A woman comes out of an alleyway, backlit, heavily pregnant, her soaked cotton shorts and tank top displaying her body’s metamorphosis. His first thought is that she, too, likes the rain and its cleanliness, but then he sees her staring eyes, her wide rictus grin, how she walks by without seeing him at all.
He wonders how she managed to conceive, with her craziness all but palpable, and imagines a pack of boys running her down, their honor dissolved in the group’s euphoria. The image of her swollen breasts under the wet cloth stays with him, and he could do what the boys did, and no one would know, for she must be all alone, and he is afraid, then, for this impulse is someone else’s, and purely contemptible, and of course the ghost would know, and even if he is a predator—and he is, must be, and the world peopled only with victims—the noble, he reminds himself, do not prey on the weak. (In any case, she’d smell like cold, and despair, and as he pressed her down her black eyes would be windows onto nothing.)
He stops, can’t bring himself to get moving again. He gathers his will and takes a few steps but his will fades, leaving him standing there, staring straight ahead. He thinks of Kayla, how she looked when she was sleeping, how she’d promised she’d always care for him. “Everything all right?” asks the ghost as he turns and heads for Red Cloud Street, where Kayla will be dancing in the Club Lazarus’s heat and shadows.
*
From a distance it looks like firelight flickering on the low cloud, and then Kern turns the corner into the glare of video. Thousands of screens are embedded in the walls, the lowest over the bars’ awnings, the highest lost in the rain, their light reflected in the puddles, the windows, the wet hair of passersby, and as he stares up into the screens the world falls away, leaving him floating among abstract planes of shifting light, a dream saccading without intent, but then the images, which have been form purely, resolve into the shapes of the bodies of women. They’re beautiful, the women, though their hair and makeup are dated (as are, more subtly, their breasts and musculature), because all the video is from archives of old porn, and he wonders why anyone bothers to make more, since the fundamental things never really change.
A trio of marines jostle past, splashing water on his pants, bringing him back to the roar of the street’s arcades, the massage parlors’ jangling musics, the rain’s drumming. They’re out of uniform, but he knows them by their haircuts, their muscular bulk, and an aura that’s both lethal and puppyish. One of them calls back to him in a child’s Spanish, to apologize, or perhaps to mock him, but is laughing so hard he can barely speak, and Kern sees that they’re very drunk. Their training is said to be severe, but whatever they may be in battle, for now they’re just foolish, and loud, shouting over each other in the street, and their swagger reminds him to go quietly through the world. They’re the ones who die, mostly, in their country’s wars, they say, and he looks up again at all the ancient records of the beautiful, locked forever in their endless loops, and all these girls must be dead now, their ranked ghosts shining brightly overhead. He follows the marines into the crowd.
Press and heat of bodies, smells of sweat, fried meat, beer, perfume and always the rain, all familiar, and in aggregate they feel like life itself. “Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s a terrible idea,” the ghost says. “Too many people, cameras, drones. You might as well be holding up a sign. You’re going to get your ass killed and I’m going to have to watch. Don’t mind me, though—I’ll just keep giving good advice while you throw your life away.” He ignores her, falls in behind a girl with vinyl boots buttoned to mid-thigh, tattooed serpents twining around her wrists and makeup done in black diagonals; he doesn’t know what her look is trying to say, but he suspects that she’s an artist, like so many who live on the favela’s periphery, and he knows that she’s a stripper, though he couldn’t say how he knows it, it’s just something he learned to recognize when he was with Kayla, and then, as though to confirm his intuition, the girl in the vinyl boots goes through the neon-outlined doors of Club Lazarus, where Kayla probably still works.
A sense of threat puts him on the balls of his feet but it’s just the club’s bouncer, bald, massively built and frowning down at him; strong, but the type who thinks all the muscle will make him invincible—his face and his legs will be his weak points—and after a tenth of a second Kern is morally certain that his confidence is shallow—hit him once or twice and he’ll crumble.
“Stop,” says the bouncer, holding out an open palm, trying to say it like a cop would. “If you’ve got money, let’s see it.” Kern smiles inwardly. “Otherwise, we’re full up.” There’s a tattoo on his palm, elaborate gothic lettering spelling Family.
Then the bouncer’s face clears, and, amazed, he says, “I know you! You’re a fighter, right? I’ve seen you fight a dozen times. You move like the mantis, brother—you’re hard core. I should have recognized a warrior of your stature.” It’s kind of a joke but he also means it and Kern doesn’t know what to say so he says, “What’s that on your hands?”
Gentle now, the bouncer shows his palm, saying, “This is my family,” and showing the other, equally tattooed palm, “and this is my pride. If I’m going to die I only have to close my hands and I can hold on to both of them.” The bouncer realizes something and there’s a moment of awkward silence which he tries to cover with a false heartiness, saying, “Oh, that’s right, Kayla’s your girl, isn’t she? Well, she’s working tonight, so why don’t you go on in.”