Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  84.

  “The dogs are born deaf and with no teeth or claws.”

  85.

  Señora Albýno#2460 barely looks up when I come into the stationery shop. Her long hair is in a plait: not my work, I’m sure. How long since my last time? The street outside is surprisingly empty, as though the gamblers normally lining it, as well as the usual sacks of cement and the trash cans, have fled the city. Been a while, she says, been awhile, before going back to what she was doing, which is filling little transparent plastic baggies with sequins, fifty or sixty perhaps in each, separating them by size and color. Any stations free? I ask, and she shrugs and starts to say something, but her voice is immediately drowned out by what sounds like a dogfight outside, the barking and braying too dementedly loud for anything else to be heard. Señora Albýno#2460 takes sequins from a larger baggy, and the smaller baggies she tears from a large roll with perforated joins; the roll, judging by its thickness and the dust covering it, looks just about infinite. At intervals she tears off a new baggy, which says “Made in China,” to place on the counter, which looks like it takes some effort (the bulging vein at her temple). And she begins again, plunging her hand into the sequins, sorting them, making a scrapheap of defective ones to one side. Any stations going? I say. Been a while, she replies, in that low, unmistakably Señora Albýno#2460 voice. Been a while. And back to her task. Her forefinger moves reasonably quickly, not really very quickly if you bear in mind that in fact this is part of her job, something she does for a living, separating sequins—one, two, three—she isn’t in a hurry, though sometimes the sequins are stuck together and she has no choice then but to employ her thumb and sometimes even her ring finger in prying them apart. Now, each of these stops and pauses, in themselves quite brief, and unto themselves not very significant, when you add them all up, plus add them to the manifold interruptions and distractions throughout the course of the day, interruptions and distractions, such as my arrival, finally result in a not-inconsiderable amount of dead time: an hour each day is seven hours a week, and given that time is nothing if not money, that’s a not-inconsiderable amount of money. Once ten more baggies have been filled, five or six hundred shiny sequins in their rightful places, ready to go out on the shelves, Señora Albýno#2460 gives a flick of the head, and through I go to the back.

  86.

