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The electricity was so pervasive, it eventually coursed into water as well. We couldn’t get any. Water, the very stuff that the Chimu had handled so deftly, that the Inca had mastered after them—labyrinths of it, pulsing through desert like veins through a warm animal—water had stopped cold in Lima. It trickled reluctantly from faucets, thinning to a sullen drip, stopping altogether by late afternoon. When the family above us cooked or bathed, our supply was paralyzed, and our throats would fill with the stench of ripe commodes.

It happened in August, when the garúa squatted over the city the way smoke squats on peat fire. A gray haze locked itself in between Cerro San Cristóbal and the Pacific so that we could see nothing beyond our own walkway. So that a priest approaching his church would wonder if it still flew a cross. It was clear the apus were angry, mocking us from their perches. You say you need water, you miserable olla podrida of pig-farm conquistadors and faithless serranos? Here you are. Take it. Fog.

It seldom rained in Lima. The city hadn’t seen real rainfall for years. Water hung in the air, it pounded the shore, but the kind you could use was rare. Even then, in Lima’s splendid modernity. Even then, with engineers all about. Whatever water there was, we were looking at. It sat in our faces, curled around our hair, wound its tubercular coccus into our lungs. We could not drink it, we could not clean ourselves in it, we could not boil an egg for dinner. But the worst of all worries was this: Lima was thirsty. The bodiless head was approaching. Tac pum.

There was a race to see how much we could collect in our buckets, save up, for all the times the spigot ran dry. Next door in Sandra’s all-American house, ready as her father was for nuclear missiles or an atomic holocaust—his basement shelves creaking with pig—they were having trouble finding enough water to brush their teeth. In our house, things were worse. We had to compete with the people upstairs.

One Saturday, Vicki turned on the faucet, thrust a finger under the trickle, and found herself tingling with electricity, her crisp hair standing on end. Our water had become charged, galvanic, but only at certain times of the day; it would begin about noon, when Nora prepared the main meal of the day, and it would last through evening.

Papi puzzled over it for days, banging tubes, twirling nozzles, poking rubber cables deep into the metal. Eventually he pulled out the reason why. Someone was dangling a live wire into our tubes from the upstairs bathroom, and the someone was doing it whenever we needed water the most.

Our father stomped to our neighbor’s door, with the evidence in his hand. They denied everything. But the next day, our water was back to a magnificent trickle. We took shallow baths in it, luxuriating in the warmth.

I went to bed cheered that night, feeling things had taken a turn for the better. My parents had gone to a wedding. Nora had made us flan, kissed with anise and doused in burnt sugar. I slid under my covers and watched Vicki’s eyes tick rhythmically across her book pages, until a sweet sleep swallowed me in.

I was jolted awake by a loud thwack at the other end of the corridor. I sat up straight. Vicki was fast asleep in her bed. It was dark, but the eerie glow of the moonlit fog spilled its silver on the floor. My father’s voice skipped down the corridor, over the tiles. “Sin zapatos?” he said. “You’re going out like that? Without shoes?”

“Yes, I am,” came my mother’s reply. “Did you ask my opinion when you decided to get pie-eyed and leave me to wander around that idiotic party like some idiot mujercita … so that I had to get some stranger to take pity on me and bring me home? No. So here’s some news for you, hombre. I can walk the streets of this city whenever I want and however I want to. Barefoot if I feel like it. I am going out.”

“Go out then! Ciao!” and I could hear my father stumble through the room, grabbing at walls.

The front door crashed shut. Then there was