The Lord of Opium(91)

“It’s stuffy in here. Let’s wake up Mirasol and go horseback riding.” Matt clapped his hands and sent the girl to the kitchen to help Celia. He took Listen to the stables and ordered a horse to be saddled. All the while his mind was churning over the number on his foot. He’d seen the mark before. He’d thought it was a scar from when he fell onto broken window glass as a small child.

They rode past the pottery and weaving factories. The craftsmen and -women were outside, producing their goods in the way people had done for thousands of years. The women patted wet clay onto a potter’s wheel turned by pedals they worked with their feet. Others spun wool shorn from a sizable herd of merino sheep. The wool was colored with natural dyes obtained from saffron and indigo plants, and from mushrooms.

Mushrooms. Rose, lavender, yellow, and blue. He remembered seeing them in a barn near the stables as a child. He hadn’t been interested enough then to ask about them.

They came to the guitar factory. “Can we go in?” Listen asked.

Matt woke up. He’d forgotten her existence, although she was clinging to his back like a burr. “I don’t want to. You go. Ask Mr. Ortega to take you home.” She looked at him oddly as he swung her to the ground.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I’m as good as I ever was,” he said, and rode off.

The world had changed for him. He barely heard the gardeners shouting, “¡Viva El Patrón!” as he passed. He registered that a team of eejits was being moved from one field to the next, and that the Farm Patrolman tipped his hat. Was he one of them on some level? Did something in his brain control him? Was this where El Patrón’s voice came from?

A trapped feeling like that he’d experienced as a young child in a room full of sawdust came over him. He had trouble breathing and felt for his asthma inhaler.

There was no noxious air or suffocating dust to account for it this time. The reaction was purely in his mind. He was part of the machine El Patrón had created.

He came to the new eejit pens, now built some distance from the evil-smelling pits. They had beds inside and large communal showers. Dining halls with tables and chairs were at the end of each building. The eejits ate a balanced diet of meat, vegetables, and bread, although the Farm Patrolmen were still using eejit pellets for lunch in the fields. Did it matter? Did the workers notice how their lives had improved?

In the distance lay the water purification plant and the polluted pits. Matt headed the horse that way. It was a perverse thing to do. It was guaranteed to bring on a full-scale asthma attack, but he didn’t care. Now he understood Cienfuegos’s desperation. The head of the Farm Patrol was trapped in an endless round of violence that he wasn’t allowed to escape.

Am I allowed? I’ll find out, Matt thought savagely.

When he drew near to the pits, the horse began to snort and act up. The stench wasn’t too bad, but the animal was clearly alarmed by it. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Matt said. He rode back to where the air was cleaner and tethered the horse to a fence post. “Someone will find you if I don’t come back,” he said.

He didn’t really want to die. The closer he got to the pits, the more foolish the trip seemed, yet he kept on. He wanted to know how far he could push this death wish. At a certain point he sat on the ground and thought, I’m not really like Cienfuegos. I left the country, and he can’t do that. I can love. I love María. This made him feel better. He didn’t have to kill himself to prove he was free.

One worrisome thing remained, though: the voice in his head. Celia thought he was possessed. Cienfuegos believed that he really was El Patrón come back from the dead. So did Sor Artemesia, but she said that he had a chance to be different.

“And I do,” Matt said aloud. He stood up and shaded his eyes as he gazed at the polluted pits not far away. The ground was covered in sheets of the same light-sensitive plastic he’d seen at the mushroom greenhouse. A person was tending them, lifting sheets to examine what lay beneath and spraying water from a large hose. The smell wasn’t nearly as bad as Matt remembered. He went closer.

It was a woman. She wore a white hazmat suit that must have been hot. Her face was flushed and angry. Her heavy boots came halfway up to her knees. The purposeful way she moved told Matt that she wasn’t an eejit. Every now and then she stopped, kicked a stone, and swore a blue streak.

“Fiona?” he said.

She looked up and cursed again. “You did this to me, you pile of eejit droppings! Is this the kind of job for someone who got an A in her A-levels? Who kept the hospital going when all the doctors and nurses buggered off to that party? Served them right to get poisoned. Self-centered duckwits! And didn’t I save your life when you got sick? Oh, but nobody cares for Fiona. She’s expendable.”