“No, something else. Something that’s not dead yet.”

“You know, there’s a program idea in that,” Celso said, but the eyes of her alt dot family were slipping away from hers. For the first time they made their separate farewells and left one by one.

You did not hold me , Marcelina thought. The spirit of maconha waited in the air. In its frame of tenements the sea still held late lilac. The surf was up and the air so still that the ocean-crash carried over the traffic on the Copa and the air smelled like she imagined hummingbirds must: sweet and floral and shimmering with color. A huge pale moon of Yemanja was floating free from the water tanks and aerials. Gunfire cracked in the distance: the little favela of Pavão at the western end of the Copa still tossed and scratched. She remembered a lilac night a lifetime ago; suddenly swept out of her bed by a tall queen from a Disney movie, all swish and swinging diamonds. Come on, get dressed. The three Hoffman sisters had sat pressed in round their mother in the back of the cab as it swept along the boulevards, the dark sea booming. Is it carnaval? Marcelina had asked when she saw the crowd in front of the floodlit hotel, white and huge as a cliff. No no, her mother had replied, something much more wonderful than that. She had pushed into the rear of the crowd. Some of the people had glared and then went, ah! or oh! and bowed from her path; most she shoved past: Come on girls, come on. Gloria and Iracema and Marcelina holding hands in a chain until they were at the front of the crowd. She had looked up at men in uniforms and men with cameras and men in evening dress and women even more glamorous than her mother. At her feet was a red carpet. A broad man with graying hair but the bluest eyes has walked up the carpet to flashing cameras and cheers and applause. Marcelina had been afraid of all the noise and the lights and the bodies, but her mother had said, Cheer! Cheer! Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! The man had looked over, looked puzzled, then raised a hand, smiled, and walked on down the alley of lights.

In the taxi back she had peeped up the question Gloria and Iracema were too big and shy to ask.

“Mum, who was that?”

“My love, that was Mr. Frank Sinatra.”

Her mother’s face had shone like the women in St. Martin’s on solemn novena.

One moment of silver. The flicker on the screen. Her mother had shown it to her, on the steps of the Copa Palace, in every beautiful old tune she had pumped out of the organ. Marcelina had chased, leaped for it, snatched with her hands until she caught it and held it up, shivering and flowing from form to form, and she had seen in an instant how the trick was done.

She got her mattress and lightweight bag, stripped down to panties and vest in the backscatter of light from the morro.

How to weep, in Cidade de Luz.

Every new entry in the book requires Crying Cake. Flour, margarine, sugar, nuts, more sugar — the saints have sweet teeth — and a generous glug of cachaça, which the saints don’t mind at all. Bake. Cut into cubes with a knife cleaned in holy water, one cube per invocation. The rest must be left on the cooling tray on top of the front wall, for all the neighborhood. Select a saint. Her I-shades tell Dona Hortense the best for this entry is St. Christina (the Astonishing). She prints an image that she carefully snips out with scisssors, pastes onto a matchbook-sized board with other Catholic tat ripped from the parish magazine, and decorates the border with plastic beads and tinsel and shards of broken glass ornament from the Christmas box. The icon is then purified with salt and incense. Divination with the Chinese compass gives the best alignment; then the Book of Weeping is opened before the altar, the name and the need written in felt marker that gives a nice thick line, easy to read in the dim of the barracao, and the whole is dusted with farofa, which is then tipped down the valley of the book into an offertory cone before St. Christina the Astonishing. Thereafter until the weeping stops, the entry, with all the others for that day, will receive a tear.

St. Christina, be true , prayed Dona Hortense. Astonish me. For my littlest and second-favorite son suffers. He lies in his hammock, and from the flicker of his eyes I can tell he plays games and reads chat on his glasses; the food on his plate goes cold and draws flies; he neglects his deals and contacts and plans: this is a boy of energy and business and determination. I know Gerson — stupid, soft Gerson — slips pills into Edson’s Coke and coffee and they steal his energy, sap his will. Get him up get him out get him around his friends and clients for they can help him. Until then, let me launder his clothes and straighten his papers and fetch him coffee and leave him plates of chicken and beans and rice and tell Gerson to stop it with the pills and instead bring some proper money into the house.

