Keller sat out on the wooden vestibule of the shack, drinking cautiously from a bottle of white cachaca and listening as Ng explained the trouble they were in.
His English was easy, flat, American in inflection. “I don’t know Cruz Wexler.” He shrugged. “Cruz Wexler means nothing to me. Two months ago I was approached by a man, he said he was a surveyor working for SUDAM. A Brazilian. He had SUDAM credentials, he had a nice suit. He said there was a buyer interested in acquiring a deep-core stone and was it possible I could set this up?” He stretched out across the three risers that connected his wooden shack to the mud, plucked at a hole in his T-shirt. “Well, it isn’t easy. Security is very tight. They named a figure, the figure was attractive, I said I would do what I could.”
“It’s arranged?” Byron asked hopefully.
“You should have the stone tomorrow. The thing is best done quickly. But you have to understand… you came here as couriers, right?”
Byron said, “We take the stone, we carry it out of the country…”
“Nobody told you it might be dangerous?”
“We have documents—”
“Paper.” Ng shrugged. “If it was that easy, any forao with brains would be walking out of here wealthy.” He grinned. “There’s not much smuggling because the military is in charge. Mostly, you can do what you want in the old town. But the military is there, and they carry guns and they use them. The official penalty for the crime we’re discussing is death. What it means is summary execution. A trial would be”—and the smile widened—“very unusual.”
“Son of a bitch,” Byron said. “It’s a walk, he says, it’s a fucking vacation^. It’s a walk through the fucking cemetery is what it is!”
Teresa said quietly, “It’s all right.”
“He fucked us over!”
“Byron, please—”
“Goddamn,” Byron said. But he sat down. She turned to Ng. “If it’s so dangerous, why did you agree to get involved?”
Ng sat back, hugging his knees. “I’m easily bored,” he said.
2. Oh, but I can feel it now, Teresa thought.
In the midst of this brutality it was so close. She felt it like a pain inside her, like the poignancy of old loss, a kind of melancholy.
She lay in the darkness of Ng’s small shack, curled on a reed mat at the heart of the world.
Melancholy, she thought, but also—she could begin to admit it—frightening. She was not as naive as Byron seemed sometimes to think, but the mine had taken her by surprise … the brutality, the squalor of it, the lives that were lost here. It was not meant to be this way, she thought.
She sat up in the darkness. Through the paneless window she could see Pau Seco sprawling at the foot of this moonlit hill. Oil-can fires burned sporadically like stars in the darkness.
She thought of the Exotics, the winged people she had seen so often in her ’lith visions. She was not afraid of them; the impression of their benevolence was strong and vivid. But they were different. There was something essentially unhuman about them, she thought—something more profound than the shape of their bodies.
They would not have created Pau Seco. They would not have expected it to be created.
She lay back in the darkness, weary and confused.
It had not been wholly her own idea to come here. It was an imperative she felt more than understood, a kind of homing instinct. Her own history faded back into darkness, lost in the fires that had swept the Floats fourteen years ago. Her childhood was a mystery. She had come into the Red Cross camps scalded and smoke-blinded and nearly mute. She had been cared for—adopted, though it was never legal—by an extended family of Guatemalan refugees; they fed her, clothed her, and practiced their English on her. They named her Teresa.
She was grateful but not happy. She remembered those days as a haze of pain and loss: the searing conviction that something valuable had been stolen from her. She became attached to a rag doll named Amy; she screamed if the doll was taken away. When Amy fell into a canal and disappeared beneath the oily seawater, she wept for a week. She adjusted to her new life in time, but the nameless pain never went away… until she discovered the pills.
One of her Guatemalan family, a hugely fat middle-aged woman named Rosita—whom the others called tia abuela—brought the pills home from the public health clinic. Rosita suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and took the pills for, as she put it, “ree-lif.” They were narcotic/analgesics keyed to the opiate receptors in the brain; Rosita was frankly addicted but, the clinic told her, the pills did not create a tolerance … the addiction would not get worse, they said, and that was good, because the arthritis would not get better.
Teresa, alone one afternoon in their antiquated houseboat, stole a pill from Rosita’s bottle and hid it under her pillow. The act was impetuous—partly curiosity, partly a dim intuition that the pill might work for her the kind of magic it worked for Rosita. In bed that night she swallowed it.
The effect was instantaneous and profound. Inside her a huge and unsuspected tide of fear and guilt rolled back. She closed her eyes and relished the warmth of her bed, smiling for the first time in years.
Tia Rosita was right, she thought. Ree-lif.
Rosita collected her prescription twice a month. Twice a month, Teresa took one off the top. Rosita did not seem to notice the thievery, or if she did, she did not suspect Teresa. And Teresa did not dare take more, for fear of drawing attention to herself.
Still, she lived for these moments. The pills seemed to detonate inside her, tiny explosions of purity and peace. Words like loneliness and loss began to make sense to her; she realized for the first time that they might not be permanent or universal.
When she was sixteen one of the boys she had come to think of as her brother, a rangy twenty-year-old named Ruy, took her out to the empty margin of the tidal dam and showed her a fistful of pink-and-yellow spansules—the same kind Rosita got from the clinic.
She could not help herself. She grabbed. Ruy pulled his hand away, laughing; a cloud of sea gulls whirled up from the concrete pilings. “Right,” he said. “I thought so.”
She stared covetously at his clenched fist. “You can get those?”
“Many as I want.”
“Can I buy them?”
“Acaso.” He shrugged loftily. Maybe.
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
She had nothing. She had been going to the charity school up in the North Floats, where her English teacher called her “a good pupil” and her art instructor called her “talented.” But she didn’t care about the school. She could quit, she thought, get a job, get some money… acaso.
“When you do,” Ruy said—walking away, heartbreakingly, with the pills still imprisoned in his hand— “then you talk to me.”
But Rosita, older and more gnarled but no less vigilant, wouldn’t let her leave school. “What kind of job are you going to get? Be a whore down by the mainland, like your sister Livia?” She shook her head. “Public Works is pulling out of this place, you know. Too many uncertified people. No documents, no green cards, no property deeds. You’re lucky you have a school. Maybe won’t have one much longer, you think about that?”
But it was Rosita’s anger and not any practical consideration that deterred her. She stayed in school, maintained her habit, and ignored Ruy when he taunted her with his apparently endless supply of drugs. Until, one day, her art instructor complimented her on a collage she had assembled. She had a real talent, he said. She could go somewhere with it.