Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa

knowing that expanse of time wasn’t just a dead space but could be used doing useful, instructive, and even beautiful things, and where many people, for example, went out to work, something that hadn’t been part of her world, because her days, as I’ve already said, were all the same, waking up at two or three in the afternoon, doing the first line of coke and going down to the pool, ordering a burger or a Hawaiian pizza from Harvey’s, with a beer to lessen the hangover and a siesta on a floating mat while she called her lover to find out where they were going that night, and then, it being quite late by now, putting on perfume and nail polish and lipstick, doing a few lines of coke while she chose from the closet what she was going to wear that night, and, finally, waiting with a vodka and tonic in her hand for her lover’s Hummer, ready to go out and tame that wild tiger called night, and so it went on day after day.
    It was hard to get used to a structured life. One night, after she’d been in the house six weeks, she ran away and got drunk in some club somewhere, but that longing gradually disappeared and after a while the prayers and the devotion and being so close to Walter made her strong, they were the armor that protected her from the other Jessica, the handmaiden of Satan. Being with Walter made her believe that life had a meaning, that after the night the sun would come up again and everything would continue in spite of the questions and that strange unreal feeling that things have when you see them in natural light, without alcohol or drugs; every now and again terrifying voices came from the bottom of the mine, the howls of the wolf, my friends, but she was able to contain them, and even ended up the strictest person in the house. It was she who made the Ministry rule that anyone caught high on drink or drugs had to leave, arguing that whoever was in the Ministry should be so close to God that such a thing would be intolerable, and even though Walter, who was very realistic, thought the rule a tad harsh, it was enforced to the letter.
    And so, my dear friends and listeners, time passed, just like in a daytime soap, and over the next couple of years the Ministry of Mercy continued its unstoppable rise, becoming a really flourishing institution; the first chapel had become a model and now there were six more in Florida, where we went regularly, always the three of us, by the way, Walter, Jessica, and I. And we were still recruiting friends and followers of Christ in the prisons, which was my area of expertise, and in some counties in Florida we managed to open evangelical prayer rooms financed by us, or rather, by the neighbors in each county through us, which we called workshops, and in many of them I was the one who led prayers.
    During a visit to the prison in Sarasota, Walter met a black man from Ohio named Jefferson who struck him as a serious, devout man; after putting him in charge of the workshop there, which he ran for seven months, dealing with the inmates himself, he decided to bring him to the house. The crimes he’d been imprisoned for were minor ones, he wasn’t a murderer or a pedophile or anything like that, so it was relatively easy to pay a bond and get him out, and I have to be honest, my friends, when I saw him I almost fell down: he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life, uglier than a farting she-donkey with colitis, I swear, but then the house wasn’t a catwalk for male models, so he was accepted, with a rank similar to mine, insofar as our situation vis-à-vis Walter could be compared, or measured in ranks.
    I was suspicious of him from the start, and I say that in all honesty, because it was obvious that with the success and growth of the Ministry we were all starting to be possessive of Walter, fearing that his unpredictable passions might remove us from the limelight of his love, and that was why we kept watch on each other, and