Brasyl (15 page)

"My mum does this," Fia says. "She has a little urban
farm, a couple of backlots, and she hires half a dozen rooftops. She
wouldn't come here, though; she specializes in designer brassicas for
the Japanese restaurant market. She's boring. It's beautiful."

She's secretive; she takes it slow. Edson hasn't gotten to kiss her
yet, let alone sex. Over kibes in that little Arab lanchonete he had
promised (and they had not disappointed—Yellow Dog lanches
would soon to be added to the De Freitas Global Talent portfolio)
Edson had thrilled her with his telenovela of family:
The Sons of
Dona Hortense
. Emer the bricklayer who bought a share in a gym
with the money he brought down from the tower cranes of São
Paulo; Ander the dead this eight years gone, cut down up in the
favela; Denil the builder of fine planes for mighty Embraer; Mil the
soldier boy in a violent and foreign land, remembered every night in
Dona Hortense's Book of Weeping that no high-velocity round might
seek out his blue beret; Ger the aspirant malandro if he could do a
decent day's work; and Ed the man of business and affairs and talent
management and many faces who would one day buy this lanchonete, turn
it into an empire, and retire to his place by the ocean to watch the
sun rise out of the sea. The Brothers Oliveira: on festivals and
public holidays the house was so full of testosterone that Dona
Hortense would send them all out into the street to play soccer;
anything to work off the male aggression.

Fia had applauded but turned away his question about her family.
Edson supposes there's only so much you can say when you are a secret
quantumista.

Now they've been out together ten times and she's taking him to Our
Lady of Trash to buy a pair of shoes and telling him finally about
her family.

"And my dad runs a stable of accountancy ware, but what he
really likes best are the pieces he writes for this cheesy New Age
feed in Brasilia. He's got this idea of fusing Mahayana Buddhism with
umbanda Paulistana—as if Brazil doesn't have enough religions
already. My kid brother Yoshi is on a gap-year—he's surfing his
way around the world. All the girls think he's fantastic. And I grew
up in a little house with black balconies and red roof in Liberdade
like six generation of Kishidas before me. We had a swimming pool and
I had dolls and a pink bike with candy-stripe ribbons on the
hanndlebars. See? I told you it was boring."

"Do they know what you do?" Edson asks as Fia hauls him by
the hand through the temporary alleys between trucks and buses.

"I tell them I'm freelancing. It's not a lie. I don't like to
lie to them." Edson knows the date is a test. Our Lady of Trash
rules a landscape of superstition and street legend. Whispers of
night visions; strange juxtaposiitions of this city with other,
illusory landscapes; angels, visitations, UFOs, ghosts, orixás.
Some, they say, have received strange great gifts: the power of
prophecy, the talent to discern truth, the ability to work the
weather. Some have been lost entirely, wandering away and never
returning to their homes and families, though relatives may sometimes
glimpse them among the trash towers, close yet far away, as if
trapped in a maze of mirrors. It changes you, they say. You see
farther; you see things as they really are.

Edson's damned if he's going to let Todos os Santos scare him. But it
surely is a place to move with confidence and smarts, and so he has
dressed for authority and jeito in a white suit and ruffle-fronted
shirt. Fia's shopping outfit consists of slinky boots, goldie-looking
shorts with button-down pockets, calf-length shimmer coat, and
Habbajabba bag.

"Hey!"

Edson almost dislocates her shoulder as he yanks her to a stop. She
turns, cartoon eyes wide, to open her hot little temper on him and
sees the garbage truck sway to a stop blasting all fifteen horns at
her. The driver crosses himself. Trucks pile up behind him, a garbage
jam. There is one direct road into the heart of Todos os Santos, and
it belongs to the huge municipal caminhaos da lixo, laboring through
dust and biodiesel reek. Their multiple wheel sets deeply rut the red
dirt road; under rain it rurns to mud and the trucks lumber and lurch
axle-deep, like dinosaurs. The track leads to the only completed
onnramp of the unfinished intersection; from it they wend higher,
like some kid's Hot Wheel toy-car set, up the curving roadways until
they reach the edge of the drop, reverse, lights flashing and
warnings yelling, to evacuate their belllies onto the ever-growing
trash mountain of Todos os Santos.

