Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  In the cool of the evening, Edson finds Mr Peach leaning against his balcony rail with a big spliff in his hand. The burbs glow like sand beneath him; the stars cannot match them. Even the light-dance of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, like attenuated bioluminous Amazon insects, up on the edge of space, is muted and astrological. The night air brings with it the slur of wind turbines up on the old coffee plantations, a sound Edson has always found comforting and stimulating. Endless energy.

  ‘Hey, Sextinho.’ Mr Peach offers Edson the big sweet spliff.

  ‘I’ve told you not to call me that,’ Edson says, but takes a good toke anyway and lets it swirl up into the dome of his skull. Mr Peach leans toward him. He takes another toke from Edson, slips an arm comfortably around his back. He holds the spliff up, contemplates it like holy sinsemilla.

  ‘This is the only thing keeping me from running right out that gate and getting on the first plane to Miami,’ Mr Peach says, looking at the coil of maconha smoke

  ‘Miami ?’

  ‘We’ve all got our boltholes. Our Shangri-las. When it’s abstract, when it’s more universes than there are stars in the sky, than there are atoms in the universe, I can handle it. Numbers, theories; comfortable intellectual games. Like arithmetic with infinities: terrifying concepts, but ultimately abstract. Head games. She didn’t know me, Sextinho.’

  Edson lets the name pass.

  ‘She didn’t recognize me. She would have known me, same as . . . the other one. Jesus and Mary, the word games this makes us play. Quantum theory, quantum computing, quantum schmauntum; at that postgrad level you work across disciplines. But she didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t there. Maybe I was dead, maybe I was in jail, maybe I never was a physicist, maybe there never was a Carlinhos Farah Baroso de Alvaranga. But I know: I’m in Miami. I could have gone. Twenty years ago I could have gone. Open arms, they’d have had me. Lovely doe-eyed Cuban boys with nasty Mafia connections. But Dad would have had to go into a home, and I couldn’t do that. Leave him. Leave him with strangers. So I turned the offer down, and he lived three years and I think he was happy right up to the end. By then I was too old, too entangled. Too scared. But he went. He’s leading the life I could have led. I should have led.’

  Mr Peach quickly wipes any tears gone before they gather gravity.

  Edson says gently, ‘I remember you told me once that it was all fixed, from beginning to end; like the universe is one thing made out of space and time and we only dream we have free will.’

  ‘You’re not reassuring me.’

  ‘I’m just trying to say, there was nothing you could have done.’

  The spliff has burned down to a sour roach. Edson grinds it flat under the sole of his Havaiana.

  ‘Sextinho . . . Edson. I think I really need to be with you tonight.’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed.’

  ‘I know but, well, why should it matter if it’s not her?’

  Edson loves the old bastard, and he could come for him, without games, without boots and costumes, without masks, pretend to be that nasty Cuban malandro, pretend to be whatever he needs to send him to Miami in his mind. But still, it does matter. And Mr Peach can read that in Edson’s body, and he says, ‘Well, looks like it’s not fated in this universe either.’

  In retro Hello Kitty panties, Fia backstrokes laps of the pool. From verandah shadow Edson watches sunlit water dapple her flat boy-breasts. He checks for stirrings, urgings, dick-swellings. Curiosity, getting a look, like any male. Nothing more.

  ‘Hey.’ She treads water, face shatter-lit by reflected sun-chop. ‘Give me a towel.’

  Fia hauls herself out, drapes the towel over the mahogany sun lounger and herself on the towel. Nipples and little pink panty-bow.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve felt clean in weeks,’ Fia declares. ‘He’s not your uncle, is he? I found your stuff. I couldn’t sleep so I went poking around. I do that, poke around. I found these costumes and things. They’re very . . . sleek.’

  ‘I told him to make sure they were locked up.’

  ‘Why? If you guys have something going on, I’m cool with it. You don’t have to hide stuff from me. Did you think I would be bothered? Did she know? That’s it, isn’t it? She didn’t know.’

