“See? I told you to trust in me,” said the voice we heard earlier coming from the depths of the road. “You’re safe now.”
“Hmm, okay, tell me more,” José María said into the dark.
“You’ll be safer this way,” the voice said. “Just walk closer, you two. Come toward me. You’ll see everything is fine down here.”
“Down there?” José María said as turned to me and bit his lip.
“Bring your box with its light magic. I want you to show it to me,” the voice said.
It’s strange to think one could fall in love with just a voice, but it’s true.
When I was 31 years old, I got a phone call late at night after coming home late from work in the Loop. My hair was tangled by the winter air, and my belly ached with hunger. My lips had split from the cold as I stepped out of my car, and as I ran my tongue over the wound in my lip, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, and to this day, I am not sure why I picked up the line.
“Is Morgan there?” the voice said. The silky, deep texture of sound that insinuated itself into my ear made me sit up as I poured myself a tall glass of water and multitasked to order takeout.
“You must have the wrong number,” I said. “There’s no Morgan here.”
“Morgan who went to Western Chicago University,” he said. “This isn’t her number?”
I had a roommate at the university once, and her name had been Morgan. I explained this to the caller.
What I didn’t say then was that Morgan had also been patient with me when I had been part of the OLF, and she had been kind when my face emerged from the bandages after the Millennium Riot. Morgan had been there when I needed her most, and though her life in teaching meant that we lost touch over the years, she had been important to me. She had met José María the night before we went into Mictlán as she prepared to visit her boyfriend across campus. Morgan had been red-headed, bold, a good friend.
“So, she’s not there?” the stranger said. I wanted to hear that voice, to know it.
“Morgan has never lived at my address,” I said.
“But clearly it’s the same Morgan.”
“Honestly, this feels like coincidence,” I said. I should have been alarmed, creeped out, in fact. Instead, I was intrigued.
“Well, it’s a good coincidence. Surely you must be a good person, if you know her. I was hoping to get a group of people together to go to dinner for the holidays, for those of us who don’t have family in Chicago.”
Chicago winters were searingly cold and lonely, if you let them be.
“You live here?” I said.
“It’s where I do my work, and I have an apartment in the south Loop. You could say that, yeah.”
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Ken.”
His voice danced through the mobile phone. I wanted that voice the way that people want to smoke a second, third, and fourth cigarette.
And so Ken and I started a conversation. Our relationship started during that call, and it continued for a decade, in all its forms and shapes. He was a good lover, despite the things he did when he learned about my history. But on that day, it was his voice that brought him into my life. A sensuous voice that I wanted in my ears forever.
And just like I fell in love with Ken’s voice, I saw how the voice coming from the darkness in the path below seduced my brother José María in the upper parts of that canyon in Mictlán.
“We have to see who she is,” José María said. He yanked up his jeans from his hips and ran a hand through his nonexistent beard. The textures of his skin remained smooth, hairless, and the color of onyx.
“I think we should be careful,” I said.
“That’s not like you,” he said.
“Is that so?”
“Of course. I can’t think of anytime you were actually careful., You always act on impulse.”
“Strange that you see me that way,” I said. It was true. I had always thought of myself as cautious, but José María saw something else.
“Hell, you went to that protest at Millennium, and you stole a family heirloom,” he said. “All I can say is badass.”
He had no idea what I saw in Millennium.
“Well, I still think we should be careful of the thing down there,” I said. “When I was at Minerva’s house, something else spoke to me, through the walls. And it wasn’t good.”
“Oh, snap, and what did it say?” my brother said.
“‘Give them to me, Wanderer,’ among other things. Terrible things.”
“The Xolotl also called you a Wanderer,” José María said. “What does that mean?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Our family also warned me about the Lords,” I said.
“Well, duh!” José María said. “They have to. The Lords are the kind of things you only see once, if you catch my drift.”
“Are the Lords really down there, at the bottom of that canyon, you think?” My own words felt thin,and brittle. I was not prepared for this journey.
The Lords of Mictlán were supposed to be a couple, a man and wife. I hoped I could find my tonal without actually having to face them.
José María walked to the edge of the road, and he pushed a few of the rubbery plants aside so he could get closer to the voice. As we glided along, he let out a bellow.
“Yo!” he said.
The cones around his head swelled in size, and though we couldn’t see a single shard of light, I could suddenly understand the objects around us better, and in more detail. José María’s voice was lighting the way around us in the sonar of the music.
“You sound like those dinosaurs in that movie,” I said.
“Raptor World!” he said. He bellowed again.
“But that thing with the voice will hear us—the Xolotl will hear us, too! I told you to be quiet!”
“Not loud enough,” he said. “Wish I had Dad’s voice. Needs to be deep.”
I pulled at José María’s shirt, but he fought me.
“Do you want to see what’s up ahead or not?” he screamed.
“But how?”
“The louder we can get, the louder we can sing, the better we can see in this world. Bats and whales do it; why can’t we?”
And it made sense.
