100%
My battery is running out so slowly that I’m starting to think my phone will last forever. It’s made of plastic and metal and it’s just a little broken. Sometimes I dream the cracks in the screen fill up with mud and the retina display clouds up, or that my fingers become full of splinters as they slide over the screen. Its material is shattered, yes, but I still think it’s easier to imagine the end of history than the end of my phone battery. I’ve lost my charger, and I don’t think I’ll buy another. Lucía says the battery won’t last forever. I tell her I use my phone for everything, and she says that’s the problem. It’s early, and the Chicano afternoon is starting to fall over us as though hastening our departure. Behind us, they’re painting over the mural Rida drew last June, before the protests.
Lucía takes my hand and brings me to her house. We go up a Spanish staircase and under the sun her translucent skin turns almost reflective, a disco ball at the end of spring. Inside, she makes me an inventory of the things she’ll leave behind in LA: baseball bats, dresses embroidered by sensible girls, a PEZ collection stolen from an old woman who had been friends with Lou Reed in the seventies. While we’re talking, she puts on a new record by some Scottish guitarist, bunches up her clothes into balls, and throws them violently into a purple suitcase.
We talk about things that are unimportant, uninteresting. Lucía insists on explaining her theories, according to which Latin America as a continent was concocted by a bunch of bureaucrats in the United States. She says that the division marked by the Río Grande is an absurd, affected invention by the CIA. Lucía spends all night reading conspiracy theories, and I swear that I once saw her wondering whether or not to storm the Capitol: not for ideological reasons, but for the vertigo of finding herself among her people—the paranoids who speculate, the ones who see what’s coming.
“If you predict the future often enough,” I tell her while she packs eco-friendly deodorants and cotton T-shirts, “you’ll get it right eventually.”
“The difference between my theory conspiracies and reality is two months,” she replies despondently. She watches me turn my phone screen on and off. She points to the fine threads of broken glass and declares: “You’re going to have to make that last the whole trip.” From the Pacific coast to the depths of the Atlantic.
89%
I spent the night at Lucía’s, and in the morning Rida and Tony came to get us. Tony is six-two and weighs about three hundred pounds; he makes up a good portion of our total body mass, and at least forty of our years. He’s handsome, dangerous. When we fall quiet, he takes advantage of these intervals of our puerile melancholy to tell stories about the Gulf War, or the finer points of his youth spent washing dishes at a bar in Brooklyn, where the Italian mafia shot down Ukrainian adolescents for sport. He might not realize it, but his main intertext isn’t Roberto Bolaño, as he’d like to believe, but the kind of B-movie porn flicks they used to sell on 42nd Street before it became a tourist destination: Mad magazines and smuggled erotic fiction, movies about armed robberies and cocaine, everything that tries to depict this universe he once belonged to and which he now sees disappearing into a tangle of immigration problems and feigned racism. We take Tony along for safety reasons, but most of all for his invincible arsenal of stories, which he relays to us every night. Lucía was able to convince him to come thanks to her charm, or because of some mafia shit he might be escaping that I don’t want to know about. If we’re lucky, Lucía says, at night before going to sleep he’ll tell us about his adventures selling marijuana to Larry David’s comics and Playboy models. Tony’s world seems impossible and distant to me. While we’re getting in the car, I ask myself if he’ll ever tell us the truth.
In the trunk, we’ve got 170 books. At least ninety are copies of 2666, forty are The Savage Detectives, and the rest of first editions of everything else. We take turns driving, drinking a Red Bull each, Rida rolling joints that she passes around and that we all reject at first, trying to project an aura of responsible driving. On our way out of LA, Lucía’s old car makes a low, bestial groan, complaining about the length of the journey ahead. Lucía takes three wrong exits and makes a U-turn. For a moment I hope we hit the curb.
76%
A year ago, when Rida was studying in Madrid and the walls of Catalonia hadn’t yet imploded under the weight of their own history, Bolaño’s widow, Camila Gómez, organized an exposition with a few of Roberto Bolaño’s manuscripts. His annotated books and notebooks hung from invisible threads in the Cuartel de Cultura Contemporánea, with a kind of grandiloquent, postmodern disposition that, Rida decided, smothered his mythos instead of working in its favor.
