Fat Tuesday
Ian McDonald
 
 
Not only was Ian McDonald one of the first of a new generation of British SF 
writers to break into print in the eighties, he did it in the USA. After 
publishing several highly acclaimed short stories in Isaac Asimovs Science 
Fiction Magazine and being nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best 
New Writer of 1985, he published his first novel, Desolation Road, and a 
collection of short fictions, Empire Dreams, in 1988. Three more novels have 
followed, the latest being Hearts, Hands and Voices. At present hes working on 
something called Necroville, but whether that has to do with the fact that he 
lives in Belfast isnt apparent. If anything, as with Van Morrison, Belfast 
inspires McDonalds lyrical fictions, notable for their density of ideas and 
exuberant characters and prose, which in Fat Tuesday find an ideal marriage of 
form and content. 
 
McDonald tells us:
 
Id like to say it happened like this:
 
Six fifteen. Pressing buttons on the remote control.
 
Channel one: the child killers of Rio are abroad in the hills again.
 
Channel two: dance energy, some Harlem kid pulling incredible rhythms out of a 
plastic bucket.
 
Channel three: ladeezlgennelmenlboys n girls: life in the Lycra Age!
 
Channel four: the great white guitar thrash fetish.
 
Remix is the dominant popular culture form of these last two decades of the 
twentieth century.
 
Except - it didnt. Quite.
 
* * * *
 
Black Sunday
 
      S
ambada: musical composition in 2/4 rhythm characterised by massed drumming, 
remixed sampled material and extended electric guitar improvisation.
 
Also: sambada: a popular dance originating from the conurbations of Alto 
California province, to the above-mentioned musical composition, especially as 
performed during the annual pre-Lenten carnival.
 
Also: sambada: a social gathering at which sambada is danced and performed.
 
Sambada school: a collection of individuals, usually of one shanty district (see 
cabaa) incorporating musicians, dancers, costume designers, etc. who represent 
their district in the carnival parade and sambada competition.
 
sambadero(a): a man or woman wise in the ways of sambada.
 
* * * *
 
Run, Annunciato
 
Do not doubt they are behind you, pouring down the steep alleys of Birimbao 
Hill. Do not doubt that theirs are the voices whooping and cheering, theirs the 
wolf cries and the laughter like whips, echoing among the shanties and favelas. 
Do not doubt that theirs is the batteria surging through the trash streets and 
dirt squares, drums beating beating you from wherever you try to hide. And never 
for one instant imagine that they will ever give up until they catch you and 
kill you. For they are the Lobos de Sangre, and no wolf will abandon the chase 
until it has tasted blood.
 
Grasped in Annunciatos right hand, the glass guitar gently bleeds.
 
Thoughts of escape, Annunciato? That maybe if you can reach the boulevard you 
will be able to lose them among the holographic saints and neon madonnas and 
videowall advertisements for Coke and Sony and cannbarillos? Prayers, 
Annunciato? Oh Mary, dazzle them with your neon halo, oh gay St Sebastian, send 
your laser arrows into their eyes?
 
Better to run, Annunciato. The freeway has new gods now, new deities born out of 
the media remix. They are gauche and inexpert, but enthusiastic.
 
Nissans and Toyotas cut smoking rubber hexagrams into the blacktop as Annunciato 
and his glass guitar weave between the bumper-to-bumpers crowding the five lanes 
inbound and five lanes outbound: Hey boy you tired of living, stupid favelado, 
cabaero you want to mash yourself all over my hood ornaments I am only too 
happy to oblige you where he steal that guitar from anywhereplacehow? Oaths and 
imprecations cease as the Lobos come loping through the gridlock slapping out 
the rhythm of the hunt on spray-customised hoods, leaping from fender to fender 
to fender, leering in at the Valley Girls in six centimetre heels and 
hi-thi-leos and wrap-round teleshades.
 
In some off-avenue back alley overseen by videowall Marys, he stops to listen if 
they are still behind him.
 
Oh yes, Annunciato. Most definitely, Annunciato.
 
The roar of engines is like a steel-capped boot in the stomach. The lowriders 
come revving along the alleyways, Lobos hungry, eager, riding on doors and 
roofs, beating out their hunting song on hot-shopped Toyota steel. Sparks scream 
back from their scratch plates.
 
Reconcile your soul with the saints of the boulevard.
 
