“Okay. Tell me, manita . . . What are you up to now that you’re not taking out so many books?”
Alina smiled.
“A lot of things. I keep thinking of my little schemes.”
She wouldn’t lie to Carmen ever, she’d just decided.
“Is it about your training? In the village they say they see you running like you’re possessed.”
“It’s an experiment with Colonel Sanders, but I’m still looking for the perfect idea,” said Alina.
Carmen sipped the last drops of her juice through a straw. She didn’t seem intrigued enough to ask again.
In the taxi back, a kentuki standing on the dashboard chirped to warn the driver about areas that were monitored with radar. That way the driver avoided speeding tickets or having to stop at stoplights. A boy who was able to anonymously hack into the street security systems of Oaxaca was behind it all. In exchange, the driver deposited five dollars a week into an account in Haiti. The five dollars wasn’t because he was cheap, the driver explained. It’s just that in Haiti, it’s a fortune.
When Alina got back, Sven was still out. The kentuki was right outside the door, waiting. The beak was still stuck on its left eye, and someone had taped a flyer for the gallery over the swastika: this week the Russian was showing his work. She was invited to the reception at seven, which, of course, she would not attend. She opened the door and went inside. She picked up the kentuki, pulled off the flyer, and threw it into the garbage, and then left the crow on the counter in the little kitchen. Alina opened and closed the drawers and cupboards; she knew what she was going to do next, though she still hadn’t decided how. The Colonel moved from one end of the counter to the other, peering over the edges of the precipice.
“Keep still,” she told him.
He didn’t calm down, so she got out a pot and put him in it to contain him—he’d asked for it. Now he could spin in circles of only a few centimeters. She found some string, laid the crow down on its side and made several knots between its feet. Two strings a little more than a meter long were left hanging down between its wheels, as if someone had stuck a big tampon in it. She turned off the overhead fan and brought the stool to the middle of the room, climbed up with the crow in her hands, and, after maneuvering for a good while, managed to tie the body to the fan, head down. She stepped back to get a good look and take some photos. It looked like a chicken hung by its feet, and if it tried to move, the wheels bit into the string and made it swing from side to side. The crow shrieked. She opened the second drawer and took out the scissors. They were big, strong scissors, and she opened and closed them several times, wondering if they were sharp enough. The crow saw her and shrieked again.
“Quiet!” she shouted, hoping for its disobedience, which was the push she’d need for her final gesture.
When the crow shrieked for the third time, she reached for the stool, scissors in hand, and in only two clean slashes, she sliced off its wings.
Antigua—Honningsvåg
SOMETIMES USERS Marvin had never seen in the dance hall would appear in the chat. FURIOUS_cowboy explained to him that they were users who had once passed through the club, but who, after being liberated, decided to leave and choose for themselves where they would live. His friend Dein8Öko, for example, had managed to get onto a bus and get to Sweden, where one of his daughters lived. The girl hadn’t spoken to her father in three years, but she kept two kentukis in her yard, and when she saw the little rain-soaked mole standing in the doorway of her house, she’d immediately adopted it.
One time, a user Marvin had never seen before suddenly joined the conversation:
Mac.SaPoNja= i have 5 min of battery max. Dog pulled off tracer pls i think im in basement #2 Presteheia street.
Z02xxx and Kingkko were also connected. They sent messages to Jesper but couldn’t contact him. Although Presteheia Street was at the other end of town, they tried to help. Kingkko looked for phone numbers for houses in the area and called them at random. “Do you live on Presteheia? Do you have a basement? We think there’s a kentuki about to die—could you go down and look?” Some people who answered still didn’t know what a kentuki was. After seven minutes, they lost the connection. Later, when Jesper tried to find him by following the clues of the tracer, nothing led him to number 2 Presteheia; instead, he ended up crouched under the fishmonger’s truck, where, alongside a stolen bag of garbage, a stray dog was calmly chewing on Mac.SaPoNja’s tracer. Things like that happened every once in a while. The deaths of other kentukis always brought them together. It got them all thinking. And it made Marvin forget about the real world for a while, and the only thing that worried him in that other, boring world: soon his report card would come, and he would have no choice but to show it to his father.
One night, after a long outing with Kitty03, he received an e-mail from Jesper on his tablet: his accessories were finished. Jesper would fit them on that afternoon, and the next day, as soon as Marvin woke up in Antigua, his kentuki would be ready.
“I’m going to touch the snow,” he announced the next day during recess at school. “By the time I get home, everything will be installed in Honningsvåg.”
His friends no longer talked about asses or Dubai. They listened, and their eyes were attentive, restless with envy. The one whose kentuki was in Dubai had tried to escape; he wanted to “ self-liberate.” He’d tried three times now, but was caught every time. They’d set up a small fence around the living room that had put him completely out of the game.
“Is there a plan?” his friends asked. “Do you know how to get from the dance hall to the snow?”
He had it all written down. He had a plan ready that would get him at least as far as the town’s exit.
