Red Water

23 min readMar 24, 2026
or “Rio Vermelho”

This is an original story by Neboh.
There was a group of clouds rolling in as the sky turned thick, and my father thought to say, “Isn’t that extra-ordinary?”
“Don’t you mean — ”
“I know what I mean,” he said. “The word extra-ordinary gets mixed up sometimes, and people forget and say it like ‘extr’ordinary.’ I demand and expect for me and you to say it the way it was meant to be said: extra-ordinary.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. My dad nodded.
“You ought to be thinking of school. You graduate this year. I want you to find something for yourself — you know, something you love, ’cause you’d be doing better than me.”
“Why’s there so much traffic?” I wondered as we sat staring at a bumper.
“It’s Friday in California. Everybody’s go’n somewhere.”
“Dad, what do you think ‘bout life? I mean, would you relive it? Or would you change it?” I asked him, abnormally heavy in tone for our conversations, typically.
“I love you, man. You’re so intuitive. But boy, you can badger.” I curled back. I always curled back when he criticized me. “Yeah, I love life because I’m a happy man and am inclined to. I wouldn’t change a damn thing.”
It was of high misfortune that my father passed away days after from a severe panic attack. What I heard, he froze up and couldn’t feel any part of his body. He was sweating, and his heart beat so fast it might have skipped a few throws and then most likely gave out on him. That was the first I ever heard of somebody dying of something like that. He was the only man I lived with — only person at all. After he died, I promptly moved to a city called Salvador.
I find that everyone who tells a story — well they attempt for it to make sense. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a build-up and a climax. My story didn’t make sense, and if I could change something, it’d probably be that. Though I guess I’d still want it to mean something.
My first night in Brazil, I met a girl, naturally. Beautiful women there aren’t hard to come by, but at that moment she seemed special. She was locking eyes with me, so I walked up and took her hand. She forced mine down towards her midsection, and there was a stream flowing from her side. I had no idea how it happened, but after watching that girl bleed out, I swore never to get close, even in acquaintance, to another woman in Salvador for the rest of my days. That, in any case, was my goal.
Instead I distracted myself as an artist, struggling hard as I could. I went to a part of the bay on the other side from Salvador called Itaparica to paint. There was always a big yacht harbored in the middle of the bay, so you could never see what went on behind it. I lived there on the coast, in a box, I’m sorry to admit. Every day I’d wake up cold and go for a jog to warm up. I’d rinse off in the sea and watch the beautiful, and, in some cases, the most extra-ordinary people in the world come to play. My days went by slowly, mostly letting movies of my dad’s talks play onto the silk screen of the ocean waves.
I was truly alone, and I realized it for the first time. Worse, no one wanted my damn art! I considered moving into the city, but that beautiful girl’s blood rushing over my and her hands kept me fixed in place. I was, albeit starving and alone, glad to be in the water every day, even if it was going to be my grave.
One day I got tired of looking at that yacht. I took one last glance at Itaparica and plunged into the ocean. Dumb, since I had only ever learned to swim in suburban pools. It was a rough swim, and the current tried to drown me the whole way out. Reaching near the yacht I hit my head against the bottom.
I called out in pain, and I was lucky for a few men to find me buoying without purpose on the side of the boat. They threw down a rope ladder for me, and as I climbed to their clouds I heard the gasping trumpets of many young virgins. Swelling bulged my forehead and coughs barked deeply from my throat. All the while, they had a man perform an extreme unction on me. Everyone there was wearing the fanciest suits, bowties, gowns, and garments I didn’t know how to name.
“Are you alright?” a man asked me in Portuguese.
I answered brokenly, “I’m alright. Hit my head, only.”
“You are extremely gorgeous,” said one of the women. Another hummed in agreement.
“He is!” seemed a few other guys and ladies to chime in the background.
“Where do you live?” asked another man, apparently the captain.
Pointing, “On that side of the bay…”
“Come with us to the city. We’ll get you to the UPA.”
