‘I need to get to João de Deus,’ Wagner protests. ‘I need to see my family.’
‘We’re your family now,’ Irina says. She hands him his lost knife.
Marina brings the tea from her living room to sit and sip and watch the man sleep. Sex has always rewarded her with insomnia. The men have snored or grunted or mumbled their way into the night while she pulls an arm from under a belly, repositions a leg, slips out from under a shoulder and there is no sleep until sun-up.
Marina drinks her tea. The darkened room, lit only by accidental light from the bathroom, the street, turns Carlinhos’s skin to velvet. He has the most beautiful skin. Like all dusters he has shaved his body hair. It’s a particular agony, peeling a sasuit off over back hair. She touches his skin gingerly, afraid to arouse him; enough to catch the nap, feel the living electricity. The light casts fine shadows across the landscape of his back, like low sun exposing the memories of old craters and rilles. His side, his hip and the sculptural curve of his ass are covered in a faint network of lines. Scars.
The charmer, the schemer, the talker, the fighter.
He breathes like a baby.
How good it is to have a muscled man. A tall, muscled man; moon-tall, big enough to scoop her up and enfold her and overpower her, which she likes. A big man to roll over on to his back and ride. The other men had been collegiate: geeks and engineers, dice-rollers and occasional runners; snowboarders and skateboarders. Board boys. One jock once; a swimmer. He had been a good shape. Earthmen. This is a moonman. Marina has seen Carlinhos naked, freshening up after the Long Run, suiting up, suiting down, in that precious pool at Beikou under the eyes and claws of Ao Jung, but she has never seen him as a man of the moon until now; on his belly, head turned to one side, in her bed. And he is so different, this moonman. A head and some taller than her, though he’s reckoned not tall among the second generation, and below average by the slender trees of the third gen. His skin lies close over a different musculature, a landscape, like all landscapes, governed by gravity. His toes are long and flexible. You grip with your toes. His calves are round and tight: Marina’s calves ached for a whole lune while she learned how to walk like a moon girl. Carlinhos’s thigh muscles are defined and long from running, but underdeveloped by terrestrial standards. Thigh muscles are too powerful for the moon: they can send you slamming into walls and people, or soaring up to crack open your skull on the roof. His ass is magnificent. Marina wants to bite it. Calves and ass get you around, give you that Gagarin Prospekt swing. That’s why 1950s retro is so hot this season; those skirts and petticoats, these box jackets move like seduction on the streets.
His belly is turned from her but she knows it’s tight and packed. His spine runs in a deep valley of muscle. The upper body by contrast is overdeveloped. Heavy shoulders, massive pecs, biceps and triceps bulging. He’s top heavy. On the moon you need upper body strength more than lower. He lies sprawled on her bed like a defeated cartoon superhero. Mouth-breathing.
Strange man, beautiful man. You’re fit for this world and fitness is beauty. But I’m as strong as you, I pushed you into a wall at the hospital, when you scared me. I grabbed you when you came down on me and turned you over and you laughed because no amor has ever done a thing like that with you and then I came down on you.
Marina’s tea has grown tepid.
She had run, corridor to corridor, unable to escape the hospital, the city, the moon, until she found a tiny corner. There she curled up, arms around knees, and felt the stone sky press down on her; billions of tons of sky. He found her there. He sat across the corridor from her, not speaking, not touching, not doing anything except being there. Up in Bairro Alto, in the desperate sky, a man with a knife had taken her fog-catcher and drunk her water before her eyes. The knife had won, the knife would always win. The knife was a reproach to her until fear and fury and adrenaline sent her to face the knife, and drive a titanium spike through a man’s brain and through the top of his skull.
‘Carlinhos,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’
Scared?
‘I am like you.’
In her room under the same stone sky she lays her cheek against the hollow of Carlinhos’s spine. She feels the movement of his breath, the rhythm of his heart and blood. The impossible texture of his skin. She can’t feel the scars at all.
‘Oh man, what do we do now?’
‘How old is he?’ Lucasinho asks.
‘Twenty-eight,’ Lucas says.
‘Twenty-eight!’
At Lucasinho’s age, that’s death. Lucas remembers seventeen. He hated it. Rafa’s shadow fell long on him; his few friends had all moved away, he had slipped off contact with them and felt too gauche and uncertain to make new ones. Nothing felt right around him; friends, lovers, clothes, laughter and what seventeen understands as love. It came to Rafa like rain, soaked him through with charm, cleansed him. Alone then, alone now.
He’s jealous of his son; Lucasinho’s easy sexuality, his charm, his comfort in his own body. The Dona Luna pin on his lapel.
Lucas met his son at the station. The kid wore all his piercings – a formal occasion – and clutched a cardboard cake box. Lucas almost smiled at the cake box. Where had he learned this kindness? Escoltas cleared a way through the press of celebrity spotters. On the moon, nothing was as gossip-worthy as an assassination attempt. Lucasinho held the cake box like a baby while drones swooped overhead.
They stood together ten minutes by the window to the ICU. Familiars could have shown Ariel in every detail, overlain with schematics and medical notes, but that would just have been image. The glass made it physical. Ariel lay in her coma; Beijaflor performed slow topological involutions. Then Lucas took Lucasinho up to his room. Jinji had transfered schematics to the hospital printers: the Boa Vista staff had built a comforting replica of Lucasinho’s colloquium room in Meridian. There Lucas told him about the wedding. He had planned it carefully. Lucas’s own room would have been indecent, his office too formal, too overbearing.
‘Your mother was twenty-nine when I married her. I was twenty.’
‘Look how that worked out.’
‘It worked out with you.’
‘Don’t make me do it.’
‘We’re not free in these things, Luca.’ The intimacy, the nick-of-a-nickname: he had rehearsed it on the way down to the station, trying to get used to its discomfort in his throat. He had feared he would stumble over it but when he had to say it, the word slipped free. ‘The Eagle of the Moon has ordered it.’
‘The Eagle of the Moon, the rat of the moon – that’s what you say.’
‘He has us, Luca. He can wreck the company.’
‘The company.’
‘The family. I didn’t want to marry Amanda Sun. I never loved her. Love wasn’t in the contract.’
‘But you bought you way out. Buy me out of this.’
‘I can’t. I wish I could, Luca. I would do anything to be able to do that. It’s political.’
In the box are macaroons, glossy and perfect, arranged in a spectrum of colours. Those are the things that make Lucas feel the greatest traitor. They are innocent and kind and gentle and betrayed.
‘I have a first-draft nikah,’ Lucas says.
‘Ariel is on life-support.’
‘It’s not one of Ariel’s,’ Lucas says. Lucasinho’s cheek twitches.
‘What?’
‘It’s a first draft. Luca, I could order you. For the family, all that. I’m asking you; will you marry Denny Mackenzie?’
‘Paizinho …’
Now Lucas is rocked, a small quake: he can’t remember the last time Lucasinho used the familiar, the contraction. Daddy.
‘For the family?’
‘What else is there?’
‘How long have you been there?’
The voice wakes Marina from her warm, antiseptic doze. Intensive Care Units are hugely conducive to sleep. Their warmth, the hum and mesmerising dance of the machines, the perfume of gentle botanicals that reminds her of forests, of mountains and home.