Chapter 3
On the way home, Tamara and Flaco were so drunk they had to lean on me for support. Tamara kept swearing and mumbling that she wanted a gun, and Flaco kept saying “What?” When we reached the house, I laid Tamara on the couch and Flaco on the hall floor in front of the bathroom door and went to bed.
After a couple hours I was awakened by Flaco vomiting and Tamara murmuring, but I just went back to sleep. I dreamed of an old Zeller Cymech advertisement that portrayed a group of people in a lunar gambling casino, all of them cyborgs wearing designer cymechs. I had seen this holo once before, and admired it. All the cyborgs were laughing, and drinking Rum Sunsets. Several of them wore feminine bodies, complete with metal breasts studded with small jewels. One female cyborg was talking to a companion, and she giggled in a quaint manner. I suddenly realized she was my wife, Elena, who had been hit by a truck thirty years earlier. But it seemed irrational to believe she had died. I had merely forgotten that she had bought a cymech and we had somehow scraped her pieces together and put her in it, and now she was here on the moon, drinking Rum Sunsets and laughing. I planned to go embrace her, tell her how happy I was to see her, when the cyborg closest to me caught my attention. He had only one arm that was still flesh, and he wore it as if it were a badge of his humanity. He wore a head of electrically dyed, red tungsten that looked like a handsome man around the face and eyes, but his jaw curved abruptly into something skeletal. He had gleaming blue zirconium eyes, and his huge smile hinted at perpetual mirth. But suddenly it seemed this man’s smile held something malicious, that he was plotting the deaths of the others in the room, and only I could discern his intent. Then I thought: This is not my dream. This is Tamara’s dream. And I was awakened by someone shaking me.
“Angelo! Angelo!” Flaco said.
“Sí. ¿Qué pasa?”
“¡Huy! What do you think? That woman, she is a bitch when she drinks, no?”
“Yes, she is a bitch,” I said.
“I like that. I like a woman with a fierce spirit!” Flaco talked very slowly and deliberately. “Move over. I want to get in bed with you.” I moved and Flaco climbed in and accidentally kicked me with his shoes. “Ah, this is a good bed. Very comfortable. Just right for two. You should have invited me in earlier. Did I ever tell you that you have nice breasts? For a man, that is. They are very flaccid. You have more breast than some women.”
Flaco’s words disturbed me, till I realized he was joking. “Yes, flaccid breasts run in my family. You should have seen my mother: she had five of them.”
Flaco laughed. “No more jokes! I think I will vomit again if I have to laugh at your sick jokes. Angelo, do you think Tamara is in danger?”
“Yes.”
“I held her hand today,” he said. “It was very delicate, like a child’s hand. We will have to take good care of her. Tell me, what do you think she is running from?”
“What does anyone run from? She runs from her past.”
“Ah, philosophical poop. Do you always poop philosophy at night? If so, we should sleep together often. But I have been thinking—perhaps she is a notorious refugiada. Perhaps she is looking for political asylum, and would be happy to marry a Panamánian like the handsome Flaco just so she can live in a neutral country, eh? Welcome to Flaco; welcome to freedom! What do you think? You still think she is a thief?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t,” Flaco said. “Believe me, oh great philosopher, I know thieves. She is too alive to be a thief. Understand?”
“No.”
“Ah, it is very simple. You see, man is a territorial creature. He needs to possess things—houses, land, body space. And if he possesses something, he is happy; and he is happy to let others possess something. But thieves violate their very nature by violating the territories of others. They are never at peace with themselves. And because of this, they die inside. This is something an educated, philosophical man like you should know.”