As if on scheduled alarm, there was a sudden whistle that shrouded and infiltrated every other noise. Without warning, each person on the yacht jumped overboard and disappeared below the waves. Absolutely all, from the old and refined to the young and bold to the even younger and wilder, followed each other off the yacht to their demise. I shouted for them, but none of them heard me over the whistling sound. Just as soon as the captain had spoken to me, I was again alone, floating in the Bay of All Saints. Immediately and to my interest I looked to the east side of the bay to see what had been blocked before; nothing but a few great houses and condos shaded by tropical trees along the coast.
I’m gonna live there someday, I thought to myself. It didn’t matter which house — the blue one, the orange one, the green or the yellow; the one-story, the four-story, the penthouse or the garage floor. As I watched the stranger shore, an old ocean liner passed in front of my view, blocking it once again. I went to the control area of the yacht and, through trial and error, carried myself southeast toward the city. As I pulled into the busy port, I noticed an empty cruise ship dock. I anchored and disembarked, and a woman of about forty came up along the dock, seemingly out of the evening mist.
“What a sunset, huh? It’s so nice. The best of the region,” she said.
“Something was wrong with the crew…”
“That crew, yes. They were a cult; all thought the end of the world was today. Well, what a waste!” I watched her, trying to get her angle, subconsciously checking how potentially kissable her face was. “I think you should be a model. You’re so handsome!”
That was the most I’d ever heard such a compliment, and I let her know it. She asked if I thought she was pretty, and I said of course, be real.
“Explain yourself.”
Suddenly I was on the spot. “You have curves. What else do you want?” We laughed.
“Boy, your accent is strong. Are you from the South? Or, you’re a gringo, right?”
“I am from California, if that means anything to you.” I saw her about to speak and then said, “I’d never been to the beach before coming here.”
“Never been to the beach? California has some good ones — ”
I cut her off, “Dirtiest beaches in the world, so I’m told. That’s America.”
“This is America too, isn’t it? South America.”
“You know, the United States. The country where I’m from.”
“Got it,” she said peremptorily. The woman then began to walk away. I watched her butt cheeks switch for a moment, well, her skirt in the general form of her butt cheeks, then I yelled, “Do you really think I could be a model?”
“I’m not sure. If that makes sense for you…”
“Of course it does. Everything makes sense.”
“Not everything,” she said, and she turned her whole body to face me — at this point forty-odd meters away — and said, “I’m a model.” It was what I had imagined at first, and it is what I was forced to expect. Nothing less. “I’ll introduce you. Look me up on Insta. At Dália Fernandino. You figure out how to spell it.”
I slept rocking in the yacht that night. The next day I found a library and searched for her on Instagram. Apparently, we had one mutual friend, though I didn’t check who. I found the address of her modeling agency and walked there from the bay, running into spinning doors like a hick who’s never seen glass rotate. I told the receptionist I knew Dália, and she called to confirm. From there I was led up two flights of stairs and into an orange-peel hallway, in texture more than color. Cheerful footsteps picked and packed round the corner. I knew who would make the turn.
“Let’s fix you up!” said my acquaintance from the docks, and she took me to her home on the other side of the alley to cut my hair and shave me in makeover fashion, leaving a low patch on my head, some scruff on my chin and above my lip.
“I don’t know in America, but being a mulatto is good here. And you’re just so damn gorgeous. We have a photoshoot tomorrow. Be ready; it’ll be a big day! a big day,” she told me. That night we slept in the same bed, platonically, as I had done with my cousins until I was about five. I could hardly sleep this time. Something about starting a vulnerable, aesthetic-based career in a foreign country had my brain racing. The morning came too soon, and Dália tried to wake me, though I had been up. I put on the best clothes I had, practically rags, and we walked down to the alley.
As we went we chatted casually, and a man walked up to us, shifting and then fixing his focus on me.
