He finished lunch and walked home. Once in the apartment, he went straight to his room and set the new tablets on the desk. Nikolina turned toward him right away.
“We have a problem,” she said.
Grigor was surprised not to see the table covered with tablets. Nikolina worked voraciously, the octopus of long arms and conspicuous vertebrae who had so disconcerted him the day of his first outing, and she usually managed ten or even twelve connections at once without a break. But now there was a single tablet in front of her, alone on the table.
“This girl,” said Nikolina, pushing the tablet toward him.
Grigor never referred to his connections by the keepers they were linked to. He didn’t work with people, but rather with devices linked to IMEI numbers: cell technologies, hexadecimal systems, and a snazzy block of spreadsheets full of data. Who was “this girl”?
Nikolina held out the tablet so he could see. It was the panda kentuki number 47, if memory served him.
“Something’s happened. You promise not to get mad?”
Grigor reached over to his desk and found the spreadsheet for 47. Yes, that was the one. He’d collected almost no information on that connection. The device was confined to a closed room—rudimentary, yet equipped with game consoles and a giant screen—that it wasn’t allowed to leave. A teenage boy came in for a few hours at a time to play video games or nap on the sofa. It had been over a month since Grigor connected it, and he still hadn’t gotten any details or found a way out of the room.
“What happened?”
“The door was open. I don’t know why. So I took the chance to escape.”
“And? Do we finally know where we are?’
Grigor picked up a pen, anxious to finally obtain some information. But she signaled him to come closer and sit beside her. She’d taken photos of the tablet screen, a lot of photos, and she wanted to show them to him while she explained.
“You have to see it to understand—this thing is crazy.”
Grigor sat down and Nikolina showed him the first images. She’d stored them on the tablet itself, and while she scrolled through the pictures she told him everything, from the beginning. The house turned out to be a humble farm. At first she hadn’t seen anyone, and she wanted to find some people and hear what language they spoke, so she went out to the yard. There were untethered dogs that ignored the kentuki, and goats, a lot of loose goats. Nikolina stopped on one photo: he could see an open, flat village in some hot and humid zone, a heavy sky, and not a soul in the photograph, just the road, some houses, goats, and more goats all around.
“You left the house?” asked Grigor, uneasy.
“I know, I know the rules, but wait. Listen first. I couldn’t cross the road because it’s dirt, see? It wouldn’t work.”
Grigor looked at the next photo. The place looked like a ghost town, and the goats didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. There was one lying down in the middle of the street, five more resting in the shade of the awning on an abandoned restaurant, and a larger group farther back, walking away. Amid so much desolation, the sight of a red motorcycle parked in front of one of the houses was alarming; so there were people around, thought Grigor.
“But I could move on the sidewalk, see?” Nikolina went on explaining as she skipped to the next photo. “I thought I could check the house next door. But there was no one there, either.”
So she’d gone a little farther.
“How far?”
“Two blocks, maybe three.”
Grigor clutched his head. It was a stupid risk, going that far from the charger. If someone locked the kentuki up now, if for some reason it couldn’t get back to the charger, those weeks of work would be lost.
“Come on, boss,” she said finally, interrupting his lecture. “Haven’t you ever given in to temptation?”
Plenty of times, but they were his kentukis. He knew there was nothing better: to escape from the keepers and move around the connection area autonomously was an extraordinary experience. Extraordinary for him, but he wasn’t paying this girl to have fun. He looked at her impatiently.
“Wait,” she said, “this is important.”
Nikolina had entered a house three blocks down, a big, long, one-story house. Her charger had showed 70 percent then, so she thought she had some leeway. Two men were sitting in plastic lawn chairs in the doorway. Nikolina showed him the photo and Grigor saw that, leaning against the wall between the men, there was a shotgun.
“A shotgun?”
Nikolina nodded.
“A shotgun and a lot more goats.”
