A little before midnight Keller reclined his seat and dozed off. Smiling faintly, she found herself watching him: watching the way his face relaxed into sleep. He looked different, she thought, with all the daylight tension drained out of him.
She thought, He’s an Angel.
Odd, how easy it was to forget that. Talk to him, she thought, and you could be talking to a million people. Everything he saw was spooling down into his mechanical memory, buried somewhere inside him: Remembering for the masses.
She wondered if he could turn it off… whether he would if he could.
She slept in spite of herself. When she woke in the heat of the morning, the wilderness was gone; the bus moved through a steaming box barrio, tin shacks riding up dirty little hills—the outskirts of Cuiaba, Keller said. “It’s an ugly town. A meat town. The abattoir is the only real business.” He wrinkled his nose. “You can smell it already.”
“You were here before?”
“In the war,” he said wearily. “It was a staging base. From here we rode carriers out along BR-364. Lots of guerilla activity in the farm towns out that way.”
So it had been an Army town. That explained all the signs she had seen in English and in cursive Japanese: Bar Grill, Live Sex Acts, manga outlets. The bus station itself was a cavernous concrete structure crowded with humanity. Old diesel buses filled it with their stinking fumes, and the names written on cardboard signs over the ticket windows were all strange to her: Ouro Preto, one said; Ariquemes, another. She shouldered her bag and they left the terminal, Byron leading them to some hotel Wexler had told him about; a man would meet them there, Wexler had promised. She felt lost, walking among these ancient colonial buildings. It was a bad neighborhood, more bars, ragged men sleeping on the fractured sidewalks. Down one alley near the hotel she saw a sign that intrigued her: Church of the Vale do Amenhecar, it said, and in the dusty window beneath it there was the painted image of an upraised hand, a dreamstone radiating from the palm.
We are close now, she thought, and the pronoun came so naturally to her that she did not notice its strangeness: we.
2. From here, as Keller understood the plan, they would cease to be tourists. They would pass, for a day or maybe two, into the sertao hinterland. They would be taken to Pau Seco by a truck driver, an expatriate Vietnamese named Ng.
But Ng wasn’t at the hotel. No problem, Byron said. They were booked for three days. Ng would be here tomorrow, guaranteed. Day after at the latest.
Keller shrugged, spreading out his bedroll on the floor of the hotel room.
“Hotel” was a generous word. Cuiaba was not in any sense a tourist town. The building was a box of ancient stucco and rotting wood. Byron and Teresa each occupied one of the room’s two tiny beds. Keller lay in the dark for a time, aware of the night noises; meat trucks moaning down the narrow streets, the empty distances between the old buildings. Aware, too, of the distance between himself and Teresa, between Byron and Teresa: distances that had become electric with implication.
He understood now—it had taken a few days—how profoundly Byron was in love with her.
Understood, too, that the feeling was not mutual.
It surprised him a little. A decade ago Byron had been the model Angel—slick, aloof, obscure behind protective lenses. It was the image he still projected, dealing dream-stones in the Floats. But with Teresa (Keller saw all this ruthlessly) he was another thing altogether: nervous, gazing at her when he thought she wouldn’t see, almost fawning.
Strange, but maybe predictable. Byron had rescued her from a slow suicide: some sense of responsibility had to follow on that. Too, there was this aura of unfinishedness about her. She was drawn by strange tides. She had imbibed often and deeply at the well of the oneiroliths. Keller recognized that there was an allure in all this—night territory, dangerous and exotic. He understood the attraction.
Understood it, he thought, maybe too well.
His eyes strayed to the bed where she slept.
In spite of his doubts, in spite of his lapses, he had learned in the years since the war to practice scrupulously the art of wu-nien. And he had learned to recognize the threats to that condition. The threats were named Compassion, and Hate, and Desire, and Love. In Angel basic he had been taught to set these things aside as earnestly as a Buddhist monk sets aside the temptations of the flesh. But like the temptations of the flesh, they were difficult to suppress. Suppressed, they were prone to erupt—randomly, unexpectedly.
He lay in the cloistered darkness with his pulse whispering in his ears. In the dim city light through the curtains, he could make out the shape of her body under the blankets—the delicate geography of her.
You know better than to think what you’re thinking.
He closed his eyes and worked to make his mind empty. A mirror bright, he thought, echoing the Shen-shiu poem they had all memorized in Angel basic: Carefully we wipe it clean / And let no dust alight.
But the dust had alighted, Keller realized. Feelings welled up in him that he had thought long cauterized.
Adhyasa, he thought bleakly. Angel sin.
He woke up wearily; Byron handed him a cup of coffee from the wall dispenser. By midmorning their truck driver still hadn’t arrived. Teresa moved restlessly around the room in fatigue pants and a khaki shirt, hands in her pockets, brooding. “I want to go out,” she said at last.
“We have to wait here,” Byron said. “We have to be here when Ng shows up.”
“We don’t all have to stay.”
Byron drew his head back, drummed his fingers thoughtfully. “Where do you want to go?”
“The church we passed. The dreamstone church.”
“It’s a Valley church,” Byron said. “Jungle cults. You want to sacrifice a chicken? Maybe we can arrange it.”
Keller remembered the Valley from the war. The Vale do Amenhecar was a Brazilian stone cult, one of the junk religions that had prospered since the discovery of the ’liths. It was a peasant’s religion, wildly syncretic; they believed in sacred jaguars, the divinity of Christ, the imminent arrival of fleets of flying saucers.
“I want to see what it’s like,” Teresa said. She added quietly, “I have a right.”
“It’s not safe.”
“None of this is safe.’.’ She turned to Keller. “You want to come along?”
He said yes without thinking about it.
Byron turned stiffly to the window. Over his shoulder Keller saw the rain sheeting down from a leaden sky. The streets were slick and black. “Go ahead,” Byron said coolly. “Pick up some local color.” He looked back at Keller, pained. “Why the hell not.”
3. She bought an umbrella at one of the sidewalk stalls and held it over them. It was hardly more than waxed paper, she thought, the color of a dahlia, but it kept the drizzle off.
Keller said, “He loves you, you know.”
Byron, he meant. It took her by surprise. She peered at Keller—at his blue eyes, studiedly inscrutable. She said, “Is that an Angel question? Or are you really worried about him?”