"I know, I know. Don't expect me to be consistent about this.
What did you do, anyway, with the gear and all that?"
"Superhero sex."
Her eyes open wide at that.
"Like, Batman and Robin slashy stuff? Cool. I mean, what do you
actually do?"
"What's it to you?"
''I'm a nosy cow. It's got me into trouble already."
"We dress up. We play. Sometimes we pretend to fight, you know,
have battles." Hearing it spoken, the secret spilled, Edson
feels burningly embarrassed. "But a lot of the time we just
talk."
"I'm trying to picture Carlinhos in one of those full suits . .
. . "
"Don't laugh at him," Edson says. "And I call him Mr.
Peach. The first time we met, he gave me peaches for minding his car
because he didn't have any change. He watched me eat them. The juice
ran down my chin. I was thirteen. You probably think that's a
terrible thing; you probably have some clever educated middle-class
judgment abour that. Well, he was very shy and very good to me. He
calls me Sextinho." There is an edge in his voice that makes Fia
feel self-conscious, tit-naked in an alien universe. It's their first
row. A motorbike passes the gate. Edson notes it, remembers fondly
his murdered Yamaha scrambler. A few seconds later it passes the gate
again in the opposite direction. Slow, very slow. Edson feels his
eyes widen. He looks up. A surveillance drone completes it buzz over
the shiny new gated estate, but does it linger that moment too long
on the outward turn? He had been so careful in Mr. Peach's car, but
there were always cameras he could have missed, a new one put up, an
eye on a truck or a bus or in a T-shirt or even a pair of passing
I-shades that later got into a robbery or an I-mugging or something
that would have had the police running through the memory. Paranoia
within paranoia. But everyone is paranoid in great São Paulo.
He says, "How long have you been here now?"
"Three days," Fia says. "Why are you asking?"
"You've been talking all that physics—"
"Information theory ... "
"Whatever shit, but I want to ask, have you found a way back
yet?"
"What do you mean?"
"You said it was a one-way trip, there was no going back."
"Well, a quantum mainframe the size of São Paulo U's
would do. Why do you want to know?"
"Because I think they're looking for us." That gets her
sitting upright. Hello Kitty. "In fact, I think they know where
we are. We're not safe here. I can get you safe, but there's one
problem. It's going to take a lot of money."
Bare-ass naked on the pseudo-Niemeyer wave mosaic by the green green
pool Edson holds the towel in one hand and asks the soldados, "Where
do I go?"
They grunt him to the landscaped sauna at the back of the spa. Both
High and Low Cidades know The Man has a morbid fear of age and wreck
and spends profanely on defeating it. No one in the two cities
expects him to live so long, but he has resident Chinese medics and
Zen hot springs for his hilltop pousada. Some sonic-electric field
tech thing holds in the heat. The Man beckons Edson join him on the
hardwood bench. Around him sit his soldados, as naked as he;
stripped-down guns at easy reach on the hot wood: the Luz SurfTeam,
they call themselves. They have surfers' muscles and scrolls of proud
dotted weals across their chests and bellies where they pierce
themselves and carefully rub in the ashes of scarification ritual.
Edson sits carefully, conscious of his shaved genitals, unsure of the
etiquette of being caught staring at your drug lord's dick.
"Son, do we find you well?" The Man is nested in as many
names as his corporate structure. The lower city, where his writ runs
partial, knows him as Senhor Amaral; in the upper city he is
Euclides. Only the priest who baptized him knows his full name.
Layers, pyramids: he is fleshy, rolls of fat tapering toward his
hairless head, shaved as close as Edson's balls. "And the dona,
how is she this weather?" When Anderson died, Euclides the Man
sent flowers and condolences with a picture of Our Lady of
Consolation. He claims to be as omniscient as the Angels of Perpetual
Surveillance, but he does not know that Dona Hortense shredded the
card and, by dark of moon, threw the flowers into the fetid,
Gurana-bottle-and-dead-piglet-choked sewer that is Cidade de Luz's
storm drain. "I hear you've been causing that good lady grief,
Edson."