And the big hoload for Diet-Coke on the side of the National Lottery Office 
says: ANNUNCIATO.
 
The name, tastefully iconised in spray-can platinums and razor blues, tumbles 
away through holospace. The spotlights of the Lobos pin and pluck you naked as 
one of the chickens Madre Amparo takes to the shrine of St Anthony. The back 
streets off St Dominics Preview are loud with the whisper click of 
switchblades.
 
TRUST ME. I WILL PROTECT YOU.
 
Lasers sear the night. Brave, bold howling Lobos fall back swearing screaming 
clutching burns gashes scars. A new ingredient in the city perfume of sweat, 
shit, smoke and semen: scorched flesh. Glass guitar in hand, Annunciato is safe 
behind a wall of flickering laserlight.
 
A miracle.
 
STAY HERE. SOMEONE WILL COME TO HELP YOU, says the hoload.
 
What who why how? says dazed and confused Annunciato.
 
The big BVM videowall on the Credit and Loan fills with starry starry night. A 
pair of strawberry luscious lips rezz up on the startrek sky. Fruit comes 
tumbling out of the mind of the Coca-Cola Companys videographics computer; 
bananas, pineapples, oranges, guava, mango, piled up like Mr Socks stall in 
Birimbao Plaza. A womans face fills in behind the lips, beneath the 
tutti-frutti hat. Blessed Virgin Mary was never like this.
 
LA MIRANDA, says the videowall as, with a wink and a smile, the woman fades into 
the Alto California night. Los Lobos howl and smash the big chrome wrenches that 
are their ritual weapons against the oily concrete. But the lasers hold them.
 
A light. And a voice. A womans voice. Flashlight beams, a vision, riding down 
on an extending fire escape out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 
U-Bend-We-Mend. Silver lam from the peak of her baseball cap to the tips of her 
boots, a jingle-jangle of ripped-off hood ornaments around her neck, the Six 
Mystic Stars of Subaru.
 
Angel of mercy, and, incredible of incredibles, white.
 
Annunciato thought they had all died out in their rotting haciendas and Tudor 
mansionettes years ago.
 
You come now, right now, she says. Her Angeleo is appalling. Right now, you 
come. La Miranda, she cannot go on drawing this much power from the grid for 
long time. Catholic engineers come, shut her down. So you come, come now. He 
reaches toward the pure white hand and is drawn up into heaven. Over rooftops, 
she leads him, through forests of aerials and satellite dishes, past cooling 
towers and rotary clotheslines and coiling serpentine airco ducts, across 
rooftop marijuana gardens and coca plantations, leaping through the yawning dark 
over deep dark alleys while the never-ending stream of taillights winds and 
wends beneath them and the Lobos, released from luminous imprisonment, go loping 
along the shining sidewalks, howling at the grapefruit moon. And the glass 
guitar drips a trail of minims and crochets like the silver slime of a night 
snail on the side of the basilica of Santa Barbara.
 
Down. Now.
 
The big jacked-up mauve and yellow 4X4 is circling, growling in the parking lot 
of Seor Barato All-Nite super-mart like a bull in the ring, pawing at the 
piss-stained concrete with its monster balloon tyres. The Lobos, war drums 
a-swinging, arrive in a wave of uniform pink and green as Annunciato and the 
angel drop from the swinging end of the fire escape and hit the ground.
 
In, in. The driver is an old old black man - more incredible even than the 
silver lam angel - already gunning the accelerator, tyres smoking on the 
concrete. In! Doors slam.
 
Caution, caution, your seatbelt is not properly engaged, please engage your 
seatbelt, says a made-in-Yokohama chip-generated conscience. Lowriders slam to 
a halt beneath Seor Baratos flashing sign. Grinning and gabbling like a loco, 
the old black man throws the beast into four-wheel drive and up they go on those 
big monster wheels right over the tops of the lowriders and out into the neon 
and smog of the boulevard.
 
* * * *
 
Porque?
 
Because on this Black Sunday night Annunciato killed a Blood Wolf with a glass 
guitar.
 
The sambadrome had been jumping. Word is up, compadres. Tonight tonight tonight 
is the big Play-Off. Tonight the last two guitarristos do battle to the beat of 
hip-slung drum and mixing desk for the glory glory hallelujah of leading all 
Birimbao Hill on Fat Tuesday.
 