“Are you not a socialist?” I asked. “What you say sounds anti-socialist.” It was a cruel to question—meant it only as a joke. Traditionally, socialists believe in using social engineering to eradicate outdated ideas, ethics, and ways of thought—and according to the first rule of social engineering, a society cannot be engineered to specification unless the engineering takes place in cultural isolation. So, to avoid cultural pollution, the socialists believed they needed to either absorb or destroy all nearby capitalists while they engineered their own communal society. To accuse Flaco of being one of them was bad enough, yet the Nicita Idealist Socialists had gone a step farther—rumor said they were trying to engineer a non-territorial human—a man they believed would be unselfish and full of empathy, willing to give everything he owned to others. Rumor also said that the creatures they had engineered in Argentina had been alien, murderous.
This news terrified the peasants, for it was said that once the Socialists perfected the genetic structure for a non-territorial man, they would release a vector virus that would infect everyone on Earth. Through viral warfare mankind would be changed, become a creature incapable of adopting ideals outside those touted by the socialists, and I think the peasants feared death less than they feared undergoing such a change. I was unsure whether to believe such stories. Yet Flaco was speaking much like a socialist, and I thought it funny to accuse him of being one.
He asked, “Why would you think me a socialist?”
“You live in Panamá, between the hammer of Colombia and the anvil of Costa Rica, and don’t run away. Also, you’re skinny and sneaky-looking, like a socialist.”
“Oh, I am not a socialist,” Flaco said. “I don’t believe socialism can work with man today—we are too territorial. And I don’t think we should engineer the trait away. I believe a man must possess himself and be his own man. But these Nicita Idealist Socialists will not let a man possess himself. It is not enough that they enslave the artificial intelligences; they must also dominate humans too, grind down their opposition. Always they blame the capitalists for their economic failure.
“According to the socialists, if a socialist buys a car it is a sign of progress, but if a capitalist buys a car, it is a sign of decadence. They refuse to see that because they take away men’s will to work, their countries collapse into economic ruin.
“I met a man from Budapest who said his father had worked in a factory that kept closing because the workers wanted to sit and play cards. The government sent the military to force the workers to go back to work, and some still refused. They sat and played cards with machine guns at their backs. Finally, the military shot them all, and the radio proclaimed these men traitors.
“This man told me that his father, even though he had been murdered, had won against the socialists because he refused to be dominated by them. And I believe this is a second way to submit to inner death—to live under the domination of others, to deny your need to possess yourself.”
Flaco fancied himself a great political thinker, but I had spent so much time studying medicine I was out of touch with politics. I remained respectfully silent for a moment, as if contemplating his words. “So, did you not say that you don’t believe this woman is a thief?”
“No, I believe she is a brain transplant.”
This made me sit up and think. Intuitively I felt he was right. “Why do you say that?”
“I saw a documentary once. Back when they were drafting people into the cyborg units, the military would put the soldiers’ bodies in stasis until their terms were up, and if a soldier wanted to enlist afterward, he could opt to sell his body for parts. But there was a big scandal, because sometimes a soldier would end his term or want to sell his body and find that it had already been sold on the black market by the cryotechs. All this talk about cyborgs made me remember this, and I realized that this was how Tamara could be listed as being on active duty a light-year away and still be here.”
“Do you mean someone has stolen her body?”
“I have been thinking: would anyone steal a useless body like that? No, I think Tamara de la Garza enlisted and sold her body. And now this woman is wearing it.”
I remembered the beautiful red-haired woman in Tamara’s dream, so different from the scrawny, black-haired thing that slept on the couch, and I realized that a brain transplant could explain why she dreamed of herself looking so differently. And I remembered the way she had fumbled after the water at dinner—a sign that her brain had not yet accustomed itself to a change in body size. “Perhaps,” I said.
“‘Perhaps’? What do you mean ‘perhaps’? It is a great solution to our question. If my theory isn’t true, it should be!”
“We are being paid much money. She is paying a little for her treatment, and much for our silence. If she must suffer a brain transplant to escape her pursuers, perhaps our questions jeopardize her.”
“You did not tell me earlier she was in danger,” Flaco said.
Out in the living room, Tamara stirred in her sleep and moaned.
“I did not know if I believed it earlier.”