"Senhor, I would not pur my own mother in any kind of danger,
believe that." Edson hears the shake in his voice. "Could I
show you something? I think you'll be impressed." Edson lifts
his hand. The SurfTeam stirred toward their guns. The Man nods. Edson
completes the gesture and out of the changing room bounds Milena in
her monogrammed top and patriotic thong and socks, soccer ball
skittering like a puppy before her, blithely chewing her gum before
her audience of naked male meat.
Remember what I taught you
,
Edson wills at her as she keeps the ball up up up.
Smiling smiling
always smiling
.
"So, senhor, what do you think?"
After this
, Edson
thinks,
one hundred thousand fans at Morumbi are easy.
"I am impressed; the girl has a talent. Now, she will need some
surgery up top, and I am sure you have that already planned, but her
ass is good. She has a Brasilian ass. How long can she keep it up
for?" The Man slaps the soldado beside him hard on the thigh.
"Hey, you like that white ass? That getting you stiff, eh?"
Slap slap.
I would remember that, ifl were him,
Edson thinks.
"Jigga jigga eh?" Slap slap slap. "Who's got boners,
eh? Come on, show me, who's hard?" Everyone but The Man, Edson
notices. And Edson. "So, son, I am rightly entertained, but you
didn't come up here just to show me your Keepie-Uppie Queen."
"That's correct," Edson says. ''I'm here because I'm
planning an operaation, and I need your permission."
Pena Pena Penal!
The word up and down the ladeiros, running
down the serpentine main street of Cidade de Luz like sheet-water,
rumored through the diners and supermarkets, the ball courts and the
lamp standards where carpimpers hard-wired their arc-welders and
spray-guns. Black cock tail-feathers stuck into the verge mud, poked
through the wire mesh of a front gate, tucked under windscreen
wipers. Stencil-cut roosters sprayed onto shop shutters, curbstones,
into the corners of bigger, bolder swaths of street art; the cheeky,
ballsy little black cock. His crow sounded across the hillside from
the rodovia to the bus station, from the Assembly of God to the Man
high over all: call the boys, the good old boys, the gang is back.
They met in the back office of Emerson's gym among the broken
exercise machines: Emerson himself; Big Steak—could do with
patronizing his own gym; Turkey-Feet with his Q-blade; that fool
Treats because if he had been left out he would have blown the whole
thing; then the car boys Edimilson and Jack Chocolate from the
garage; Waguinho and Furação the drivers; and, honorary
Penas, Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles for stealth and security, looking
simultaneously superior and scared.
"And me," Fia had said. "You used my money, I want to
see what you're spending it on."
"It wasn't your money. Someone had to know how to place the bet.
And some of the guys, they knew you from before."
Edson had to admit, it was a brilliant little scam. Fia had come
banging on his door in the wee wee hours, a look of wide-eyed
astonishment on her face. Edson had been out of his bed in an
instant, bare-ass naked, reaching for Mr. Peach's gun thinking,
Killers Sesmarias pistoleiros
.
"I can't believe it, you've got
A World Somewhere!
"
O Globo 12 ran twenty-four-hour telenovelas, and In the insomniac
hours Fia had channel surfed onto a quantum marvel. ("Everything
happens somewhere in the multiverse," Mr. Peach had said at
breakfast the next morning where they cracked the plan over the eggs
and sausage.) Not just that Edson's universe too had
A World
Somewhere
, but that it was identical to the one to which Fia had
been secretly addicted: cast, characters, and plot. With one
significant, big-money-making difference: the telenovela in Edson's
universe was a week behind. Edson even remembered the cause:
Fia—the other Fia—had explained that it was a strike by
the technicians. It had gone to the wire, but they had walked out all
the same. It had seemed important to her at the time. In Fia's
universe, they had made the deal.
"The same, word for word?"
She nodded, dumbfounded. "Are you sure?"
Big big eyes.
"Information is power," he had declared over breakfast eggs
and sausage.
"How can we make money out of this?"
"That's easy," Fia said. "Boy-love." Mr. Peach
scrambled eggs, unperturbed. For two months now
A World Somewhere
had been working up to a culminating moment of passion and oral
between Raimundo and Ronaldão. If Edson ever bothered to watch
the television read mags follow the chat channels, he would have
known that the most important question in Brasil was
will
they/won't they?
