TWENTY-SEVEN
The South SJ detention center where Beto is being held is a defunct office-park.
After checking in at the main desk and going through security, Rigo is led by a stern security guard across crumbling asphalt varnished with smooth diamond lacquer. Through the clear glaze, the preserved remnants of pre-ecocaust Americana are clearly visible. Cigarette butts. A discarded lottery ticket. The flattened blue plastic of a ballpoint pen cap. Shit the work crews didn’t bother to pick up before laying down the sealant.
The security guard leads him into the skylight-illuminated lobby of a satellite building, through a wooden door, into an office space packed with gray cubicles. The place is stuffy, redolent with the potpourri scent of disinfectant and surfactant disassemblers. A susurrus of conversation wafts on the filtered, recirculated air. Subliminal voices. Not that there’s any privacy here. None of the cubicles have doors; escape, and any contact between prisoners, is prevented by law enforcement pherions that result in instant paralysis.
At the end of one row, the guard doses Rigo with an antipher—“You’ve got ten minutes”—then turns and leaves. Rigo heads down the aisle, reading the labels next to each cubicle for Beto’s cell number. The cubicles are small, maybe two meters square, barely enough room for a gel bed and a foam sink/toilet stall. The inmates are dressed in pink sprayon jump-suits, formless negligee-thin crepe that biodegrades in about thirty seconds when exposed to direct sunlight. The ceiling lights are evenly spaced rows of biolum panels set in gray acoustic ceiling tile.
It’s depressing. Some of his mood could be residual gloom from the conversation with Anthea. He feels despondent and eerily detached, the same way he did when Tiresias broke up, leaving him weightless. Spinning in free fall. Except this time, there’s no shuttle to pick him up, to keep him from crashing and burning or losing it entirely and careening out of orbit.
“That you, bro?”
Rigo turns to a cubicle on his right. Lost in thought, he’s been walking blindly, paying zero attention to what’s around him. It takes a second to register the face in front of him.
Beto snaps his fingers, waves a hand in front of Rigo’s nose. “And I thought I was in the fucking twilight zone.”
Rigo ducks into the cube. Takes a seat on the bed and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “This place is the fucking pits.”
“Tell me about it.” Instead of a caged
tíguere
, bristling at his captivity, Beto looks docile, heavy lidded.
“How you doing, bro?” Rigo asks. “You seem a little out of sorts.”
“I’m tired.” Beto yawns. “They got me dosed. I can’t keep my eyes open. All I want to do is sleep.”
“So what happened?”
“They busted my ass, that’s what. Illegal pharming. Possession of unregistered pherions. Intent to distribute. You name it.”
“That’s total bullshit,” Rigo says. The obligatory denial, spoken for the benefit of whoever happens to be eavesdropping.
“According to the assistant DA,” Beto says, “they got evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“Antisense inhibitors. Protosome nucleotide modules. Restriction enzymes.” Beto sniffs. “But it’s all circumstantial. Shit I coulda picked up via casual contact or in the environment. Nothing they can pin on me.”
“How do you know?”
“They wanted me to confess. Name names. Suppliers. Clients. All of which tells me they don’t have shit.”
Rigo’s not so sure. The nape of his neck prickles with sweat. What if the police decide to go after him . . . or Anthea? Question his mother? No way she can lie, even if she wanted to. “You got an attorney?”
“No. I’ve decided to represent myself.”
Rigo suppresses a grimace. “Could be worse, bro.” It’s as upbeat as he can be, under the circumstances.
“Yeah?” Beto’s eye twitches. “How?”
Rigo shrugs. “You could’ve opted to go with a public defender.”
Beto jerks, a short guffaw. “You got a point. Plus, I could look like you. Like I just got the shit kicked out of me, and my life’s over.”
“I had a fight with Anthea,” Rigo explains.
Beto takes a seat next to Rigo on the bed. Appears willing to listen. “I told you to dump that bitch,” he says, commiserating. “Warned you she was trouble.”
“You got that right.”
“What’d she do to you, bro? I’ve never seen you so freaked out. Not that you aren’t a crazy fuck to begin with.”
Rigo sighs. “That makes me feel better.” Strangely enough, it does. He slumps into the camaraderie the way he would a comfortable merengue riff.
