Arms exploded outward with every step we took inside Minerva’s house. Mom and I were the insects, they were the Venus flytraps.
“Clara!”
“Juliana!”
“Clarita!”
“Juliana and Clara!”
Every hug came with kisses on the cheek, the forehead, and just as I finished that hug with a cousin, aunt or uncle, those arms ushered me toward another. We had to move around the dance floor, which had exploded into applause. All adults and most of the grandchildren danced, but when the toddlers decided to join in for the cumbia, all of my relatives went wild. Whooping, hollering, laughing. I soon lost sight of my mother, who ended up at the back of the house, near the kitchen, while I looked for my aunt Minerva and her newborn.
Minerva was the youngest of my father’s six sisters. She and my father had always been inseparable, and now they sat on a sofa, side by side. He took her newborn from her arms and brought him over to me. My father kissed me on the cheek during the exchange, and then he was gone, to go drink beers with the men in the living room. He kept his eyes distant, far away from mine. He didn’t want to let on that anything was different.
I took the baby in my arms, and he stirred for a moment, brushing his nose and then falling back into sleep. He was still red and lumpy, but his clean smell and the big eyes on his round head stirred something in me. He was a beautiful baby cousin. Jonas.
“He’s so pretty,” I said.
“He’ll be a lawyer, just like his dad,” Minerva said. She liked to predict, and often.
(There’s only one prediction that’s true. You’re learning that now, aren’t you?)
I pushed the thoughts aside, and I squinted under the throbbing colors of the blue baby blanket and the walls of the green living room.
Just days before, this tiny infant had emerged from my aunt’s body. I had never stopped to think much about babies, not until now. After everything I had seen and witnessed, I wanted to find a place where there were only brand new babies and their smells. If I could forget about places like Pritzker or the gate to Mictlán, I would do so now.
“Maybe you’ll let me babysit sometime,” I said.
“Only when you are off during the summer. You have school to think about,” Minerva said. “After all, you’re going to go law school, too.”
I let her words hang in the air for a moment. I gritted my teeth. I had never talked to my aunt Minerva about what I intended to do when I finished school.
“Well actually, I was thinking of changing majors—”
“Don’t even think of it. You’ll be just like your uncle Horacio. Where is he? Go get him, would you, Clara?”
I didn’t particularly want to go find her husband Horacio, but I sure did want a break from her. I sniffed my hands as I walked away. Keep that baby smell.
“Hey, Clara—” Minerva said, one hand in the air to make sure I didn’t stray too far. “You doing okay after, you know—the tragedy—”
“Yes, I am. Thanks for asking.”
“The plastic surgeon did an incredible job, and—”
“I’m still not used to it.”
“And your eye? How is your eye?”
I had explained to all of my father’s sisters many times over, but it never seemed to stick.
I don’t want to talk about my blind eye.
“It’s dead,” I said. “But the other one still works.”
Minerva recoiled, and satisfaction allowed me to keep walking away from my aunt. Problem solved for now, but she’d be back later to prod me some more.
“You know, your father knows a lot of things about dead things,” she said. That caught my attention. I glanced over my shoulder, playing with my cell phone to pretend my interest was low. However, my ears were alert for every syllable she spoke.
“What things are those, Minerva?”
“He learned the old ways from our mother, Abuela Blanca. You know, the very old ways, from Oaxaca. Surely Abuela showed you some of that when she was alive—”
“No, she never showed me anything,” I said. It was true.
In my mind, spirals of lichen and fungus exploded, expelling the fumes of death, stink and rot. I heard the sound of bells, the sound of the Xolotl ringing from the top of the mountain with his black human eyes set into his dog head.
“Well, I am surprised,” Minerva said. “Your father knows those old ways best. Can’t forget them.”
“Guess you’re right,” I said.
“You sure he hasn’t taught you the songs your abuela used to sing? Those songs could help you after the tragedy from Millennium—”
She’s getting bolder. She wants to get right down to it.
