Chapter 1
A dusty gray hovercraft floated to a stop in front of my booth in the feria. As its door flipped open an emaciated woman struggled up from the shadows within and into the stabbing daylight. A strange feeling swept over me, the physical shock one feels upon recognizing an old friend whose face has been marred by tragedies. I searched my memory for an elusive name.
Her head slumped and rolled from side to side as she moved. Sweat stained the armpits of her black skinsuit, and blood dripped from the bandaged stump at the end of her right arm. An old mestizo woman lurched away from the craft, made the sign of the cross, and muttered “¡Qué horror!” A small boy gaped at the thin woman and moaned “¡Una bruja!” and the crowd murmured in agreement that this walking skeleton must be a witch.
She staggered to my booth, shouldering past curious peasants, and thrust her bloody stump over the counter. I opened my mouth, hoping my tongue would find the name my mind couldn’t supply, as she demanded in English, “Are you Señor Angelo Osic?”
I nodded, relieved that she didn’t know me, secure in the knowledge that her husky voice was unfamiliar.
She braced herself on the counter, trembling. “Can you fix this … this body?”
“Sí—yes,” I said, gently prodding the stump at the end of her arm. “Do you have your hand? Perhaps we could reconnect it.”
“No.”
Her wound was fresh, but would soon be infected. “A new hand will take months to grow—months more to be usable. Might I suggest that a prosthesis would be fast—”
“Do a hand. Now! And bones too. I need bones.” She talked with the quick, commanding voice of the rich refugiados from the Estados Unidos Socialistas del Sur. I thought she must be a criminal from Guyana or the American colonies in Brasilia Independiente. I studied her closely: The slope of her shoulders and her narrow cheeks indicated that she’d been born with a small frame, but even if she had bone disease too, the two factors couldn’t account for the small diameter of her joints. “How long were you in low-G?” I asked.
“Never been in low-G,” she lied.
“You should be in the hospital,” I told her, afraid to deal with a criminal. “I am only a poor pharmacologist. And my drugs are not as miraculous as people sometimes claim.”
“Fix me!” she said. “No hospitals. No questions.” She pulled out a computer crystal as long as her hand and slipped it into my palm. Its smooth, non-glare surface was virtually invisible, except for the packet of liquid RAM at one end. It was fine crystal, Fugitsu quality, worth a small fortune, perhaps even enough to buy a rejuvenation treatment. I had never been able to afford a rejuvenation, and needed one badly.
“You need a place to rest—a hospital bed,” I said.
She leaned forward, and I saw she was young, much younger than I had first imagined; her black hair fell in front of her deep-set, black eyes and her sweaty face paled with genuine terror. “If you ball me over, I die,” she said.
In that moment when she showed her terror, I thought she was beautiful. I felt a strong urge to help her, to comfort her. Telling myself she might not be a criminal, I got out of my booth and locked its rusted aluminum door, then escorted her back to the hovercraft. I gave the driver my address in Gatún and told him to go by way of Avenida Balboa. He drove slowly through the crowded feria, and soon the thin woman closed her eyes and curled into a ball and breathed in the wheezing manner of those deeply asleep. We floated past crowds of mestizos selling bright dresses and macaws, fresh fruit, cheap Thai microchips tumbling from earthenware pots.
Everywhere their hungry eyes and gestures beckoned the merchant sailors from Europe, Africa, and Asia who searched the backwaters of Panamá for high-tech and contraband items.
The local peasants became angry with my chauffeur for driving in a pedestrian zone and refused to move, so he flushed the hovercraft’s thrusters, blowing hot air and dust into the crowds, burning the naked legs of the children. Their curses and cries of pain came to me distantly through the thick glass of the windows. I felt dirty and sinful to be in that craft, and wished I hadn’t agreed to take care of the thin woman. I jacked in a call to Uppanishadi-Smith Corp. and ordered a limb-regeneration kit, an osteoporosis rehab packet, and a self-regulating canister of fluothane. I wetted my lips with my tongue and searched the faces in the crowd for a friend.
