The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus)

by Torres, Cesar

  We both slept soundly, though I don’t know how. We were more wired than ever.

  Snow pelted the streets and the roof of the El train. José María wore his hoodie over his down jacket, and he looked like a puffy doll.

  “If I told anybody this, they would laugh me off the street,” he said, “but I think Arkangel was right. Mictlán is just a place. One of many.”

  “Many what?” I said.

  “Many cities. Cities in other worlds. Places out of space and time, but cities nonetheless. Cities that can be visited.”

  “And what does Arkangel have to say about Mictlán? It’s too late for me to learn all their music,” I said.

  “Well, all their songs are stories, you see,” he said, “and according to the trilogy of albums, the gates opened not too long ago.”

  “They were sealed before?”

  “Not exactly, not how you think,” José María said. “Gates to the other worlds were always accessible, but that was a place for the priests and the wizards to squeeze through. According to the second album, The Golden Architect, a change in the cosmos is allowing more stuff to seep back and forth in our time.”

  “When did that happen?” I said.

  “It started in late 2012, but it’s almost irrelevant, because Arkangel says it’s gradual. It doesn’t just open up overnight.”

  “That means more people can step into the other worlds more easily,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “So if a wizard made a gate in Lake Michigan in 2006, maybe it’s easier to open smaller ones, like the one at the Aragon.”

  “I can’t believe this all sounds so normal to me, but hey, I’m listening with full attention,” José María said.

  “And how many worlds are there?”

  “Thirteen. Says it right there in the liner notes, and the closing song.”

  He showed me the Arkangel CD and its kaleidoscope of red and purple shapes, the liquid lettering dripping off the edges. Its gold border.

  “And that would mean there are—” I said.

  “Yes, that many cities.”

  “And are all the cities in…the Aztec world?” I said. I knew that there was also an overworld for the Aztecs, and other gods and creatures that lived there.

  “Oh, no,” José María said, giggling. “The only city that maps to the Aztec myths is Mictlán. The other cities are—more terrifying than that. And not Aztec at all.”

  “How can that be?” I said.

  “According to Arkangel, some of the cities are friendly to visitors. Those places can get a little spooky, but—”

  I knew I could complete his sentence, because that was definitely one Arkangel chorus I knew by heart.

  “Some of the thirteen cities are much, much worse than the others.”

  It was my suggestion to walk through Millennium Park, and even now, after everything that has happened, and all that pain, I still regret having done so.

  We were stopped twice as we walked across the park. Once by security. A second time by police. They checked out our IDs, and for now, I wasn’t yet flagged in their database. My heart didn’t stop racing until we reached the center of the park.

  The city had announced that the park would be remodeled into a memorial for freedom in 2017. The Pritzker dome was already being dismantled to make way for the spear-shaped tower that would take its place.

  The snow hid the grass, and I was glad. The layer of ice helped me keep some distance from the memories of all that death on the ground. The color green was an instant reminder of the Millennium Riot, and I welcomed the lie that the snow told me.

  Temperatures were dropping fast, and we inched along the BP bridge. Memories blasted my mind, and the colors of the city screamed as if they were made of neon and fire. I shut my eyes for a few seconds at a time.

  Breathe.

  I fought off nausea and fear, and José María smoked a joint, whistling to himself and sliding down the last twenty feet of the bridge as if on a slide. The rock salt on the ground impeded his movement, but he looked happy anyway.

  We walked along the bike path, headed to the very spot where my father had burned twigs over the water on my birthday. We didn’t talk as the gray clouds rolled over the water of the lake.

  “If that is where we go to die, it seems too sad,” I said.

  “Mictlán, you mean?” said José María.

  I nodded.

  “Well, other Gods have been down there; you know that,” he said.

  “Quetzalcóatl?”

  Quetzalcóatl. The most iconic of all Aztec gods. Perhaps the only one that people recognized in America. He was the feathered snake. The bearded white man. The progeny of the sun.

  “They called him the White Tezcatlipoca,” José María said. “He’s one of the four Tezcatlipocas.”

  “That makes no sense. How could four separate gods be the incarnation of a single god?” I said.

  “Well, you heard of the trinity in the Catholic Church. Doesn’t take a genius to see how it works.”

  “And he went down to Mictlán, then?”

  “Sure, he went down there to restore life to humankind. Because all the humans had died out already.”

  The way they die when a flu pandemic wipes them out. Or when meteors hit the Earth. Or when nuclear blasts pulverize us off the planet.

  “But he’s not down there at all now, is he?”

  “He went there once, and whatever he did there allowed man to be reborn. He got the fuck out, like any sane god with superpowers would do.”

  I laughed, but I had to know for sure.

  “Couldn’t he still be there?” José María said.

  “Not sure what Quetzalcoatl looks like, so I don’t know.”

  “Well, he’s not made of darkness, so if you saw him, you would know. He’d maybe be radiating light. And you know, it’s not like he could hide—being a feathered serpent and all—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “If he was down there ages ago, it doesn’t matter. That’s not gonna help us. I have one thing to do, and it’s my tonal.”

  “Good deal,” my brother said, respecting my anger and confusion.

