Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘It’s a chance for us to get closure on something that still festers, fifty years on. We’ve won since, but not when it really mattered, on our own soil, in our own stadium, in front of our own people.’

  Adriano nodded. Lisandra had folded a page from her origami book into two red rabbits, fucking. She jiggled them in the edge of Marcelina’s vision.

  ‘No, I like this,’ the director of programming announced. ‘It’s edgy, noisy, divisive - we’d run an SMS guilty/innocent vote. It’s absolutely Canal Quatro. IPTRB.’

  It presses the right buttons, Marcelina guessed.

  ‘List shows have always performed well for us,’ the Black Plumed Bird said, inclining her head a degree toward Lisandra. ‘All-Time Greatest Seleção would get people talking.’ Celso had folded a sheet from his book into a green penis, which he slowly erected in Lisandra’s direction.

  ‘No, thank you all,’ Adriano said, pushing himself back a fraction from the glass table. Anticipation cracked around the room like indoor lightning. ‘I knew you’d do it. Okay, IRTAMD.’

  I’m Ready To Announce My Decision.

  ‘The universe has ten to the one hundred and twenty calculations left to perform,’ said Heitor, feet on his desk in his corner office, gazing out at the traffic headed beach-ward and the rectangle of gold and blue on blue at its end, like a flag of jubilee. ‘Then it all stops and everything ends and it’s dark and cold and it goes on expanding forever until everything is infinitely far apart from everything else. You know, I am sure I’m developing a wheat allergy.’

  ‘You could say, “Well done Marcelina, congratulations Marcelina, killer pitch Marcelina, I’ll take you out and buy you champagne at the Café Barbosa, Marcelina.”’

  The newsroom was accustomed to Marcelina Hoffman bursting out of scruffy, bitchy Popular Factual into their clean, focused atmosphere of serious journalism like a cracked exhaust muffler, striding thunder-faced between the rows of hotdesks to Heitor’s little sanctum where he contemplated his role as the bringer of bad tidings to millions and the futility of the news media in general. The door would close, the rants would start, the stringers put their heads down or looked up holidays online. So when she came in grinning as if she had done six lines off a toilet seat, small tits pushed out and golden curls bouncing, the news-roomers were momentarily flustered. No yells from Heitor’s office. Everyone in the building, let alone the eighth floor, knew they were occasionally fucking; the mystery was why. A few understood that a relationship can be born out of a necessity not to have sex with anyone who needed to have sex with you. They kept the insight to themselves. They feared they would have to play that card themselves someday.

  ‘Fully funded development and a complete proposal in two weeks moving to a commission green light before the end of the month. Am I fucking hot or what?’

  Heitor took his feet off his desk and turned toward Marcelina, seemingly filling two-thirds of his office, capoeira queen, haloed in success.

  ‘Well done, Marcelina.’

  He did not hug her to his big, bear body in its gray suit. It was not that kind of relationship.

  ‘What are your shifts like this afternoon?’ Café Barbosa: always a sign somewhere. Thank you, Our Lady of Production Values.

  ‘Early evening bulletin and the main seven o’clock.’

  Heitor the depressive newsreader was a media joke far beyond Canal Quatro, but Marcelina knew that his sweet, contemplative melancholy was not caused by the constant rain of sensationalist, violent, celebrity-obsessed news that blew through his life, but because he felt responsible for it. He was Death invited to a nation’s TV dinners. Marcelina, in contrast, was quite happy to pursue a career of insignificant triviality.

  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. I have an appointment with a needle. I go to the Café Barbosa with my team, my alt dot family and anyone else who wants to buy me a beer. You come round, we go on to Lapa. We go back to yours. I fuck the ass off you. But first, I need you to help me.’

  ‘I thought there’d be a price.’

  ‘The commission’s dependent on finding Barbosa. Do you know how I might go about that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t . . .’

  ‘But you know someone who might.’ The standard joke of journalists and lawyers.

  ‘Try this guy.’ Heitor inscribed a pink Post-it. ‘He can be a bit hard to find, but he knows Rio like no one else. Try catching him on Flamengo Beach, early.’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Whatever you call early, earlier than that. He says it’s the beach’s best time.’ Heitor turned away and grimaced as e-mail flurried into his in-box. ‘It’s bread, definitely. I’m going to give it up. You should read this.’ A hardback book lay prone, praying on the desk. Heitor read aggressively, trying to find in printed pages ideas he might weave into an excuse for this mad world he found himself presenting twice a day. He pressed a book a week on Marcelina, who passed them on unread to Dona Bebel. Reading text was so static, so last century. ‘It’s about information theory, which is the latest theory of everything. It says the universe is just one huge quantum computer, and we are all programs running on it. I find that very comforting, don’t you?’

