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 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 find 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, Gurana-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 pur 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 stirred 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, ifl 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 operaation, and I need your permission.”
Pena Pena Penal! 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 lamp standards where carpimpers 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 alclass="underline" 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 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?”