by E. J. Swift
Pilar is crouched a few metres away, looking for a moment like some kind of statue, a hunched, wingless angel, a peculiar guardian for the city. He likes that idea. Pilar watching over them.
She takes out a pocket radio.
‘You get the best signal up here.’
She switches on the radio. Music leaps out, bright and clear. Pilar leans back, the radio resting on her stomach. Her face in the gloom is beautiful, her expression content.
Mig recognizes the little jingle as one song fades into another.
‘Good choice,’ he says.
Pilar nods. ‘This is the only one worth listening to.’
Mig agrees, but he loves the radio in all its variations. It is the oldest and most constant thing in his life. Wherever you go in Cataveiro, you can hear the radio. You can creep close to an apartment window or simply stand in the street and listen to the competing stations of the vendors. If you have a favourite station, you can follow it around the city all day, tracing the morning show, the afternoon show and the night show through their different listeners. Mig likes to mix it up. He likes the chatting in the morning, the yawning presenters exchanging banter and insulting one another. In the afternoon he catches the news reports – useful to the Alaskan. To Mig they are stories from another planet, places he has never been to, things he will never see, like the ocean, the shipping reports with their peculiar words and sullen tone. But at night, he is all about the music. He likes it all: big brash music to throw your limbs about to, or quiet, shy music that sneaks up on you like Pilar’s hunched walk. Once or twice he has fallen asleep on balconies in the lull of some late-night tune, and woken in the morning to the irritated tones of its owner evicting him.
Pilar is looking at him strangely.
‘If you tell anyone about this place, I’ll kill you.’
‘I won’t tell.’
‘Good.’
‘How’d you get past all the enforcers, anyway?’
‘They’ve got better things to do than worry about me. And they like my songs. Some of them.’
They listen to the radio in comfortable silence. Pilar sings the odd line, not full singing, not fado, a sort of whisper, half-notes and syllables. It sounds like starlight, like Pilar is whispering to the stars that grow brighter and more defined as the city lights go out, and one city shuts down, leaving only time for a single breath, a brief intake of air, before the other city, the city of the nocturnes, begins to venture out from the cracks.
It makes Mig think about all those places he doesn’t know. The world beyond Cataveiro. A funny thought occurs to him: he wonders if, in some of those faraway places the Alaskan likes to scorn, there are people like him and Pilar, perhaps listening to the radio, perhaps wondering about his city, and his country. The idea is at once thrilling and alarming. He wants to share it with Pilar, but he is afraid she would mock him.
Instead he asks, ‘Did you know there’s a war on?’
Pilar steadies the radio. ‘What, like the guerrillas?’
‘No, a bigger war. Like a secret war.’
‘Between who?’
‘Antarctica and the north.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘The Alaskan.’
‘She’s touched.’ Pilar taps her skull pointedly.
‘She knows things, though. Don’t you think it’s strange, to be in a war no one knows about?’
‘I think she’s spinning stories. I think she went mad when she left Alaska. Why did she leave, anyway? Why would a northerner come here? It doesn’t add up.’
He thinks about the Alaskan. Her cold black eyes. What she is.
It was Maria who told him. Maria wouldn’t lie. After she told him, he knew why Maria was always scared. He didn’t blame her.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But I think she was important there.’
He looks at Pilar, her head tipped back, her eyes half closed. ‘What would you say if I said I was going to Alaska?’ He tries to gauge her reaction.
‘Like tomorrow?’
‘No, not tomorrow. But some day.’
‘I don’t know. Don’t they have all that robotics shit up there? Neon stuff?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what people say. I want to see for myself.’
‘Nothing stopping you.’
‘Don’t you want to get out of the city?’
Pilar shrugs. ‘Might not like my singing up north.’
‘Why’d you choose the parrot anyway? Teachings say the parrot—’
‘—ate all the world’s voices till it lost its own. I know. That’s one version. But there’s another version that’s better.’
‘What’s that?’
