The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus)

by Torres, Cesar

  “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” my father said. His tone was harsh, excited.

  “They think it was a drunk driver that hit him,” my mother said, “but the witnesses said it was random, very random.”

  “No matter how it happens, it always feels random,” my father said.

  My mother drew me into her arms, and her smell filled my nostrils. I wished for those tears, and they didn’t arrive. Instead, my insides were hollowing out.

  “I was so angry the last time I talked to him,” I said.

  “José María said he saw you the afternoon of the parade,” my mother said. “He was also very upset.”

  My face flushed, and I felt shame in every inch of my skin.

  “Yes, I thought I might see you guys after the parade,” I said.

  “We waited for you for a while. José María texted you for a long time to meet us,” my mother said. She was not angry about this fact.

  She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what you really said to him the last time we saw each other. She doesn’t know about the anger we left between us.

  La Negra came over to the sofa and sandwiched me together with my mother.

  “I am sorry, Clara,” she said, and she held me for a long time. “He will be in a good place now. And remember he helped you so much to find your tonal.”

  I loved my aunt, but I no longer wanted her comfort about tonales, especially since I had failed to find mine.

  “I found it; I don’t know if I had mentioned it earlier.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s true,” I lied to forever get her off my back.

  “That’s strange, I don’t feel a tonal around you.”

  “Well, you just have to try harder,” I said.

  She drew me in tighter into her bosom, and I let myself enjoy the embrace.

  I moaned, but no tears arrived.

  The rest of that day was a series of rote performances. Wash my hair, apply eyeliner, smooth out the wrinkles in my skirt.

  Kiss my aunt, hug my uncle. Attend mass with Mom.

  I wanted to eat, but I skipped that night’s meal.

  I read back through all the text messages José María had sent me on the night of our victory at the Parade of Lights.

  “Everyone’s waiting for you.”

  “Did you see that crazy bullshit on the screens?”

  “Tsk, tsk, reina. I know your secret.”

  “Hey, why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  “Check your texts, Clara.”

  On and on they went, pestering me. I had ignored them all, but reading them now made my stomach turn, and I had to force myself to finish reading every last one. I knew by their tone that he was still angry. And then they stopped.

  Then they stopped forever.

  At the funeral, I chose not to look at the open casket. My father pulled me out into the parking lot to shout at me, and I shouted something back, but the exact words faded quickly from my memory.

  My father escorted me back into the narrow funeral parlor, and when he asked me again to look at the body to say good-bye, I shook my head and took a seat at the opposite end of the room.

  I knew too much, and I knew too little.

  Returning to my everyday life was what hurt the most. I survived the wake, the funeral, and the shitty condolence cards from Hallmark.

  José María wasn’t coming back.

  Sometimes, I wished I were just dreaming it, but I wasn’t.

  My parents didn’t let me go back to school right away, and I stayed in Little Village with them. I went to mass daily with my mother, and I went through all the rituals, prayed all the prayers. I did this for her, and she was happy.

  My father mostly kept to himself. He talked to my aunts every day, whispering sometimes, crying at others.

  “He’s lost his little best friend,” my mother said one day as she beat pancake batter in a frenzy. She didn’t even look up when she said this. She never mentioned my father’s mourning after that.

  I survived the two weeks I stayed at my parents, and I even brought my grades up by the end of that semester.

  But I didn’t want to go back to classes, to my part-time job, or to anything. I just wanted to hide, to lie inert on a patch of grass, stone-like.

  My mother was the person who forced me to go back to my routine. She packed up my things and drove me back to school, and I am glad she did. I spent more time with Dennis and less with Mercy. In fact, Mercy and I drifted apart, and something inside me felt okay with that.

  When I came home for the Christmas holiday that year, I managed to get through a meal without that spiky-haired runt at the table.

  I went through my day staring at television shows that had no point, and noodling on Facebook, numbing my mind, and regretting my addiction at the same time. I visited my cousins down the block, and at night, I helped my dad cook dinner. I pretended like everything that had started since my birthday in 2013 had never happened at all.

  It’s very easy for any of us to do this, and if we pretend hard enough, we can fool ourselves into almost anything. As humans, we like to pretend that the dead ones aren’t actually dead.

  Until we are reminded by outside forces.

  I spent New Year’s Eve wasted on cheap beer via a fake driver’s license at the Hideout, and I puked so hard that night that I vomited blood. I think I cursed out Mercy in the women’s bathroom, but I don’t actually remember. Dennis claims I also broke up a fight of big men, but that I also don’t recall.

  I spent the next four days nursing a massive hangover, and I went back to classes on January 5th. By now, I was pretty good at staying out late, slogging through a hangover, and avoiding the dreadful nights.

  It wasn’t until then that my dreams about the Lords of Mictlán began in full.

  The first dream was a tiny knife tearing into the darkness of my dreamless nights.

  The knife plunged and then it sliced, and blood the color of snow poured out of black skin.

  After the cut, the sounds started.

