by Idra Novey
Or no name at all just a web of lines that
resembled letters
Her mind filling them in as
Raquel smelled the bacalaão on his fingers
bit down
into his thick palm
until her teeth broke the skin
until she tasted what lay
beneath his skin
his blood
beginning to
and he began to
she’d never been stunning
never publicly revered
but never weak never hidden
never crazy
gone
the man behind her
yanked at her hair
jerked her head back
if there is a gun in a purse
its bullets traceable to no one
her finger bent
and the trigger went off
Emma felt the ricochet up through her body, the loudness of the blasts detonating in her head. Yet she was still standing, still pressed against the brick wall, still conscious enough to see Flamenguinho’s man pull open the same door and vanish.
Across the alley, a plume of smoke rose from a bag of garbage, releasing burnt specks of plastic and cardboard and a new scatter of roaches. A few meters beyond the burning bag, Marcus was writhing on his back and clutching his leg, and this time Emma did not consider Raquel. She rushed right toward him, but Raquel was already closer and reaching him faster, restrained Emma with her arm, Stay back! she shouted at Emma. I just shot my brother, for God’s sake.
But Emma crouched beside Marcus anyway, tried to undo the knot to get the burlap sack off his head but he kept thrashing and the knot was tight. One side of his shorts was blackening with blood and each time he shuddered the blood darkened faster. We need to make him a tourniquet, she said. We can use my tank top. She started to pull it off but Raquel told her to stop.
Just move back, Raquel insisted, pulling a cotton headband from her purse. As she knotted it around Marcus’s thigh, Emma felt something along her own leg, and thought she must be imagining it from staring so fearfully at the blood pooling around Marcus. But then the rat twitched its hairless tail against her hand and she screamed.
I said get back! Raquel yelled again and this time Emma obeyed. When the ambulance arrived and the EMTs poured out, she stayed where she was. Raquel did all the explaining. With so many people speaking at once, Emma could only grasp fragments of what was being said. Metal things kept snapping on the gurney. Someone finally cut off the burlap sack and she saw the swollen, horrible state of Marcus’s face before he turned away and Raquel ducked after the EMTs into the ambulance and there was nothing to do but mutely take a step back and watch. Emma knew the distance—how far to retreat to be respectful yet still present. To remain available yet silent. To quietly withdraw until she was flush up against the dirty bricks of the alley wall.
Once again, my friends, Beatriz Yagoda has kicked the bunda of Brazilian literature. We may not know where she is, but here at Radio Globo, we’ve just gotten word that she has a new book coming out, so somebody must know where she’s hiding.
The line for a copy is going to be as long as the anaconda and it’s going to sell out fast. So do yourselves a favor, my friends: put your shorts on and get to the Travessa bookstore now. Or you could skip the shorts and get there faster, but if you get arrested or assaulted while reading naked on the bus, you are on your own.
All the images had been there. The only thing Rocha had to do was give each one the space it required. Or so he explained to the interviewers from the magazines who had received the galleys of the new book and kept calling, pushing him to reveal where Beatriz was. He had no problem taking a little perverse pleasure in withholding information. There was an art to the elegant evasion of an answer. But when the questions were about the book itself, how much he’d worked on it with Beatriz, he got nervous. He couldn’t entirely recall what he’d done with the manuscript on his plane ride back from Salvador. In his mind, there was just the rapture of those hours, the thrill of them, all the way up in the sky with his pen, editing each passage down to its intrinsic perfection.
But even that thrill felt sickening now as he stood in the air-conditioned marble lobby of his building with the package someone had left for him earlier that morning. Inside the package, covered in Bubble Wrap, was the cheapest sort of knife, its blade crusted with blood, and the following note:
BOA TARDE, SUGAR DADDY,
YOU’RE ALMOST THERE.
$200,000 MORE AND I WILL LEAVE YOUR FAGGOT FRIEND
WITH THE RED BICYCLE
ALONE.
Crushing the note, Rocha trembled. At well over a hundred kilos, it was not something his body did easily, but his legs were shaking beneath him and he could not stop them. Alessandro had warned him that once the book was released it would only be a matter of time before the loan shark figured out where the cash well was, who was dipping the bucket down and bringing it up full. But the loan shark was a brute and an ignorant fool. A loan shark didn’t know anything about literature, what an editor might be willing to do for an author who made all the days holed up in an office worth it.
Or it had been he who’d been the ignorant fool, thinking he could buy Marcus’s release and then retreat. But it was only the beginning. The preface to who knew how many other abductions—Alessandro this very afternoon, or tomorrow morning, every minute they spent on the street distorted with paranoia.
With Marcus still in the hospital, it seemed cruel to tell Raquel about this new threat. But she was an adult and it was her compulsive mother who had caused all this. The package still in his hand, Rocha reached into his pocket for his cell. The thoughts in his head were coming at such a furious clip that he had to pause and make an effort to focus, to rehearse his own controlled voice in his head.
Roberto here, he said when she answered.