Jonas kicked in Minerva’s arms, and she brought him closer to her breast. She flipped down the flap in her blouse and fed him. He suckled with his eyes shut, in absolute innocence. Jealousy and revulsion churned inside me. But my curiosity burned.
“What songs?” I said.
“Well, after a tragic death, or in this case, many tragic deaths, you sing special songs to send the souls off to the next place.”
“What place is that?” I said.
“You should ask your father. He’ll tell you. Then come and tell me what he said, okay?”
She suspects already. Mom was right.
I had no idea why my father asked me to conceal things from his sisters, and it made no sense to me. This was a family of paradoxes.
I squeezed past relatives through several rooms, looking for José María. I found him in the den, kneeling before an Xbox, surrounded by eight other cousins around the glow of the screen. José María ignored me.
Uncle Pirulí nursed his tenth rum and Coke in the La-Z-Boy in the corner. He traveled for a living, selling marketing services to insurance companies, but he was more of a fixture in this room than the Xbox or the furniture. When he didn’t travel, he lived in this basement, and though he tolerated nephews and nieces during parties, this was his kingdom, and we all knew it. I still wasn’t sure why my aunt Minerva allowed him to live in the basement this way.
“Clara,” croaked Pirulí. “Go get me another cuba libre?”
Even at nineteen years of age, I still hadn’t shaken off the obligation to run small errands for all my uncles and aunts in this way. No one needed maids as long as the kids were there to refill ice buckets and deliver bowls of chili peanuts to the adults at the party.
I glanced one more time at my brother. I was invisible to him while he lanced demons through the flat screen.
At the top of the stairs, I ran into Minerva again. I thought of making an excuse for not going to find my father, but instead, I just scooted past her, hoping to avoid more questions. In the hall, I walked past the portrait of my grandparents, which took up the whole surface of an ebony mantel.
Just as soon as I thought I was free from her gaze, she said, “Did you go ask your father yet?”
I bumped into a doorway, and I stumbled forward.
Man, I want to go back to school right now. Get me out of here.
This monster of a house went on forever. It was easily triple the number of rooms of my parents’ house in the city, and I knew I could go sit for a moment in the TV room upstairs. The magnetism of the Xbox would ensure none of my cousins would be up this far in the house. My head was starting to pound, and gray spots floated in my vision. Headache time.
In the 1980s, every single one of my father’s sisters had left Little Village, trading in their bungalow rentals and apartments for homes in the suburbs.
Even when they had the chance, my father and mother refused to leave our house on 26th Street and Kedvale.
“It’s a love for cities,” my father had told me once when I asked when they were going to move to a nice neighborhood. At the time, I was only about nine, and I coveted the giant bedrooms of my cousin’s homes and the long driveways where they could play without fear of a car or a bullet.
But now that I was at the university, I was glad my parents had
stayed put in the city. Every single one of my new friends at school had grown up in suburbs like the one Minerva chose when she bought this house. They were homes filled with space and light, dramatic and filled with Pottery Barn furniture, but I no longer related to those things. Maybe I was like my father. Maybe a city was better. As a result, I still felt at home in Chicago, in its alleys and its anonymity.
Was my father upstairs, perhaps? I took the stairs.
Most of the lights were turned off in the upstairs portion of the house.
My footsteps echoed, and beneath them, the bunny-hop beat of the cumbia vibrated through my shoes and socks.
Minerva decorated every room in the house with two types of images: Monet prints or cats. Jungle cats. House cats. Siamese. Garfield. Every room except the TV room. In this room, the walls were bare, and the TV and DVD player’s black surfaces made austere shadows. Portraits of her cats dotted the bookshelves, and I got ready to flick off the light and head back downstairs when an object caught my attention.
At the far end, I spotted the rocking chair.
My grandmother Blanca’s rocking chair.
When she had been alive, she planted me in her lap in this very chair, and I screamed. I screamed again, and I kicked out my legs. I jammed my elbows in her soft belly, and my sobs finally forced her to let me off.
