The alien’s name was something unpronounceable in any language spoken on this planet, which suited him fine because he was, to be perfectly honest, having a terrible Tuesday.
He had come for food. Simple enough. The loft on Avenida Corrientes smelled of instant noodles and soldering irons and the specific despair of a man who owns 17 external hard drives and trusts none of them. The nerd was out. The alien was in. So far, so straightforward.
Then he opened the drawer.
Listen to me, because this matters: there are places in the Universe — dead stars, collapsing singularities, the men’s bathroom at a Ramones tribute concert — that contain within them a density of wrongness so profound that the mind simply refuses. This drawer was one of those places.
It had a life. It had geology. Cables lay in strata the way civilizations do, each layer representing a different era of human optimism and subsequent abandonment. The alien reached in — four fingers, bluish, slightly luminescent, the kind of fingers you’d trust with delicate surgery — and pulled out a coil of something thick and grey with a connector on each end that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated the concept of insertion.
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RS-232. Serial. The label on a yellowed sticker said “FUNCIONA!! NO TIRAR.” It works!! Don’t throw it away.
He turned it in his hands for a long time.
Back in his home world — a place of crystalline efficiency, of data transmission at the speed of embarrassment, of connectors so elegant they made mathematicians weep — this object would be displayed in a museum of catastrophic thinking. Here it was in a drawer under a Caloi comic strip calendar from 2003.
He dove deeper.
FireWire. He found FireWire. Six-pin. Four-pin. A cable that connected neither to the laptop on the desk nor to anything else visible in the loft and yet had been kept, preserved, cherished in a plastic bag with a twist tie, as though it were a relic, as though someday there would come a moment — some crucial 3 a.m. moment of absolute necessity — when a FireWire connection would be the only thing standing between this man and oblivion.
The alien sat down on the floor. This was not in the mission parameters.
From the drawer he extracted, in order: a MiniDisc optical cable (the thin one, the one that goes nowhere now, the one that went somewhere once and the memory of that somewhere is apparently worth preserving forever), a SCART adapter that connected European televisions to the collective grief of an entire continent, something that might have been a connector for a Palm Pilot or might have been a small weapon, three USB-A to USB-A cables (impossible, ethically), a coil of coaxial cable like a sleeping snake with delusions of relevance, and — at the very bottom, alone, without any device it could possibly belong to — a single DE-9 connector, male, with two of its nine pins bent at angles that suggested violence.
He held this last one up to the light coming through the window, through which Buenos Aires roared and honked and smelled of facturas and exhaust and the river you can’t quite see but always sense.
Why, he thought — and he was a being capable of holding seven simultaneous thoughts the way you hold seven simultaneous conversations, a being who had mapped three nebulae and read the philosophical traditions of four civilizations — why would any creature keep this?
And then, because he was also a creature who had crossed 11 light-years to break into an apartment and steal leftover milanesas, he understood.
You keep it because you remember what it was for. You keep it because somewhere in the nervous system — biological, silicon, crystalline, whatever substrate carries the ghost of past purpose — there is a refusal. A refusal to admit that the moment when this thing mattered is gone. That the device it connected is gone. That the version of yourself who needed it, who celebrated finding it in a computer shop on Rivadavia at nine on a Friday night, flushed with the specific joy of the correct connector — that person is gone.
The drawer is a tomb, the alien realized. Lovingly maintained. Occasionally visited. Never disturbed.