Immediately, Raquel launched into a litany of details: how long it had taken the doctors to drain Marcus’s ear and all the blood tests, the various police figures who kept coming by. Some high-level inspector is in with him now, she said, but Marcus is not up to that kind of interrogation, Roberto. I tried to tell the inspector to let him rest. We can’t have reporters waiting for him outside the hospital and following us back to Rio. I mean, poor Marcus—
Raquel, it’s out of your hands now. You need to work with the police. And who knows? Maybe with all the media attention they’ll feel compelled to actually do something. In the meantime, I’ve received a package with a filthy knife in it. It’s crusted with blood I suspect may be your brother’s.
In the immaculate glass doors onto Delfim Moreira Avenue, opening onto the posh center of Leblon, he apprehended his broad reflection, how intimately it resembled that of his father, who had mostly ignored him after adolescence, except for initiating a few select conversations each year to remind Roberto that his inclinations would leave him diseased, or at the very least devastated and alone.
He heard Raquel start with her sobbing again on the other end of the phone, and told her he had to go but that he would take care of this. There were ways.
Inspector Lucio de Santos: I can tell you’re in no shape for questions, son, but you should know you’re actually a lucky guy. You’ve still got part of the skin there for a new ear. In six months, they’ll be able to sew on a new one, no problem. They’ll make it from your own rib—did you know that? Ever read about Adam and Eve?
Victim: [no response]
Inspector de Santos: I know I’m a stranger, but you’re going to have to give me something. You said you were blindfolded, but wasn’t there some point when they took it off?
Victim: When they hacked off my ear. I told you that already.
Inspector de Santos: But what happened then?
Victim: I saw the machete.
Inspector de Santos: So you must have seen the guy holding it, right? Could you identify him in a picture?
Victim: What for? There are always more
hit men in Brazil.
Inspector de Santos: Well, we have a system of justice, son, and we are doing the best we can to address—
Victim: I’m tired.
Inspector de Santos: I have no doubt you are, son, but when they were bandaging your ear, maybe you saw—
Victim: They didn’t bandage it. They gave me some gauze and a bowl of dirty water and left the room.
Inspector de Santos: And when they came back in?
Victim: I passed out. I told you.
Inspector de Santos: Right. Well, after something like this, it’s hard to know whether you really didn’t see where you were or don’t want to see it again, you know what I’m saying?
Victim: [no response]
Inspector de Santos: Does your mother know what’s happened to you?
Victim: [no response]
Inspector de Santos: Do you have any idea where we could find her?
Victim: [no response]
On the pond beside Hospital Aliança da Bahia, a flock of white herons descended petal-like onto the water. It was the second day that Raquel had come to watch them. There was a bench on the other side of the pond, but a thin gray-haired man was already perched there with a book, and the last thing she wanted to do was get any closer to books and the people who bothered with them. When they got back to Rio, everyone she knew was going to be talking about what Rocha had published and—unless he could buy an end to Flamenguinho—the possible kidnapping of his partner.
To get the book printed in two days and into a handful of select stores, Rocha had paid an exorbitant sum. She didn’t think the title he’d chosen, After the Alley, was what her mother would have selected, but maybe it was better. Her mother’s titles had always embarrassed her with their intentional mistakes of the senses: Have You Tasted the Butterflies, The Warm Green Sound of Your Sleeve. As if her mother thought there was something beautiful about errors and being mistaken. But what was beautiful about accidentally shooting her brother in an alley, or her mother gambling money she didn’t have? What was beautiful about the scabbed-over hole on the side of Marcus’s head?
She wanted to call Thiago but didn’t feel up to hearing his jokes about her aim. Across the pond, the old man on the bench was hunched intently over his book, so absorbed that it was as if he had willed his whole being into the pages on his lap. Her mother had read with that kind of abandon. Raquel had never been able to. She’d had too many reservations about giving herself over that way, risking that some book might obliterate her carefully constructed sense of who she was.
Yet a book had done that anyway, and she’d been the one to print it off the computer. She’d put it into Rocha’s hands, and now everyone she’d ever met was going to know she wasn’t supposed to have happened. How long had it taken her mother to find that error beautiful, or at least the daughter who had come of it?
Raquel reached into her bag for her phone as if the right question might make it ring.
Alessandro had been sleeping beside him for hours, but Rocha was too nervous to sleep. He’d called the two illegal “elimination” services that his sister had insisted upon, though not before she’d berated him for putting their family in such a perilous position over some writer with a gambling problem. He didn’t offer an apology and his sister didn’t demand one. They were not that sort of family, though she was right that he had gone too far with this. His misstep had been with the translator in his hotel. When she told him Beatriz’s new manuscript was there in the room, he’d panted for it like a dog. He’d acted with as little forethought as an animal. Now his name, the love of his life, the full extent of his holdings—it was all exposed.
