“We always do that, boss.” She turned on her laptop.

“Well, someone sent a hoax e-mail to Adriano, and it wasn’t me.”

“It was,” said Agnetta faintly. “You did it. I saw you.”

The chattering, ringing, beeping tunnel of the Glass Menagerie suddenly turned on end and Marcelina felt herself falling through desks and workstaations and heaps of paper toward a final shattering on the great window become a floor.

“Imagine I’m very very stupid and haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“About five, six minutes ago you came in, said hello, logged onto your laptop, and fired off an e-mail,” said Celso. Cibelle sat back in her chair, arms folded.

“But my laptop is biometric locked.” Standard security in a world where ideas were currency.

“Well, it’s open now,” Celso said.

Marcelina went to the screen. The login icon spun in the taskbar. She opened the in-house e-mail system.

To: Adriano@canalquatro.br

From: capoeiraqueen@canalquatro.br

Subject: Take Our the Trash…

The glass tube of the development office revolved around her, Marcelina a shiny ort in a kaleidoscope of flying madnesses.

She had drunk the tea.

The Green Saint was the saint of visions and illusions.

Feijão had the sacred vine growing in his garden.

The Barquinha of Santo Daime was a church of hallucinations.

She had drunk the tea. There was no other rational explanation.

Marcelina closed the program and touched her thumb to the log-out pad.

A trip to the market. A trip into the biodiesel smog beneath the unfinished rodovia intersection of Todos os Santos, the missing buckle of the cincture of highways that binds the city of Saint Paul. A trip to the printer, to buy new shoes.

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It’s not that the drivers won’t go inside — and they won’t no matter how high you tip them — it’s that they can’t. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com rowers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, mota-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos’s rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuce and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past palisades of sugar cane waiting for the hand-mill and past the chugging, sweet steam of cachaça stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the veggetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the spread ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can’t afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

“My mum does this,” Fia says. “She has a little urban farm, a couple of backlots, and she hires half a dozen rooftops. She wouldn’t come here, though; she specializes in designer brassicas for the Japanese restaurant market. She’s boring. It’s beautiful.”

She’s secretive; she takes it slow. Edson hasn’t gotten to kiss her yet, let alone sex. Over kibes in that little Arab lanchonete he had promised (and they had not disappointed — Yellow Dog lanches would soon to be added to the De Freitas Global Talent portfolio) Edson had thrilled her with his telenovela of family: The Sons of Dona Hortense. Emer the bricklayer who bought a share in a gym with the money he brought down from the tower cranes of São Paulo; Ander the dead this eight years gone, cut down up in the favela; Denil the builder of fine planes for mighty Embraer; Mil the soldier boy in a violent and foreign land, remembered every night in Dona Hortense’s Book of Weeping that no high-velocity round might seek out his blue beret; Ger the aspirant malandro if he could do a decent day’s work; and Ed the man of business and affairs and talent management and many faces who would one day buy this lanchonete, turn it into an empire, and retire to his place by the ocean to watch the sun rise out of the sea. The Brothers Oliveira: on festivals and public holidays the house was so full of testosterone that Dona Hortense would send them all out into the street to play soccer; anything to work off the male aggression.

Fia had applauded but turned away his question about her family. Edson supposes there’s only so much you can say when you are a secret quantumista.

Now they’ve been out together ten times and she’s taking him to Our Lady of Trash to buy a pair of shoes and telling him finally about her family.

“And my dad runs a stable of accountancy ware, but what he really likes best are the pieces he writes for this cheesy New Age feed in Brasilia. He’s got this idea of fusing Mahayana Buddhism with umbanda Paulistana — as if Brazil doesn’t have enough religions already. My kid brother Yoshi is on a gap-year — he’s surfing his way around the world. All the girls think he’s fantastic. And I grew up in a little house with black balconies and red roof in Liberdade like six generation of Kishidas before me. We had a swimming pool and I had dolls and a pink bike with candy-stripe ribbons on the hanndlebars. See? I told you it was boring.”

“Do they know what you do?” Edson asks as Fia hauls him by the hand through the temporary alleys between trucks and buses.

“I tell them I’m freelancing. It’s not a lie. I don’t like to lie to them.” Edson knows the date is a test. Our Lady of Trash rules a landscape of superstition and street legend. Whispers of night visions; strange juxtaposiitions of this city with other, illusory landscapes; angels, visitations, UFOs, ghosts, orixás. Some, they say, have received strange great gifts: the power of prophecy, the talent to discern truth, the ability to work the weather. Some have been lost entirely, wandering away and never returning to their homes and families, though relatives may sometimes glimpse them among the trash towers, close yet far away, as if trapped in a maze of mirrors. It changes you, they say. You see farther; you see things as they really are.

Edson’s damned if he’s going to let Todos os Santos scare him. But it surely is a place to move with confidence and smarts, and so he has dressed for authority and jeito in a white suit and ruffle-fronted shirt. Fia’s shopping outfit consists of slinky boots, goldie-looking shorts with button-down pockets, calf-length shimmer coat, and Habbajabba bag.

“Hey!”

Edson almost dislocates her shoulder as he yanks her to a stop. She turns, cartoon eyes wide, to open her hot little temper on him and sees the garbage truck sway to a stop blasting all fifteen horns at her. The driver crosses himself. Trucks pile up behind him, a garbage jam. There is one direct road into the heart of Todos os Santos, and it belongs to the huge municipal caminhaos da lixo, laboring through dust and biodiesel reek. Their multiple wheel sets deeply rut the red dirt road; under rain it rurns to mud and the trucks lumber and lurch axle-deep, like dinosaurs. The track leads to the only completed onnramp of the unfinished intersection; from it they wend higher, like some kid’s Hot Wheel toy-car set, up the curving roadways until they reach the edge of the drop, reverse, lights flashing and warnings yelling, to evacuate their belllies onto the ever-growing trash mountain of Todos os Santos.