Yelping and blowing football whistles, his brother LionsaJudah had carried him 
shoulder high down the precipitous paths of the favela, this boy from nowhere 
who had swept the wing play-offs with his glass guitar. Have you not heard? 
Tonight tonight tonight the red gold and green of Judah will smash the pink and 
green of the Lobos.
 
As the rival guitarristos were borne into the sambadrome, the batteria had 
struck up, those aristocrats of rhythm, drumming up an avalanche of sound that 
seemed to sweep all Birimbao down before it into the valley. And the remixados 
in their baseball caps with the correct corporate logos and their hi-tops and 
cycle shorts had spun and scratched and sweated and mixed and mastered. And the 
sambaderos in their Famous Names sportswear, the sambaderas in their leos and 
body-paint had spilled onto the floor, shaking it strutting it slapping it 
stuffing it shrieking it ai ai ai ai.
 
He had been good, the Blood Wolves guitarristo. Had he not been, he might have 
lived. But as the guitars up on their speaker towers clashed and tangled in 
fugues and counterpoints, he had felt a spirit awaken in the glass guitar, that 
same spirit that had called to him that morning when this Annunciato, sixth son 
of a sixth son, glimpsed that gleam of glass in a Birimbao trash heap, a spirit 
growing stronger, stronger than Annunciato could hold, something that fed on the 
sweat and the stink and the shatter of drums and one by one the dancers and the 
remixados and even the batteria stopped to watch and the only sound beneath the 
sambadromes corrugated iron roof was the unbearable feedback howl of the glass 
guitar on and on and on and on and on and on and on like the scream of every 
child that was ever born in the street and the scream of every soul that ever 
fell to a blade in a cabaa alley and the scream of every sambadera in the ear 
of her sambadero as she gave it away in the rear seat of a hot-wired Nissan in 
the back rank of the drive-in and the music seized the Lobos guitarristo and 
burned his soul away to nothing and he toppled from the speaker tower with smoke 
coming from his eyes and then they all screamed with one voice and heart and 
soul.
 
One chord. That is all the difference there is between hero and monster.
 
* * * *
 
Blue Monday
 
Sambada por mujeros.
 
Everything is crucially dependent on the T and A zones. Yah, you got it. Tits 
and Ass.
 
The T Zone. You got a mirror? Then get a mirror. Strip off. Yes, everything. All 
you going to be wearing come Fat Tuesday is gloves and boots and black velvet 
G-string. The Five of Spades look. Cellulite? No worries, there will always be 
someone worse off than you. Roll your shoulders; left, then right. The idea is 
to get each breast to describe its own separate, complementary orbit.
 
The A Zone. As above, but with hips rather than shoulders, and - here is the bit 
that marks the true street sambadera from the exhibitionists in from the suburbs 
or up from the projects - the A zone has to work in contra-rotation to the T 
Zone. They reckon it takes half a year just to get the basic rhythm. When you 
can give the impression you are having an orgasm sitting on top of a 
thousand-speed spin washing machine, you are close. It helps if you smile. 
Anything that makes you feel more confident wiggling your T and A in front of 
several million spectators and eleven satellite channels while dressed in a 
postage stamp on a piece of elastic has got to help.
 
* * * *
 
Her name is RosaJericho.
 
She is an apostle of the Tucuromb.
 
They are members of a kairis.
 
A kairis is a group of (usually) four individuals who may, or may not, 
previously know each other, called together by the Tucuromb to achieve some 
divinely ordained purpose.
 
The purpose of this kairis is to find a guitarristo to lead the Tres Milagros 
parade, the theme of which this year is the New Gods.
 
The Tucuromb, of whom this La Miranda who saved Annunciate from the Lobos is a 
member, are the new gods.
 
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Kid Annunciatos head is spinning. He is only a 
malnourished undereducated favela boy, after all.
 
RosaJericho lives with the old black man, who is known as El Batador, in a 
house on Tres Milagros Hill. They do not sleep with each other. Annunciato has 
heard of Tres Milagros Hill. Most people in this city have heard of Tres 
Milagros Hill, the one with the big white letters on top of it that no one can 
understand, the one where all the weirds, and freaks, and devos, and teevees go 
to be weird and freaky and devo-ish and dress up or dress down together. Tres 
Milagros have won the golden Bell of St James five times in the past ten years 
under the leadership of their director, the fabled La Baiana.
 
