The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus)

by Torres, Cesar

  “Because they will take over,” my mother said.

  “They always take over,” he said.

  My mother checked her phone, ran to the door to see if they were here, and once she was satisfied enough, she came back to the bedside.

  "Have a seat, Juliana," my father said. "You know my brothers and sisters never arrive on time. Clara, how do you feel?"

  I cracked a smile. It's as close as I could get to laughter.

  "Like a champ," I said.

  My father chuckled and handed my mother a coffee. From my vantage point, my mom and dad looked small to me, like miniatures of themselves.

  "Your injuries..." my mother said. "The doctors say your recovery will be slow."

  "Juliana, let’s start at the beginning. Clara deserves to know what happened," he said.

  My father took shallow breaths, and the wrinkles in his eyes bunched together.

  "Dr. Ecker, was just here, before you woke up,” he said. “Whoever did this to you broke three ribs. Punctured lung. You also bled internally. That is what almost killed you. The blows to your head fractured your skull in two places. You’ve suffered a brain injury, and the doctors did their best to work on your left eye. But you may not be able to see out of it again. They have reconstructed your face, and Dr. Ecker assured us their cosmetic surgeon is one of the best."

  I raised my left hand to touch my face. The texture of the bandage was soft, feathery. My whole face was a bandage.

  This is when the horror movie gets really good, I thought.

  José María would like that joke. My parents would not.

  "Don't touch it, Clara," my mother said. "The swelling will go down soon. But don't touch it."

  "Could have been worse, right?" I said. The face of the woman under the pile of bodies flashed in my mind, and I knew that could have been me, exhaling for the last time on the grass.

  My father took out his slender hand from his jean jacket and pointed his index finger at me. His eyes went flat and cold.

  "YOU," he said. "You had to go to the march at Millennium. What the fuck where you thinking, Clara? Do you not have a brain up there?"

  He tapped the side of his cranium hard enough to make a solid thud. This was a serious matter if he was swearing. He never did so in front of us.

  "I was going to tell you," I said.

  "When, exactly? At your funeral?"

  "I don't even know what happened!" I said.

  "The body count right now is at three hundred or so," my mother said.

  "Not to mention the thousands of injured," my father said.

  "This was the way to make change happen," I said. "I know that, and you know that." It was my turn to push back.

  "You think that armed forces gunning down people makes change happen?" my father shouted. "You learned nothing from history, then."

  He pulled up a plastic chair, and he propped one leg up on it so I could see it up close. He loomed over the room, his short breaths thickening the air. He tossed his jean jacket over the chair and rolled up his right shirt sleeve. Then he rolled up his pants leg.

  I had seen the long scars on his arms and legs before, many times. My father was sixty-three years old, but the strength in his arms and legs gave him the appearance of a man in his forties. The scars bloomed on his skin like dull white veins.

  "This is what revolutions bring, Clara. I want you to get a good look at it," he said. "A day doesn't go by where I don't feel pain. Two bullets and a femur fractured in half. And my limp -- you wanted to have a limp, too, didn't you?"

  "Adán, calm down," my mother said.

  "No, I'm not calming down," he said. He puffed up his chest and my mother sat still as stone. This was their dance. "I thought I could change the world, too.”

  “Some would argue you did,” my mother said.

  “And look how Tlatelolco turned out. My country went to the dogs. Our country, Juliana."

  On October 2 of 1968, my father, together with his older brother Jorge, took the city bus to the plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City. That day, many other students also organized to gather at the plaza to protest the repressions of the Mexican government. This was one of several protests that had taken place in Mexico City. That was a year that was filled with civil action and unrest.

  Over that afternoon, ten thousand people, most of them students, gathered. What happened next was unclear, but my father told us helicopters had flown over the plaza, and at some point, someone fired flares from a nearby building.

  And then gunfire erupted. The army assaulted the plaza, killing hundreds of people. My father had been sitting on the stone steps of the Aztec ruins at the plaza when the shooting started, and he led Jorge and all of those he could to safety, doing his best to avoid gunfire. As they ran into a nearby apartment building, a bullet shot Jorge clean through the head. Two rounds pulverized my father’s leg.

  Jorge’s death turned my father into a gaunt figure over the decades. There was a pain about Jorge that my mother couldn’t describe, and which my father hid from us. To mention Jorge was to summon my father’s strongest silence.

  I had heard the stories about Tlatelolco from my mother over the years, because my father refused to talk about them. He only ever raised it as leverage during conversations like this one, where he reminded me of how incompetent I was.

  My father's eyes shimmered as he bit down on his lips. He rolled down his pants and sleeves again, and he sat down on the chair. His former magnitude was gone now. He shook his head and sank into the white plastic.

  "Your mother has something to say to you," he said.

  "So you're going to just disengage from this, Adán?" my mother said. "Sure, yell my ear off in the car about working as a team, and now it's just me that's the harbinger of bad news. Mom plays the good cop."

  "This was your idea,” he said. “So here we go, team. You get to tell Clara the big news."

