I was a skinny teenager, barely fifteen years old, crossing the intersection of Pulaski and Lake. I didn’t react quickly enough to the pops. They went off like soda bottle caps. Pop, pop, pop. My friend Bernard shouted. He shouted hard, and he called my name. None of it made sense. Behind me, a liquor store’s glass windows blew out, and then I understood. The black Suburban screaming down the street was shooting, its passenger holding a handgun in each fist. I felt pressure in my gut, in my head, and in my shoulder. Red flowed from me, and it was then that I felt regret and fear. Would Momma be okay? I pressed my hand to my chest and my stomach, and my insides were soft, like gelatin. Momma lived under the fist of my father, who also beat me when he showed up unannounced at our house around the corner. If this blood was true, I would never see Momma again, and I would never get her out of this neighborhood.
I was old, much too old, and I hated it. Ninety-three years old, and my knee ached like the devil. I remember that. I no longer had a reason to live, because my wife’s death had left me empty. My many sons tried cheering me up, but my knee tortured me every minute of the day, and the cancer in my liver was winning. My father had come to Chicago from Poland a long time ago, and as I lay on the sofa, drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, I became alarmed. He used to drink like this, too, sideways on the couch, piss stains on his boxers and one eye half shut. I couldn’t remember my father’s name. I tried. I really tried. His name. What was his goddamn name? There was a blank space in my memory. I wept into my hands, and the stabbing pains grew deeper in my gut, right where my liver was located. It was New Year’s Day, and my sons were coming for a visit at four p.m. The pain in my insides grew deeper, sharper, and I knew what was coming next. I died with my hand still wrapped around the neck of the bottle, and wishing I could just remember that name. Since we arrived in Chicago, we had lived on the South Side. I remembered that.
I wrapped my hair in a towel, and I walked out into the back porch to smoke a cigarette. I could hear the son of the Montes down the street blasting Rhinoceros, and I thought, Don’t they ever turn down the music? My phone rang from the living room, but I let it go to voice mail. I was dreading answering the call from my boss, so no hurry. I’d fake a doctor’s note if that’s what it took to take another day off. Instead, I went to the kitchen and popped an Eggo waffle in the toaster. I ran down the figures of my credit card debt and the student loan payments I still had left. I was going to get a handle on this problem, and today was the day it all would start. I had spent the past three months hiding the numbers from my Trevor, but he knew I had a problem. $150,000 in debt, and a serious shopping problem. I stared at the stuff I bought and put in our extra bedroom. All of it beautiful stuff, my things, my clothes. A new purse and a silk skirt. Dozens of DVDs. Perfume. I considered going out shopping later today. Why not? Then I put the butter knife into the slots of the toaster to fish out the waffle. The knife came to life, hot to the touch, and suddenly it was glued to my skin. My jaw clenched, and I felt a surge. Cramps in my flesh bent my arm into the shape of a hook. My lips trembled, and fear filled my being. I shook, my whole body clenched, and I felt my own eyeballs cook and my hair begin to smoke. The clock that was plugged into the wall popped, and fire broke out from the socket. I didn’t fade out into death. It was more jerky than that. Like a TV set flickering on and off. I tumbled into a place of fear, and the last thoughts in my head were those of that credit card bill for $14,608 that lay on my counter as my retinas and my corneas burned. I smelled my own body fat cooking, and the dark came over.
Each plume of marigold stench thrust these experiences into me, and my eyes watered. I vomited black liquid onto the dirt, and the bends in my stomach made ghostly music.
“Want more, wanderer?” X said.
I shook my head.
“Then you know not to try touching me like that again. Never touch me.”
“Am I dead?” I asked.
X was still holding his jaw open from the corners of his mouth, and his tongue rolled out like a snake. He pulled the corners up, and his grin mocked me. He walked toward us again, and in a swift move, he grabbed José María and me by our collars. He leaped over rocks with grace, and as we cut through the darkness, I felt as if I were flying up the side of the mountain.
“I do not want to go up there. Stop it,” I said.
The mountain peak felt wrong, all wrong, and I knew we were not supposed to go there. The toes of my shoes grazed the rocks beneath us, and I heard screeches above us. Birds were circling this mountain. They had always been there. I just couldn’t see them until X’s nimbus of sound lit them with its tone and I could see their textures.
It was a whole flock. It stayed close to us, scanning with dozens of eyes. The birds stared at me with a deep knowledge. These were like no birds I had ever seen. Their bodies were solid but made of the blackest smoke. Their eyes and flat faces stared into me, and they left trails of smoke in the moonless sky.
They are owls.
We reached the peak in what seemed like seconds, and the final point was nothing more than a mound of snow, black and glittering like the same snow I knew on Earth.
“If I cannot keep your guest as my present, you must leave,” X said, and he hurled us toward the snow mound. The snow sparkled like volcanic sand, though I knew that if I touched it, its icy coldness would sting my skin. X swelled with rage, and his skinny body filled with wetness, as if his circulatory system had reactivated. His dog face and his human eyes coveted José María. It wanted to consume flesh.