  ‘Try and make it, Heitor. You need a lot of beer and hot hot sex.’

  He lifted a hand, absorbed with the incoming world.

  Her car was not waiting outside on Rua Muniz Barreto. Marcelina looked up, Marcelina looked down, then went into reception.

  ‘Did you call my taxi?’

  ‘Called, came, went,’ said Robson on the door, who was a glorious creature, tall, killer cheekbones, swimmer’s muscles, so black he glowed, and regularly voted Most Lickable in the Christmas Awards. Marcelina could not believe he was natural.

  ‘What do you mean, went?’

  ‘You tell me. You went off in it.’

  ‘I went off in the taxi? I only just got here now.’

  Robson looked at his hands in that way that people do when confronted by the publicly insane.

  ‘Well, you came out of the elevator and said just what you said to me there now, “Did you call my taxi?” And I said, yes, there it is outside, and you got in it and drove off.’

  ‘I think that one of us is on very strong drugs.’ It could be her. This could all be a guaraná and speed flashback from the all-nighter. The pressure is off, you get the result of results, and your brain geysers like Mentos in Diet Coke.

  ‘Well, I know what I saw.’ The people who voted Robson Most Lickable had never spoken to him when riled, when a tone of camp petulance entered his voice.

  ‘What was I wearing?’ Marcelina said. Time was ticking. ‘Aw, fuck it, I’ll walk.’

  Mysteries could wait. She had an appointment with the thin steel needle of love.

  ‘Black suit,’ Robson called after her. ‘You were in a black suit, and killer shoes.’

  SEPTEMBER 25, 2032

  Hot hot hot in skinny-heel knee boots, high-thigh polo neck body, and a cutie little black biker’s jacket cut bolero style, Efrim stalks the gafieira. Cidade de Luz is bouncing. This is a wedding gafieira, and they’re the best. The open end of José’s Garage is now the sound stage; the speakers hauled up on engine-tackles. A kid DJ wearing the national flag like Superman’s cape spins crowd-pleasers. A rollscreen displays a shifting constellation of patterned lights, the arfids of the gafieira tracked through the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance and displayed as a flock of beauty. Kid DJ sticks his fingers in the air, gets a small roar, claps his hands and holds them aloft, gets a big roar. Senhors, senhoras . . . Her entrance is lost in the dazzle of swinging lights and the opening drum-rush of ‘Pocotocopo,’ this year’s big hit, but the audience sees the silver soccer ball lob into the air, freckled with glitter-spots. Milena Castro, Keepie-Uppie Queen, volleys her ball across the stage and back; head tits ass and knees. A smile with every bounce. The V of her thong bears the blue lozenge and green globe of Brasil. Ordem e Progresso. She turns her back to the crowd, shakes her booty. There�
�s a ragged cheer.

  Good girl, thinks Efrim. She’s the first of his two acts on tonight, in his other incarnation as MD of De Freitas Global Talent. But tonight he is in party mode, fabulous in huge afro wig and golden-glow body-blush with a tab of TalkTalk from Streets, his supplier of neurological enhancements, down him so he can say anything to anyone: absolutely flawless. The girls stare as Efrim stalks by, bag swinging. They’re meant to. Everyone is meant to. Tonight Efrim/Edson - a lad of parts - is hunting.

  ‘Hey, Efrim!’ Big Steak is over by the bar, one arm holding up a caipi, the other curled around fiancée, Serena. He owns a half share in the gym with Emerson, Edson’s brother number one. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ From his ebullience and sway, Big Steak’s been loving the hospitality of his own gafieira. Serena Most Serene frowns at Edson. She has glasses but is too vain to wear them. Big Steak’s engagement present to her is a lasering in a proper Avenida Paulista surgery. ‘Looking foxy.’ Efrim curtseys. Serena checks his fab thighs. ‘So you finally got yourself a good act. How long can she keep it up?’

