THE SOLDIER SENT TO SAVE ME WAS MY BABY'S FATHER

Office Alejandro was leaving his office when Germán approached him. He knew him well—they were almost friends—and Germán was the driver for Brigadier General Gabriel Venegas, the commander-in-chief of the country’s Air Force.

They were inside the military base. “Sir

,

” Germán greeted him with a salute.

Alejandro returned the salute with a smile. “How are you?

” he asked. “Very

well, thank you. The Brigadier wants to see you.” “Okay

, should I take my car?

” he asked, since Gabriel Venegas always made that decision.

Germán shook his head.

Alejandro walked over to the official car and got in, settling into the back seat. He had to follow protocol, and he knew that perfectly well, because even though he was a psychologist, he was also part of the country’s Air Force.

He thought he’d love to flop down on his couch, grab a beer, and watch a soccer game, but he could never—ever—refuse to go when he was summoned. The truth was that for the past few months, the Brigadier General had been summoning him quite often, and he wasn’t quite sure why he was being called in.

He was supposed to be the psychologist—the one who was supposed to listen to his patients—but often, in Gabriel Venegas’s office, the opposite happened: it was Alejandro who was answering questions. The strange thing was that the questions were very specific and repetitive.

At first, he thought it made sense that Gabriel Venegas, given his position, would want to know who the therapist was who would be treating him.

As the sessions progressed, and as he heard that the Brigadier General didn’t say much and kept probing about his adolescence—asking about the places where he spent his free time and even inquiring about his memories from that time—he began to doubt the purpose of it all.

After getting past the three secretaries and a security check, he arrived at Gabriel Venegas’s office.

They greeted each other with the proper formality. Then Gabriel told Alejandro he could sit down.

“Alejandro, I need you to recall whether you ever saw, when you were a teenager, a child being kidnapped.”

Alejandro hadn’t expected such a question, but he attributed it to some kind of obsession Venegas had. “No

, sir, not that I can remember.”

“Think hard.”

Alejandro thought that on that particular day, the Brigadier General must have recalled something specific from his own adolescence; perhaps this disorder stemmed from the fact that Venegas had actually witnessed a kidnapping and, maybe, hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

He was about to type something into his notebook when his superior continued speaking.

“Don’t type anything—I don’t have any disorder. I want to know if you remember the day a 4-year-old girl was kidnapped and if you know the circumstances surrounding it.”

Alejandro froze with his hand in the air.

“Don’t be surprised, but every word you type into your computer is recorded.”

Alejandro was taking in the scene.

“I’m not obsessed with anything, except for the alleged kidnapping of a little girl 12 years ago—we were never able to locate her.” “And

you think I saw the kidnapping?

” “I don’t think so—I know you saw it. The thing is, it wasn’t violent, so it didn’t catch your attention.” “Do you know

how it happened?

” he asked, intrigued. “Yes

, of course. There were three women—one in her 40s and two in their 20s, or maybe younger. They took a little girl by the hand; she’d slipped out of her mother’s arms and absentmindedly grabbed the hand of one of the young women, and immediately the portal opened.”

Alejandro didn’t write anything down, but he thought that Gabriel Venegas was definitely not a sane man, that what he was saying was the product of something that existed only in his mind, but that had never actually happened.—

You have to bring that little girl back to our world,

” he insisted.

The psychologist decided to listen to him, in order to clear his own mind and find a solution to his superior’s obsession. “We tracked

down a video from that time, and in it, you can be seen in a nearby bar with your group of high school friends, but you’re the only one who was looking in the direction where the events took place.”

“Didn’t the girl’s mother scream when the kidnapping happened?

” “No… she wasn’t aware of what had happened until she got home…” “A

woman who wasn’t aware of what was going on went out alone with a little girl?

” Alejandro wanted to know just how far the Brigadier General’s story went.

-“Well, we assume that as she was passing by, one of those women must have slipped a drug into her system.”—“Who

assumed that?”—

“The investigators and the family. That woman has been desperate ever since that day—her daughter is in another dimension!

”—“Sir… if that woman was drugged… could she have hallucinated that whole ‘another dimension’ thing?”—“She

didn’t hallucinate!” “We’ve already pinpointed the dimension—you have to rescue her!

” Her words were so confident they seemed undeniable.

Alejandro decided to go along with the conversation, even though, to him, it made no sense at all. “How

would I go about rescuing her?

” “Did you remember anything?

”The poor psychologist searched his memory for glimpses of his adolescence—some detail that might help him recall the moment the brigadier general was referring to—but he found nothing in his mind. Because even though he’d always paid attention to what was happening around him, a little girl walking hand-in-hand with a woman wasn’t something that would have caught his attention.—

No, I didn’t remember anything.

“You’re going to travel to that dimension; there you’ll make contact with her. Somehow you’ll manage it—you might even fall in love with her.”

Alejandro raised an eyebrow, thinking his superior’s delusions were beyond belief.

He couldn’t report anything without obtaining more evidence—the nation was at stake!

“The plan is for you to present yourself as a psychologist for the Armed Forces. At first, you’d also have to serve as a soldier and be out on the streets to find her.” “How

would I do that?

” “She’s your destined wife; you’re going to find each other.”

Alejandro had no doubt that Gabriel Venegas was unwell, that he was suffering from some kind of delusion. Perhaps he’d gotten lost as a child or had experienced the disappearance of a daughter,

sister, niece, or other relative—and he’d go so far as to say that Venegas felt guilty about that disappearance. “I’m not

crazy. The ‘plane’ is already ready. You can’t tell anyone that another dimension exists.”

The psychologist thought it wouldn’t occur to him to talk to anyone about Venegas’s madness. “Sir…”

he dared to say. “Listen

to me for a moment, without trying to analyze me or conclude that I’m crazy.”

Alejandro waited expectantly.

Had he become obsessed with the movie *Back to the Future*?

Perhaps someone close to him had been kidnapped, and he was mixing reality with fantasy. “Take

a good look at the video I’m about to show you.”

Seconds later, a screen appeared in front of him; until that moment, it had been hidden inside a piece of furniture.

Images appeared on the screen, showing him as a teenager inside a bar, looking out onto the street through the large window. He was accompanied by four or five classmates. He remembered that day because he’d skipped school—he hadn’t done it very often himself, but some of his classmates, the ones who hadn’t even managed to pass the first entrance exam for college, had; they used to skip school often.

He also saw (in the video) a little girl holding hands with a woman in her 30s; suddenly, absentmindedly, she let go of the hand that was holding hers and kept walking, moving a few steps ahead, since the woman with her suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, but he noticed, upon watching the video, that she stopped after that group of three women—one in her 40s and two women no older than 20—bumped into her, and it seemed as though they did so on purpose; and it undoubtedly must have been so, because seconds later, the youngest of the three women took the little girl by the hand, and Alejandro thought he was hallucinating, because he saw what appeared out of nowhere: a sort of fairly dense mist that surrounded them, and he saw an escalator—which hadn’t been there moments before—and the three women and the little girl disappeared, riding up that escalator, which faded away just as quickly as it had appeared.

At that moment, after watching the replay, he remembered—or thought he remembered—that situation; suddenly, our psychologist was confused.

What had seemed absurd just moments before no longer struck him as so.

“I’d like to see the replay again,

” Alejandro asked Venegas.

He really wanted to look for details in that image to determine whether the whole thing had been staged.

Back then, it was easy to create images; with the right software, anyone could do anything.