But the thought was not a pleasant one, and he suppressed it. (His wife and child were still in Cubatao.)

He climbed down the wooden ladders and followed a switchback trail steeply downhill; then rope ladders and another narrow trail to the bottom of this vast open pit. The temperature here was a good ten degrees warmer than at the top, and he had tied a rag around his head to soak up the sweat. Here men were already laboring, garimpeiros watching with clipboards from canvas tents or joining in with shovels and picks. The primitiveness of it did not impress him: the factories of the Mogi River Valley had been primitive too.

He set about his work as he did every day. It was impossible to ignore, however, the obvious fact that this was not a day like every day. The military police stood in stern phalanxes at the high wire fences that surrounded the mine. Everyone who passed in or out was being frisked. And there were soldiers down here, too, for the first time in Meirelles’s memory, moving among the garimpeiros and asking questions.

If I had any sense, Meirelles scolded himself, I would leave the stone in the mattress and forget about it, just forget about it. If I had any sense.

Meirelles worked for a man named Claudio, a city man reputed to be a nephew of the Valverde family, a rich man who had taken many valuable stones out of the soil already. Claudio enhanced his profit by hiring workers out of the hopeful masses who thronged the old town, giving them false certification cards and then threatening to expose them to the military police. Meirelles himself was such a person. He earned very little at his work, and what he did earn he sent immediately back to his family in Cubatao; he could eat for free—with his false certification card—in the workers’ compounds, and he did not pay rent on his shack.

It was a stem but equitable enough arrangement, Meirelles thought at first: and if Claudio uncovered a valuable oneirolith from the mud, then Meirelles would take his small share and move himself and his family out of the toxic Mogi River Valley. All he wanted was money enough to make a new life.

Time passed, however, and many stones were uncovered, and Meirelles never saw more money than his weekly pittance. One time he screwed up his courage and confronted Claudio in his big tent above the mine, and Claudio appeased him and promised that things would be different in the future. The next day one of Claudio’s hired men, a thug, blackened Meirelles’s right eye and told him to be grateful for what he had. He had a work permit, didn’t he? Well, it could be taken away. He could be turned over to the military police. He should remember that.

He did. He remembered it one day when he drove his shovel into the elastic clay and felt it rebound from something solid there.

The day had nearly ended. Already long shadows were gathering here in the deepest part of the mine. Workers were collecting their tools and readying themselves for the long trek up to the compounds, warm food, a dash through the shower stalls. Feeling suddenly feverish, Meirelles put his hand down into the wet clay and grasped the object he had uncovered. Still bending low, scrubbing the dirt from it, he saw the deep azure glint of the oneirolith’s surface. It was a large and perfect stone, undeniably very valuable. He trembled, holding it.

Later he could not say why he chose to steal it. Thievery was difficult and dangerous, and there was no ready market a man like Meirelles could count on. It was undoubtedly an irrational act. Still, he thought of Claudio’s bland reassurances and of the man who had blackened his eye. He thought of his wife and child, his daughter Pia coughing in the ugly yellow air of his hometown. A day in the deep angles and convolutes of the oneirolith mine sometimes induced in Meirelles a kind of abstracted dreaminess, as if the alien artifacts beneath the soil were working a subtle influence on him, making the past more real and the present less urgent. And so, with Claudio and his daughter Pia on his mind, dreaming, he thumbed away the excess clay from the oneirolith and used his cotton leggings to wrap the stone and bind it to his ankle. When he stood up, the long hem of his denim pants obscured the bulge.

He had turned and found Claudio himself watching from a few yards away. Meirelles froze. Panic boiled in his stomach; his testicles drew up toward his body. But it was only the routine suspicion Claudio directed toward everybody. “Hurry it up,” Claudio said, waving at him with disgust. “Get moving.”

At the wire barricade Meirelles had almost passed out with fear. His head was swimming; a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. His teeth began to chatter. He was certain his fear would give him away.

Perversely, it may have saved him. This was at the height of the Oropouche Virus epidemic, and the military guards had become squeamish of the formigas, especially if they showed any sign of infection. Meirelles, with his sweaty forehead and his chattering teeth, must have frightened them. He was frisked by a young and pale guard who touched Meirelles’s clothing as if he were touching a hot griddle, and then Meirelles was allowed to walk unmolested down the muddy hillside strewn with offal, to his shack, where he secreted the oneirolith inside his mattress.

It became a token of his independence from Claudio, a tangible embodiment of his pride, his hope, his future.

He had been born in the town of Cubatao and was one of the approximately one in five children there who survived to puberty.

Cubatao was an old industrial town. In the twentieth century it had been one of the most toxic places on the face of the earth, factories spewing out sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and polychlorinated biphenyls into the valley air. The toxins denuded the hillsides and killed the children. In the first decade of the next century the factories had been nationalized… they were antique, but still, with their low overhead and negligible cleanup costs, very profitable. There were other places in the world said to be worse now. But the river valley remained very dangerous. The factories— modified but never modernized—spewed out new poisons: cyanide and arsenic compounds from the semiconductor lines, xylene, a substance called TCA.

Meirelles had a factory job running solvents in big rust-pocked canisters. He worked with a man named Ribeiro, a patriot who defended the factories whenever Meirelles suggested they might be old-fashioned or dangerous. “The factories,” Ribeiro said sternly, “are necessary for the wealth of Brazil.”

“No, no,” Meirelles said. “The dreamstones create the wealth of Brazil.”

“The stones,” Ribeiro said, “are sold to foreigners.”

“But in exchange for money. And with the money,” Meirelles persisted, “surely we could modernize the factories?”

“Nonsense! The money services the national debt. There’s nothing left over for the factories.”

“Then Brazil isn’t wealthy.”

“Not without the factories!” Ribeiro said proudly. “The factories are necessary to the wealth of Brazil.”

It was a logic he wished he could share. But Meirelles was married. He had a wife and a daughter. Twice in the last year Pia had fallen sick with bronchial ailments, and he knew she might not see her tenth birthday unless he found some other place to live. Most of the people Meirelles met were as complacent as Ribeiro—the will of God, they said—but he prided himself on his thoughtfulness, and knew it was time to leave.

There was of course no money. He supposed they could pack up their meager belongings and simply walk away, but he had heard terrifying stories about the camps for the homeless outside Rio and Sao Paulo. No, he thought, they needed money. And there was only one way Meirelles had heard of that a poor man could make the kind of money he needed.