“What is your name, kid? You have a name?” He spoke so quickly that it seemed his words were being forced out under threat of a bomb exploding.
“Yes. Britton.”
“Britton, what a nice name, I think that’s an extraordinary name, don’t you think that’s a nice name?” he asked Dália. She nodded and tried to speak when he cut her off, or rather, cut her off in anticipation before she could begin: “You see, kid — How old are you?”
“Seven — ”
“Seventeen! What a marvel. We’re looking for a young man to be in a movie — ”
“Excuse me,” said Dália harshly. “We’re on the way to a photoshoot.”
“You want to make big money on movies or pocket change as a model?” I’m sure it was a comment very offensive to Dália, as I could see its effects ringing in her face, but the man was speaking so fast he had no time for regret.
“You’ll be too old in two seconds and trying to fatten up to cure your bulimia while losing kilos on Mounjaro. So, what do you say? Huh?” He looked at me so eagerly, and I saw that if I was to follow this man, it’d change my life. Though I wasn’t sure in what way. I followed him, at first forgetting — for a brief moment — about Dália. “Aren’t you coming?”
Her frown turned into the most vibrant smile her tanned face could stretch out. “Of course I’m coming. I can’t let this guy cheat a poor foreigner.” The movie man hailed us a taxi, which drove until we reached the neighborhood called Rio Vermelho.
“You know why they call it ‘Red River?’” the man asked us.
“I hear it’s because at every new moon, the river turns red,” replied Dália. “At least that’s what I heard.”
“I bet it turns red with the blood of the members of cults that drown themselves all the time.”
“Why? Has that been going on?” said the man.
“Certainly, yes.”
“Well that doesn’t make sense. Why would a river turn red at all?” asked Dália, and I said, “Everything has to make sense. Everything.” Dália rolled her eyes in a playful way and gave me a look of content. “You’re cute.”
The man asked, “Where are you from, Britton? Cool name, huh? Sounds like ‘Britain.’”
“Oh I’m from somewhere in California.”
“California! I know. California girls will melt your popsicle,” he sang. “Hollywood, and — the beach. Right?”
“I wouldn’t know about it.”
“How strange. Do you speak English?” he asked me.
Dália smacked her teeth and gave the man a nice pop on the shoulder. The driver peered at us through the rearview. “What do you think, dummy? He’s an American.”
“Well, our director — his name is Bikram Sidhu — he speaks a little English. You’ll get along well.”
When he took me to meet the director, I had a slick, sly confidence in myself based on how things were going. I had been offered two impossible gigs in a matter of hours based solely on my looks. Dália tagged with me the whole time, she said, for protection.
“Mr. Sidhu!” I said in English. “Hi, my name is Britton.”
“Like the people who colonized my home country?”
“No, like the name. I was wondering if you had an open slot for me in your roster.”
“What? What does this mean?” Bikram said.
“An acting job. Don’t you have a role for me?”
“Yes! You’re one of the people in the yacht cult that jumps and everyone drowns. That’s basically what you’re playing. Can you do that?”
“How did you know?” I said.
“About what?” asked the director.
“You mean you don’t know? I thought everyone around here knew.”
“What?”
“That’s a real thing. It goes on,” I said.
“Is that really?” he said, and I could no longer tell if he was being serious. We began filming this odd mix of Bollywood, Brazilian, and somehow Canadian productions for the movie inspired by the similarly cosmopolitan neighborhood, Red River, or better, in its local title, Rio Vermelho.
After filming, Dália and I took some time and went to Itaparica; she watched the men and women frolic in the ocean or rub sunscreen on their sandy backs, her judgments held secret by her shades, as I painted the view from the east side of the bay.
“You know I’m going to be an artist one day,” I told her, and she, looking at my painting, believed every word.
