There we were, like hippies staring at the dim slice of moon through the clouds. Birthdays were starting to become more and more like this, as the lines in my parents' faces grew just a little deeper, and some of their weirdness got...well, weirder.
"In another part of the world, there is a lake where men once built a city," my mother said. "This city floated on top of the water, like a dream. Its towers reached toward the sky, and its architecture reflected the beauty of the natural world. The city’s surfaces were red, blue and gold, like the plumage of jungle birds."
José María leaned over behind my mother's back and twisted his face into a knot. "Here we go again..." he whispered to me. Shush, I mouthed over to him.
"Tenochtitlán," I said, speaking loudly enough to make sure my father heard me, to make sure I had this knowledge etched into my memory. "That's the city Mom's talking about."
Tenochtitlán, or in other words, Mexico City. The place my parents were born. I was born there, too, but I only lived there for year. By the time I could walk, we were living here, in Chicago.
"We probably won't live in Mexico City ever again, but it's good to visit Lake Michigan and remember that we once did," my father said.
My father turned back toward all of us, and his face shone clear, despite the shadows cast by night. His skin was deeply grooved by lines and wrinkles, and his hairline had receded, but his eyes looked young to me. My uncles and cousins had always said that my father's eyes looked defiant. In my experience, his eyes were sometimes gentle, sometimes terrifying. Mostly terrifying.
"In any case," my father said, "before your mother interrupted me, I was going to tell you what you need to do when you come to this lake, Clara. You're nineteen -- almost old enough to be an adult."
"Dad, I work and I vote. I am an adult. I don't like being dismissed," I said.
"Fine," he said. "In this country you're an adult; I'll grant you that. But your adulthood in other terms is still a long time away. So we come here on your birthday to think about this for a minute and to put our hopes in your future."
José María stirred, crossed his skinny arms. "Mom, you always let him go on and on...I mean, are you listening to this?"
"As a general rule, your father's wrong about many things," my mother said, and I could see José María sit up straight from his own sense of validation. "But in this case, you do need to listen. You may not understand everything we're doing as a family, Clara, but it is your responsibility to grasp it. So, sit back and listen. Yes, this means you too, José María."
My father was a strange dude, and that meant he always carried strange stuff with him. He dug in his coat and pulled out a bundle of twigs and leaves.
"Pay special attention, birthday girl," my father said. Using his free hand, he pulled out a lighter from his trousers.
"I bring both of you here because the lake is a place you should respect. It's a place that's beautiful, but my mother always said that certain beautiful things should not be touched, by any means. Lake Michigan has been here longer than you, me, or the men who built this city behind me. And though the lake gives life, the lake also has also dealt out death over the years. Never dive into its waters. Understand?"
I nodded, so that we could just move on. Over the years, I nodded a lot this way. I got good at scurrying past these talks.
"We live about six miles from here," my father continued, "and that's just about the right distance to show our respect for these waters. If our house was any closer and we would be under its threat."
"Actually, that's not really true," José María said. "Clara lives by the lakefront, so she's really just a few hundred yards away from the shore--"
My mother smacked my brother on the back of the head, and he grinned as he shrugged his shoulders and chortled.
But José María was right. The dorms were very close to the water. But I kept my mouth shut. This was not the time for interruptions.
My father lit one end of the bundle of twigs, and it took a moment to catch fire. Soon its flames were leaping up its length as my father held it away from his jean jacket and over the concrete lip. His hand stayed poised over the water. He spoke no words. He just let it burn until the flames caressed the tips of his fingers and the fire lit our faces. He tossed the bundle into the waters, where the darkness swallowed it up in a hiss.
"Clara, you have to promise me you'll always stay away from this lake." My father said.
"Sure."
My father turned toward all three of us.
"So, that's what you do when you come to show respect to the water," my father said. "Learn it."
Another order for me.
I pressed my lips into a flat line. Impatience burned in my gut. I was feeling ready to leave this place. I wanted to be back in my dorm room, cracking open a PBR. I was over this spooky water and the hippie weirdness.
My mother was the first to stand up, and she reconfigured her shawl, adjusting its length and folds bending to suit her will and keep out the wind. She shooed us along the bike path, toward the parking lot. Pretty soon, we were inside the car, the engine running and the heater roaring to life, and on our way to the dorms. I stared out the window at Lake Shore Drive, and the water was blue, very blue now. Its former black appearance was gone.
Our family was not the most normal of families. I had always thought so, but as we walked back from the lakefront to the parking lot, I realized that not a single jogger, cyclist or even cop had crossed our path while we sat on the concrete in front of the lake’s waters. We had spent a half hour at the water's edge without a single interruption, as my father tossed flames into the lake.
Four days later, the Millennium Riot became a reality.
A PLACE CALLED MICTLÁN
"If I should paint my city in red, would you think that I bathed it in sacrificial blood?" – Sodium Chloride Veritas, "Bleed Like Me”, Meditating on the Medusa, 1995, 5AD Records.