And they want Annunciato to be chief guitarristo? HeesusHosMaria . . .
 
RosaJericho is the remixado. She lives on a mattress amid piles of rotting 
Chinese food cartons in a room stacked to the ceiling with silver and black 
boxes bearing the logos of Pacific Rim corporations. The only light is that of 
LEDs and crystal displays.
 
No vinyl, no spiral, no scratch, she says. Happening world is my found 
source. The pockets of her silver lam suit contain DATcorders from which she 
remixes the sound of the city into her music.
 
The aged aged black man makes food. Guitarristos are always hungry. It is good 
for the music. While Annunciato pokes rice and beans and a little chopped 
synthetic meat into his face, El Batador tells him about the Tucuromb.
 
They are gods. Real gods. Street gods. Patterns of alien intelligence stirred 
out of the informational minestrone of the Pacific Rim computer cores and 
seasoned with Catholic hagiolatry; favela myth and superstition; silver screen 
iconography; the symbolism of candombl, umbanda, vodun, Rosicrucianism and 
mass-market Buddhism; emergent myths of the global data nets; night-hawk radio 
heroes, rocknsoul legends. They have quite a following on Tres Milagros and in 
some of the big projects and arcosantis. Gods of the remix.
 
Though it was Seu Guantanamera had been watching you, calling you, chose you for 
the kairis, says the old black man, it was La Miranda, the oldest and 
strongest of the Tucuromb, traced you through the traffic control cameras down 
on the boulevard and called us. These are gods of the public telephone and the 
traffic signal. They are strong, young, eager. They do not ask of their 
disciples renounce the world, the flesh and the devil, they ask and what have 
you done for me lately?
 
Ogun D is the old black mans particular patron. Conceived in the 
informational shatter of a Mundo Tercero terror groupings viral attack on the 
military systems, he oversees all things dynamic and rhythmic. Arcologies, 
freeways, ionocruisers, carnival fireworks, heavy rains, fire, fighting, team 
sports, all these fall into his bailiwick. He is Master of Rhythm. He is Lord of 
the Drums. His avatar, rezzed up on Sendai-Nihon wristie-vision, is a stealth 
bomber in Gothic spiked armour.
 
San BuriSan is a rotating icosahedron of Japanese theatre masks, persona of 
change and evolution. Bottle banks and carcrushers are his, his also 
adolescence, plastic, birthdays, editing desks and lasers. Born one 
cherry-blossom morning in the transfinite complexity of the Pacific Rim stock 
exchange cores, he is King Scratch, Master Remix.
 
Seu Guantanamera, the one who, if this crazy old black man can be believed, if 
anything that has happened these past twentysomething hours can be believed, is 
the personal guardian and guide of Annunciato and his glass guitar. He is Master 
of Harmony, Completer and Sustainer of the quadrilateral of entities; his source 
and symbol is a glass guitar.
 
El Batador reverently picks up the Glass Guitar, wipes the scabs of dried music 
from its wounds, hands it to RosaJericho, who shakes her silver head - she 
cannot understand anything that is itself, not made from other things remixed 
together - passes it back to Annunciato, like some sacramental ganja. His 
fingers come and go, come and go, up and down the silent frets.
 
Back in the time of the Black Star Liner, says El Batador, when the black 
people left for Ethiopia on that ship that was three miles long and two miles 
wide and a mile high that sailed for forty years through every ocean in the 
world, back then lived the greatest guitarist ever laid finger to fret. Bar 
none. Seu Guantanamera. With those six strings he could make you cry and laugh 
and die and feel like you had seen the face of God or something even better. 
People said he was God, or something better, and they would have made him God if 
he had let them, but he died trying out a new guitar, a guitar like there had 
never been before. Made of glass, it was. Clear pure and perfect crystal. And it 
killed him. An accident with the electronics. The circuitry went live. He died 
instantly, up on stage in front of twenty thousand people, in mid chord.
 
And then the legends started. Legends that his soul had passed into the glass 
guitar, that whoever bought it would have no luck with it until it passed into 
the hands of someone who had as much, or more, talent than Seu Guantanamera, 
legends that when the time was right the trapped soul would be released.
 
And as the old black man says those words, Annunciato, who has been thinking, 
yo, yo, ga, ga, suddenly feels the strings hum beneath his fingers, like 
electricity like summer lightning in the hills. And he is much much afraid.
 
