Her room is the color of the dry grass in the hills. She checks mail on her phone. Inevitably, there’s a reminder from her agent about her meeting at Water and Power Capital Management in now alarmingly few hours. She drops the phone on the floor.
She looks out the window—there’s a sense of glittering immanence, of menace, almost, over the salt flats—then regrets not brushing her teeth as she shrugs out of her clothes and falls into bed, glad of the silence and of the guard, out front with his gun, keeping the world at a distance.
5
Working
The concrete is still cooling under Kern’s back when the moon starts to set. Under the faded sky the favelas’ rooftops are a plain of undulating shadow, fractured by the glowing faults of the alleys and the streets. Lifting his head, he sees the Bay and across it the firelight flaring among Oakland’s ruined towers. The wind brings cooking oil, sewage, the sea. Ear to the concrete, he hears music’s muted subterranean pulse.
His phone chimes as a text arrives. Phone framed on pale night, the message one word: Working? The sender is anonymized, but only Lares has the new number. Tempting just to lie there, and watch the night progress, but his restlessness is growing, so he texts back Yes, and an instant later gets another message with an image of the night’s mark and his latest GPS.
Corded muscle on the stranger’s arms, billowing thunderheads tattooed on his shoulders, a studied gangster’s gravitas. Another text: Touch him up and bring his phone to me. He memorizes the GPS, then deletes all. Springing to his feet, he stretches through the moment’s dizziness and then lopes off across the rooftops.
A vertical plane of light rises from a wide fissure in the concrete before him. He starts to sprint and as the fear rises he launches himself from the edge, floating, for a moment, and in the light rising from the street below he casts a skyward shadow, and then the balconies of the far wall are rushing toward him, then the shock of impact in his palms, knees and soles, his eyes just inches from the stratified concrete, and then once again he’s pushed off into the air.
He lands running, stumbles, jogs off the last of his momentum, unscathed, euphoric, though the descent is easy, on these surfaces, if you commit yourself, which he’s done now many times. (The first time, when he’d only seen it done in videos, it had taken an hour to work up to the jump). As he wasn’t hurt, he won’t be hurt, and for tonight he is invincible.
The pulse of the music is louder on the street. It’s a carnival night, which he likes, for the shattering music and the fires and the strobe lights that make a strange country of the favela’s familiar mazes, and because there will be crowds, mostly drunk, making it easy for him to fade away. Lares, who is particular about words, says it’s not technically carnival, but more like this floating world, which Kern first thought referred to the levels flooded by the Bay—he’s found basements where you can hear the tide race—but it turned out to be Japanese; he forgot the details but retains a sense of lantern light and sake jars, of hot water clattering into tubs, of ragged samurai walking through the cold mud singing, and as the bass vibrates in his bones he’s floating over the surface of things, exultant and detached as he closes on his victim.
Dank corridors with closed doors, mulched paper squelching underfoot, reek of urine. A family place—mothers had their children piss in the throughways to keep the working girls away. An old man with a too-wide grin, dressed as though for church, calls out to him, full of unctuous concern—is he entirely well—is he hungry, perhaps? Kern shakes his head just perceptibly and the old man laughs, says he’s sorry, he hadn’t recognized him, would never have spoken so to a resident of such standing. Go with him and you’d get a meal, fall asleep, wake up in a brothel. It didn’t seem fair, kids making it this far just to be picked off by a pimp who seemed to think that it was funny. The gang kids hated people like that, caught them and hurt them whenever they could, prone, afterwards, to sentimental monologues on sisters disappeared.
A momentary silence, shocking in its suddenness, ringing in his ears. It passes, as he moves on, but there are places like that, here and there, islands of quiet, implied by the ways that shape warps sound. They move, as people build, and he imagines the silences projected from high above, like spotlights roaming the surface of the city.
The sky is intermittent strips of indigo, and the street—dark even in the day—is lit sporadically by bioluminescent strips stuck to the walls. He dodges into the gaps in the gathering crowd, making a game of it but one with an urgency, and someone shouts “Woo!” as Kern slips by, not touching him but passing near enough to feel his heat, and he knows he should slow down, avoid notice, but needs to be in motion.
He rounds a corner into a wall of darkness and deafening sound and then a blinding flash of light. The music is from everywhere, the stereos built into the walls and the floor—there are guys who are into that, who spend weeks and their own money getting it just right. Every strobe flash brings a static image of the dancers in their ecstasy, like a sequence of luminous stills, and he retains details that would otherwise be lost—the hair of a girl in mid-jump splayed out like a corona, her eyes shut tight, her smile raw, inward, somehow like a child’s, the skinny shirtless boy turning to watch her, the beads of sweat flying from his forehead. On a concrete stage there’s an elfin-looking girl screaming into a microphone and she has black lipstick and black eyeliner and a torn, sweat-stained army T-shirt, and she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds—she’s what Kayla would call one of the banshee cases—and it’s like she’s been possessed by something terrible that’s working out its pain through her disintegrating vocals. A pulse of darkness, like going into a tunnel, and then the next strobe shows the way.
He checks his position on his phone, scans the teeming faces when the next light comes. So many, and though it’s only been minutes the mark is surely gone, but the mass of dancers opens up and there he is.