We fell toward the snow, and as we approached it, I saw it magnify before me, as if my eyes contained microscopes inside each eyeball. Inside each black snowflake, I saw myself reflected. It was like seeing a honeycomb of mirrors, and we approached it with speed and fury. My eyes magnified the images, and I know José María saw them, too. We had been here before.
Thousands of mirrors before us. And my brother and I inside each one.
We barreled toward the snow, and when we made contact, we passed through it like bodies through gelatin. Sound swallowed us up, filling our ears and blasting our bodies into ether.
We struck a hard object.
What it feels like to hit the pavement at 1106 West Lawrence Avenue in November: wet and slick. And oh, so good.
I had never been so happy to feel gray water slide on my cheek. I breathed in exhaust, the smells of french fry grease, pho, injeera and motor oil. City air. But what was even better was seeing color. Red stoplights, the emerald tease of the Green Mill off to my right and the gorgeous brown of the back of my hands. Light spread everywhere, and where it shone, color followed.
Things are no longer black.
Tears came to my face and the wind got knocked out of me, but there was glory on my right as José María landed with a thud next to me. I heard a dull crack near his hip. This sound was glorious, because it was a sound from the real world. It felt familiar, and thankfully, it didn’t emanate music. We were back.
José María scrambled to his feet and withdrew his Samsung from his pocket. “Piece of shit!” he said, and he tossed the two halves of the phone into the traffic before us. It hit the windshield of an SUV driving east on Lawrence Avenue.
The driver pulled over across the street.
I stood up, straightened my skirt, and I blinked, over and over and over, to make sure I was really here, really back.
The driver of the car stormed toward us. His belly bounced over his belt, and his face reddened.
“What the fuck is your problem? You wanna start something?” he shouted.
José María spat out, coughed, and his voice choked on a syllable. He coughed again, and I heard his voice, loud and clear now.
“Step the fuck away from us! I’ll beat your fucking ass!” my brother shouted. Red spots bloomed on thin cheeks and he shivered with anger.
José María ran toward the vehicle. This was nothing I had ever seen him do before. The driver stepped backward, almost stumbling over himself. Jos�
� María punched the passenger side window, and the window rattled. He then took his closed fist, raised it above his spiky head, and slammed it down on top of the car. He didn’t leave a dent, but the noise of his fist slamming on the steel rang out like a gong. The driver stepped back into his car.
He locked himself in his car as José María ran up to the window.
“Step out of the car, asshole,” screamed my brother.
José María was still shouting as the car took off.
I heard Rhinoceros’s sonic boom rock the building. The show was still on. My brother stood across the street from me, shivering, as it started to rain.
José María held his hand to his throat, and he smiled each time he spoke.
“I can talk,” he said.
I felt tears welling up behind my eyes, but I fought them back. A deep sense of confusion was washing over me now, and I felt slightly dizzy. So much time had melted inside that world of darkness. I turned around to face the building looming over me. The glass of the Aragon Ballroom doors looked as innocent and inert as ever.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” I said.
“Clara, did you also see what I saw back there…back through there?”
“Shared hallucination, right?” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, glad you said that. Me neither.”
José María pulled up his hoodie over his head, and he sank his hands in his pockets. This meant he wanted something.
“Do you think it’s too late to go buy a T-shirt? If I get this one, my collection will be complete.”
“You are unbelievable. We just popped out of—what?—Hell? And you want to buy a T-shirt.”
“Retail therapy, reina. It will make me feel better.”
I could see the long tunnel of the Aragon’s lower level through the streaked glass.
“No way. No way at all. We’re leaving,” I said. “Everything is different now.”
“But we made it out alive, you see? We’re okay!” José María said.
“Talk to me. Dad will be here to pick you up shortly. You saw that dog creature?”
José María nodded.
“And the way it made music, the way the sound allowed us to sort of see in the dark?”
“It was a world made of every shade of black. I saw it too,” José Maria said.
My brother lit a cigarette, and we took tiny steps against the wind that whipped through Broadway. I figured we’d walk a few blocks until we got to Little Vietnam. Something about the pho shops and families huddled over the bowls made me feel more comfortable than standing in the presence of the Aragon. The concert hall felt like a mountain in this stretch of Broadway, and the last mountain I had seen had been black, so black, the home of a creature who spewed bell tones from himself….
“Did we die?” I said.
“You still don’t get it? You know, for being in college, you are the dumbest person I know,” José María said. “This is what Dad tried to tell you about. We peeked into Mictlán.”
“So… we should be dead.”
“No, no, no, stupid. Not dead. All we saw was a tiny glimpse. Just the gate,” he said.
“That’s what the creature called it, a gate.”
“Exactly. I mean, who else would be guarding it but Xolotl? ”
The word escaped José María’s lips like an elongated, wet whisper. Show-low-tuhl.
He knows the thing’s name.
“It was most terrible thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“I dunno; I thought it was pretty cool myself. He meets dead souls at the gate and he takes them, you know, down there.”
“He told me his name. I don’t supposed you heard him say it?” I said.
José María shook his head.
“I heard nothing.”
“Me, neither. Not until he shared his blood with me. Then I could hear what he said.”
“That was fucking cool, Clara,” José María said. I thought about shaking him by the shoulders to rattle some sense into him.