Pilar’s lips curve in a secret smile and the edges of her eyes crinkle. A feather has fallen down over one eyebrow, giving her a roguish look. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you … one day. Do you want to share a cigarette?’
Mig nods. Pilar lights the cigarette carefully. She draws on it and exhales a few times, then passes him the end. She leans back, sighing.
‘Gives you a lift, doesn’t it? Hey, don’t listen to all the shit that old witch tells you. You’ve got to think of the day. That’s all there is, the day. Like this music and those stars up there. This is a good one. This is one to keep and wrap up inside you. Else you got nothing.’
Mig lies on his back, like she is. He watches the stars forge into hard, shiny diamonds. Despite the night-time chill, Pilar’s words and the nicotine give him a warm, spaced-out feeling deep in his stomach. He thinks about his secret stash of peso and his plan to buy Pilar a way out. Perhaps it isn’t such a fantasy. She says there are days she keeps and this one, this one with him in it, is one of them. He wants to ask her why she brought him here, him and not any of the others, but there is only one answer he wants to hear. If it’s anything else, it will spoil it all. So he keeps quiet, listening to Pilar’s breathing and the whistle of a wind sneaking about the rooftops. He cannot say it aloud so he thinks to himself: I love you, Pilar.
22 ¦
STATION CATAVEIRO BABBLES in the background. When Taeo first arrived in Patagonia, the sound drove him to distraction. So many airwaves, jammed with loose chatter, music and propaganda, the escapades of pirates at once celebrated and denounced. The broadcasts slide into one another without announcement; it is impossible to distinguish what is truth and what is fiction. In Cataveiro, every home in the vicinity is hooked onto a different wavelength with the volume cranked up, and they ripple over and under one another, burbling through the day and the night, thrumming in the walls. Taeo hears voices when he is trying to sleep and voices when he wakes. He longs for a moment of silence.
He has to get used to it, else he will go mad. But between the dialects and the speed they gabble, he almost misses her name.
He thinks it is the hourly news report. It might be, it might not be. Two men are discussing an accomplice of the pirate El Tiburón, who has recently been captured.
His accomplice, that is, listeners, or should we say her accomplice? But right now we need to tell you about the fugitive Ramona Callejas. Who hasn’t heard about the pilot, the lucky one they call her, the one who carries the hummingbird with her …
Ramona Callejas, clear as water. Taeo listens with increasing alarm. Ramona is wanted in Cataveiro. She was here in Cataveiro just recently, a week ago, or was it longer? Look for her picture in the posters. There is a reward, from someone named Señorita Xiomara, whose name the broadcaster pronounces with an air of reverential importance. Xiomara almost died; the pilot was involved. Then they are talking about something else, guerrilla movements in the north-west, and there are no more clues as to the pilot’s fate.
Taeo flicks rapidly through the radio stations, straining for the combination of those few syllables again. He gets weather reports, music, agriculture, more music.
Of the pilot, nothing.
Why did she stop here? What the hell was she doing? Now she is wanted, hunted, just like himself and Vikram. Whatever she ha
s done, it has put all three of them in danger. She carries the holoma. If she still has it. He tries to reconstruct her face, her expression as she took the device. He believed her when she promised she would go directly to Panama. Despite her fear, or perhaps because of it, he trusted her.
Now he doesn’t know.
‘Everything all right?’
Vikram hovers in the doorway. Taeo is kneeling on the floor, holding the radio up, right against his ear.
‘Yes. I thought I heard something – about Fuego. But it was nothing.’
‘I’m listening to another station,’ says Vikram. ‘If I hear anything, I’ll tell you.’
‘You don’t understand the dialect.’
‘I’m learning,’ says Vikram. ‘I have nothing else to do.’
He leaves the room abruptly. Taeo puts the radio back. He is in a precarious position, now more than ever if his message north has been delayed. Vikram will go. At some point he will walk out and leave, and there will be nothing Taeo can do to stop him. He cannot keep the other man here by force. His hold over Vikram is weakening with every day they spend in the city, waiting for Taeo to find the Antarcticans, as he promised he would.
