Interfictions 2 (19 page)

To research this story I climbed volcanoes, traveled in boats through stormy seas, talked to people in hushed, smoky
nakamals
, and once stood on the beach in Sanara, where shoes still float onto the sand. This is a story. This really happened. Or at least, it might have...

Lavie Tidhar

[Back to Table of Contents]

Brian Francis Slattery

Charles Patrice Hodges, entrepreneur:
The swifts gave me the idea, there in the narrow streets of the old city at the top of the hill, overlooking the bay. It was the way the birds rocketed around the houses and through the alleys, through the ruins of the church at the summit. I stood there in the dirt streets as the sun was going down, and I put out my arms, and I swear the swifts all swarmed around me. Like I was at the center of a whirlwind.

Anastasia Godunov, project manager, SMQ Investments International:
We lost track of him for three days, and thought the worst. Stood around the doorway of the hotel near the shore, waiting for a ransom note. Two million, maybe? But then he just appeared, a million little scratches on his skin. Rats? I said. No, he said. Birds. And he wanted to invest in San Marco. What do you have in mind, I said. I was thinking a textile mill, shipbuilding maybe. [
Laughs.
] A party, he said. But San Marco already has a nightclub, I said [
the Good Foot—ed
.], this rickety place built right into the seawall that they'd hollowed out the first floor of, had apartments above it. It was packed every night but flooded once a month. Charles laughed. No, no, he said, a
big
party. The glammest the world's ever seen. I said to him, you realize this country's in the middle of a civil war? He shrugged. Wars end, he said.

Hodges:
The party circuit needed a new destination, and I saw a massive business opportunity in San Marco. The city was so beautiful, so undiscovered. The price of real estate was unbelievable. All it needed was the facility—a spectacular building, a destination within a destination. A hotel, a club, a resort, an everything, put together in one place. So I bought land, see? All along the top of the hill overlooking the city and the ocean. These old places, most of them didn't even have glass in the windows, but people lived in them all the same. Sleeping in chipping plaster, covered in dust. Terrible conditions.

Godunov:
They were refugees, I think. From the war.

Hodges:
When the war ended, I gave them all jobs tearing the buildings down, until there was just the old church at the top and those twisting streets. It looked like a map of the city up there for a while. And I waited, and the sun started to go down, and the swifts were there again, funneling into the church steeple. I broke ground for the palace the next month.

Q:
Ms. Godunov, did you get any other investments in development projects that year?

Godunov:
No. Too risky, everyone said. [
Pause.
] I have to impress upon you just what kind of a place San Marco was. And still is. It had two heydays—two more than most places get—the first one four hundred years ago, the second maybe seventy-five years ago. Everything that was built was built then, and in between, there was no money to keep them up. So the buildings are covered in moss, dripping wet, and vines crawl all over and crack walls, sidewalks, streets. The San Marcans like to say that the jungle outside the city has been trying to eat them for five centuries, but it can't finish its dinner because the San Marcans are too bitter.

Hodges:
In the spring, the whole town bursts into bloom, a hundred species of flowers, and swarms with birds and insects. It's marvelous.

Godunov:
But the poverty. I can't tell you. San Marco is and always was a working port, so it wasn't as bad off as other places. But the murder rate there was the highest in the country, even in peacetime. Drug runners and other smugglers. Prostitution. Extortion rings of various kinds. They used to say that San Marco was the other capital, for the other government, the people in the black market. And then during the fighting—

Hodges:
The town never got hit when I was there.

Godunov:
There was a local joke about that, too: they said it was because nobody wanted the place. And they didn't. Until you built your palace. Everything in San Marco changed after that.

Q:
For better or for worse?

Godunov:
[
Pause.
] It's more complicated than that.

