My friend Tony was a green beret in the first Gulf War. Now he is a security specialist married to a Brazilian airline attendant named Constância and they have a baby. Constância keeps Tony on lockdown, discourages him from learning Portuguese, and leaves him to take care of the baby during her many flights abroad. The other night my wife and I were over at their apartment in Rio, smoking weed, drinking whiskey, and listening to New Romance music. When his wife came in he left her with the baby and invited my wife and me down onto the street for a pizza in a place that he says doubles as a cocaine delivery service.

He told me in hushed tones he thinks Constância is plotting against him, that she’s a gypsy (which, to me, is cool as fuck) and is lezzing up with another hot airline attendant who’s also a gypsy and into Wicca, and that they’re going to use his sperm to make a baby. Apparently she doesn’t give a shit about him, just nods her head and smiles when they argue, and tells him to get a whore when he feels like having sex. “Dude,” he said, spelling it out, “I think that they are going to use their gypsy magic to kill me once the baby’s born.”

When we got back up to the apartment Constância’s friend was there. It was late and we were staying over. Through a convoluted and manipulative conversation Constância got Tony to agree to sleep in the storage room while she and her friend stayed up smoking pot all night in the bedroom. My wife and I slept in the baby’s room.

“Can you believe that?” my wife said when we were alone. “Let’s draw Tony away from his woman so that we can visit him in the middle of the night. This is the last time we’re ever sleeping over here.” Since she is a witch, I had to ask if she thought Tony was losing his mind or if they’re really planning to get a baby out of him and kill him. She said definitely, yes.

I woke up with a shudder in the middle of the night. An airline attendant was looking down at us. “Shh,” she said. She grabbed a pillow out of the baby dresser and left

PIP