On the border of the free zone, the crowds thinned and I found Flaco, a good friend who did not mind dealing with criminals as much as I did, and had the driver stop the limo. Flaco stood with some arms dealers who haggled with four guerrillas over the price of used body armor.
One of the guerrillas pulled off a helmet, and I saw by his oversize, misshapen ears that he was a chimera—one of the genetically upgraded supermen General Torres had created in Chile before the socialists overthrew his regime. I watched the chimera search through the armor for a better helmet.
Although he was short in stature, his frame was huge. In Haiti men had engineered ten-kilo fighting cocks with spurs long enough to disembowel a coyote, and no one had raised an eyebrow. But when Torres announced that he was engineering chimeras so they could live on other planets, the news caused fierce riots in Concepción, revolt in Temuco. I remembered a picture shown to me by a peasant from Talcahuano: he smiled as he and a fellow rioter each held the wingtip of a large brown creature, half bat, and half man. He told me he’d clubbed it inside one of the engineering compounds. The Alliance of Nations had lodged formal protests of the work done in Chile.
The chimera finally picked the best helmet in the lot. He had a broad, pleasant smile, and I was happy he had come to fight the Colombians.
I waved to Flaco. He came to the hovercraft, stuck his narrow face through the window and raised an eyebrow as he saw the thin woman.
“Hola, Angelo. So, you have taken to dating dead women?” he said, laughing. “Good idea. Very classy! Very sensible!”
I got out of the hovercraft, embraced Flaco, and walked out of the thin woman’s listening range. “Yes,” I said. “She’s quite a catch for an old man. Not only is she beautiful, but when I’m done with her, she’ll make fine fertilizer for the lawn.” Flaco laughed. I handed him the crystal. “What is the value of this?”
Flaco rolled it over in his hand. “Any software on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe 400—500 thousand,” he said.
“Will you check its registration code? I think it’s stolen. Also,” I whispered, “I must know who this woman is. Can you get a retina scanner and bring it to my home tonight?”
“Yes, my friend,” Flaco whispered. He glanced at the woman in the floater. “Once, I saw a spider with legs that thin—” he said, “I stepped on it.” He patted my shoulder and then laughed.
I got in the hovercraft and left the free zone. And as we floated down the highway on the outskirts of Colón, we rolled past the evenly spaced rows of banana plants. Because I’d never floated down that road in a fast car before, I noticed for the first time how perfectly ordered the plantations were, with each plant three meters from its neighbor. I lost my eyes while serving in the army in Guatemala as a young man, and had them replaced with prosthetics. They register colors in the infrared spectrum as shimmers of light, something like the sheen one sees glimmering off platinum in the sunlight. And on this day the dark green canopy of the banana plants shimmered with infrared light. Under the canopy of leaves were jumbles of hammocks, burlap lean-to’s, tents, cardboard boxes and old cars—squalid, temporary shelters for the refugiados who were fleeing the socialist states in South America. The refugiados were afraid to brave their way through Costa Rica to the north, so they huddled together, waiting for ship passage to Trinidad or Madagascar or some other imaginary capitalist paradise.
I looked at the homes among the plantations and thought it strange to see such disorder among order. It reminded me of an incident from my childhood: a family of murderers called the Battistas Sangrientos had been caught selling body organs outside our village.
When the police caught them, they took the family to the beach to execute them in front of the whole town so people would know what a despicable crime had been committed. Three boys in this family were only children, perhaps ten to twelve years old, and it was rumored that when gutting victims these boys often raced each other to salvage the most precious organs. But all the Battistas swore the boys were innocent. And when the police got ready to shoot the family, the Captain told them to form a line, but the young boys clung to their murderous father and refused to leave. The policemen clubbed the boys, and it took a long time for the police to get the family to stand in line. And once the family was standing in a line, it took a long time for the Captain to give the order for the firing squad to shoot. I have always believed that the Captain waited just so he could enjoy that moment of watching them stand in line. And as the bullets tore through the children I wondered, Why could the Captain not shoot them while in a huddle, clutching their father? What difference did it make?