Pato Rochereau Paraguana:
My brother, Pedro, was born on the floor of our apartment. That was when we lived above the Good Foot. It was three-thirty on a Saturday morning when my mother pushed him out. Downstairs in the club, my father used to say, there was a band playing with twenty drummers, two basses, two guitars. Big horn section, lots of singers. It was some party down there. My mother said that my brother didn't cry once. He just hit the floor, put his ear against it, and started taking it all in right then. The band, the cheers from the crowd, the stomping feet against the club's floor. He never cried. But never slept either. Just listened and listened.

Q:
So you knew he'd be a musician early?

Paraguana:
From birth.

Q:
How did you become a fisherman?

Paraguana:
A bet. Nothing else to do. School and I, we never shook hands. I was on my first boat by the time I was sixteen. Pedro was in his first band when he was six.

Q:
What did he play?

Paraguana:
Whatever they asked him to.

Oroyo Batide, bass player, the Silver Diablos:
He could play bass, drums, guitar, guitarr?n, requinto, mbira, banjo, violin. Some trombone. And he could sing. You've heard the bootlegs. So you know. I had only been playing a year when I met him. He was seventeen already. He heard me playing in a
vale callampa
band—a very bad one—and asked me to play with him instead. I knew who he was. We all did. Why do you want me to play with you? I said. I don't understand what you do. And he took both of my hands in his and said, these do.

Buto Longo, drummer, the Silver Diablos:
We practiced together above the Good Foot for a few weeks. That was all. Then we played the Good Foot. They invited us back, and we played there, oh, many times. Soon we had gigs all over the place, in the towns all around here, in the capital. That was when the war was still on, before the peace accords. There were firefights in the jungle, militias going up and down the highway, ambushing each other, and here were us three musicians in a little green truck with all our gear in the back, trying to make a living. The things we saw on the road. [
Shakes head.
] I could tell you some stories. We came across roadblocks all the time. Sometimes they took all the money we'd just made. Sometimes they threatened to take our instruments, but somehow Pedro always talked them out of it. We were just kids, though sometimes the fighters were younger than we were. They'd put the barrels of their guns right in our faces. You could see the rifling on the inside. [
Pause.
] We should have all been dead a long time ago.

Q:
When did you first hear the name of Charles Patrice Hodges?

Batide:
Who? [
Laughs.
]

Paraguana:
Right after the peace accords. A month or two after, maybe. They brought in big yellow wrecking machines and just razed the top of the hill. I thought the war was over, I remember thinking. Why are they destroying the city now? Then they started bringing in all this ... metal and plastic, by the truckload, by the shipload. So many ships. Some days, we had to stay out to sea. One day, a third of our catch rotted in the hold. But when our captain complained, they [
Hodges Enterprises—ed.
] paid us for it anyway. The captain came back, shaking his head and laughing. We ought to catch rot more often, he said.

Hodges:
The metal and plaster was what E.G. Saro [
architect of Apus Apus—ed.
] had called for. They really built the building in Malaysia, I think, then took it down again and brought it over piece by piece and fit it all together in San Marco. Those soaring wings—I had told Saro about the swifts, you see—came off the boat already in flight. Apus Apus was up in a week. It was marvelous.

Longo:
But then for the first nine months, it was dark.

Celine Newton, general manager, Apus Apus:
There were, how to put this, numerous unforeseen obstacles to creating a destination like Apus Apus in a place like San Marco. For starters, there was no beach to speak of, and I told Mr. Hodges that he'd best make one before the first party if he hoped to have another one there after that. Within days it was also clear that we would need our own power supply. Food was a nightmare, at first. The people at Development International were concerned, they said, that we weren't creating sufficient sustainable employment for the San Marcan community. I told them if they wanted us to create something sustainable, they could start by having someone grow some fresh basil. I know how uncharitable that sounds. But I don't get paid to be charitable, and, frankly, I don't think people like being treated charitably. Which is why I disagreed so much with the way that Mister Hodges dealt with people there. They didn't want handouts. They wanted jobs.