“She cheat on you?” Beto asks. “Dirty dick you with some asshole while you were out of town?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Then what’s the problem, bro?”
“It’s complicated.” He doesn’t know where to begin. Doesn’t know how things got out of hand.
“Complicated how?” Beto says.
“She’s not who I thought she was.”
Beto lets out a snort that manages to be both derisive and affectionate at the same time. “Bro, I got news for you. No one is who they say they are. I can’t believe it took you this long to figure that out.”
“Supposedly, her moms is English. On top of that, she grew up in HK—not LA.”
“She’s a
chinita
?”
“No. That’s just where she was born. But get this. Not only is she part English, she’s upper-clade. Probably has an inheritance up to here.” Rigo rocks his head in his hands, hefts it like a bowling ball he’s getting weary of holding.
“So you’ve got it made, bro. Everything you ever wanted. And you don’t even have to work for it. What more could you ask for?”
“Except she doesn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Rigo says. “She hates her moms, ran away from home.”
“Well, no relationship’s perfect. She drop any other bombs on you?”
Rigo unloads the whole sordid story. It comes out less dramatic in the retelling-—more trivial.
“Sounds like she pulled a fast one on you, bro. Like possibly there’s a few more skeletons waiting to turn up.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Makes me wonder about her moms, too. If maybe the two of them are birds of a feather.”
“Her moms?”
“Yeah. I’m starting to wonder if maybe she’s the one who screwed me over. Set me up.”
“Wait a minute,” Rigo says, making a T with his hands. “Time out. When exactly did you meet Anthea’s moms?”
“It makes sense,” Beto goes on, still rapping to himself. “A haut-goût
puta
like that. I should never have trusted her. But I figured she knew you, so I’d help out. Play the role of the Good Samaritan for a change. In return, I get fucked.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rigo says, louder. “I never met Anthea’s moms. I wouldn’t know her if I bumped into her on the street.”
“That gerontocrat
puta
at Salmon Ella’s,” Beto tells him. “The one I arranged for you to meet the other night.”
“Dorit?”
“I guess. She didn’t tell me her name.”
Rigo tries to speak. Can’t. His thoughts feel lopsided—misshapen. His tongue lies paralyzed in his mouth, botoxed by disbelief. “How do you know for certain it was Anthea’s moms?” he finally stammers.
“Because she told me. Said she hadn’t seen Anthea in a while, and asked about her. Wanted to know details.”
“What kind of details?”
“How she was doing. What she looked like. Did I see her often? Was she happy? The usual shit you’d expect from somebody’s moms. You could tell she had more than a casual interest. That it wasn’t an act. She definitely knew you two were an item.”
“Did she say anything else? About herself or what she was doing? How she knew about me?”
“To be honest, bro, I didn’t ask too many questions. Like I said, she dropped your name so I didn’t think anything of it. Plus, I figured it was none of my business. You know?”
“How’d she get in touch with you?”
“Like everyone else. Her IA left a message, asked me to call back.”
Rigo massages his forehead, pushing the wrinkles around. “What I’d like to know is how she found out about me. Where she got my name.” She conveniently left that out of their conversations. The same way she left Anthea out.
“Sniffers, bro. Send out enough of them and you can gather any information you want. All it takes is time and money.”
And Dorit has plenty of both. Twenty years and unlimited resources to scour every nook and cranny of the planet, if that’s what it took. It occurs to Rigo that Dorit has probably known Anthea’s whereabouts for a long time, and decided to do nothing. Was simply biding her time, waiting for the right moment or way to reestablish contact.
“What did you two rap about,” Beto says, “when you were together? She must have said something.”
Rigo shakes his head, playing dumb for the bitcams. No sense letting on that he knows more than he does, even to Beto. “Not much. I mean, we talked about what it was like to grow old, the spiritual legacy of the ecocaust, and metaphysical rebirth. But that was pretty much it.”
“She didn’t ask about Anthea?”
“Nope, the subject never came up.” No way he’s going to risk dragging Anthea into what happened on Tiresias.
“You’re about to get irritated,” Varda informs him with clinical matter of factness.
Rigo brushes off the interruption, swiping the air with one hand as if swatting at a fly.
“Could be she just wanted to meet you, bro,” Beto ventures. “Spec you out, see who’s kicking it with her little girl.”