I had been scared of Abuela Blanca back then. Her face looked old and different. And the chair’s creaking noises reminded me of the dark gap in the basement of my parent’s house.
But she was dead now.
Now I was alone with the chair. I brushed my fingertips on its arm rests and relished the smooth feel.
BUT SHE’S DOWN THERE.
ABUELA BLANCA WAS THERE, IN THE DARK WORLD.
YOU KNOW WHERE, DON”T YOU?
SHE WAS DEAD AS DIRT.
SOMEWHERE IN THAT WORLD OF SOOT AND STINK.
SHE WAS DOWN THERE.
“These are shitty thoughts,” I said out loud to myself. “Stop it.”
Of course she was dead. But was I to believe she had gone down into that land of black mountains, black dirt and air?
Even if my grandmother had scared me, I didn’t want to think of her as a corpse or a trapped soul moving into the vast abyss in the bottom of a world shaped like a spiral.
She had been my father’s mother, after all. The woman who taught him everything he knew.
But your father will go down there too, you see, and he’ll rot belly first, split open like a melon, and he’ll sink into the stench of that place. You know this, too.
Had that been one of my thoughts? Could I really think that? Or was there someone else saying those words?
Was it a voice? It was a voice.
Though I heard no sound, that voice that spoke to me felt close and real, as if it were whispering in my ear. Its rhythms were lascivious, and its tones like the sound of night swamp.
The way it filled my head reminded me of the language of music that the Xolotl initiated me into with his blood. It had felt that close to my thoughts.
I took a seat in my grandmother’s rocking chair. My feet pushed me back, and I rocked for a few moments.
For the first time, I considered that it was only mental illness—a progression of mental illness—that was making me hear voices. A mental illness that had started when I had the shit kicked out of me at Pritzker.
But it’s not in your head, Clara. I’m right here. Can’t you hear me?
I’m in the room with you.
Don’t you see my teeth?
Can’t you hear the rumble in my gut?
Can’t you feel my blood thumping in my body?
I caught a movement in the bookcases, and I stopped the chair from rocking by planting my feet on the hardwood.
A shadow stretched over the bookcase next to me, and it shifted, bulging outward, like a fist through pantyhose. The shadow floated at eye level, where Minerva kept her cat encyclopedias and her ceramic doll collection. It throbbed, defying the light that created it, and I heard a rustling sound, like leaves in the month of October. Just like the voice, the sound came from inside of me, clear as anything I could hear with my ears.
I’ve been here with you, nuzzling you. Why do you hide from me, Clara?
I took in long breaths, trying to calm myself down.
Fight the fear.
Another shadow shifted next to the first one, and the triangular shape bent itself like taffy. They were twin shadows now, dancing just about ten feet in front of me. They formed into a shape.
I was looking at a pair of eyes, blinking, staring at me. They were big eyes, and I didn’t dare imagine just how big their owner would be.
I could see the details in the dark, just like I had learned to see every shade of the color black inside Mictlán. The eyes glistened with wetness, and veins marbled their surface. It had no eyelids, just a membrane that flicked over the eyeballs as if it were blinking.
You gonna bring me your little cousin Jonas, too? You’ll let me suck on those little eyeballs? I will squeeze them between my teeth like grapes.
Jonas, I thought.
I can have the infant, and your uncles, and your aunts. Bring them all to me, Wanderer?
The voice had used that word: “Wanderer.”
I let out a scream, but my hand muffled it quickly. I rose from the chair. I had no idea if I would run away, but I would be ready if I had to.
I needed the comfort of something familiar, something from this world. Something good.
The voice spoke again, and its speech grew harder, more clipped. I heard nails scraping on a hard surface. Thousands of nails.
You like Abuela Blanca’s chair. She did, too. I ate her up after she had the stroke. Your father Adán was right there in the room with her, and he watched her go while I bloomed in her head like the marigolds that flower down inside the valley of spines. Your grandmother, so old, so ready. She was praying to Jesus Christ when she died; did you know that? When I took her, she forgot about everything but the Jesus. Funny, because she used to believe more in us, the citizens of Mictlán, than in that other god. She understood we were very real, but at the last moment, she turned back toward that man on the wood. Her flesh became mine.