When we reached my home, I carried the thin woman to the cool basement and laid her on a blanket on the floor. I checked her pulse and was looking at the bandage on her stump when I heard a foot scuff on the carpet behind me. The limo driver had brought in two small bags and set them down. I paid him for the thin woman’s fare, and it took all of my cash money. I escorted him from the house and asked if he would drive me to Colón for free since he was going that way. He said no, so I walked the eleven kilometers back to Colón to pick up my drugs at Uppanishadi-Smith Corp.
I enjoyed the walk back home. My house was old and the plaster walls were crumbling, but all the other houses in the area were also in poor repair, so it didn’t look bad by comparison. Some people even thought it was a rich person’s house because it was on the lake and because they couldn’t imagine a morphogen dealer not being rich. But I had once hustled rejuvenations in the penthouses of Miami, where people never seemed to overcome the boredom of their hollow lives, where a person’s obtainment of a rejuvenation treatment was often the prelude to suicide. I would sun myself on my rooftop in the afternoons, and dream of a simple place where people lived lives of passion. I found that place when I found Panamá.
By the time I got back home the sun had just set. The air was getting cool. Flaco lay under the papaya tree in my front yard, watching a large brown fruit bat gorge on the uppermost papayas and spill dark seeds to the ground. “¡Hola! Angelo,” he called when he saw me. “I brought that thing you wanted. Spider Legs is inside. She’s awake now. I brought beautiful yellow roses for her. She likes them as much as that bat likes papayas. I think her nose is stuck to the flowers.”
“So, you have met her?” I asked.
“Yes. I told her I am a doctor, and that you called me in to administer medications.”
“Did she believe you?”
“Oh yes, I am a very good liar,” Flaco laughed. “Also, that crystal did have software on it—old military software.”
“Military?”
“Yes. A reality program for a brain bag.”
I had once heard a doctor at a convention give a speech on reality programs. The military attached them to brains when they needed to store them for transplanting. The reality program kept the transplantee from suffering sensory deprivation, so he wouldn’t become paranoid or psychotic. It locked him in a dream where he ate, worked, slept, and did other routine things, unaware he was separated from his body. But the reality program can only tap into existing memories and vary scenarios by merging portions of those memories. The brain bag then monitors the brain’s reaction to the scenarios and keeps it from becoming surprised or shocked. I asked, “Is it stolen?”
“According to the registration code on the crystal, it belongs to a Señor Amir Jafari. He lives at one of the Lagrange orbits. He hasn’t applied for citizenship with any nation, so he may prefer to live outside the law. It would be illegal for him to have this program; he won’t report it stolen.”
“Is he a doctor?” I asked.
Flaco shrugged.
“Why would he be interested in brain storage?”
Flaco shrugged again, pulled the crystal from his pocket, and said “If you want to sell it, we could get 572,000 standard IMUs.”
I calculated: barring complications, the thin woman’s medication would cost about twenty-six thousand international monetary units, which would leave a great deal of profit, almost enough to buy a rejuvenation. All I would have to do was invest the money for a year or two. However, I decided to ask the thin woman if she had a receipt for the crystal, hoping she hadn’t stolen it. I asked Flaco to hold the crystal a few days.
When we got to the basement, the thin woman sat propped in a corner with her knees against her chin. Three yellow roses rested on her knees, and she was asleep. I opened the limb-regeneration kit and spread packets of salves, washes, and medical instruments on a clean cloth on the floor.
Flaco read aloud the directions on the fluothane and practiced putting the gas mask over his face. When he’d done it enough so he could put it on the thin woman, I touched her shoulder, waking her. She crawled to the center of the floor and lay on her back.
The roses had fallen off her knees, and Flaco handed them to her. She inhaled their fragrance and said, “You know, when you try to smell them too long, you lose their scent. You can’t hold it.”
