Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  She cocked a weary eyebrow. “Já ’tá nessa, Ignácio? You running de brizola? Wha’ happen to de clean-an’-sober thing, gato? You falled off de wagon now?”

  “No way, kid. Nada disso. I just need a little hustle is all. Strictly business.”

  “’Tá bom, gatinho . . . Pagando uma de avião agora, hein? Tst tst . . .” She clicked her tongue with mock reproach. “You always surprising me, Ignácio!”

  After a little pause, I gave her the punch line. “Narcisa’s back. Got it?”

  She got it. “Pobre gatinho!” She frowned. Reaching a long, elegant hand out, she gestured for a cell phone. “Tá legal, gato. Me presta seu celular.”

  I reached in my pocket, handed her the battered old Nokia and watched as she dialed, then pushed the speaker button so I could listen in.

  “Copacabana Palace Hotel, boa noite . . .” A melodic little voice crackled. “Boa noite.”

  “Por gentileza, o senhor John Johnson, por favor.”

  “John Johnson? Fala serio!” I laughed. “Ya gotta be shittin’ me, ’Nanda.”

  She smirked and winked, holding a warning finger to her lips, as another voice with a distinctly American accent came on the line.

  “Hullo?”

  “Hall-oo, John-ee! Eees Fernanda, bay-bee!”

  “Hey there, Fer-naaan-duh.”

  “Eii, John-eee . . .” She smiled, cooing sweetly in the most adorable English. “Lissen, ném, you remember de little t’ing we was talkin’ ’bout de night befo’ . . . ? Sim, iss-sso . . . Poisé, ném . . . Ye-aah . . . Well, I got somebody over here I like for you to know . . .”

  38. WAR ZONE

  “POVERTY IS THE PARENT OF REVOLUTION AND CRIME.”

  —Aristotle

  A familiar pungent sewage stench invaded my senses. Almost there.

  I gunned the motor harder, scrambling up the hill, up, up, over the slick, dark cobblestone path, up, up into the rambling hillside favela.

  Little fruit bats flittered in the looming shadows of a giant ancient mango tree, dancing around my head as I rode past, reminding me at the last minute to pull off my helmet and cut the light as I neared the slum’s entrance, headed for the boca.

  The boca. The Mouth. The Drug Spot.

  It was a tense, well-guarded place nowadays, with many strict new rules; best to show your face when approaching the fortified ghetto drug markets these days, if you wanted to keep from getting ripped to shreds by a burst of automatic weapon fire from some shell-shocked, coked-up, trigger-happy teenage lookout.

  Entering the comunidade, I reminded myself I was heading into a war zone. This place was no longer the familiar, easygoing hillside shantytown I used to come and go from as an innocent adolescent coke-runner.

  That was a million years ago. Things were very different now.

  I rolled along the dark, garbage-strewn path, reminiscing about my old life there with my ragtag teenage gang, forever waiting for the next score in our myopic little world of bohemian malandragem and petty crime. Yeah, things were all different up in the hills of Rio today. Desperate. Hard-edged. Deadly.

  I cut the motor and coasted in silence down a bumpy, mottled alley, past the ever-present graffitied letters, CV, spray-painted on walls—a constant reminder of just where I was going . . . CV. Commando Vermelho. CV. Red Command turf.

  Rattling along through rows of sleeping shacks, down into the dark, deserted favela plaza, I eased the bike to a quiet halt beside an idling yellow taxi. Setting the kickstand down, I sat there, looking around.

  Easy does it, man. Don’t wanna come tearing up beside someone and give ’em call for suspicion, paranoia, a sudden violent reaction. Quiet, gentle, slow, easy.

  I shot a casual glance at the guy behind the wheel . . . Looks cool . . . But you never know up in here . . . I knew it could easily be Death sitting in that car. Could be anything, anyone, any time of the day or night up there on the hill. I gave the driver a quick nod and a casual thumbs-up, then looked the other way, getting my bearings, waiting for someone to come out of the tangled maze of alleyways ahead, so I’d know which way to go next.

  Sitting on the bike, I reached in my pocket and pulled out my smokes. I could feel the gringo’s cash rolled up in the pack . . . Two hundred and fifty . . . Plenty to work with here . . . I’ll just give him fifty’s worth and keep the rest for Narcisa.

