Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  She had crammed every room and corridor with lights, screens, dials, cut glass, and mirrors everywhere. Cameras lay hidden behind every mirror, mounted in every chandelier and concealed behind every trompe l’oeil capital. They followed every shift of light, recording and projecting it, glossed and reglossed, round and round her body/mind.

  Mother’s mind was not discrete. She had no single thinking place, no ‘brain’; her body served instead. Images infested it, wandering itinerant from screen to lens to mirror to screen to lens to polished plate. Refracted thus throughout her flesh, these reflections were Ma’s thoughts, her mind a mirrored thing.

  Rosa longed to know her mother, but while she lived inside her, her wish would never be granted. Places whose boundaries are not crossed cannot be modelled in the mind. A fish cannot imagine ‘sea’. A tree snake cannot picture ‘forest’. A foetus does not know its mother’s shape. Rosa, living here, lived still in her mother’s womb. She had, as a consequence, no image of her mother. She could no more understand her ma than a bacterium in her gut could know her.

  ‘I am too small,’ she told herself, dispirited.

  She let go her mother’s cool, insensate walls.

  Womb-trapped, friendless foetus, she traipsed through Mother’s ornamented veins, past trompe l’oeil capitals, false doors, false columns and false perspectives towards her hunting ground, turning and turning, up ramps, down stairs, through colonnades hung with stucco grapes, round columns with decorated capitals, down panelled halls hung with dark paintings, spiralling tighter as she approached the hospital, past screens, and cameras, and doors of many colours. The doors were lively, ever-changing: a red swirl, a buttery bleed; greens of a sunlit forest. Some doors were black. Not dark; black, and so silent, when Rosa looked at them her skull felt as though it were lined with felt. Pits and open mouths, she shied away from them.

  Some doors blinded her. Others slipped from view. Some, she was sure, were quite invisible. When she was young she would whirl round suddenly, trying to catch her mother out, and see what she was like. Now she was older, she knew there were no short cuts. Prodigal bacillus, curious microbe, she would discover her mother’s vast nature only slowly, by degrees.

  DAUGHTER

  They drove out to Barra Shopping, entered one of the better malls and followed a filet mignon. She wore a metal watch – first mistake, leather shoes – second, had a camera – third, around her wrist – fourth, which also had a gold bangle round it – fifth. Someone this clueless, you wanted to mug her yourself. She found herself a pivete soon enough because forget malls, these little shits can penetrate palaces; some of them are so small they’ve been known to crawl up the sewers of condominiums and climb out through people’s latrines. Now she was hogging the Amsterdam Sauer window, salivating over some solid sapphire watches. Ajay knew what they were because when you errand for Herazo you pick up all sorts of extraneous trash. Like only last week Hez sent him to take a watch just like that round to some fio-dental-clad samba princess over in Niteroi, Anna-Amelia-something-something and

  suddenly

  the kid’s barrelled into her, ripped the camera from her wrist and shoved her a second time, right into the glass. No reason except maybe he thinks this is too easy, his public deserve more.

  Solid sapphire; unwearable. A moral in there somewhere if the turista was inclined to look which, since her nose had been spread wetly over the plate glass, she was not. Ajay blinked, startled not by the violence so much as the clumsiness. No finesse, this little fart, just shove and split, and it seemed dumb with so many cameras around.

  ‘East Four staircase. Tudo bom,’ said Jorge. ‘He’ll use the ventilation.’ He took Ajay down a different way. A guard – hung over, gaunt, Mr Minimum Wage – watched them dully as they careered through the fire door. They descended a couple of floors on industrial-gothic staircases, all steam and threaded light, Jorge ahead and Ajay tagging, not too fast, not wanting to let on how out of shape he was. He caught up; Jorge was squatting in the shadows beneath a duct suspended from the roof on steel ties. Ajay, out of breath, leaned up against a nearby wall. Jorge held his finger to his lips. Along the vent came scrabbling. Not desperate, not even fast, just steady. Jorge winked: regular route.

  The gauze grille banged open. The boy didn’t even look round, just dropped blind and trusting into Jorge’s outstretched arms. He shrieked and flailed. Jorge dropped him to his feet and punched him in the face. Ajay followed the boy as he spun and staggered. How old? He wondered. Six, seven.

  They took him to the car.

