I swatted its caterpillar hairs away from my face, and I sang my own name, just like I did in Chicago at the Parade of Lights. The Ocullín recoiled, and it slashed at my arms, making tiny cuts that stung like fire.
“HELL IS REAL. COME SEE IT”
“YOU’LL DIE BURNED AND MUTILATED”
“JOSÉ MARÍA BURNS IN HELL”
The creature’s tongue lapped the blood from my wounds, despite the hummingbird’s attempts to shake off the invader.
We tumbled through a jungle in the upper levels of the Coil, and I crashed into the leaves. The trees shrieked as I slashed at the Ocullín, and the Hummingbird plucked me out with its beak to resume our flight.
We flew past the layered levels of the canyon and emerged onto a flat land dotted only with a mountain with a snowy peak. The very same mountain I had felt and heard the first time I entered Mictlán.
“Take me to the top,” I commanded, and the bird beneath me soared to the destination as the smoke trail that he left with his tail screamed like a bottle rocket.
As we approached the Snow Fields, the Ocullín crawled over my body, and its caterpillar barbs raked my skin.
I knew we were headed toward the Xolotl’s gate, where the snow of the mountain began. As we neared it, I stabbed the Ocullín many times in its face, which was both insect and human. It recoiled and shrieked, and as we dove through the gate, it called me more names, fading into the darkness as I exploded out of Mictlán through the gate at the top of the mountain.
I took in big gasps of air, and the scents of car exhaust filled my lungs. The Chicago skyline filled my vision, and I slid forward on the BP Bridge, just a couple of feet from where I had entered through its reflection. My skin bled, and burns dotted my cheeks and forehead. I scrambled onto my feet, and every bone in my body hurt. I looked up toward the sky and felt its hollow air brush my lips. I took in big gulps of air until my breathing slowed down to its normal rhythm.
“Hey, bitch, I’m still here,” said a voice behind me.
He was dressed just like the men that struck my face until it cracked on the day of the Millennium Riot, but he wore no helmet. He wore the face of my uncle Jorge, and the eyes of a feral cat, and his mouth lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth. Jutting from the side of his neck, he wore the face of the woman who died next to me at Pritzker Pavilion. It was a tiny head, bulging and sick, like a tumor. The Ocullín opened his moth and the black needles extended toward me. He was smiling from ear to ear in lust and hunger.
“No,” I yelled, and I lopped off his head with a single swipe of my hand, which had a force it never had before.
The headless body turned into thick liquid, and then smoke. The head stared up at me and winked.
“We’re not done with each other, Wanderer.”
I stomped on the head until it was pulp and my boots were covered in its pus, blood, and feces.
I ran in my T-shirt through the remainder of the ice storm. I didn’t care if I got frostbite; I was going home.
I dropped out of school that fall due to “illness” and I moved back in with my parents for a couple of months. I lay in bed. Fevers and sores raked my body, and I spoke to no one.
During those weeks in my parents’ house, I discovered something: my parents didn’t know how deeply I had gone into Mictlán. It occurred to me then that the Coil was part metaphor in their hearts and minds.
I also discovered that my father was more fragile than I had ever imagined. To touch José María’s room caused him physical discomfort, and even through his shouting matches with my mother, I knew that his obsession with keeping my brother’s room impeccably clean would never end.
At night, I heard my father walk through the attic. The sounds I heard sounded like coughs or sobs. I am not sure which.
I assured my mother that things would go back to normal, but she had many questions.
“Would you want to take a trip with your aunts to Mexico?”
“What for?”
“To keep learning the old ways. To learn from a teacher.”
My heart said yes. My mind said no.
“I’d be a danger to them, Mom. Trust me.”
“You need people,” she said.
And she was right. I probably did.
It was impossible to explain to her how I could physically look close to thirty while remaining twenty years old on the surface. But I tried.
“I see real age in my face,” I said.
She ran her fingers over my brow to smooth out the wrinkles in my skin.
“I would never tell anyone if you got a little more surgery to fix this,” she said.
“Are you saying get a facelift?”
We both laughed, though my casual tone left my mother looking hurt and sullen.
“Mom, what you need is a joint so you can relax.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Get the good stuff. You’ll feel oh so sweet!”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
She was right. I noticed that over the weeks of my stay in their house, the sick sense of humor — something irreverent and wild — had found its way into my speech. In José María’s absence, I was learning how to find levity in things — including my relationship with my mother. Just like he did.
When I handed my mother a rolled joint as a gift at Christmastime, she took my temperature again, shaking her head. I hope she smoked it when she had some time alone.
I went back to the university during the last semester of that year, and on my way up to the campus in the middle of January, my father hummed a song to himself as we cruised along Lakeshore Drive.
“Minerva’s having another baby,” he said.
“Good, I love babies.”
“Maybe she’ll make you the godmother.”
“I’d pencil that in my calendar, sure.” I laughed.
“Promise me you’ll never leave Chicago, Clara,” he said.
“Promise.”
This was a promise I never kept.
Many of the things I did during and after university are not a big secret, and anyone who takes the time to look at the public record, or chooses to read books, can learn of what became of my life.
But of course, they won’t ever have the full story. I am not sure myself that I even have the full story.
I traveled far to continue to investigate the mystery of the gates that connect between our world and that of the Coil. To do this, I chose to go live in Mexico, the place that none of my aunts wanted me to visit permanently. You can learn from your relatives there; just don’t actually stay and live there, OK?, they said.
