Chapter 4 IV

Felipe, Goiania, Goias, Brazil day 1

Vitor went out in Laura's lap, we put him in a beach chair at the edge of the pool and we sat down in another one at the side. The pool is very beautiful, huge with led lighting, whirlpool and the hell, it was a party for a lot of people, on our side there is a low and wide table and on it snacks, small sandwiches, thin slices of a type of salami with a great face, doritos and a lot of sauces of several colors. Laura gets up and goes to an outfit lying on the grass, a dress like this one, full of those shiny carnival type things. Laura picks it up, there is a dust on it, as if it were ashes, she takes some of the ashes and brings it to her nose.

"Careful."

"It doesn't smell like anything."

"What do you think happened Laura?"

"I don't know. But for our sake we need to find out."

"How?"

Laura looks at me.

"The security cameras, Philip."

Laura runs out of the house and gets on her bike.

"And Vitor?"

"He won't wake up so soon."

I get on the other bike.

"What did you give him to drink?"

"A little something, he'll wake up calmer."

We ride in silence, I try not to think about my mother. I'm not one of those lucky people for whom good things happen. What happened certainly got my mother, I feel it in my bones. I should be desperate like Vitor, but nothing happens in here. We arrive at the gate and go inside, the monitors are on, Laura sits down in front of the computer and chooses the monitor that shows the highway in front of the condo. Slowly she starts to turn the video, for hours the pile of cars remains static until exactly at ten thirty at night the pile starts to undo itself in a normal flow of passing cars.

"Stop there Laura and let it go forward."

Laura pauses the video and puts it forward. The video shows cars passing at high speed, a car stopped at the gate with the security guard checking the driver's documents as the cars begin to lose control on the roadway and hit each other and run off the road.

"Have you seen the security guard, Lipe?"

"I was looking at the highway.""

"A little something, he'll wake up calmer."

We ride in silence, I try not to think about my mother. I'm not one of those lucky people for whom good things happen. What happened certainly got my mother, I feel it in my bones. "What did you give him to drin?" I should be as desperate as Vitor, but nothing happens in here. We arrive at the gate and go inside, the monitors are on, Laura sits down in front of the computer and chooses the monitor that shows the highway in front of the condo. Slowly she starts to turn the video, for hours the pile of cars remains static until exactly at ten thirty at night the pile starts to undo itself in a normal flow of passing cars.

"Stop there Laura and let it go forward."

Laura pauses the video and puts it forward. The video shows cars passing at high speed, a car stopped at the gate with the security guard checking the driver's documents as the cars begin to lose control on the roadway and hit each other and run off the road.

"Have you seen the security guard, Lipe?"

"I was looking at the highway."

She turns the video back on and this time I focus on the security guard. One moment he's looking at the documents and the next his clothes are lying on the ground.

"Can you go any slower?"

Laura slows down the video playback speed, the security guard crumbles like a sand statue in the wind. We look at other cameras in the condo and where there were people the same thing repeats, They crumble like sand, no panic or blood, they just turn to dust and fall apart.

"I remembered something."

"What was it Laura?"

She opens a security company's web page and then typing in a user and password, opens the image of some security cameras of a house.

"What's that?"

" I have some things stored in this house, it is in Curitiba."

Laura selects the camera on the front of the house and starts to play back the video, the same as the security videos from the condo, at exactly ten thirty the cars lose control and start crashing into each other. Laura gets up.

"Fuck."

She kicks the table and throws a stapler at the wall, I pull away and lean against the wall, I can't hide that this reaction scares me, I look at her not knowing what to say, she looks back at me.

"It's over twelve hundred miles Lipe. This shit happened for thousands of miles. It's impossible to know how far this shit went."

"Yes, Laura, it does."

I approach the computer and type the domain that I always use, my teleportation, for when things get really dark at home.

"What is this, Lipe?"

"It's a site that shows hundreds of live cameras in various places around the world."

"There Philip, that avenue, the one with the Eiffel tower."

I open the image and what we see is a pandemonium of cars crashing on the sidewalks and hundreds of clothes on the ground.

"Australia, try Australia."

I open a camera in Sydney, the same scenario. Tokyo, Madrid, Rome, Lisbon, Cancun, Helsinki, Beijing. Laura takes a truncheon that is on the table and goes to the car stopped at the gate and starts to destroy the car and scream.

"Laura."

She turns to me with the baton raised. Her look is as I say, I heard the word in a movie, wild I remembered, it was wild like my mother's with that coat hanger in her hand. Laura continues to look at me.

"There are people over there."

She lets go of the truncheon and approaches me looking at the monitor.

"Where is that?"

"New York is Time Square."

In the image we see a group of about thirty people walking together, scared, with their cell phones on their faces, calling or, like us, trying to call someone. The power goes out. Laura slams her closed fists on the table.

"Holy shit!!!"

I shrink back against the wall. She walks over and puts her hand on my face.

"I'm sorry."

