The Summer Prince (11 page)

It hurts, and I wondered for a while if the Aunties made it like that so we go quietly to the slaughter. But now I see that it has to be this way, that you cannot force the human body, the human mind in such unnatural directions without a payment. In the Tokyos, they have subverted this rule, continued their self-augmentation until the body itself became uninhabitable. They haven’t transcended the body as they say. Of course they haven’t. Who wouldn’t rather be neurons and synapses and electrochemicals and sweet, sticky orgasms? They live in their data streams because their bodies won’t have them.

My body won’t have me.

Did you realize this, when we first made our pact in that mausoleum to ancient technology? You said my body was a canvas.

But a human canvas can’t live. It can only flare and make a record of its dying.

This is a record of my dying.

O
n the twenty-fifth of December, Enki and I look over the bare cliff edge of O Quilombola, the easternmost island in the bay. We are arguing, because we always argue, and I’m thinking that I’m in no danger of falling in love with him, since right now I feel
in hate
with him, though that isn’t really true either.

“Just blast it open, June,” he says, and kicks a cascade of volcanic scree into the rippling waters a hundred meters below.

I gulp and remind myself that I’m wearing my nanohook boots. In the city, a monument to the comforts of technology, this is reassuring. Out here, in the raw embrace of nature, I’ve never felt more exposed.

“We’ll destroy the cliff face. There’ll be nothing left to plant the lights on. Plus, you know, the Aunties will kill you.”

Enki turns to me, dreadlocks swinging, and smiles that slow, mad smile.

“I don’t know if you heard this,” he says, leaning out at a dangerous angle over the water, “but they’re already planning to.”

I grimace. “You know what I mean.”

“Of course I do, bem-querer. You’re saying that we shouldn’t deface public property for art.”

I open my mouth. Close it again. “That is not —”

“Exactly what you mean?”

“It’s an
island
, Enki. It’s been sitting in this bay, minding its business for the last ten thousand years. Can’t we just … work with it?”

He leans out all the way. The nanohooks in his shoes catch him, of course, but I still shriek. Enki giggles and hangs, an upside-down crucifixion, Prometheus laughing on the rock. The sun brings out the blues in his skin and the fleeting glitter of some of the mods he won’t explain.

“Work with it?” he repeats. But I don’t say anything, because by now I recognize his
considering
voice. He detaches one foot and settles himself into an upside-down crouch.

“O Quilombola,” he says, caressing the rock, “will you help us make you beautiful?”

I purse my lips, but they still turn up in a smile. “What does he say?”

“He says … he says there are crab holes.”

This is strange, even for Enki. I kneel on the cliff edge, pray to Yemanjá, and lean as far out as I can, my nanohooks firmly planted on the rock.

“You okay down there?”

Enki clucks his tongue, but I can’t see his face. He’s looking at something beneath him. “Always worrying, always worrying.”

“Someone has to be down here on the ground.”

“And me in midair?”

My breath stutters in my chest. My blood rushes to my head. I should get up — Enki isn’t going anywhere — but I can’t. The song he’s referencing is old-classical and rare, not even South American. “How do you know all this music, Enki?”

He’s still looking at something in the rock. I don’t know how he hasn’t passed out yet, hanging upside down. He must have found some sort of crevice, because his right arm has disappeared to the elbow.

“How do you, June?”

“My papai,” I say. “I asked first.”

“My mamãe.”

This renders me silent again. Suddenly, Enki laughs, and pulls out his arm. He holds a bright green crab still dripping with water.

“O Quilombola has an answer,” he says. “Here,” and without any further warning, hands me the crab. I grip it by its head, trying very hard not to shudder. I like crabs plenty when they’re cooked, but right now its helplessly flailing legs remind me of a mushi bot.

“You want to make art with crabs?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.” He turns back around and sticks his hand in a different hole, a meter below the first.

“Why am I holding this?”

“Because it’s wet.”

“Genius, Enki.”

“Oh, you can’t figure it out, June?”

Against my better judgment, I carefully disengage my right boot, twist for a vertigo-inducing moment, and take a step farther down the rock. I do it one more time, so my head is finally level with Enki’s.