I lay in bed for a long time, thinking. If this woman had had a brain transplant and the transplant were recent, it would explain why her antibody levels hadn’t shot up when her hand was pulled off—she could still be on antibody inhibitors. But I wasn’t sure.
Any legitimate surgeon would have used antimosin C, an inhibitor which only stops the production of the suppressor cells that attack transplanted organs. But Tamara’s antibody levels were down all across the spectrum—which meant she’d been given one of the more common AB inhibitors. The antibody injection I had given her earlier had thymosins in it, which stimulated the production of all T cells, including suppressor cells. And if the level of thymosins I’d given her were too high, they could override the AB inhibitors. And if her brain wasn’t perfectly compatible with its body, Tamara’s suppressor cells would treat her brain as an infecting organism, destroying it cell by cell. These thoughts made my stomach ache.
I went into the living room to check on Tamara. She looked like a tiny rag of a person, thrown on the couch, and I could see by the brilliance of the platinum glow of her body that she had an elevated temperature. This is one of the first signs of organ rejection; unfortunately, it is also a sign of an ordinary infection. To add to my confusion, the hormones I’d given her sped up her metabolism, which would cause a low-grade fever. She had already complained of headaches, but until she complained of cramps, numbness, or loss of senses, I couldn’t be sure she was in danger. This was all compounded by the fact that under the right conditions she could go comatose or die without warning. All the if’s began swimming in my head. I got a cool rag and sponged her face. She woke and looked at me, “Bolt the … charge a gun,” she said. Then her eyes cleared. “Do you have the crystal?” she asked. I pulled the crystal out of my pocket and showed it to her. She reached up and stroked it, then smiled and slept.
I continued sponging her and held her hand through the night. I felt an odd desire to kiss her. At first, I smiled at the thought. But as the night drew on I massaged her scalp and shoulders, and I was filled with a deep longing. I wanted to cradle her in my arms. My desire became very powerful, until I wondered at it, and I realized that lack of sleep was making me giddy. At dawn, comlink tones sounded in my head. I tapped my comlink switch, opening the channel, and an image flooded into my mind: A dark man with long black hair and wide nostrils sat on a sofa. He wore the dark blue of the Allied Marines.
“I’m Jafari,” he said. “I understand you have something that belongs to me.” His voice had a disturbing atonal quality, lacking inflection. The over-emphasis on depth in the scene was typical of computer-generated images.
I reached in my pocket and fondled the crystal. “I believe you’re mistaken,” I answered.
“I want the woman back,” he said. The statement startled me, left me unbalanced. “Here is what I propose: It will cost me two hundred thousand standards to send my men to take her—and I could take her. But it will be easier for both of us if you bring her to me yourself and accept the two hundred thousand in token of my gratitude.”
“What will you do with her?” I asked. Jafari stared at me and offered no reply. I felt stupid for asking. “She is very ill,” I blurted. “She cannot be moved safely for several days.”
“She has led me on a goose chase for months, but it will stop here. You have until sunset to bring her to the airport in Colón. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
He seemed to gaze at me for a moment, as if he could see me. “You wouldn’t try anything irrational would you? You wouldn’t try to escape?”
“No.”
“You couldn’t if you tried, you know. Running is not an option.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Jafari said. “I will be kind to her. It’s for her good. I’m not inhuman.”
“I won’t run,” I said.
Jafari cut the transmission. I sat by the couch, feeling as if I were in a box. I pondered every word he’d said, sifting for meanings only the tone could have supplied. He had threatened to send his men for me, and I wondered if these were the same men who had pulled off Tamara’s hand. And I wondered what kind of men could do such a thing. Jafari’s last words hinted at emotion, or at least an apology for emotion. The AEM couldn’t operate legally on Earth. But I knew that wouldn’t stop Jafari. As commander of Cyborg Intelligence he would be hooked to the military AIs and have the resources of crystal brains that gathered billions of times more information than a biological brain could handle. I wouldn’t be able to access my bank accounts, make a call, cross a border, and pass a police monitor. I sponged Tamara’s head until exhaustion took me.