How can that be cool?
“The name was long, full of syllables and musical notes. Maybe it sounded like Xolotl, the more I think about it.”
“So, you could hear everything down there?” José María said.
“Only after he cut me and rubbed his blood on the cut,” I said.
We reached the corner of Argyle and Broadway, and my head pounded with fresh pain. My stomach churned, and I felt nausea rise up my body.
“I think I need some time to think about what happened,” I said.
“Why not talk about it right now?”
“You’re unbelievable; you know that? You just came out of that place fresh as a daisy? Didn’t you just feel all that despair, that rot down there? Didn’t you smell all those dead people?”
“Yeah, but, like, whatever. Get over yourself.”
How quickly this little shit made me angry. It was real skill.
“What will our parents think?” I said.
“Sooner or later, you’ll have to ask Mom and Dad.”
“I don’t know how you find all this time to try to be a smartass.” I said. “And put out that damn thing. You’re gonna get cancer.”
My words made me pause. Would cancer claim my brother, like the cancer that I saw, heard and felt inside the man who died on his couch in the stench of the marigold? Why would I wish cancer on my brother? And why did I say those words? After the vile things I saw in that kingdom of darkness, words seemed to matter a bit more.
X said, “You must be careful what sound you make, with body and with your mind. Even in your breathing, your music announces you.”
I glanced up Broadway, and I spotted my father’s Honda racing down the street. Behind us, I heard sirens blaring, and an eerie quiet flooded the streets.
The car pulled up, and my brother hopped in. My father lowered the window and I peered in. My father layered a thick sweater under his jean jacket and wrapped his neck in several coils of his wool scarf. I got ready to tell him a million lies, to create a smokescreen he could never see through. He didn’t know how happy I was to see him, but I needed time to unpack what I had experienced.
“How was the show?” he said.
“Sick,” shouted José María from the back. “So sick!”
How is he so fearless?
“Come on, get in the car. It’s cold.”
We fielded questions about Rhinoceros, and we skipped over the near scuffle in the pit as we told it. My father had no idea. During the drive up Broadway, nothing broke the eye contact that José María and I held through the vanity mirror. I pretended to check my makeup, and he and I held our gaze. I kept my mouth shut, and José María knew I’d beat his ass if he said anything. This time, he held the information in.
I had no idea how I was ever going to tell my father about what happened. In doing so, I would admit that he had been right all along about Mictlán.
And if he was right about that, he might also be right about things like the OLF.
The OLF. The thoughts about my real life with the OLF popped back into my head, and I was grateful.
We crossed the intersection at Sheridan, and I remembered I was supposed to host a meeting the next morning for the OLF. I had no idea how I was going to do it. I still felt sick to my stomach from the journey to the dark, but I wasn’t going to let anyone down.
I popped the door handle as hard as I could when we arrived in front of my dorm. I glanced back at my brother one last time, and I said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Don’t sleep in.”
“Never sleep again,” José María said. “Scout’s honor.”
He held his hand up, showing me how he crossed his fingers.
“Wait a minute there,” my father said. “You’re not leaving without giving me a time to pick you up tomorrow.”
“What?” I said. Pain throbbed in the base of my neck. “I have an OLF meeting tomorrow. We’re marching next week.”
&nbs
p; “You really don’t read your mother’s texts, do you?” my father said. “I don’t care about your meeting. Your aunt Minerva will be expecting you at her house.”
“The baby—”
“Yes, early again. They sent her home today, and that means we can go visit them tomorrow. I’ll pick you up right here at two p.m. Don’t be late.”
José María shook like a marionette in the back seat. He laughed without a single worry.
“See you tomorrow, reinaaaaa!”
I crept into my bunk that night, and I tossed and turned, afraid of dreams. Thankfully, none came. Eventually, I slept, but just for a handful of hours.
The next morning, I washed my unease away with four cups of coffee with lots of sugar, lots of cream. The OLF meeting locations were never decided until two hours before, when we each got a message sent through IRC.
Ever since the Millennium Riot, we no longer used university buildings to meet. Coffee shops were also out of the question, thanks to their high visibility and open Wi-Fi networks. Instead, we chose old diners. The greasier, the better. Today, we were told to go to the Golden Nugget on Lawrence Avenue, and we filed in in batches. No meeting could ever be larger than about six to eight members. This also helped keep a low profile.
Most of us were students, some were not.
We filed in around the circular booth, and we poured maple syrup over flapjacks.
The taste of those fluffy cakes and the thick butter that dripped from their edges was heavenly. It was a drastic extreme, the opposite of Mictlán, in fact, and I wanted the taste of those flapjacks to last forever. I couldn’t tell anyone how much I appreciated every element of the real world. The most mundane things had become rich and beautiful.
Our meeting kicked off.
Mercy, a lesbian queer activist, the oldest of our group, took a seat across the table from me. She brought two others with her: Julian, and Mauricia. I represented the university, though by now, our numbers had dwindled to a mere fifteen on campus. Today, only three of us attended. Myself, Dennis Cho and Kayla Onayemi. There was no texting, no checking in allowed at these meetings.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 10