Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Cibelle asked.

  ‘There’s stuff going on I can’t explain,’ Marcelina said. ‘All I can say is, if you know me, trust me: if it looks like me but doesn’t act like me, it isn’t me. I know this makes no sense at all, but it makes even less sense to me. I’m being haunted.’

  ‘A ghost?’ Tito, her third gay dad, was a specter of a man himself, pale and nocturnal. He knew every spook of old Copacabana personally, greeted them each dawn as he swung back through the streets to his home.

  ‘No, something else. Something that’s not dead yet.’

  ‘You know, there’s a program idea in that,’ Celso said, but the eyes of her alt dot family were slipping away from hers. For the first time they made their separate farewells and left one by one.

  You did not hold me, Marcelina thought. The spirit of maconha waited in the air. In its frame of tenements the sea still held late lilac. The surf was up and the air so still that the ocean-crash carried over the traffic on the Copa and the air smelled like she imagined hummingbirds must: sweet and floral and shimmering with color. A huge pale moon of Yemanja was floating free from the water tanks and aerials. Gunfire cracked in the distance: the little favela of Pavão at the western end of the Copa still tossed and scratched. She remembered a lilac night a lifetime ago; suddenly swept out of her bed by a tall queen from a Disney movie, all swish and swinging diamonds. Come on, get dressed. The three Hoffman sisters had sat pressed in round their mother in the back of the cab as it swept along the boulevards, the dark sea booming. Is it carnaval? Marcelina had asked when she saw the crowd in front of the floodlit hotel, white and huge as a cliff. No no, her mother had replied, something much more wonderful than that. She had pushed into the rear of the crowd. Some of the people had glared and then went, ah! or oh! and bowed from her path; most she shoved past: Come on girls, come on. Gloria and Iracema and Marcelina holding hands in a chain until they were at the front of the crowd. She had looked up at men in uniforms and men with cameras and men in evening dress and women even more glamorous than her mother. At her feet was a red carpet. A broad man with graying hair but the bluest eyes had walked up the carpet to flashing cameras and cheers and applause. Marcelina had been afraid of all the noise and the lights and the bodies, but her mother had said, Cheer! Cheer! Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! The man had looked over, looked puzzled, then raised a hand, smiled, and walked on down the alley of lights.

  In the taxi back she had peeped up the question Gloria and Iracema were too big and shy to ask.

  ‘Mum, who was that?’

  ‘My love, that was Mr Frank Sinatra.’

  Her mother’s face had shone like the women in St Martin’s on solemn novena.

  One moment of silver. The flicker on the screen. Her mother had shown it to her, on the steps of the Copa Palace, in every beautiful old tune she had pumped out of the organ. Marcelina had chased, leaped for it, snatched with her hands until she caught it and held it up, shivering and flowing from form to form, and she had seen in an instant how the trick was done.

  She got her mattress and lightweight bag, stripped down to panties and vest in the backscatter of light from the morro.

  JANUARY 27, 2033

  How to weep, in Cidade de Luz.

  Every new entry in the book requires Crying Cake. Flour, margarine, sugar, nuts, more sugar - the saints have sweet teeth - and a generous glug of cachaça, which the saints don’t mind at all. Bake. Cut into cubes with a knife cleaned in holy water, one cube per invocation. The rest must be left on the cooling tray on top of the front wall, for all the neighborhood. Select a saint. Her I-shades tell Dona Hortense the best for this entry is St Christina (the Astonishing). She prints an image that she carefully snips out with scissors, pastes onto a matchbook-sized board with other Catholic tat ripped from the parish magazine, and decorates the border with plastic beads and tinsel and shards of broken glass ornament from the Christmas box. The icon is then purified with salt and incense. Divination with the Chinese compass gives the best alignment; then the Book of Weeping is opened before the altar, the name and the need written in felt marker that gives a nice thick line, easy to read in the dim of the barracão, and the whole is dusted with farofa, which is then tipped down the valley of the book into an offertory cone before St Christina the Astonishing. Thereafter until the weeping stops, the entry, with all the others for that day, will receive a tear.