“Probably,” Rigo says. That might have been part of it, he thinks. Beyond just keeping an eye on him. Making sure he didn’t infect the Tiresias warm-blooded plants. Ironic that the bioenslavement Dorit was trying to avoid was the exact situation Anthea had fled years earlier.
Rigo wets his lips. He can still taste the sweet citrus of Dorit’s parting kiss. Like it never went away, or is constantly being refreshed. Maybe the softwire connection to Tiresias is functional again, remote-linking him realtime to whatever pherion she sprayed into her mouth.
A gift, which I trust you’ll share with someone
else.
Rigo breaks out in hives, starts to itch. So this is what Varda was babbling about. His time is almost up. He stands. “I have to go, man. Antipher’s wearing off.”
Beto stands. “Keep in touch, bro. It was good to see you. I’m glad you stopped by. No shit.” He cuffs Rigo on the side of the head.
“Me, too.” Rigo feels awkward. This is the most affectionate Beto has been with him in years. Since they were fifth-grade kids. “What do you want me to say to Mama? Anything?”
“Tell her that I love her.”
“That’s all?”
“Not much else to say.” Beto shrugs.
Rigo nods. “Okay.”
The chafing intensifies. Fiery. Itchy buboes erupt under his armpits and around his groin, spread to his scalp. Unbearable. “Take care, bro,” Rigo says, beating a hasty retreat. Backing out of the cubicle.
“You, too.” Beto says. “I’ll see you around. In the meantime, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Rigo returns Beto’s grin, feels like a mirror reflecting back what his brother wants to see. Expects.
It’s what he’s been doing his entire life. Trying to please people . . . be the person everyone wants him to be. In the neighborhood, all the way through school, and finally at Noogenics. The grin curdles. Twists into a grimace. Time to be his own person, to do what he wants, for a change, no matter how much it hurts.
“You have a message,” Doug informs Anthea.
She shakes her head, doesn’t want to hear it. Presses a tear-reddened cheek against the window of the pod. Outside, the white-cap water of the bay looks unreal, shiny as acrylic under a veil of clouds.
“‘What’s gone and what’s past help / Should be past grief,’” the IA quotes, still stuck on Shakespeare. “ ‘The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ ”
A train moving in the opposite direction flashes by, obscuring her view. “I liked it better when you were suicidal.”
“ ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,’ ” Doug reminds her, “ ‘Which we ascribe to Heaven.’ ”
Anthea makes a face. “Who’s the message from?”
“There’s no address or name. It’s either unregistered or heavily encrypted.”
So there’s no way to respond.
Anthea blinks, then pushes away from the window. Waits for her eyescreens to uncrumple, and the tingle of adrenaline to subside from her knuckles. “All right”—she might as well get it over with—“I’m ready.”
Dearest Theodora,
Don’t worry. By the time you receive this, I’ll
be gone. Out of your life forever. You don’t
have to run anymore. Not from me, at least.
You’re free. Hopefully, so am I. It’s too late to
say I’m sorry, but I am. I don’t expect you to
forget—but perhaps you can find it in your
heart to forgive. If not, that’s fine. You’re the
one who has to live with the decision, not me.
By the way, I met your
tíguere
. He seems
nice enough. Sincere. You could do worse. Not
that you need my approval.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never stopped loving you. And never will.
Yours eternally,
Mom
Anthea closes her eyes, shutting out the words. Slips off her eyescreens.
Feels the light from the window beating against her lids. Her pulse fluttering as fast as bird wings, struggling to hold her aloft against the crushing weight of her mother’s words.
“I’ll never be free,” she whispers. All she can think of in the blood-mottled dark of the past.
“ ‘Pray you now,’ ” Doug says, “ ‘forget and forgive.’ ”
TWENTY-EIGHT
He’s doing okay,” Rigo tells his mother after the visit with Beto. “Looks good, is managing to keep his spirits up.”
“I knew this would happen one day,” his mother says philosophically. “It was only a matter of time.” She stares at a bouquet of violinias someone has brought in to brighten up and deodorize the room.
“He claims he’s innocent,” Rigo says in Beto’s defense. Compelled to stick up for his brother because for once Beto didn’t get on his case, deride him about being a sellout or a pussy.