The day of the premiere was balls wild. Dália and I power-shopped to see if we could find some decent clothes. While she threw me a yellow shirt with a blue tie, a blue blazer, and some yellow socks, I told Dália I would be escorting a woman who was making her debut. She was a young actress, blond and rather tall. It was a producer’s idea, plus she was younger but not as pretty as Dália, that I made sure to tell her. Dália looked annoyed but I knew she’d tucked away my last statement for keeps.
I sat next to the blond giant in some middle row at the showing, because that’s all acting gets you as a first-timer. I was shaking, waiting to see the reactions of the audience, but when it was over they stood and ovationed and I got over that small phobia. The shaking finally subsided, but I couldn’t help but think of pops. My father was killed by his anxiety. Sometimes I feared I would have the same fate.
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The young lady asked afterwards if we could go on a friendly date someplace nearby.
We got on pretty well, mostly chatting about our experience filming and about the scene in which we kissed. That night I kissed her on both cheeks with a customary “Tchau!” and made my way back to my one friend in the whole country.
“How’d it go tonight?”
“It was great. How was your night?” I asked.
“Slow and boring. I was waiting for you.”
“I’m here now! Let’s celebrate,” and we both threw off our clothes piece by piece and had a party with just us two. We laughed and danced, slid past each other but never touched, keeping like professional ghosts avoiding a brush with the living at all costs. At the falling action, those moments otherwise consecutive to a climax, I said, “I want to get into directing. I think I…I could direct.”
“I have total faith in you,” she said and then kissed me. It wasn’t coded with passion, didn’t mean more than what it felt like. The next day we took a friend of Dália’s boat, the Pôr do Sol, out to the middle of the bay, as it had been arranged when (and probably before) I had come to the region. There was a couple making love on a sailboat near us; their moans could be mistaken for elephant seals. I kissed Dália on the arm as we passed, and I steered away from that suggestion. Dália leaned over the siderail, seeming to want a bit more. Her hair blew like a bag of straw thrown into the wind, each strand tied down by an invisible string.
“So what do you want to make a movie about, Mr. Tasty Director?” It got into her mouth too.
“I want to make a movie like no one has seen before. But it has to make sense. Everything has to make sense, you see?”
“Well, it’ll be the best movie ever then,” said Dália, then she asked, still smiling, if I had a girlfriend back home.
“I don’t, no.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I thought everyone in America had a boyfriend or girlfriend.”
“You mean the U.S.?”
“Right.”
“That’s absurd. Like how I thought every girl in Brazil had big butts. It’s a lie, I can see,” I said, giving her a playful tap on the subject of our talk. She gasped mockingly and kicked me on my small butt over the rail into the water, and I dog-paddled for my life.
“Don’t be so weak, Britton. Let me get you.” She reached for a life vest and lowered it to my hand, and I grabbed and yanked it, pulling her down into the water with me. The rest of that day was a salt-wet haze of splashing and hugging and watching distant things grow golden before dark.
A month later we started filming outside Rio de Janeiro. “Let’s get the camera rolling! I want it to be barren; do you see all those ferns? I want it barren. These are the plains of the Midwest. And can you get me a guy who’s younger? I need someone younger. What are you? French?”
“Of course…”
“Get me an American. It’s an American novel, get me some Americans. United Statesians. Whatever you all call them. Oh but the women! The women can be Mediterranean or Cambodian for all I care. It would help if you moved a little quicker and…” I turned to face a young actor who was the same age as me when I’d first arrived in Salvador.
“You need to speak up. I know you’re young — I know you’re young — but can you do me a favor and give it some verve? Wouldn’t hurt you, would it? Would it?” I then called for all the feet and
hands — actors, electricians, sound engineers, grips, and the plant lady — to coalesce so that they might hear me as one mass.
“What is this movie about?”
There was only a low murmur of voices, which oddly culminated in one lone, audible “lemon flavor” before trailing off. It sounded like they were on the phone.
