Halley 2012

Beto, a night-shift security guard at a 24-hour gym, wants to quit his job because he is sick. What he doesn’t reveal is that his sickness is actually death, a secret that grows harder to hide as days pass. He spends his nights watching others do what he cannot—people pushing through workouts, a woman applying bright makeup on a bus, and a baby contentedly eating ice cream—longing for a normal life he no longer seems able to lead. To conceal his rapidly decomposing body, he layers on drab makeup and cheap perfume, injects himself with embalming fluid, and methodically picks maggots from his sores. This grim, intimate routine becomes a fragile shield that keeps the fear of his condition at bay.

His strange condition finally lands him in a mortuary, but in a shocking turn, he is resurrected, startling the mortician before he quietly slips away again. After a church sermon, he heads to a pharmacy to buy bandages, where the pharmacist suddenly starts dancing to the music in the background. He cannot join in because his body is too frail, yet the small moment of movement and laughter remains with him, a rare flicker of life. He returns home still buoyed by that fleeting connection, even as he tries to eat pancakes and discovers he cannot swallow them, discarding the food in distress as he grapples with the idea of his own “immortality.”

During this strange liminal period, he develops real feelings for Silvia, the manager of the gym where he works, and she invites him for a night out as a way to bid him farewell before he leaves his job. The prospect of human connection offers him something like warmth, a reminder of the world outside his pale, drifting existence. Yet the day after their brief joy, he confronts a painful, almost clinical moment of self-exploration and harm—an attempt to masturbate ends in an unintended castration. He sits on the bathroom floor, a somber image of resigned fate, forced to reckon with a life that refuses to behave like a life.

Time moves on, and the story shifts to a distant, stark landscape as Beto travels to the North Pole. There, he stares out at the vast glaciers and the open water, a silent tableau that echoes the vast, frozen distance between who he was and who he has become. The journey lingers as a quiet, absorbing closure to a life haunted by death and persistence, a meditation on what it means to exist when the body no longer functions in the ordinary ways we expect.