  I lit up and sat there watching a skeletal little tiger cat, tipping across the dark clearing in the shadows. All of a sudden, a bright red dot from a high-powered assault rifle’s laser sight appeared beside her.

  The cat stopped, still as the night, watching the shiny little light like a bug. Then she pounced. The red spot moved a few inches. She cocked back her haunches and pounced again. I smiled. I like cats. I hoped the kid on the other end of the gun liked cats too.

  Spooked by footsteps, the tough little creature scurried off to live the next of its nine lives. Just then, the taxi’s passenger emerged from the dim, narrow beco ahead, walking fast with that furtive, jerky, “just copped” body language.

  I watched as he got into the taxi. He said something to the driver and they pulled away . . . Perfect, Max!

  Now it was all going to be easy. Simple. All I had to do was go down the same alley, then follow the trail of rifle-toting teenage thugs to the spot.

  I got off the bike. Glancing around, I put my boot down on the last of my cigarette, then strode down toward the boca.

  Back in Lapa. I parked under the trembling flicker of the battered old neon sign. As I stepped into the lobby, an elderly Arab man gave me a weary nod.

  Above his head, an ancient wall clock said it was 4 a.m.

  Taking the shabby wooden stairs two at a time, I grinned, playing the tape over in my mind. A dozen skinny, bare-chested teenage bandidos standing around the boca, laughing, funk-dancing, flirting with local whores, shouldering big assault rifles that weighed half as much as them. Favela life. A naked brown baby sitting on a trash-strewn dirt path, crying all alone, howling into the smoky night—neglected, unattended, abandoned like a dead man’s sneaker.

  Walking down the hall to Narcisa’s room, I could still feel the warm ocean wind on my face. I savored the details, replaying the satisfied look on the gringo’s face as we’d sat up in his luxury hotel suite overlooking the dark rolling sea; Mr. John Johnson, slowly, methodically cutting out lines with his platinum credit card on a spotless green glass tabletop; his look of mild surprise when I declined his imported whiskey on the rocks. The huge bump he cut out for me sitting neglected on the table. His big friendly gringo smile as he handed me five more crisp blue hundred notes and portioned me off a taste. “One fer th’ road, ol’ buddy.” That soft, warm gringo handshake as he told me he’d be staying in Rio for another week. And me thinking to myself, Yeah, and there’s a thousand more just like you where you came from, ya grinning gringo prick!

  I knew right then that I’d be able to keep going with Narcisa now; that I’d stay on this mad, demented, fever-dream destruction derby ride to hell till the fucking wheels melted.

  39. BUSINESS AS USUAL

  “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND ADDICTION WITHOUT ASKING WHAT RELIEF THE ADDICT FINDS, OR HOPES TO FIND, IN THE DRUG OR THE ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR.”

  —Gabor Maté

  I knocked on the door and Narcisa opened up fast.

  She was ready for me this time . . . Crack pipe in hand . . . Check . . . Seductive grin on face . . . Check . . . Ready . . . Set . . . Go! Go! Go!

  Like telepathy, like magic, she knew she really had me at last. And she was ready to really work it now, standing in the doorway in her skimpy denim miniskirt. Miles of long, gangly white legs and knobby Lolita knees; a glowing, ethereal neon fairy. She’d even donned her good old whorehouse heels.

  Narcisa’s flat, bare alabaster belly rubbed against me like a cat in heat. I put my arm around her waist. Kicking the door shut behind me, I led her over to the window. As her crack-furnace breath tickled my neck, I was already hard as stee
l.

  We stood looking down at the drunken hordes of Carnaval’s last gasp. Holding her close, I could see them all down there, scrambling around like rats in an overturned garbage can.

  At the back of my mind, I had a hazy plan to help her out of her self-made hell . . . There’s still a chance, if I can just outlast that fucking Crack Monster . . . Just gotta keep her alive now, long enough for her to burn out and cry for help.

  I held out a big, waxy yellow crack rock. Her eyes lit up like a short-circuited slot machine. Slipping it back in my pocket, my hand wandered down her spine and latched like a talon on to her firm, perfect ass.

  “Fock!” Narcisa breathed with a sheepish grin. “You gonna keep give it to me these kinda presente, Cigano, I gonna be in love with you . . .”

  Without a word, I pulled her underwear down, leaned her over the window ledge and slid it inside. Pow! Bang!

