They’re in the rooftop suite of the St. Mark Hotel, which his mother had said was the best that was practical but even so leaves him feeling exposed, with the constant hum of drone traffic overhead, and the lines of sight from the terrace to the rooftops of distant buildings, like an invitation to a sniper’s bullet; he misses the sense of hermetic insulation of the family compound in Leblon and the hotels they’d stayed in when they still had money. Since his father’s death and their flight to LA he’s overheard his mother on the phone trying to arrange high-interest loans secured on frozen assets in Rio, on the house she built in the mountains around Los Angeles, and even to get new architectural commissions, though she hasn’t practiced in many years, but he’s made a point of pretending not to notice.
His brothers, Helio and Marco Aurelio, will come and find him soon, and greet him with back-slapping false bonhomie. (He suspects they’re glad to be out of Rio, regard LA as an adventure—Marco Aurelio had been expelled from his college for choking someone half to death at a party, and Helio had been brought up on rape charges, though they’d soon been quashed—a columnist who’d said the family was Brazil’s answer to the Julio-Claudian dynasty had never worked again.) They’ll see the book beside his water glass—Ramanujan’s Analytical Theory of Numbers—and look disconsolate but say nothing as they take him away from the hotel and out into the city, and the day will be the same as every other. He’ll pass the morning in the humid jiu-jitsu studio of the Malibu Athletic Club, watching them roll on the blue mats in white gis. In the afternoon he’ll wait in the dunes wishing he had his book with him as his brothers ply the waves on their longboards, and when the sun sets their friends will gather, the cauliflower-eared jiu-jitsu players and their slim-waisted girls, and all watch the fading light through a serene cannabis haze. His brothers pity him, but take pains to hide it; he accepts their charity without resentment, for to him they are no more than vacant, handsome animals, moved solely by instinct, blind to all the beauty of mathematics and the world.
A wave closes with the shore, and as it approaches the narrow beach below the cliff its vitreous curvature furls and collapses, and the equations of hydrodynamics rise in his mind, but the white foam is unanalyzable; the world around him shivers, then, and fractures into a meaningless chaos of atoms and light. Where the water glass was there’s an illegible confusion of reflections; he sees the warped light of migraine, and closes his eyes.
Luminous patterns burn inside his eyelids. He opens his eyes onto a blur of pinions, white motion, refracted light. The headache intensifies, and he starts to panic, but he’s going to the clinic in the evening, and the surgeon, a competent man, will help him; he draws a deep breath, focuses, and the blur resolves into a gull hovering over the table, its churning wings glowing in the sunlight, red eyes on the untouched omelette on the rough porcelain plate.
9
Matches
The match flares and fades, and then the next, and the next. The face of the man flicking matches into life and tossing them into the darkness is that of her first surgeon, and Irina is calm, lost in the slow sequence of conflagrations, and she thinks she’ll be content to watch forever but then the surgeon says, “These are the seconds, you know, burning away,” and lights another. In the dream she laughs and says, “Nothing is lost, or ever will be,” and summons forth all the recent images of the matches burning and fading out, delighting in her power, but the surgeon shakes his head and points at her stomach and looking down at a point just above her navel (she is naked, now) she sees a black spot so tiny it ought to be imperceptible, and as she tries, futilely, to scrape it away with her fingernails she can feel the tainted cells’ surging reproduction as they boil outward into clean tissue. The black spot widens before her eyes—it hesitates, as her immune system rallies, then surges again. As it reaches bone, she feels cold.
She sits up in the hotel bed and turns off her phone’s alarm; the sound of waves hissing over sand stops abruptly, leaving only room tone—voices reflected down corridors, the hum of the air-conditioning, distant traffic. In her bag are pills that offer sleep, or worse than sleep, but she’s already late, and the client pays well, and more years of life come dear, so, moving herself like a marionette, she gets out of bed.
Brushing her teeth, the little lines around her eyes are a legible fraction of a millimeter deeper, the visible consequence of another bad night, and what other, less obvious damage has her restlessness caused, damage not reparable by any decent plastic surgeon. “So get to work,” she tells her reflection.
In the early light the hotel lobby seems oddly tragic, suggesting a valiant determination not to waste the morning. Other souls rush by, coffees in hand, immersed in their phones or having energetic conversations with the air. Most are younger than she is, bustling young things from the vast reaches of the middle middle technocracy; a pretty, somehow Midwestern-looking girl with roses in her cheeks, clad in the Armani of seasons past, is all but hyperventilating as she berates a cloud of invisible subordinates who have apparently failed to establish a link between networks in Reykjavík and Poznan. Irina tries to imagine feeling so much emotion over infrastructure, thinks that, medical bills or no, she may have to be less frugal about hotels.
In the cab, the fog glows with diffuse morning light, a migraine light, and she puts on her sunglasses, closes her eyes. Her face, reflected in the chrome of the cab’s dash, looks closed, remote, arrogant, a mask formed over an interior darkness. She tries a smile, convinces no one. They’ll see her essential strangeness, but let them; her mind turns to the cathedral vastnesses of the AIs’ memories.
She dozes, soothed by the rush of tires, opening her eyes as the cab ascends an overpass and there, slipping by, are the favelas, like concrete termite nests on a monumental scale, if termites were inclined to cubism and many balconies. Occasional windows reflect the morning sun; squinting, she imagines she’s looking at geology, the product of a chthonic upheaval in the faults beneath the city, but, no, the favelas are actually like a Lebbeus Woods drawing she saw in an architecture textbook for half a second twenty years ago, and these things are, of course, what she always thinks when she sees favelas. Her other memory stirs—she has thought these thoughts two hundred and nineteen times, now two hundred and twenty.