Flaco and I nodded.
“By the way,” Flaco asked, “what should we call you?”
The thin woman didn’t answer. Flaco kept talking in a conversational tone. “Angelo says we should call you Spider Legs. He thinks that is very funny. But I told him it isn’t proper to call a woman that. You must forgive him—he has a peasant mentality and doesn’t know better.”
“Call me Tamara,” she said.
“Ah, Tamara. A fitting name, very beautiful,” Flaco said.
“Do you still have the crystal?” Tamara asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“May I touch it? Hold it until you’re done?”
I nodded, and Flaco wrapped her left hand around the crystal, put the gas mask over her face, and flipped on the canister. She sniffed the acrid scent of the fluothane and tried to wiggle out from beneath the mask for a moment, and then fell asleep.
I put a tourniquet above her wrist and peeled off her bandage. A bit of clear, oily synovial fluid from breached joints had gathered inside the bandage, along with a little pus. The wound began bleeding, so I opened a package of plastic AV clips and pinched off the radial artery. In these cases, you’re supposed to seal any split bones and regenerate them separately. Molecules in the regenerative wash read the genetic codes of the cells they infiltrate and begin replicating them in an orderly fashion—in effect, following the pattern of growth ordered in birth. But skeletal tissue doesn’t regenerate by the same chemical formula as other tissues, and no tissue except skin regenerates on a limb unless both formulae are used simultaneously.
I took a disposable scalpel and began peeling the flesh from the radius and ulna. Because of the small diameter of the bones, I thought they’d been severed just below the joint. But to my surprise the pale-blue articular cartilages, which fit like a cap over the joints, were whole and unbreached. Only the ligament, the fibrous cover that holds the joints together, was severed. Apparently her hand had been pulled off instead of sliced or blown off. My neighbor once set a leg-trap for a mean dog that had snapped at his children. The dog got caught in the trap and wrenched off his foot in exactly the way this woman had wrenched off her hand. All her bones from the carpals on down were missing, though a long ragged piece of flesh from her palm was still attached. This made my job very easy. I set the bloody scalpel back in its cellophane wrapper, cocked her arm at a right angle so most of the muscular tissue pulled away from the exposed bone, and applied the skeletal regeneration wash.
Flaco had been watching me, but he got bored and picked up the thin woman’s left arm and watched it flop to the floor as he dropped it.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Why?”
“Her bones might break. I don’t think she was born on Earth. She’s very fragile.”
“I had a friend who once slugged an off-worlder and accidentally killed him,” Flaco said. He began searching the thin woman’s bags, removing clothing, a jar of pills that looked like vitamins. He pulled out a folding, chemical-laser rifle. “Hah! What do you think, she hunts anteaters with this?”
I grunted my surprise at the rifle. Flaco put it back and left the room a moment. I administered the regeneration wash to the muscles, tendons, and skin, and used Doering clamps to anchor some torn flexors and brachioradials to their proper places; then I painted a resin bandage over the whole stump and called it good. Of course, these regeneration kits never work exactly as they’re supposed to, and in a few weeks I’d have to reclamp some tendons and splice some of the new nerve tissue to the old.
While the resin bandage was wet, I opened the osteoporosis rehab packet and inserted the catheter of a hormone fusion pump into her flesh about five centimeters above the wrist and began pumping in calcitonin, collagenates, SGH, and mineral supplements. When the resin bandage dried it would seal around the catheter, preventing any chance of infection.
Meanwhile, Flaco had brought in the retina scanner and had been fiddling with it by the electrical outlet. I looked up at him. I expected him to have one of the little hand-held models policemen sometimes carry, but he had a large industrial model. Its corners were dented where he’d pried it free from someone’s wall, and the screws that were supposed to hold it to the wall dangled in their sockets; little bits of white paint and plaster still clung to the screws. Flaco had cut the electric cord to get the scanner free, so now he was splicing on a plug.