  My mother swept my hair back with her fingers. Unhappy with the results, she pulled out a brush from her purse and ran it in strokes away from my face. Each brushstroke hurt my head a little, but I let her go on. Her eyes went very dark, and she never dropped them from mine.

  "They're calling the event the Millennium Riot," she said. "The police and the other troops who were there shot the protesters many times. There are rumors that a few of the protesters in the crowd might have shot back, but it's all on shaky cell phone videos, and the country is in chaos, pointing fingers."

  "Really?" I said. I felt a sick dread, but also a sense of victory in my heart.

  Change. Was it possible?

  "I saw a few clips of the start of the riot,” my mother said, “and I had to stop. There was so much gas -- and when the shots started, I kept on thinking, 'She's dead, she's dead.' I had to turn it all off."

  "We were very lucky to get you back," my father said. "We had no way of knowing if you were there, buried beneath somebody."

  "I escaped the park when the gas canisters hit the stage," I said. "I got pretty far, and then--"

  I trailed off. My father had warned me to stay away from the lake, and that's exactly where I had run. My mother's side of the family kept many secrets, and so did my father's. I kept this bit of information from him, at least for now. I couldn't stand to see him lose his temper like he had just moments ago.

  "Do you remember who did this to you?" my mother said.

  "Men in uniform."

  "How many?"

  "Not sure. It happened fast. I ran into them, and then I can't remember much after that."

  It was true. The dark visors had made the people in uniform anonymous, faceless. And then the baton swung. I did remember the baton.

  "I think they were the same people who dragged me back to the pavilion, where they brought the rest of the dead and the injured," I said.

  I couldn't keep everything secret. I decided to share this part of the story before my mother had a chance to ask me. "They put me next to a pile of bodies. There was a woman at the bottom a
nd what I saw was horrible--"

  I sobbed.

  "Clara, you don't have to--" said my father.

  "It's okay, Clara," my mother said. "Tell us what you saw. The details matter."

  I needed a little space, but my mother would be hurt if I told her not to crowd me in with her body. It was better just to get this over with.

  "She was the last one alive under that pile of bodies. Until she wasn't."

  "So, you saw her die. That's what you're telling me?" my mother said.

  I nodded.

  We all fell silent for a moment, and my mother tightened her grip on my hand. My father paced around the room, as if he were formulating something long and intricate. He dug in his brown leather bag. He pulled out a petri dish, which I recognized immediately. He handled these often at his job at the Botanical Gardens, and he kept a few at home for odd projects in our back porch. The dish was lined with clear agar, and white spirals coiled around its surface like the trail left by an ice skater. My father pulled out the tray built into the bed, and he placed the disc in front of me, like some sort of present.

  "This is a fungal spiral," he said. He traced the white tendrils over the plastic. "They call this little beauty the Yellow-Gill Damsel. Its job is simple. It thrives off of dead things. Dead wood, dead plant matter, but its favorite is dead flesh. This powerful little fungus spreads itself deep in the ground, and when things go to die, it extends tendrils like these."

  The tendrils made me want to puke.

  "Don't fear it," my father said. "These swirls, Clara -- this is what death looks like, from a microscopic level. What you saw when that woman died was also death, at a macroscopic level. You saw her take her last breath, and out it went, into the air, possibly in little spirals of air, just like the ones here."

  "Hurry," my mother said, and she brandished her phone in my father's general direction. "Dolores texted to say she’ll be here within minutes. Clara, be sure to keep your mouth shut when your aunt gets here."

  The odor from the petri dish corkscrewed its sweet and musty scent into my nose.

  "Thinking about that dead woman is making me sick, Dad," I said. "I wish you would take this thing away."

  "That's the whole point, Clara," he said. "I'm afraid I can't. After the riot, the woman that died in front of you, the hospital--I am sure you think morbid events are following you. This very scent is shadowing you.”

  "No, I think you're putting morbid thoughts in my head.”

  "That's my girl,” my father said. “You don't let anyone push you around."

  "Well, I'm pushing this fungus back to you," I said, and I put it back in his bag, which lay on the bed. It took me some time to do this, because my arm still ached, but I did it without his help. When I was done, my father reached inside the bag and placed it back on his lap.

  I knew we could go on forever like this, taunting each other.

  My father stopped pushing the dish back.

  "Do you recall the early hours of the morning of your thirteenth birthday?" he said.

  "Not really, no. Well, let me think about it," I said.

  I thought hard. I still shared a room with José María back then, and my father had painted the walls bright green so we could have a color that suited us both. I went back to that memory, and a small fragment appeared, like a glint of metal inside a cave.

  I remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and I had looked at the clock. José María lay curled into a ball, snoring. It was about 4 a.m. My stomach stirred with hunger pangs, and my mouth was dry. At the far end of the room, a light flickered. Two figures sat in the far end of my bedroom, and they watched me from the corner.

  I remember wanting to scream.

  My parents, my parents--now I remember. They were there with me.

  They sat side by side, lit by the glow of a veladora candle. My father waved at me, smiling, and I felt confusion, shock and fear.