"Saved your life," says Edson. Fia holds his eyes for three
seconds. That's enough to signal a kiss. But Edson hesitates. The
moment is lost. She lets slip his hand and heads up into the second
circle. This is the district of the ware shops, the copywrong
vendors, the black pharmers. Your child has tubercuulosis, flu,
malaria? HIV? Here's a pill for your ill, at noncorporation prices.
You can't get yourself up in the morning, your husband just wants to
sit and watch telenovelas all day, your children won't go to school
and are eating the walls? We can give you something for that. It's
been how long since you last had an erection? Oh my man, I feel for
you. Here. And it will make you come buckets. You really like this
track this movie this installment of
BangBang!
or
A World
Somewhere
but you can't keep up the rental payments and don't
want to lose it at the end of the month? We strip it, you keep it.
Entertainnment is for life not for hire. You want, you need, the
futebol feeds but you can't afford the payments? We have a chip for
every need. You are a man of debts, mistresses, crimes; seguranças
police priests lawyers lovers wives after you? Here are eyes, here
are fingerprints, here are names and faces and alibis and
doppelgängers and ghosts and people who never lived. We can wash
you purer than the crentes' Jesus. And among them, a spray-bombed
pink door to a tottering upstairs office and a hand-rollered pichacão
sign slung on a selfadhesive peg:
Atom Shop Is Open.

It wasn't always sex and spandex. Today Mr. Peach was making Edson a
mogueca.
You need feeding up, Sextinho; you don't look after
yourself. Wasting away like a love-struck fool.
Superhero
costumes were hung up in the Bat-wardrobe. Mr. Peach was dressed now
in dreadful shorts and a beach shirt. Edson in his sharp-creased
whites said, "I still can't believe you knew her at São
Paulo U."

Onions slid into the pan with a hiss. It was an old family recipe, a
slave dish from the coffee estate days. Captains and masters were the
Alvarangas, but they faded and failed until only one remains of the
name. Edson has an enduring fantasy that Mr. Peach makes him son and
heir of
fazenda
Alvaranga.

"Why so surprised? It's a big multiverse and a small world, even
smaller in quantum computing. I was an adviser on her doctoral
dissertation in computational and information physics. Her thesis was
that all mind is a multiversal quantum computer and therefore a
fundamental element of reality, and also linked across universes by
quantum entanglement. I always enjoyed sessions with her; she was one
of my top students. Scarily bright. We'd argue the toss—she had
a foul temper. Great arguer. Have you discovered that yet? Her theory
was that the multiverse is a massively multiply parallel quantum
computer and therefore a mindlike state. I'd argue that was
metaphysics at best, religion at worst: whatever way you looked at it
you ended up back at the strong anthropic principle, and that's
another word for solipsism. There's nothing special about us. Given
enough universes, something like us is bound to occur, many times
over."

A rich tang of garlic, then the astringent perfume of peppers.

"I'm not surprised she's working with the quantumeiros—I
couldn't see anything in academia or even research giving her that
adrenaline rush, but I can't say I'm delighted."

Crayfish now, fresh from the pond-farm up on the hill under the wind
turbines. The power farms with their rotors and golden fields of rape
crept down on the Fazenda Alvaranga while the housing projects crept
up; street by overbright street and Mr. Peach gave his heritage away
to Edson table-lamp by painting by vase. It is as if he wants the
Alvarangas to be gone, wants to disappear completely. Mr. Peach
slides a serving straight from the pan onto a plate; drops a little
chopped coriander on top, green on yellow. A patriotic dish.

"But the real question is: have you fucked her yet?"

"I thought we'd agreed that we could see whoever we liked, that
it didn't matter." Knowing that Mr. Peach had a wide circle of
friends straight and gay, none of whom he would ever dress up in
Lycra and cape.

"It doesn't matter until it's one of my ex-students."

Edson had been uncomfortable with Mr. Peach's former relationship
with Fia since the Captain Superb/Miracle Boy session. They had been
through Captain Truth/Domino Boy, Bondage Man/Pony-Lad and Lord
Lycra/ Spandex Kid, and Edson still feels as if he is sharing her.

"Well, she may be super-bright, but I bet you didn't know she
watches
A World Somewhere
. Addicted to the thing. She'll
download it and we could be having a beer or eating something or even
at a club and if she doesn't like the music, I'll see her watching it
on her I-shades."

"She always was like that."