"Nothing about the events that took place on October 4 made sense. For months, we tried to figure out how the riot started and who fired their weapons first. We investigated the question: How could a peaceful march turn so deadly? I was one of the first responders at Millennium Park. I still don't understand the savagery I witnessed." –Interview with Officer Michael Coleridge, Super Cops: How Technology Changed the War on Terror, by Haley Phair, Neo Press, 2016.
"The inequities of life: Parents are the first people to teach their sons and daughters shame." – Internet meme. Point of origin circa January 2011.
I fell into a darkness, something denser and thicker than sleep. When I awoke, pain crept down my back and through my jaw, my face and the top of my head. I was a thick knot of hurt, and each breath I took sent deeper pain coursing down my right leg. I tried to move my arms, but they were stiff, gnarled, determined to fight me.
Someone was dragging me along the ground.
The underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive lay before me, and it shrank away as I moved further away. I was moving swiftly, as if riding a sled.
A person draped in shadow dragged me through grass. If I craned my head toward the sky, I could see his or her head bobbing, like a black bowling ball. We crossed Columbus Drive, and pain ballooned inside me.
All the work I had done to run, to escape the tear gas and the shooting inside Pritzker, was now undone. I was being taken back toward the place where it all started.
We hit a bump on the ground, and my body shook. And then there was worse pain coursing all through my body, in my teeth and inside my guts.
Night was descending, and the orange glow of the streetlights swirled with the sky.
The person carrying me set me down on the ground on my back.
"Listen up!" He shouted into the distance. "No one gets moved until all EMTs move in. Bring the rest and put them here, next to this one. Careful with backs and necks!"
The person got down on his haunches next to me. He kept shouting orders as his gloved hands straightened out my legs beneath me. A hard black h
elmet and visor kept his face hidden.
Then a strong smell of chemicals and pats on my cheek.
"Stay awake; stay with me," the man in the helmet said. "I'll be right back."
He stood up and ran off into the distance, the letters SWAT glowing on his back as the noise of sirens, shouts and motor vehicles drowned my world out.
The pain in my head had become so intense, I forgot to cry. My pain threshold had always been low, and back then, small bruises and sprains could drive me to tears. But this pain muted me.
The edges of my vision were going fuzzy, and I hoped I could black out, to forget this all, to unfeel it all.
Something loosened beneath me, and warmth dampened my jeans. I had wet myself, or I was bleeding, not sure which. I was now on my right side, in a fetal position, wet, and my head and neck on fire in pain.
In the distance, I could see the turtle-shell shape of Pritzker Pavilion, lit by ambulance lights, and I took a moment to glance at the grass around me.
The sight in front of me made me scream.
Just two feet away from me, a tangle of flesh writhed like a living pile of garbage.
The shape the legs and arms made was sloppy, uneven, asymmetrical. Over the top of the heap, I spotted a portion of a torso and a chunk of parka, then one of its arms folded over on its back like a broken doll. The arm poked sharply through the sleeve of the parka, most likely from the break in the bone. The faces at the top were lifeless.
Something moved along the bottom of the pile.
A portion of a face poked out from under the pile. A man’s boot pinned the face deep inside the heap, but the eye stared out in wide open fear.
The eyes looked female. The cheeks looked swollen, the pupils frozen in terror. Beneath the chin, I saw her brown arm missing its hand, the wound jagged and ringed in black soot.
Then, a grunt from the mound. It was wordless but filled with pain. Inside its notes, I heard deep sorrow and loss.
"Awwwreh," the voice said.
"AWREEH," it repeated, weeping with every syllable. "SAWWW UHM AWREEH."
My eyes danced in circles, looking for someone to help me, someone to help this person. Her mumbles sent a chill down my neck, and I hoped the red lights washing over the metal skeleton of the park meant that ambulances would come help her soon.
The pain in my body grew white-hot. I swept my hand in front of me to touch the mound of people. I didn't know what I could accomplish by doing this, but I could extend my left arm without triggering more pain.
I felt under the brown boot, and I shoved it aside with the heel of my palm. It didn't move. Beneath, the voice continued.
"AWREEEH."
PUSH.
I used all my shoulder strength to shove the work boot, and the leg inside it finally gave way.
Just twenty inches away from me, I saw her full face. Older than mine, female, and her ebony skin slashed to shreds but somehow still recognizable as human. The eyes flat like paper, barely holding on. Her ragged breaths escaped as steam through her matted hair.
"SAWW UHM AWREEH," the woman said.
There was something in her mouth obstructing her words. I put my index and middle finger between her lips and dug around. I found something firm, and I pulled. A chunk of her tongue, which she had bitten through, fell into my palm. The sorrow in the woman's eyes swelled. Now I could hear her words clearly.
"God, I'm sorry. God, I'm SORRY," the woman said, and she stared out at me, but her eyes looked through me. There was no focus there.
She was dying.
"Gaaa--" she said, and the last plume of steam left her lips.
I had never seen a dead body in my life, and I had never been this close to someone so brutally injured.