Did you know most of them wet themselves when I come and touch them on the shoulder to take them to the next world, Clara?
“Stop it,” I said. I was talking to no one and nothing. “Stop this now.”
But it doesn’t stop, Clara.
Did you like it when you set the wheels in motion, Clara? When the gas blinded everyone in that hollow dome and the men were free to shoot them like cattle? When their heads exploded, round after round? When those women and teenagers got shot?
The eyes blinked, and I recognized something in them. Something feral and big.
“Xolotl!” I said, invoking the name of the creature. I had called its name once, and it stunned him. Perhaps—
Thunderous music sprouted from the bookshelves. It was angry music, full of metal and acrid tones. The music died and the sound of clicking nails returned.
I am not Xolotl, Wanderer. But I can send the Xolotl to fetch you. He can do my bidding, too. He knows your scent well.
“Who are you, then?” I said.
I am the keeper of the law in Mictlán. You don’t know my name? You should know my name. LET ME WHISPER IT TO YOU.
My eardrums burst with pain from the needles of sound that stabbed my brain. My breasts stung like fire and I felt things, like cockroaches, all over my body. The sound was music, and its melody was built of sandpaper, belches and the tearing sound of teeth on flesh.
The name I heard was nothing like Xolotl’s true name when he had given it to me at the gate of Mictlán.
Send me more tribute, wanderer. Millennium Park was not enough.
I took slow steps backward, ready to bolt out of the room as soon as I got close enough to the doorway. I wanted Xbox, I wanted Corona, I wanted cumbia, I wanted my mother’s prying eyes and an
ything else that was happening downstairs. I wanted away from this thing.
“I am imagining this,” I said.
Interesting idea, the shadow said. But how can you imagine me? Those without a tonal do not have imagination.
But one thing is true… THEY know you who you are.
“Who are…they?” I demanded. My hand was on the doorway finally.
The Lady and the Lord. The Lords that live inside the black heart beneath the coil. Come see their faces. You will never forget their faces. They will kiss you long and hard, and you will feel the pleasures of the body, and the ejaculation of your mind. Come, Clara.
I bolted out the door. Fuck this, I thought. I pivoted on my heel and darted into the hallway.
I slammed into limbs and breasts, and the soft textures of a knitted sweater.
We tumbled to the ground, and I kicked out my legs and my arms, and I kept my screaming quiet, my fear tight inside my belly.
“Clara!” shouted my mother. Her hair was tangled in mine, and she tossed me off her. She was flat on her back, and she got onto her knees to inspect me.
“Get up,” she said. I was stunned and my head ached, and she lifted me up in what José María called “Mexican Mother Move.” She put a hand under my armpit and then hooked the other at my hip and lifted me as if I were made of paper.
“Cálmate, niña!” she said, and she slapped me. That was also part of the Mexican Mother Move.
“Clara Hortensia Montes Olmedo!” she hissed.
She said my full name. Now I knew she was angry.
I felt the shadow back in the TV room, and I wanted out. But my mother held her eye contact. Soon, I was breathing slowly again.
“I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“Black eyes,” I said. I blubbered, and all of it spilled out. “This other thing talked to me—it’s not the Xolotl, it’s something else—and it says I have no tonal, I have no tonal, and is that like not having a soul? Mom!”
She smacked me hard again.
My cheek stung from her slap, but then I was crying into my mother’s hair, and
(you have no tonal)
WANDERER.
“Come with me,” my mother said.
She moved fast through the hallway. She opened the last door on the left, the one that led up to Minerva’s attic on the third level of the house. I looked up into the white stairway and saw many hard triangular shadows, and I knew that thing I saw could move through them, bend them so it could make a pair of eyes, and I didn’t want him to take my mother, or me, or anyone in the house.
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