  We rolled off our packs from our shoulders and found a spot right north of Chicago Avenue. From this curved part of the bike path, we could lean over the concrete and see the gray waves leap toward us.

  “You’ll wait for me here, then,” I said. “If I’m gone too long, well, you’ll know what happened.”

  “You’re coming back; don’t worry.”

  I wanted to believe everything my brother said.

  He removed his winter coat and got down to his hoodie. He rolled up the sleeves and his tattooed arms got to work. He set a thin blanket on the ground and placed a set of tools on it in even rows.

  We performed the ritual according to what we remembered hearing from our grandmother Blanca when we were children, stories my father told us and the books that José María carried in his L.L. Bean pack.

  The ritual hurt. We sat cross-legged, drumming the concrete at first with wooden spatulas—it’s all we could find—José María smoking his cigarette and invoking words in the best Náhuatl he could muster. We burned herbs that José María stole from our parents’ house.

  It was weak drumming in terms of volume, but we both felt it and heard it.

  And the longer we drummed, the more the sounds of Lakeshore Drive faded away.

  We drummed in a steady beat, and the waves of the lake got quieter.

  I worried we’d break the wooden spoons, but they skittered on the concrete over and over.

  I was scared of the Xolotl and even more scared of the creature called the Ocullín, but I saw the face of the woman at the Pritzker haunting me. I saw her eyes go flat again, and I wanted to fix the emptiness I saw in them.

  The drumming felt steady, but our arms grew tired. What was I supposed to hear or see?

  We gave it a go this way, risking hypothermia and frostbite for an hour. Nothing worked. The sun would rise so
on, and I felt frustrated.

  “Not working, reina,” José María said. He laughed.

  “Stop laughing; fix this.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  He reached into his pack for a headphone splitter, and he jacked both of us into his iPod. He put his giant headphones over his head, and I stuffed earbuds into my ear canals.

  He tapped the playlist named “#13SC,” and it started to play.

  We had drummed on the concrete, convinced that would help us find the entrance, but we had been wrong. What we needed besides beats was to feel the sound, to feel music.

  The first few bars of “Plainsong” by Arkangel pirouetted inside our ears.

  The music swelled in our brains, and the withering guitars and the thunder of the synthesizers pulled us into its depths. We moved on from song one to song two and on and on, until we couldn’t keep track.

  The songs put us in a trance. José María’s Parliament Lights and the weed he packed into them wafted in our noses, and suddenly, we were moving in a mental space that was quiet, punctuated by drums, and soft, so soft.

  We didn’t drum anymore. We sat on the blanket, shivering, listening.

  We fell into this place for what seemed like hours, and we climbed down into the very structures of Arkangel’s music, as if it were a solid ladder leading us up a tree and into the woods.

  When the playlist ended, I opened my eyes. José María was there, still as a statue, with his eyes closed, as if in meditation. I stared in front of me at the Lake beneath.

  Below our patch of concrete, a large crevasse had opened on the surface of Lake Michigan. A set of iridescent stairs led downward, and the light that shone from its walls was so brilliant, it glowed.

  The hole in the water defied the laws of gravity. It was just wide enough for a person to walk through, and even as small splashes of water surged up to its edge, I saw the droplets of water strike the interior of the opening. Even the floor shimmered in an emerald color.

  I stood up, and I took a step down. Then another. And another. Soon, the water level of the lake was up to my waist, but I was dry as ever. The water held its shape around the hole. A perfect tunnel with stairs.

  I touched one the walls with my fingers and gasped when it moved as if it were alive.

  It was made of living things.

  One by one, millions of green butterflies overlapped, silently vibrating. They made perfect patterns, forming a surface made of what seemed like scales.

  Like dragon scales.

  No!

  Like snake scales, wanderer.

  And as I took a step into the tunnel, the walls shimmered in long waves. I put my feet on the green floor and stared off into its depths. It continued forward seemingly forever but pointing toward the center of Lake Michigan.

  “This is the object that the wizard built,” José María said from behind me. I could still see him behind me, standing on the concrete at the top of the butterfly stairs.

  “Stay here,” I said. “You know what you need to do.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” rang my brother’s voice.

  When all of this is over, I can’t wait to go back to the plans we have for the Parade of Lights with the OFA. This will all be over, and I can go back to school and the things I love. That will be my reward for doing this.

  Each step I took made a soft sound, like a cat’s purr, and soon, the sunlight from above had disappeared, and my skin was bathed in emerald light.

  I felt in my winter coat for La Negra’s knife. I had no idea why this entrance to Mictlán would be safer than the passage we found in the Aragon, but it sure was more beautiful.

  Then I heard the wings flutter behind me by the thousands, and I snapped my neck around.

  The gate is closing.

  I felt the anxiety of suffocation come over me, and I tried to calm down.

  You’ll drown in here, bonita. Drowned forever, and under thousands of pounds of pressure from the water.

  You’ll never leave. But you sure will be mine.

  The bits of sunlight that filtered through the gate above dimmed.

  José María was outside, and now I was down here. There was no going back.