  Prainha’s pretty. Two miles long, steep, narrow, the best surfing beach in Rio. A couple of bamboo barracas, with signs chalked up for caipirinhas, guaranas, fresh-dug mussels. All shut up, it being late and winter, July 10. Moonwolf struck before the city stretched much outside Barra, so nothing’s changed much in forty years; eerie greenish light, and mists, and distant hills like mauve paper crumpled into the pink horizon. Ajay glanced at his watch: eighteen hundred. He got out and checked the beach. Some stoned surfistas played in the wash. ‘Fuck ’em,’ said Jorge, and told the two in the back – no names, and Ajay had started calling them Angry and Dozy so as outwardly to build rapport and really to piss everyone off – to bring the boy, who by this time had a pair of Angry’s underpants in his mouth, this being the sort of humiliation Angry enjoyed planning days ahead.

  Jorge took a gun out from under his bush jacket and handed it to Ajay, a Chilean import, cheap as spit. Ajay knew it. It came with ammo jacketed so thin, dum-dums were kinder.

  ‘Well?’

  Jorge shrugged. ‘Kill the little fart.’

  ‘No need,’ Ajay handed back the gun and from his trouser belt he drew his own weapon: the one Herazo had given him.

  Jorge looked at the piece in Ajay’s hand: olive drab butt and tooled ceramic barrel, like something a child makes from model kits. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Use this.’

  ‘With kids in earshot?’

  Jorge glanced round at the boys, still playing in the surf. They were a long way off. Anyway, witnesses hardly registered with him. Years in the Amazon, torching Yanomami babies in front of their mothers, had given him a taste for showmanship. ‘Needles are traceable.’

  ‘Not when they dissolve.’

  Jorge shrugged, unimpressed. Suspicious maybe. He holstered his gun.

  Ajay tried not to think about it. As long as he got through tonight it didn’t much matter. He wasn’t here for his career. He snapped the safety off. An LED blinked at him: chambered/ready.

  ‘Left eye,’ Angry challenged him, like they were shooting grubs off distant twigs. The real reason being, flechettes don’t make much fuss on entry. Just hypo through and blow the innards. Eyes are different; they’ve been known to explode.

  Jorge stepped back and took a handcam out his jacket. He pointed it at Ajay. Ajay wondered if he should say something. Some sign that he agreed, approved, would do the same himself, great, cool, okay, ’ta legal. Since saying nothing did the same, he chose to keep his peace. Angry and Dozy were holding the boy up by his arms, taking his weight. His feet were just enough in contact with the ground that he could kick the sand around. His jaw was working like crazy. It dawned on Ajay he was trying to swallow the pants, to take down all that shit and salt and smegma, bite through the belt holding the gag in place and scream – what? Some word of power? Some word to make things right again? Even as Ajay raised the gun he knew there’d be nights he’d lie awake, wondering what it was. Merda, most like, Oh shit. But what if not?

  Annoyed, put off, he fired. There was a targeting ROM in the barrel. He hardly needed to aim. The pivete’s head snapped back, snapped forward again. The bridge of the nose was dented. The eyes were crossed, sucked in by the needle’s passage. He looked more stupid than dead. Angry and Dozy dropped him and bent over to get a proper look. The boy let out a fart, shook for a bit, started bleeding at the mouth.

  ‘Hit him again,’ Jorge said.

  ‘He’s dead.’
r />   ‘Bitten off his tongue.’

  ‘Bullshit, he’s dead.’ Too loud, he told himself. Easy. Calm down. He slipped the flechette gun into his pants.

  ‘It ricocheted into his mouth?’ said Dozy, unseemly curious; his first words all evening.

  The boy quit shaking.

  Jorge pocketed the handcam. ‘Arnaldo, get the bottle.’

  Angry flared: ‘No names!’

  ‘S’okay,’ Ajay said. ‘Angry’s better.’ He wished to Christ he could stop shaking.

  Angry Arnaldo unscrewed the bottle, slugged. Ajay read the label. Ypioca, thank Christ – some of the cheaper brands cut a hole straight through him, laid him low for days. Arnaldo handed the bottle to Jorge. Jorge tutted. Handed it where it should have gone in the first place, to Ajay, the new boy. Ajay grinned, deathly, raised the bottle. He wondered if he was supposed to say something. Invoke law and order or some such shit. No one said anything, so he drank. Jorge started clapping. Arnaldo and Dozy joined in. Oh fuck, he wasn’t expected to drink the bottle, was he? He took down another four or five slugs then gave over, spluttering. Dozy rolled forward to save the bottle, gripped it in his puffy hands and drank. Jorge slapped Ajay on the back, said something comradely. Ajay was too busy holding his stomach contents down to listen.

