Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira

how the old one lasted so long. Whose car’s that? The huge one?” Sofia asked, approaching the black shining and polished seven-seat van of unknown brand in front of the house, looking as it had just landed from the future. “Is it yours?”
                  “No. It belongs to my Uncle Crane,” Mariah explained. “It’s a prototype. They gave it to him to test in Florida’s hot climate.”
                  Dr. Crane spent so much time in South Carolina that his Florida residence was more official than real. Sofia didn’t really understand what the deal was with this uncle. At first she’d thought that he really was Mariah’s uncle, since he had similar physiognomical features.  He’d met her friend’s father in as fortuitous way as Sofia had met Mariah at the university. The chance meeting had taken place several years before, after he’d been widowed. Later, when he learned that Mariah’s father was going to build a new house, he offered to take care of the domotics and wound up designing the house at no charge. Their friendship had strengthened since then. They seemed like childhood friends. When she saw Mariah’s new house for the first time, Sofia was stupefied because it looked like it was more than a century old. The house’s exterior was designed to look old, with the wood facade coming from demolitions and scrapped vessels. Making something look old is easy, her friend had told her. Rejuvenating it is more difficult. The contrast between the aged appearance and the technological interior made the latter more unexpected. Like a century-old vintage Port wine bottle but filled with five year old Single Malt Scotch.
                  Her uncle had resisted making the house look old, but later became an effervescent defender of the idea, to such an extent that architect who designed the exterior felt put off. He first suspected that the NASA geek was being sarcastic because he considered the hypothesis of NASA giving a retro aspect to the next line of space ships.
                  “Well,” the architect responded, “maybe that’s more probable than convincing this neighborhood to let him build a house that looks like a spaceship.” Later, when he realized that this was not the case, he was still troubled because it looked like it had been the engineer’s idea, such was the enthusiasm with which this uncle explained it to everyone. Anthony Crane was one of a kind. “He’s a lunatic who looks like a lunatic. He exaggerates,” Sofia joked in the beginning.
                  “My mother’s plastic surgeon says that he’s not a lunatic, he’s lunar,” her friend corrected.
                  “It’s serious then,” thought Sofia. “He’ll only go there with a transplant.”
                  “Of the brain?” Mariah asked.
                  Sofia thought it was curious that the family collected half of the people they had dealt with for any length of time, for whatever reason, as friends. It was not only the house’s architect who came to visit them—in the case of the engineer, he became part of the family or they would not call him uncle—but all sorts of characters accumulated as persistent visitors, from Mariah’s mother’s plastic surgeon to the church pastor, from a pediatrician of times gone by to the fellow who’d sold them their Mercedes.
                  It’s a good thing people die. If not, in three or four hundred years, we’d have an army. Sofia recognized some of the parked cars. It looks like there’s a party at your house every day, from the number of cars parked out front. Another thing that surprised her was they all had something uncommon about them. When Sofia learned that the Mercedes salesman always drove a BMW, Cadillac or a Lexus—but never a Mercedes, Mariah explained to her, quoting Crane, that “It’s good to know the enemy and even better to sell Mercedes