I do not know what happened next, but when I awoke there was an oxygen mask over my face. The steward told me I had fainted in the aisle, but that it was probably only exhaustion. I nodded lethargically, and went back to sleep.

When I awoke it was morning, and we were over the coast of Bahia. I fell back asleep and did not wake again until the wheels of the plane touched the runway in Rio. I retrieved my luggage from the carousel, bought a newspaper and café com leite, then exited the terminal to find a taxi.

I was soon stuck in the morning rush hour, overwhelmed by motion sickness from the stop-and-go traffic. I opened the windows to let in the fresh, humid, air, but was soon choked by the exhaust of whizzing motorbikes and diesel fumes from trucks. I was forced to close the window again, and curled up in the seat and closed my eyes in an attempt to keep from vomiting.

The driver, seeing me fidget, caught my eye the next time I looked ahead, and asked if I was okay. I told him the pollution was making me ill, and he suggested an alternate, if longer, route. I agreed and we pulled off the highway at the next exit. When he saw I had regained my composure, he began to re-create for me an argument he had had with his wife that morning. My Portuguese was limited to the superficial amount I could remember from a college class, combined with cognates from other Latin languages, which was perfect for his purposes, since it allowed me to follow the story only if I kept absolutely alert to what he was saying. He gleaned this, and smiled. He needed someone to hear him, so I listened as he filled the sealed interior with his woes.

We finally pulled up to the hotel, a boxy, glass-and-steelaffair from the seventies whose best days were well in the past. Its single charm was in being directly on the beach, with palm trees offering shade all around, beckoning optimistically.

When I went up to my room I found the interior as rundown as the exterior, but was pleased to discover I had a little balcony that opened to the sea. It was still early in the morning, and I opened both the double doors to let in the breeze, then lay down for a nap.

I had only just closed my eyes and started immediately to dream, when a banging at the door blasted me wide awake. From the ruckus in the hall I knew it was my friends, and opened the door to find Schoeller, Freddo, and Doc, who lifted me in a great bear hug. “There he is, in the cheapest goddamned room he could find,” Doc said, peeking around the room. “We are glad you came, but why are you so mean to yourself? You live once. Everything is available to you. Why not take it?”

“I flew right,” I said.

Doc had arrived in college after a stint in the Navy, where he was stationed in the Pacific doing intelligence. He had spent two years after that living with a tribe in Micronesia, until it was time for him to either take a wife or come back to the West and try to unify his experiences. After all of that he took school with a grain of salt, working hard enough to get into medical school, but not so hard that there was ever a Friday he did not skip classes to play golf. “Come on, let’s get this man to the beach,” he said to the others, after looking me over. “He needs a sun cure.”

They had been drinking since breakfast, and before I could change for the beach someone pushed a caipirinha into my hand. I went to get my swim trunks and bathing towel, and we headed down to Leblon.

It was nearly winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but still warm enough for the beaches to be packed, the tourists to be sunburned, and the homeless people to sleep out on the sidewalk. As we passed I gave a real to a mother begging with her child hitched against her hip, who was immediately harassed by the security guard from a nearby business, informing her she was begging too close to the entrance of a nearby mall. The way he spoke to her reminded me we were at the southern terminus of the old slave belt, whose northern edge was the Mason-Dixon line.

“You should let those people be,” Doc said to the guard: “Beggars are holy. They trust the universe to provide all they may need.”

“Maybe, but they’re bad for business,” Schoeller said.

The city was in the midst of a financial boom, and the air along the grand boulevard at the front of the hotel was charged with the thrill of new money vying against the anxiety of the old.

All of it melted at the shore into the democracy of the sea, along with my own worries. It was my first time in Rio, and the country felt like the New World in miniature, so much so that by noon, as we lunched at a beachfront café, I felt perfectly at ease with what to expect.

We retired for a siesta after lunch, and did not go out again until evening, when we had a lavish dinner atop Santa Teresa. After eating we piled into taxis, and Doc gave the driver an address across town. We drove out through the hills surrounding the city, past the outskirts of a ghetto, which looked like every other ghetto — kids too old for their age, premature sicknesses, somewhere to buy liquor, somewhere to play fútbol, a dancehall, no visible means of egress. I felt my earlier sense of division return, and began to watch everything from a remove, trying to decipher the society around me, until we eventually reached an industrial district, where we rolled two levels down a garage ramp, before stopping at a security gate.

Schoeller spoke into the camera at the gate, and the metal barrier receded into the ground, opening onto another ramp, which took us down a third level, where we were greeted by a doorman at a lavish, well-guarded marble entranceway, with a discreet sign above the door that said unironically, Cielo.

The manager came to the entrance to welcome us, and escorted us into a sumptuous room with a walk-in humidor and wine cellar stocked with mature wines and aged cigars. In the room next to it was a chef grilling aged Argentinean steak, and in a larger room, girls in every corner, each more beautiful than the last. The room was furnished with antiques modeled after the Topkapi Palace, with rare Persian carpets and Ottoman artifacts. Only the girls were young. Tall girls, short girls, thin girls, buxom girls. Sweet girls, ruthless girls, desperate girls, good girls who had lost all trace of innocence, cynical girls whose experience of it had ended before their childhoods. Black, white, Asian, indigenous, mestizo, octoroon, quadroon, cafuzo, castas, they only have names for in the local language, and others they just invented with the last people to get off the boat and had not named yet. Whatever you wanted, whatever your unvoiced fantasy, whatever moved through you, dancing together in groups, laughing and winking, as we toured that palace of vice.

“Bunga bunga,” Freddo said.

“Technically,” Doc corrected, “bunga bunga requires the presence of water.”

“Please,” Schoeller begged, “don’t be a fucking pedant tonight.”

“I can’t believe you are having your bachelor party here,” Freddo said. “You’re getting married.”

“And when I get married I will be married,” Schoeller answered. “I am not yet.”

“Do you mean you will give up places like this once you are married?” Doc pressed.

“No.”

“He’s not marrying for love. Should he also give up pleasure?”

“What are you marrying for then?”

“Because we share the same values, and are devoted to the same way of life.”

“That makes it okay?”

“Once I’m married, it will mean something different to come to places like this, is all I mean.” He was marked by resignation as he looked around.

“I don’t care that he’s lying to his wife,” Freddo protested. “I care that he’s flaunting it, and making all of us complicit in his lying.”

“Please shut up, Freddo.”

“I can’t be here,” Freddo protested.

“Why not?” Doc demanded. “You are not forced to do anything. What are you afraid of?”