A good three weeks on foot: those were the words of the fisherman who ferried them to the mainland for a hefty fee. Three weeks without storms, that is. Get caught in a storm out in the open … The fisherman said no more, but the twist of his mouth made it clear what he thought of their chances. There must be transport, Taeo pressed. He could not wait three weeks. The fisherman shrugged. There’s the farm trucks. Maybe they’ll take you. And the army. He looked at them, knowingly. Maybe they won’t. And there’s others who’ll like your money, but maybe you’ll avoid them, if you want to keep all of your fingers.
The farmland of Patagonia was all open. There were no greenhouses or biodomes and there was little cover. At first their journey was uneventful. The farms were intensive islands, production hubs amid long stretches of cultivated land. Taeo and Vikram were able to pay for food and shelter overnight, and the farmers took the money and did not question them. The people with which they stayed were poor, sometimes very poor. They wore face masks in front of strangers. Their children had never been vaccinated. Some of them had the jinn.
As they progressed north, following the ridges of overgrown highways now used only by farm workers or the army, the climate grew hotter and drier. When they could they begged or bribed for a lift, travelling wedged between crates of produce in the back of a truck, watching the land recede, kilometre after kilometre swallowed up in the truck’s solitary, jolting wake. The harvest changed. They passed old anti-aircraft towers, installed to protect Patagonia’s most important export. There was nothing to suggest whether the towers were manned or empty.
When he decided that flight to Cataveiro was their only option, Taeo had not thought about the poppies. It had not occurred to him that the route would take them deep into poppy country, field after field of flower heads, tall and resplendent on their stems. Sometimes in the distance they saw the careful hands of a family at work, children scoring the ripening pods to produce a thin trickle of latex that would harden in the sun, the children watching them with a strange detached curiosity, interested and not interested, wondering and not wondering. He had forgotten that traversing this country would be dangerous, that there would be farmers with machetes in their belts, sometimes soldiers too, and the soldiers would have guns. He had not thought about how those bright bobbing petals would make him feel. That his chest would go tight with a terrible longing. He would find it difficult to breathe. The headaches would take him in sudden, fierce bursts so that there were times he could barely see, and would have to hold his hand in front of his face to shield his eyes from the open sky.
He had not thought about Vikram, who stared at the flowers the way Taeo’s children stared at the ocean the first time he took them to the beach. Vikram, who wanted to pick the flowers, to examine the petals and the delicate stamen, touch them and smell them, marvelling that the land he had believed poisoned could produce such a beautiful thing. Vikram wondered about the children they saw and the farmers with machetes that ran at them, shouting, brandishing their shining blades. Once a woman hurled a machete in their direction. The blade buried itself in the ground no more than a few metres from where they stood, and then they ran.
The question from Vikram was always why.
Why are they guarding the flowers?
Why are they chasing us away?
Why are there no greenhouses?
It was a strange thing to explain, while in the back of his mind was nothing but the pulse of his addiction.
It was the first time Taeo had acknowledged it to himself: an addiction. In the poppy fields he could no longer deny it. There was a relief in the admission, even if it were only to himself. He was having visions. Once his craving was so great he got up in the middle of the night, first checking Vikram was asleep, and he went and lay among the rustling flowers. He took one of the pods and tucked it into his pocket, not to use, just to hold there, like a charm, an amulet, just in case. The sky was clear overhead and a thousand stars looked down on him. He could not remember the last time he had lain and looked at the stars. As he gazed up they seemed to descend towards him, surrounding him on all sides, cocooning him in their silvery light. He closed his eyes and felt Shri, lying beside him. She took his hand and whispered.
You’re very far away, she said. Come back soon.
