Memory Wire

Pau Seco.

It was a legend in the slums. Money in the ground, they said. Money from outer space. It was there for the taking. Everyone believed in it, although Meirelles noticed few believed in it strongly enough to attempt the journey, and those who did never seemed to report back. But then he woke one morning to find Pia down with the croup again, gasping, her face a sickly blue, and that afternoon he spent his last money buying medicine for her and then hiked down the road where a truck might pick him up. Under the circumstances he could not bear to stay.

Over the course of the day Meirelles made several journeys up and down the vertiginous walls of the mine. He was carrying bags of tailings away from the dig to the big wooden machines Claudio kept up top, which would sift the clay for Exotic stones and then dump the residue into a clotted ravine. His legs worked until the muscles knotted against him and he had to stop; his breath hissed in and out. He did not have the lungs of some of the younger men. He was not as efficient a formiga as some, and that worried him too: it meant Claudio might decide to get rid of him. Would he simply be fired, or would he be turned over to the military police? He didn’t know. There was no one he could ask. People moved in and out of this place like phantoms. Competitiveness was extreme, friendships rare.

Meirelles’s only friend in Pau Seco was the man called Ng. If “friend” was the word. Ng was a foreigner and had lived a life very different from Meirelles’s. Meirelles had heard Ng was looking for a deep-core oneirolith, and so he had approached the foreigner in a bar in the old town. They didn’t talk about the stone. Plainly, it was on both their minds; it was the reason they were together. But it was necessary to prepare the ground, Meirelles thought, and Ng seemed to understand this; they talked about the mine, they talked about the past.

They met several times, and Meirelles came to understand that the small quick-tempered Vietnamese was in some way like himself. Like Meirelles, Ng had cut himself adrift from the familiar world. Ng could have gone home after the war, lived out the life of a career soldier. But he had chosen to stay in Brazil. When Meirelles asked him why, Ng shrugged: it went beyond words. Meirelles understood.

“You’re a smuggler,” Meirelles said finally.

Ng blinked his narrow eyes. “Among other things, yes.”

“They say you want to buy a stone.”

“The right kind of stone.”

“They say the money is considerable.”

“The money,” Ng said, “is considerable.”

Meirelles lowered his voice so that it could hardly be heard above the rattle of glasses and the roar of conversation. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t,” Ng said flatly. “You trust me or you don’t. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“Ah,” Meirelles said.

But in the end he made the deal. And now the appointed day had come around at last and he was lashed with a nervousness that threatened to undo him. There were military police everywhere.

He looked up with dismay when the last whistle sounded. Already the deepest cha

Soon, he thought, you have to decide.

He trudged up the switchbacks and narrow ladders and was frisked again at the high link fence outside the compounds. His fear, this time, was no defense. A beefy military guard peered deep into Meirelles’s eyes and then searched him intimately, his hands probing Meirelles’s clothes while the other military men looked on and made ribald comments. “All right,” the guard said at last, contemptuously. “Go on.”

He went directly to his shack. He walked stiff-legged down the filthy hillside. His hand shook on the sheet of corrugated tin he used for a door.

The stone was still there, inside the mattress.

He took it out and stared at it angrily. It was the stone, he thought, that had put him in this impossible position. He had pla

He would risk his life for Pia’s sake. Gladly. But if the military police took him—what then?

This damn piece of rock, he thought. But then, holding it, he felt some of its strangeness radiate through him. He was momentarily overcome with a memory of Pia ru

Abashed, he wrapped the stone in a length of oilcloth and tucked it into his pants.

It was dark outside now. Fires were burning in oil barrels up and down these ragged hills. From the old town the sound of human voices had begun to rise in pitch and tempo.

It was time to go meet Ng.

The bar had no name. None of the bars in the old town of Pau Seco had any names. They were interchangeable, they performed the same function, so there was no reason to call a bar by this name or that. Meirelles recognized the one he wanted because it was at the intersection of the mine road and the dirt path that divided the barrios. He hesitated a final time at the door. His fear now was profound.

As he was walking here, he had passed the hill where Ng had his shack. As his head was turned in that direction, two burly military police had rushed past him; stu

Ng might know about this or he might not. Either way, Meirelles thought, the Vietnamese might still be inside the bar. Waiting. Ready to deal. Meirelles thought of the money and licked his lips.

But if the police are looking for Ng, he thought, they can’t be far from finding him. There were police all over the streets. They might be inside, waiting for the exchange to happen; they might arrest him too. Or Ng might take the stone and refuse to pay. Meirelles was powerless; the stone itself was his only weapon.

He closed his eyes and shouldered through the door, sighing.

But there was only the usual dimness and clangor inside. The stink of cachaca and cheap beer made him blink; the pressure of warm bodies forced him up against the wall. He was acutely aware of the oneirolith against his body. In a moment his eyes had adjusted to the flickering lamplight, and he looked for Ng at the corner table where they had met a month ago. Ng was there.

He was there with three others. Ng wore his usual torn T-shirt and ragged denims. The others were dressed similarly, but with dust caps pulled down over their eyes in the style favored by the younger formigas who migrated in from the cities. A kind of disguise, Meirelles thought, though not very effective, and in this heat it must be excruciating. Because he saw no sign of the military police, Meirelles worked his way toward the table, wedged his body into a chair and waited for Ng to speak.

“You have it?” Ng said softly.

And Meirelles felt his heart sink. It was obvious from the Vietnamese man’s attitude—cavalier, almost amused— that he knew nothing about the police raid on his shack, probably had not guessed that the police were looking especially for him.

Meirelles thought: and if I tell him?