  A paralyzing electric shock therapy jolt to the soul, and I’m hard as a diamond, breathing in the musky fragrance of her scalp, pulling her long, greasy brown hair, pushing it deep inside her, drooling, slobbering like a horny cartoon wolf, grabbing that hard Garden of Eden Apple ass, and we’re hanging over the window, fucking like the damned, dancing in a raging sea of lust, like electrocuted puppets on the devil’s high-voltage high-wire, fucking up and down, all around the room, knocking things assunder, and it’s raining mad, hungry spirits of debauchery and mayhem, and I don’t care, don’t care, don’t give a fucking shit anymore, all ashes, ashes, ashes, raining down down down down down!

  I spun her around and clutched her to me hard, running my hand up and down the velvet highway of thigh, kissing her with a burning desperation, inhaling her hot, musky breath like a strong hit of crack . . . Breathing her in, eating her alive, fucking her hard, harder, bouncing her perfect white ass up and down on the dirty ledge for all the world of drunken slobbering slobs down there to see and eat their dirty black rat-shit hearts out, because I am with Narcisa, and I am blessed, holy, alive, bathing in eternal pounding waterfall mists of motion sex sound energy, crazy electric spirits dancing us away away into the ashy dawn of never forever, forever.

  Journal entry: Ash Wednesday—7 a.m. The world of day is coming to life at daybreak. Riding up to the top of the hill, up, up, into the favela again, nothing more to do now but sit and watch the sun coming up over the city. Sweaty skin still tingling from a short-circuit glow of lust-drunk passion. All is dreamlike and magical up here. Nothing but sleeping shacks and nature, and a devastating ocean view of a fairy-tale world spreading out below, pastel-gray sea shimmering into eternity, a silent, blinking crystal vision. An alien nirvana. Dawn over Alpha Centauri.

  A small yellow bird lands on a branch. A loud cheeep, a tiny crunch of claws grasping at wood, then whooooosh overhead. Hundreds of wild black ducks moving past in a crooked formation. Twenty seconds later and they’re gone again, just a blurry, wobbly little line, moving away over the mute ghost town below, fading into distant mountains and jungles, across murky visions of Guanabara Bay.

  Watching, waiting for the first orange pinprick of sun poking through gray morning mists; another loud, piercing birdcall, another row of ducks, a crooked, trembling shadow approaching, and I hear a windy rush of another two hundred powerful beating black wings, and then they’re gone again.

  Pale purple and blue hues of new day appearing, overtaking the tiny lights twinkling across the water, distant buildings and factories, crippled gray worker-ant wastelands emerging across the glassy mirror of water.

  After sunup, I rode back down the hill, buzzing past graffiti-scarred brick walls, through my humble working-class neighborhood. Skirting past the ornate ironwork fence around the Gothic stone grounds of the old Hospital Português, I could see the White Ambulances of Death, still coming and going, screaming like bloodthirsty harpies in the early-morning haze, hauling load after load of Carnaval’s expired casualties, like delivery goods to a macabre meat market.

  Carnaval. A crippled slaughterhouse of stabbings and shootings, car wrecks, overdoses and quick, undignified death. People dead and dying at the party’s whimpering finale, drunken victims of themselves. Another long, dark, ugly circus of mayhem and murder and mindless, godless debauchery. Idle hands, forever still.

  I rode on, past run-down colonial buildings, crowded street corners and open-air botecos. People still milling around in wilted, sweat-soaked costumes from the night before; still drinking, laughing, dancing, staggering along the ruas of the ramshackle, run-down old bairro, tops of graying Negro heads crowned with withered headdresses, bobbing down the dirty cement battlefield of Carnaval’s last pathetic tweet; dying feathery explosions of expired exuberance and hope.

  Ash Wednesday. The sheeple were going back into their pens at last, just as poor and lost and ignorant and exploited as before their big, happy-go-lucky piss-fest. Just as fucked. I could hear Narcisa’s words echoing in the wind. “E’stupid e’sheets!”

  Riding along like a stealthy black vampire bat beating leathery wings to close the coffin, it dawned on me that, for all their jovial, artificial joy and drunken, shouting Carnaval abandon, nobody had a fucking thing on me now. Because I was in love! And isn’t love the greatest power a man can ever know?

