Carlos’ Spanish was rusty. You wouldn’t think that would be possible, even; it was his mother tongue, the language of his cognitive categories. But here he was in a bodega in south Florida, struggling to pass the time of day while he ordered pupusas.
“Listen,” said the guy behind the counter, his big American gut resting on the surface, “I can speak English, don’t trouble yourself.” His wife smiled from where she was working the grill. Carlos gritted his teeth.
He hated Florida; had hated it when he first came here, all alligators and swamps, and he had not stopped hating it for five hundred years while every horror of the godawful place was successively conquered and supplanted by fresh horrors.
“Okay,” he said. Just give me the fucking pupusas, he didn’t say. He was stuck here for the next week, which was going to be one long party with people he’d been sick of for literally hundreds of years, and then he was going back to Jakarta, which was a different kind of insane tropical shithole but at least it was home, for the time being.
“You here on vacation?” The guy was still smiling, being friendly. His shop was the kind of locals-only place that made its day-to-day off of working people looking for a quick bite, and had the occasional windfall when some tourist magazine or website or whatever named it a Secret Hidden Treasure of Local Culture and for a season or two it wound up crowded with out-of-towners looking for the Authentic South Florida.
Carlos could tell them that the Authentic South Florida was a horror show of lethal wildlife, awful smells, and terrifying locals who would kill you as soon as look at you, but if they hadn’t figured that out by the time they left his saying it wouldn’t help. He smiled a forced smile as the guy took the pupusas from his wife and wrapped them up in waxed paper, shoved them in a bag.
He said his goodbyes and walked outside, thinking about Jakarta. He wasn’t going back to Jakarta, and it was time to be realistic about that. One of the reasons he was there in the first place was that Indonesia was still a relatively easy place to disappear from, and to take your money with you when you did. His money was in sixteen bank accounts, four safe deposit boxes, and three different hawaladars, to be picked up in three different cities around the world; working all that out had been a lot of work and would have been next to impossible somewhere like the United States or Europe.
He wondered how this was going to work in a future where everything was actually transparent, legal, taxed. Probably not that well, he thought. He’d have to resort to a scheme like Benito had set up, where he was his own uncle and father and granduncle in succession. Even that would start to break down when everybody used fingerprint scanners and DNA records, which was where Carlos saw the future going.
His wife in Jakarta would be fine, his kids would be fine, he’d left them enough money for college and a life of... well, maybe not luxury, but a life without a day job, with the opportunity to pursue goals that didn’t involve going into an office every day and working for someone else.
But it would be a life without him, because he was going to be someone new, somewhere else, at the end of the week.
It was like this every thirty years, but it didn’t ever get easy. He hadn’t had a five hundred year life, he’d had sixteen thirty-year lives, each begun in obscurity and labor and...
He sighed and climbed into his shitty little rental car, pulled back onto the freeway and aimed south. They were going to be pulling whatever heavy machinery Benito had rented into the yard in an hour, pulling that giant slab of granite off the well, and raising the first toast to Ponce, their leader, the first of the immortals to die, sweating out his life from a poisoned arrow in the thigh.
Fucking Florida.
“Listen,” said the guy behind the counter, his big American gut resting on the surface, “I can speak English, don’t trouble yourself.” His wife smiled from where she was working the grill. Carlos gritted his teeth.
He hated Florida; had hated it when he first came here, all alligators and swamps, and he had not stopped hating it for five hundred years while every horror of the godawful place was successively conquered and supplanted by fresh horrors.
“Okay,” he said. Just give me the fucking pupusas, he didn’t say. He was stuck here for the next week, which was going to be one long party with people he’d been sick of for literally hundreds of years, and then he was going back to Jakarta, which was a different kind of insane tropical shithole but at least it was home, for the time being.
“You here on vacation?” The guy was still smiling, being friendly. His shop was the kind of locals-only place that made its day-to-day off of working people looking for a quick bite, and had the occasional windfall when some tourist magazine or website or whatever named it a Secret Hidden Treasure of Local Culture and for a season or two it wound up crowded with out-of-towners looking for the Authentic South Florida.
Carlos could tell them that the Authentic South Florida was a horror show of lethal wildlife, awful smells, and terrifying locals who would kill you as soon as look at you, but if they hadn’t figured that out by the time they left his saying it wouldn’t help. He smiled a forced smile as the guy took the pupusas from his wife and wrapped them up in waxed paper, shoved them in a bag.
He said his goodbyes and walked outside, thinking about Jakarta. He wasn’t going back to Jakarta, and it was time to be realistic about that. One of the reasons he was there in the first place was that Indonesia was still a relatively easy place to disappear from, and to take your money with you when you did. His money was in sixteen bank accounts, four safe deposit boxes, and three different hawaladars, to be picked up in three different cities around the world; working all that out had been a lot of work and would have been next to impossible somewhere like the United States or Europe.
He wondered how this was going to work in a future where everything was actually transparent, legal, taxed. Probably not that well, he thought. He’d have to resort to a scheme like Benito had set up, where he was his own uncle and father and granduncle in succession. Even that would start to break down when everybody used fingerprint scanners and DNA records, which was where Carlos saw the future going.
His wife in Jakarta would be fine, his kids would be fine, he’d left them enough money for college and a life of... well, maybe not luxury, but a life without a day job, with the opportunity to pursue goals that didn’t involve going into an office every day and working for someone else.
But it would be a life without him, because he was going to be someone new, somewhere else, at the end of the week.
It was like this every thirty years, but it didn’t ever get easy. He hadn’t had a five hundred year life, he’d had sixteen thirty-year lives, each begun in obscurity and labor and...
He sighed and climbed into his shitty little rental car, pulled back onto the freeway and aimed south. They were going to be pulling whatever heavy machinery Benito had rented into the yard in an hour, pulling that giant slab of granite off the well, and raising the first toast to Ponce, their leader, the first of the immortals to die, sweating out his life from a poisoned arrow in the thigh.
Fucking Florida.
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