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Christian Ives Solis

INTERFERENCE II

It was not coexistence. It was the method. Stability on paper does not protect. It only encloses you with better lighting, lets you see the damage with absolute clarity, and then asks you to remain composed.

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During this stretch, the third body stopped having a specific face and became pure weight. Sometimes it arrives as a case file, as the email that opens on its own, as the case number that lands on your chest like a cold rosary, or as the lawyer writing “this is common” with the calm of someone who does not live inside your throat. On their screen, it is office routine. In your body, it is sacrament.

But the third body does not remain within the administration of the State. It also sits down at the table and arranges the scene without asking permission. That is where Carlota entered. It was not a passing remark. It was a verdict delivered in a hygienic tone, as if Carlota were performing moral maintenance on someone else’s life. The bingo table reorganized itself beneath that judgment: me in the center, the others as committee, the air transformed into a record. I came home with the sentence lodged in my throat and did the only thing that still seemed clean: I named it as a fact. Camilo’s response was perfect in form and useless in effect: “I can’t make myself responsible for what other people say.”

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Correct. Irrefutable. Insufficient. Because the other people were already inside. They had already left a sentence floating over the dining table, and now the task was to sleep with it as if it were fine dust in the lungs.

That was when the full trap revealed itself: the third body does not only judge you, it trains you. It trains you to justify yourself before you speak, to lower the volume of your voice, to sound reasonable, and to measure the air, because in this ecosystem any emotion can become evidence, and any evidence can become a weapon. And meanwhile, you keep holding everything together: the pharmacy at seven in the morning, someone else’s fever, someone else’s paperwork, someone else’s anxiety, and silences with witnesses. Your own fear stays locked away, because in systems like this, the one who falls apart automatically loses jurisdiction over their own story.

That is how a person disappears: not all at once, but through strict discipline. Through the terrifying desire to make everything function, and through the panic of becoming a problem inside your own life. The third body does not break things through open violence. It breaks them through training.

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A faint beep in the kitchen.

The microwave clock flashing without an hour, at 00:00.

Something in the house had already reset itself.

And no one wanted to name it.