Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE: RED TEZCATLIPOCA
BURN: RITES MY FATHER TAUGHT ME
A PLACE CALLED MICTLÁN
RHINOCEROS
PART TWO: WHITE TEZCATLIPOCA
9 UNDERGROUND RIVERS
FUCK THE MOTHERS, KILL THE OTHERS
LA NEGRA
PART THREE: BLUE TEZCATLIPOCA
BLUE HUMMINGBIRD, SORCERER OF MY HEART
MY MOTHER'S SKIRT OF SNAKES
THE OCULLÍN
ABOUT THIS SERIAL
PART FOUR: BLACK TEZCATLIPOCA
0.13.26
WANDERER
MICTECACÍHUATL AND MICTLANTECUHTLI
DOTS AND LOOPS
AFTERWORD
BONUS MATERIALS
MORE BOOKS BY CESAR TORRES
13 SECRET CITIES
Cesar Torres
This book is a work of fiction. References to actual people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Copyright © 2014 Cesar Torres All rights reserved.
FIRST EDITION
Cover Design by Matt Davis
ISBN: 978-0-9910363-2-5
To Lino and Elsa.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This digital serial and its companion paperback would not have been possible without the help of many people. My first readers, Robert Haining Tolar, Jacqui Cheng, Matt Saba, and especially Max Carmona III, provided valuable insights on the manuscript as each installment went into production. The talented Richard Shealy copy edited the book, and the visualization of the digital and physical book emerged from Matt Davis’ mind. I would also like to thank Dr. Lisa Barker and her undergraduate students at Towson University, who did an analysis and reading of the text in October. Lastly, I would like to thank all my family members for knitting their love into a tapestry of support for 13 Secret Cities and the books that are going to follow.
PART ONE
RED TEZCATLIPOCA
BURN: RITES MY FATHER TAUGHT ME
"There are thirteen secret cities, but no one knows where they are." –Arkangel, "Plainsong", The Violet Album, 2008, Reckless Records.
"The city of Chicago is experiencing a renaissance that outpaces all other North American cities. There has never been a better place to live." –Acceptance speech by Mayor Ron Amadeo, inauguration night, 2010.
"The elders of the Illini and Chippewa tribes explained that their people drew their strength from the immense lake they call Michi Gami. This body of water was the source of much fear and superstitious rumor. In their native tongue, they told me how death hovered above the waters, like a cloud. The lake itself was a place of death, and its scent was that of carrion. Where men tread, death stalked in shadows, made of no discernible form." –Louis Jolliet, letter to Terese Chirac, 1674, Chicago History Museum archives.
A glance into the past revealed to me the simplicity of time: The moments of my life were stars, suspended in the vastness of space, and each one shone bright. But between each one, there also existed a vast darkness, a vacuum that threatened to swallow their light forever. My story began with a single point, a single star: The events that happened on October 4, 2013 in Millennium Park.
I followed the crosshatched dome of the pavilion, moving toward the silver wings that cradled the stage. I shoved my way forward, scared to be knocked over by someone bigger than me.
A hiss and a whistle overhead tore through the din of the shouts. I looked up to follow the noise, above me. I turned my head toward the sky. Small objects streamed through the air, headed north, in the same direction I was moving.
The missiles left white trails as they soared. When they reached the stage, I heard the metal clink like empty beer cans. A white cloud bloomed immediately in three spots.
When those of us who could see the stage saw the tear gas swell before us, our screams grew into shrieks.
The protesters who had already gathered by the stage ran immediately away from the cloud. But they weren't quick enough. The white smoke swallowed them up.
The hiss continued and the cloud grew. The breeze blew toward the north, but Chicago wind was fickle, and it could turn right around, toward the south, at any moment.
I thought about my parents, and my brother, and it occurred to me that right now, my father was probably still at work, at the Botanical Gardens. My mother was also at her office, and perhaps she was texting my brother as he arrived home from school, just to make sure he made himself a snack while he waited for her and my father to come home. This thought shifted and moved beyond my grasp as I ran, until it was gone.
On my shoulders I wore the shawl my mother had given me the day I moved away to college, and I wrapped it around my mouth and nose to keep the gas out. I fished in my pocket for my petrified moss, a good luck charm from my father that I carried on my keychain.
I pivoted and ran toward the south, away from the stage.
As I ran, I witnessed moments from my short nineteen-year-old life flash before me like water rushing down the side of a mountain. I re-lived the awkward pomp of my first communion, the climbs we made on the hills surrounding my grandmother's lop-sided house in San Miguel, Mexico, and the road trips through San Diego when I was a toddler. I lived through these moments fast. In was the girl with the long face and the auburn eyes, a face I could see with precision, as if I were a camera-man shooting these memories. These visions of the past slid downward, vanishing as soon as it had arrived, gone in microseconds.
And I ran. My legs pumped with fury and speed, but they were untrained and clumsy. I was not an athlete and I had never been fit. And now, the pounds of weight in the backpack on my back forced me to run without grace or agility. Now that tear gas was encroaching on the pavilion, slipping out of the straps could cost me precious seconds.