A couple hours after dawn, Flaco came out of the bedroom. “Ah, Angelo,” he said, “should the dark angel come to take me, I’d embrace him with open arms. Often I’ve wished my grandfather had invented a drink that allowed one to get drunk and not have a hangover!”
“It is a small price to pay for so much happiness,” I quoted an old song. Flaco sat on the bed, and I probed Tamara’s scalp around her hairline and the external sensory jack at the base of her skull, searching for scar tissue—any exterior sign that she’d had a brain transplant. There was none, but that didn’t mean anything; a good plastique artist wouldn’t leave such a sign. I said, “You must watch Tamara for me,” then went to fix breakfast. I fried some gallo pinto—a dish made with brown beans and rice—opened some nice doughnuts, and mixed the coffee.
Soon, Flaco came into the kitchen. “She sleeps with the angels,” he said.
“Good.” I offered him a plate. He loaded it up and sat at the table. We ate in silence for a long time.
“I can read your mind,” he said after a while. “I was not so drunk that I don’t remember the call I got at the restaurant. Perhaps we should move the girl to my house.”
“No. If he can call you, he knows where you live.”
“Then we will move her somewhere else. We could hide her in the bananeros, the banana plantations.”
“The plantations would be good,” I said. I ate a while more in silence, unsure if I should tell Flaco about the call from Jafari. Flaco was a good friend, and a good man, but he was a thief at heart. Perhaps he was even capable of selling Tamara for the reward.
“What’s bothering you?” Flaco asked. “Are you afraid to hide her in the banana plantations?”
I ran my finger over the worn plastic of the tabletop. Tamara got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the water go on as she washed her face. “No. I gave her an antibody treatment yesterday that could be dangerous. She could die from it.”
“What’s the probability?”
“I don’t know. Not very high.”
“Then I would only worry about it slightly, and not look so glum. One would think by the look on your face that you were a rooster and your owner was starving.” I laughed a little. “See, things are not so bad. Flaco will fix everything. Also, when Tamara comes in, I’m going to test her to see if she is a refugiada.” He pulled his lower eyelid as a sign for me to not say anything.
Tamara staggered into the kitchen, her head slumped. “I’m leaving,” she announced.
“We know,” Flaco said. “I am coming with you. We’ll hide in the banana plantations with the refugiados. No one will find you.”
“You don’t know who I’m running from. You don’t know their resources.”
“Their resources don’t matter!” Flaco said. “No one monitors the plantations—the refugiados come and go too fast. Hundreds of thousands of people live there, yet no one even asks for ID.”
Tamara said, “I’m not sure …”
“Ah, but you would blend in perfectly with the refugiados,” Flaco said, “you have that starved look.”
Tamara stared at him a moment, as if to read some deeper meaning into the joke, then she smiled a labored smile and said “Okay,” and began eating.
“Speaking of refugiados, guess who I saw yesterday—” Flaco said, “Professor Bernardo Mendez!” I had heard the name, but couldn’t remember where. I looked at Tamara and we both shrugged. “You know, Bernardo Mendez! The great social engineer who did so much good work in Chile—the one who promised to use genetic engineering to breed greed out of man within three generations! I saw him on the street in the feria. He took his idea to Colombia and the Colombians lobotomized him and shoved him over the border as an example to the refugiados. They didn’t like his brand of socialism, so they cut out much of his brain, and now he wanders the streets with pee stains on his pants, stealing food.”
Tamara stopped eating and turned pale. “Perhaps it was capitalists,” I said. “Perhaps they lobotomized him.”
“Ah, no,” Flaco said. “It was the Colombians. I have a friend who has a friend who knows for sure.”
Tamara said, “Nobody knows anything for sure.”
