On My Way to Paradise (11 page)

The customs agent fed my ID into her computer, and
began punching in commands. This made me nervous. Sweat began
breaking out on my brow and upper lip. If Arish’s death had been
reported, she would know in a matter of minutes. On the far side of
the room, five men sat along one wall. One small man with a
pencil-bar moustache and long hair, smoked a thin cigar. He was
positioned so he could see the computer terminal, and he stared at
it intently. He was different from the others, abnormally
attentive. His white shirt was bright and clean. Not rumpled and
dirty, as was the attire of most of the rest of us. He stared at
the monitor, then glanced up at me. Abruptly, the customs agent
switched off her computer and rose from her chair. She didn’t look
at me as she left the room.

"Gringa pubic hair," a big mestizo muttered as the
customs officer walked out the door. Everyone breathed a sigh of
relief and laughed because we had all been made nervous by the
domineering gringa’s presence.

"Perhaps our smell finally drove her out," one of the
Indians joked, and everyone laughed.

 One heavy-set man across the room said, "So,
Perfecto, you have decided to come with us after all?"

"I did not decide; the people of my village decided
for me," answered Perfecto.

"I’d have thought you’d be
alcalde
of that
dirty little village by now," the heavy-set man said.

"Ah, no. My wife gave birth to our eighth child three
months ago. And just last week we found that she was pregnant
again. When people heard of it, they became outraged and blamed me.
Even the dogs snap at me."

Everyone laughed, but some of them gave him knowing
glances, begging him with their eyes to say more.

"Unfortunately," Perfecto said, "I have not made love
with my wife since the last baby!"

Among friends, such an admission would have brought
loud laughs. But only a few people chuckled, while Perfecto laughed
hard, painfully.

Across the room, the man with the clean white shirt
and pencil moustache got up from his chair, stretched, and went
over to the customs officer’s computer. The hair rose on the back
of my neck, and I fidgeted. He inserted one of my ID cards, and
switched the computer on.

"Eight children!" a woman exclaimed, "You’re lucky
they didn’t kill you!" Perfecto laughed again, almost maniacally. I
looked again at the cut above his eye and a bruise on his jaw, just
above the tattoo. Perhaps someone
had
tried to kill him, or
at least tried to hurt him badly.

The man at the computer seemed to read my files with
interest. My stomach churned; I couldn’t decide what to do with my
hands. Then he began punching many buttons, accessing files that
had nothing to do with me. His actions caught the attention of the
men he’d been sitting with. I wondered what he found that so
interested him, and would have stopped him if I could have done so
without attracting attention.

Jafari could have sent this man,
I thought.
Then I realized he could be making calls over the computer,
notifying Jafari’s men that he’d found me. I became very frightened
but pretended to ignore him and reached up and wiped the sweat from
my brow.

"Señor, are you all right?" Perfecto asked.

I glanced over at him. "I’m fine, thank you."

"You don’t look well," Perfecto said.

"I don’t feel well," I answered truthfully.

"Malaria?"

"What?"

"You have malaria," Perfecto said. "I have seen it
many times! People who have malaria turn pale and shake and sweat,
just as you are doing."

"Yes, I have malaria," I said, glad that he did not
see my fear.

"Shall I get you a doctor?" he asked.

"No, thank you," I said, "I am a doctor." Across the
room, one of the singers chuckled, and I wondered if he chuckled
because he could read my body language and knew I was afraid. My
fear would give me away if I didn’t do something quick. I would
have reached for my medical bag and taken a tranquilizer, but I’d
left my bag in the trunk to be a pillow for Tamara, and couldn’t
risk opening it. My fear cramped my chest, and made my breathing
ragged. I remembered the "conquistador cocktails" I’d taken from
Arish. I didn’t know the strength of the prescription, but I was
close to Arish’s body weight, so I took a capsule and broke it
between my teeth. It tasted like garlic, so sweet, so strong and
heady. Like warm whiskey, it burned my lips and gums for a moment,
then as the cocktail began to take effect my face went numb.

Perfecto nodded, apparently satisfied that I had
taken care of myself. He looked across the room to the computer
where the man with the pencil-bar moustache was smiling, enjoying
himself.