“It’s a crab,” I say. “Why wouldn’t it be wet?”

Enki pulls his hand out of the rock. He’s holding another crab, smaller, but the same species.

“Also wet,” he says. He lets the crab skitter up his arm before it hops onto the rock and disappears down another hole.

“You think the crabs are climbing from the ocean through the rock holes?”

“How else would they get up here?”

“Crawling?”

Enki detaches his left boot, so he’s swinging wildly on the sheer cliff face. I watch him with what feels like a crab in my throat, knowing that at just the slightest wrong angle the nanohooks could give way. He’s laughing, of course he is, swaying like a pendulum right by my face. Our noses brush and my breath comes out in a fierce exhale.

“A demonstration,” he says.

“You know the water is twenty meters beneath us, right?”

He stops his wild swinging and reaches for my free hand. I’m terrified, but I relax a little when he twines his fingers in mine. This isn’t the first time — sometimes Enki just likes to touch — but it never gets
any easier. In my head, the two of us are all and only about art, but that doesn’t stop my skin from tingling and my stomach from leaping into my throat. I’ve gotten good at ignoring it. With his other hand, he reaches for the crab, still struggling weakly.

“Now watch,” he says, and puts the crab down on the cliff face.

It tries to scramble into a hole but Enki shoos it away. Enki
herds
it, until it goes farther down the cliff edge. And he follows.

Of course, he’s still holding my hand and he won’t let go. My arm stretches. I shriek, but he doesn’t even look at me.

“You bastard!” I yell, but even then I’m detaching a boot, planting it on the rock, detaching the other —

— all so I can
walk
down a cliff face at the behest of the summer king.

“You are insane!” I say, and he just laughs.

I think he wants to run, but he can’t with me along, and I don’t know whether I should feel grateful that he won’t leave me alone or terrified. The poor crab doesn’t know what to do. Enki shoos it away from every hole, every other direction it might want to go except for down, down, down.

And then something very strange happens.

We hit a part of the cliff that’s smooth and sheer, straight down to the water below. It’s not any harder for our nanohook boots. Scared as I am, I don’t even think about the sudden lack of pitted rock and protuberances. But the crab, that poor crab scuttles and slides, straight down the cliff face and into the water below.

Enki and I turn to each other at the same moment. “You knew that would happen?” I say.

He shrugs. “I just guessed.”

I look back down. The crab was swimming a moment before, but now it’s disappeared. “They climb up through the rock,” I say.

“Which means it’s probably honeycombed with passages.”

“We can just thread the lights through it! Light it up from the inside!”

Enki closes his eyes for a moment. As if the world has turned too beautiful for him to even look at. My hand tightens around his, and I look for both of us.

“Should we jump?” he says.

His eyes have opened again.

“Enki …”

“Come on, June,” he says. “Sometimes you have to step out.”

That’s what Gil says. I wonder if that’s where he first heard it.

I know he’s expecting me to plant my feet in the rock and refuse to do anything so dangerous. But he’s right, and I’ve done so many crazy things these past few months I don’t see how I can draw the line here.

“We won’t cut ourselves on the rock?”

“Nah, see the dark blue? It’s one of the deepest parts of the bay.”

“All right.”

Enki lets off a yell loud enough to send a few birds on the rock above screeching away.

“On three,” he says. My thighs are burning from the effort of holding myself horizontal for so long. The sun is hot and sizzling on my exposed neck and arms. Enki’s hand is as warm as a lamp beneath mine.

My heart feels like it might explode.

He counts steady and slow. I’m ready — if we don’t do this at exactly the same moment, we’ll need a medic to get us off the island.

I feel his
three
like a heartbeat.

For a moment I am empty. For a moment I am flying and I am flying and Enki is the other me at the end of my arm and the blue of the water above us is the same as the sky below.

Our shouts echo in tandem. A defiant scream at the Aunties and the Queen and every grande in Palmares Três.

We hit the water. We plunge deep inside, and I’m shocked at how icy it is despite the searing heat of the sun above. I open my eyes. Enki’s hair billows around him like sea anemones. A few feet away from us, fish nibble on a bed of seaweed. And crabs — dozens and dozens
of green crabs just like the one Enki chased down here — crawl in and out of the gaping holes in the rock.