“Where did you get the scanner?” I asked.
“I stole it from the checkout desk at the public library,” Flaco answered.
“Why didn’t you just rent one?”
“I don’t know. I thought you wanted to keep this private—no records.”
“It’s not that important,” I said.
“If it will make you feel better, I’ll take it back tomorrow.”
“Good,” I said.
Flaco finished splicing the wires and plugged the scanner in, then I turned off the fluothane and pried open one of Tamara’s eyes. Flaco aimed the scanner at her eye, but it rolled back and we couldn’t see her retina, so Flaco started calling to her, saying “Oh, Spider Legs! Oh, Spider Legs. Wake up! We have nice flies to eat!” and things like that. I patted her cheek a little. After a few minutes her eyeball rolled forward and Flaco scanned it. For all practical purposes she was still asleep, but I turned the fluothane back on to put her under, just to be sure she wouldn’t remember we’d scanned her. Then Flaco jacked in a call to his hacker and read off her ID number: AK-483-VO-992-RAF.
I cleaned up the room and gave the thin woman an injection to make her sleep for the night. Flaco went to the bathroom. Five minutes later he came out and said, “I’ve got my hacker on line. Are you sure we got her ID right?”
The scanner was still on, so I read the number to him again.
Flaco stood in the corner, listening to the comlink in his head. “According to records,” he said, “she’s Tamara Maria de la Garza. Born 2-24-2267 on Bacchus 4 in the Ceti star system. She left at age eight, and spent seventeen years in-flight back to Earth. Two years ago, she joined the Allied Earth Marines and went with a peace-keeping force to the Epsilon Eridani system.” Flaco’s eyes remained unfocused as he listened to the voice in his head, and he laughed at something the hacker said. “According to her military records, she’s been in-flight two years. Expected to reach Epsilon Eridani in 2313.”
“Oh,” I said. I flipped off the fluothane on her gas mask. According to Flaco, this woman was nearly a light-year from Earth. Apparently, she had either jumped ship or never left—but then if that were true she would be listed as AWOL. Obviously, the military had falsified her files. I started thinking of reasons the military would falsify her files, and came up with many, but I realized it would be just like them to falsify her records for the hell of it.
Flaco stood in the corner for a moment. “Also,” he said. “My friend didn’t bother to mention earlier that two months ago the man who owned the crystal, Amir Jafari, was made a Class D General in the Federated Earth Marines—he’s in charge of Cyborg Intelligence.” Flaco smiled; he was still on line.
At first I thought that explained Jafari’s interest in brain storage. The cyborg command was once notorious for shanghaiing draftees, placing their brains in brain bags, and jacking them into reality programs—convincing them they were just living through their daily affairs until they could be transferred to mechanical bodies. But why would the computer crystal be registered to Jafari, not the Alliance? He wouldn’t be holding it as a commodities investment—the price of crystals drops daily as better crystals come onto the market.
Flaco tapped the subdural comlink switch behind his left ear; his eyes suddenly focused as he went offline. “My hacker says he doesn’t want to know me anymore. He just got tagged. He’s going on vacation.”
“Did they trace to us?”
Flaco tried to sound confident. “No, I don’t think so. I’d called him. They won’t trace back to us.” He sat on the floor and sighed. I knew he was wrong. I knew that if they took the initiative, they could check the hacker for incoming calls and get back to us. But it would take time, perhaps days. “So, what do you think?” Flaco asked.
I knew he wanted me to venture a guess about who had tapped in. I phrased my words carefully, trying to turn the subject of the conversation. “I think this woman is not Jafari, so perhaps she stole the crystal.”
“Do you know what I think?” Flaco said. “I watched you treat that girl. I think you wasted your money going to school to study morphogenic pharmacology. All you did was read the directions on those boxes. Anybody could have done that. A monkey could have done that!”
“Yes,” I said. “Flaco could have done that.”
“I did fine with the fluothane, no? I’m a fine anesthesiologist.”