  St Christina, be true, prayed Dona Hortense. Astonish me. For my littlest and second-favorite son suffers. He lies in his hammock, and from the flicker of his eyes I can tell he plays games and reads chat on his glasses; the food on his plate goes cold and draws flies; he neglects his deals and contacts and plans: this is a boy of energy and business and determination. I know Gerson - stupid, soft Gerson - slips pills into Edson’s Coke and coffee and they steal his energy, sap his will. Get him up get him out get him around his friends and clients for they can help him. Until then, let me launder his clothes and straighten his papers and fetch him coffee and leave him plates of chicken and beans and rice and tell Gerson to stop it with the pills and instead bring some proper money into the house.

  Early in the morning of the day of the Feast of Nossa Senhora Apareçida Dona Hortense finds her littlest and second-favorite son climbing on the house roof. He is in shorts and a sleeveless T and Havaianas, poking at the geometry of white plastic pipes that surround the solar water heater. Cidade de Luz wears its civic bairro status proudly, but the every-man-for-himself plumbing uphill and down alley and the sagging, crazy-crow wiring - you can still plug into the streetlamps - betrays its favela provenance.

  ‘These pipes need replacing.’ Edson stands hands on hips looking around him. Not at pipes and plumbing, Dona Hortense knows, but at the city, the sky, his world. It’s begun.

  ‘I’ve made kibes,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll be down in three minutes.’

  That night Dona Hortense turns St Christina the Astonishing’s icon facedown and crumbles her Crying Cake as an offering to the birds.

  In the mornings pensioners get special rates at the gym. Edson passes treadmills churning with men in baseball caps and saggy shorts and women in Capri tights and big Ts. Afternoons the soldados of the drug lord come down from Cidade Alta to pump. The Man has negotiated a corporate membership for them. The deal’s good, but they have a habit of leaving the weights at max to look macho to the next user. Emerson is out back trying to weld a broken weight machine, squinting through a square of smoked glass at the primal arc.

  ‘Still taking old people’s money off them?’ asks Edson.

  Emerson looks up, smiles, then grins.

  ‘At least I’m making money.’ Emerson kills the welding gun, slips off his gloves, hugs his brother to him. Little Sixth always was fiercely independent, never needing anyone’s permission, but he always brought his plans to Emerson as if for a blessing that Dona Hortense and all her saints could not bestow. There are Skols in cool-jackets in the store refrigerator. Emerson chases receptionist Maria-Maria out of the office-‘all she ever does is chatbots anyway’ - and they sit across his battered desk. Pensioners thump and hiss behind the ripple glass.

  ‘So.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. It’s time, isn’t it? Everything’s time. It’s like, I’m back again. Does that make sense? I was away, somewhere, like on holiday in my own house, and now I’m back again and it’s like it was spring and now it’s summer.’

  Emerson doesn’t say, It’s been three and a half months. Nor does he say any stupid talk-show shit like, I don’t think I can ever understand what she meant to you. Emerson recalls how he felt when Anderson was killed. He had been up in the favela working on a newlywed floor on the top of an apartment block. They worked together: bricklayer and electrician, brothers Oliveira. Then the fireworks went up all around like a saint’s day. Police. Out on the steep ladeiros The Man’s foot soldiers had dumped I-shades, cash cards, arfided valuables - anything that might betray their location to the Ange
ls of Perpetual Surveillance. The police stun drones swarmed in over Cidade Alta like black vultures. Already gunfire was rattling around the intersections where Cidade Alta grew out of Cidade de Luz. Anderson had gone to pick up electrical tape. Anderson had been caught out there. Firing everywhere now. Nowhere to run from it. Nowhere to go but stay on this roof. He’d called Anderson to tell him to get out, get home, get down to Luz, and if you can’t get out, get in, anywhere with a door and walls. No answer; the police had shut down the network. Scared now. He’d done a locate on Anderson’s I-shades. The seek function was accurate to millimeters. The center of Anderson’s I-shades was resting eight centimeters above ground level. That is the height of the bridge of a nose of a head lying sideways on the street. That was how Emerson had found him, in a great dark lake of drying blood. He had looked so startled, so annoyed. The police tried to make him out to be a soldado. Outrage from the Cidade de Luz District Council forced an admission that Anderson had been caught in crossfire trying to find safety. It was much as anyone could hope for. A platitude to add to the stumbling well-wishes of friends and neighbors. Words were not sufficient, so they resorted to platitudes, trusting that Dona Hortense and her five surviving sons would read the unsay-able truth behind them. Sometimes only platitudes are enough.