  So what if my love was for a psychotic, violent, abusive, foul-mouthed, unsanitary crack whore with a hell-bent rage and an insatiable appetite for destruction? So fucking what?

  As I parked, the nostalgic words of an old bossa nova tune popped into my head. Humming like a man in love, I strode across the dark, quiet lobby . . . Tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim . . . A felicidade é como a pluma, que o vento vai levando pelo ar, voa tão leve, mas tem a vida breve, precisa que haja vento sem parar . . . e tudo se acabar na quarta-feira . . . tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim . . .

  A happy sort of sadness without beginning or end occupied my heart like a plea, merging with the haunting, melancholy lyrics echoing in my brain.

  Climbing the creaky wooden stairs, I thought of the past week, playing it all over in my head. Five flights of stairs. Five days of Carnaval. Five days into the gates of hell . . . Tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim . . . Porra! Que merda!

  And now, Ash Wednesday had dawned at last, closing the musty old tomb on another absurd human carnival of rats and ants and ashes and ruin.

  And the whole world’s a cold, old, smoldering empire of ashes.

  40. MANIC MODE

  “THE SICK WOMAN ESPECIALLY: NO ONE SURPASSES HER IN REFINEMENTS FOR RULING, OPPRESSING, TYRANNIZING.”

  —Nietzsche

  Carnaval was over. Weeks crawled by.

  The city was getting back to a prosaic workaday pace. Winter was just around the corner. My life with Narcisa was its own Dark Carnaval; a surreal, thundering cavalcade of escalating weirdness.

  Since I had fallen into her mad trajectory, three months had passed in a swirling haze of passion and drama; a relentless flurry of days and nights of love and terror; danger, drama, excitement, lust, addiction, and impending mental collapse.

  Between her grueling, soul-shattering, weeklong crack runs, I’d still try to take Narcisa to a movie, a beach walk at night; something safe and stable and normal, like a quiet água de côco beside a palm tree by the gentle waves. Things were getting worse, though, and she wanted to do that sort of thing less and less.

  I was getting worse too.

  I couldn’t deny it as I watched my own compulsions running amok. Like some distant, impartial observer, I could see the madness unfolding, but I was powerless to stop my fall into a dark, dangerous vortex of petty crime, self-doubt and trouble—all in my desperate efforts to keep her voracious habit sated.

  I feared for my sanity. But never once did I feel the urge to pick up a drug. Narcisa was all the drug I needed. And I tended to her like a flickering, dying flame; still trying to pretend, all the while, that everything was fine, that it would somehow turn out all right in the end. We both knew it wouldn’t be all right. But when all that’s le
ft is the power to pretend, you take what you can get and do the best you can with it.

  As the weeks slithered by, Narcisa began slipping into this crazed, frenetic manic-mode, whenever she was high. She would morph into an insane alien deity, dancing a savage, sensual, militant, extraterrestrial goddess dance; rattling on for backbending hours on end, jumping and writhing, gyrating around my cramped apartment with the music blasting away at top volume.

  Musica! Musica! Go! Go!

  I loved it and I hated it, all at once, like everything else about Narcisa when she jumped into that wild, compulsive go-go mode. And, like everything else about her, I knew I couldn’t change it, even if I’d wanted to.

  I didn’t want to.

  I was standing alone on my balcony late one hot, misty afternoon, looking out over the city. Another long, manic day with Narcisa. I stared out at the breathtaking visions of Rio de Janeiro; daydreaming, thinking, my weary, sleep-deprived eyes searching the view, scanning the horizon with a deep sense of longing, seeking some fleeting glimpse of normality. A cooling ocean breeze blew in off the expansive blue bay, caressing my tired flesh; a vanquished mortal shell, beat and worn, pained and spent after fucking Narcisa long and hard into the murky dawn.

  Sex with Narcisa had become like smoking crack for me. Powerful, compelling, ecstatic, debilitating, raw, obsessive, addictive, deadly. The more I got, the more I had to have.

  More more! Want want! Go go!

  After going at it all night long, I stood there in a trance, replaying the fuzzy visions of our wild, unstoppable sex excursions.

  Narcisa was still going, smoking inside the darkened apartment, frying her brains out, all alone . . . Jesus! She can’t stop!

  I ventured back inside. Exhausted, I crawled up to the loft bed and collapsed.