“But to call attention to ourselves—” I said.
“We won’t get killed, silly. We just need to shout a little to get more details. But you need to sing it like you mean it.”
He was right. The deeper he went in making his sounds, the farther the cones expanded. Thanks to José María, I could now see farther down the canyon, as if a fog had lifted from it. The immensity of the place gave me the chills, and the soft scents of the place rose all the way from its depths. I expected the smell of dead flesh, but instead, the notes of flower petals and moss rose from the canyon. Much to my surprise, I liked this smell.
Those were the smells of the specimens on my father’s desk at the house in Little Village. All the petri dishes with fungi, lichen and many fuzzy things I couldn’t name.
José María’s voice was strong enough: More details came into relief. The spiral of Mictlán’s topography was thousands of miles wide, but I could suddenly feel its ridges, its walls and the things that lived there. José María’s voice provided the map I needed.
I could now feel the cities that dotted the roads on the way down, and the forests, and the desert-like plains. This place was populated by trillions of things that I couldn’t name, but I felt their heartbeats and smelled their breath.
Now that I could feel that far into the canyon, I could now also understand our position in its nine levels.
“Oh, my god,” I said. “We’re in the upper parts of this place. This road goes so deep into the ground, so far down.”
“And not a single star in this world. Freeeeeeeeeeaky!” sang my brother.
A wind kicked up from inside the canyon, and it reached us in our upper level. It bit at my shoulders, and it felt comple
tely different than any wind from Chicago. It was filled with the scent of tree sap and applewood smoke. I heard a buzz. Objects were rising from the canyon, moving up toward us. They were probably thousands of miles away, yet I heard their approach. They would be here soon. My heart pounded, and I broke into a jog again.
“The Xolotl’s coming back,” I said. “Run!”
“I hear them, too,” José María said.
Our boots held fast on the glasslike surface, and as we ran, we picked up more speed, just like before. The angle of our descent became steeper, and I struggled to not tumble forward as we traveled downward. The wall on our right whizzed by. We covered lots of distance in very little time.
And off to our left, I saw the Xolotl glide past us, seated on the hummingbird and leading a flock of the smoking birds, streaming smoke by the thousands, diving deep into the canyon. And then they were gone again.
The road curved around the wall, and I could no longer see around the bend. We would reach the bend within a few seconds.
“I see that you listened to your brother,” the voice at the bottom of the road said. The syrupy voice shimmered with a series of sharp sounds, like the vacuuming sound of opening a tennis ball canister.
“I am waiting for you,” the voice purred.
José María ran faster as the voice beckoned us further. He dropped his backpack.
“Hey!” I screamed. I stopped to pick it up. “You idiot!” I said. I slung the pack across my shoulder by its strap. By the time I got back up to a jog, José María was already heading around the corner and into the depths. My own cones were losing my brother’s location. If he ran farther, I would lose him.
No, I can’t lose him.
But José María ran fast, because he knew where the voice was coming from. It was a voice he needed to feel. He was gone. I heard him give out a yelp, and then he went silent.
I needed to go further to see where my brother had disappeared, and the wall curved. In my rudimentary sonar-like vision, I could see how it turned, like a highway.
I didn’t dare run around that corner, but I had no choice.
My feet pivoted on the smooth ground as I ran, and then I turned through the bend.
I pulled back before it was too late. The road dropped off in front of us, and below, I looked down on the tallest drop I had ever seen. And José María was completely gone.
I slid forward on the smooth road, and I wondered, if there were light, would this road have a color? In this place, only black ruled, and not even gray survived down here.
And then the voice at the end of the road hissed at me.
“You want to see your brother, yes?” it said.
I was hundreds of feet away from the drop, but since the floor moved, I would fall off the edge within seconds.
And then it hit me.
This is not a conveyor belt.
It’s not a road.
It’s not even a floor.
And it’s not made of glass.
“José María!” I shouted. “Get back! We have to go back! Where are you?”
He was nowhere to be seen, but it was too late for me. The ground slid forward, moving me to the precipice, and off in the distance, maybe ten miles away, I felt a single body move in the distance. It flowed gracefully in an undulating line, and it rose into the sky. It reached a point high up in the air, many miles above. And then it came toward me like a question mark.
This was the thing I hated the most. The thing I couldn’t tolerate in zoos, or the desert, or the woods.
The undulating shape beneath us—the very living thing that made this road possible—was a snake.
And all that time we had jogged on the smooth road, we had been traveling along her back. And if that back was big enough to make a flat surface, that meant that she had to be the size of—
Her head zoomed toward me.
She had four pairs of eyes, two on each side of her head. They emanated a hard sound from deep within their orbs, but even from this distance, I had a sense that her nostrils were more skilled at detecting my moves. Those nostrils were large enough for a grown man to walk through. The snake pulled its jaws apart, revealing a perfect, interlocking-triangle mouth made only for killing.
So many teeth.
She was unlike any snake I had ever seen on Earth. Inside her mouth, I counted ten rows of teeth, filling her gums and even her palate.