  Edson says, ‘I need to ask you something.’

  Emerson has learned to be wary of questions with preludes, but he says, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Was there a video?’

  ‘What do you mean? Like . . .’

  ‘Take Out the Trash. Did you see one?’

  ‘I don’t watch that kind of thing.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘I haven’t heard.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  Again, he hears the shudder in Edson’s breath.

  ‘It was a Q-blade, so everyone automatically thinks, Take Out the Trash. But what if it wasn’t?’

  ‘Go on.’

  Edson twists his bottle in its plastic sleeve on Emerson’s desk.

  ‘The last time I saw her, at Todos os Santos, when the gay guy tried to scare me off, she was talking to some people. One of them was a priest - a white priest. Well, he dressed like a priest, but a lot of white guys have this priest thing. And the night of the gafieira she got called over to some people who were not on the guest list.’

  ‘What is it you want to do?’

  ‘I just want to go down and have a look.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A trash can.’

  ‘And if you find it?’

  ‘Then that’s the end of it.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let it lie.’

  ‘I know, I should. But I don’t think I can.’

  ‘Then brother, you be very fucking careful.’

  The old fit people thud and creak.

  Edson makes his first pass on the wrong side of the road, then turns through the Ipiranga alco station on the central strip and pulls over onto the verge. He can re-create every slo-mo frame of the massacre scene, but now, here, he cannot find it in all the empty blacktop. No flowers, no Mass cards, no edible blessings. He leaves the Yam and walks up and down the margin, grit-stung by fast trucks. An off-cut of tire here, like a snake’s shed skin. A coil of sheared-off steel: street jewelry. He stands where the killer waited, hand out, hitching a lift. Edson extends his arm, draws an imaginary line of division across the blur of vehicles, houses, towers, sky. He feels nothing. This edge-place is too dislocated for anything like memory or grief to attach.

  A moto-taxi stops on the opposite verge. A long-haired woman dismounts. The flowing cars frame her like the shutter of a movie camera. The woman walks up and down the verge. She leans forward, hands braced on hips, staring across the highway. Edson jerks upright. The image is branded onto his visual centers. The fall of the hair; the tilt of the cheekbones; the false-innocence of the doe-eyes, the anime eyes. Her.

  Their eyes meet across car roofs. Heart stopped, time frozen, space congealed, Edson steps toward her. The blare of horns sends him sprawling across the grit. She is running for the moto-taxi, gesturing the driver to Go go.

  ‘Fia!’ The highway swallows it. He saw her on this same margin, this spot where he stands. He saw her dead. Face covered. Logos on the soles of her shoes. He saw them take her away from this margin.