I bow my head and get on my bike. We return in silence, and find Vitor sleeping heavily. We sit down on the beach chair next to his, I get up and drag the low table full of snacks closer. I take the doritos and a jar with a green sauce that tastes like avocado, I place it between us and start to eat. Laura gets up, goes to a farther table, and returns with two bottles. She opens a bottle that pops like champagne, without my asking she replies.

"It's not champagne, it's sparkling wine."

I look at her without understanding.

"Never mind, Lipe."

She takes a sip and offers it to me, I take a sip and give it back. Slowly and silently we dry the first bottle and start the second.

"The car must be stopped in the middle of the road.

"What's wrong, Lipe?"

"The car must be in the middle of the road, maybe crashed."

"What car?"

"I heard Jorge telling my mother, from a job in Brasilia, that thing caught them in the middle of the road."

"Maybe they escaped."

"The hell they did. The radios in Brasília are also silent and the phones there don't answer, I've already tried."

Laura puts her hand on my shoulder.

"She might not be the best mother in the world, but she was mine. You know what sucks?"

" What?"

"It's like I don't feel anything, she's dead, just like Grandma. Like, I'll never see her again. I want to scream like Vitor, cry, but I don't, nothing. I'm an asshole son of a bitch who doesn't feel the death of his own mother. I feel nothing."

She wraps me in a hug, the second hug after a long season without them, years maybe.

"Things don't work that way. Not everyone is the same. How old are you?"

"Fifteen."

" I was about your age when my mother died. She was the only thing that kept me in that house."

"Was she also a fuck in your house?"

"My father is an evangelical pastor, was, at this point I think he was. A very radical one, you can't imagine what it was like to live in that house. Breathing was a sin, and I was never an easy person, I always liked fun, money, I started my runs early and once in a while I got caught.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing serious at that time, little scams, little thefts, taking things here and there, you know. My father went crazy, my mother put up with the worst of it, it was always her fault. When she died, he found a way to blame me and it was probably my fault."

"How did she die?"

"She had a heart attack, went to sleep and didn't wake up. I couldn't cry either, I felt like that too, anesthetized. After the funeral I ran away from home and never saw the pastor again."

"And you were able to cry?"

"A few days later, on any given day, I sat on a curb and cried, out of nowhere. I simply unstopped."

We stayed quiet, drinking and eating the doritos with gravy. I can't tell if it's good, it's like eating sawdust.

"Is everything okay, Lipe?"

"I'm remembering Laura before, she wasn't always hell, she was loving and fun. My mother used to take me to the airport every week and we would have ice cream and watch the planes go up and down. She knew all their names, she dreamed of being an air hostess, but it didn't work out, I don't really know why. It didn't happen overnight, slowly and without anyone noticing things were getting worse, she didn't stop at any job anymore and her nice friends were disappearing, she had a lot of nice friends, nice boyfriends and nice girlfriends."

Laura laughs.

I lift my shoulders and smile back.

"My mom was the queen of her clique. I don't know, I think she got it wrong. She started sniffing every day, in the beginning she hid it from me and Grandma, and after a while she didn't even make a point of it anymore. She used to come home crazy, screaming at her grandma, she even hit her."

Laura lowers the collar of my shirt, showing the bruises.

"Was it her?"

I nod my head positively.

"Grandma never complained, but she became sicker and sicker. One day I came home from school and there was an ambulance at the door, grandma went and never came back. Her mother disappeared for days, and if it wasn't for Vitor's mother, Grandma would have been buried in a public grave. A week later she appeared and started to disappear the things from the house until there was nothing of value left, she was never the same as before."

"No one should have to go through what you went through, Lipe."

"She said that I was special, that she didn't know how she could be the mother of such a special boy, she said."

Laura looks at me seriously.

"I can only remember yesterday. Her words: 'I only did one good thing in this life and that was this boy... she said, I swear."

"I believe her."

"She said if anyone tries to hurt my boy I won't think twice before killing the bastard. I keep thinking Laura that if only we had more time."

I can't keep talking and only then do I realize that I am crying. Laura puts my head in her lap. She begins to pat me. I can't remember ever talking this much in my life, not about myself, nor can I remember the last time I received a cuddle, I think it was from my grandmother.

Laura, Goiania, Goias,Brazil day 1

Lipe slept with so much crying. My heart is racing and my head is pounding, I need to calm down, nothing good happens when I lose my temper. The three steps that that psychopath talked about? First: Analyze the facts coldly. The population of the world has been practically eradicated the current count is us three and those people in New York, there must be more people. Second: elaborate a strategy of action. I get up and open my purse, a well-prepared person is worth it on her own. I take off my shoes, sit down by the pool and take a stash of marijuana and slowly and unwillingly roll a joint while I think about the options. The more I think about it the less I know what to do. The heat increases, I open the sunshades over the boys and sit on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water and finish smoking. I take off my pants and shirt, dive into the pool and swim until my arms and legs burn and nothing comes to mind, for the first time in years I don't know what to do next, what to do next.