  "Go back to bed, Clara; there's still more time to sleep," my father had said. We lived in Little Village, where street noise lasted all night, but I remember that night had actually been quiet.

  My mother had wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and tucked me back in bed. I wanted to ask what they were doing here, but I was mute, drowsy, inert.

  This was not a happy birthday memory, no sir.

  My mother had leaned forward into the soft glow of the candlelight.

  "When you step inside the Palace of the Skulls, just remember we're always with you," my mother had said.

  She had stood up then, and she crossed the room with an odd grace, as if her feet were being carried by a gust of wind. Her face above mine had calmed my fears a bit. I felt her dry kiss on my forehead, and then I was dissolving into deep sleep again. That cocoon of nothingness that arrives with sleep took over me.

  When you step inside the Palace of the Skulls.

  When you step inside the Palace of the Skulls.

  When you step inside the Palace of the Skulls.

  Surely this had just been a dream.

  Today was the first time the memory had sprang back into my hands, like a found object.

  "That morning, I had a scary dream,” I said. “I woke up and you two were in the room with me. You tucked me back into bed."

  My mother nodded toward my father in silent approval. He looked eager now, excited. If he could, he would have lit a cigarette. He liked to celebrate with smoke.

  "It wasn’t a dream. We were actually there with you," my father said. "That night was as important as the day you were born. That night, you survived a rite of passage."

  "Come again?" I said.

  “A rite of passage,” my mother said.

  "It was actually your second rite of passage, Clara,” my father said.

  “There’s more than one,” my mom said.

  “The first one is birth itself,” my father said. “When a baby is born and arrives into the world alive and breathing, the first rite is complete. The child has survived the emergence from the matter of the universe and exits the womb through the mother.”

  “And the second one – oh — this is what you talked about. The night of seeking —” I said.

  “So she does remember,” my father said to my mother.

  In our family, we began to leave childhood behind at thirteen, but according to my father, true adulthood didn't arrive until the twenty-sixth year.

  "José Maria also passed this rite when he was thirteen,” my mother said. “It begins in the middle of the night, when the sun is on the other side of the planet. It's very simple. During that night, a dream arrives. Then the rite begins inside a dream.”

  My father nodded, and my mother continued.

  "That night, we watched over you while you dreamt. We were there to protect you. That’s what all parents have to do for their children on the thirteenth year. Your dream journey is all your own of course, and no parent can accompany the child inside the dream. We simply wait at the bedside, making sure the children are physically unharmed.

  “That night you woke up from sleep — just for a minute or so. An interruption like this is normal, but it was our job to make sure you went back to sleep, to make sure you completed your task."

  "Which is...?" I was so damn impatient already.

  “The task on the thirteenth year -- is the one where each person goes out and seeks his or her tonal. The search can lead you to many places, many of them very dangerous."

  My tonal.

  I hadn't heard that word in many years. This word also came back to me, like a message in a bottle.

  Tonal.

  I remembered the tonal, in stories that my father told me about his mother in Oaxaca, and stories of his uncles’ travels in the jungles of the Yucatán. All the stories led back to the same word: tonal.

  The tonal was an animal or symbol that corresponded to each person’s birthday. Some people got the deer, some got water, and some the monkey. There were twenty in total. These had always been the little stories my
mother and father told me growing up, but it had been years since they had mentioned tonal in my presence.

  “And if I went out to find my tonal, then what was it?” I said. I had always wished for the rabbit.

  “That is the problem,” my father said. “You came back without one. Your mother and I never saw one come back to the room with you.”

  “Is that like having no soul?” I said.

  My father stared out the windows into downtown Chicago and cried in silence.

  I tried sitting up. My heart was racing and the aches in my back were roaring back to life.

  “Sit back,” my mother said. “You’re not well enough to sit up yet.”

  "I want José María here right now," I said. "I'm not liking this conversation."

  It was true. José María was nothing close to being what I called a "normal," but at least he could corroborate the utter weirdness in our family. I could surely use his backup now. I needed him here to bring some sanity into the room.

  "Timing is not on our side," my father said, "The painkillers they are giving you interfere with your lucidity. Normally, we would explain all this history to you without the intrusion of a single foreign chemical in your body. But your mother and I don't have a lot of time."

  "Your father and I--" my mother added.

  "We're worried you're headed in a very wrong direction," my father interrupted. "Joining the OLF and going to the protest was only a first step. I'm worried that you carry not just my stubbornness, but also my temper, and maybe even my bad luck. I have to ask you to stop your involvement with the OLF."

  "What do you know about OLF?" I said. "You'd rather have me stay complacent and superficial."

  "These are the same people that hacked the 911 phone system when the Millennium riot started. That disruption kept ambulances from arriving on time. People died as result. Clara, before you fight me on this, you need to get the whole story--"

  "I don't need anything."

  "They say that the OLF has put a contract out on the city politicians. This information's coming directly from OLF. Do you think you’re not going to be bring more violence and anarchy about?"

  "What does this have to do with the tonal, anyway, Dad? Get to the point."