SnowDragon= im going out into the world this afternoon
Kitty03= here’s to the brave ones :-)
He made the announcement in the chat as soon as he turned on the kentuki. There was a great commotion followed by advice from the entire group. It wasn’t until he came out of his cubbyhole and saw himself in the mirror of the salon that he understood how much the new accessories had changed his dragon. Jesper explained how they worked. With the battery-life extender, he had autonomy for almost two days, although this, of course, depended on how much he used the kentuki. Jesper came a little closer and spoke to him almost in a whisper.
“Check your e-mail, I just sent you something.”
It was a map of Honningsvåg. There were seven red points marked on it, and the e-mail explained that they were chargers. It was like receiving a map of seven buried treasures. Jesper explained that he didn’t share this information with most of his kentukis, because in the long run it would mean exposing them to a dangerous freedom. But when someone had an important mission, the bases could help them get out of danger. Marvin smiled, swung his legs under the desk. This would make the trip much easier. On the screen, Jesper smiled back at him.
“Now, pay attention, SnowDragon.”
He showed Marvin how to activate the snow wheels. They were high, about a third of the kentuki’s height, and now the camera had a much broader perspective. It was as if he’d grown.
“Kitty03= well aren’t we handsome today, hmm?”
Z02xxx and Kingkko were also there when SnowDragon decided to set off. Kitty03 proposed that he get as far as the plastic curtain and then all three of them would gently push him out; she said it would bring him good luck.
Jesper was waiting for him in the street. One of his girls hung from his left arm, but she seemed to have no clue what was happening. Jesper knelt down in front of him.
“If anything goes wrong, activate the alarm and I’ll be there,” he said, showing his fists with two thumbs up.
SnowDragon growled in happiness. He went down the slope and turned right.
“Kitty03= touch the snow for all of us!”
“Z02xxx= we’ll follow you from here, champ”
“kingkko=<3<3<3<3<3”
Before setting off on his advent
ure in the snow, Marvin passed in front of the appliance shop window. Though all the sidewalks had wheelchair access and it was easy to cross the streets, it still took him a good while to get there. He kept very close to the wall to avoid being seen by some nocturnal drunk. He found the store smaller and gloomier than he’d imagined it from the shop window. Stuck in among the vacuums, in a lovely turquoise vase, was his bouquet of flowers. By now it was gray and withered, but it had clearly been a spectacular bouquet, and he was happy that Lis, as if she’d been waiting for him, still hadn’t thrown it out. In Antigua, Marvin felt a knot in his throat, and he wondered if he hadn’t abandoned the only keeper he’d ever had.
He went down the ramp toward the port, heading for the area where Jesper had marked the snow on the map. Two dogs followed, sniffing him. They tried to bite his wheels, growling and pushing him with their snouts, and Marvin remembered Mac.SaPoNja and feared his adventure would turn out to be shorter than expected. Finally the dogs left him alone. It wasn’t easy or fast to cross the town, but he liked to think that, even now that his mother’s account didn’t have a cent left in it, he could live for a century as a kentuki without worrying about money. He could eat and sleep in Antigua, tending to his body every so often, while in Norway the days would pass calmly as he went from one charger to another, never longing for a piece of chocolate or for a blanket to get him through the night. Needing nothing to survive had something of the superhero about it, and if he finally managed to find the snow, he could live the rest of his life in it without ever feeling the slightest bit cold.
At one point he lost his balance on the new wheels and rolled over the gravel toward the beach. He came to a stop a few meters down. He’d gotten stuck lying horizontal between the rocks, and although his wheels were large, it seemed impossible to stand up. He heard steps behind him—a man was approaching. He made his dragon growl, and the man saw him and came closer. He picked up the dragon and looked at it for a while, turning its wheels from side to side, shaking it as if it were a box of nuts. Marvin wondered if the tag from the appliance store was still between his wheels. Finally the man got bored with him and put him back on the ground. Marvin rolled off immediately, afraid of being picked up again. But the man didn’t move, he stayed right where he was for a good while, watching curiously as the kentuki rolled away.
Marvin had always thought that, for his dragon, humans would be the greatest danger. It had never occurred to him that holes, rocks, and ice would be the most relentless in holding him back. He wasn’t surprised when he ended up stuck under a truck. With his new wheels, it was difficult to calculate the dragon’s height, and at midnight, after he’d crossed all of Honningsvåg and was just blocks away from the road that led up to the snow, he opted for a shortcut and got stuck between the ground and a gas tank.
Kitty03= how’s life, SnowDragon?
The situation was too frustrating and embarrassing to reply. He hadn’t participated in the chat since he’d left the club earlier that day, though he had been reading it, and he’d seen his name mentioned once or twice already. He was pleased that Kitty03 and Z02xxx were thinking about him. As soon as he had good news, he would chime in.
But now he was trapped, and although he did everything possible to get out, his head seemed to have been soldered to that hateful gas tank. When his father called him to dinner, he had no choice but to pray for the kentuki’s life and battery and leave it to its fate.