Tell me, says El Batador, and it is as if all Tres Milagros Hill right up to 
those crazy letters on the top is listening for Annunciatos answer, Tell me, 
how did you find it?
 
On a trash heap, says Annunciato, on Birimbao Hill. One morning, I went out, 
and there it was. It didnt look like it was anybodys. I taught myself to play, 
day in, day out, every hour I could spare, I practised, so I could be like the 
big guitarristos, better, even. But as he says these words, he understands that 
they are true, and at the same time not true. They should be reversed, It found 
Him, It taught Him. It made Him the best. There had always been a sense of the 
hand of the angels about it, from the moment he saw it twinkling from the shit 
and foam styrene burger boxes that bright Birimbao morning.
 
* * * *
 
Sambada por hombres.
 
You got it easier. You only got one zone to worry about. From the waist up you 
might as well be foam polystyrene. From the waist down you got to be hotter than 
Mama Marilenas hot salsa. So start today. You want ten-, twelve-, 
fourteen-year-old boys to out-sambada you?
 
First, the stance. Feet apart, shoulder width. Now, bend back from the knees. 
Back. Back. Are you making a thirty degree angle with the ground? Thats all 
right. Next, clench the cheeks of your ass. Tight. You should be able to carry 
an Amex card between them all the way from the sambadrome down to the Square of 
the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels where the judging is held. Once you can 
do that you are ready for the grind. Swivel your pelvis, left hip up, round in a 
circle, back, then your right hip so that your groin - the entire focal point of 
sambada - is going round and round like an aeroplane propeller. When your RPM 
equals your degree of inclination away from vertical, you are muy sambadero. But 
do not forget: dignity. You got to have dignity, or the boys will laugh. You got 
to be cooler than a bottle of Dos Equis in a tin tub full of ice.
 
* * * *
 
La Baiana: is: twenty-two stone of fun wedged into leopard-print lycra, falsies 
jutting like the Guns of Navarone, little troublesome moustache line virtually 
invisible beneath a stucco of powder and rouge. Rei de Las Reims, carnivalado of 
carnivalados, the designers designer. There was never as titanic an old Queen 
as La Baiana. From his throne of hammered flat Heineken cans in Tres Milagros 
sambadrome, guarded by Playa Venecia body-shop musculados, he purses persimmon 
lips as radiantly beautiful young teevees parade past, wiggling it, jiggling it, 
pouting and preening and prinking, pausing in front of La Baiana for that little 
turn, that little shake of the tushie.
 
He choosing teevees, says RosaJericho. Tres Milagros much much famous for 
quality of transvestites. Big honour, be chosen by La Baiana to march in 
Tucuromb parade.
 
But the big carnival queen has seen his fellow kairisados and claps his 
be-ringed hands.
 
Out girls, out. Back at nineteen and then we shall see who wins the prize. He 
leans forward in his throne, peers at Annunciato like he is a turd sticking to a 
shower curtain. La Miranda saves this piece of ass to be our guitarristo? This 
is Seu Guantanamera come again?
 
Annunciato, with the unerring cabaero talent for the gratuitous move, lifts the 
glass guitar above his head in both hands, strikes a groin-jutting sambadero 
pose.
 
I got his guitar.
 
I got a crucifix, but that doesnt make me Jesus, says La Baiana. But you can 
see he is just the littlest, tiniest, poco bit impressed. He indicates the wall 
of banked-up amps speakers bins drivers mixers decks behind his throne. Let 
the sambada decide. Yo! El Batador!
 
Rhythm answers. Complex, sinuous, muscular, many-layered rhythm that strikes 
into the heart and finds its resonant frequency. El Batador is seated on an 
empty beer-crate drumming on an upturned plastic bucket, lifting the rim and 
slapping it against the pounded clay of the sambadrome with his boney feet in 
counterpoint.
 
Q: How many men does it take to fill a sambadrome with one plastic bucket?
 
A: One, but he must be muy muy sambadero.
 