  I turned back toward the place where the entrance had opened up.

  It was sealed up tight now, and the gray light of late autumn was done.

  I tried taking a step into the tunnel, but I couldn’t move my feet. I was too scared.

  The walls shimmered in green, and their light felt alien, cold.

  I needed to do something to calm my nerves that could help me keep going. I covered my good eye with one hand. The open dead eye returned nothing to me but darkness. That dark wasn’t as scary anymore. I knew what darkness could really be.

  I can’t do this.

  I took several breaths to calm myself down.

  And then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I shrieked as loud as I could.

  “Relax, reina!” I heard my brother’s voice and in a blur, I saw his long face , his whiskered chin. He had snuck down next to me, slinking behind me.

  You have a blind spot, Miss Cyclops. He took advantage of your blind spot.

  “José María!”

  “Now, you didn’t think I was going to let you go get autographs from the gods of death and I would stay behind just to text and play on Instagram, did you?”

  The gods of death. The masters of the thing called Ocullín.

  The Lady is Mictecacíhuatl. The Lord is Mictlantecuhtli.

  They are the Lords of death.

  Suddenly, I realized I had learned the names of the things called “Lords.” And knowing their names felt like power.

  I wanted to rattle my brother by the neck, though.

  “You were supposed to stay up there, fool!” I said. “How will we reopen the door?”

  “Shut up and let’s get moving,” he said. “Who knows how solid this tunnel actually is? I mean, look at it. It’s old.”

  He was right. Many of the butterflies’ wings looked nicked, as if they had been here so long that their tiny scales had fallen off.

  From inside the green corridor, we heard a roar, like that of an animal. The walls gave off a slight emerald strobe effect. My brother’s face looked goblin green and his hair reddish under the shimmer of the tunnel.

  “Come on,” I said, leading the way. “Before these butterflies collapse on us.”

  We stepped on metallic insect bodies, and they provided support for our feet. The butterflies stayed glued to the surface of the tunnel even as our feet murdered them by the dozens. Green scales caked the edges of my boot. Each step we took caused the wings of the butterflies to whisper, like an animal taking its last breath.

  The corridor stretched on for what seemed like forever. As I walked, I saw at least two distinct sets of footprints on the ground. People had been here before.

  PART THREE

  BLUE TEZCATLIPOCA

  BLUE HUMMINGBIRD,

  SORCERER OF MY HEART

  “At the age of nineteen, I demonstrated for my mother my camera obscura, and she screamed in terror. It is the work of the devil, she said. She didn’t want to look through it ever again.. That’s one of my strongest memories of her during my youth in Philadelphia.” – Photographer Harvey De Castille, in an 1899 letter to George Eastman, Eastman Kodak Company private archive, New Jersey.

  “If you want to glimpse at the god Huitzilopochtli, all you have to do is play a sport, play a match of chess, or go to war. To call Huitzilopochtli’s name is to invoke battles. He has that power. But I think I misunderstood your question, child. What do his mommy and daddy call him, you say? Oh, that’s simple. His parents call him Blue Tezcatlipoca.” – Q&A by children’s author Paolo Verdi at the Global Children’s Book Summit, Mexico City, September 2013.

  “Even the gods abandon the places where they once thrived.” – Arkangel, “My Name is Dita”, The Violet Album, 2008, Reckless Records.

  The tunnel of green butterflies curved, which me
ant that we couldn’t see how far it stretched into Lake Michigan. As soon as we advanced a few more hundred feet, we still had more ground to cover. I felt guilty stepping over so many insects with my winter boots, but the butterflies never took off in flight.

  Above us, thousands of pounds of water bore down on us, ready to crush our bodies, but the wall was as firm to the touch as wood. My fingers came away with green stains from wing scales.

  The cylindrical shape shimmered and pulsed each time its musical tones echoed in the hall. The steamy air was making me sweat, and I shrugged off my wool coat. I re-slung my backpack over my shoulders and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

  “This is insane,” José María said. “How was this thing built?”

  “Mom said a wizard built it,” I said. I felt vulnerable saying this out loud. Could the walls hear me? Was it wrong to talk this way inside this tunnel?

  “What kind of wizard?” my brother said.

  “I don’t know what kind of wizards there are.”

  We had been walking for twenty minutes now. Roughly a mile by my estimate.

  “So, a tunnel into Mictlán…” José María said. “Why would that wizard leave it behind for anyone to find?”

  “Maybe it was so much work to put up that it would be even more work to collapse again,” I said.

  “Like building a house.”

  We stopped for a moment for my brother to tie his shoelaces and take off his parka. He took my coat from my arms and laid it flat on the ground. Then he placed his parka on top. He folded once, twice, and then he tied the bundle using the sleeves. He stuffed the bundle into his backpack.

  “How do you know how to do that?” I said.

  “Dad showed us when we went to the Redwoods, remember?” I did remember. My father took us by the hand to forage for berries and photograph mushrooms. Mom had stayed up in the tent, making dinner. My dad had draped our coats over a tree log and folded it several times. He spoke the directions out loud to me, but José María had been the one to learn.

  “Wish I had paid attention.” I said.