On My Way to Paradise Page 4

  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 AI’s 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 table top. 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 knee cap. 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.

  Chapter 4

  I wandered until I found a place I recognized, and walked on home. Then I took a shovel back to the plantation to bury Flaco. By the time I got there, his body had grown cold.

&nbs
p; The Chilean woman had taken down one of the tents in preparation to leave. She began shaking when she saw me and shouted, "The woman, Tamara, she has gone away! She ran toward town!"

  I nodded, but the Chilena kept muttering over and over, "She has gone. She has gone." As she packed her clothes and cooking utensils, she watched me out of the corner of her eye. I dug a shallow hole and put Flaco in.

  I checked his pockets. They were empty.

  I looked up at the Chilean woman; she moaned and ran a few steps, then began shaking again and fell to the ground. "Don’t murder me!" she screamed, waving her hands in front of her chest. "Don’t murder me!" She was genuinely afraid, and I realized she thought I had killed Flaco and run away.

  "What did you do with his things?" I yelled at her.

  "Mercy! I’m a mother. Have mercy!" she cried. "Let me keep a little of the money—enough for boat passage to Puerto Rico!"

  I stepped forward and raised the shovel as if to strike her. She began weeping and pulled a bundle of cloth from beneath her blouse. She tossed it to the ground: Flaco’s wallet, a packet of money wrapped in brown paper, and a Saint Christopher medallion were inside. I checked Flaco’s wallet. It was full of money. As I had guessed, he had already taken a healthy cut from the sale of the crystal. I threw it to her, and then turned away. The woman crawled off with her child and other possessions.