HeesusHosMaria, Annunciato has been waiting all his short life to play with 
musicians of this calibre. This old black man, he makes the massed batterias of 
all Birimbao Hill sound like kids kicking rhythms out of the bus stops with 
disposable chopsticks. Annunciato picks up the beat: Baile Mi Hermana, one of 
the standards, easy to play badly, hard to play good. He will show this fat 
transvestite carnivalado. If they are gods, these spirits in the computers, he 
will be worthy of them. He plays the theme high and pure and holy and 
RosaJericho behind her deck comes in on a wave of samples as he breaks into 
improvisations. And it lifts. It soars. It takes off and heads from the Van 
Allen belts. It screams, high and holy and hot hot hot and the cabaa bums and 
malandros are standing two four six eight deep around the concrete-block walls 
mouths open eyes popping what kinda merda this and Annunciato feels the thing in 
the guitar awaken and open like a moonflower blooming and he looks inside and 
sees ...
 
Ai ai ai ai, shouts La Baiana dancing on his throne. Enough enough enough 
enough. I believe you, I believe you. And one of his body-boys throws the 
master isolator and it all fails, it all falls, it all fades and comes apart and 
Annunciato, soaked with sweat, feels like a crashed angel.
 
Hot dog, jumpin frog, says RosaJericho. Muy guitarristo! Seu 
Guantanamera! She kisses him on the mouth. She tastes of pork, like white women 
are supposed to.
 
* * * *
 
Crackin bottles, yabba yabba; long-necks from a tin bath full of ice up at La 
Baianas place, which is cool and airy and has ceiling fans which Annunciato has 
only ever seen on television and lots of things in terracotta pots on the patio 
and is built into the third O of the letters of the hill.
 
Bosque de los Acebos, that is what it means, RosaJericho tells Annunciato, 
which means nothing at all to him.
 
Used to make movies here, way way long back before the Treaty of Albuquerque, 
says La Baiana, sweating like a pig developing little five oclock shadow 
problemo vicinity upper lip. Legend is, if you go down, way down, way down low, 
whole damn city is built on a can of film a hundred kilometres across.
 
Merda, says RosaJericho. Is city built on rocknroll. Bossanova. Blues. 
Soul. Samba. Sambada. Is electric guitar is way down low, down deep deep deep. 
Great guitar hundred kilometres long, and when great guitar finally plays, world 
ends, everything remixed and remade.
 
Yo yo, rocknroll, says La Baiana, belching gently.
 
* * * *
 
Fat Tuesday
 
Sambada por gringos.
 
Tragic. You see them, these fat women in shades and hi-thi leotards, these 
Japanese boys with all the correct corporate logos and hood ornaments you know 
they have bought at the airport and these norte intellectuals down by the 
planeload from Vancouver and Medicine Hat because the carnival is the Last Great 
Celebration of Folk Culture, trying to shake it shake it shake it to the drums 
and the deck and, I tell you, it makes me want to cry. Like watching something 
crawled from under a stone running away from the light. Sambada for gringos? 
Forget it. You do not have the street.
 
Please God, dont let it rain today.
 
In every cabaa, in every slum and favela, on every hill, they have been up 
since dawn, those who have been to bed (their own, anyone elses) perming hair 
waxing bikini lines slipping/wedging into feathery flowery leathery rubbery 
silvery goldy costumes checking the T and A zones in front of the mirror 
worrying about lip gloss powder paint running in heels through the shit and mud 
for the bus to take them to the assembly point where directors high as comsats 
on dexxies mescalin and nervous energy marshal floats, batterias, vast mobile 
sound stages for the guitarristos and remixados like launch platforms for 
interstellar expeditions, regiments of bare-cheeked sambaderas bitching about 
the cellulite levels of their opponents gleaming rumps; phalanxes of 
hung-over, battle-scarred sambaderos in shell-suits and baseball caps of the 
requisite colours into some semblance of a procession.
 
Down on the freeway at the foot of Tres Milagros, La Baiana, dressed in lace 
tutu and Herman Goering white with campy upswept bikers cap, issues orders 
through a loud-hailer from the back of El Batadors pick-up.
 
Primero: a dancing wing of two hundred teevees.
 
Segundo: four floats each bearing the glass-fibre likenesses of the Tucuromb: 
La Miranda first, with body-painted acolytes throwing real fruit to the 
audience; then Ogun D with his bodyguard of Tres Milagros bloods in black 
spiked rubber demon suits, then San BuriSan on a videowall of one hundred 
televisions donated by a variety of Pacific Rim electronics companies; last Seu 
Guantanamera accompanied by strolling mariachi musicians and girls dressed as 
lightning bolts.
 