There were so many of them near that house that they helped shield the kentuki from view, and she was able to circle around to the back door. Well, really there was no door, but bars that had been fixed into the threshold.
“Okay, get to the point, you’re making me nervous.”
One of the dogs, a small one, went inside. It fit easily between the bars, so Nikolina steeled herself and followed it. She showed Grigor the next photo, now inside the house: a dining area open to a rudimentary kitchen, and a woman who was washing dishes, leaning over the sink. Nikolina explained that she crossed the kitchen and went through a door that led to the living room where two more men were talking, slouched on a sofa. She didn’t take a photo of that, she went by as fast as she could behind the dog, since she was too exposed and had nowhere to hide.
“What language were they speaking?”
“Portuguese, I think.”
Grigor looked at her, impressed and doubtful at the same time.
“You know I love Ronaldinho,” said Nikolina, winking at him.
Grigor made a note of the language. Nikolina had followed the dog down the hallway, which led to the bedrooms; there were a lot, some six or seven. The first one had bars on the door, and it was empty. She showed him the photo.
“It’s clearly a cell, Grigor. The bed, a blanket, a little table, nothing else.”
Grigor made another note, and Nikolina looked at him a moment, disconcerted. She shook her head and went on.
The rest of the rooms were also empty, each with a barred door half-open. There were some images of the beds, which were double and unmade, everything dingy and disheveled.
“In the last room there was a girl,” said Nikolina. “The door on that room was closed, but I could fit between the bars, and when the girl saw the kentuki her eyes opened wide. She jumped out of bed like she’d seen a glass of water in the middle of the desert. She ran to the door and laid a chair down so I couldn’t get back out again.”
“So now we’re locked in, without a charger? How many hours now?”
“She’s not even fifteen years old, Grigor. She wrote this on a piece of paper and held it in front of the camera.”
Nikolina showed him the next photo. It seemed to have been written in lipstick. It was a dirty napkin, and except for the phone number, Grigor was unable to understand what the message said. Nikolina read from her notes:
“‘I’m Andrea Farbe, I’ve been kidnapped. Mom’s phone number: +584122340077 please!’ It’s written in Spanish,” clarified Nikolina. “I googled the country code and it’s Venezuela. I think we’re in Brazil but the girl isn’t from there.”
Grigor looked at her in horror. She shook her hands as though she’d burned them, somewhere between frightened and excited.
“We have to get her out. We have to call the mother.”
“We don’t know where she is.”
Grigor explained that the connection system worked on anonymous proxies and jumped automatically from server to server. Even if there was a way to pinpoint the kentuki’s location, the only thing they would get in a period of searching would be expired signals from almost everywhere in the world. Nikolina put her hand over her mouth. They sat for a moment and thought.
Grigor picked up tablet 47 and saw the girl for the first time, not in photos, but live. Skinny, with dark circles under her eyes, she was desperately searching through drawers,
and she seemed to be taking care not to make any noise. The walls were concrete and the black-and-pink sheets looked to be made of cheap, synthetic material.
“We need a charger,” said Grigor. “If we stay here with her, we might be able to figure out where we are, but who knows how long that could take. In the meantime, we need battery power.”
“Hold on, she’s writing on the floor now,” said Nikolina. “Turn the kentuki around.”
He turned it. The girl had drawn a cross on the floor in lipstick, and now she was writing in the four rectangles. She wrote NO in the upper left, SI in the upper right, NO SE in the bottom left, and in the last one: PREGUNTA MAS. Nikolina was looking up each word in a translator.
“Confirmed,” she said, “it’s Spanish.
“This is no good,” said Grigor. “We’re the ones who need to be asking questions, we’ll never figure out where she is this way.”
A notification warned them that the battery had hit 50 percent. Nikolina took the tablet from Grigor and moved the kentuki over the rectangle for PREGUNTA MAS, maybe because out of the four options, Ask more was the closest thing to Tell us more.
The girl spoke, but they didn’t understand.
