The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus)

by Torres, Cesar

  “Lots. Where will you be when it happens?”

  “Just a few floors below, in the newsroom. I’ll be happier than I have been for years.”

  “Do you expect this place to change?”

  “This time, I do. That’s why I am helping you.”

  Mercy and I had talked for a long time about the frustration we all felt with old newspapers like this one. These companies didn’t report on the actual events. Instead, they defended their self-interests, which were driven by a lot of money and a lot of political campaigns. Snowy had written to us in chat so many times anecdotes of cover-ups and corruption inside the tower.

  “They’re buying me out,” Snowy said as he put his lips on an electronic cigarette. His fingers and hands were delicate, hairless, and smooth. “I get to retire early, and they can get us dinosaurs out of here. And then they can continues to provide ‘content’ without any investigative journalism.”

  The newspapers and TV stations inside this tower had never shown the user-generated videos of the Millennium Riot. In some of those clips, it was possible to get a sense of who shot first in the clouds of tear gas, but the Tribune ignored those clips, as if they didn’t exist at all. They never aired or appeared as links on any of their broadcasts or sites.

  In most of those YouTube videos, the SWAT teams shot at the crowd without mercy.

  “And once you take the buyout?” I said.

  “Belize. I have a tiny house there, and my lady will come with me. Then I can dive as often as I want.”

  “But I thought you’d go back to harder reporting.”

  “We all get a little tired as time passes. Some of us get more tired than others. I think this will be my swan song today.”

  For once, I could relate to these kinds of words. I did feel a tiredness, something heavy, tugging at me, and I thought that perhaps I would come to envy Snowy’s situation one day.

  We emerged into a narrow hall, which led into another boardroom lined with more books. Snowy led me through a locked door with a key he kept in his pocket. I stepped out onto a balcony that overlooked Michigan Avenue. Off to my left, I could see the jagged steel lines of the skyscrapers, and down to my right, a valley of streets and commercial buildings. The wind buffeted my face and arms at this height. I leaned over the railing and I felt a rush of adrenaline. The parade would come through here in just minutes. People filled the sidewalks.

  “I probably won’t see you in person again, Montes,” Snowy said.

  “Seeing really isn’t everything,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean we won’t cross paths in some way.”

  “Your tour group is scheduled to exit the building at 3 p.m. I imagine it’s not going to go as planned.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  “Enjoy the parade,” Snowy said, and the elevator doors slid shut. I was now alone in the highest level of the tower.

  The event was coordinated simply but covertly: The parade was scheduled to start at 2 pm, and it would take an estimated sixty minutes for the floats to cover the length of Michigan Avenue down to the bridge over the Chicago River from north to south. The tower was located right next to this bridge.

  At 2:10, I would begin recording using my camera.

  At 2:20, I would begin transmitting my live feed to four different video streaming sites.

  At 2:25 p.m, the web attacks would begin. OLF had three sites on its list: the City of Chicago, the mayor’s political fundraising site, and the Tribune’s site.

  At 2:27 p.m., the computer-based controls for turning on the decorations throughout Michigan Avenue would be cut over to control by the OLF.

  At 2:30 p.m., the operations on the ground would begin.

  The time was now 2:09. I steadied my camera on a portable tripod, and checked the sound and the image one more time. Above me, the clouds swirled as the wind picked up speed.

  2:21 pm.

  The adrenaline in my veins quickened my heartbeat, and for the first time since the return from the Coil, I felt what it meant to be older. I had a nineteen-year-old mind but a twenty-three-year-old body. Inside my heart, nothing had changed, though. I wanted change with a touch of revenge.

  My live feed had kicked off, and I tested them on my laptop. Anyone with a web browser could watch these feeds at sites like Ustream and through other hosted sites. Days before, we had spread the word about these feeds, and I hoped that our meme went all the way around the planet, if possible.

  I wished we had thought of this before we attended Millennium.

  I tried to spot Mercy on Ohio Street, but I had to squint, and my eye gave me nothing more than a cluster of tiny heads.

  Dennis was positioned much farther north, and I gave up on trying to spot him.

  The sites where I fed the video showed users were starting to log on to watch. I knew these were probably just OLF members on the ground.

  The numbers would rise soon.

  The floats gave off tiny clicks like camera shutters as they traveled south on Michigan Avenue. The familiar characters of my youth crowned each one. Cartoon characters that had entertained me for years at the movies and on DVD at home with my parents. The corporations that owned these characters put them on top of the motorized floats, and they waved endlessly, some waving hankies, and the crowds on the sidewalk roared. They were anthropomorphic darlings: mice, ducks, dogs and even a woodpecker. They smiled forever from their large masks, and the familiar theme songs of their shows and movies played on the float speakers. Children begged for their attention, and later that afternoon those same children would beg their parents to take them to the shops on Michigan Avenue to buy the corresponding merchandise.