In those days, Rida was reading so much Bolaño that he had begun to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and to feign a stateless extroversion, though even now it’s hard for our shy, Algerian friend to intone several sentences in a row in front of almost anyone. In a moment of neurotic innocence, our voracious expatriate friend went to the manuscript exhibition and took rolls and rolls of photographs of it all. Not one scrap of cloth or piece of paper of Bolaño’s exhibited by Camila Gómez avoided being photographed by Rida; there is not a centimeter of paper that he didn’t capture on his camera or his phone. Rida’s documentation is the genesis and limit of our journey.
Roberto Bolaño’s manuscripts are not available to the public. If any of us wanted to visit them, we would be turned away immediately, no questions asked, rejected before the law. No one can write a proper biography, nor even retrace his steps, because his diaries are hidden from the public. All of Roberto Bolaño’s papers are in the hands of his heirs. For several years, we’ve suspected that the unpublished books which keep coming out are written by a kind of literary algorithm, an AI robot that reproduces his words, his syntaxes, and his nigh-pathetic characters without any of their original charm. Every year, new and worse books come out, written by the apocryphal Bolaño machine.
Looking through Rida’s photos, we discover a false epigraph for The Spirit of Science Fiction. On the manuscript, written in a hardly legible blue pen, it reads: To Philip K. Dick. The books we have in our car, including fourteen first editions, all say the same: To Camila Gómez.
How much of our hero has been revealed? How much is hidden, kept from us? The day we found the forged epigraph in Rida’s photos, Lucía and I set out to steal Bolaño’s papers from the inhospitable, illegible hand of Camila Gómez.
55%
We arrive in Salt Lake City. I can’t tell you what happened in San Francisco or what Tony did in front of those nutjobs from Palo Alto. Suffice to say that some poor Google employee ended up in the hospital, with a broken nose and his blond locks full of funny random craters.
On the road, half of us sleep in Lucía’s car, the other half in a roadside motel. We take turns: in San Francisco Tony and I got the car, and with it a late night between the bars and then the hospital. We went in with the Google dude as far as the security guard, but Tony got worried about my health, my nerves. He said that the notes I take on my phone every day (my obsessive, aphasic diaries) should include what I eat, that everything I put in my body should be accounted for, that if I improve my dietary habits, I’ll improve my standing in the world. While Tony was helping the guy, I wrote down:
“12 cans of Diet Coke. 1 7-up. 4 bottles of water, 1 coffee, 1 Charmander-shaped chocolate bar. ½ a can of tuna.”
If I show it to Tony, he might get angry with me. Or maybe instead he’ll tell me about the time he left his daughter’s boyfriend torched under a bridge in Costa Rica for having said no when he asked him for a favor.
Tony scares me. He feeds and drains my libido at the same time. I can’t write, so I spend the second night taking Adderall, and Rida and I stay up on it while Tony and Lucía sleep. We talk about the war, about the terrible literature that’s being written about the war. Rida reads some paragraphs by Assia Djebar. I tell him I don’t like them; he makes a face at me. He runs his index finger first over the screen showing her PDF and then over my sharp cheek. The room we’re in dissolves and the walls turn into chalk. The smell of roadside hotels is the most rancid smell in the world.
40%
Stealing the work of Roberto Bolaño came up as a joke, whose consequences still do not compute. Lucía says that denying his widow the economic boost of publishing bad manuscripts is a misogynistic joke, and I answer that it’s the opposite. I love widows, I tell her. If I could, I would have been María Kodama, Leonard Woolf, Diego Rivera holding vigil over Frida Kahlo, praying to her as though they were some holy images of Che Guevara in the random house of a Singaporean leftist party. But using a bot to stand in for our last hero, I say to Lucía, in all his eschatological force—that is like stealing the future. The worst thing is, everyone has figured it out. We can see the artifact. The joke is no longer funny.