“Yes, you’re a fine anesthesiologist,” I told him.
“I am also tired,” Flaco said, yawning.
“Me too.”
“Can I sleep here?” he asked.
“We should put this woman on the couch, and I have no other bed.”
“I will sleep on the floor—” he said, “a fine floor, very soft, very practical.”
“Good,” I said, “you can make sure this thief doesn’t run off with my valuables.”
“I will guard your valuables with my life,” Flaco promised. We moved Tamara to the couch; then Flaco lay down on the floor and closed his eyes.
Although it was late and I had many things on my mind, I went to my room, turned on my computer, phoned Informer 261—the artificial intelligence who services me—and requested a readout of all scholarly articles on morphogenic pharmacology published within the past three days. The AI bartered with me, trying to restructure my payment schedule for the information. He started out asking far too much money; at times it seemed his bartering equations went totally off kilter. He didn’t understand the emotional attachment I had to my money. I talked him down to a reasonable fee, and then he granted access to the information. I studied long into the night.
In the morning Tamara gave the computer crystal back to me, and I refilled the hormone pump on her arm, told her to eat and drink as much as she could, and left “Doctor” Flaco to watch her.
I took her dirty bandage to Uppanishadi-Smith for a blood analysis. Tamara’s blood had very low levels of leukocytes and other antibodies, and this seemed very strange. With such a severe injury, her antibody levels should have rocketed. However, people raised in artificial atmospheres often have unresponsive immune systems, so I did not worry so much. But with the high humidity in Panamá and the resultant risk of infections, I thought it necessary to buy a wide-spectrum antibody treatment. Then I went back to my booth at the feria. The day was slow: I sold two lipid and cholesterol flushes to old people and had one soccer player who wanted to get his nerves myelinated so he could speed his reflexes. His was an unworkable plan, and I told him how much better a nerve bypass was, since silver wire conducts electrical impulses much faster than a myelinated nerve, and recommended the doctor who had bypassed my sympathetic and peripheral nervous systems for me. The day was cool, so I walked home before sundown.
When I got home a gray kitten with white feet was on the roof and Flaco and Tamara were in the front yard throwing a red plastic ball up to the kitten. It would hide on the other side of the roof, and when Flaco threw the ball up it would clatter on the roof’s red tiles, and the kitten would hear it and run over the top, swiping and biting at the ball and chasing it till it rolled off the roof. Then the kitten would hiss and raise the hairs on its back as if surprised to see Flaco and Tamara, and would run back over the rooftop to hide. Tamara enjoyed this as much as the kitten did. She giggled when the kitten attacked the ball and acted very excited, often putting her hand over her mouth. I suddenly desired to kiss her; the thought of taking her in my arms and kissing her seemed totally natural. I would have done it, yet I knew that it was inappropriate. After thinking about it, I had a strange realization: the beauty I had seen in Tamara when she showed terror was in her when she laughed. The way emotions played over her face gave her an unusually expressive quality that made her different from the dead-eyed, emotionless refugiadas and merchant women I often met. Flaco must have seen it too, for when he spoke with her his voice took on a mellow, respectful tone.
I watched Tamara for some time, looking for any signs of the cramping the hormone injections can cause. She wobbled a great deal and clung to Flaco for support, but it was good for her to get the exercise. I remembered the antibody packet I’d bought, so I had her sit on the front porch while I injected the antibodies into her catheter.
“I have been thinking,” I said when I was done, “that I would like to sell that crystal. Would you happen to have a receipt for it?”
Tamara looked up at me in surprise, and then burst out laughing until tears formed in her eyes. Flaco started laughing too. I felt very foolish for asking about a receipt, but now I knew for sure she was a thief. Tamara struggled up and went into the house to rest.
I sat on the porch next to Flaco. He wrapped his arm around me. “Ah, Angelo, I like you. Promise me you’ll never change.”