Masashi Shimura, relief worker, Global Crisis Response:
I don't think the Apus Apus folks ever understood how dangerous the situation really was. It was common knowledge that the only reason the rebels signed the peace accords was because they ran out of bullets. There were rumors that the army had bombs planted all over San Marco, and if it ever looked like the rebels were going to take the place, they'd just blow the whole city up. Nobody ever found any bombs after the accords, but a lot of people here still think that's because the army just hid them really well, and now they're all still here, ready to go off. If Miss Newton had ever gone to a party at the Good Foot, she would have understood a little better, I think. In that place, people say they dance like they're going to die tomorrow. Because the next day, a couple of them always do.

Longo:
[
Laughs.
] You know, all of these people—the government people, the aid and relief workers—they mean well, they really do. I know that. But whenever they want to talk about how dangerous it was, they always put a story in our mouths. San Marcans say this. San Marcans say that. I'm not saying they're liars. Maybe someone told them those things once. But I never say any of those things, and I don't know anyone who does. I also don't think San Marco has ever been as dangerous as they say. You just have to know who to stay away from. Who not to look at. But it's not hard to learn those things. [
Pause.
] I think they see what they want to see. They make up the story they want to tell. But who doesn't?

Q:
What was the first party at Apus Apus like?

Batide:
Like an invasion. They had lights on the outside walls; searchlights sweeping the sky, back and forth; and this throbbing dance music going boom, boom, boom. [
Accents with fist.
] The speakers they must have run the sound through, I never got a good look at them, but they must have been something. Then a flock of helicopters flew over the city, a fleet of ships landed in the harbor, and the people on them were driven up in jeeps with fresh coats of red and white paint. More jeeps came down the highway from the capital, same new paint job. They were all in by midnight, and then Apus Apus really lit up. My mother watched the whole thing from the roof of our house. Is the war on again? she said. I said no, it's just a big party. And she gave me this look, and I could tell she was wondering what the difference was.

Longo:
Nobody thought it would be like that. The size of it, and how long it lasted.

Batide:
Looked like fun.

Hodges:
Yes, the first party was a massive success, a full week of the best music I could buy, the best food, the best accommodations, for a few thousand people. A small village. It got a little out of hand, you know, the way it's supposed to. More people started coming on the third day, after word got around that the party was good.

Q:
Where did the people come from?

Hodges:
Everywhere. Tokyo. Shanghai. Singapore. Bratislava. Johannesburg. Buenos Aires. S?o Paulo. They couldn't have all stayed at Apus Apus, I don't think. Though I don't know where they stayed if they didn't.

Batide:
We saw them sleeping on the street in the morning, or in the black sand on the shore, looking like they fell out of the sky with their bright clothes and dirt on their knees. Or they'd wander around town, so altered they didn't know they'd left the party. I remember one of them stopped me and asked where the beds were. I pointed back up the hill, and he said—really, my English isn't good, but I'm pretty sure he said thank you, Purple Walrus. And made a motion in the air like he was shaking a tusk.

Alfonse Guerrera Machado, former mayor of San Marco:
Of course there were robberies the first year. People taking advantage. I tried to warn the manager that would happen, but either she didn't believe me or she lost control of the situation, or maybe let it get out of control. But then the second year, there was much less crime. And the third and fourth years, almost none at all.

Paraguana:
Well, the crime went down because Apus Apus started paying people more not to mug the partiers than they'd ever get by mugging them.

Q:
How did they know who'd been doing the mugging?

Paraguana:
They had their own security force, lots of cameras. Which was how they caught us later. Anyway, some of the seediest people in San Marco started showing up in the banks with checks from Apus Apus. I don't know whether to cash it or frame it, one of them said, but of course he cashed it. You could always tell who'd tapped the Hodges fortune. New cars, fancy clothes. An expensive wedding. Other things, too. Lots more smuggling boats coming into the harbor a couple of weeks before the parties. Someone else bought up some jungle not far out of the city, cleared it, and started growing ... basil, I think. All I know is that all that money wasn't making the fish come any closer. But the paying people not to rob—that was what gave my brother his big idea, though he would never have guessed how big it would turn out to be. He might still not even know.