  ‘You’re not her, I know. But are you bothered?’

  ‘Me. No. Maybe. I don’t know. It bothers me you didn’t tell her.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I know, I know. Don’t expect me to be consistent about this. What did you do, anyway, with the gear and all that?’

  ‘Superhero sex.’

  Her eyes open wide at that.

  ‘Like, Batman and Robin slashy stuff? Cool. I mean, what do you actually do?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m a nosy cow. It’s got me into trouble already.’

  ‘We dress up. We play. Sometimes we pretend to fight, you know, have battles.’ Hearing it spoken, the secret spilled, Edson feels burningly embarrassed. ‘But a lot of the time we just talk.’

  ‘I’m trying to picture Carlinhos in one of those full suits . . .’

  ‘Don’t laugh at him,’ Edson says. ‘And I call him Mr Peach. The first time we met, he gave me peaches for minding his car because he didn’t have any change. He watched me eat them. The juice ran down my chin. I was thirteen. You probably think that’s a terrible thing; you probably have some clever educated middle-class judgment about that. Well, he was very shy and very good to me. He calls me Sextinho.’ There is an edge in his voice that makes Fia feel self-conscious, tit-naked in an alien universe. It’s their first row. A motorbike passes the gate. Edson notes it, remembers fondly his murdered Yamaha scrambler. A few seconds later it passes the gate again in the opposite direction. Slow, very slow. Edson feels his eyes widen. He looks up. A surveillance drone completes its buzz over the shiny new gated estate, but does it linger that moment too long on the outward turn? He had been so careful in Mr Peach’s car, but there were always cameras he could have missed, a new one put up, an eye on a truck or a bus or in a T-shirt or even a pair of passing I-shades that later got into a robbery or an I-mugging or something that would have had the police running through the memory. Paranoia within paranoia. But everyone is paranoid in great São Paulo.

  He says, ‘How long have you been here now?’

  ‘Three days,’ Fia says. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘You’ve been talking all that physics—’

  ‘Information theory . . .’

  ‘Whatever shit, but I want to ask, have you found a way back yet?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said it was a one-way trip, there was no going back.’

  ‘Well, a quantum mainframe the size of São Paulo U’s would do. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I think they’re looking for us.’ That gets her sitting upright. Hello Kitty. ‘In fact, I think they know where we are. We’re not safe here. I can get you safe, but there’s one problem. It’s going to take a lot of money.’

  Bare-ass naked on the pseudo-Niemeyer wave mosaic by the green green pool Edson holds the towel in one hand and asks the soldados, ‘Where do I go?’

  They grunt him to the landscaped sauna at the back of the spa. Both High and Low Cidades know The Man has a morbid fear of age and wreck and spends profanely on defeating it. No one in the two cities expects him to live so long, but he has resident Chinese medics and Zen hot springs for his hilltop pousada. Some sonic-electric field tech thing holds in the heat. The Man beckons Edson to join him on the hardwood bench. Around him sit his soldados, as naked as he; stripped-down guns at easy reach on the hot wood: the Luz SurfTeam, they call themselves. They have surfers’ muscles and scrolls of proud dotted weals across their chests and bellies where they pierce themselves and carefully rub in the ashes of scarification ritual. Edson sits carefully, conscious of his shaved genitals, unsure of the etiquette of being caught staring at your drug lord’s dick.

  ‘Son, do we f
ind you well?’ The Man is nested in as many names as his corporate structure. The lower city, where his writ runs partial, knows him as Senhor Amaral; in the upper city he is Euclides. Only the priest who baptized him knows his full name. Layers, pyramids: he is fleshy, rolls of fat tapering toward his hairless head, shaved as close as Edson’s balls. ‘And the dona, how is she this weather ?’ When Anderson died, Euclides the Man sent flowers and condolences with a picture of Our Lady of Consolation. He claims to be as omniscient as the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, but he does not know that Dona Hortense shredded the card and, by dark of moon, threw the flowers into the fetid, Guaraná-bottle-and-dead-piglet-choked sewer that is Cidade de Luz’s storm drain. ‘I hear you’ve been causing that good lady grief, Edson.’