Disgusted, he got up and shuffled into the kitchen. It was almost dawn. Agitated, he flipped again through the unopened mail from the day before and stopped at a slender blue envelope that he hadn’t noted earlier among the bills. The post office stamp said Boipeba, the smallest of the Tinharé islands off the coast of Salvador. It was the slip of island where After the Alley ended—or rather where the novel ended in his version of it. The scene he’d chosen for the final page hadn’t been the last one in the document, but he’d felt confident that it was the correct place to close the story, and that Beatriz would agree. He’d left the woman standing at the edge of the ocean with her child while the man who is not the child’s father lies asleep, oblivious, in the hotel, the sun reflecting so harshly off the sand that the woman tells the little girl to close her eyes.
He’d been uncertain about eliminating the pages after that without Beatriz’s permission. At the thought of it now, he nervously jerked back his thumb and sliced it along the edge of the envelope. That damned woman. Whatever she wanted from him now, he would ignore it.
Unfolding the letter inside, he skipped to the end of the message, to the name Yolanda. They had disagreed about that early story as well. He had thought Beatriz could get away with only so many tales of self-sabotage in one book, and Yolanda was an adolescent character. He found teenagers even more irritating in fiction than they tended to be in reality. Yolanda in her foolish adolescent pursuit of gloom pretended to be deaf. She gave herself over to this false malady so completely that she didn’t hear, or refused to hear, the soldiers approaching her family’s house, or her father calling for her to run and hide in the silo. She just kept cutting things out of her mother’s magazines, the word “shine” and then a sliver of a windowpane, her hand guiding the scissor blades as delicately as if she were cutting a bandage off a wound.
Querido Roberto,
The quiet here is complete.
You were right, this was the place to let things end.
Please tell Raquel I’ll wait for her.
I’m at the hotel with the yellow umbrellas.
Yolanda
At 4 a.m., Emma entered her room to find Miles snoring in her bed and Marcus’s boxers in the trash can. The location of the boxers was easy enough to alter. She just quietly extracted them from the garbage and zipped them into the inner pocket of her luggage.
Miles’s current location, however, was harder to resolve, and she was exhausted. So many hours of keeping vigil outside the trauma ward, waiting for news about Marcus, had worn her down. Every time a new nurse appeared, she’d asked for an update and for the woman to let Raquel know she was still there. The nurses had all nodded politely. One had finally given in and told her that Marcus was no longer in danger of dying. Finally, at close to dawn, Raquel had emerged. There’d been two surgeries and a blood transfusion, but he was alive and being pumped with antibiotics through an IV. Most likely, he would be asleep until noon. Raquel insisted that there was no reason for Emma to stay, and so Emma had returned, exhausted, to her hotel though everything in her body told her it was not where she was supposed to be.
For so long, she’d willfully sought the in-between. She’d thought of herself as fated to live suspended, floating between two countries, in the vapor between languages. But too much vaporous freedom brought its own constraints. She now felt as confined by her floating state as other, more wholesome people were to the towns where they were born.
She stared at the man snoring in her bed. She’d gotten under the covers next to him so many times, but her legs would not allow it now. They were already backing up to the door. In the hall, just outside the room, she sank to the floor. The carpet beneath her had the stiff, prickly feel of Astroturf. But what alternative did she have? She couldn’t pay for a second room. Her checking account was down to the triple digits, and really, all she needed was to be horizontal for a moment, to lie in this hallway and close her eyes for just a second and continue the scene she hadn’t finished in her notebook. In the evening light, the translator’s hazy specter on the stand had taken on slightly more definition, if only from the extra lights in the courtroom. All she needed to build her case now was for her author to arrive and testify on her behalf, to tell the court…
Senhora, você precisa de um médico? Você caiu?
Emma woke up to somebody’s h
igh-heeled sandals in front of her face. Stiff bristles of grass had imprinted themselves on her cheek and legs. Or no, it wasn’t grass. It was carpet. She was still in the hallway. Looking up, she saw that the sandals belonged to a kind-faced older woman with a São Paulo accent. The woman inquired about the cut above her eye and asked if she should call a doctor.
Thank you, but I’m fine, really. Emma tried to get up to demonstrate that she was neither ill nor insane, but one of her feet had turned into a sandbag.
I’m so sorry, she said as the woman helped her to her feet. This is my room, right here. Emma gave a brisk, confident knock to prove it.
Miles swung open the door immediately, already dressed and shaved and freshly furious. You look awful, he said. Where have you been?
I’ve been nowhere, she replied. Absolutely nowhere.
Then it was noon. The brightest, sight-obliterating Brazilian kind of noon. Emma’s eyes were still adjusting as she entered the trauma ward and finally approached Marcus’s bed. It took her a minute to comprehend the ruin of swollen skin and stitches that had replaced his face. The misshapen right side of his jaw was now a wedge of raw meat.
Close the door, Raquel ordered from the chair.
Emma obeyed, relieved to have a reason to look away from Marcus and busy herself with the things she’d brought for him. Should I put your clothes here, on the table? I also brought your chocolate and some mango for—
He’s in pain, Raquel said. Can you just sit down?
Of course. I’m sorry. Emma clutched her tote bag to her chest, but once again there was no obvious spot for her to put herself. There was only one chair and Raquel was in it. Maybe I should come back later, she offered.
