The Summer Prince (19 page)

“An hour, maybe. The wind. It’s whistling from the east.”

I swear, Enki has the ears of a bat. Or he modded them that way, never mind how. “Do you think —”

“It will work, June. Or it won’t. Nothing we can do about it now.”

And this, for whatever reason, relaxes me. It’s true. For the past month, we’ve spent late, grueling nights crawling the four siblings, installing lights and feeds and programming them to respond to remote stimuli.

To respond to the city herself.

I’ve coordinated with Bebel — in person and anonymously — so that she knows precisely when to start and how long to sing. I’ve skipped school to spend hours in the markets of the city, in its pods and its meeting halls and sometimes even its homes, to find the ones whose voices will bring this all together. And now summer is almost over. Its wet heat beads our skin, oppresses us because it knows the chill that rides behind it. In two weeks, parliament will start its special sessions again, and Enki will have so much to do that a project as intricate and grand and brash as this will be impossible.

I should probably start the boat up again, since we’re drifting too far west of our mooring, but I just trace the muscles of Enki’s left calf with a wet finger. We still have half an hour. We’ll get back in plenty of time. On the water, maybe the rules don’t apply. Maybe here I don’t have to wonder what he feels for me, or what Gil will say. When I started this, I swore we would only be art. And maybe we are — good art has a habit of breaking boundaries.

The sun is setting behind the city, but with the clouds rolling in, all we can see is a gradual dimming of light and the occasional angry streak of red.

“There’s a song,” I say.

“There’s always a song,” he says.

“It’s English. It’s about a storm. Or it’s about love.”

Enki’s hands play on my skin. “Same thing, my mamãe would say.”

“My papai too. He taught me, do you know it?
Look for the silver lining whenever a cloud appears in the blue.
”

Enki laughs, but he joins me.
“Remember somewhere the sun is shining …”

I break off. “Wait, what’s next? English is so weird, I swear, it’s like singing rocks.”

“Well, in our mouths, anyway.”

I giggle. It’s true, Enki and I between us can just barely keep a tune. His voice is low and scratchy and skips through the notes. I have my mother’s voice: thin as a reed and a great disappointment to my papai when he realized it would never get much better. But with Enki, my voice is a joy, not a lingering shame.

“I think,” Enki says, “
And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you.
”

We stumble through the next stanza, pausing every other line to argue over the tune or the words. Enki insists it’s
An artful of joys the sadness
, which I point out isn’t proper English, and doesn’t make any sense besides, and he counters that since when did these weird old songs make any sense? After a protracted three minutes, we agree on
An artful joy fills with sadness
, which doesn’t seem right either, but I privately admit that Enki is right, and there’s nothing quite as nonsensical as an old English song lyric. We do, however, agree on a triumphant finish, belting “
Try to find the sunny side of life!
” as if the storm clouds might actually listen to us.

A particularly strong wave nearly knocks us out of the boat.

“Twenty minutes,” Enki says, though he doesn’t check his fono. “We should get back.”

I swallow and nod. I lost my nerves in the song, but now, slipping from the warmth of his chest, his arms, his thighs, I feel I’m losing something else.

“Who was your mamãe to know all those songs, Enki?”

He looks away from me, and I think he’ll ignore the question or deflect it, but instead he shakes his head, looks back up. He starts to cry, just a little. I don’t know if I should comfort him or pretend I don’t notice.

“A historian,” he says. “She studied at the university in Salvador, before the Pernambuco guerrillas bombed it. She made two copies of everything she could recover from their classified servers, before the ’bucos took it over. She buried one in her garden in the body of an old rag doll, so no one would know what it was if they found it, and then she walked to Palmares Três.”

“She
walked
…”

“It took her two months. She almost died a dozen times. And she had no idea if the Aunties would take her in. They refuse thousands each year, did you know that? They don’t like contamination, our Aunties.”

“So why …” I gasp. “The library?”

He smiles, and wipes his eyes. “A penniless Salvadorense six months pregnant with a negro bastard? It was her only chance.”

I take his hand. “Do you hate us?”

“I used to.”

This seems to still my heart. There’s a distant bitterness in his voice, something almost nostalgic. “Used to?”

He turns to me. My other hand falls off the boat’s console and now we’re bobbing again, like my thoughts, tossed in a storm. “I always loved everything too much, even after she died. I would love the lights, the blocos, the spiderweb, the street fairs. I hated the catinga, who doesn’t, but I know you’ve seen it, how beautiful those vats can look when the light hits them. I wasn’t made for that kind of hate, but I felt it anyway.”

“And now?”

He laughs. I want to hug him but I don’t, I won’t. “June, June,” he says. “You say you don’t want to know, you turn away at every chance, but then you ask and ask. Why not be like Gil, why not pretend I’m unknowable and perfect, like some orixá?”

My lights feel hot as the sun on my skin. If I look down, I’m sure they’ll be visible beneath my wet shirt. But the rest of me is cold and afraid and ready to run.

Like I have all summer.

“I can’t be like Gil,” I say. “He thinks everyone deserves love. He thinks the people who should love us will. He thinks the people he loves will always return it. And they do, because he’s Gil. But I’m not easy to love, I haven’t trusted that since … sometimes I think I’m alone as you are, Enki.”

“Then ask, June.”

I can barely hear myself over the wind. “Why don’t you hate anymore?”