  ‘Senhor, I would not put my own mother in any kind of danger, believe that.’ Edson hears the shake in his voice. ‘Could I show you something? I think you’ll be impressed.’ Edson lifts his hand. The SurfTeam stir toward their guns. The Man nods. Edson completes the gesture and out of the changing room bounds Milena in her monogrammed top and patriotic thong and socks, soccer ball skittering like a puppy before her, blithely chewing her gum before her audience of naked male meat. Remember what I taught you, Edson wills at her as she keeps the ball up up up. Smiling smiling always smiling.

  ‘So, senhor, what do you think?’ After this, Edson thinks, one hundred thousand fans at Morumbi are easy.

  ‘I am impressed; the girl has a talent. Now, she will need some surgery up top, and I am sure you have that already planned, but her ass is good. She has a Brasilian ass. How long can she keep it up for?’ The Man slaps the soldado beside him hard on the thigh. ‘Hey, you like that white ass? That getting you stiff, eh?’ Slap slap. I would remember that, if I were him, Edson thinks. ‘Jigga jigga eh?’ Slap slap slap. ‘Who’s got boners, eh? Come on, show me, who’s hard?’ Everyone but The Man, Edson notices. And Edson. ‘So, son, I am rightly entertained, but you didn’t come up here just to show me your Keepie-Uppie Queen.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Edson says. ‘I’m here because I’m planning an operation, and I need your permission.’

  Pena Pena Pena! The word up and down the ladeiros, running down the serpentine main street of Cidade de Luz like sheet-water, rumored through the diners and supermarkets, the ball courts and the street lights where car-pimpers hard-wired their arc-welders and spray-guns. Black cock tail-feathers stuck into the verge mud, poked through the wire mesh of a front gate, tucked under windscreen wipers. Stencil-cut roosters sprayed onto shop shutters, curbstones, into the corners of bigger, bolder swaths of street art; the cheeky, ballsy little black cock. His crow sounded across the hillside from the rodovia to the bus station, from the Assembly of God to the Man high over all: call the boys, the good old boys, the gang is back.

  They met in the back office of Emerson’s gym among the broken exercise machines: Emerson himself; Big Steak - could do with patronizing his own gym; Turkey-Feet with his Q-blade; that fool Treats because if he had been left out he would have blown the whole thing; then the car boys Edimilson and Jack Chocolate from the garage; Waguinho and Furação the drivers; and, honorary Penas, Hamilcar and Mr Smiles for stealth and security, looking simultaneously superior and scared.

  ‘And me,’ Fia had said. ‘You used my money, I want to see what you’re spending it on.’

  ‘It wasn’t your money. Someone had to know how to place the bet. And some of the guys, they knew you from before.’

  Edson had to admit, it was a brilliant little scam. Fia had come banging on his door in the wee wee hours, a look of wide-eyed astonishment on her face. Edson had been out of his bed in an instant, bare-ass naked, reaching for Mr Peach’s new gun thinking, Killers Sesmarias pistoleiros.

  ‘I can’t believe it, you’ve got A World Somewhere!’

  O Globo 12 ran twenty-four-hour telenovelas, and in the insomniac hours Fia had channel surfed onto a quantum marvel. (‘Everything happens somewhere in the multiverse,’ Mr Peach had said at breakfast the next morning where they cracked the plan over the eggs and sausage.) Not just that Edson’s universe too had A World Somewhere, but that it was identical to the one to which Fia had been secretly addicted: cast, characters, and plot. With one significant, big-money-making difference: the telenovela in Edson’s universe was a week behind. Edson even remembered the cause: Fia - the other Fia - had explained that it was a strike by the technicians. It had gone to the wire, but they had walked out all the same. It had seemed important to her at the time. In Fia’s universe, they had made the deal.