We had been traveling for hours on the back of this giant snake, and now this was the end. And who was “we,” anyway? I was now alone.
José María was gone, probably fallen into the pit beneath the precipice. The snake cocked her head to the side. Her eyes grew wide, and I cringed from the presence—the consciousness—I felt in them. Just one of the fangs in that mouth was easily three or four times my height.
“Welcome to the Coil, Wanderer,” she said.
MY MOTHER’S SKIRT OF SNAKES
“No, you wouldn’t actually want to glimpse one of these gods. The act would be too terrifying.” – Director Robert Hanig, on his film tetralogy Kieślowski’s Dream in Four Colors. New Yorker Video Channel, 2036.
“How do we rescue that which we do not know we lost?” – Arkangel, “Heartbreak of the Colossus That Moves Through the Water”, Millennium Recedes, 2009, Reckless Records.
“Your problem isn’t that you’ve been beaten down by a racist, sexist government, motherfucker. Your problem is one of scale. You’re not imagining big enough. If you can imagine yourself out of this ghetto, your shit’s free. Now get.” – Englewood and Dickens. HBO series, 2015.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the snake. “I’m open and ready.”
“For what?” I asked.
“To have you share your knowledge with me,” the snake said. Her neck swelled, and her skin took on a braided appearance, as if her muscles were flexed so hard, they serrated. The head weaved around me, and her eyes locked in on mine.
“I don’t have much to share,” I lied. My heart raced in my chest, and my legs felt rubbery.
“Every being has much to share,” she said. “I don’t understand your tone. Surely you will share your knowledge with me?”
“First tell me what the Coil is,” I said.
“Why it’s this canyon of poetry, flowers and blood. The Coil is what we citizens call Mictlán.”
“I need you to take me to my brother,” I said in my hardest, coldest tone.
“You speak to me in a strange manner,” the snake said. “A guarded manner. Because you fear me. Odd.”
The absolute darkness of this world reminded me that my parents’ Catholicism said nothing about what Mictlán could really be. Was this hell? I couldn’t be sure. Was this snake like the snake of the Garden of Eden? I began to think I should believe in something good, something filled with light. Maybe it was better to believe in a God up in the clouds, a God who could take people away from places as dark as this one. I still had the little laminated Virgin of Guadalupe in my pocket.
Cold air whipped around me, and I remembered how adept my father had always been at meeting strangers when we traveled. He did this with charm and wit, and I had an idea.
I opened up my backpack. I removed my cell phone, my notebook and the knife. I also took out the remainder of my clothes. I took my time, despite the impatient hiss of the animal. Her breath was imbued with the smell of the ocean, and it rolled over me in waves. Surprisingly, it was a pleasant smell, long-lasting and clean. My heart screamed in my chest.
Her eight eyes blinked, and I felt the air shift as their membranes flickered over her eyeballs.
I wanted to cry in frustration at not knowing where José María had gone, but I had never felt a presence so powerful inspect me in the way the snake did.
“These are my things,” I said, and I held each object up. “My phone. My notebook. The shawl my mother gave me. My sweater.”
The snake emitted pulsing bursts of music, and as she did so, her eyes widened. She was understanding these objects
, even if she wasn’t seeing them with her eyes. As the bits of her music filled the air, her skin emanated a sound sparkle that allowed my mental representation of her skin understand that it was as smooth as a polished stone.
“These tools you show me—they are hard objects, vibrating objects,” she said. “Are you a warrior?” she said.
“I am confused by your question,” I said. “I am just a person. You don’t have tools down here?”
“This place —what you call Mictlán—has no objects. All we have down here are beings. The mountain, the trees, the smoke owls. Every being here has a spirit, or what you might call an essence. But we have no objects to speak of.”
I felt the snake’s body shift beneath my feet, and the conveyor-belt motion almost toppled me off my feet. She was bringing me closer to her, and I had no choice. I wouldn’t be able to move off the back of her body in time.
“I would like to travel with you, friend,” the snake said.
Friend?
What the hell. Maybe you can work with this. Just play along, Clara, play along.
Her tone confused me. Her face was the most terrifying reptilian horror I had ever seen, but the velvety tones of her words made me feel as if she were asking me for something private and intimate.
That snake head and its movements reminded me of the currents in the depths of the ocean. Moving slowly, in the dark. Gargantuan.
“Sure, take me with you. I want to learn more about this place—the Coil,” I said.
This seemed to make the snake very happy. Her head dove down into the canyon, and soon, the length of her body closest to her head was gone. The thick body beneath shifted, and we were gliding over the cliff. We were about to slide straight down the wall.
I had nothing to grip, and if I went over the precipice, I would slide off the smooth scales and tumble down to my death. But as soon as I came close to the edge, the snake’s body throbbed and its flesh liquefied in front of me.
Two bony ridges, covered in tiny scales, rose up from her back. I grabbed onto them, and they grew longer, sliding under my armpits and wrapping around my legs like limbs.
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