  ‘Give me a hand with the bag,’ said Jorge. He took a bin-liner out his pocket. Meanwhile Arnaldo was cutting open the kid’s shorts with a pocket knife.

  Oh fuck! ‘What’s the knife for?’ Ajay said.

  ‘You’ve a problem?’ Arnaldo sneered.

  Ajay’s mind raced, trying to find some way of stopping this. Arnaldo reached inside the boy’s pants. Ajay wondered dizzily what he did with the bits. He turned to protest to Jorge, but Jorge had wandered off alone, watching the surfistas playing soccer on the beach.

  ‘. . . Oh.’ Arnaldo pulled his hand out like he’d been bitten.

  ‘Has he crapped?’ Dozy breathed.

  Arnaldo wiped his fingers through the sand.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She.’

  Ajay stared at the corpse. She? His head swam. All this for nothing? What would Herazo say? ‘He can’t be.’ He couldn’t believe his bad luck.

  ‘That or castrated.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You feel.’

  Ajay stepped back.

  ‘Castrated then,’ said Dozy.

  ‘Why’s she stealing?’ Arnaldo demanded. ‘All she need do is—’

  ‘Not if she looks like that.’

  ‘She’s only a child, for Christ’s sake,’ Ajay said.

  The others looked at him like, So? Sensing danger, Ajay quit shaking . . .

  Jorge returned. ‘Arnaldo, get a move on. Bag him up. Her. Whatever it is.’

  No complaint from Arnaldo now. He even said, ‘Hey, Douglas, lend a hand.’ So: Dozy Douglas.

  With the new boy blooded, all was smooth between them. That was, at least, the outward show, and Arnaldo wasn’t going to go against precedent just because Ajay had pissed him off. Not when precedent was Jorge, the veteran.

  Arnaldo laid the body in the boot. Douglas slammed the lid. Ajay climbed into the front passenger seat. Jorge flicked the engine on and swung them off the sand onto the beach road, heading north, back to Saúde. At Barra they turned East on the 101. There was a tailback outside the Túnel Dois Irmaos: a Beetle broken down near the entrance, just to remind everyone how stupid it was to tunnel a mountain and forget the hard shoulder. Above the tunnel mouth, the winding, sheer favela streets were bright with bunting, fairy lights, and Big Name signs hung off the undressed walls: Brahma, Demon, Apple, Subaru.

  Moonwolf had all but obliterated Belo Horizonte not five years into its being capital. Sao Paulo too had been more or less razed, and nobody wanted to go back to Brasilia. Rio – forgotten, antiquated – had once again become first city.

  In a world without capitals, Brazil stood out alone and antiquated. But its history was stranger than most, its path into the new age skewed by its brief global hegemony of the old. From the beginning of the Oil Drain, Brazil had not been inclined to follow global trends and lose its nation-status. It went its own way, blitzing Amazonia to make room for a new cash crop, petroleum. The petroleum nut made Brazil, for a short while, the fuel dump of the world.

  That hegemony was short-lived. There were too many better alternatives, and too many other interests developing them across the globe. All patience lost, planes from many nations sprayed defoliants across the blue-flowered basin.

  There was no way Brazil’s outmoded national government could handle two such vast ecological disasters – first the loss of rain forest, then of crops completely in the Amazon – nor stem the leaching topsoil, unless the whole rescue attempt be subject to real-time control. That would take minds far faster and much bigger than Brazil’s human commanders. At the brink of destruction, the Brazilian armed services ploughshared their firepower into fibre optics, a motor-afferent system capable of reacting in real-time to the challenges of the Amazonian catastrophe.

  A web of magic glass! Fio frenético – ‘hot wire’ – bloomed in every town.

  Through all the pain and panic, Brazil had somehow remained a nation-state, with nation-state habits of thought. It had a government of sorts, and politicians, councils, and a capital. Unable to resist old political habits, and learning nothing from the Moonwolf War, the politicians and generals gave their magic web a centre. Trunk lines from Manaus and Tapurucuará and from the towns of Selvas all stretched ritually to Rio, thousands of kilometres to the south, where they looped needlessly round Carioca slums.

