather, who's recently passed away. Jorge's grandfather was the one who raised him and his sister, cause they lost their parents as kids. Jorge's sister is just a couple years older than him, and now she's the only family Jorge has left.

At the start of their conversation, Saul and Jorge were sitting two chairs away from each other. But now they decide to sit close to one other, closer than it’s recommended to stop the virus from contaminating one of them in case the other is already infected. There's now only one of the working station wooden divisions between them; Saul feels that it's somewhat ridiculous that he's calculating the risk he might be in, that it's probably ridiculous to be this self-involved, at this point.

Jorge tells Saul that his sister and him were forced to have a closed casket funeral for Jorge's grandfather; Jorge says he was never able to say goodbye, that he couldn’t look at his grandad one last time. “Do you mind if I ask you to hug me?” Jorge asks.

Jorge’s tone is a key, it unlocks a harmony that unfolds around them; they sit in the same measure now, framed within the same two panels, sharing the same hideout. Saul hugs Jorge.

As they pull apart from each other, their masks (and faces) brush past one other. A pause, or a bridge, Saul hopes. “If it weren’t for everything else, I guess I’d want to kiss you,” he says.

Jorge pulls the mask away, and then unmasks Saul too.

“Your face is so beautiful,” Saul says.

Jorge kisses him. Jorge’s mouth tastes salty, like tears.

“I want you to touch me,” Jorge confesses.

Saul unzips Jorge’s pants, takes him in his hands. He stares at Jorge’s face while Jorge winces, and kisses the tears away.

“What if I’m sick?” Jorge whispers.

Jorge’s face contorts into a blank note, into white noise, or death.

A hotel clerk finds Saul and Jorge sitting on the floor, holding each other’s hands, talking about where they would be if it weren’t for the pandemic.

“Your father is drunk,” the clerk says to Saul.

He follows the clerk to the hotel bar, and Jorge comes along.

His Father is passed out on one of the bar tables. The table has been cleaned before he got there.

“Your dad looks depressed,” Jorge says.

Is this what it’d would like? If Father is depressed, is this what depression does to him?

“Do you want me to help you carry him upstairs?” Jorge asks.

Saul looks around, the clerk is gone and there’s no one else nearby.

“I guess I do,” he says.

The next morning, Saul walks the corridor and passes by Jorge’s room, and notices the room is now empty; that it’s being cleaned by one of the hotel maids.

He wants to go to the maid and ask her, is this what it looks like?

He can’t tell the difference between Jorge leaving during the night, without talking to him or leaving him a message at the hotel desk, or Jorge and his sister being dead now and the hotel pretending like nothing happened.

He decides he’ll never listen to Aphex Twin again. Just as he felt that he was starting to get it, that it didn’t sound out of tune to him anymore.

“Why did you kill that protester?”

“I can’t be judged for being used as the tool for someone else’s suicide, Saul,” Father says.

His Father’s tone implies that he’s rehearsed and repeated these same words, many times already.

“When that protester started to provoke us, and we’re the Law, right? That man knew what was coming to him, and he probably wanted it.” Father shrugs. “These types are always suicidal, it’s part of what makes them believe the bullshit they do.”

Saul and his Father are sitting at the buffet, having dinner. Saul puts his knife and fork down, rubs his hands with hand sanitizer, puts his mask back on.

“I wanna see your face, I’m talking to you, Saul,” Father says.

“I already finished,” Saul says.

There’s a TV on the wall behind his Father. President Sérgio Barbero is on the news, he's got a wide grin on his face. Sérgio Barbero is celebrating that the vaccine trials have been halted because one of the test subjects died.

“The President is right, the vaccine is a hoax,” his Father says.

Saul puts on his earphones.

“Dammit, you never listen!”

Father gets up, yanks Saul's earphones away, throws them on the floor, and then he steps on them.

At the dead of night, Saul lies awake in his bed.

He needs a song to feed his soul, to keep from screaming, from disappearing under his Father’s presence.

It’s his birthday, now.

As soon as Father wakes up, he confiscates Saul's phone for the remaining of the day.

“Sometimes, you act like there’s nothing else in the world but your phone, Saul,” Father says.

