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My sudden urge to accelerate the world's destruction was connected in a way to the human shit stinking up the sidewalks and the fumes wafting from the slime pooled around the city's dumpsters, to the bus strike and the widespread despair over the late January heat smothering Porto Alegre, but, if there was a before and an after, a line that separated the life I thought I'd have from the life I ended up having, this line was the news of Andrei's death the night before, when he was robbed at gunpoint near Hospital de Cl’nicas, just a few blocks from the Ramiro Barcelos neighborhood where I was walking. I had stopped so abruptly while trying to process that piece of information on my Twitter feed that my right foot, wet with sweat, had slipped in its sandal and my ankle had twisted, sending me crashing onto the hot sidewalk, my left arm jutting ridiculously into the air to protect my phone.
Near the site of my fall, a homeless woman rummaged through a dumpster, doubled over its edge like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, black legs and bare feet poking out from her pink pleated dress. Hearing me groan, she slipped out of the container's mouth, lowered its lid, and walked toward me. I was already propped up on one of my knees, adjusting the strap on my sandal, when she asked if I was all right and offered to help. Only then did I notice that she was a cross-dresser with fine, curly hair covering her thighs and sculpted arms. I said I was all right, thank you, I just needed to sit down for a second. She watched me with interest as I eased myself onto the nearest stoop and, although she looked like she might want to lean over and help, kept a safe distance. Her beautiful face was covered in a thick icing of grease, and her smile, filled with white, straight teeth, seemed more improbable on her than the women's clothing she wore so naturally. I assured her that I was fine, and she didn't insist. Instead, she headed in the direction of Avenida Osvaldo Aranha, her legs gently crisscrossing, like a girl in a bikini stepping toward the pool at her boyfriend's pal's house.
I moved my ankle around, checking for torn tendons. I was scared to look at my phone again, because doing so would confirm the news that just a few hours earlier, Andrei had been shot by a mugger someplace close to where I sat, and was now dead at the age of thirty-six-so I calculated, remembering he was just three years older than me. The step I had sat on was covered in burned matches, and the thought that they might have been lit by Andrei's murderer, a crack fiend ready to kill for a hit, sent a chill through me, followed by nausea. Pearls of sweat formed behind my ear and ran down my neck. I wondered what had happened to my city while I had been away, which was ridiculous, considering that just minutes earlier it had seemed to me that nothing at all had happened, that it was the same city it'd always been. It was probably then, in those few mystifying moments, that I was struck by the thought that these days were simply the gateway to a slow and irreversible catastrophe, or that the force, the natural law or entity, that gave life to our expectations-and by "our," I mean my expectations, those of my friends, my generation-was starting to die out.
It was my first trip to Porto Alegre in almost two years. I had arrived a week earlier, filled with memories of a breezy, colorful town trapped in the amber of spring days tinted by blue skies and the flowering pink trumpet trees of Parque da Reden‹o, memories that were undoubtedly real and yet pointed to a past both indistinct and disconnected from the present. Throughout that week, the city, carpeted in filth and sizzling under the heat of the worst summer in decades, had reminded me of a hepatitis patient left to die in the sun. Cars and people steered clear of the streets on that final day of January, school vacation in full swing and Carnaval just around the corner, and the municipal transport strike, which was on the fifth consecutive day of its shutdown, was the final component in a bell jar of lethargy that had descended over everything. Workers in the city's outskirts cried into news cameras that they couldn't get to work and their bosses were docking their pay. Jitneys, school vehicles authorized by the city for emergency use, and illegal buses that seemed like they might fall to pieces at any moment sped down empty bus lanes crammed with heat-stricken passengers. Cabbies honked their horns and wreaked havoc willy-nilly, high on the overdose of passengers, some even charging night fares in the light of day just because they could.
The cabdriver who, a few days earlier, had driven me from the airport to the hospital where my dad was admitted said the strike had already been deemed illegal by the Labor Courts, but that the strikers were unmoved and there was no end in sight. Buses seen daring to leave their garages were pummeled with rocks by trade unionists. Drivers quarreled with each other and with their bosses, who were being accused of encouraging this stoppage as a way of pressuring the government to raise fares, even though it wouldn't, not in the wake of the June 2013 protests that, fueled by police violence, had put an end to countrywide fare hikes. In the meantime, plants scorched under the sun, the real feel in the early morning resembled a rain forest, and all over downtown, temperature displays showed afternoon highs of over forty-five degrees Celsius. The tap water ran hot. Not warm. Hot. Nearly scalding. Several sections of the city were without power or water, sometimes for hours or even days. Those living in the outskirts had it the worst, of course, and started road blockages to protest this neglect. Panhandlers crowded together in the shade, napping the morning away on their cardboard beds, their sleep incredulous and beggarly, their eyes half-open. All I wanted was to nestle into the building's stoop and sink into that same slumber.
After a slow lull, I glanced again at my cellphone screen, which still displayed the story of Andrei Dukelsky's murder on the Zero Hora news site. I scrolled through the article, the sweat from my finger slicking the iPhone glass. According to his girlfriend, a certain Francine Pedroso, Andrei had gone out for a jog around nine thirty that night, taking with him only his house key and his smartphone, which the criminals had swiped. though the crime scene was in a reasonably busy area, even at night, there had been no witnesses. "One of the most promising new talents of contemporary Brazilian literature," was the descriptor accorded him in the text. "Duke, as his friends called him." The hashtag #RIPDuke offered instant access to the shock and sadness expressed by his friends and readers on social media. I didn't have the guts to click on it.