I screamed, and I tossed the lump of tongue away from me. My eyes were still making contact with the dead woman's, but now I was sure that she had joined the other three or four bodies on top of her in death.
I could see other injured people like me, laid out flat, some groaning, others silent as stone. The helicopters above me screamed dangerously close to the ground, and the words the woman spoke turned in my mind, downward and in circles, like a spiral.
"God, I'm so sorry," she had said.
Sorry for what? I thought. Sorry for... Sorry for all this death? Sorry for joining the march? Sorry for her sins?
I tasted a bitterness in the back of my throat that reminded me of insecticide, and I realized that traces of the tear gas must still be dispersing through the air. My eyes stung, too, and it hurt to blink. Wind whipped around my legs, and I felt coldness in the spot where I had wet myself. My eyes went there now to my gray jeans, and the stain that ran down their leg. There was no shame left in me, just pain, and a new creeping fear.
The woman's eyes had been online for one moment, and then they weren't. Is this what death was? Just like a circuit moving into the open position?
My father had warned me about these horrors, and I could see him now, seated in the living room, smoking his cigarette, reminding my brother José María and I, that "if you give men weapons, they become butchers."
The word “butcher” had felt crass when my father said it, but I thought of it now, as arms poked through piles of bodies and the metal from the blood scented the air. I didn't need to see the other dead people in this field. I had seen enough. The woman before me had no name, and I didn't want her to have one. The redness of her cheeks invaded the skin, and the matted hair, wrapped in blood around her cranium like a cocoon. It was a shade of red filled with chaos.
The massacre around me felt like it had no meaning, and I feared that this was all there would ever be. Pain, sorrow, the woman's sorrow, her sad apology to God, her body a broken pretzel under her.
I felt a stir in my stomach, and I remembered.
When I was a freshman in high school and José María had only entered sixth grade, he yanked me by the hand to the front porch of our house, away from our father’s close eye. José María fished from his backpack one of his treasures — the library books he liked to read. The title, Devil’s Mask: The Richard Speck Story sprawled in red ink over its grey cover. The nonfiction paperback had gone into great details about Richard Speck, who in 1966 entered a hospital in the South Side late at night and committed atrocious things to eight of the student nurses who lived there.
Eight women, raped and tortured and killed, all at the hands of one man. When I had finished that book, I felt sick inside, as if I had swallowed a dozen needles. I slept in my room with the light on for weeks, and each time I remembered the murders, the sharp pains came back to plunge into my midsection.
The needles of pain solidified. Richard Speck had nothing to do with the massacre before me, but I felt something tenebrous, something sick on this wide lawn beneath the Pritzker Pavilion, and it felt just like on those nights I thought of that awful book my brother handed to me.
The woman’s face went slack, and the wind picked up, blowing her hair over her lips.
More voices shouted, and I saw an ambulance creep toward me, driving right over the sidewalk and onto the grass, its red lights dancing like pinwheels. How they whirled.
My vision went grey at the edges, and then I fell into unconsciousness.
My eyes came into focus.
Everything’s gone white and blue.
The halogen lights burst in a wash of blue, and they drew sharp shadows over the bed, the machines at my sides, the food on the tray before me, and the pale flowers at the far end of the room. A television hung from the corner like a single black eye staring into the room. The IV in my arm throbbed, and my lips felt dry as dust.
My mother walked into the room, and I felt relief wash my insides.
As far as I could remember, she had always looked this way: rail thin and her hair pulled behind her as if to say, “Let's do this.” As she took each step into the room and toward my bed, her eyes widened like saucers, and despair distorted her face into long lines. Her hands flew up to her temples, and
her tears came down, the droplets braiding themselves into her hair, staining her blouse and beading up on her leather jacket.
I felt my own tears come up, but something was wrong. I felt a throb inside my chest, and I realized it hurt, a lot, a whole fucking lot, to cry. My face was frozen into a mask. Why couldn’t I wince?
My father trailed right behind my mother. He did his best to not let his eyes widen in shock, but I knew by looking at him that whatever had happened to me was a lot to bear.
Every part of my body felt puffy and stiff. I tried moving my arm to prop myself up, but instead, pain greeted me. My parents took places on each side of my bed, their faces hovering over me while machines beeped behind them in a steady rhythm.
"What time is it?" I asked.
“Ten in the morning," my mother said.
She leaned over and kissed my forehead, eclipsing my view of the room. When she pulled away, I could see my father's tears coursing down his face.
She interlaced her hands on mine. I felt the tiny bumps of the rosary beads looped around her wrist as they touched my skin. I couldn't stop staring at my father, though. I had never seen him cry, not like this.
"If it's ten, where's José María?" I said. I really wanted to see my brother.
"José María's at school," my father said.
"But isn't it Saturday?" I said.
"Clara, you've been in the hospital for six days," my mother said.
I looked down at my body in the powder blue sheets. Only my arm poked out. A bruised brown arm. The rest of me lay underneath.
"Pretty soon, your aunts and uncles will be arriving," my mother said. "Your father and I wanted to spend an hour with you alone first."
“Before they take over —” my father said.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 2