Tercero: the batteria, made up of dockers from Drowntown and construction 
workers from the new Todos Santos arcosanti over by Poco Venecia - during the 
marching season, drumming in the lunch-hour ousts even football - all dressed in 
mauve and yellow and led by El Batador himself, as he has led them every year 
for the past twenty-five years.
 
Cuarto: the mobile sound-stage borne on the backs of three tank transporters 
(some general down in Chihuahua owed La Baiana, but what he was not prepared to 
say); complete with sound system lighting rig FX backing musicians and roadies 
in mauve and yellow. Here Annunciato and RosaJericho will amaze the city.
 
Quinto: two hundred maidens dancing.
 
Sexto: two hundred lords of the cabaas a-leaping.
 
Septimo: a wedge of open-topped bunting-and-flower decorated cars in which the 
sambaderos and sambaderas of former days, too old now to dance all the way to 
the square of Our Lady of the Angels, ride in honour and splendour, decked with 
synthetic feathers and often wearing ludicrously decorated glasses.
 
Octavo: a rearguard of assorted devos freakos pervos rubberboys leatherboys 
bike-fetishists SM enthusiasts etc. etc.
 
El Batador is already sounding time on his plastic bucket tucked under his arm, 
crazy old black man. Annunciato is scared three kinds of excretaless, only 
RosaJericho looks like she knows what she is doing. Her silver lam suit is 
covered in clip-on microphones wired into a transmitter in the small of her back 
and beaming tight and righteous into her sampledeck. No recordings, no found 
sources; this Fat Tuesday her source is her city and she mixes in real-time the 
sounds and music of carnival itself, snitched and snatched and crammed rammed 
jammed through her mixing desk.
 
La Baiana takes his position in the gilded cupola at the back of the portable 
sound-stage, looks to make sure everything is ready. Which of course it isnt 
but if you waited until it was you would never get anywhere.
 
Okay, my little chikadees. He slips a Little Thunderer between his ice-cream 
pink lips, blows a mighty blast that sets even the letters up on the hill 
reverberating. Lets go!
 
Last census Alto California had a population in the region of thirty-five 
million people. Looks like every last one of them, plus eleven satellite 
channels, turned out this Fat Tuesday. The streets are canyons of sound and 
colour, cheering voices, whistles, banners, streamers, balloons with the faces 
of cartoon characters and football stars on them; it is high, high stuff, higher 
than anything they ever sold in zip-loc plastic sachets back of Mr Socks stall 
on Birimbao Plaza and the Glass Guitar snorts it down its f-holes and it burns 
along the strings up Annunciatos fingers and it is just the edge, the promise 
of a wildness that could be if he is brave enough and RosaJericho takes up the 
roar of the crowd and the beating of the bells and the cymbals and slams them 
through her processors and La Baiana is jigging and clapping his hands like he 
is in heaven and now the canyon walls of the business district close in around 
you and funnel Tres Milagros into the massive procession twenty kilometres long 
that is Carnival, a torrent of life and sound and colour and music channelled 
between the twenty thirty forty fifty storey high videowalls of the big Pacific 
Rim corporadas and the people crowded twenty thirty forty fifty deep along the 
boulevards are so close so pressing the sound of them is like a physical 
presence and RosaJericho scoops it up and takes it apart and puts it back 
together again and the glass guitar snorts it down and sends it burning up 
through your fingers into your brain and you see with a sudden new light like 
the dawn slanting through the windows of Our Lady Star of the Sea mission 
between the end of one note and the next what it is that lies hidden within the 
moonflower heart of the Glass Guitar, it is every great moment you ever had 
listening to the radio in the heat of the night, it is dancing in the rain to 
sound of accapella, it is rhinestone guitars playin live from Las Vegas on the 
Sunday night satellite channels, all these and more, every great and true and 
holy and profane moment whether you call it rocknroll or soul or bossanova or 
blues or sambada and he realises now what he is to do, he is not to hold it 
back, that was where he went wrong that time in the Birimbao sambadrome, that 
was why the boy was killed, because he held back and it struck out to be free, 
struck out blindly, in anger and hurt; he opens himself to the thing in the 
guitar, draws it up into the heart of him and he screams and the guitar screams 
as his eyes are opened to a new light and he sees the faces on the videowalls 
change into the face of a woman with a bowl of fruit on her head and a stealth 
bomber in spiked armour and a dozen kabuki masks spinning in space and, last of 
all, a glass guitar rimmed with lightning bolts.
 