I felt my head swing forward as if it were a weight
on a pendulum that travelled in a wide arc, and at the same moment
I felt as if I were pushed into another world where I experienced
heightened lucidity. Even though everything was blurred around the
edges, if I looked at something straight on I saw it’s every crisp
detail. I could read Perfecto’s entire life story in his
appearance: The veins in his neck throbbed, and the movement made
the little lion’s head on his tattoo lash back and forth, and I
suddenly understood what the tattoo represented, and what Perfecto
was—a chimera, one of the genetically upgraded men Torres had
created to fight the wars in Chile. Yet because his ears weren’t
deformed, as were the ears of chimeras who had sonar, and because
he was in his thirties, he must have been one of the early models,
a truly upgraded human rather than a humanoid species. His eyes
were wide-set, for greater depth perception; his thick hair
concealed an enlarged skull, for greater intelligence; his neck and
backbone were massive so that his frame could support the huge
muscles of his body.

Most people considered it taboo to marry such a
creation, or even to carry its child full term. A chimera is even
lower than an Indian. When he had fathered eight children, his
community would truly have risen in an uproar. I saw all this in
the throb of a heartbeat, while the cocktail slid down my throat,
burning and numbing my neck and esophagus.

I looked at the other people in the room, and saw
that most of them were lost in reflection. Their eyes had the
dulled quality I associated with the refugiados: burned-out,
lifeless, empty of hope. They had fought many wars in South
America, and lost them all. All of them were poor; their dirty
clothing attested to the fact that they lived in houses without
floors. Only the man in the silver face was unreadable. And across
the room was the man in gray slacks. He sat rigid, ready for
action, and he purposely avoided looking at me.

I gauged the tension levels of the others in the
room. Three men and two women were of the same age and build as
Perfecto—they were chimeras, and I realized they were banding
together, perhaps to settle in a new world where they could form a
community so they would not be outcasts. On the ship would be many
chimeras; knowledge of mercenary jobs would have spread through
their community by word of mouth. I could read this in their faces
as easily as reading the stories that Brazilian woodcarvers etch
into the handles of their machetes. Only the man with the moustache
and cigar seemed out of place. Different. His eyes glittered as if
he stared into candlelight. He was aware. He was quieter than
others, more dangerous. He was looking at me.

It all seemed fascinating. Even the gray walls and a
wad of paper beneath one chair fascinated me. My hands stopped
shaking and my breathing felt less restricted, but my chest was
thudding as if a rabbit were kicking against my ribs. I imagined I
felt the cocktail slide into my belly and sit, burning like a live
coal. Everyone was looking at the man behind the computer console.
He was fascinating. He wore a fascinating clean white shirt, and
when he moved his arm it left a fascinating white afterimage in the
air behind it. His pencil-bar moustache and narrow face were
fascinating. Like the face of a rat or a whorehouse owner. He was a
leader here. He was a whorehouse rat, and he was hitting the
buttons on the computer and laughing loudly in a fascinating
manner.

His voice slurred. I heard him in slow motion. "My
friends," he said, "I have interesting news:" Fascinating. "Among
us is a dangerous murderer!" Fascinating.

"No!" someone said.
Oh, yes,
I mouthed.

"It’s true!" Whorehouse Rat said. Fascinating. "Even
today, in Panamá," Panamá ... Panamá ... Panamá ... "this murderer
slit a man’s throat!" Each word was like a fruit, like a ripe
avocado. I could see his mouth forming the words, and when each
syllable had grown and ripened on his tongue, he let it roll past
his lips and plop to the floor. Fascinating. I knew something was
terribly wrong: I couldn’t think straight, and I wondered if it was
because of the pill I’d taken, and yet I didn’t connect the problem
to the morphine levels in the cocktail.

I did not like what Whorehouse Rat was saying. The
cocktail burned in my stomach like a glowing ember, giving off
waves of heat. I could feel the heat winding its way up my
entrails, and I knew that if I kept my mouth closed, it would
envelope my brain, consume me. So I opened my mouth and purposely
spit the heat at Whorehouse Rat.