  ‘Longer than you,’ says Efrim, gabby on the TalkTalk and striking the kind of pose you can only get with spike-heel boots and monster Afro. Serena Most Serene creases over. Big Steak waves him away and someone is beckoning him over from beside the gas tanks, Hey Edson, get on over here. It’s Turkey-Feet with a posse of Penas, that old gang of Edson’s, at the back of the garage where they’re storing the knockoff vodka.

  It had never really been a gang in the sense of honor and guns and ending up dead on a soft verge; more a group of guys who hung together, stealing the odd designer valuable, dealing the occasional dice of maconha or illicit download, here a little vehicle lifting, there some community policing, all as The Man up in the favela permitted. It had gone that way, for the younger ones saw no other road out of Cidade de Luz than walking up into the favela and taking the scarifications of a soldado of the drug lord. By then the old Penas were moving on, moving out, marrying, getting children, getting jobs, getting lazy and fat. Edson inevitably followed his older brothers into the Penas, but he had understood at once that it would ultimately be an obstacle to his ambitions. Edson subtly loosened the ties that bound him to the gang, flying farther and freer as his separate identities developed until, like a rare comet, he drifted in shaking his gaudy tail only for parties, gafieiras, weddings, and funerals, a fortunate portent. He was his own gang now.

  ‘It’s Efrim, honey.’

  ‘Efrim Efrim, you got to see this.’

  It catches the scatter-light on its curves like a knife, it fits the fist like a knife, it smells like a knife - but Efrim can see a shiver along the edge of the blade, like a thing there and not there, like a blade made from dreams. This is much more than a knife.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Bought it from some guy from Itaquera, says he got it from the military. Here, want a go?’ Turkey-Feet waves the knife at Efrim.

  ‘I’m not touching that thing.’

  Turkey Feet masks his rejection by making three sharp passes, blade whistling. Cutting air. Efrim smells electricity.

  ‘Look at this. This is cool.’

  Turkey-Feet squats, sets a brick on the oily ground. With the delicacy of a dealer measuring doses on a scale, he rests the handle on the ground, sets the edge of the blade against the brick. The knife blade swings down through the brick as if it were liquid. Turkey-Feet quickly props a cigarette packet under the hilt. The blade continues its downward arc through José’s Garage floor until it starts to slide, to pierce, sliding into the concrete until its hilt finds purchase.

  Q-blade. Yes, Efrim has heard of these. No one knows where they come from: the army, the US military, the Chinese, the CIA, but since they started appearing in funk-bars as the weapon of preference, everyone knows what they do. Cut through anything. Edge so sharp it cuts right down to the atoms. From his sessions with Mr Peach, Edson knows it’s sharper than that. Edged down to the quantum level. Break one - and the only thing that will break a Q-blade is another Q-blade - and the shard will fall through solid rock all the way to the center of the earth.

  ‘Is that not the coolest thing?’

  ‘That is a thing of death, honey.’ He can feel it from the blade, like sunburn. Streets’ pirate empathics have a fresh little synesthetic edge.

  José’s Garage quakes as Kid DJ starts up a new set. Efrim leaves the Penas playing finger-and-knife games with the Q-blade. You will never get out of Cidade de Luz that way. It is time for De Freitas Global Talent’s other act to make its debut.

  ‘Senhors senhoras, pod-wars! Pod-wars! Pod-wars!’ the DJ bellows, his voice reverbing into a feedback screech. ‘Round one! Remixado João B versus PJ Suleimannnnnnn! There can be! Only! One! Let the wars begin!’

  A wall of cheering as the contenders bounce onto the sound-stage. Petty Cash will face whichever of these two wins the crowd’s hearts, hands, and feet. Efrim positions himself by the churrasco stand to check out the competition.

  ‘Foxy, Efrim,’ says Regina the churrasco queen. Efrim grins. He loves the attention on the special occasions when he trots out in his travesti aspect. He lifts the bamboo skewer of fatty, blackened beef to his glossed lips. PJ Suleiman takes João B so easily it is embarrassing: the kid’s got no beats, takes everything down to this vaqueiro guitar riff he thinks is funky but to the audience sounds like the theme from a gaucho telenovela. They pelt him off with empty caipiroshka cups.

  Senhors, senhoras, Petty Petty Petty Caaaaaash!