But then he imagined he heard another sound: a purposeful movement through the flowers, the calculated stealth of a farmer coming to hunt the trespassers like prey. He crawled from the fields in a state of terror to collapse shivering on the ground.
Where did you go?
Vikram, awake.
Nowhere, he said. I went nowhere.
The pod was a hard nub in his pocket. In the morning he clenched his teeth and hurled it from him, as far as he could throw.
While they walked he thought often of the villagers who had taken his stash in exchange for Vikram. He imagined them lighting it, releasing its potent smoke. He imagined the dreams they might have, of jaguars and strange northern things, burning beaches and the people of the sea city who turned to mermaids and hurled themselves into the sea. Or whatever it was they dreamed of while high. But he could not say to the man beside him: these flowers bought you, although he thought it in his own head regularly, sometimes bitterly, when he caught Vikram standing on the edge of the fields gazing at the flowers as if in a dream.
He had to explain the function of the flowers to Vikram. They adjusted their route, skirting the edges of the guarded farms, making their way along the scrubby hills that bordered the farmland.
Vikram said it was like the manta trade in Osiris. Occasionally he would reveal a small detail such as this, and Taeo gathered them eagerly, knowing they might be of use to the Republic when he finally returned and made his report.
He asked about the manta. Vikram said it was a narcotic that was smoked. From a sea plant, he thought, he wasn’t sure. It had a strong smell and produced hallucinations.
There was little to do on the journey other than talk to one another, but Vikram had little to say and Taeo was tortured by his visions, so he continued teaching Vikram a few words of Spanish. By the time the farmland gave way to the small settlements and factories that marked the city’s approach, Vikram had mastered simple phrases. He said he liked the foreign words. He said people had not kept their languages in Osiris.
Sometimes Taeo caught himself looking at Vikram, and as the only question Vikram had was why, the question Taeo had about Vikram was always the same.
What are you?
What are you what are you what are you?
Now they are holed up in the city, venturing out only to acquire essentials. Is it possible to hate a space after only a few hours? Practically, there is nothing wrong with the rooms he found. In the Brazilian quarter, they are cheap, very cheap. Taeo has enough cash to cover them for a
few weeks, and the landlord is the ask-no-questions type, a resolve strengthened by a substantial tip. Across the hallway is a self-proclaimed high-class brothel whose madame declares herself the soul of discretion, if only for her clients. Another screen to hide behind. The rooms themselves are ugly but clean. There is plumbing and a fridge. They are up on the fifth floor. The shutters close tightly so no one can see in. Providing Vikram keeps his head down and stays indoors, no one will ever know the Osirian has been in the city.
Despite all of these advantages, the rooms have an overwhelmingly depressing air. Resentment has seeped into every nook and cranny: his resentment, Vikram’s resentment, the resentment of those who came before them and left, perhaps abruptly, perhaps violently. There are suspicious stains on the underside of his mattress, stains he does not mention to Vikram. He did not ask the landlord about the previous occupants. Now he doesn’t want to know.
They pass the hours. Vikram, sat by the radio, listening for words that Taeo has taught him, piecing together a world from half-comprehended sentences. Taeo, dreaming of opium, dreaming of Antarctica, dreaming of Shri, dreaming of home.
Home which is suddenly that much further away because the pilot, the fucking pilot, has caused an incident.
He has been comforting himself that this will not be for long. All he had to do was find a fellow Antarctican agent. Then they could get out. His people wouldn’t let him down, not this time. Not when he has Vikram.
And now the pilot’s name is on the fucking radio.
What by all the ice in Antarctica were you thinking, Ramona Callejas? Didn’t I fix your plane? Didn’t you say you would go straight to Panama? Now what do I do?
Taeo is convinced there is at least one Antarctican agent in the city, more likely several. He spent yesterday tramping over Cataveiro with his one remaining holoma, surreptitiously activating it in different locations, and waiting for a response. Not a flicker of life came back. There are no holomas in the city, or his holoma is somehow blocked, or the signal does not work here.