The next day, as soon as he turned on the tablet, he saw that the truck was no longer there. Someone had placed him next to the back door of the fishmonger. He wondered if they’d seen him in time or if he’d rolled under the truck when it pulled away. How scratched up was he? In any case, the kentuki still seemed to function well. The only problem was his battery: he had 4 percent left. He looked at the map Jesper had sent him and saw there was a charger two blocks away, and he headed straight for it. According to the directions there was only one service station in the town, and it wasn’t far. He crossed the streets without getting distracted, focused on optimizing his energy. Behind the service station there was a small square, and beyond that, hidden behind seven garbage cans of different colors, was a firewood shed. Someone had roughly sawed a small opening. It was empty inside, and some rays of light filtered through the wooden planks that served as a ceiling; the charger was placed in one corner. It looked dirty and damp. His battery showed only a 2 percent charge. He approached without accelerating too much. If for some reason the base didn’t work, he was lost: even if he activated the alarm, Jesper likely wouldn’t make it in time. He climbed on. On his controller the red battery changed to yellow, indicating it was recharging. Across from him, spray-painted on the wood, someone had written: Breathe, you’re in the liberated zone. He took a deep breath. He would leave the kentuki there all night, in that safe space, and the next day he would set off with a complete charge, headed for the snow. He finally leaned back in his father’s chair. Only then did he realize he was still wearing his backpack.
Lima—Erfurt
KLAUS STILL OPENED the girl’s wallet, and now he made lascivious phone calls while he scratched his genitals in front of the TV. It was a repulsive display, and after a while Emilia would get sick of it and leave the computer to take care of activities around her own house, peeking into the hallway now and then to evaluate at a glance how things were going in Erfurt.
The German hadn’t attacked her again, but she knew leaving the man unsupervised was irresponsible. She knew sooner or later the girl would have problems, and Emilia was the only one who could point to the guilty party. She talked about it with Gloria, who lent her a little handheld camera and explained how to use it. It worked as a good insurance policy: she wasn’t informed about everything that went on in Erfurt, it was true, but she had a daily record of her connection. If something happened, she would have it on tape and could send it immediately to the police.
Something else had changed—Emilia surmised that Eva was taking yoga classes. It had taken her a while to figure out, but now it was very clear that that was what she was doing on the days Klaus sat waiting for her while he watched soccer and drank beer in the apartment. Emilia would have liked some kind of notification about this new activity, although since Klaus started coming around, Eva had stopped hanging little signs on the chair legs for her, and the communication between them wasn’t as fluid as it had once been.
Sometimes, when it was just the two of them, the girl practiced yoga poses in front of the mirror.
“Am I doing it right?” she’d ask. “How do I look, sweetheart?”
She looked phenomenal. Emilia chirped excitedly and Eva laughed. Once, Emilia went over to her left heel and gave it a few taps until Eva understood she had to place her foot in line with her shoulder. Though Emilia had never done yoga, three years of rhythmic gymnastics in her youth had granted her a certain common sense, a knowledge applicable to other disciplines.
Often, nearly half the time, when Emilia woke her kentuki it was only Klaus in the apartment, and if she saw the German she was careful not to move or make any sound. She preferred to keep an eye on him while she pretended to sleep. She kept her eyes open, but didn’t make any movement or respond if the man peered into her screen. After all, what did he know about how a kentuki really worked? She was sure he’d never read a manual in his whole life.
Sometimes, at Gloria’s suggestion, she looked at some of the recordings randomly, just to make sure they were being saved correctly and to know what kind of material she’d have if the time to report him ever came. That was what she was doing one day when Gloria called to ask if she could stop by. At first the surprise annoyed her—she’d have to hurry and tidy up before Gloria arrived. But then she remembered Klaus and thought how finally she could show someone her little Erfurt, so she agreed and ran to sweep the living room and the kitchen. She gave her bedroom a once-over, and when she passed in front of the computer, out of habit, she glanced quickly at Eva’s apartment. She’d moved on to cle
an the bathroom mirror when it dawned on her what she’d just seen. She dropped the cloth into the sink, and as she peeled off her gloves, she went back to check on what was happening. From the dog bed, the horizontal image showed Klaus drinking his beer in front of the TV; her attention zeroed in on the German’s red shirt. It said Klaus Berger and it had the number 4. Emilia went over to her wicker chair and sat down at her desk. Under the number it said Rot-Weiß Erfurt. She opened a search window and googled it immediately. It was a soccer team, just as she’d thought. The website listed the players, and among them was Klaus Berger, alongside a photograph of a man much more attractive and professional-looking than the one she saw on her screen now, lounging on a sofa. Emilia didn’t let herself be fooled: there was no doubt it was the same man. She googled the name separately and found him on several social media sites. Almost all the photos of Klaus were the same: he was holding a soccer ball, or had one arm around a girl’s waist, or both arms around the shoulders of other players. Eva didn’t seem to be in any of the photos or have a profile of her own, and Emilia realized she was disappointed. Would she have liked to contact her, write her a message? She wasn’t sure. What would she say? “Dress more warmly”? “Eat more”? “Find yourself a better man”?
All of Klaus’s contact information was neatly listed on the site. When Emilia saw the phone number, she knew what she would do next. It was just that sitting around waiting for catastrophe to strike wasn’t her way of doing things; she hadn’t raised a boy like hers by sitting around with her arms crossed. She got her phone, entered Klaus’s number, and texted a message.
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