“It’s about a man named Jay Gatsby,” I said, “before he was rich, when he was James Gatz. You see, he’s from the Midwest, came from a poor family…”
I would have continued, but a production designer seemed to say, in sincere confusion, “Isn’t this man fictional?” Somebody else was confused about the Midwest.
“Isn’t your career here about done? I need you to act as if you’ve seen him, met him, and you…” I pointed to the young man portraying Gatsby, “You are him. You are the essence and effect and official effigy of him. Now I know…I know he’s fictional, but the point of a good story is to make you believe it. And you,” I directed my attention to the mass, “shall believe it before and so that anyone else can. Are we understood?”
“Yes!” everyone hailed, and the set was set along. As the night came, the air above us was aglow with the mists of our spit and sweat, as we filmed nearly without end. Once it was finally time to break, I texted Dália that I loved her, which was the first time she’d heard, or rather seen, those words from me. Excitement burned in me to receive an incoming text; it read a simple yet honest “I love you too.” I rose from my seat and screamed with my mouth shut, lips bouncing from the vibrations shot through them. I had somebody, I thought, finally had someone.
When the night of my premiere came to São Paulo, I escorted another new star to the movie. I had been to several premieres by then as an actor. This was my first as a director. As the movie played I ate the collar off my shirt. When the damn thing finished everyone stood up and clapped, and I was not quite relieved, as I thought any minute they might be coaxed into booing. Afterwards I took the lovely young co-star of the film to dinner.
“What did you think about the movie? Do you think they liked Gatsby?”
“I think you’re too hard on yourself. You did an excellent job. You’re the best director I’ve ever worked with.”
“Yes, but my directing sucks, you get me. I’m a painter really. You know I’ll become a famous painter someday — an established painter. Like Frida or Dalí or — well, not Picasso.” I shook my hand as if scaring off a fly and pouted my lip at the thought.
“I love a man who has so many talents like you,” she continued to talk, bold words spoken through beautiful, purple-brown lips, but my mind was stuck on the word “love.” I ached and fidgeted, and I finally said, “I have to go home.” Her curved, smiling lips turned flat and dry before leaving my view.
I ran into the streets and up some stairway that led to a slum, ran through the slum down an alley and then found a train to hop on. The ticket line was long, and I kept thinking: what if she gets hurt while I’m away?; oh, I can’t take the fact that she might die !— just, out of nowhere. As I got on the train, two men started fighting.
“You stay away from my girl!” said one of the men.
“I hate you, bro…Damn! I hate you,” said the other. I tried to watch their showdown as I boarded, but different people kept blocking my view. A woman screamed and a few men shouted disjointedly. The crowd cleared a bit to where I saw one of the men walking unsuccessfully, more like limping away through the car. The train shook violently as it gained speed, as if it had run over a fat bump. The train stopped then and everyone came out to see what was wrong. The other man who had been fighting, the one talking about his girl, was under the train, with his head hidden below the train floor and his arm split between a few wheels and the rail. The shock and sudden gore of the situation reminded me of back when I’d met the one I loved.
When I arrived at Dália’s house in Salvador, I told her about the train. She kissed me almost with pity, and she told me, “You think too much. Let it go.” She grinned and it rubbed off on me.
“You know I love you, right?” I said.
“And when I’m older…”
“You’re already older.”
“You know what I mean!” she said, kind of angrily. Then she pinched the back of her jeans. “This pancake will get even flatter with age, you know? It might cave in, and then what will you do?”
“That matters little. If I were here for the ass…” I told her with a smirk, then said, “I’m producing a new movie. You want to be in it?”
“No. Why me? No.”
“So I could kiss someone I actually like.”
“Don’t you get tired? You’ve acted and you’ve directed; you’re becoming a very powerful man. Very rich. Are you ready to handle something so overwhelming like that?”
“I have the chest for it. I’m not sure if my nerves will last — ”
“Go,” she said. I gave a half-nod of confusion and cleared a breath to speak before she said, “Go be a producer. You’ll be alright. Just don’t get a big head. Well, a bigger one.”