  In moments, the ragged breathing of the huddled forms synchronizes, falling into something like the rhythmic putt-putt of an outboard motor. I have to pick my way through them for a while before I come to a free station; I get in position, find a vein, and slide the needle in. Flash of goose bumps across my body, the opening jingle. The tedious tutorial for first-time gamblers, followed by the health warnings from the Department of Hygiene, followed by offers of free Cređits in exchange for your vote: withal, the immeasurable sensation of freedom and comfort that comes when you plug in. You see the stats rattling away in the bottom part of the screen, you hear the echoing footfall of the plaýers crossing the courts. Here we are in the Vakapý realm, the cells and windows, the stadia and ball trajectories, which together contain both of us, the gamblers, and the twelve simultaneous matches, all part of the same continuously shifting stake, and in among it and variegating it and comprising it, the constant callouts and adjustments made by various bookmaker hubs as they try to configure the head-to-heads, the ever-changing odds, the translations for the gamblers tuning in from abroad, and the camera angles necessary for us to see the aħakas swinging and slicing the air. The ball comes back off the sloped tambul, and Aña IV dives to catch it millimeters before the second bounce, flying through the air, arm pistons fully extended, before crashing to earth. His opponent, a youngster just graduated from the Atahuâ youth system, runs up to the ref screaming, claiming traveling. The ref, barely looking at the irate plaýer, gives a weary shake of the head, as though this plaýer is well known for such theatrics, or all the plaýers are. The ref doesn’t seem to be considering a video replay: that’s what the rules are for. The plaýer, who has turned a little purple from screaming, unstraps his aħaka and goes on imploring the ref, gesticulating wildly. The ref has turned away, motions for the game to go on. Above that game, on Window#7, Yagwatý X, rookie of the year two seasons ago, has just been trashed by Mýlpalta Man, who, though he appears to have put on a few pounds, is looking pretty untouchable: his heat map shows laser-precision shots from all over the court. In the bottom window, a doubles match on Intra-Klay—a synthetic clay sprinkled with water to make the going very slippery, and very high-speed—is being played at such a chaotic pace the two sides remain almost constantly neck and neck; neither can establish a clear lead. It resembles a pell-mell system of whirring pulleys and pistons, or a philharmonic ensemble on fast-forward. This is where I am, my mind, my very being spread across the different matches, tracking the twelve balls in flight, tracking the multitude of betting positions, and my dots soon start to appear without me thinking, with no conscious decision on my part: at first faintly, like the beginning of a rash, and after that increasing, seemingly splashing onto the screen, until I start to be able to synchronize them with the scores, and the columns begin to fill out like two processions of ants: reds marching down the left-hand side, blues down the right. Reds and blues: the dots, the premonitions of dots, flock behind the changing numbers, instantaneous and 100 percent accurate. Looks like I’m on a roll. Each time a plaýer collects a ball in his aħaka and slings it at the wall, I’m up points. A blinding pink light begins to illuminate my station, spotlighting my face in the general gloom of the backroom, but who cares: I’m rolling. At first my gains are slight; I don’t feel bold enough to come piling in with any big bets. But that starts to change. Who cares, I think. Really, who gives a shit. It’s so seductive when you get on a roll, though in a sense it’s just a more subtle way of deferring loss. But I’m not thinking about this. I’m winning, and I think about winning. About the winning feeling. About the faces of the others in the room, the losing faces, tiny, unrecognizable faces, now that I’m winning; how this joyfulness separates me from them, making all ugliness and suffering seem strange and far away. I see the Cređits, the pixels splashed across my screen that signify Cređits, all of those digits bumping one another up, up, up: they are Cređits. Up I go, up to my eyelids in precious Cređits. I ascend, though it is not an ascent you feel as such. Up, until I myself become Cređits. And yet, alongside this ebullience, a still, small part of me vacillates: there is the very real risk that my streak will come to an end just as suddenly and inexplicably as it seemed to begin. When your luck’s in, it’s contingent, temporary, so delicate—or worse, maybe it isn’t even me this is happening to … In among the images that course through my bloodstream courtesy of the needle, a shadow appears, one I recognize as belonging to the owner, Señora Albýno#2460, a faint smudge that is her, and a stab of nostalgia hits me, nostalgia for her comic strips, for those small shiny disks of hers in their sachets and their piles, for the hairdos I will no longer style for her once the world devolves into its natural end-state as one great carpet of molten lava … I see her signal to me to close my eyes, she’s going to do an emergency discońńect. I nod, and the needle comes out with a little spray of blood—eyes still closed, I feel the warm spatter down my forearm. By the time I am able to blink again, a cluster of gamblers has gathered around me, and Señora Albýno#2460 is smiling. Felicidades, she says, felicidades. And they begin clapping—slowly, a smattering at first, before it becomes a full-blown round of applause. They start chanting, And so say all of us, and so say all of us, and lean in to embrace me. Smell of old sweat and meringues. Then we’re all hugging, all of us together, an indeterminate amount of time like this, slathering one another in the mutual affection that, unbeknownst to us, has germinated due to all the time spent in this consummate togetherness: cońńected to the one Vakapý source. Soon Señora Albýno#2460 tells everyone to calm down. Then, not without a large dose of shame in her voice, a voice edged with a metallic hum (like Grandma’s
), she says I need to make myself scarce. Get out of here, she says. Get out of here. They’ll be coming for you, says one of the gamblers, a hairpiece guy. The Department. They’ll assume you’ve gamed the Sýstem somehow. You should get going. As I gather myself and make to leave, Señora Albýno#2460 presses an enormous roll of paper into my hands. Take it up to Cordillera Hill, she says. You can cash it in there. We don’t keep enough on the premises. There’s an address, she says, under the serial number, your winnings and the number of points you got: it’s a map. It’s a map. This wasn’t supposed to happen, right? Nobody planned for this. I make my way toward the exit, people’s hands reaching out to touch me; everyone wants to touch me. Adiós, amigos, I murmur, half to myself. Adiós, amigos, with a wave of the hand. No one says anything in response. I’m at the door. I come through the stationery shop, which feels very empty without her in it. Without her in it, even the sequins look dull.

  87.