  They were drums. They drummed and drummed, like twin heartbeats that syncopated and throbbed in the same time signature, and in the darkness of my sleep, I felt a cool rush of air on my skin.

  You owe us a visit still, said a voice that was distinctly female. It was a voice the size of a continent, deep as the ocean.

  And we expect you to be here. Soon, said another voice. This one was more shrill, yet more masculine than the first.

  And then, in the dream, I had the vision that I could never have had inside Mictlán. I could see through the dark and into a deep pit that smelled of wet moss and that pulled light toward it like a magnet.

  Mictlántecuhtli and Mictecacíhuatl were in the pit, and I approached within a few feet, without a body. I came close to a thin blue membrane, metallic and in movement, like the beautiful swirls on a soap bubble in summertime. And behind the blue sheath, the drumming grew bigger.

  Wanderer, we are waiting.

  The two voices said this in unison, and it occurred to me then that they could help me.

  Give my brother back to me, I said, but the membrane was already fading, and the drumming picked up speed, and before I knew it, I had fallen out of my bed and onto the floor.

  Morgan shook me awake. I tore at her face and yanked her hair and kicked her in the knee.

  “Give him back,” I screamed.

  I dreamt a variation of this dream every single night for weeks.

  In February, Mayor Amadeo resigned from his position as mayor after the scandal of his leaked documents became bigger and bigger. The Parade of Lights became a success inside OLF, and we patted ourselves on the back for a long time.

  But not everything went according to plan. Our dancers, those brave people who leapt onto floats to toss banners, were eventually tried and convicted. They were all sentenced to multiple life sentences for acts of treason against the state. The police that apprehended them became heroes for the city, despite
all our protests.

  The city did agree to channel more money to Englewood to help rebuild the city, and Little Village, my parents’ neighborhood, received the first Spotlight Grant from the federal government to help residents buy homes first to prevent gentrification (but of course, it was only symbolic, since we know how things turned out). In the spring of 2015, the city re-inaugurated Pritzker Pavilion, and its new drone-based camera system became the first in the country to monitor all angles of public events through the use of tiny robots shaped like dragonflies. The city deployed 2,000 of them in a pilot program, and they would expand it to other public places if it was proven to be successful.

  Despite several investigations, no one ever found out who recorded the footage of the Parade of Lights from the top of the Tribune Building. Tribune folded in May, after repeated bankruptcies, but the Freedom Museum remained open. The rest of the tower was sold to developers to be converted into condominiums. Englewood remained impoverished for decades, and when it burned again in 2043, its maladies seemed to loop one more time.

  For me, each month that went by drew me further away from Mictlán, as if that too had been a dream, just like the dream of a blue membrane and its sound of drums. It was easier to forget, to forget deeply, and to just go back to classes, exams, and papers that kept me up late into the middle of the night.

  Every night, though, I dreamed again about the Lords, and each time, I awoke terrorized, unsure of who I was or where I was.

  Spring passed and summer grew hot on my skin, and both of them came through like a series of short breaths.

  And before I knew it, I was back for my second year of university.

  In early October, my father called me back to the house.

  “I’ll pick you up tonight, and I’ll have you back tomorrow.”

  He showed up promptly that night at my dorm.

  “You don’t come home anymore,” he said.

  “Okay, and your point?”

  “What did you do for your birthday?”

  "I ordered pizza with Morgan and Dennis.” It was the truth. Together, we drank PBR while watching old X-Files reruns on our laptops.

  “I suppose that’s pretty fun,” my father said.

  My father took my bags to my room. I found my mother in the hall. She was preparing an ofrenda. I had seen her build them a million times with my father, but for the first time, I paid attention to every detail.

  They put it in the hallway, on a side table. My father stacked several long wooden cabinets to create a series of levels, and my mother draped each of the boxes with pristine white linens. At its skirt, she placed two of her best dishes: lasagna and mole verde, made with pumpkin seeds. Between these two dishes, she places several packages of gummy worms in bright wooden bowls. These had all been my brother’s favorite foods. On the next level, my father draped several dozen marigolds, and he handed me one of the dozens he had wrapped in butcher paper.

  “You do it,” he said.

  To look deeply inside the structure of a flower like the marigold can be a dizzying thing. Inside it, the petals form ridges, one laid on top of each other. So many, in fact, that when you pull the flower away from you, a pattern emerges. A pattern inspired by a circle, but not quite a circle. And there, in the center, is its sex organs, its stamens, also arranged like a spiral and the little spaces between them deep, like cuts.

  Like slits on a shark.

  Or like gills underneath a mushroom cap.

  I had never really taken the time to see these structures on a marigold, but my father brought his magnifying glass and showed me.

  I was grateful that he did, but seeing the petals, moving about in a spiral, made me want to vomit.

  These tiny spirals, inside this place were small, smaller than me, but they made a very structured coil.

  A COIL, Clara. They make a COIL.

  The music wafting from the flower was too familiar, too deep, and too real.

  My father could see into the flower, but he could not hear it. I moaned under my breath.

