Brasyl

SEPTEMBER 25, 2032

Hot hot hot in ski

Good girl , thinks Efrim. She’s the first of his two acts on tonight, in his other incarnation as MD of De Freitas Global Talent. But tonight he is in party mode, fabulous in huge afro wig and golden-glow body-blush with a tab of TalkTalk from Streets, his supplier of neurological enhancements, down him so he can say anything to anyone: absolutely flawless. The girls stare as Efrim stalks by, bag swinging. They’re meant to. Everyone is meant to. Tonight Efrim/Edson — a lad of parts — is hunting.

“Hey, Efrim!” Big Steak is over by the bar, one arm holding up a caipi, the other curled around fiancee, Serena. He owns a half share in the gym with Emerson, Edson’s brother number one. “Are you enjoying it?” From his ebullience and sway, Big Steak’s been loving the hospitality of his own gafieira. Serena Most Serene frowns at Edson. She has glasses but is too vain to wear them. Big Steak’s engagement present to her is a lasering in a proper Avenida Paulista surgery. “Looking foxy.” Efrim curtseys. Serena checks his fab thighs. “So you finally got yourself a good act. How long can she keep it up?”

“Longer than you,” says Efrim, gabby on the TalkTalk and striking the kind of pose you can only get with spike-heel boots and a monster Afro. Serena Most Serene creases over. Big Steak waves him away and someone is beckoning him over from beside the gas tanks, Hey Edson, get on over here. It’s Turkey-Feet with a posse of Penas, that old gang of Edson’s, at the back of the garage where they’re storing the knockoff vodka.

It had never really been a gang in the sense of honor and guns and ending up dead on a soft verge; more a group of guys who hung together, stealing the odd designer valuable, dealing the occasional dice of maconha or illicit download, here a little vehicle lifting, there some community policing, all as The Man up in the favela permitted. It had gone that way, for the younger ones saw no other road out of Cidade de Luz than walking up into the favela and taking the scarifications of a soldado of the drug lord. By then the old Penas were moving on, moving out, marrying, getting children, getting jobs, getting lazy and fat. Edson inevitably followed his older brothers into the Penas, but he had understood at once that it would ultimately be an obstacle to his ambitions. Edson subtly loosened the ties that bound him to the gang, flying farther and freer as his separate identities developed until, like a rare comet, he drifted in shaking his gaudy tail only for parties, gafieiras, wedddings, and funerals, a fortunate portent. He was his own gang now.

“It’s Efrim, honey.”

“Efrim Efrim, you got to see this.”

It catches the scatter-light on its curves like a knife, it fits the fist like a knife, it smells like a knife — but Efrim can see a shiver along the edge of the blade, like a thing there and not there, like a blade made from dreams. This is much more than a knife.

“Where did you get this?”

“Bought it from some guy from Itaquera, says he got it from the miliitary. Here, want a go?” Turkey-Feet waves the knife at Efrim.

“I’m not touching that thing.”

Turkey-Feet masks his rejection by making three sharp passes, blade whistling. Curting air. Efrim smells electricity.

“Look at this. This is cool.”

Turkey-Feet squats, sets a brick on the oily ground. With the delicacy of a dealer measuring doses on a scale, he rests the handle on the ground, sets the edge of the blade against the brick. The knife blade swings down through the brick as if it were liquid. Turkey-Feet quickly props a cigarette packet under the hilt. The blade continues its downward arc through José’s Garage floor until ir starts to slide, to pierce, sliding into the concrete until its hilt finds purchase.

Q-blade. Yes, Efrim has heard of these. No one knows where they come from: the army, the US military, the Chinese, the CIA, but since they started appearing in funk-bars as the weapon of preference, everyone knows what they do. Cut through anything. Edge so sharp it cuts right down to the atoms. From his sessions with Mr. Peach, Edson knows its sharper than that. Edged down to the quantum level. Break one — and the only thing thar will break a Q-blade is another Q-blade — and the shard will fall through solid rock all the way to the center of the earth.

“Is that not the coolest thing?”

“That is a thing of death, honey.” He can feel it from the blade, like sunburn. Streets’ pirate empathies have a fresh little synesthetic edge.

José’s Garage quakes as Kid DJ starts up a new set. Efrim leaves the Penas playing finger-and-knife games with the Q-blade. You will never get out of Cidade de Luz that way. It is time for De Freitas Global Talent’s other act to make its debut.

“Senhors senhoras, pod-wars! Pod-wars! Pod-wars!” the DJ bellows, his voice reverbing into a feedback screech. “Round one! Remixado João B versus PJ Suleima

A wall of cheering as the contenders bounce onto the soundstage. Petty Cash will face whichever of these two wins the crowd’s hearts, hands, and feet. Efrim positions himself by the churrasco stand to check our the competition.

“Foxy, Efrim,” says Regina the churrasco queen. Efrim grins. He loves the attention on the special occasions when he trots out in his travesti aspect. He lifts the bamboo skewer of fatty, blackened beef to his glossed lips. PJ Suleiman takes João B so easily it is embarrassing: the kid’s got no beats, rakes everything down to this vaqueiro guitar riff he thinks is funky but to the audience sounds like the theme from a gaucho telenovela. They pelt him off with empty caipiroshka cups.

Senhors, senhoras, Petty Petty Petty Caaaaaash!

Petty Cash had been the perfect alibi-quiet, no gang co

Straight up Petty Cash catches PJ Suleiman’s hip-swaying samba paulistano, hauls a mangue bass out of his sample array, and brings in a beat that has the bass drivers bowing and booming in their cabs. The crowd reels back all at once, whoa! Then in midbeat everyone is up in the air, coming down on the counterpoint, and the bloco is bouncing. Suleiman tries something clever clever with a classic black-metal guitar solo and an old drum-bass rinse, and it’s itchy and scratchy but you can’t dance to that. Petty Cash takes the guitar solo, rips off the bass section and bolts on funk in industrial quantities: an old gringo bass line from another century and a so-fresh-they-haven’t-taken-the-plastic-off pau-rhythm. Efrim can see the track lines on Petty Cash’s I-shades as his eyeballs sample and mix in real time. The audience are living it loving it slapping it sucking it: no question who wins this face-off.