Hypothermia

cans filled with earthworms that we used to collect in my grandmother’s garden in Autlán before going fishing.
    I stood there paralyzed by the liquid mass of bodies, completely absolved for a moment of my personality and private anguishes. One of the young men whom I had seen chatting outside came walking past me. He was just about to lose himself inside the soft, pulpy turmoil when I came to my senses and ran to grab his arm: I asked him about the nursery school kids. He told me he didn’t know, he had just been on the tennis courts at the fifth level; there were no kids there. Let me ask, he said at last. He gestured for me to wait and approached a nearby group of bodies, all molded tightly together. They spoke among themselves without stopping work on each others’ interlocking parts. At last one young woman slipped a penis out of her mouth and told me that all the kids were in the women’s locker room, which was on the other side of the stairs.
    Feeling drowsy and overwhelmed by the poor lighting, lack of oxygen, and the accumulated shocks I’d suffered, I walked toward the women’s locker room with the lassitude of a man resigned to his fate. I had to knock on the door and identify myself before they would open up and let me in. Once inside, one of the teachers apologized, saying that they’d had to lock themselves in. When all the students began stripping off their clothes, they’d sent a father and his son to find help, but they hadn’t returned. I didn’t tell her that I had run into them enjoying a floor with fresher air. Instead, I went directly past the lockers until I could hear the sounds of children playing as though nothing unusual were happening.
    Before arriving where they’d been corralled—the kids were sitting in a circle, surrounded by fans—I came face to face with another father, a Colombian man with whom I often chatted. He was distracted, staring at the floor with his hands in his pockets, and didn’t notice me until I said his name. He looked in my eyes and for a fraction of a second didn’t recognize me, then I saw a flash of fear cross his face. Didn’t Cathy manage to get out? he asked. I don’t know, I answered. I saw her leaving with your kids when I was coming in, he told me. The tornado hit when I was signing out Jorgito. He ran his fingers through his sweaty mop of hair. Struggling to compose himself, he sent me off to talk to the principal who was further inside.
    All the teachers went silent when they saw me standing there. Aren’t Cathy and the kids with you? the principal asked without getting up from the bench where she was sitting. She opened the gigantic purse she always carried and took out her mobile phone, handing it straight to me. Call your house, she told me—maybe she was already safe when all hell broke loose.
    Cell phones were still a novelty in those days: once I had it in my hands I didn’t know how to use it. She told me I had to punch in the number then press the green button, but that to get a signal I had to go upstairs, as close to the ground floor as possible; down below, here among the furnaces and heating ducts, there was no way to get through to anybody. The pained looks that followed me as I made my way out of there made it completely clear: none of them harbored the least hope that my family had made it home before the tornado struck.
    With more resignation than anguish, I walked back through the outlandish scene in the hallway. Now it came to me that I had needed to go to the bathroom for ages now, but all the pent-up tension in my body had prevented me from paying this any mind. Not wanting to run into another orgy, I went up to the next floor to find a men’s room. I had to wait in a long line to take a crap in an overtaxed toilet. As I flushed, I had my first clear inkling that I might well no longer have a family; that my whole emotional universe had been shot to hell while I was reading a handful of poems by Rubén Darío that none of my students would ever remember.
    I walked on upstairs, no longer in any hurry, thinking over, for example, how difficult it was going to be to break the news to my parents that I was suddenly a widower and their grandchildren were no more. When I reached the spot where a phalanx of volunteers blocked the way up to the surface, I was already feeling the first stirrings, inside me, of an unexpected sense of freedom.
    I punched in the number for my house and nobody picked up, not even the answering