Saul thinks to himself that if he had the power to do the same thing to his Father, that by hiding his Father’s phone, he’d be taking away the source of every opinion his Father has, of everything he talks about, of all his beliefs and worries about the pandemic, or President Sérgio Barbero, or anything else. Saul believes that if he could make social media disappear, his Father would turn into an empty shell – which is just like he feels now, without music.

He’s back on the passenger seat; his Father is driving through a dirt road.

The radio announces that the person whose death had halted the vaccine trials didn’t die because of the vaccine. That person took their life.

Despite the news on the radio, Father is still beaming. Maybe Father's beaming because of it, too.

“Today, it’s all about you, Saul,” Father says.

His Father has also forbidden him from using masks, from now on.

Early in the morning, his Mother called to congratulate him.

“Why am I here with him, in this stupid trip?” he asked her.

“Do you want your Father to be proud of you, or do you want him to resent you?”

His Father and him are playing cards against a pair of men who smell of alcohol and sweat. Saul can’t help but notice that none of them are wearing masks, and nobody bothers to clean their hands before or after touching the cards. He remembers that he was still a child when his Father first taught him to play poker; and now he’s seventeen, but still too young to be in here, at least for another year he'd be too young to be here, according to the law – but not according to his Father. There’s also a woman with them, a very thin woman who’s wearing a bikini, and who’s sitting on Father’s lap.

The room is barely illuminated, and it stinks of cigar smoke, of cachaça and cheap perfume.

Saul never would’ve guessed that a place like this remains open during a pandemic, despite the pandemic, not that he cared enough to know; he also never would've guessed that his Father would ever bring him to a place like this, and tell him to pick which woman he wants to have sex with, that his Father has the money to pay for it – family money, his Father says, to pay for it.

There’s a song booming on a blown speaker that’s placed over the colorful bar, right above a bored bartender, and Saul used to like this song, but now he hates it.

It’s the first time in years that he looks at his Father, and that he’s able to tell that his Father is feeling proud of him.

He’s sick to his stomach, and the stale beer he’s drinking isn’t helping.

Suddenly, one of the men starts arguing with Father, but Saul can’t hear them man's exact words because of the loud music.

His Father jumps the man, pushes the man to the ground.

Saul stands up, but everything happens too fast, and the ceiling is too low and there’s no more air to breathe, and his Father is punching a man on the ground, this time right in front of him.

The other man attacks Saul, and Saul misses his step and falls. The man kicks him in the mouth, hits his head enough times that he loses the count.

“I don’t wanna fight,” he tries to say. But maybe I deserve to die, because of my Father.

“What if I’m sick?” he says, and it makes the man stop.

He stands up; he can taste his own blood.

“C’mon Saul!”

Father holds the man who attacked him, locks the man’s arms from behind his back. The man tries to shake himself loose, but he can’t.

“C’mon Saul!” Father says, “he tried to kill you, son!”

Saul punches the man hard; his hand a thousand tiny fractures against another person’s skull, and the man collapses.

“That’s how you do it, Saul!” Father says, loud and proud. It brings back memories of being a kid and believing that a Father is the most important thing in the world, of wanting to make dad proud and happy.

Saul finds his own bloodstained reflection on a broken mirror behind the bar counter. And realizes that he’s smiling at his Father.

Seconds pass, whole years maybe, and whatever is moving him away from that place never fades out. The horizon forever out of reach, the only place Saul’s Father can’t reach him, beyond the sun, or song. Saul runs from his Father, from himself.

Saul runs; but he’s afraid that his Father will catch up to him, at some point.

Saul feels his head throbbing, his pulse a drum that pounds against his chest; and he’s alive at least, at last, a different flow running in his veins.

There’s something that smells broken, that he’s carrying around with him, within.

Saul runs for as long as he needs, sweat pouring from his skin, and the sun bright warm over his tired body, so bright that even Saul’s shadow turns luminous.

Image Credits – Leonora Carrington: Adieu Ammenotep; The Night of the 8th; The Saints of Hampstead Heath; The Fig Mother; Surgeon; Who art thou, White Face?; Moose Mayor; Untitled (1960); Peacocks of Chen.