Edson bangs down the pot and cups.
“Carlinhos. I need to borrow your car.” Edson’s going shopping. Out on the streets of his big dirty city with his hands on the wheel and one of the many backup identities he’s stashed all across northwest Sampa, I-shades feeding him police maps, Edson feels his mojo returning. Careful. Overconfidence would be easy and dangerous. For this kind of operation he would normally have picked up an alibi, but that’s not safe after that poor bastard Petty Cash. The Sesmarias may be out of the game, but there are those other bastards: the Order, who ever they are; and then the cops, always the cops. No, a malandro can’t be too careful. He takes camera-free local roads and backstreets to the mall. Among the racks and hangers is bliss. It is good to buy, but he dare not use his debit account. If the stores don’t give him a disscount for cash — and many will not even accept notes — he moves on to another one.
“Hey, got you something to make you look less like a freak.” From the glee with which she throws herself on the bright bags, Edson concludes there are other things than physics that light up Fia Kishida.
“Did you choose for me or for you?” she asks, holding up little scraps of stretchy sequined fabric.
“You want to look Paulistana?” Edson says.
“I want not to look like a hooker,” Fia says, hooking down at the bottom of her cheek-clinging shorts. “But I love these boots.” They are mock-jacaré, elasticated with good heels, and Edson knew she would coo and purr at first try-on. The crop top shows off the minute detail of her tattoo-computer; in the low light slanting across the fields of oil-soy it burns like gold. Edson imagines the wheels and spirals turning, a number mill.
“Where I come from, it’s rude to stare.”
“Where I come from, people don’t have things like that tattooed on them.”
“Do you ever actually apologize for anything?”
“Why should I do that? Come and eat. Carlinhos is making his moqueça. You need to eat more.”
In the cool of the evening, Edson finds Mr. Peach leaning against his balcony rail with a big spliff in his hand. The burbs glow like sand beneath him; the stars cannot match them. Even the light-dance of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, like attenuated bioluminous Amazon insects, up on the edge of space, is muted and astrological. The night air brings with it the slur of wind turbines up on the old coffee plantations, a sound Edson has always found comforting and stimulating. Endless energy.
“Hey, Sextinho.” Mr. Peach offers Edson the big sweet spliff.
“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Edson says, but takes a good toke anyway and lets it swirl up into the dome of his skull. Mr. Peach leans toward him. He takes another toke from Edson, slips an arm comfortably around his back. He holds the spliff up, contemplates it like holy sinsemilla.
“This the only thing keeping me from running right out that gate and getting on the first plane to Miami,” Mr. Peach says, looking at the coil of maconha smoke.
“Miami?”
“We’ve all got our boltholes. Our Shangri-las. When it’s abstract, when it’s more universes than there are stars in the sky, than there are atoms in the universe, I can handle it. Numbers, theories; comfortable intellecrual games. Like arithmetic with infinities: terrifying concepts, but ultimately abstract. Head games. She didn’t know me, Sextinho.”
Edson lets the name pass.
“She didn’t recognize me. She would have known me, same as … the other one. Jesus and Mary, the word games this makes us play. Quantum theory, quantum computing, quantum schmauntum; at that postgrad level you work across disciplines. But she didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t there. Maybe I was dead, maybe I was in jail, maybe I never was a physicist, maybe there never was a Carlinhos Farah Baroso de Alvaranga. But I know: I’m in Miami. I could have gone. Twenty years ago I could have gone. Open arms, they’d have had me. Lovely doe-eyed Cuban boys with nasty Mafia connecctions. But Dad would have had to go into a home, and I couldn’t do that. Leave him. Leave him with strangers. So I turned the offer down, and he lived three years and I think he was happy right up to the end. By then I was too old, too entangled. Too scared. But he went. He’s leading the life I could have led. I should have led.”
Mr. Peach quickly wipes any tears gone before they gather gravity. Edson says gently, “I remember you told me once that it was all fixed, from beginning to end; like the universe is one thing made out of space and time and we only dream we have free will.”
“You’re not reassuring me.”
’Tm just trying to say, there was nothing you could have done.”
The spliff has burned down to a sour roach. Edson grinds it flat under the sale of his Havaiana.
“Sextinho… Edson. I think I really need to be with you tonight.”
“I thought we’d agreed.”
“I know but, well, why should it matter if it’s not her?”
Edson loves the old bastard, and he could come for him, without games, without boots and costumes, without masks, pretend to be that nasty Cuban malandro, pretend to be whatever he needs to send him to Miami in his mind. But still, it does matter. And Mr. Peach can read that in Edson’s body, and he says, “Well, looks like it’s not fated in this universe either.”
In retro Hello Kitty panties, Fia backstrokes laps of the pool. From verandah shadow Edson watches sunlit water dapple her flat boy-breasts. He checks for stirrings, urgings, dick-swellings. Curiosity, getting a look, like any male. Nothing more.
“Hey.” She treads water, face shatter-lit by reflected sun-chop. “Give me a towel.”
Fia hauls herself out, drapes the towel over the mahogany sun lounger and herself on the towel. Nipples and little pink panty-bow.
“This is the first time I’ve felt clean in weeks,” Fia declares. “He’s not your uncle, is he? I found your stuff. I couldn’t sleep so I went poking around. I do that, poke around. I found these costumes and things. They’re very… sleek.”
“I told him to make sure they were locked up.”
“Why? If you guys have something going on, I’m cool with it. You don’t have to hide stuff from me. Did you think I would be bothered? Did she know? That’s it, isn’t it? She didn’t know.”
“You’re not her, I know. But are you bothered?”
“Me. No. Maybe. I don’t know. It bothers me you didn’t tell her.”
“But you said — ”
“I know, I know. Don’t expect me to be consistent about this. What did you do, anyway, with the gear and all that?”
“Superhero sex.”
Her eyes open wide at that.
“Like, Batman and Robin slashy stuff? Cool. I mean, what do you actually do?”
“What’s it to you?”
’’I’m a nosy cow. It’s got me into trouble already.”
“We dress up. We play. Sometimes we pretend to fight, you know, have battles.” Hearing it spoken, the secret spilled, Edson feels burningly embarrassed. “But a lot of the time we just talk.”
“I’m trying to picture Carlinhos in one of those full suits.…”
“Don’t laugh at him,” Edson says. “And I call him Mr. Peach. The first time we met, he gave me peaches for minding his car because he didn’t have any change. He watched me eat them. The juice ran down my chin. I was thirteen. You probably think that’s a terrible thing; you probably have some clever educated middle-class judgment abour that. Well, he was very shy and very good to me. He calls me Sextinho.” There is an edge in his voice that makes Fia feel self-conscious, tit-naked in an alien universe. It’s their first row. A motorbike passes the gate. Edson notes it, remembers fondly his murdered Yamaha scrambler. A few seconds later it passes the gate again in the opposite direction. Slow, very slow. Edson feels his eyes widen. He looks up. A surveillance drone completes it buzz over the shiny new gated estate, but does it linger that moment too long on the outward turn? He had been so careful in Mr. Peach’s car, but there were always cameras he could have missed, a new one put up, an eye on a truck or a bus or in a T-shirt or even a pair of passing I-shades that later got into a robbery or an I-mugging or something that would have had the police running through the memory. Paranoia within paranoia. But everyone is paranoid in great São Paulo.