Other Worlds Than These

don’t know how it works but all it needs is to be a random Russian roulette device. You stand in front of the gun and then you say, all right Miss Hottie, start the process and record what you see. The quantum device spins the gun at random and fires. Click. Nothing happens. And again: click. Nothing happens. And a third time, click. You’re still alive. Miss Hottie notes it down. Round four. The quantum device spins the chamber and fires. Oh my God! screams Miss Hottie as you take one right smack between the eyes and go down dead as dead can be.”

“Correct me if my quantum theory is flawed, my friend, but this sounds more like a quantum suicide device than an immortality theory.”

“Not so fast. Round four, other point of view. The quantum thingie spins the barrel and fires. And where Miss Hottie sees the back of your head come off, all you hear is another click. Empty chamber.”

At the lights a lad skinny as want waves his windshield squeegee at us. I wave him away.

“Explain.”

“Well, I don’t understand it but Captain Spooky did and according to him it was this. Now, he was very drunk at the time, but every time the quantum thingie spins the barrel, it divides the multiverse into two sets of universes, one in which you live and one in which you die.”

“I’m keeping up so far.”

“And the next time it spins, that set of universes where you live on takes another hit: a subset where you live, another where you die.”

“This is basic probability. Anyone who’s ever put a bet on will get this. The odds get shorter all the time whether it’s dice or Captain Spooky’s parallel universes.”

“Absolutely, but no matter how many times the gun fires, there will always be a universe where you live.”

I consider that as we pass a group of Pentecostals dressed in respectable whites holding some evangelical praise-service in a bus shelter.

“But in the one that really matters you’re dead,” I say.

“Now here comes the spooky bit. Those universes where the gun fires, you’ve no awareness of them. You’re dead. The only realities which exist for you are the ones in which the gun hits the empty chamber and you live. You can’t perceive your own death. So the quantum trigger runs on and the gun barrel spins and goes click click click. And it will keep going click click how ever long you stand there, because you must always survive to perceive those realities.”

We’re at a light again. A crente waves a badly printed tract at us. I wave him away too. I’m getting that coldness in my balls, the clench of the alien.

“But what about Miss Hottie? She saw you die in front of the gun.”

“Ah, but that’s her perception, isn’t it? From your perception you’re immortal. No matter what happens, a miracle will always save you. You’ll never be in that fatal car crash or get into that mugging. If you get cancer, they’ll find a cure. If you get Alzheimer’s, they’ll work something out. When you’re so old they have to feed you soup and hold your dick to pee, they’ll find some way to make you twenty-five again and hung like a horse. Because only you can perceive those universes where you exist. You’ll be there at the fucking end of time. It’ll be you and God.”

I shiver again but it’s not quantum chill. It’s the deeper darker cold of mortality and the futility of any hope against it; Captain Spooky’s insane theories or the promise of a street corner evangelical tract. I say,

“I can see how this chimes with your gestalt theory, mate. But it didn’t work for him, did it?”

“He’d say that we’re seeing from our own point of view. We’re the Miss Hotties. From his point-of-view, it was just a little twinge, a little trapped wind, a quick burp and he’s fine.”

“There’s a big difference between a quantum Russian roulette machine and a dicky ticker.”

“Yeah but he reckoned everything was quantum, all the way up, the only reason we couldn’t see it was because our minds were all just aspects of that universal quantum computer he used to play with.”

We’ve arrived at my apartment. The beach is two blocks down, lines of gold and blue like the design on a 1930s cigarette packet. I hate the beach, I don’t do beaches but today in my going-to-funerals suit and too-tight tie it looks like heaven,

“The Captain surely did have a theory for everything,” I say.

“That I think was the idea,” Marcelo says.

“You got your check-up booked?” I ask stepping out of the car.

“The earliest I could get was Friday,” Marcelo says. “You?”

“Next Monday. It does kind of make you sit and look after yourself.” I close the car door.

And I go to the beach. I slop along the hot hot white sand in my sober suit, grit filling my shoes. There are gorgeous people here, playing beach volleyball, futvolley, roller-blading along the sidewalk. There are boats in the marina and stalls for beer and caipis and men fishing and old men just staring out across the bay, their leather skins knuckled with melanomas. I’m listening to Pretty Petty Thieves. Sun and shade, alegria and saudade, joy and melancholy; that has always been our music. The final track plays: [a ghost samba]. Those ghost worlds are real, the guitar and cello, the whispered vocals say. We come from there. Among those parallel universes the Captain is in a tutorial with his good-looking students, reading at his desk with his trademark small coffee, exploring those other worlds and other lives on that magical computer. He’ll never know about those worlds where his heart stops dead and drops him to the floor of his favourite per-kilo restaurant. There’s a dark truth buried in Captain Spooky’s vision of himself stepping forward to the end of the universe, one that makes this bright day and its people look as false and insubstantial as carnaval costumes. Around us others die, by age or disease or accident, but we live on. Little by little we lose everything and everyone. Every one of us is alone in our own little universe of ourselves.

I stop dead, a mad man in a dark suit on a blazing beach, and watch a TAM shuttle lift off from Santos Dumont. The compulsion, formed in an instant, possesses me. I must know if the Captain’s Pretty Petty Thieves is the one my Seu Alejandro intended. Certainty is impossible—that’s as true in pop music as quantum theory—but I can find hints and intimations. There is still room for faith. I trudge up between the brown volley-boys on to the sidewalk. I sit on a bench and empty the sand out of my lace-ups.

If in another life—another universe—I had to be a favelado, I think it would be in Vila Canoas. It’s small and green and folded in on itself so that streets and alleys can cross each other several times. There’s an underground river. Police and taxi drivers eat in the diner on the corner. They always know where the good food is. There’s even a neat little backpacker hostel. I’ve never got that sense of perpetual tension I feel in big sister Rocinha around the mountain; as if the whole city on a hill might break lose and slide into the sea like an avalanche, sweeping the rich of Barra de Tijuca before it.

So, I’m a cosy middle-class music hack who doesn’t know any speak of the street or the signs and ways you need to know to live as a Vila Canoista and not a tourist and I wouldn’t last more than two nights in this place without killing or being killed. But I like the circle of forested mountains and the lap of sea. I like the way the clouds catch around Sao Conrado Mountain. Hang-gliders circle through the mist up there like hawks. On the intersection at the cafe a youth painstakingly welds an old Toyota pick-up, his gun wired into the streetlight. I turn off into the shadowed alleys between the leaning buildings, overhung by ramshackle balconies and washing. There is the studio, rebuilt and now a DJ school. I remembered it burned, I remember the yellow walls smoke-stained and the green paint peeled away, the windows and doors empty and eyeless. Vila Canoas was a pilgrimage site for a time. I was one of many who laid flowers and set candles and plastic virgins, Flamengo shirts and thongs to the Seu. I feel the hard drive in the breast pocket of my jacket grown heavy and warm. There’s a second Pretty Petty Thief in it; the ghost Captain Spooky found on the shores of the multiverse.

The bar across the alley is changeless, a brick counter built into the under-hang beneath an apartment house, a bench seat set into the opposite wall. The television blares some Canal Quatro reality shit, the usual malandros loll around with Antarcticas, one in green with an attempted moustache, one in yellow with a smart light in his eye, one in white who thinks he rules. They nod when I greet them.

“I wonder if you could help me; does the Dona Severino de Araujo still live round here?”

The barman steps back to better regard me. His bar is the width of a street.

“I don’t know who you mean.”

I introduce myself. “The music journalist? I have a column in Copa News.” Looks, head-shakes, shrugs. “I do a radio programme on Saturday afternoons. The history of MPB?”