Underwater, sound is strange. All I can hear is close and far away. My heartbeat and Enki’s, pounding like ceremonial drums. A pod of dolphins calling to one another too far out to see. The sunlight filters down in streams so clear they look like bars of gold.

Enki runs his hand through the cloud of my hair. He smiles, because Enki thinks the world is beautiful.

I kick first and he follows me, up through this quiet, sun-streamed world and back into the air. I gasp when we break the surface, get a little of my breath back, all so I can laugh.

I rub the brackish bay water from my eyes. “That … was … amazing!”

Enki smiles. “Happy Christmas, June.”

I’d forgotten. Most Palmarinas don’t celebrate it, though I’ve heard that in Salvador there are traditional Catholics who celebrate it like carnival. Maybe that’s why Enki gave me the present of this day: for the memory of his mother’s home, in the summer of our own.

Gil comes over that evening for our monthly family dinner. Mother has insisted upon it since Papai’s death, no matter how much I protest. I think at this point she does it to spite me. Gil comes when he can to help lessen the tension, but today I dread the upcoming two hours of stilted conversation and waylay him on the stairs to our house.

“What do you say we ditch and find a bloco party in Founders Park?”

He perches on the end of the railing and pretends to consider. “I don’t think it’s anyone good tonight.”

“It could be a howler monkey, Gil, I’d still dance.”

“Bad day?”

I think about Enki under the water, and my hair, which has dried into a saltwater Afro I refuse to comb out.

“It’s been sort of perfect.”

Gil tilts his head. He knows I’ve been out with Enki today, and the considering look in his eyes makes me say nervously, “Just our project. It’s going to be amazing.” I don’t want him to think there’s anything more than that between me and Enki.

He leaves it alone. “And what makes you think this will be any less?”

“Mother? Auntie Yaha? You’ve heard of them?”

“Could be worse. You get to spend an evening with three people who love you.”

My expression could make one of his sunflowers turn away, but Gil just meets it, eyebrows raised higher than my own. “Well, at least I love you, menina, so it’ll have to do.”

“Oh,” I say, “you’re smoother than glass. Let’s get this over with.”

I don’t tell him how happy his words make me. That’s not how Gil and I work.

Besides, he knows anyway.

Mother is sitting at the table when we walk in, sipping red wine with her thick, loosely curled hair uncharacteristically down. Auntie Yaha lights actual wax-burning candles. Even I’ve noticed how hard she’s been trying since I confronted her about the Queen’s Award. I can’t bring myself to appreciate it.

“Gil!” she says, and kisses him on both cheeks. “We’re so glad you could come.”

“Yes,” says Mother. “You’ve been so busy lately.”

I glare at Mother, noting the hint of disapproval in her tone, but Gil just smiles. “Never too busy for June.”

Auntie Yaha gives one of her smoothing-over chuckles and then we all sit down. Gil could have a bright future as a diplomat if it weren’t for the dancing.

Well, that and his flamboyant choice in sexual partners.

He and Enki have hardly been exclusive with each other in the last two months, but they remain the golden couple of all the gossip casters. I can always tell when Gil’s been with Enki, because he moves
like he might start dancing at any moment and he hardly hears a word I say to him.

Enki, on the other hand, is a cipher. The gossip casters say he’s with someone nearly every night, but I wouldn’t be able to tell from his demeanor with me. He almost never mentions Gil, and when he does, I can’t tell how he feels about him. I can hardly tell how Enki feels about
me
. Not that I care, so long as we get to make our art together.

Gil asked me once if Enki loved him. I said that maybe summer kings don’t feel things the way we do. Maybe with everything so compressed and escalated, he can’t really love like a human with another two hundred years in front of her. That made Gil cry, so I stopped talking.

I can smell the food — hot peppers and coconut milk and stewed shrimp and that unmistakable musk of palm oil for deep-frying — but the table is bare. Instead, Mother holds out her hands to either side and after a shocked moment I realize that she means for us to join hands. All of us. Together.