  ‘The same, word for word?’

  She nodded, dumbfounded.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Big big eyes.

  ‘Information is power,’ he had declared over breakfast eggs and sausage. ‘How can we make money out of this?’

  ‘That’s easy,’ Fia said. ‘Boy-love.’ Mr Peach scrambled eggs, unperturbed. For two months now A World Somewhere had been working up to a culminating moment of passion and oral between Raimundo and Ronaldão. If Edson ever bothered to watch the television read mags follow the chat channels he would have known that the most important question in Brasil was will they/won’t they? The bookies’ odds were dropping day by day as the Notorious Episode approached: it surely must happen: boy-love on prime time. As part of the buildup the writers had been holed up in a hotel under armed guard. Expectation was sky-high, advertising prices cosmological.

  But Fia had already watched that ep.

  It was a complicated bet; small amounts liquidated from antiques donated by Mr Peach spread around backstreet bookies all over northern São Paulo, never enough to shift the odds, sufficiently far apart to break up a pattern. Edson, Fia, and Mr Peach cruised the boulevards, swinging coolly into the back-alley rooms and slapping the reis down on the Formica table.

  Edson was so engrossed sending the black feathers and the pichaçeiros with the cockerel stencils out into Cidade de Luz to summon the old team that he completely missed the Notorious Episode.

  Old Gear summoned his safe out of the floor and fetched sufficient reis to bathe in.

  ‘How did you know they’d chicken at the last moment? Were you holding a scriptwriter’s mother hostage or something?’

  ‘Or something,’ Edson said.

  And standing up in front of the old Penas in Emerson’s gym, sports-bags full of reis under the desk, Edson had watched the years scatter like startled birds. He was twelve again, as reality hit dreams of hope and achievement, came the bitter realization that for all his ambition he had never been able to fly fast enough to escape Cidade de Luz’s gravity. You end as just another malandro with a gun and a gang.

  ‘Thank you all for coming. I have a plan, an operation. I can’t achieve it myself; I need your help. It’s not legal’ - laughs here: As if, Edson - ‘and it’s not safe. That’s why I wouldn’t ask you as friends, even as old Penas. Don’t think I’m insulting anyone’s honor when I offer to pay you, and I’ll pay well. I had a bit of a windfall. A couple of bets came in. You know me; I will always be professional.’ He takes a breath and the room holds its breath with him. ‘It’s a big ask, but this is what I want to do . . .’

  ‘I see no political objections to you planning an operation,’ says The Man, leaning into the heat so that the sweat drips from his nipples. ‘Edson, I respect your businesslike attitude, so I’m offering you fifteen percent off the standard license fee.’

  Edson realizes he’s been holding his breath. He lets it out so slowly, so imperceptibly, that the sweat-beads on his thin chest do not even shiver.

  ‘It’s a generous offer, senhor, but at the moment, any monetary fee hits my cash flow hard.’

  The Man laughs. Every part of him jigs in sympathy.

  ‘Let’s hear your payment plan, then.’

  Edson nods at Milena, still keeping it up, still smiling at every bounce.

  ‘You said she was impressive.’

  ‘I said she needed surgery.’

  �
�I’ve got her a try-out with Atletico Sorocaba.’ It’s not quite a lie. He knows the first name of the man there; he’s left an appointment with the secretary.

  ‘Not exactly São Paulo.’

  ‘It’s building a following. I’ve a career development plan.’

  ‘No one could ever accuse you of not being thorough,’ The Man says. ‘But . . .’

  ‘I’ll throw in my fut-volley crew.’

  The Man scowls. The SurfTeam copies his expression, amplified by hard.

  ‘They’re girls.’

  The Man rolls his head on his sloping, corrugated neck.

  ‘They do it topless.’

  ‘Deal,’ says The Man, suddenly quivering with laughter, rocking back and forth, creasing his big hairy belly, slapping his thigh. ‘You kill me, you fucking cheeky ape. You have your license. Now, tell me, what do you want it for?’