“Because I’ve infected myself with bio-nanobots that stop it.”

I love him. I shouldn’t, I swore I wouldn’t, but I have no more defenses. My next question is as inevitable as death.

“Do you love me?”

“I love the whole world.”

And he kisses me.

My skin burns like fire, but this is what she sees, the city that he loves:

The four siblings glow like falling stars, transmuting and flowing into one another in a feedback loop I spent weeks perfecting. They kindle slowly, four smoldering lumps of coal floating in the bay. The lights of the city itself dim, allowing the crowds that rush to the glass and the parks and the walkways to witness our display more clearly.

The lights begin in a gentle, familiar white, but soon enough a hint of color appears. Green blooms first on O Quilombola, our crab island that glows with an intensity those watchers in the city can’t quite describe, but will fascinate them. Then A Castanha, A Velha Preta, and finally the massive lump of A Quarentena (just on its city-facing side, because we would have needed a year to collect enough lights to cover the whole island). And then more colors — the orange of bougainvillea, the purple of açaí berries, the red of hibiscus — bursting and fading in the sea of limned verde.

This would have been enough. I realize that as I watch with Enki at the very base of the great pyramid, where gray and white barnacles cling to the pylons and night fish brush against our feet. If we had just lit the four siblings, we would have created an object worthy of our ambitions.

At least, everyone else would have seen it that way. Gil would still hug me and tell me I’m a genius, I would still impress Queen Oreste and the Aunties when I reveal my involvement in a week. They might even have remembered it for a while, at least until the next sun year, and the selection of a new Queen. I might mention it to my children as something fun I did one time.

And it would do nothing at all. It would change nothing at all. It would move no one at all, and so it wouldn’t really be art, would it?

“Bebel,” I say to my fono, almost a whisper though it doesn’t need to be. “You ready?”

“They’ll never forget this, will they?” she whispers back.

“Not even if they tried.”

Where’s her music?
he had asked.
Here, Papai, here.

I watch the seconds tick down. Over my shoulder, Enki smiles and I let him run his fingers through the interface. It pulses green: connection verified. Bebel and her musicians are now jacked into the city.

Bebel’s voice slips over the speakers, low and gorgeous. For the first time, I think of how the opening lines of the song relate to my papai. She speaks of being alive and yet feeling like you’re among the dead. I wonder if that’s how he felt in those last bleak days when he seemed a stranger to me.

And maybe Bebel deserves the Queen’s Award more than any of us — her voice treads that high wire of sorrow and joy so deftly you forget there’s a drop on either side. At the sound, the lights on the islands explode. The initial burst is so fierce I need to squint, though Enki is wide-eyed and still.

Are there bio-nanobots for that too?

I’ve mapped each shade of color to a sound — orange for her round voice, brown for Pasqual’s guitar, shades of red and green for the other instruments. I didn’t know how well it would work until this moment.

It’s chaotic and muddy and stark all at once. It’s music imagined as light, and I can hardly bear to look away.

But there’s one last thing to do.

In the middle of a verse, before the final, ever-faster, multi-harmonic ramp through the chorus that almost everyone knows, Bebel pauses. The city holds her breath, and so do I. What did he add? How much will I regret this in the morning? Enki touches my forehead, like he’s blessing whatever choice I make.

I play his track.

“Pepi,” a woman says, “I told you to eat it, you want to make your mamãe sad? I made it just for you.”

And another voice.

“Come on, baby, menina, coração, it won’t hurt, it’s just — oh, shit, that
hurt
! What’d you do —”

And another.

“We’re going to kick ass tonight, after what those vermelhos tried to pull last time —”

And more and more, all at once, overlapping one another and silencing and looping and feeding back into the lights of the four siblings, the city speaking and the city listening.

And then, quite clearly despite the layering voices, I hear one that surprises me. Oreste: “That boy will be the death of me, I swear, Maria. Why did we ever allow his election?”

“Because of the wakas, Queen. And the verde.”

Oreste sighs. “Always the wakas and the verde.”

All the voices cut. I’m trembling, staring at Enki and wondering how he ever managed to catch Oreste and Auntie Maria saying something so damning. I’ll never be able to claim this project. Not if I want to win the Queen’s Award. The knowledge is restful, in a way.

He was right. His version is better.

I try to catch his eyes, but he’s gone rigid and distant, staring at the now-dormant lights of the four siblings. I wonder what’s wrong, but not for long. A memory of his voice speaks into the silence:

“You can’t smell the catinga,” he says (he said), to a roomful of shocked Aunties covering their noses and rushing to the doors, “until it comes back home.”

The harmonizing singers get louder, more insistent, striking their words off of one another like metal on metal, flashing sparks.

“June,” Enki says as the crescendo is crashing over me, over the islands, over the city. He says it more than once, I think, before I finally hear him.

He’s shaking. When I touch him, he flinches like it hurts.

The song ends.

And in the breath the city takes — that drawn-out, stunned silence that should be my moment of greatest satisfaction — I am terrified.

“The city,” he says. “Something is collapsing in the city.”

We run.

Up through long-disused emergency stairs, so dusty and caked with the droppings of a century of roosting seabirds that I sneeze uncontrollably. When I fall, Enki pulls me up, rough and hard, by the elbow. I take them two at a time, Enki does three. My thighs burn like the lights on O Quilombola and at first I think his energy must be a mod but then I realize it’s just Enki.