Over the following year I helped produce an American film set in Rio de Janeiro. Dália was the protagonist. I would tell her after each day on set how amazing she was, how much God favored her (we had formed a kind of Christian bond at this point, with our beauty and wealth approximating us to the divine). I even gave her a ruby-studded cross, which she wore even while shooting even though her character didn’t call for it, and I’d call her “my little Maria,” though her second name or first name really was Maria, I think, it was always confusing how she explained it. It didn’t occur to me that the others on set might find the favoritism weird, let alone the amorously religious overtones.
During filming a day came when I came by two rings. One was intended for Dália. The other I acquired in a meeting with a group of very important people; the kind that would be on a cult-led yacht. The man in charge of that meeting had the ring rolling back and forth in his pinkish palms, eyes twitching from it to me.
“You know now that you are a very important person internationally, and I want you to take this ring,” he said without offering his hand.
I had my sunshades on in the office room. I took out a Clonazepam in the middle of the main man’s rambling. Someone I recognized appeared from among the other members and handed me a drink of water. He said nothing, to my surprise, as I had only known him to talk too fast. My lips touched the paper cup, and I felt a strange viscous sensation flow through my teeth and down my throat. The movie man who had kick-started my film career watched in curious silence before retreating to his corner seat. The taste after sipping was like I had scarred a gum or bitten hard on my tongue. The sudden shift in flavor caused me to cough embarrassedly, and I caught my saliva before it could spatter out.
When I wiped my mouth I saw that the spit was bubbling red. I looked to the cup of water. It had turned to blood, and I knew not only because of the color but it also tasted like the plasmatic fluid, something I’d savored after busting my lips in fights.
“Excuse me,” I said as I rose up and left for the restroom. I turned the faucet on, half expecting more blood to fall out, and rinsed my hands. Only water this time. Kneeling down to the sink, my mind got lost in the sound of the running water; as it fell, the screams of a dozen kids gathered in a crowd came, at the highest pitch their frightening voices would allow. I put it to my face, but again, as it dripped down and back into the sink bowl, it appeared to be blood. I moaned horribly and wiped it from my face and hands with a towelette. I brushed my hair back with my hands and bit my large lower lip lightly, widened my eyes and poked my tongue out. I tapped myself on the face to “awaken.” Right then a man I didn’t recognize entered the restroom.
“Are you alright? We heard a yell.”
“Oh yes, I’m great.” I patted my loose hairs down and my collar, exhaled, and walked out of there. I reentered the meeting room, and I told them, “I cannot be part of your…What would you call it? A division, a sect, an organization? A cult? Last time I found myself with a cult, all the people died.”
“If you don’t join, you’ll regret it. Everything will be taken from you.”
“That’s just a test from God. I know what this is.”
“There’s no test, you understand? No God judging you. Just us and you. This is ridiculous… baffling… extraordinary…”
“You mean extra-ordinary,” I corrected the gentleman. The familiar movie man kept silent in his corner.
“No, that makes no sense. No one pronounces the ‘A.’ It’s just extraordinary. Hear it?”
“Ask the ones who made that word. That’s how they spelled it, that’s how it ought to be said. I don’t care what any of you…you…vampires are trying to say.” Vampires! the main man repeated in ghastly offense. “And forget me joining. I’m not giving in.”
“Well. I guess we’re done.”
The ride to the premiere was awful. I couldn’t get the image of my father as he died out of my head. I kept going on about it, imagining how it happened. I pictured him shaking, throwing up, and most frightening of all, crying. I arrived with the beautiful Dália, admittedly older than any other starlet I had premiered with yet, at the Village Theater in Westwood, and I, again, was nervous beyond all reprehension or reason. It was my first movie appearance as a producer, and you’d think there would be less pressure, but my stomach felt like tied strings trying to hold a piece of roasting beef together as it swells and creates hot boils. I kissed Dália, who was making her debut as an actress, and I sat with her that evening, this time in the front row. I sat in so much angst, I didn’t even notice her reactions.