  “Hold still and stop your twitching,” he told me.

  I arranged the marigolds on the linens. Their colors painted the room in shades of crimson and gold.

  On the third level we placed five framed photographs of José María. One as a baby, one as a toddler in his tricycle, and three from the last year he was alive. His hair extended from his brow like spikes on a porcupine, and his thin arms crossed his narrow chest. Every photo revealed his grin, his hidden smirk.

  My father put the last photograph, a school portrait, at the top level of the altar, like a snow-capped peak on a mountain.

  “Now, you know that in just a few weeks, your brother will return, and we put this ofrenda up to welcome him back. He’ll be here so soon, and we’ll be glad to spend some time with him.”

  This was our tradition for Día de Los Muertos.

  It had been almost a year, and my father still didn’t know what José María and I had done in the tunnel of butterflies and in the places that lay beyond it.

  There are the secret lives of parents, but there are also the secret lives of their children.

  To tell my father about Mictlán meant I would tell him about the Ocullín’s promise to find me, and that was something I would never do. I was not going to endanger anyone other than myself.

  Minerva and La Negra were still convinced that I had eradicated my problem of “the stench of death” when I announced I found my tonal, but now, as my father showed me this yearly rite, I felt like the world’s biggest clown.

  I could do better than this, and I knew it.

  When we finished the ofrenda, I went into José María’s room and rummaged through his drawers. I took his iPod, his hoodie, and as many of his books as I could carry out in my backpack.

  “Clara, are you ready to drive back?” my father shouted.

  “Yes, gimme a minute.”

  On my way out the back door, a hand tugged at my sleeve.

  “Mom, you scared me!”

  “Clara,” my mother said. “You don’t want to forget this one.”

  She placed a copy of The Popol Vuh — José María’s copy of the book of Maya creation stories — in my hands.

  “I am not sure what you’re up to, but I want you to succeed.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “And your tonal?”

  “We’ll need to discuss, but much later.”

  “If you need more of his books, you tell me. I’ll get them to you.”

  “Mom, do you think we can really atone for things we have done? You know, after we die?”

  My mother smiled to herself and reconfigured her shawl. She pulled out a fresh laminated card of the Virgin of Guadalupe and tucked it into the book. She kissed me on the forehead and ushered me out the door.

  I met my father in the car, which was idling in the garage. His hands wiped the dashboard with even strokes. Not a single speck of dust escaped his movements.

  “How long have you been wiping down the car, Dad?” I said.

  “It’s just a touch-up. Your mother’s mad at me, Clarita. Do you know why?”

  “There’s very little I actually know anymore,” I said.

  My mother walked into the garage a few seconds later to say goodbye.

  “Juliana, are you staying?” he said.

  “Yes, I am. You two have a good drive back. I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, Clara.”

  My mother winked.

  On the morning of November 1, 2014, I was alert, in case José María indeed came back the way I expected — and the way our family expected him to return. That’s what our traditions told us would happen.

  That day I felt energetic and full of health. Otherwise, I didn’t get a single sign of José María’s return.

  After everything I knew about Mictlán and the beings from that place, I had expected my brother to return, even just for that day. But instead, nothing.

  I did want him to come back. He had to come back.
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  I was going to make sure it happened.

  November 3, 2015, turned out to be much too cold for the outdoors. Arctic winds arrived early, and the wind chill factor was ten degrees below as ice pelted Randolph Street. I kept my steps short and firm to prevent myself from slipping on the ice, but I skidded more than a few times.

  I cut through Millennium Park on Monroe Street. I kept my eyes lowered as I passed through the security scanner that read my driver’s license. The uniformed cop nodded and I passed on to the park. I stayed on the sidewalk, walking east until I reached Columbus Drive. From this point, I turned around to make sure I wasn’t being followed. At 4 pm on a Monday during an ice storm, I had most of the park to myself.

  Drones swept the perimeter of the park like toy UFOs. The whined as they soared in the sky about every ten minutes or so. And then they were gone again.

  I walked up the pathway that ran parallel to Columbus Drive on my right, and as I moved north, the tinfoil wings of Pritzker Pavilion unfurled, as they always did when tourists walked toward the structure.

  I was no longer scared of the memories of the dome or its grass.

  I had come here to find the bridge. The pavilion was besides the point, but I still felt proud of myself as I glimpsed it from the corner of my eye.

  Off to my right, behind a set of trees, I found the gate I was looking for. The BP Bridge was made of sheet metal was so smoothly made that it seemed to melt right into the ground. I took the bridge step by step, careful not to fall on the ice, and I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets.

  I was sweating inside my coat, but I didn’t care. I had layered myself with silk long underwear, ski pants, jeans, and two wool sweaters. I had covered myself with a thin down coat, followed by a heavy wool pea coat.

  This time, my return to Mictlán would be far more comfortable than before.

  At the end of the BP Bridge, six metal poles marked the gate of the eastern end of the snaking structure. I turned around and caught the first threads of red and orange as the sun began to set.