Flaco smiled and winked at me. “Tsk, Tsk—so much cynicism, and it’s only breakfast time! How cynical will she be by noon? All the same, it is a shame to see a great man in such a state: peeing his pants that way. Now he is no smarter than an iguana or a duck.”
Tamara said, “Let’s not talk about it,” and finished eating in silence.
We packed some food and clothes, and went to the plantations, watching to make sure we weren’t followed. Among the plantations we would travel for a long time without seeing a tent, and then suddenly we would find a cluster of them like a small village. None of the tents belonged to the guerrillas; they were still far to the east. Flaco chose a camp with only four tents next to each other. The tents were dirty and molded, and two had white crap on their tops where chickens roosted at night. Outside one tent a naked baby boy sat in an aluminum washtub with only a small amount of water. He didn’t have any teeth, and he had a rag in his mouth, chewing it. Flies crawled all over him and the rag.
Flaco called at the tent door, and a young Chilean woman came out. She opened her blouse, and began nursing the baby. Flaco asked if he and Tamara could camp there, and the woman told him that the people who owned one of the tents had disappeared a week earlier, so he could live there. These disappearances are common—many refugiados are found murdered for no apparent reason. The police are too apathetic to do anything about it. Flaco and Tamara seemed to be pretty well set up, so I went to work in the feria.
The feria was very crowded that day, and if I had not worried so much about whether Tamara would stay well hidden from Jafari I would have enjoyed it. A great swarm of people—Chinese and Korean mariners, Hindu merchants, and South American guerrillas—descended on the area until the street in front of my stand was packed solid with people, all of them in clashing costumes, milling endlessly.
The smells of sweat and dust and spicy food filled the air, while the people yelled and bartered.
I always loved the sights of the feria. When I was a student at the university, I lived with my uncle in Mexico City. All the sidewalks downtown were one way, and if pedestrians wanted to walk to a store on the other side of the street, they had to pass the store, go to the next pedestrian overpass, then walk back to the store they wanted to get to. All those people walking in the same direction sickened me. They kept pace with each other as if their legs were bound together with invisible shackles. And I remembered that when I had first come to Panamá, it was the people milling listlessly in the feria that attracted me. I had always thought I enjoyed the lack of order in Panamá, but after thinking about Flaco’s words of the night before, I wondered if I didn’t enjoy the simple freedom of being able to turn and walk against the crowd. Perhaps this was my way of possessing me.
Flaco came at noon and bought a water jug from a booth down the street. He stopped and talked with me. “Did you not see the look on her face when I told her about Bernardo?”
“Sí, she looked very sick,” I said.
“She is a refugiada for sure, no?”
“Sí, she looked very sick,” I said. Flaco laughed and told me to come by later and bring some fruit, and I said okay. I gave him the computer crystal and asked him to sell it. He said he’d try. As Flaco stepped into a crowd of pedestrians to make his way back to the plantations, I watched the crowd behind him to see if anyone was following. The crowd was so thick it was impossible to watch everyone.
Business was good in the afternoon; I sold a rejuvenation, a thing which had not happened in over a month, so I stayed at my booth till well after dark, telling myself that I hoped for more good fortune. But Jafari’s deadline had well passed, and part of me was afraid.
Flaco’s camp was 114 rows south of the canal freeway, and about three kilometers west of Colón. I walked to it in the dark, carrying a fruit basket and mineral water I’d bought at the feria. The banana plants and warm soil gave off enough infrared glow to see by. No one followed.
When I got to the camp, I saw a large black man about fifty meters from Flaco’s tent, slightly hunched over as if he were peeing. I thought to pass him quietly so I wouldn’t frighten him, but when I reached him I saw that he was hunched over Flaco. He was unwrapping a garrote from around Flaco’s neck; he had strangled Flaco.
I yelled “Stop!” and the man looked at me. He charged as if to attack, but I jumped aside and he ran away.
I checked Flaco’s pulse; he had none. I pushed on his chest to get fresh air in him; he gurgled and blood bubbled out of a hole below his Adam’s apple. I stuck two fingers into the hole to see how deep it was, and my fingers went back in his neck until they touched the stumps where his vertebrae had been severed.