About two hundred feet in the distance, uniformed police were closing this perimeter, shouting and pummeling, and bellowing through megaphones. I would never make it past them without being beaten down by their weapons and their strength. I let my running stride slow down a bit, enough to shake off my backpack, and to give me some time to think of where else I could run to. If I broke out toward the lake, to the east, I might be able to squeeze onto Columbus Drive and perhaps avoid the dozens of officers around us.
My father had always warned us to avoid the lake, and instead I ran straight toward it.
I found the short concrete wall that lined the perimeter of the pavilion, just about forty feet ahead. I zigzagged my way over to it.
My long legs, which I had always been proud of, catapulted me over the short wall of the perimeter. But my legs were too long, in fact. My shoe caught the edge of the concrete wall. I flipped forward and landed hard on my hands and knees. These awful long legs, I thought. But I looked around me. I could see the southern end of the pavilion, and behind it, the glint of the BP bridge. I wrapped the shawl around my head one more time, though the gas was starting to creep into my eyes and sear them with pain. Other protesters were escaping through this very same route, where the police and SWAT forces were a little thinner.
I realized I was free; I was escaping the pavilion.
Just as I came to standing, I heard the crack of gunshots behind me. One. Then another and another.
I heard new voices, full of anger, surging from the crowd. New gunfire exploded, and this time it sounded very different from the first three pops I heard. Their rhythm was calculated, an
d precise. Perhaps it was an automatic weapon.
The bursts grew louder and moved closer to where I stood. Whoever was firing was cutting through the middle of the pavilion.
I kept on running, away from Pritzker, and I spotted an opening of about thirty feet with fewer officers, where I could run through.
I turned around one more time to look behind me through the open patches of clear air inside the white cloud.
The SWAT officers had now joined the police. They wore gas masks lowered over their face and their Kevlar gear protected them like scarab shells. They formed a dark ring around this cloudy oval, and they moved in tight, choking it out. They fired over and over. Their dark figures and hard helmets rendered them genderless, ageless, raceless.
Soon, the thick gas engulfed the black shapes of the SWAT men, too. The whole Pavilion disappeared under the chemical mist.
The screams were beginning to fade a bit, and I realized that the gas might be taking its effect now, silencing the crowd as it burned itself into their eyes and throats.
More gunfire exploded from the white cloud.
In front of me, I could see the street and the snaking structure of the BP Bridge. Hundreds of people ran in every direction, pleading for help that wasn’t going to come.
Though police officers flanked the entrance to the bridge to seal off the area, I spotted an opening I could take. I darted through.
I ran up the curving path of the bridge. By now I had stopped paying attention to the discomfort in my legs and the ache in my throat. I had become a runner. I didn't dare look behind me, though I could hear the cacophony still.
The run over the bridge became a kaleidoscope of fear, my ragged breath, the pointed spikes of sailboats in the marina, and the silvery reflections on the waters of Lake Michigan, where I was headed.
Then I moved toward the exit, relieved. I dashed toward Lake Shore Drive, and I clutched the fossilized moss in my hand.
I felt like a coward. I didn't know how to stay back there in the pavilion and fight, but how could I? Someone was shooting guns in there, and all I wanted was to run far away from this place. And Edgar. I had no idea what had happened to him. I had a cell phone in my pocket, but my mind could not conceive of picking it up and using it. Instead, my legs did the thinking for me, telling me to go far away from this place.
Before me lay Lake Shore Drive. If I reached its underpass, perhaps I could catch my breath for a few moments and then continue toward the lake. If hiding meant I had to jump into its icy waters, I was ready to do it.
I felt a sigh of relief when I ran down the grassy slope that led to the overpass. I was almost there. The flapping beats of helicopters overhead smothered my hearing. I saw three of them circling overhead, vultures against an orange sky.
Just about a hundred feet until I reached the underpass.
At the bottom of the slope, I tripped again, clumsy and unathletic. My knees stung, but I didn't care. I heard more shouts, more gunfire and a strange whistling sound in the air. I ran again.
Just twenty feet left.
My legs pumped harder, and I could see the cool darkness underneath the hard concrete structure.
Just five more feet.
I turned the corner into the safety of the underpass. I was not about to stop running until I was deep inside its cavern, safe.
I made it.
I ran into the opening and turned the corner.
My body slammed into a hard mass and bounced back, losing balance and falling backward. I looked up. Six SWAT team officers, masked and faceless, stared down at me. The one whom I slammed into didn't hesitate. He brought down the baton with a muscled arm.
The black club swept across my face and connected with my cheekbone. A deep crack sent a sliver of pain down from my right eye and down my back. Then another one. And another one.
This was how my cheekbone shattered in two, and the reason why I eventually went blind in my right eye. The nerve damage in my spine because of the blows I endured was also a direct result of what happened to me in that underpass. When the officer's metal wand made contact with my body, I bit down on my tongue, and blood gushed into my mouth. The baton also flayed open my cheek; I knew the liquid that ran down my cheekbones was not sweat, and it was not tears. I rendered my dignity as I curled up into a ball at the feet of the officers.
