courage, leads to a sort of . . . mortification of the soul. Corruption. And then it takes more courage, costs more pain, to clean it up afterward.”
I drank more cold wine, thought about the heat in Belize, how I had been cool in my hotel room, cool and unconcerned about the fate of those people in Caracas. “I was in the jungle once. I lay on my back in the middle of a clearing while insects crawled over my hands and under the small of my back, and looked up. Up through the endless greenery.” I spoke slowly, remembering. “The jungle isn’t just one place, you know—it’s a dozen, all in layers. And the animals and insects of each layer are utterly obliv ious to what’s above them, or below. They don’t even know anything outside their world exists. So I lay there, covered in bugs, and tried to imagine what the world looks like to the white hawks and harpy eagles soaring over the canopy hunting for their food—troops of howler and spider monkeys. A green carpet, maybe. Something flat, anyway. They float about up there and have no idea that lower down anteaters ramble about, clinging with their prehensile tails to thin tree trunks, leaning down and licking out termites from the high-up nests. Sloths live there, too.” I had seen them, fur slimed with algae, hanging upside down, creeping from bough to bough. “Did you know that the sloth’s claws are so well adapted to hanging upside down that if it fell off, to the forest floor, it would die because it couldn’t crawl away from predators?” I had been born to soar above the canopy, oblivious. But humans were adaptable, weren’t they? “The eagles don’t know the sloths and anteaters are there. The sloths and anteaters don’t know that underneath them are other layers. Little, quick things that flit from bloom to bloom, like bees and hummingbirds. And kinkajous and geckos and insects. All scampering about, oblivious.” The layers I had seen that day were endless. “The bottom layer is the forest floor. Big things, slow-moving. Heavy. Jaguars, herds of peccaries, tapirs. Where things squeal and run.” Bright crunch of blood. Shrill screams. “Layer after layer, each separate, each teeming ith life . . .”
They were looking at me oddly.
“Don’t you see? Everything works in layers: jungles, cities, people. Each layer has its predator and prey, its network of ally and foe, safe place and trap. Its own ecosystem. You have to get to know the land.” I wondered if I was making sense. “We don’t always know what we’re getting into. And we don’t always know how to get out. We can’t understand everything. We each have a niche.” I remembered Paolo, saying, I’m nothing, a nobody. Thought of Spanner, her amusement when I had suggested a job: Now, why would I want a job? “If we fall out of it, like the sloth, we’re not equipped. We can die. Others can see it happening, but they can’t help. They can’t climb down the tree and help us back up. We have to do it ourselves.” I was crying. I couldn’t seem to stop.
Interest in the porn films lasted until early summer, but then their money began to dry up again. They swapped their PIDAs often—though her middle name always remained Lore—but their stock began to dwindle, and there were no more PIDAs from Ruth, and no more money to get them elsewhere. Hyn and Zimmer stayed out of sight, and Spanner went out more and more often on her own. She came back restless and irritable. One evening after they ate, she stood behind Lore’s chair and rubbed her shoulders.
“We’re going out tonight to meet some new friends. Wear that black thing I bought you before Christmas. The dress.” She went into the bathroom, and Lore heard the click as she opened up the cabinet, the chink as she dropped the tiny glass vial into her pocket with her razor.
It was a warm night, and Lore’s dress clung to her body. Her shoulders and neck felt exposed as they rode the slide to the bar. It was a new place, built only a year or two ago on a patch of land that had been a park until the city ran out of money. Inside, it was all rounded angles and glass just a little too thick to see through. The floor was some kind of clay tile. There was no bar, just