I crawled away and vomited, then yelled for help.
The Chilean woman came out of her tent, followed by Tamara. The Chilean was very surprised and terrified to see Flaco dead—she kept making the sign of the cross and moaning. Tamara just stared at Flaco, her mouth wide with horror.
I got angry and jumped up to chase Flaco’s killer. I had only run about five hundred meters when I saw him hiding behind the stalks of a banana plant. I ran straight at him. He jumped from behind the plant and swung a knife at me, so I tried to kick off his kneecap. But I only managed to kick him hard in the knee.
He dropped the knife and took off running. I picked up the knife and followed.
He didn’t run fast—he kept grabbing his knee and limping—and I felt very light and free. I controlled my breathing and soon fell into a rhythm and fantasized. It would all be very easy, I thought, to pounce on this man and slit him from crotch to skull. I had already disabled him; and I thought it would feel good to kill him.
He had probably underestimated me because I am old and flaccid, but I have always taken good care of my body, and I felt like an old lion who has just discovered that he still has one tooth left with which to kill.
Because I enjoyed this moment, I did not hurry. I wanted him to be terrified of me. I wanted him to have to wait to die, to know it was coming. Then I realized I was like the Captain who’d shot the children on the beach, and I threw down the knife. The man in front of me soon straightened out his leg and doubled his speed, and I kept following him. Comlink tones sounded in my head, and I answered.
“You run good, for a dried up old turd,” the man in front of me said in English over the comlink. I didn’t answer. He ran out of the plantation and crossed the canal freeway. I followed as he leapt the crash fence and maglev rail on the far side of the freeway. “What would an old man like you do if he caught me?” he asked.
“I would rip out your bowels,” I raged. He crossed the underpass of the old canal, and then crossed the new canal, and I still followed. He was heading into the ghettoes of Colón.
We ran past a few businesses, but soon the apartment buildings reared up on both sides of us like the walls of a canyon. Few people were on the street, and most of them leapt into doorways when they heard the sound of running feet.
Once, I passed three dirty young men who stood outside an apartment, drinking beers. One of them laughed and said, “Want any help?” as I ran by, but he didn’t follow when I said, “Yes.”
I kept expecting to pass one of the little police cameras that monitored the area. But every time I saw a monitor stand, the camera was torn off, and I was relieved and afraid at the same time—whatever happened would be between him and me.
“Let’s make this fight even. Let’s find a place with a little light, so I can see you,” the man said. He ran past some garbage cans where a junkyard dog was eating.
The dog growled and took off chasing him. The man and the dog ran to a well-lit corner and darted around it. But the dog yelped in pain immediately afterward, and I hesitated. Just as I began to turn the corner a flash, like a brilliant strobe, silently went off. All the apartments that were exposed to the light made a sound like the inrush of breath and burst into flames. The reflected light burned my eyelashes and gave me a sunburn. My eyes closed down for a second as a defense against the light.
“Was that bright enough for you, you old pecker?” the man asked. I ran into the alley. The dog was dead, charred black and smoking as his back legs still kicked. The paint on the buildings on both sides sputtered blue and green flames, forcing me back. “Ah, you should thank Allah, you sorry bastard; I’ve wasted my only energy grenade,” the voice said. “I’ll come back for you later.” He broke off the connection.
He had been heading toward my house, so I ran down the street, parallel to his course, then cut over, hoping to see him. But he was gone.
I sat on the ground and cried and thought about Flaco with his throat cut, angry that I had been unable to avenge his death. Fire sirens wailed down the street as I began walking home. The air seemed very foggy, and my legs felt weak. I kept remembering Flaco dead and my chasing the man who had killed him. I had thought it would feel good to kill the man, and I had run with great ease as I chased him, but now I felt weak and sick. I looked up and found myself on a street I’d never seen before, and I was lost.
***