The plan is to cross the whole country, from the city where we met to New York’s gigantic lungs, to see if the papers are in one of Camila Gómez’s apartments overlooking Central Park. And if they’re not there, we’ll get on a plane to Madrid. And if not there, then Barcelona, Paris, or Italy. And if not there, then to Mexico or Chile or Algiers. Maybe to Israel. We know they must be somewhere. We imagine the papers sitting in a vault in Switzerland, waiting for us next right next to the mathematical functions that can model prime numbers. I think we’re hoping that, if stealing the papers takes long enough, the summer will never end.
27%
I ask Lucía if traveling with men bothers her. If she also feels Tony’s red eyes on her when she’s next to him in the back seat of the car. She says no, that she enjoys the attention. She likes feeling seen. I like to look at her.
We get to Kansas City around nightfall and go to a trucker bar. You can figure out their work schedules by the quantity of red on their otherwise very pale skin, by the places they get freckles where they’re burned by the sun. Those who travel at night aren’t so injured by the daylight, but they do have intense violet bags under their eyes. Rida doesn’t talk to anybody. He drinks dark beer and hides behind the light of his screen in a corner next to a broken pinball machine. Tony makes friends with everyone instantly, talking about boxing, saying he loves football and basketball but hates Mexicans. Lucía and I are off to the side, laughing, nervous, drinking and taking pills while we imagine how to have a less boring, bothersome life. When summer comes around, it opens up a vortex to messianic times, I tell her. Then autumn comes and we have to numb it all little by little, to go back to giving up our gray matter for the sake of the academy.
While Tony’s conversation with the Southern bus drivers is getting louder and louder, we imagine staying on the road for years. We think about what it would be like to be children in the Russian taiga. Lucía speaks, above all, about César Vallejo’s diaries in Moscow, and she says that maybe César Vallejo was in the KGB, but that all the other Spanish-language writers belonged to the CIA. She says that the Latin American Boom was invented by the CIA, as were university Spanish departments like the ones she belongs to, that García Márquez and Borges were cops, and that if someone pushed her, she’d even say that Felisberto Hernández and Idea Vilariño, the pleasant Uruguayans, belonged to the martial heart of the Cold War. I am bored by her theories, and I leave her talking to a fat farmer who seems to be scandalized but who agrees to everything she says. I go for a walk through this wasteland that is a distant suburb of a city called Topeka. I don’t see a single person in the distance: Kansas City is all made of rats and small neon signs that announce the proximity of an airport or a military base. I think that America, as the gringos call it, is beautiful in its way: like an old actress, aging alone, a monster of noteworthy kindness, like Tony.
As I’m walking, I realize that I’m drunk, very drunk, jammed up to my sternum on Rida’s pills and on boredom and on fatigue in my feet. On my phone, I write what happened that day, and my food intake. 2 paracetamols, 1 McFlurry, 4 packs of gum. Night falls very late and I don’t sleep. I stay awake to watch the sun appear behind the mountains. I imagine men in cowboy hats watching the dawn with me, keeping me company, however tacitly. I reread what I’ve written and I decide that I’m remembering things wrong. I also decide I can’t do anything about it. My battery’s getting low and I don’t have time to erase text, let alone correct it. This is the small grace of the road.
16%
There are a million and a half people in this country who live as nomads. Most of them lost their houses in the crisis of 2008. Faced with zero chance of recovery, faced with the near end of the immense landscapes that consume us, of the flaming cannons and the sunken mountains and the dead fauna, they decided it was better to buy a van and live by cutting secret routes through the country until the country, the one the gringos call America, ends. The nomads find a place to park, they barter their labor at provisional garages, they eat the leftovers off other people’s plates. The plan is as utopic as it is eschatological. Most of them are between the ages of fifty and eighty-five. While we gaze out over the steppe, I imagine the secret codes of these old whites, vagrants by trade.
Where once the empire stretched its frontiers west, now there’s nothing left but to carve a provisional path from south to north, to make figures with the path itself documenting this to and fro.
The empire is dead: long live the empire.