  Petty Cash had been the perfect alibi - quiet, no gang connections, deeply deeply devoted to the beats trilling out of his headphones. In Total Surveillance Sampa even the most respectable man of business needs an alibi to swap identities with sometime: many were the afternoons Edson had gone about Cidade de Luz and even up to the favela with Petty Cash’s identity loaded on his I-shades while Petty Cash sat mixing beats as Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. Then one day Edson, as he switched identities back, actually listened to the choons dancing across Petty Cash’s I-shades, and for the first time the words crossed his lips: I might be able to do something with that. On that tin-roofed verandah De Freitas Global Talent was born. Now the world will see him shake mass booty.

  Straight up Petty Cash catches PJ Suleiman’s hip-swaying samba paulistano, hauls a mangue bass out of his sample array, and brings in a beat that has the bass drivers bowing and booming in their cabs. The crowd reels back all at once, whoa! Then in midbeat everyone is up in the air, coming down on the counterpoint, and the bloco is bouncing. Suleiman tries something clever clever with a classic black-metal guitar solo and an old drum-bass rinse, and it’s itchy and scratchy but you can’t dance to that. Petty Cash takes the guitar solo, rips off the bass section and bolts on funk in industrial quantities: an old gringo bass line from another century and a so-fresh-they-haven’t-taken-the-plastic-off pau-rhythm. Efrim can see the track lines on Petty Cash’s I-shades as his eyeballs sample and mix in real time. The audience are living it loving it slapping it sucking it: no question who wins this face-off.

  Then God says, Tonight, Efrim/Edson/everyone else you ever were or might be, I smile down from beyond satellite and balloons and Angels of Perpetual Surveillance on you.

  Her. At the bar with a caipiroshka in a plastic cup in her hand and a gang of girlfriends. Pink jacaré boots (what is this she has with endangering the cayman population?) and a little silver snake-scale A-line so short it skims her panties but moves magnificently, heavily, richly. Korr I-shades that go halfway around her head. Space-baby. Her hair is pink tonight. Pink and silver: perfect match for the seasonal must-have Giorelli Habbajabba bag on her arm. She came.

  PJ de Peeeeeepoooooo! Kid DJ announces the next challenger as Efrim moves through the crowd toward the bar.

  ‘Efrim Efrim Efrim!’ The cries in his ear are like pistol shots. When Edson was in the Penas, Treats followed him like a dog around a bitch. Treats’ eyes and manic insistence betray a load of drugs. ‘Trampo�
�s dead, man. He’s dead!’

  Trampo is - was - a dirty little favelado stupid enough to want to look mean who presumably took Edson’s place as the sunshine in Treats’ life when Edson walked out of the gang. Some are born with bullet marks on their bodies, like stigmata. Even in semirespectable Cidade de Luz murder is the most common death for young males. You properly come of age if you make thirty.

  ‘They cut him in half, man; they fucking cut him in half. They left him at the side of the rodovia. There was the sign cut into the road.’

  It would be a slope-sided rectangle with a domed top, a stylized garbage can. Take out the trash. Cut with one of those same weapons that the Penas played with so casually in the back of José’s Garage. That’s how everyone knows the Q-blade. It’s the real star on what has for the last six seasons been São Paulo’s top-rated TV show. No network could sanction a reality program where José Publics compete to join the resident team of bandeirantes to hunt down street hoods. But this is the time of total media, of universal content provision, wiki-vision. A bespoke pirate production house casts it pay-per-view to twelve million pairs of I-shades. Reformers, evangelical Christians, liberation priests, campaigning lawyers, and socialists demand something be done, we know where these people are, close them down run them out of great São Paulo. The police turn a blind eye. Someone has to take out the trash. Efrim would never filthy his retinas with such a thing, but he admires their business plan. And now they’ve come to Cidade de Luz. This is not a conversation for now. Frightening people at a wedding gafieira, and Efrim on the hunt. She is still there, at the impromptu bar made from trestle tables borrowed from the parish center. The priest has more sense than to come to see what is being done with his tables; but the crentes, with their infallible noses for the unsaved, are handing out hell-is-scary-and-real tracts, all of which have been trodden underfoot into alcohol-soaked papier-mâché. Women scoop caipiroshkas into plastic glasses from washing-up basins. Two guys in muscle tops pound limes in big wooden mortars. Get rid of this fool quick. Efrim rolls a little foil-wrapped ball of maconha out of his bag.