I sighed, and wondered what to do. It would be wrong to sell stolen property, no matter how much I would make from it. Once again I wished that I had not taken Tamara into my care, and I wondered if I should send her to the hospital, let the police arrest her if she was a criminal. “How is she doing?” I asked.
“She slept much in the morning,” Flaco said, “and I made sure she ate a good lunch. After that she spent much time in your bedroom, hooked up to your dream console. She didn’t like it. She said it didn’t have enough memory to make a large world seem solid. Also, she erased all the old worlds you had in it. I hope you’re not angry.”
“No, I never use it,” I said truthfully.
“You should get a new one,” Flaco said. “I have a friend who steals only from other thieves. He can get you a nice one, cheap. And it isn’t as if it will have been stolen from a Padre.”
“No,” I said.
Flaco got up, walked into the house, and got some beer. When he came back, we sat on the porch and drank while the sun set. Just as it got dark we heard a distant explosion—a deep booming one—and howler monkeys in the forests on the south side of the lake began howling in fear.
“Chepo?” I asked, wondering if the socialists were bombing refugiados on our side of the border. Prime Minister Montoya had been spewing rhetoric all week—talking about how the ‘Progressive Ideals’ of Nicita Idealist Socialism could never take firm root while the dogma of the capitalists to the north continued to pollute his ‘New Society’—all of which simply meant that he was tired of his people listening to our radio stations or accessing our dream networks. He had reaffirmed his vow to either absorb or eradicate all other Latin American nations, so I’d been waiting all week for a new offensive.
Flaco shook his head, and spat on the ground. “Guerrilla artillery. Synchronous barrage; they’re trying to blow up that new Colombian neutron cannon. They’ll do it, too. Those chimeras have been giving the Colombians hell.” Flaco started to rise, as if to go in the house.
“Wait here for a moment,” I told him. “You will see something strange.”
Flaco sat back down and waited. Soon, an old grizzled spider monkey came walking up the street, away from the jungle south of the lake, heading north. The monkey was very nervous, being away from the trees, and he often stopped, raising his head to look for the perros sarnosos—junkyard dogs that ran loose in the streets. Flaco saw him and laughed, “Ha! I’ve never seen a spider monkey leave the jungle like that.”
“The fighting and people in the jungle scares them,” I said. “I see them every night now. Usually there is just one or two, sometimes bands. They are always heading north.”
“Perhaps this old spider monkey is smarter than you and me. Perhaps he is a sign,” Flaco said, reaching down to pick up a rock. He threw it, hitting the monkey’s chest. “Go on; get up to Costa Rica where someone can make a good stew of you!”
The monkey lurched back a few meters, clutching his chest, then ran in a circle, and finally took off as fast as he could past my home. I felt bad to see the old monkey in pain. “You did not need to do that,” I told Flaco. Flaco was staring at the ground, angrily, and I knew he was thinking about the threat of the Colombians to the south and Costa Ricans to the north. It would not be long until the two countries would invade us, try to force us to refuse the capitalists access to our canals.
“Ah, piss on him if he can’t take a joke,” Flaco said. Then he laughed and we went into the house.
I sat on the porch a while and thought. The monkeys leaving, that was a bad sign, but all my life people had been seeing bad signs. My own country of Guatemala had been invaded by Nicaragua, overtaken by a dictator, passed through a revolution, and ended up where it began, as a free democracy—all in less than fifty years. I’ve always believed that no matter how bad things become, they somehow even out eventually. And the problems with the socialists would be no exception. I went into the house to eat. Flaco and Tamara had eaten all the fresh fruit and I do not like to take a meal without it, so we decided to eat at La Arboleda, a nearby restaurant. I went to get Tamara.
She lay on my bed, with the dream monitor plugged into the interface socket at the base of her skull and her visor down. She was curled so that her knees touched her chin, and she had her hand in her mouth, biting it. Her tightly drawn face hinted at pain.
“Does she always do this?” I asked.
“Does what?” Flaco said.
“Curl up in the fetal position when she’s hooked to the console?”