5%
We get out of Lucía’s car and throw ourselves into New York. The city is a machine that smells like cooked meat, a stench that reminds me of the place where the Nueva Chicago hooligans meet in Buenos Aires, where the slaughterhouses used to be. In the machine-city, everyone looks synchronized, a barbaric mess of people where all is taken for granted, where everything is part of an atomic clock. Rida looks for Camila Gómez’s address on his phone’s browser. He finds it where the deep web meets criminal records and pirated scans from private libraries.
The four of us sleep in an apartment some friends of Rida’s have lent us—Kurds or Afghans he bonds with over shared traumas. Tony tucks in on an armchair, and the rest of us take the floor. Rida and I sleep heel to heel, fitting together like pieces in a Playmobil box. For four days, the machine city swallows us up like provincial delicacies, melting the asphalt and creating shifting sands below our feet. While it’s spitting out our polished bones, we make ourselves a map and a plan. We don’t steal a single book from any bookstore, nor do we visit any museums. Anyone who loves New York is destined to failure.
2%
We enter the building without asking, at the exact moment when the Park Avenue doorman takes a break. We leave our shoes in the hallway and enter the apartment of Camila Gómez, Roberto Bolaño’s magnificent widow. Tony stays downstairs, keeping watch. When the doorman returns, he strikes up a conversation, talking about Brooklyn in the nineties and reviling today’s world in a hoarse voice. Once we’re in the apartment, Lucía and I hold hands as though this were a preschool game. Rida looks at us, jealous, and above all impatient.
The apartment is not as massive as we thought it would be. On the contrary, it has an austere length that perhaps owes more to the particularities of the city’s real estate than to the extreme wealth of Roberto Bolaño’s editorial tombstone. The velvet armchairs are sumptuous, but they’re covered in inexplicable marks: some yellow, others white. In one, I identify the shadow of a poorly opened fernet. It seems like a cemetery of good taste, and it’s fossilized in time—like us, like our literary tastes and political ideas, frozen the way our Spanish froze the day we crossed the border.
We walk through the living room without touching anything. Rida approaches the family photos, scrutinizing them long and close like he once did The Spirit of Science Fiction, the same way an orphan would see a happy family in a bad Dickens novel. In many of the photos, Roberto Bolaño poses shirtless with a timid smile, with a kind of paternal euphoria that must be hard to fake before the camera. While Rida looks at him, his nose so close to the glass it begins to fog, Lucía crouches to look under the chairs for some papers, some kind of clue. Where would Camila keep the real manuscripts? Where would she hide the keys to the vault that holds our idol’s royal treasure?
Lucía approaches the bed on all fours, hardly touching the furniture, so as not to leave a trace of her presence. While I walk around the kitchen, I hear her from the bathroom, moving bottles around, touching the tubes of makeup and rouge of times past. When she returns, everything in the apartment looks the same, but Lucía smells like expensive perfume and her cheeks look a little redder. The kitchen wallpaper looks white, although at a distance one wall in the kitchen seems to emulate the flight of certain butterflies.
We search the whole apartment without touching anything, as though it were a tiny glass box. We watch dust settle on the walls. We hardly open the drawers, although Rida steals a metal capsule that’s making computer sounds. He swears it’s spying on us. He says maybe that’s where we’ll find Roberto Bolaño’s papers, uploaded to the cloud, digitized by someone. We end up on Camila Gómez’s balcony, smoking something and watching the city and its monstrous park fading in the distance. Rida takes a photo of this millionaire view of Central Park with his third-world phone. We didn’t find the secret papers. We didn’t cause any more trouble. We buried the metal capsule in one of the plants on the balcony, and we threw the plants into the void. 
Julia Kornberg is a writer from Buenos Aires living in New York. Her first novel, Berlin Atomized, was published by Astra House press. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and has published literary criticism in The New York Review of Books, The Drift, Bookforum, and The Baffler, among others.
Jack Rockwell is a literary translator, writer, and editor. His co-translation of Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized was published in December 2024.
Illustration: David O’Meara.