The dried moss my father gave me didn't stop the violence, and it never could have prevented that officer from crushing my skull. In my pocket I also carried a travel-size icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which my mother had given to me three months ago, when I had moved from home to the university. She was a little Guadalupe, drenched in gold and red, boldly stepping over the horns of a demon and radiating light. Her eyes implied safety and love, but the protection I was supposed to receive from the icon never came to be. Even as I fell into a dark sleep and went deeper into shock, I remember feeling cheated by these useless objects, and though I don't like to admit this, I hated my mother and father for instilling this false sense of security in me. I hadn't realized how superstitious my parents were until I thought about how a dried piece of moss and a laminated photo of a virgin could be so utterly fucking useless. That was the hateful little thought that crept into my head, even as my vision burst into white stars and the officer fractured my bones. He shouted many words at me, and his other companions shouted too, words filled with hate and revulsion, for me and for the other thousands of people that had gathered at Millennium that day.
By my count, from the moment I lost Edgar until a SWAT officer split my face, four minutes elapsed. That in itself is a lifetime. That four-minute moment became one of the stars in the firmament of my life.
But that's all it was, just a tiny moment. To dwell on my escape would be as if I asked you to stare up at the sky and fixate on only one star or planet and expect you to understand the full scope of the galaxy that contains it. It wouldn't be fair to you, me, to those who perished in Millennium Park, or my story.
There were other moments in my life that had an impact on those four minutes. They were moments made of interdependency, like a spider's web.
Four days before the riots, I had celebrated my nineteenth birthday.
My parents had picked me up at the dorm in Rogers Park. My brother, José María, flipped me his middle finger from the backseat as I got into the station wagon, and we drove downtown. We ate pizza at Uno's, and I blew out nineteen candles on the cake. Afterward, we decided to walk off the meal. We walked east on Ohio Street until we reached an underpass. We crossed its length, and when we emerged, the dark waters of Lake Michigan greeted us.
It was much too late to be walking down the lakefront, but there we were, all four of us -- I, my parents, and my brother -- alone at the eastern edge of the city, where land meets water.
My father, the tallest member of our family, walked up in front, smoking a cigarette, and my mother walked between me and José María, our arms intertwined, her long straight hair brushing her shoulders. We walked north, along the bike path that ran up the shoreline of Lake Michigan. This part of Lake Shore Drive didn't close officially until 11 p.m., but even now, at 10:31, it was deserted. The lake's waves lashed the concrete wall next to our feet, and up on our right, we could see the tops of the cars as they rushed down Lake Shore Drive. The lake remained black tonight.
I dug in my pocket for my cell and pointed my camera toward the water. From up ahead, my father shouted, "Put it away, Clara. No photos."
His voice rumbled, and the sweetness of the chocolate birthday cake I had just eaten earlier tonight rose up to my throat in acid waves. Why do you have to yell at me? I thought. He was always yelling at me. He ignored this expression of rage in my face and squatted down, facing the lake a few feet ahead of us.
I felt a tug on my shoulder and a pat on my arm.
"Put the phone away," my mother whispered. "Do what he says.”
The lights that shone from Navy Pier turned my father's profile into a shadow. He sat down on
the concrete and patted the ground for us to join him.
"Birthday girl, right here on my left," he said. I sat cross-legged on the cold surface, and we joined him on the other side. My father offered my mother a cigarette, but she shook her head.
"Not now, Adán," she said. "Let's not stay out here too long. We have be back to the car by around eleven; you know that."
It was important for us to run on time. Not only did I want to get back to the car in the parking lot, I also wanted to get back to the dorm as soon as possible. I wanted to celebrate all night. We had spent all week making big plans for the march at Millennium Park, and Edgar had borrowed an ID to buy beer and celebrate my birthday when I returned to campus.
I hadn't told my parents yet about Edgar. I hadn't even told José María, but then again, I knew what would happen if I told my little brother. He'd be sure to notify my parents, faster than the Internet.
During my first week at the dorms, Edgar had asked to borrow my screwdriver to fix his mini fridge, and that's how I had discovered he lived on my floor, on the other side of the dorm. Over the next few days, he kept cruising through my suite, and I kept on traveling to his. We were both freshmen, and both of us held political change high on our list of values. Now we were inseparable in our dorm, in the dining hall, in the two classes we shared, and in our ways of thinking about change for the world. His face was boyish, his voice was not. We both joined the Occupy Liberation Front on the same day.
The lake pummeled the breakers, and I noticed José María was starting to resemble my father more than ever before as the angles in his face grew sharper and his hair grew out thick, wavy and black.
My mother unfolded her shawl to free up her hands. From her purse she withdrew a small laminated image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which she placed on her lap as she genuflected. She kissed the image of the virgin, and then she put the image away. I couldn't see what my brother was up to behind her, but I could hear him tapping his hands on the concrete, drumming the beat to one of his favorite metal songs.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 1