A yellow ripple in the air, like a fiery wheel,
floated across the room as I blew the heat toward Whorehouse Rat.
But just before the shimmering yellow ring reached him, Whorehouse
Rat’s skin turned blue and cold, so that when the ring enveloped
him it only managed to bring his body heat up to normal. I swore
under my breath because he had defeated my magical attack, so I
blew wheels of fire at him in rapid succession and watched them
float across the room as the syllables plopped from his mouth, one
by one: "Pan a má, has, just, learned, where, the, kil ler, is. E
ven, now, sta tion, se cur i ty, comes, to, take, the, vi cious, a
ni mal, back, for, a, quick, ex e cu tion."

So, they are on their way to get me,
I
realized.
And now I will die. This should be fascinating
.
The wheels of fire enveloped the Whorehouse Rat, but instead of
burning, he moved his hand in the air and formed a mystic symbol.
The fire closed around him like a womb, and he stood protected in a
burning halo. He had defeated my attack, but I knew that all I had
to do was hold my breath and the fire in me would build, would grow
to a critical point until I could no longer contain it and I would
blow apart like a fission bomb, killing us all. But before I did
that, part of me realized I should try to escape.

I stood up and staggered around, smiling at the
people in the room. Behind me were only empty corridors—no place to
hide. I looked at the door that led to the airlock and beyond that
to the ship. It was locked. I blew a ring of fire at it, to see if
it would melt. It didn’t. The faces of the people around me
expressed various degrees of surprise, shock, and amusement at my
predicament.

Whorehouse Rat laughed, and instead of plopping like
avocados to the ground, his next words rushed like water churning
through rocks. "Not even have I told you the good part! This
fellow’s victim, the man so brutally executed, was known to some of
you: Arish Muhammad Hustanifad!"

A stream of water exuded from Whorehouse Rat’s mouth,
splashed against the walls, filled the room, knocked me to my knees
and drowned the coal of fire in my belly, leaving me cold and
naked. Several people gasped.

The chimera Perfecto jumped up and grabbed my shirt.
"Truth? Is it true?" he shouted, and several other people yelled,
"Is it true?" His hands were like iron, and I thought he would
shake me and snap my neck. I could no longer breathe fire at him. I
was too cold. My skin was turning blue and purple from the cold. I
looked around the room; no one came to help me.

I became enraged because this chimera was touching me
without permission. He dared to touch me! He dared to invade my
privacy. He was bigger than me, and I’d heard rumors of his
super-human strength, and though he could kill me, I realized the
cold in me was power, too—a magic power stronger than the flames
I’d been breathing.

It looks as if you’ll have to beat these insolent
curs, keep them in line,

"Of course I killed him, puto," I shouted at
Perfecto. I stood up. "And because you’ve touched me, I’ll kill
you, too!"

I brought my cold heavy leg up into his groin and at
the same time clubbed him in the nose with a fist of ice. Drops of
blood sprayed out of his nose in slow motion. Fascinating.

He let go of me and sagged partway to the floor,
gasping more from shock than from the cold. I kicked at his face,
ready to sacrifice my leg, to let it shatter against his skull so
that shards of ice would spray out and puncture his flesh. But his
hand came up in slow motion and grabbed my foot and twisted it and
I heard the bones of ice in my ankle snap as he threw me. I rose in
the air so that for a moment I seemed to be standing in the air a
meter off ground, and I imagined I looked just like Christ
ascending into heaven as I slammed against the wall.

Everyone in the room stared up at me with their
mouths shaped in little O’s of surprise. Fascinating.

The air whooshed out of me from the blow, and I
sagged onto the chairs and fell to the floor.

Now I will have to kill them all, and I’ll have to
do it with my ankle broken
. I got up and screamed in rage and
threw myself at a chimera woman. I became tons of ice flying at
her, an unstoppable glacier. She stared at me, frightened,
clutching the handles of her chair, then leaned back and brought up
a leg made of stone; her boot smashed my face, splintering the ice
in me.
Fascinating
.

I should have eaten more reptiles, I thought as a
wave of red washed before my eyes and the world faded to a cold,
distant, black pinpoint.