The taxi passed at speed, accelerating into the Gávea tunnel that led under Rocinha to the Zona Sul. In the back, in the back, there … The camera phone flashed. In the electric flicker she saw a figure with its head wrapped in a loose turban of white cloth. The man from the terreiro. Marcelina felt a sob of relief burst inside her. You are not mad. The universe is rational. You’ve been working too hard, to much pressure too much anxiety, that’s all.

A rap at the window. The militar gestured for her to wind it down. “Is there a problem here?” He stooped and peered into the taxi. “No, Officer, no, no problem at all.”

“Can I see some ID please?”

It was not quite a smell, but it inhabited the air; not quite a sensation but it pricked like electricity; not quite a change but a disturbance in the domestic order — nothing sensible yet she knew it the moment she opened the door to her apartment. When she was an underpaid and loving-it production runner straight off her Media master’s, Marcelina had shared a tatty little apartment by the cemetery with a Fortaleza travesti come to seek his fortune in Rio. He worked night shifts in a Lapa bar and drank Marcelina’s beer, ate her food, used her washing powder, watched her cable TV, broke her Japanese tea-set bowl by bowl, and never paid a centavo toward the rent but imagined that his innate colorfulness was ample recompense, blithely disregarding the evidence of his own eyes, that travestis were cheap as beans in Lapa. Marcelina would be returning when he was leaving and thus never caught him in his violations, but she always knew when he had been through her panty drawer. However carefully he covered his crime there was always a sense, a ripple in the aether, a linger of an alien but maddeningly familiar perfume.

She smelled it now in the small tiled lobby of her apartment.

Somebody had been in her home.

It was one of the mysteries of her alt dot family that, though their lives were strewn all over Centro and Zona Sul, they always arrived together and left together. Marcelina received them in her garden. She customarily entertained up on the roof. Adriano himself had been up here for her Stones Party, revolving with the rest of her guests through the corner of the garden with the ocean view to peer through the slot between the buildings at the tiny spider figure prancing and kicking beneath orbit-visible lighting. There, that’s Rick. I mean Mick. The roof was her refuge and temple; the roof was air and the lilac and pink evening light; the roof connected her to the ocean by that parallelogram of beach, sea, and sky; the roof was the reason she had bought this ugly, clattery, strange-smelling apartment with its back to the morro as if it had been mugged by the street; and she had been sleeping on the roof for the past three nights.

The apartment was infected.

She had gone straightaway to Gloria the concierge. She had seen nothing. Mangueira samba school could have marched through the lobby of Fonseca apartments in spangles, feathers, and skin with full bateria and she would have chittered away on her cellular.

Celso, Cibelle, Agnetta, Vitor up from his street-watching cafe, Moises and Tito whom she had met on the Gay Jungle (elevator pitch: can eleven gay men marooned in a stilt-house in the middle of the Amazon turn the one straight guy gay!) series and recruited to her alt dot family. Mediaistas and gay men. See who you run to in a crisis. All her guests were welcomed with a spliff. When the real estate agent had opened the rusting roof door, Marcelina had followed him up into a sunlit field of waving maconha. “Is this included in the price?” she’d asked. There was at least ten thousand street-reis of shade-grown Moroccan beneath the water tanks and satellite dishes. Dona Bebel had showed her how to dry it in the airing cupboard. It would take her five years to smoke her way through it.

“I’ve brought you all here tonight…” Laughs, cheers.

“You know what I mean. You’re my urban family, my gay dads. I tell you things I wouldn’t tell my own flesh and blood.”

Oohings, cooings.

“No seriously seriously, if I can’t trust you, who can I trust? And I’d like to think you could trust me as well-not just work stuff. Other stuff.” It was coming out wrong; it was coming out as stupid and insincere as the night she tried to tell the guys who’d lifted the Getaway car they were on TV. But she had never asked so great a thing from them, never stripped herself so bare and pale.

“I need your help, guys. Some of you have noticed that I’ve been acting a bit… distracted lately. Like I can’t seem to remember things I’ve done, and then I get really paranoid.”

No one dared answer.

“I need you to tell me if there’s other stuff that maybe I haven’t remembered; things I might have done or said.”

Alt dot family looked at each other. Feet twisted, lips pursed.

“You walked right past me the other day,” Vitor said. His voice tightened, grew sharp and confident. “You didn’t even look round when I called after you. Mortified, I was. I almost didn’t come tonight, you know. I was this close.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sometime around my time, you know the time I keep. Tea o’clock.”

“I do need to know, Vitor.”

“About five, five thirty. It was Wednesday.”

Marcelina touched her hands together, an almost-prayer, a particular gesture her development team knew well, when she was trying to pin down a part-baked idea.

“Vitor, you have to believe me when I tell you that at that time I was in Niteroi getting a letter of introduction to the Barquinha from Feijão. I can give you his number, you can call him.”

“Well, you walked right past me. Cut to the bone, querida; to the bone.”

“What direction was I walking?”

“The same as always; from here down to the taxi rank.”

Marcelina lifted her explaining hands to her mouth now.

“That wasn’t me, Vitor. I wasn’t there; I was in Niteroi, believe me.”

Everyone had stubbed out their spliffs now.

“Has anyone else experienced anything like this’”

Now Moises shuffled uncomfortably. He was a big fat sixty-something queen who ran a series of mysterious objet d’arts emporia; a true old-school carioca, he had an unrelenting if not always accurate wit, but delivered in a voice like velvet-covered razors. Since Gay Jungle , Marcelina had been looking for ways to get him his own series.

“Well, you did call me the other night. I thought I was on the Da Vinci Code , all those mysterious coded messages and everything.”

Marcelina’s head reeled. It had nothing to do with secondary maconha. “When was this?”

“Well. I know I’m a night owl, but half past three in the morning.”

“Was it on the house phone or the cellular?”

“Oh the cellular, of course. Took me hours to get back to sleep, everything buzzing round my head.”

“Moises, could you tell me what I said?”

“Oh, weird stuff, honey, weird stuff. Time and the universe and the order we see is not the true order. Are you in some kind of conspiracy thing? How exciting.”

“I’m trying to make a TV show about a World Cup goalkeeper, is all” Marcelina sat down on the wall. “Guys, at work, has there been anything else I don’t know about?”

“Apart from the e-mail thing, no,” Celso answered.

Agnetta said, “But you should know that the Black Plumed Bird has bunged Lisandra a few K to develop her Ultimate Seleção idea.” Unraveling, detuning, melting like a wax votive baby offered to a saint.

“Is everything all right?” Cibelle asked.

“There’s stuff going on I can’t explain,” Marcelina said. “All I can say is, if you know me, trust me: if it looks like me but doesn’t act like me, it isn’t me. I know this makes no sense at all, but it makes even less sense to me. I’m being haunted.”

“A ghost?” Tito, her third gay dad, was a specter of a man himself, pale and nocturnal. He knew every spook of old Copacabana personally, greeted them each dawn as he swung back through the streets to his home.