The concrete is still cooling under Kern’s back when the moon starts to set. Under the faded sky the favelas’ rooftops are a plain of undulating shadow, fractured by the glowing faults of the alleys and the streets. Lifting his head, he sees the Bay and across it the firelight flaring among Oakland’s ruined towers. The wind brings cooking oil, sewage, the sea. Ear to the concrete, he hears music’s muted subterranean pulse.
His phone chimes as a text arrives. Phone framed on pale night, the message one word: Working? The sender is anonymized, but only Lares has the new number. Tempting just to lie there, and watch the night progress, but his restlessness is growing, so he texts back Yes, and an instant later gets another message with an image of the night’s mark and his latest GPS.
Corded muscle on the stranger’s arms, billowing thunderheads tattooed on his shoulders, a studied gangster’s gravitas. Another text: Touch him up and bring his phone to me. He memorizes the GPS, then deletes all. Springing to his feet, he stretches through the moment’s dizziness and then lopes off across the rooftops.
A vertical plane of light rises from a wide fissure in the concrete before him. He starts to sprint and as the fear rises he launches himself from the edge, floating, for a moment, and in the light rising from the street below he casts a skyward shadow, and then the balconies of the far wall are rushing toward him, then the shock of impact in his palms, knees and soles, his eyes just inches from the stratified concrete, and then once again he’s pushed off into the air.
He lands running, stumbles, jogs off the last of his momentum, unscathed, euphoric, though the descent is easy, on these surfaces, if you commit yourself, which he’s done now many times. (The first time, when he’d only seen it done in videos, it had taken an hour to work up to the jump). As he wasn’t hurt, he won’t be hurt, and for tonight he is invincible.
The pulse of the music is louder on the street. It’s a carnival night, which he likes, for the shattering music and the fires and the strobe lights that make a strange country of the favela’s familiar mazes, and because there will be crowds, mostly drunk, making it easy for him to fade away. Lares, who is particular about words, says it’s not technically carnival, but more like this floating world, which Kern first thought referred to the levels flooded by the Bay—he’s found basements where you can hear the tide race—but it turned out to be Japanese; he forgot the details but retains a sense of lantern light and sake jars, of hot water clattering into tubs, of ragged samurai walking through the cold mud singing, and as the bass vibrates in his bones he’s floating over the surface of things, exultant and detached as he closes on his victim.
Dank corridors with closed doors, mulched paper squelching underfoot, reek of urine. A family place—mothers had their children piss in the throughways to keep the working girls away. An old man with a too-wide grin, dressed as though for church, calls out to him, full of unctuous concern—is he entirely well—is he hungry, perhaps? Kern shakes his head just perceptibly and the old man laughs, says he’s sorry, he hadn’t recognized him, would never have spoken so to a resident of such standing. Go with him and you’d get a meal, fall asleep, wake up in a brothel. It didn’t seem fair, kids making it this far just to be picked off by a pimp who seemed to think that it was funny. The gang kids hated people like that, caught them and hurt them whenever they could, prone, afterwards, to sentimental monologues on sisters disappeared.
A momentary silence, shocking in its suddenness, ringing in his ears. It passes, as he moves on, but there are places like that, here and there, islands of quiet, implied by the ways that shape warps sound. They move, as people build, and he imagines the silences projected from high above, like spotlights roaming the surface of the city.
The sky is intermittent strips of indigo, and the street—dark even in the day—is lit sporadically by bioluminescent strips stuck to the walls. He dodges into the gaps in the gathering crowd, making a game of it but one with an urgency, and someone shouts “Woo!” as Kern slips by, not touching him but passing near enough to feel his heat, and he knows he should slow down, avoid notice, but needs to be in motion.
He rounds a corner into a wall of darkness and deafening sound and then a blinding flash of light. The music is from everywhere, the stereos built into the walls and the floor—there are guys who are into that, who spend weeks and their own money getting it just right. Every strobe flash brings a static image of the dancers in their ecstasy, like a sequence of luminous stills, and he retains details that would otherwise be lost—the hair of a girl in mid-jump splayed out like a corona, her eyes shut tight, her smile raw, inward, somehow like a child’s, the skinny shirtless boy turning to watch her, the beads of sweat flying from his forehead. On a concrete stage there’s an elfin-looking girl screaming into a microphone and she has black lipstick and black eyeliner and a torn, sweat-stained army T-shirt, and she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds—she’s what Kayla would call one of the banshee cases—and it’s like she’s been possessed by something terrible that’s working out its pain through her disintegrating vocals. A pulse of darkness, like going into a tunnel, and then the next strobe shows the way.
He checks his position on his phone, scans the teeming faces when the next light comes. So many, and though it’s only been minutes the mark is surely gone, but the mass of dancers opens up and there he is.
Kern pulls on the thick leather gloves he got from a gardener for someone’s credit card and reminds himself to breathe. There are brown stains on the knuckles that won’t scrub out. Remembering fragments of jumbled meditations, he tries to slow his heart.
The music is the soundtrack for what he’s about to do and he must be near a speaker because the noise is on the verge of obliterating his consciousness, and no one is really watching and no one will really care but still he finds he doesn’t want to hurt this stranger, not really, and he stands there foolishly, pulling at his gloves, but then he remembers a story he read on his laptop, one from Iceland about men who had the souls of wolves, berserkers, they called them, and they were usually soft-spoken and unassuming till they went into battle and then something shifted deep within them and their mouths foamed and they chewed the corners of their shields as the wolf rose up through them to swallow their hearts and their pity and the last vestiges of their fear. Come, he thinks, calling to the wolf in the music’s barrage, even though he knows it’s just a story, but then it comes, and he is ravening.
Hands shoved in pockets, eyes lowered, he advances on his victim. Now his heart is calm and his fear has become something poisonous and almost like affection. Annihilating echoes roll between the concrete cliffs in the periodic dark. The mark glances at him, but Kern is staring off into space, not even a person, just so much empty air.
The mark’s loneliness is evident in the way he watches the girls, and how he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. There’s something in one of the mark’s pockets and for a moment Kern worries it’s a gun but it’s too bulky and then he notices the paint on the mark’s shirt and realizes he’s a tagger, that it’s a spray can in his pocket. Kern sees him decide to leave, start shouldering his way toward an alley, and knows his moment.
Music so overwhelming it’s like silence as he runs through the momentary darkness, leaps on the strobe flash, and as it ends drives his elbow down through the space where the mark’s skull was, but hits nothing, lands kneeling, and holds the position—though it’s not necessary, is even self-consciously cinematic—until the next flash shows the mark, eyes wide, hands raised, backing away.
They run flat out and when the dark comes Kern feels he’s standing still. The next flash shows the mark losing ground, and with the next he’s gone but Kern intuits that he’s slipped into another, narrower alley, and the next flash shows him pressed against the wall, and in his momentary glimpse of the mark’s face Kern sees his decision to stand and fight.
Pain blooms in Kern’s hand as the mark’s orbital shatters, and then the mark is on the ground, Kern astride his chest, throwing punches unimpeded, and the mark’s face is like an outraged child’s, successive strobes revealing his progress from shock to misery and finally to a blankness, almost an abandonment, and then more bone collapses, which is probably enough.
Leaving the alley with the mark’s phone in his pocket, he sees men rushing toward him, mouths open and teeth bared as they shout things he can’t hear. He turns to meet them, flooded with rage, welcoming death, knowing that he won’t lose, can’t lose, will live forever, but then he recalls his discipline, and with it reason, and with the next strobe he runs at the wall, finds traction, jumps, grabs a balcony, is up, vanishes.