  The floats of the Parade of Lights had been outfitted with the most expensive LED technology possible. These digital caravans were molded into shapes of corkscrews, mountains, and giant bubbles, and their surfaces shone with textures and shapes that made them elongate, turn purple and red, and set them on fire. It was magic for the eyes and a wonder of technology. Sunlight was still not penetrating the clouds, and the grayness of the day allowed the LED floats to shine to their brightest.

  Their colors and intensities burned my eye, but I couldn’t stop staring at them.

  It was the LED floats, all of them full of surfaces that could show any image, and any video on them that interested me most.

  My eye grew hot, and I relished the passage of the floats coming down Michigan Avenue.

  It was like seeing blood pour into a vein for the first time.

  2:24 p.m.

  I spotted Mayor Amadeo on top of the 10th float, and I laughed.

  He looked so tiny from up here.

  He’s just like any of the rest of us, I thought. Just a tiny man.

  2:25 p.m.

  As the web attacks began, but I fought the urge to turn on my phone to check Twitter. I had to trust the rest of us citizens who had a job to do. They had theirs; I had mine.

  2:26 p.m.

  The number of users of my feeds spiked from 1 viewer to 50.

  Right now, the three web sites would be taken over by OLF, defaced and filled with images of the Millennium Riot, the Englewood Fire of 2012, and the murders of teenagers by corrupt police. The fundraising campaign for Mayor Amadeo was also taken down, and we replaced it with a full archive of his own emails, where he brokered deals with the NRA and pharmaceutical conglomerates to secure his election, and eventual run for governor.

  As the websites got taken down, the numbers on my video feeds rose. Someone was sharing the link to the feeds.

  1,100 viewers.

  2:28 p.m.

  The first of the floats went dark. Gone, like an old light bulb.

  Pop.

  Then, in perfect succession, another float went dark.

  And another.

  And another.

  The luxury shops set amid the valley of concrete and glass of Michigan Avenue dimmed.

  And that’s when the floats popped off.


  Just as soon as they had been, there, those LEDs were gone.

  The lack of light soothed me. Soon, all the floats had gone dark, and the throbbing pain in my optic nerve lessened. The LED surfaces of the cars were black, matte, and opaque.

  As the floats blacked out, about two thousand people were watching each of my feeds.

  By now, Twitter would be on fire with the missives from people on the ground witnessing the blackout. And surely, the TV news crews covering the parade would also begin to cover the event. As messages poured into people’s smartphones, the eerie silence on the street began to expand, and I felt it. It felt good.

  People started to shout on the ground. I could hear them, even from this high up in the balcony.

  I smiled.

  2:29 p.m.

  Every LED float went back online. The OLF used all the electric power available to turn up the brightness of the screens.

  We hijacked each of those floats, 30 of them to be exact.

  Our video hijack used the LED screens of the floats to play the videos of every police brutality we had lived through in the Millennium Riot. The images were often out of sequence and shaky, just like I remembered.

  I saw the aftermath in one of the bubble floats, as the FBI investigated the grounds of Pritzker Pavilion in the weeks after the event. Then images of the early stages of the march showed on the screens. In these I saw the thousands of us that had marched from Roosevelt and Michigan up to Millennium on October 4, 2013. The LEDs then showed the YouTube clips of the faces frozen in fear, the white clouds of tear gas blooming, and the wounded on the ground. The sound of screams and shouts filled Michigan Avenue as the floats replayed the dozens of clips. The words “SWAT KILLS” and “WE DON’T FORGET WHAT YOU DID” flickered through every screen as OLF hacked their displays.

  Some of the drivers of the floats stopped their vehicles, and they rear-ended the floats in front of them. A couple of the drivers successfully shut off the LEDS on their floats, but the other twenty-eight remained on, reliving the events. I heard police sirens, and near me, beneath the tower, policemen on horseback moved in on the chaos that was starting to erupt on the ground.

  About ten thousand people were watching each of my feeds.

  Just one minute until moment zero.

  2:30 p.m.

  At that exact moment, our main event started.

  Each intersection along Michigan Avenue had been staked out by pairs of OLF members. We called these pairs our “dancers.”

  No one noticed how they quickly jumped into the street and began to climb the floats. Why would they? The video of the feeds was hypnotic, and they were unable to tear themselves away.

  Our dancers unfurled banners, and they draped them over the floats, working quickly to make sure the banner could be seen from both the east and the west sides of the street.

  The banners read things like “Most corrupt state” and “Bring our Schools Back.” Others read “Police Brutality is what Chicago is good at.”

  Each of our dancers was masked, and most were able to jump off the floats and run back down the side streets. Of course, they knew their chances of escaping might be very low, but they were ready for being apprehended.

  My HD camera caught all of this in its eye and fed it back out to the world.

  We had relied on the broadcast media to show our struggle during the Millennium Riot, and they had shown us nothing. Instead, we broadcast the event ourselves. We outnumbered them, and we always would.

  Each of the feeds now had forty thousand viewers. That was roughly a hundred and twenty viewers in total.

  I ran my hands through my hair and pulled it back into a ponytail, and I celebrated our victory. I hadn’t been this happy in a very long time. I let the cameras roll while I leaned over the railing of the balcony.