Several times I got up to go to the restroom to wash my hands, checking that the sink released, in fact, water. Maybe my test was over, whoever the proctor was supposed to be. I went back and forth at least four times until the end credits came on. I walked out of the restroom the fifteenth time to an audience applauding me and, more likely, everyone else involved. That painting of the night bled into me sitting in a polyglot group of actors and directors. We switch-talked and they asked about my further projects.
“I’d like to get into music — ”
“Yeah, maybe he’ll be president!”
“How about the brother of God! Or his assistant. He could use a man like you.”
My mind was so gone that I had to leave the room and check the sinks again.
“That man is a step short of OCD. You better get help, man!” they joked.
When I went back, I grabbed Dália’s hand and led her to the rideshare, and we rode in silence to the airport. There we got on a plane headed for São Paulo. From my carryon I pulled out a wrapped gift.
“The great Triple Threat,” Dália said sleepily, almost high. She guarded her mouth with a hand as if telling a secret. “He can act, direct, and produce. What’s left to do? Maybe seduce? Planes come at his will. So do the women.”
“Open it, my Maria,” I insisted.
“You make me happy enough already. Don’t you know how I feel about you?” she said as the airplane took flight.
“Yes, me too. That’s why I want you to open it.” She hesitated with a playful stare, too long to be funny, and then gave in. While she opened it, I reached into my pocket with a ring.
“It’s me!” she screeched and nearly took the plane down. “Thank you! Oh, I love you so much! And God loves you.” She then began a ramble about how good I was at painting. I got into the aisle, bowed down on a knee and reached for her left hand. My eyes slipped from her rubied cross to the crease of her breasts; finally my gaze fell to a ring on the finger I was going to use, already there. I grew aware of how dry my throat had become. It could have been scabbed with blood. I hid the ring back away.
“Why’d you ever choose to come to Brazil anyway?”
“My pops always wanted to go,” I told her without tone. A flight attendant scolded me for being out my seat.
I tried flipping it twenty ways to make sense of Dália’s cursed engagement in my head. I blamed it on waiting too long to make her into an actress. I blamed it on my going out with too many other girls. Ultimately, I settled on a good enough reason, for, “everything makes sense,” and as an opinion, it should. I arrived in São Paulo and took more than a day’s bus ride up to Itaparica, across the bay from Salvador. I was again painting, hoping it would become something I could love again, but, as it happened, it crumbled in the same impossible way I could have Dália again.
One day, overcast with the clouds shooting warm, warning-signal droplets, I rode the Pôr do Sol in a full oval around the bay. Once I got back to Salvador, a young woman was there, apparently waiting for my arrival, trying to talk to me, but I wasn’t ready to listen.
Until she said, “Aren’t you Britton, the director?”
“Why yeah, yes I am. What is your name, young lady?” I kept a hard shell around the part of my mind that finds any pull to a woman. “I also act and produce and…Why? Are you some actress?” I asked, though I already knew. She replied.
“Then you’d better leave Salvador. It’s a terrible place to be an actress. Terrible.” I then started to mutter to myself under my breath, probably repeating versions of the concept “terrible.”
“Will you take a picture with me, umm…here?” she said, positioning herself just right.
“Why here?” I asked her.
“Because this is Rio Vermelho Beach. The river that turns red,” she smiled and waited like a dog for a nylon-infused hunk of processed meal shaped like a bone. “Your first movie.”
“I remember. I’m not looking for any new stars, kid. What I’m looking for is something to paint with.” I then peered over into the sea, as if a paintbrush might be there, trying to see my reflection amid the dark sirens. The white foam started to bubble red, and the beating waves popped dots of blood onto my feet.
“Do you see? Look at the water!” I told the girl excitedly. She faced down and crossed her arms. Grunted.
“But what sense does that make?”