Andrei and I weren't that close anymore. The last time I'd seen him was a few years earlier in São Paulo, on the evening of his last book signing, or at least the last one I heard about. He had stopped updating Twitter and, as I later found out, had committed Facebook suicide. Our relationship had been at its most intense fifteen years earlier, in college, back when we both wrote for our email fanzine Orangutan and had conversations we would later recall as extremely profound. He made me read Camus, Jo‹o Gilberto Noll, Moby-Dick. I tried to picture where our other e-zine contributors might be, especially Emiliano, who I had missed the most in São Paulo. I remembered meeting Andrei for the first time in the journalism school courtyard, smoking like he'd started lighting up in diapers, sober and burly as a judo fighter, his hairline receding in peaks, signaling the onset of early baldness. He donned high-quality pink and blue shirts and wore blazers to bars, a flamboyant statement for a late-1990s college kid. His nails were always dirty and overgrown, and he stank a little. Duke never ceased to be a mystery to us. Among his friends, but especially us Orangutans, there was a sort of unspoken competition as to who would be the first person to really understand him, to win his trust, become his confidante. But Duke would open up to no one. His novels and short stories proved unhelpful in solving this enigma. Reading him, I felt that there were things that he'd even kept hidden from literature. As if he were awaiting some distant future in which he'd be ready to write about them.
The funeral at the Jewish cemetery on Avenida Oscar Pereira-the article on my phone continued-was for family only. There would be no wake, per Jewish tradition. Sitting there on some apartment building stoop, craving the numb slumber of the homeless, I thought of how Andrei's body had lay strewn on a sidewalk about five hundred meters from where I sat, of how his dried-up blood, spilled over the paving stones, would have left marks that now mixed with remnants of garbage slurry and dog piss, and then I caught myself thinking, against my will, that in truth he'd been spared, that maybe, at the end of the day, he was the lucky one. Because he'd escaped some horrible, fast-approaching thing, which we'd all have to grow used to.
I remembered I had my dad's nicotine patches in my purse. I tried to focus, locked my cell screen, got up, and began walking toward Avenida Ipiranga. A column of black smoke rose from the concrete embankments of Arroio Dilœvio, and crossing the bridge, I spotted two boys in rags squatting by a crackling fire, probably melting down copper cables to sell at the junkyard. The riverbed of the Dilœvio was no more than a stream snaking between sandbanks exposed under the sun, though in the scant deeper pools sluggish fish were visible in the ropy, gray sewage water. On the other side of the avenue, still in the Santana neighborhood, on one of the smaller blocks of Rua Gomes Jardim-lined with verandaed houses partially concealed behind unkempt gardens-and beside a glass store and an old butcher who had frightened me as a little girl, lived my parents, for whom the world, due to matters of health and longevity, was closer to ending than it was for me.
And the world really had nearly ended for my dad. At sixty-six, he'd had a heart attack and was now at home recovering from a heart bypass. Eight days earlier, when my cellphone had awoken me before sunrise in my São Paulo apartment, the surgery, which would last four hours, was already under way. On the other end of the line, my mom had sounded more cross than scared. Dad only shared details of the incident once he was discharged from the ICU and his mind had cleared. After eating a dinner of grilled cheese and salami, brought to our front door by a delivery guy from his favorite diner, and watching TV over two glasses of Campari tonic and cigarettes smoked with his usual abandon, Dad went to bed. He woke up at daybreak with heartburn and mild chest pain, wandered around the living room for a while, and, realizing the pain wasn't passing, decided to swing by the ER. Seeing no reason to disturb my mother's delicate slumber, he climbed into the car and drove himself to Hospital M‹e de Deus, unknowingly suffering a heart attack while smoking Marlboro Lights with his elbow resting on the window and his other hand on the wheel of the automatic Honda Fit, probably listening to some band like Simply Red on R‡dio Continental, certain that it was just gas or some other relatively inoffensive thing. As soon as he mentioned his chest pain to the triage doctor, they took his pressure and quickly shepherded him to the cardiologist. Shortly afterward, he was on the operating table.
I arrived at the hospital with luggage in tow and found my dad at the end of his first day post-surgery, hugging his pillow and hocking up pulmonary secretions before my mother's saucer-wide eyes. He was flustered and kept asking if it was day or night. Whenever his blanket was moved for some test or procedure, I was struck by the impossible whiteness of his body and thought to myself that this couldn't possibly be my father's skin tone, that he was much darker. He'd been drained of too many fluids, didn't have enough blood, something wasn't right. I tried not to look at him at length, thinking he felt ashamed of being exposed to me like that. And, for my part, it repulsed me to see him so debilitated. Lying back on his bed at the mercy of probes and needles, his sternum sewn together with steel thread that would remain in his skeleton long after all his other tissues had turned to dust, he was an emblem not only of his own death but of mine. This morbidity stepped into the background the moment he was transferred to a room. He became cheerful and joked that I was free to experiment on his worthless carcass, that it was high time he handed it over to science. I told him that all I needed for my research were Arabidopsis and sugarcane seeds, but a friend of mine at the University of São Paulo was studying the effects of cigarettes and cold-cut meats on the bodies of bullheaded old men and that his corpse might, perhaps, be of interest to him. Colleagues from the college prep course and the schools where Dad taught Portuguese Language and Literature, and a trio of doting students, stopped by for a visit. I helped him on strolls down the hospital corridor through which he whined about my mom's recent neuroses, the government's economic interventionism, current laissez-faire pedagogical practices, and his bratty students, who felt they had a right to everything, all the while glancing at me sidelong, trying to gauge my responses to what he said. After five days in the hospital, they let him go home. There, his mood swung out of control. Sometimes he would start crying out of the blue and stare at us, bewildered, claiming not to know why, tears still streaming down his cheeks. He made a point of standing in the shower and tending to his own incisions, fretting over the breathing exercises prescribed by his physiotherapist. He had a long life ahead of him, I thought. Who knew-maybe he'd even come out of all this strong enough to witness the world completely wither away.