  And that’s when I spotted the men with the rifles across the way.

  They were lying low on the roof of 436 N. Michigan Avenue, directly across from the Tribune Tower. Their hard helmets formed masks, and their dark uniforms covered every inch of their bodies like a second skin.

  They held aimed their rifles down into the street, locking in on targets as they squinted at the telescopic viewfinder.

  Our display below — the video displays, our dancers, the banners — had sent out a message, but the implications of what we did were real to me now.

  I felt afraid — not for myself, but for the people down below. My own family was watching the parade, and it wouldn’t take much to hit them with a round from those rifles.

  I considered my hidden position in the balcony of the tower, and I gathered all my strength, telling myself to be brave.

  Then the wind picked up, whistling, and the men in the uniforms stirred.

  As if someone had whispered to them in their earpieces heads up, all three of them looked up at me.

  I had seen those helmets and those visors before. Men in those helmets had struck my face under the overpass on Michigan Avenue once. Tiny badges marked their breasts. Their eyeless stare felt endless. I had also seen them in my mind a long time ago, when my father told me the story of how gunmen shot down students in the plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City.

  “Hey!” one of the men shouted at me.

  In the air above those men, I spotted a thick shadow that drew itself into folds, draping itself over the men like a blanket. And as the trio evaluated me—their target—a pair of eyes emerged through the shadow, and a voice filled with needles and hate spoke across the way.

  “It’s time to do this all over again,” the Ocullín said.

  And then one of the uniformed men fired at me.

  I should have remembered the camera. I should have grabbed it by the handle of its tripod, and swung that merciless video eye toward them, to capture them forever in my video feeds.

  But when their first shot rang out at me, I forgot about the camcorder.

  The rifle burst in a hollow pop, and it gave off a gnarled sort of music, atonal and thick. Behind me, the limestone exploded and bits of the wall struck me in the back of the head.

  I covered my head and ducked behind the railing.

  Weeks ago, I had obsessed and pored over tweet after tweet from witnesses at Pritzker who claimed to have seen troops with guns situated on the northern side of the park, above the stage of the pavilion. That was the conspiracy theory that had never been resolved, even after hundreds of viewings of YouTube clips and photographs.

  I had seen the pixelated pictures showing these men in dark clothing, and now here they were again, working covertly, armed and ready.

  I peeked out at the small gaps on the limestone balcony.

  Even if these three people weren’t those same gunmen, in my mind, on that balcony, they were.

  “Freeze!” they shouted. “Hands up!”

  Then another shot rang through the air, and it struck just two feet from the tripod. They could see the camera.

  I had to keep it running.

  I curled over, into a ball, snail-like.

  (spiral-like Clara, you recall the spiral, don’t you?)

  And I realized that I was crouching like a cowardly animal. Crouching the way I did when more uniformed men split my face open after I ran from the Millennium Riot.

  If I crouched, I would be repeating the same story, again and again.

  I would be weak one more time.

  I shut my eyes, and things went dark for a brief moment, and I enjoyed the sound that the city made around me. I felt my own two cones of sound radiate out from my head and shoulders, and I heard the music of the heartbeats in the street, the trill of the starlings arriving from the east, and the clanking symphony of cars, turnstiles and phones.

  Inside this darkness, I found what I needed. The anger I had felt for so long but never allowed myself to touch.

  My eyes flew open, and though I could only see out of one, I focused hard, first at the limestone floor, and my hands splayed out on the floor like a sprinter ready to start.

>   I came up to standing and clamped my hands on the railing, letting my upper body lean forward into the open air.

  I shouted a song that I didn’t know I knew, and across the way, the three people in uniform cocked their rifles to shoot me again.

  What emerged from my lips into the air currents above Michigan Avenue was a song made of a single word — it was long, very long. It had a diamond form, but its edges changed shape, forming crystals of sound, undulating, releasing its musical notes.

  As the music expanded out from my throat, two of the men across the way fired directly at me.

  Syllable after syllable poured from my lips. Their hard edges and flute-like whistles made the air shimmer around me, and as I said this word, time began to slow down.

  In that word, something secret was embedded, but as it emerged, I came to know it.

  I couldn’t see the bullets that were coming my way, but I saw the kickback throw the troops’ shoulders backward, and the bounce of their helmets. Surely those bullets would kill me.

  The shimmer in the air grew hot, and I felt a pressure come through on the balcony where I stood, but also in the empty air between us.

  I got ready for what might happen if they struck me, as I finished singing my lone, single word.

  As I neared its last dozen syllables, memories of a dog-headed creature flooded back. He, the Xolotl, had given me his name once, like a gift, and it had sounded like this, long, musical, and forlorn, replete with syllables.

  And when I finished the last syllable on my lips, I knew that what I had spoken was my own name. My name spoken out loud in the language of Mictlán.

  I heard a buzz, like that of a thousand bees, coming from somewhere above, and I feared some high-tech drone had come to piggyback on the lethal shots that would surely hit my stomach or my chest any second now.