“What else is he going to say?” His mother sighs. “He’s not stupid, but he’s not as smart as he thinks, either. I suppose I should be grateful one of you has the brains to stay out of trouble.”
Rigo can’t bring himself to tell her that he lost his job. Not yet. He doesn’t want to stress her out any more than she already is. He’ll give her the news when the shock of Beto’s arrest wears off. By that time, with any luck, he’ll have another job. Can tell her he decided it was time for a change.
“Where’s Anthea?” his mother asks, turning her gaze on him. “I thought she’d be with you.”
Rigo squirms in his seat. He half expected to run into Anthea here. Almost didn’t come because he didn’t want to face her this soon and his head’s still reeling from the revelation that Dorit is her mom. He needs time to think.
His mother’s pupils sharpen, fix him with steely pinpoints. “Is everything all right?”
Rigo slumps back in the chair. There’s no escape. No way to worm his way out of telling her. “To be honest, Mama, I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“We had a fight and she told me things. I mean, she didn’t tell me things that she should have.” It sounds confusing, even to him. Shadows from the umbrella palms outside the window next to her bed vibrate against the walls.
“Everybody has fights,” she says, pragmatic. “Says things they regret. Regrets things they don’t say.”
“She lied to me, Mama. From the beginning. About who she was and where she came from.”
“Are you talking about growing up in Hong Kong, and running away from home to escape her upper-clade mother?”
Rigo’s jaw drops. “She told you?”
His mother sniffs. “Personally, I don’t see what the problem is. What you’re so upset about.”
“She should have told me sooner. When we first started going out and spending time with Malina and Josué.”
“Bullshit.”
Rigo stares, stunned by her
sinvergüencería
. As far as he knows, his mother has never uttered a word of profanity in her life. She’ll probably have to recite a dozen Hail Marys a day for a year, at least, to bleach the stain of sin from the white handkerchief of her soul.
“Just because your
jeva
doesn’t tell you everything about herself,” his mother says, “doesn’t make her a dishonest person. I’ll bet there’re details about your life you haven’t told her. Or me, for that matter.”
Maria Sanchez, Rigo thinks, staring out at the courtyard. He’s avoided telling Anthea how he lost his virginity. It was a long time ago. He was young. Doesn’t want to have to keep living it down for the rest of his life. Once was enough.
“Could be she wasn’t lying just to you,” his mother goes on. “Could be she was also lying to herself, trying to forget what had happened to her.”
Rigo shifts his attention from the courtyard to his mother. “I don’t see why you’re defending her. Taking her side.”
His mother reaches out stiff armed, crimps his fingers in hers. “Because I’ve been in her shoes,
mijo
. I know what it’s like to get dumped by some
pajero
who’s too stupid to know a good thing when he’s got it.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d ever want to see me again,” Anthea says when she opens the door, lets him into her ap.
“Some stuff’s come up,” he says. Her face is puffy, her eyes red. It’s obvious that she hasn’t been celebrating her potential availability for dating these last couple of hours.
“What kind of stuff?” She goes to the kitchen table, pulls out two chairs and sits down in one.
“After I left the hospital,” Rigo says, settling into the chair next to her, “I went to visit Beto.”
“And?”
Rigo shrugs. “He’s pretty much how you’d expect. Trying to put a good face on things, keep his spirits up.”
“How do things look?”
“Not good. He plans to defend himself.” Rigo shakes his head. He doesn’t want to get sidetracked— doesn’t want to dwell on the misfortune of others. “Anyway, we started talking. About the night I visited my moms and called to tell you that I’d be late.”
Anthea gives a tentative nod. “You called me back a little later to say you had to stop by work.”
“Right.” He’s encouraged. She seems willing to listen, hear his side of the story. “Except what I was really doing was running an errand for Beto. I went to Salmon Ella’s to meet with someone. A client of his.”
Her eyes narrow. “The woman.”
“A
vieja
,” he says quickly. “An old gerontocrat, confined to an exoskeleton, who was dying and needed help. The thing is, it was bullshit. She didn’t need help. She just wanted to meet me.”
An uneasy look creeps into Anthea’s eyes . . . like a wild animal trying to decide if it’s in danger. The gnawed, ragged edge of her left thumbnail bites into the end of her index finger. “Why?”