“Feta? Feta?—yes, she always lies like that.”
“Don’t touch her,” I told him, then ran next door to Rodrigo DeHoyos’ house to borrow an extra monitor. When I got back, I put on the monitor and plugged into the viewer’s jack of the console—
And on the beach the wind was still but a sandpiper was running, skirting the water’s edge, darting away from the waves, burying his ebony bill, moving on. Bleached shells of clam, barnacle, and snail tumbled in the shallows and gleamed like bones in the sand drifts. Cool air carried the scent of decaying sea life. A purple sun hung on the horizon and dyed sand, sky, bird, skin in cellophane shades of red and blue. The amethyst sand cut my bare feet, and down the beach a red-haired woman in a white dress fed gulls that screeched and hung in the air, waiting to snap crumbs she tossed. I stopped and inhaled the air, listened to the sigh of the breakers, and looked at the colors. After so long with my prosthetic eyes, seeing the world in variations of only three primary colors felt like coming home.
I began looking for flaws in her dreamwork. Her world involved all five senses. I could both smell the sea rime and taste it—it felt complete. I could see unity in the starkness of the lines of the jagged stones, the wind-battered birds, and the choppy waves on the horizon. Scarlets and muted tans nicely varied the theme color of purple. Her dreamwork was almost professional quality.
But I turned around and found a warp: on the beach, a huge black bull lay dead in the water, as if he had washed up from her subconscious. The horizon, the shoreline, the slope of the sand—all converged to emphasize this bull. He lay on his side, with his head toward me and his feet toward the sea. His huge belly was distended, though it didn’t show signs of rot. His knobby legs stuck out, stiff with rigor mortis, and his whole body heaved from moment to moment as waves washed against him, surging against his belly, making his huge testicles and penis float up against his body as a wave came in, then stretch out and away as the wave receded. I focused my attention on the bull and mouthed the word delete. The monitor flashed a message: You Cannot Edit Dreams While in the Viewing Mode.
I headed toward the red-haired woman. Her beauty was the kind one can only be born with—the elegant lines of her chin were not likely to be the kind a plastique artist would conceive. Yet her lifeless expression revealed the tragic deadness one sees behind the eyes of the refugiados, and I wondered why Tamara had chosen this red-haired woman as an alter ego, and if the emotion I’d seen in Tamara’s face earlier were some trick of her body she could not control.
“What do you want?” she asked without turning to look at me, tossing a piece of bread to a gull.
I did not know what to answer. “I came to tell you it’s time to eat,” I said, looking back at the bull.
“He talks to me,” she said, as if confiding a secret. She didn’t turn, and I realized it was the bull she didn’t want to see. “Even though he’s dead, he jabbers. He jabbers at me—he says he wants me to ride his back. But I know that as soon as I do, he’ll take me away, across the dark water to a place where I do not wish to go.”
I said as if to a child: “Perhaps you should come with Flaco and me. We’ll have a nice dinner. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She stiffened, angered by the tone of my voice. “You go on ahead. I’ll finish up here,” she said. She tore a huge chunk off her loaf of bread and tossed it to a gull. The gull shrieked and dove, grabbing the bread before it hit the ground. I looked at the gull, with its battered feathers and shrunken stomach. Its dark eyes glared, mad with hunger.
I walked away from the beach and topped a rise by a rock where a lone gull sat. On the other side of the rise the dream ended in a blurred landscape of rolling dunes. I looked back down at the bull floating in the water and at the woman in the white dress. She fed the last of the bread to the gulls, and then raised her hands. A gull dove and tentatively nipped her finger. Drops of blood splashed from her wound and the gulls cried and dove upon her, shredding her flesh with their sharp beaks.
The gull beside me cried out, and I looked at it. The light of the setting sun made its white feathers gleam purple. Its dark eyes appeared to glare out of a luminous head. It watched me, cold and prophetic. I jacked out, unwilling to watch the woman be eaten.
***