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I knew I missed my best friend when, rummaging through the antiques in my room, I found the old PlayStation with the Silent Hill disc inside. Going through the game saves I found one from ten years ago. Later that day, getting up to take out the trash, I found my cat dead; he was stiff, lying by his favorite window, where he once thought he was king or tiger or both. I had more or less the same time with him as I had with the PlayStation. He was old now, at least for a cat, but he could have lived a few more years, or so I would have liked. He was a gray feline with blue eyes and a highborn personality; he was given to me as a gift by a friend from those days, whom I cannot help but obsessively remember now. I searched through my telephone records of those years, I had to call her and tell her that her cat, that is to say my cat, our cat, had died. I called and an old woman’s voice answered; son, she shouted when she heard me; no, ma’am, your son is dead, I said and hung up. Then it dawned on me how much time had passed and how far I was now from my friend. Her name is Carmen, although I always called her “Scarlett”, because of the evil deity from Silent Hill. I was the only one calling her like that so that nickname was special, so it stayed. In those years Scarlett lived with her mother and five cats, including three four-week-old kittens; she would have been twenty-one years old the last time I saw her; I was six years older. According to her own account, she had never kissed anyone up to that age. She rarely left her house. I would often visit her after coming home from work at the family business (my dad owned a sex shop). We were neighbors. We would sit in her garden shaded by pink-canopied trees that looked like something out of an anime. When we weren’t smoking joints under the trees, we spent our time playing video games in his living room. Sometimes we would just sit in silence for hours; while I read she used to draw. Once she drew me without me noticing; that time I was reading a Murakami novel (although I don’t remember which one), while smoking and a cat was rubbing on my pants; she drew me with black eyes and my hands full of blood, she didn’t explain the meaning of it, if any. His mom didn’t seem to have a problem with us smoking weed, as long as we were at home; she preferred that to us drinking alcohol outside and with unknown people; better bad things to know than to be known, she used to tell us; she made us lemonade and brownies from time to time, she even smoked a joint with us once, but she never did it again because days later we were still teasing her because in her bad trip she thought she was having a cardiac arrest. We were a bit of a pain in the ass, to be honest. Scarlett’s father was of Japanese origin; he had several shoe stores, but since he died, when she was still a child, her mother (of Canadian origin, I think) took over the business, so she was rarely at home and was pleased that we spent all our time there, smoking, playing video games or whatever. He saw me as a son. At home my own parents were like cats and dogs (lie, cats and dogs are decent next to my parents) when they came home together; I became very distant with them, but that did not prevent me from having a good childhood because I spent almost all my time at Scarlett’s house. It was the same during adolescence and until I reached my 20s, when my father died. I remember that morning vividly, I remember it red and smelling of toast. The day went on as normal until the afternoon, at checkout time. I went to the warehouse to do some inventory; I had my headphones on, probably with an AC/DC or Black Sabbath song playing. I heard several muffled pops that thundered in my head even with the shrill guitar blasts in my headphones. I imagined the worst, but didn’t think it was possible, I thought it was something happening to someone else somewhere else. When I got back to the store I looked at my father’s body with a single shot through his back. There was also a huge pool of blood at the entrance, and it extended all the way to the sidewalk. My father’s hand was still holding a revolver. I took the gun and waited for the police to arrive. I was surprised by the fact that I felt nothing, beyond the adrenaline rush. I didn’t feel sorry for my father, although I did feel guilt for not doing it; my mother probably felt even less than I did, since not even a year had passed when she was already dating someone. In any case, I don’t have a single memorable memory with either of them, just monotonous temporary spaces, gray gaps in my memory. Perhaps the most memorable memory was that one, the day of the shooting. I still keep the revolver in a shoebox under my bed. It has only one shot in it, the only one my father left after emptying the rest of it into the robber, who in fact did not die on the spot. My father, on the other hand, was only shot once and it was fatal. That one shot left in the chamber of the gun is still there as a memento. At home there stopped being screams and fights; the only screams were those of my mother in the next room when she brought men in the early morning, guys I was not interested in meeting; I only knew they were different guys when the noises in her room changed. Sometimes I would go to Tijuana for seasons to rest from all that, with my mother’s family, I guess that’s the only good thing she left me, a dual nationality. My life in the meantime didn’t change much, maybe I had a little more peace at home, but it wasn’t home where my life took place at the end of the day.
