“What, like the Assembly of God?” It had become fashionable for sportsmen to turn crente, to thank the Lord Jesus for goals and medals and records they would previously have ascribed to saints and Mary.
“You didn’t listen.” Feijão ground out his cigarette butt under the sole of his Havaiana, immediately drew another. “I said found religion, not found God.”
In response to the cigarette, Marcelina drew her PDA.
“An umbanda terreiro?” The blacks were finding lily-white Jesus; the whites were finding Afro-Brazilian orixás. So Rio.
“You could try listening instead of rushing in with guestions. The Barquinha de Santo Daime.”
Marcelina held her breath. The Cursed Barbosa a convert to the Green Saint. The ratings would go into orbit.
“So Barbosa’s still alive,”
“Did I say that? You’re getting ahead of me again. He walked out of his apartment three years ago and no one has seen hide nor hair of him since, not even me.”
“But this Daime Church would know… I can find them.” Marcelina opened Google on her PDA. Feijão reached across the table and covered the screen with his hand.
“No no no. You don’t go rushing in like that. Barbosa has been in hell for longer than you’ve been alive, girl. There are few enough he trusted; you’re only sitting here in my garden because Raimundo Soares trusts you. I will talk to the Barquinha. I know the bença there. Then I will call you. But I tell you this, if you try and go around me, I will know.”
The thin, sun-beaten man drained his herbal tea and stubbed his cigaarette fiercely our in the porcelain bowl.
It was in the taxi as it arced back over the long, slender bowstring of the Niteroi Bridge that Marcelina, Googling images, realized she recognized the sacred vine. Psychotria viridis: it glossy oval leaves and clusters of red berries had set off Feijão’s view over the Marvelous City.
Aleijadão was riding an A-frame bicycle up the center of the Glass Menagerie, weaving in and out of the boxes of tapes and slumping pillars of celebrity magazines on wheels the size of industrial castors. He wobbled twice around Marcelina.
“What is that thing you’re on?”
“Do you like it? It’s the future of commuting.”
“On Rio’s hills? You want to try a tunnel at rush hour on that?”
“No, but it’s kind of cool. Folds up to the size of a laptop.” Aleijadão tried to throw and turn and almost came into the printer recycle box. His job was office monkey in the long, open-plan development office known as the Glass Menagerie. “Steering’s a bit tricky and it doesn’t half cut the ass off you. It’s the latest thing from that English guy, the one who invented the computer.”
Always: the latest thing. “Alan Turing? He’s — ”
“No, some other guy. Invented those things on wheels you sat in and pedaled: daleks? Hawking? Something like that?”
Days there were when Canal Quatro’s playfulness, its willingness to face into the breaking wave of the contemporary and ride it, thrilled and braced Marcelina; then there were the others when Canal Quatro’s relentless hunger for the new, for novelty, oppressed her, a shit-storm of plastic trivia; and knowingness and irony became grim and joyless.
Marcelina’s workplace Alt dot family looked up from their glass cubicles at the entrance of their iiber-boss. So much she could read from their lunches: at their desks, of course. Celso lifting sushi with the delicacy and deftness of professional rehearsal in private. Agnetta, as ever so completely dressed for the moment she had been known to have new shoes delivered to the office in order to wear them home that evening, chewed morosely on a diet lunch-replacement bar snack. Cibelle, the only one Marcelina respected in addition to fearing, picked apart a homemade bauru. She had been bringing them in every day. Homemade was the new sushi, she said. Cibelle understood how the trick was done, how to add your own little ripple to the crest of the hip and watch the chaotic mathematics of storms and power laws magnify it into a fashion wave. Already half of Lisandra’s production group were making their own lunches. Clever girl, but I know you.
“Oh my God, is this some thing like we’re all going to have to do now, change clothes at lunchtime?” Agnetta flapped.
“What are you talking about?”
“Like, when you were in just now you were in the suit and now you’re in the Capri pants.”
Marcelina shook her head. Eighty percent of what Agnetta said to her was incomprehensible.
“Any calls for me?”
“Same answer as five minutes ago,” Celso said, mixing wasabi. Marcelina held her hands out in a shrug of bafflement.
“What is this, National Freak Marcelina Hoffman Day?”
Then she saw Adriano break from his creative huddle with Lisandra and the Black Plumed Bird to beckon her with a lift of the finger, a raise of the eyebrows.
“That was a very funny e-mail. Someday someone will make a program like that and the ratings will be through the roof, but I don’t think it is Canal Quatro. In fact, if I thought you were seriously proposing a series where members of the public hunt down and assassinate favelados like some kind of Running Man show, I MBATC.”
Might Be a Tad Concerned.
“Ah, well, yeah…” Marcelina spluttered.
“In future, IMBAGI to pitch ideas through the regular creative channels.”
She returned blazing like a failed space-launch to her luv-cluster.
Lunches were set down in a flash.
“I don’t know whose idea of a joke that was, but nothing ever, ever goes out of this production team unless it’s cleared by me. Ever.”
“We always do that, boss.” She turned on her laptop.
“Well, someone sent a hoax e-mail to Adriano, and it wasn’t me.”
“It was,” said Agnetta faintly. “You did it. I saw you.”
The chattering, ringing, beeping tunnel of the Glass Menagerie suddenly turned on end and Marcelina felt herself falling through desks and workstaations and heaps of paper toward a final shattering on the great window become a floor.
“Imagine I’m very very stupid and haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“About five, six minutes ago you came in, said hello, logged onto your laptop, and fired off an e-mail,” said Celso. Cibelle sat back in her chair, arms folded.
“But my laptop is biometric locked.” Standard security in a world where ideas were currency.
“Well, it’s open now,” Celso said.
Marcelina went to the screen. The login icon spun in the taskbar. She opened the in-house e-mail system.
To: Adriano@canalquatro.br
From: capoeiraqueen@canalquatro.br
Subject: Take Our the Trash…
The glass tube of the development office revolved around her, Marcelina a shiny ort in a kaleidoscope of flying madnesses.
She had drunk the tea.
The Green Saint was the saint of visions and illusions.
Feijão had the sacred vine growing in his garden.
The Barquinha of Santo Daime was a church of hallucinations.
She had drunk the tea. There was no other rational explanation.
Marcelina closed the program and touched her thumb to the log-out pad.
OCTOBER 12, 2032
A trip to the market. A trip into the biodiesel smog beneath the unfinished rodovia intersection of Todos os Santos, the missing buckle of the cincture of highways that binds the city of Saint Paul. A trip to the printer, to buy new shoes.
The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It’s not that the drivers won’t go inside — and they won’t no matter how high you tip them — it’s that they can’t. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com rowers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, mota-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos’s rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuce and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past palisades of sugar cane waiting for the hand-mill and past the chugging, sweet steam of cachaça stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the veggetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the spread ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can’t afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.