  The moto-taxi weaves into the traffic. The thrall is broken. Edson snaps off a tracking shot on his Chillibeans. He jumps onto his bike, kicks up the engine. She wears a green leather jacket. Green leather jacket and long long hair streaming. He can find those. He takes a scary scary cut across the central strip and into the fast lane. She’s twelve cars ahead of him, shifting lanes. Edson’s Yamaha can outrun anything on this highway; dodging between biodiesel trucks on the Santos convoy, he closes the gap. She glances over her shoulder; her hair whips across her face. It’s me, me! Edson screams into the slipstream. She punches the rider on the back, jerks her thumb forward, then right. The rider bends over the throttle; the bike takes off like a fighter. Edson’s right behind it. She told him she never rode pillion. The sudden slowdown almost sends him into the back of a school minibus. One of São Paulo’s endemic road-locks. He’s lost her. Edson cruises up the line of stationary traffic. She’s not in this line. He walks the scrambler between two cars, so close to the big RAV that the driver yells at him, Mind the chrome, favelado. Not in the center lane. Not in the inside lane. Where? He sees green leather accelerating up the off-ramp from the opposite side of the highway. Caught him with his own trick. But he knows where that road leads: Mother of Trash, Todos os Santos.

  ‘Take it.’ Mr Peach offers the gun handle first to Sextinho. It’s a handsome, cocky piece he keeps in his bedside cabinet, for the night when the indentured bio-farm workers above and the housing projects below meet and the world breaks over Fazenda Alvaranga.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘It’s easy, I’ve shown you; this, this, and you’re ready. Just take the fucking thing.’

  He never swears. Mr Peach never swears. ‘I’m sorry . . .’ He presses hand to head. ‘It’s just you don’t know what you’re doing. So take the fucking gun.’

  Edson lifts the bone handle in limp fingers. It’s much heavier than he imagined. He understands now what the boys see in these pieces, the sexy metal, the potency. He stashes it away quickly in his bag. Dona Hortense must never find it. It would be a nail in her heart to see her littlest and second-favorite son gone to the gun. Quickly, he says, ‘You’ve seen the video, what do you think that was?’

  ‘A ghost,’ says Mr Peach.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ Edson says.

  ‘I do,’ says Mr Peach. ‘The most real things there are, ghosts. Take the gun, Sextinho, and please, please, querida, look after yourself.’

  That evening in his hammock Edson takes a fistful of pills and invents a new self: Bisbilhotinho, Little Snoop the private dick. He is polite and quite slow spoken. He plans everything carefully and moves slowly and deliberately so that people will make no mistake about his seriousness. He always leaves himself a clear way out. He deals with killers. Little Snoop is a young personality and has yet to spread wide his wings and flash the colors hidden there, but Edson likes him, can see where Little Snoop might surprise him.

  ‘You’re going where?’ Petty Cash says as Bisbilhotinho trades identities with him. ‘Hey, I’m not so sure about this; if you get killed I’m dead.’

  ‘Then you get to inherit my clients,’ Little Snoop says.

  ‘What clients?’ Petty Cash calls after him.

  It’s a risk, leaving the bike with all its engine parts in place, but he may need to get away fast. He’s paid two different kids well to mind it, with more on his return. They’ll keep an eye on each other. Todos os Santos at night is a blazing city. Truck headlights dip and veer as they plow the rutted road into the heart of the Our Lady of Tras
h. Garbage fires smolder; kids gather around burning oil drums stirring the flames with broken planks. Churrasceiros tend their small braziers, charcoals red under white, flyaway ash. Boys shoot pool under clip-on neons in tattered lanchonetes. Edson can see the guns tucked in the backs of their baggies, like his own. But it doesn’t make him feel safe at all. Heads turn as he works his way up the spiral road. Atom Shop is closed.

  The bar is jammed with customers watching football on a big screen. Little Snoop orders a Coke and shows the video grab to the barman. Edson has watched the clip so many times it has become a visual prayer: her face turning away from him as the moto-taxi accelerates into the traffic.

  ‘Her parents are worried,’ he says to the barman.

  ‘I’d be too, if you’re looking here,’ says the bartender, a handsome twenty-something. ‘No, I don’t recall her.’

  ‘Do you mind if I pass it around?’

  The fans pass the I-shades hand to hand, a cursory look, a purse of the lips, a shake of the head, a small sigh. Some comment that that is a good-looking girl. Goooooooooooool! roars the commentator as Little Snoop steps down onto the road. Half the bar leaps to its feet.