The bookies' odds were dropping day by day as
the Notorious Episode approached: it surely must happen: boy-love on
prime time. As part of the buildup the writers had been holed up in a
hotel under armed guard. Expectation was sky-high, advertising prices
cosmological.
But Fia had already watched that ep.
It was a complicated bet; small amounts liquidated from antiques
donated by Mr. Peach spread around backstreet bookies all over
northern São Paulo, never enough to shift the odds,
sufficiently far apart to break up a pattern. Edson, Fia, and Mr.
Peach cruised the boulevards, swinging coolly into the back-alley
rooms and slapping the reis down on the Formica table.
Edson was so engrossed sending the black feathers and the pichaçeiros
with the cockerel stencils out into Cidade de Luz to summon the old
team that he completely missed the Notorious Episode.
Old Gear summoned his safe out of the floor and fetched sufficient
reis to bathe in.
"How did you know they'd chicken out at the last moment? Were
you holding a scriptwriter's mother hostage or something?"
"Or something," Edson said.
And standing up in front of the old Penas in Emerson's gym,
sports-bags full of reis under the desk, Edson had watched the years
scatter like startled birds. He was twelve again, and with the
rolling back of hope and achievement came the bitter realization that
for all his ambition he had never been able to fly fast enough to
escape Cidade de Luz's gravity.
You end as just another malandro
with a gun and a gang.
"Thank you all for coming. I have a plan, an operation. I can't
achieve it myself; I need your help. It's not legal"—laughs
here:
As if, Edson
—"and it's not safe. That's why
I wouldn't ask you as friends, even as old Penas. Don't think I'm
insulting anyone's honor when I offer to pay you, and I'll pay well.
I had a bit of a windfall. A couple of bets came in. You know me; I
will always be professional." He takes a breath and the room
holds its breath with him. "It's a big ask, but this is what I
want to do .... "
"I see no political objections to you planning an operation,"
says The Man, leaning into the heat so that the sweat drips from his
nipples. "Edson, I respect your businesslike attitude, so I'm
offering you fifteen percent off the standard license fee."
Edson realizes he's been holding his breath. He lets it out so
slowly, so imperceptibly, that the sweat-beads on his thin chest do
not even shiver.
"It's a generous offer, senhor, but at the moment, any monetary
fee hits my cash flow hard."
The Man laughs. Every part of him jigs in sympathy. "Let's hear
your payment plan, then."
Edson nods at Milena, still keeping it up, still smiling at every
bounce.
"You said she was impressive."
"I said she needed surgery."
"I've got her a try-out with Atletico Sorocaba." It's not
quite a lie. He knows the first name of the man there; he's left an
appointment with the secretary.
"Not exactly São Paulo."
"It's building a following. I've a career development plan."
"No one could ever accuse you of not being thorough," The
Man says. "But . . . "
"I'll throw in my fut-volley crew."
The Man scowls. The SurfTeam copies his expression, amplified by
hard. "They're girls."
The Man rolls his head on his sloping, corrugated neck.
"They do it topless."
"Deal," says The Man, suddenly quivering with laughter,
rocking back and forth, creasing his big hairy belly, slapping his
thigh. "You kill me, you fucking cheeky ape. You have your
license. Now, tell me, what do you want it for?"
"Very well, senhor, with your permission I am going to break
into the military police vehicle pound at Guapira and steal four
quantum computers."
Some Notes on the Hydrography of the
Rio Negro and Rio Branco
By
Dr. Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon:
Fellow of the Royal Academy of France
The Rio Negro, or "Black" River is one of the largest
tributaries of the Amazon, joining with the Rio Solimoes some two
hundred and fifty leagues from the Amazon's mouth, three leagues
beneath the settlement of São José Tarumás,
named after the nowextinct tribal Tarumá, or São José
do Rio Negro. The most striking characteristic of the Rio Negro is
that from which it derives its name—its black waters. And this
is no imaginative or fanciful appellation; forasmuch as the waters of
the ocean are blue, those of this river are jet black. The Rio
Branco, a tributary of the greater Negro, is, as its name suggests, a
"white" river. Rivers in greater Amazonia are of these
types, "black water" and "white water." Beneath
the Rio Branco all the northern tributaries of the Rio Negro are
black water-those to the south are cross-channels connecting with the
Solimões.