  Morgan was forever making things up. About doppelgängers, about visions. About people who appeared to be people but were in reality extraterrestrial outriders, advance parties from other worlds. These beings, he said, are the only reason the city is still on its feet. It was they who originally decreed that Atlantika should be erected here, and that our people should inhabit it. Do you really think the natives put up those marble temples single handedly? That they came up with those inverted-sun motifs without any influence from an alternate, extrinsic vision of our planet? Because in that time, before everything—the time before time, even—there was no such thing as engineering, not in the current sense, or not, at least, on planet earth, then barely more than a dark, glimmering rock, devoid of day and night, devoid of oceans, seas, seabeds of any kind, devoid of tektonik plates or any faults between them, devoid of vegetation, no fungal kingdom to speak of, parasitical pandemonium as yet unleashed, devoid of the great beasts that once walked the earth and the lesser creatures they dominated, devoid of the latter-day dominators, humankind, who went on to take everything for themselves only to fritter it away almost as soon as they held it in their hands: a dark, shining stone like the mirror of a river as yet incapable of irrigating any land, this was what Morgan said and also what it said in the notebooks he compiled out of newspaper clippings and other texts: that they had been around since then but were still among us, acting like us, passing themselves off as us though in fact they couldn’t be more dissimilar from us, and that was why you had to be on your guard, and I nodded at all of this, not knowing if Morgan was being serious when he said that one day they were going to come for him and take him away to the Noble Empire, that he’d show me, I’d see, to which I replied, Sure, for want of anything else to say, just to carry on the conversation, really, when I simply couldn’t bring myself to believe that those superior intelligences, minds from another galaxy, inventors of many marvels and highest technologies, could be perverse enough to deposit us on the exact point where two countervailing winds of such tearing strength collided like freight trains, and this I did say to Morgan, exactly this, and Morgan gripped his belly and laughed, baring those crooked teeth, groaning a little and laughing a little more before setting about setting me straight, setting that forked tongue of his in motion: he said it was beyond him how someone as fundamentally stupid as me had always come top in class and even got to be standard bearer on parade Mondays, truly incredible, because these minds, these intelligences, I was only so quick to deride them as such because there was no way to describe them, no image that could capture them: they weren’t minds in the usual sense of the word, he only put it like that for want of something less apt, and it wasn’t that he didn’t have a better word, there wasn’t one, and never would be. Thus spake Morgan.

  88.

  I take Avenida del Caudillo Insigne. There are people on the street. Far more than is normal at this time. Cordons, uniforms. Riot police, the mounted division. And the protestors. Chrysaliđs and Magnetiźed side by side, a great roiling mass, all together like one big family before the screens that have been erected by the Department of Communications and Fun in the main squares throughout the city. A scientist is being interviewed, a mob of microphones and flashing cameras around him: he says there’s nothing to worry about, the meteorite isn’t due to hit the earth for at least another sixty-five years. Ages. Yes, ages and ages. Hell, says an old woman beside me, who appears to have no teeth, that’s enough time for another two Bugs to come and do their business. It ain’t like it’s gonna happen tomorrow. And I guess she’s right. While all of this is going on, suddenly I see them. Two fat guys in suits, lounging oh-so-surreptitiously on the hood of a black Laputa GT—no plates—in dark glasses. They don’t pretend not to see me; they’re eating/drinking/slathering their faces in eggnog frappes and don’t bother to hide the fact that it’s me they’ve got under surveillance. My mind turns to the stone as I begin walking in the opposite direction, trying to blend in with the crowd. I think about Clara and look down at the coupon. If she was going to be proved right, it would have to be like this. Me being allowed to win.

  89.

  And I was joining things together. Joining what together? Words. Morgan wasn’t. He was the boss, and all bosses concern themselves not with joins but with dissemination. He controlled the rumor mill at school with consummate care: control that, and you controlled the school. For him, words signified control. A careful throwaway remark in the ear of the right person was enough to keep everything going the way he wanted it to. I’m sure that it was Morgan who started the rumor about the novice killing herself because of a love affair. The (his) story went: the Mother Superior happened on the couple having sex in the confessional, a couple of hours after evening prayers. The novice was penanced severely, and the diocese was contacted to begin her excommunication. The identity of the Padre was never divulged, because that, they (Morgan) said, would have made the scandal even greater. Then one night while all the convent was asleep, the novice took a belt and looped it around one of the rafters. And that was that. In our school, seven o’clock mass was always held before the Monday evening parade. In our eyes all the different priests who gave sermons or offered us the wafers soaked in caterpillar juice were prime suspects as they stood before us. Following that first day back, when we came across the article about the novice on the reverse of a picture of a naked black woman with breasts like fear itself—endlessly ample—Morgan began constructing the story, reconstructing it thereafter with slight modifications each time, and sometimes it was Morgan who told it, sometimes others chimed in, added plotlines and characters, elements from unknown sources, poaching, appending, stealing, eventually creating a tale that bore little resemblance to the original, so that in the end what you had was a blended amalgam, itself a tranche of a larger collective fiction that at some point ceased to belong to us—if indeed it ever did—and took on a life and a trajectory of its own. From that precise moment on (though I couldn’t say precisely when it was), I couldn’t stop thinking about the novice either. No longer did I masturbate over Zulaýma or her planetary breasts, seemingly astral entities from some unknown solar system, but instead began hammering out my own version of the scene involving that young novice, gasping and sweating behind the latticed screen of the confessional. The Padre, one of their number or perhaps all of them at different moments, shoving her up against the rear wall, lifting her habit up with one hand, groping her exposed body with the other. A scene that repeated over and over, and over and over, always with Zulaýma superimposed in places, or parts of Zulaýma. It wasn’t long before I gave up on the Page Threes altogether: it had to be dark, it had to be in my room, and it had to feature elements of that scene, otherwise zero hard-ons for me.