  Peak-perched, with world-envied views, Rio’s favelas lived on tap. Since way back when there’d been no slum but had its TV, cooler, ’deck and God knows what else run off Rio’s grid. Hotwire was just another grid, easily hooked and threaded under their earthen floors and loose-bricked alleys, and with it infinite TV – ’ta legal! Brazil had never learned to read, and TV-weaned thought TV all. Old men told tales of Xuxa’s breasts, TVGlobo, MTV. They’d dreamed of VR all their lives, a new world order of escapes, forever just around the bend. But now, war-torn and Wolf-hardened, VR was at last within their grasp.

  The full potential of the stuff dawned soon afterwards. Ajay focused on the windscreen, a mass of red, green, blue. Globo Hotol, Demon, Gates-Perot-Siemens, Apple. Not mere adverts; offices and shops. Necktied pivetes eye-balled in, still crouching in unplastered shacks like the generations gone. Not, this time, for lack of cash – which they had in plenty – but because they spent their time full-VRed into DreamBrasil.

  A land of pliant girls and money! What their granddads had, in short, but, not being real, less easily fucked up.

  The tunnel breeze smelled sickly sweet. Rio’s vehicles did not need the modern alternative fuels any more than petroleum. Here, as in years past, sugar cane alcool candied the air. They weren’t far out the tunnel, heading down Leonel Franca – the sunset past, and damp heat rolling in through open windows – when a shape darted across the road in front of them, smooth and brown and slick.

  Doe-eyed. Raven-haired.

  It took Ajay a moment to register what it was.

  A girl. A naked Carioca girl. ‘Goddamn.’

  He hardly got the word out before she had vanished again, into the solid darkness under the Planetario awning.

  Dozy Douglas saw her, too; he whistled. Ajay glanced at him in the rear-view, fat lips obscenely wet.

  Ajay sneered, folded his arms, wanted to be alone. He wasn’t in a whistling mood. Sights like that girl, darting naked through the night, did things to him. Reminded him of what he’d been and what he’d planned to be. Seeing her, he wanted to climb snow-clad mountains, shed his skin, be born anew, be Buddhist, practice Tao.

  Perfect legs: the nearest he would ever come to religion.

  Carioca girls – his head ached just thinking about them. How did they move so? Like deer or something. Hardly human. Weightless. Skins that gleamed, like if you sank your teeth into
them they’d burst. Twice as many girls as men here. Heaven, if your mind was geared that way.

  Nowhere in the world like this. Other places vainly imagined themselves beautiful. Only Rio delivered. Compared to the Cariocas, Californians were pampered bimbos, Havana’s best mere whores, Milanos – No.

  He didn’t want to think about Milan. He didn’t want to think about Europe. Or Trinidad for that matter. Most of all, he didn’t want to think.

  Girls. Think about girls. Rio had boasted walk-in plastics even before Bangkok. They’d been filleting northern females hungry for Those Great Cheekbones for over a hundred years. All for tourists, nada mais. Sun, samba and diet had seen to the locals already; no glass scalpels ever pricked their black-through-amber skins. Natural selection this. Plateau Theory: genes dancing, hips a-sway to a samba beat. If you reckon human evolution has stopped, you haven’t been to Rio.

  What was it? Not just flesh. They were as various as women anywhere, in shape and height and all the rest. The way they moved perhaps. But even movement can be learned; hipsway, antelopes prancing. Hell, he’d seen dancers move like them – so what was it?

  Dozy Douglas’s words came back to him on cue. Not pretty enough.

  It wasn’t bodies, or even how they moved, that made the Cariocas beautiful. It was their faces. Beautiful antelope faces. Big doe eyes. Cheekbones that cut you. Teeth to crush a sugar-cane in two. Delicate, like pure-bred cats, and tough as insects’ jaws.

  Anywhere else in the world, the kid he’d killed wouldn’t have attracted a second glance either way. Here – God’s little joke – she really had seemed freakish.

  Knowing her a girl, they’d not have shot her. Roughed her up maybe, raped her perhaps, or got him to. But that was why she’d died: she lacked the face, the badge.

  Not pretty enough.

  He knew that he stood out, too, and for the same reasons. Everything about him spelled foreigner, tourist, filet mignon. Sure, black skin was less alien here than white, and the language was a gift, but after only eighteen months he already knew he’d not blend in, not properly, not in a thousand years.