On My Way to Paradise (6 page)

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.

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.

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.

I covered Flaco with dirt and said a prayer, asking
God to forgive Flaco for his sins, then went home.

At home, Tamara sat on my bed with the dream monitor
on and her visor down. She moaned softly, curled in the fetal
position. Between her knees she held her laser rifle. The platinum
glow of her skin showed that her fever was very high. I walked over
quietly and took the gun from her hand, turned it off, and tossed
it in a corner. I examined the stump of her arm. It wasn’t inflamed
or swollen more than it should be: her fever wasn’t from an
infection.

I picked up the extra monitor and plugged into the
viewer’s jack:

On the beach the wind, cold and irresistible, tugged
at me as if it would lift me and carry me away. In the dark, clear
sky the moon was rising red and brilliant over the sea. On the
blood-red sand, thousands of ghost crabs scuttled sideways, making
clicking noises. I walked down to where the sea dipped. The bull
still tossed about in the waves near shore.

On the beach lay a human skeleton. Its bones were
picked so clean that only a few ghost crabs crawled through its rib
cage. "I didn’t expect you," the skeleton said.

"Who did you expect?" I asked.

"Not you."

I looked down the beach, and said, "It was very bad
to see Flaco dead. He was a good friend."

The skeleton moaned. A ghostly woman, draped in red
robes, stood in the air above me for a moment. She handed three
yellow roses to the wind, then vanished. I looked up at the sky.
There were no stars. The skeleton said, "I didn’t stick around to
find out—I ran away and tried to find my way back here, and got
lost—how did Flaco die?"

"He was strangled and stabbed in the throat."

"That would be Arish. Arish likes to kill that way.
He always leaves them double-dead." A wave washed up around my
ankles. The water was thick and warm and red.

"I almost got him. I almost got to kill Arish."

"Arish is good. You couldn’t have killed him."

"I almost did," I said.

"You couldn’t have killed him. He was made for the
job. Genetic upgrades. He only led you along, letting you believe
you could," the skeleton said. We both remained silent for a
moment. "I’m going to die, Angelo. I told you that if you balled me
over, I’d die. You did ball me over?"

"Yes," I said, "perhaps in more ways than one. When
we operated on you, we took a retina scan. A hacker checked your
government files."

"They would have waited for something like that," the
skeleton said. "It was enough to get me killed."

"Also," I admitted, "I gave you AB stimulators before
we figured out that you were a brain transplant. You are one,
aren’t you?"

She nodded.

"Then, you are in danger."

"I’m dead," the skeleton corrected. Its bones grew
thin and began snapping like dry twigs. I tried to think of
something comforting to say, but couldn’t. The skeleton saw my
distress, and laughed. "Leave me. I’m not afraid to die."

"Everyone’s afraid to die," I said.

Wind whipped the sand, blowing it against me. Out in
the water, leviathan, large dark formless creatures with eyes on
humps, lifted up to watch us. A gleaming tentacle slithered high in
the air, then splashed back beneath the waves. The creatures sank
back beneath the water, and I could feel the push Tamara had to
give to make them stay. Tamara controlled her dream, but only in
the half-hearted way of masochists and those who despair.

The skeleton said, "That’s because they don’t
practice. Dying. They’re so afraid of fraying into oblivion, their
muscles’ fibers unknitting, the slow settling of fluids from the
body."

"And you’re not?"

"No," the skeleton said. "I do it over and over
again." With those words, the flesh reappeared on the red-haired
woman. The crabs began feeding on her. She didn’t flinch.

"Why did Flaco die?" I asked.

She held her breath a moment, and released it slowly.
I didn’t think she’d tell me. "I guess I owe you that," she said at
last. "My husband, General Amir Jafari, wants my brain in a brain
bag and my body in stasis."

"Why?"

"I was in Intelligence. I committed an indiscretion."
She paused again, weighing her words. "I was at a party with other
officers’ wives, and they were talking about a politician who’d
been assassinated. I’d had too much to drink, and by the way they
talked, I assumed they all knew we’d made the hit, and I said some
things I shouldn’t have. Among the Alliance such indiscretions get
one killed. My husband got my sentence commuted to life in a brain
bag—but life in a brain bag isn’t life."

I remembered the empty, simulated voice of the
general saying ‘I’m not inhuman,’ as if to convince himself. Out in
the water, the dead bull struggled to its feet and snorted, then
was bowled over by a wave.

"I don’t understand. Why did he want your body in
stasis?" A cold wind blew; a thin crust of ice appeared on the
beach.

"I don’t know," she said. "Maybe he thinks he’ll get
to screw it when he gets out of the service. Once I caught wind of
his plan, I didn’t stick around to find out. I knew my only chance
of escape would be to dump my old body, so I bought one on the
black market and dismantled my brain bag. I thought as long as I
had that crystal, could hold it in my hand and see it, I would know
I wasn’t in the brain bag. I had the cryotechs put a German
shepherd’s brain in my old body and sent it to my husband, naked,
in a cage. I put a sign around its neck that said: ‘If All You Want
is Sex and Faithfulness, I’m Yours.’" She seemed very pleased by
the memory.

"Your husband called me on comlink. He offered to pay
me to turn you in. He seemed concerned about you, I think. It’s
hard to tell."

"Don’t let him fool you," she said. "He’s one of the
dead, the living dead. His capacity for emotion was tossed aside
when he put on the cymech."

"I would not be so quick to judge him."

"Believe me, all he has left are memories of
emotions. Memories fade."

"And this Arish, he is military?"

"Not officially, but he does odd jobs for them. The
kind of odd job he did on Flaco."

"Was he the man who pulled off your hand?"

The woman laughed. "No." The beach disappeared. I saw
Tamara at the airport, hurrying out of a black Mitsubishi
mini-shuttle, looking worriedly into the sky above her at an
incoming craft. Distracted, she slammed the shuttle door on her
hand, and tried to jerk free. She pulled her arm away with only a
bloody stump. She staggered off. Then the scene changed and I saw
Tamara, lying on the beach, with the ghost crabs eating her. "This
body’s worthless."

This incident frightened me. She should not have been
able to wipe the whole world off the monitor to show this single
memory. She was delving farther into her subconscious than was
safe.

"I must go now," I said. "I’ll need to get you some
more medications, to help prevent any brain damage. Will you wait
here for me?"

The dark creatures rose out of the sea and eyed me
again. She shrugged. "Yes. I guess."

I jacked out and unplugged her monitor. The sun was
rising, and because I had not slept much for two days and the
pharmacy wasn’t open, I decided to nap a few moments. I lay down on
the bed beside her and closed my eyes.

I awoke at three in the afternoon. Tamara was asleep,
lying beside me. I touched her forehead; her fever was very high.
On impulse I brushed her forehead with a kiss, then watched to see
if she would awaken. She didn’t.

I was glad, for as quickly as the impulse to kiss her
had come, I suddenly understood where I had seen her before: Her
thin body, so emaciated and small, was that of a stranger, but her
face—her nose, her eyes, and the curve of her lips—were those of my
dead wife, Elena.

In my mind I berated myself. I should have seen the
resemblance from the start, should have seen it after Elena had
haunted my dreams for the first time in twenty years. But when one
reaches my age, everyone appears familiar. Three times in my life
I’ve met men who could have been my twin; it was only a matter of
time before I met someone who looked like my wife, and I believed
that if I had been better prepared for the occasion, I wouldn’t
have succumbed to the temptation to take her in, wouldn’t have made
a fool of myself by becoming attracted to her.