Seu Guantanamera.
 
And the Glass Guitar leaps beneath Annunciatos fingers free at last free at 
last dear God free at last and roars in heat and draws the rhythm of the 
batteria and the master mix and the reality dub and the stamping of the dancing 
feet and the thirty million voices plus eleven satellite channels into one 
thing, one music which transcends music, that becomes something brilliant and 
burning and beautiful and shit-scary that even the batteria falls silent and the 
sambaderos and sambaderas stop in mid wiggle, mid shimmy to turn and stare at 
the wild things raving from the Glass Guitar and there is only old mad El 
Batador banging on his plastic bucket and Annunciato playing like no one, not 
even Seu Guantanamera, ever played six strings. It is joy. It is burning. It is 
pain. It is sex. It is every great and noble thing, it is every rat-mean and 
wicked thing.
 
Higher. Higher. Higher. God save us, please, we cannot take much more of this.
 
Higher. Higher.
 
God, please, no!
 
Higher . . .
 
And it ends.
 
And in the silence afterwards, thirty-five million people plus eleven satellite 
channels hear clearly, unmistakably, enormous musical harmonics, vaster than 
heaven, sound deep in the earth beneath their feet, like the notes of a guitar 
buried in the centre of the earth, a guitar on which God might jam with creation 
and the immense sound of it penetrates everything, shakes everything streets 
buildings earth sky music heat and mind, shakes them apart and in the space 
between is a light purer and brighter than any light you have ever seen before.
 
Then the infinite sustained note dies away and the vision fades and there is no 
God now only a cabaero punk holding the fused, shattered fragments of a once 
beautiful glass guitar. But there is a new colour in every one of the neon signs 
and holograms and videowalls, one that no one has ever seen before but everyone 
immediately recognises as the colour of street.
 
* * * *
 
Ash Wednesday
 
Street.                                                                          
                   
 
The very heart and soul of sambada. One of those words that if you have to look 
it up in a book, you will never never know what it means, compadre.              
                                           
 
* * * *
 
When the great guitar at the centre of the earth sounded and the Tucuromb were 
released, the world was never quite the same. When you take a thing apart you 
can never put it back exactly the same way. Sometimes worse. Sometimes better. 
Always different.                                                                
             
 
Many small wishes were granted. Lost things turned up again. The military junta 
all resigned.                                               
 
There was a simultaneous computer failure in all the worlds tax offices.        
                                                                   
 
The rains actually came on time this year.                                      
 
Suddenly, everyone found they had a little more money than they had thought.
 
Suddenly, there were more national holidays in the calendar than before.         
                                                                      
 
Suddenly everyone fell in love.                                                  
   
 
Suddenly your favourite football team started to play better.
 
Suddenly the radios were filled with a new and wonderful music that reminded you 
of all the great songs you have ever loved, but more so, and better, and newer.
 
The Tucuromb seemed determined to start their reign auspiciously.
 
Annunciato became the guitar hero he had always dreamed of being but was haunted 
all his stellar career by the knowledge that he would never again play as he 
played the day the new gods were born.
 
Inspired by a dream of radio, RosaJericho had wires put in her head so that 
when she went roller-skating along the sidewalks her every thought and hope and 
dream and experience would be broadcast citywide FM. You can find her most 
Sunday mornings at half-past a nightmare on the dial between the Evangelical 
Pentecostal Missions and Radio Free Oklahoma.
 
La Baiana went on to achieve his sixth Golden Bell, fabulous celebrity, enormous 
girth and immense longevity. He was commissioned to design TeeVee World, the 
first Transvestite Theme Park which crashed two years later leaving debts in 
excess of one hundred million pesos. La Miranda saw fit to extend his gift of 
sexual transubstantiation to any and all people, and for as long as they wished, 
but try as he might he could never get it to work on himself.
 
El Batador went back to his compadres at the docks and was last seen one October 
evening swimming madly out to sea toward what he thought was the Black Star 
Liner three miles long and two miles wide and a mile high come back to take him 
home to Ethiopia but in the end was only a cruise ship carrying viajeros from 
the norte, carved out of a twenty kilometre iceberg.
 
* * * *