Early in the morning of the day of the Feast of Nossa Senhora Apareçida Dona Hortense finds her littlest and second-favorite son climbing on the house roof. He is in shorts and a sleeveless T and Havaianas, poking at the geometry of white plastic pipes that surround the solar water heater. Cidade de Luz wears its civic bairro status proudly, but the every-man-for-himself plumbing uphill and down alley and the sagging, crazy-crow wiring — you can still plug into the streetlamps — betrays its favela provenance.

“These pipes need replacing.” Edson stands hands on hips looking around him. Not at pipes and plumbing, Dona Hortense knows, but at the city, the sky, his world. It’s begun.

“I’ve made kibes,” she says.

“I’ll be down in three minutes.”

That night Dona Hortense turns St. Christina the Astonishing’s Icon facedown and crumbles her Crying Cake as an offering to the birds.

In the mornings pensioners get special rates at the gym. Edson passes treadmills churning with men in baseball caps and saggy shorts and women in Capri tights and big Ts. Afternoons the soldados of the drug lord come down from Cidade Alta to pump. The Man has negotiated a corporate membership for them. The deal’s good, but they have a habit of leaving the weights at max to look macho to the next user. Emerson is out back trying to weld a broken weight machine, squinting through a square of smoked glass at the primal arc.

“Still taking old people’s money off them?” asks Edson. Emerson looks up, smiles, then grins.

“At least I’m making money.” Emerson kills the welding gun, slips off his gloves, hugs his brother to him. Little Sixth always was fiercely independent, never needing anyone’s permission, but he always brought his plans to Emerson as if for a blessing that Dona Hortense and all her saints could not bestow. There are Skols in cool-jackets in the store refrigerator. Emerson chases receptionist Maria-Maria out of the office — “all she ever does is chattbots anyway” — and they sit across his battered desk. Pensioners thump and hiss behind the ripple glass.

“So.”

“I’ll be all right. It’s time, isn’t it? Everything’s time. It’s like, I’m back again. Does that make sense? I was away, somewhere, like on holiday in my own house, and now I’m back again and it’s like it was spring and now it’s summer.”

Emerson doesn’t say, It’s been three and a half months. Nor does he say any stupid talk-show shit like, I don’t think I can ever understand what she meant to you. Emerson recalls how he felt when Anderson was killed. He had been up in the favela working on a newlywed floor on the top of an apartment block. They worked together: bricklayer and electrician, brothers Oliveira. Then the fireworks went up all around like a saint’s day. Police. Out on the steep ladeiros The Man’s foot soldiers had dumped I-shades, cash cards, arfided valuables — anything that might betray their location to the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. The police stun drones swarmed in over Cidade Alta like black vultures. Already gunfire was rattling around the intersections where Cidade Alta grew out of Cidade de Luz. Anderson had gone to pick up elecctrical tape. Anderson had been caught out there. Firing everywhere now. Nowhere to run from it. Nowhere to go but stay on this roof. He’d called Anderson to tell him to get out, get home, get down to Luz, and if you can’t get out, get in, anywhere with a door and walls. No answer; the police had shut down the network. Scared now. He’d done a locate on Anderson’s I-shades. The seek function was accurate to millimeters. The center of Anderson’s I-shades was resting eight centimeters above ground level. That is the height of the bridge of a nose of a head lying sideways on the street. That was how Emerson had found him, in a great dark lake of drying blood. He had looked so startled, so annoyed. The police tried to make him out to be a soldado. Outrage from the Cidade de Luz District Council forced an admisssion that Anderson had been caught in crossfire trying to find safety. It was as much as anyone could hope for. A platitude to add to the stumbling well-wishes of friends and neighbors. Words were not sufficient, so they resorted to platitudes, trusting that Dona Hortense and her five surviving sons would read the unsayable truth behind them. Sometimes only platitudes are enough.