“She was part of the Tiresias project, one of the colonists. I didn’t know that at the time. This was before I learned I was going to be a part of the implementation team.”
“But she knew.”
“Yeah.” Rigo runs the tip of his tongue along the inside of his teeth. “I met her again on the comet. Turns out she wanted to give me a gift that I was supposed to pass on to you.”
Anthea presses the knuckle of her thumb to her lips. “Why would an old woman—a gerontocrat— give you a gift for me?”
“Her name was Dorit,” he says. “According to Beto she asked about you before the meeting with me.”
Anthea’s hand starts to tremble. She gets up fast. Makes a beeline for the bedroom, where she sits on the floor in front of the dresser and yanks open the bottom drawer.
Rigo follows at a safe distance. Watches from two meters away as she takes out the black-lacquered coffin box, puts it on the carpet, then picks up the binder and rests it on the crossed legs of her lap.
“What’s with the skeleton?” he says. Might as well get the story while they’re coming clean.
Anthea glances from the binder to the box. Opens the lid to expose the plaster figure with the black grin and red saxophone. “It’s a Day of the Dead doll that my father brought home for my birthday one year. I named it Jobina.”
“That’s a pretty name,” he says, moving next to her, hoping that now is the time for reconciliation.
Anthea nods. “It means ‘sought-after.’ For a long time a part of me kept hoping that he would show up one day. I don’t know why. After all the trouble with my mother, I guess I wanted someone to care about me. Anyone.”
“What happened to him?” Rigo says. “Where is he?”
“Good question. He was an old military-industrial-complex warrior. He took off when I was only four. That’s all my mother ever said.”
“Do you still hope he’ll come back?”
“No. Not anymore. I’m not sure why I kept the doll. I should have gotten rid of it a long time ago.”
“Maybe you’re not ready to bury him yet,
mami
.” Or whatever part of herself the skeleton embodies.
Anthea nods. “It’s hard to let go. It was the only thing he ever gave me.” She returns her attention to the binder, flips to the first page and traces the fragile stem of a flower with her fingertip. “I stole this from my mother, took it with me on the LOHop out of Hong Kong.”
Rigo joins her on the carpet. “What is it?”
“Favorite plants from her private garden. She collected them during the ecocaust, before they died out.”
“Shit must have meant a lot to her,” Rigo notes. “She rapped nonstop about the past while we were together.”
Anthea fans through several stiff pages, lots of them blank, containing only bits and pieces of the plants that used to be there. Stops when she gets to a faded plumeria flower close to the end.
“What was my mother like?” she says.
It takes a second for Rigo to find the word he’s looking for. “Sad.”
“How?”
“Full of regret about the past. Things she’d done. Hadn’t done. Shit that was extinct, gone forever. At the same time she seemed pathetic. Rundown, like she’d given up and was wasting away.”
Anthea’s mouth crimps tight at the corners. “Did she say anything about me?”
“No.”
“I’m not surprised.” Anthea flips the page to a dried sliver of bamboo leaf. “I got a delayed-delivery message from her this afternoon. After the hospital. It was sent a couple of days ago.”
“Just after Tiresias blew up,” Rigo says.
“I guess.”
“What did she say?”
“That she was sorry. That she still loved me. That she met you and thought that I could do worse.”
“Really? She said that?” Rigo can’t believe it; no one’s ever said that about him before.
Some of the brittleness in Anthea’s lips relaxes, like wax softening under a candle flame. “I think she was trying to make amends. Give us her blessing. Not that it matters anymore.”
“It might. If not to you, then to her.”
“Maybe.” Anthea closes the binder, as if shutting a book on that chapter of her life. “So . . . What are you supposed to give me?”
Rigo hesitates, tries to read her expression. “Are you still pissed at me?” he says, unable to gauge her mood.
“Does that make a difference?”
“I don’t want to make things worse,
mami
.” Any worse, and he’ll have no one to dance merengue with except Varda.
“Do you have to give it to me?” Anthea gnaws her lower lip. “Can’t you just tell me what it is?”
He shakes his head. “It’s better if I don’t. Trust me. It wouldn’t be the same.” Besides, there’s no telling who might be listening in.
“Rigo?” Varda interrupts in a soft cochlear whisper. “I know this isn’t the best of times, but I thought you should know. I’ve pinpricked Ibrahim.”