Edson pushed his plate away from him.

"I'm nor hungry."

"Yes you are. You're always hungry. Does your mother not feed
you?"

"My mother loves me. You don't talk about my mother like that."

They're having a fight over a woman. Edson can't believe it. They're
letting a girl come between them. And Mr. Peach has taught Edson much
more than postcoital physics. He has educated him in other
disciplines: shaving and how to buy and drink wine and shake
cocktails; dressing for style not fashion; ten ways to knot a tie;
etiquette and how to talk to people to make them appreciate and
remember you and call you back and what women expect and like and
what men like and expect and how to be respectful but still get your
own way in a hierarchical society.

Once when he was very small, a man hung around outside the house and
Edson asked Dona Hortense if he was his father.
Why bless the
child, no.
The days when men would come round to play cards and
drink were gone, but Edson remembers the heat of that embarrassment
in his cheeks.

Edson glances over at Mr. Peach, the tanned skin, the wiry gray hair
sprouting from his shirt collar, the thin legs rattling in the baggy
shorts.
You are the father I never knew, the father I suck off.

"Just eat it," says Mr. Peach. "For me. I like making
you things."

Edson suspects that Mr. Peach may not have set the worlds of quantum
physics ablaze, but in one area he excels. He's a great cook of old
slave food.

In Atom Shop Edson hunts for kissable moments. As she brushes between
him and the big 3-D polymer printers, as she leans over to squirt the
design from her I-shades into the renderer, as he bends with her to
study the holoographic image of the noo shooz on the screen. A touch,
a whisper, the scent of her perfume and honey-sweat and fabric
conditioner but never contact.

"Good bag," says the girl on the reception, who has eyes
the size of mangoes and a cloud-catching look from the fumes. The
place smells strongly of plastics, like glue-sniffers' paradise.
"This original?" Fia hands it to her. She holds it up to
the light, turns it this way that way, squinting, peering. Atom Shop
prints print necklaces, hats, earrings, formal masks, body armor,
watches, costume shades, I-clothing, anything you can weave from
smart polymers. Topmarque handbags. "Looks like it. We couldn't
print at that resolution."

"I know," says Fia clutching her bag back to her. "But
you can do me these shoes." She touches her I-shades and loads
the pattern onto Atom Shop's house system. Edson does not doubt it's
stolen. Bad thing to get shot for; copywrong violation on a pair of
top-marque shoes. The girl loads up the cartridges, closes the
transparent cover. Lights blink on, mostly yellow. The print heads
rear like striking snakes, then bend to their furious business,
mollecule by molecule, millimeter by millimeter, building the soles
and heel-tips of a pair of Manolo slingbacks.

It will take about an hour for the shoes to print, so Fia leads Edson
up into the third circle of Todos os Santos, the circle of the
vendors. Recycled reconditioned reengineered reimagined are the
straplines here. Car parts, washing machine engines, lathes taps and
dies, entertainment equipment, jerry-built white goods, custom
mopeds, domestic and civil robots, surveilllance systems, computers
and memory, I-shades and guns—all constructed from the flow of
parts that comes down the spiral from the next circle in, the circle
of the dismantlers.

Circuit boards cook on coal griddles, release their lead solder like
fat from pig-meat. Mercury baths grab gold from plated plugs and
sockets. Homemade stills vaporize the liquid metal, depositing the
heavy treasure. Two boys stir a stream of sand-sized processors into
a plastic vat of reagent, dissolving the carbon nanotubes from their
matrix. Two eight-year-olds sittting cross-legged on a soy bean sack
test plastic from the heap beside them by heating it over a cigarette
lighter and sniffing the fumes. Younger children rush handcarts of
e-junk down from the central dump. This is the circle of the slaves,
sold into debt indenture by parents crushed by 5,000 percent
interest. The drones pause only to pick and scratch at their skins.
The loudest sound is coughing. Wrecked neurology and heavy metal
poisoning are endemic. Few here are our of teenage; few live so long.
Those who make it do so with ruined health. Edson chokes on a waft of
acid. All around him is a sense of heat, a sense of defilement. The
air is sick with fumes. He folds a handkerchief over his mouth. Fia
marches blithely ahead, untouched, untouchable, stepping over the
rivulets of diseased cadmium yellow; toward the heart of Todos os
Santos.