NO, Nikolina had the kentuki say, PREGUNTA MAS.
The girl cursed under her breath and looked to either side, desperately shaking her head.
Nikolina went over to the lipstick and pushed it toward the girl’s feet.
“Where are you?!” she shouted at the tablet, while behind her Grigor twisted himself up in his chair, trying to think of something.
A little later, when the battery was already down to 30 percent, the girl seemed to calm down and think things out better. She wrote something on the other side of the napkin and showed it to them:
Surumu.
Grigor looked at Nikolina.
“So what’s she speaking now?”
Nikolina googled it. She ruled out some of the results and then cried out:
“It’s a place! Surumu is a village in the state of Roraima, it’s in Brazil.”
She found it right away, only a few miles from the border with Venezuela. It was such a small town it didn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Nikolina put the photo of the napkin with the phone number on it in front of Grigor, and he dialed it. As he did he was trembling and silently cursing his luck, wondering if he would have made that call if Nikolina hadn’t been there to pressure him. He asked in English if he was speaking with the mother of Andrea Farbe, and the woman who answered was silent for a few seconds and then burst out crying. Nikolina took the phone and tried to soothe her. She quickly realized the woman didn’t understand a word of English, and that she was crying because she’d heard her daughter’s name. So Nikolina hung up and called the closest police station to Surumu they could find, 317 kilometers away. They were passed along from one extension to another, transferred as soon as the person realized they weren’t speaking Portuguese, until finally someone with a basic command of English answered. They tried to explain what was happening, but every time the cop seemed to finally understand, the connection went dead. Nikolina called back; it took several tries before she understood what had been clear to Grigor from the start—the local police were most likely involved in whatever was going on in Surumu.
Nikolina called other nearby police stations. Either they hung up on her, too, or they refused to speak English, or they kept her waiting endlessly on the phone. Grigor thought it would be enough to take a picture of the girl’s image and get in touch with some media outlet to get things really moving, although he wondered if that wouldn’t be a reckless move. What Grigor hadn’t realized—but deduced when Nikolina suggested a similar solution—was that she’d been recording the calls to all the police stations, and had eight different conversations saved on her phone. Nikolina called several outlets in both Venezuela and Brazil and handed over all the material.
Some hours later Grigor’s phone rang; it was the Venezuelan police. The Brazilian federal police also called, and the headquarters of the general police department of Roraima. In Surumu, the girl had asked if they’d made the call, holding her hand up to her. Nikolina had indicated SI, and the girl had been crying silently since. Grigor enumerated for Nikolina the possible consequences of what they had just done, and then the two of them were silent for a while, perhaps each taking stock of how far they were willing to go for this stranger in peril.
“We have to move everything,” said Nikolina finally, and it wasn’t until she gathered up her personal belongings along with the first two tablet boxes and went out into the hallway that Grigor understood what she meant.
They moved all sixty-two of their functioning tablets to her small apartment across the hall. They took apart the table Nikolina used as a desk and moved it back to the kitchen. They hid the spreadsheets and the cameras with their tripods. They carried away anything that could incriminate them. When the Croatian police knocked on Grigor’s apartment door there was only one tablet left, and it wasn’t kentuki number 47’s. Grigor didn’t trust the police, and he’d decided it was better to maintain the connection and follow what was happening in Surumu as long as possible. So he sacrificed a kentuki he would have gotten very little for anyway: he ended the connection, and apologetically gave the cleared tablet to the police instead of number 47.
Meanwhile, the real 47 was agonizing on another continent, down to its last 10 percent of battery. They turned back to that problem as soon as the police were gone.
“We have to get it to the charger.”
“No,” said Nikolina. “We can’t leave the girl. Not at a time like this.”
“If we stay here,” said Grigor, “we won’t last much more than fifteen minutes. If we move, a miracle could still happen.”
