Beto Rockefeller, Con Man
Published in Issue #11(Excerpt from a Novel)
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In 1968, I was seventeen, and in my first year of medical school in São Paulo. Rosh Hashana fell on a Monday and Tuesday that year. I remember, because it was the first year of my life I could recall that I didn’t go to shul. I’d thought about getting special permission to miss class, but didn’t feel like going to shul anyway, so figured I might as well go to school.
In anatomy lab, we’d moved on from the heart to the rest of the circulatory system, tracking the tangle of spokes that radiated outward. Superior, inferior, internal, jugular. I stared into the body cavity, trying to follow the blood vessels’ complicated paths. I was having trouble concentrating.
It wasn’t missing High Holyday services, though, that was preoccupying me; it was the resistance meeting that evening. I couldn’t decide whether to go with Isabel or not. I’d attended one with her the week before, but that had been small time, a bunch of students getting drunk and pontificating to each other about fascism. This one was going to be in a poor area of the city, far from the university and from our own middle class neighborhood. This was the real thing: honest-to-goodness revolutionaries, plotting real guerrilla activities. Whatever that meant.
“You’re coming, right?” Isa asked, her probe lifting a bronchial artery.
“I don’t know.” I peered over her arm. “Careful,” I said. “Don’t poke so hard.”
Isa snorted. “What am I going to do? He’s already dead.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked...
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