Nikolina nodded. They guided the kentuki over to the chair and tapped against it a few times. The girl understood and removed it. The dog was sitting in the middle of the hallway waiting for them, and it sniffed at them again as they headed toward the kitchen. There was only one man on the sofa now, and he was asleep. The radio was on. Nikolina left the house, and, skirting some potholes of concrete and dirt, pausing between the goats’ feet and making sure they didn’t kick her over, she guided the kentuki along the sidewalk of that ghost town, now dark and nocturnal. It was a wonder to watch her control the kentuki; Grigor had never seen her work from so close up, and he was impressed. She was a virtuoso. Back at the other house, the goats were still outside and the doors open, same as in the morning. When Nikolina finally fit the kentuki on the charger, they both shouted and high-fived. They had power.
Oaxaca
ALINA SAT DOWN on the steps near the fountains and took off her sneakers so the heat from the flagstones would dry her damp feet. She thought of Carmen, who claimed that artists always smelled bad, especially their feet. They were beautiful as the gods of Olympus—“hot and crazy,” as Carmen said peevishly—but they smelled like hell itself, and every time one of them came in for a book, Carmen had to air out the whole library. Did she smell as bad as the artists after she ran ten kilometers? She was sitting on the top steps of the embankment. On the other side of the fountains, a kentuki—not the Colonel—rolled along in the shade of the exhibition hall and headed off toward the gallery.
Now there were kentukis everywhere. Alina had counted five at the residency. A few days ago, the crazy woman with the cork installations had taken a mole kentuki that wasn’t hers from the kitchen, and the Russian, who had the same color mole, had taken hers. Sven told her about it in full detail. Neither of the artists had realized the mix-up. Not until the dweller of the Russian’s mole—that is, the dweller of the kentuki now in the possession of the crazy cork lady—sent an audio message to his keeper’s phone. It was the first time the Russian had heard that voice, and he didn’t know who it was or what language it was speaking. He played it at dinner and one of the Chilean photographers said it sounded like Welsh—her mother was Welsh, and she recognized it right away. So the Russian forw
arded it to the Chilean woman and the Chilean sent it to her mother, who translated it and recorded the same message but in Spanish, which the Chilean was kind enough to repeat in English for everyone, trying to maintain her mother’s intonation. The message said: “Either get me away from this crazy lady, or I’m disconnecting!” The cork artist was among the curious listeners who had gathered to hear the translated message. It took her a few seconds to realize it was referring to her; then, furious, she grabbed her kentuki—that is, the Russian’s kentuki, and she stomped on it as hard as she could. The first kick only knocked it over on the floor—the Russian leapt to try and save it—but with the second stomp, her high heel drove directly into the camera eye and crushed in the creature’s face, laying bare the metal. The rest of the artists pulled her away and tried to soothe her. In the commotion the other mole disappeared, and no one saw it again. The beaten kentuki had survived, it was shrieking, and the Russian carried it away in his arms, soothing it with what to Sven was the most chilling lullaby he’d heard in his life.
Things like that were all Sven talked about those days. Artists and their kentukis. Alina just listened.
She went to her room and showered. Then, sitting at the desk, she stretched in her chair, pulled her hair up into a big bun, and checked the savings in her bank account. She wanted to go back to Mendoza early, even though she was short on cash.
Are you sure you’re ok? her mother kept asking by text.
She sent emojis of faces blowing kisses, of watermelons and cats, and she attached photos of Alina’s nieces.
Alina replied that she was fine, and sent little skull emojis.
Carmen had promised that the Day of the Dead would be the best thing to happen in Alina’s whole visit. She wouldn’t let her leave before she saw how good the Oaxacans were at celebrating. By now, Carmen and Alina were having coffee at the kiosk every afternoon. Alina suggested that they go down together to Oaxaca on the night of the Day of the Dead. It would be fun, they could go from bar to bar and stay out until morning. For a moment Carmen smiled. The plan was a good one, but Alina was forgetting that Carmen, aside from being a librarian, was a mother of two boys—two boys with kentukis.
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