But I lived in Mexico City for two decades, and in between, I traveled to other places that showed me glimpses of the other cities, those thirteen places that José María and I knew existed, currently exist, and will exist. These glimpses were seen sideways through a ramen stall in Shibuya, or inside a shaman’s hut in the Himalayas. That’s when I saw shadows, reflections, and blurs of places. Sometimes, I could glimpse these cities in a single gold reflection of the sun on the Black Sea, and in an instant, it would vanish.
During the twenty years I lived in Mexico City, I searched for a young man named Alan. His uncle Guillermo had disappeared years ago, and like me, he was in search of knowledge and what became of his relative. I will one day write a book about how I finally found this young man, and how he found me. We had his uncle in common, a man who built a living tunnel of insects that he shouldn’t have.
I will also write one day about how I discovered symmetrical slits on my breastbone, and how they make music when I dream at night and the sun goes down. These slits don’t bleed, and they give me no pain.
I have lived long.
Time has become my ally, but as a result, it has been painful to outlive many of my relatives. This is pain no one should ever feel.
This is the first time I have ever written about what I did atop the Tribune Tower, so in a sense, it’s a bit of a confession. The only crim
e was trespassing, I suppose, but it doesn’t matter. The video footage I shot lives on. Of course, those who could complain, and those who might seek retribution against me for what I did by broadcasting those images, are dead at the time of this writing. All of them are dead.
DOTS AND LOOPS
“Food nourished my body; travel fed my soul.” – Tumblr meme, origin circa 2019.
“Heartache smells of moss, licorice, and flowers.” – Princess Kami: A Horror Tale for Children, Studio Gibri Films, 2017.
“We are bold and bright. We are a celebration.” – Karyn Andersson, lead singer of Arkangel, upon the announcement of the band’s breakup. Twitter, 2020.
In the spring of 2017, almost four years after the Millennium Riot, Arkangel announced a single stop in the Midwest for their world tour. I read about the update on my computer, and though I was in the middle of a lecture, I stood up and walked out into the street. Using my smartphone, I ordered myself a ticket for their concert.
I kept the ticket in my phone for weeks, and I stared at it every day. I dreamt about that ticket often, and though I was tempted, I didn’t sell it.
On June 19, 2017, I rode my bike down to Millennium Park, and I entered Pritzker Pavilion from its western side. The attendant scanned my phone, and I moved up to the front, directly in front of the stage. The metal wings of the pavilion shone bright, and the hot air on my bare shoulders meant summer was actually arriving. I was the only person there.
Above me, tiny dragonflies made of aluminum, glass, and silicone swept through the air, fighting the Chicago air currents and glinting in the sun.
An attendant in a ponytail inspected the aisles, glancing at me a few times until I noticed her.
“You must be a big fan to arrive this early,” she said.
“It’s Arkangel or nothing,” I said.
“I used to listen to them, until I started having strange dreams. Now I listen to nicer music,” she said.
Over the next three hours, thousands of people filled the seats and the lawn beyond the turtle shell of the pavilion. I took short breaks to reply to my mother and father, who still wanted to know if I could make a trip with them in autumn to the Yucatan to greet the passing of the seasons in the jungle. This was my father’s idea.
“We all need this,” my father wrote.
“I’m surprised you didn’t suggest we go during summer solstice,” I said. “Isn’t that when everyone goes?”
“That’s for tourists,” my mother added. “Your father’s choosing these dates because he wants us to get a glimpse of the jaguars.”
“Funny, I thought there were none left,” I wrote. “I thought they abandoned the Maya cities, just like the humans did.”
I sometimes got the sense that my parents were aware that something was different about me, and if we traveled often on these journeys into nature, they likelier I would be to tell them what I really knew about a place called Mictlán. I agreed to the short vacation and stopped texting them back when the DJ arrives on stage to warm up the crowd. At no point did I tell my parents where I was that evening.
When Arkangel arrived on the stage at 9 p.m., the crowd’s screams reached a hysterical pitch, and the purple lights on the stage bloomed into the night. Arkangel used new holographic technology, and that meant they could project images into the air above the stage with the solidity of physical objects.
Their favorite image, a mouth filled with many buildings instead of teeth, opened and closed.
It took the brother-and-sister duo a full thirty minutes to arrive on stage, and by the time they strolled on stage, I felt electric shocks on the back of my neck. The warmth of all these bodies in the pavilion felt right, and I heard the music of all their heartbeats.
Sergio and Karyn’s masks lit up in green, and they stared out at the audience, arms at their sides, like two colossal figures.
When the first strums of guitar from “Plainsong” fell over us, I felt the deep movement of sound, full of soul and adrenaline, like I remembered, but I knew that it wouldn’t be until later bars in the song that the stakes would go higher.
I let the bass and the melody flood my ears, and then there it was.
The second movement of the song allowed the synthesizers to trickle in, and suddenly, Arkangel’s music took me back through time, to places I had been to before.
I should have bought two tickets, dammit.
That was my thought, in my inner voice.
I never expected for someone to answer it, right inside my head.
Stop, fussing, reina. Shut up and enjoy the show.
I heard that soft voice inside of me. A voice other than my own. Male, young, just over the hill of puberty.
The music from the stage flowed over my skin and seeped into my bones, and for the first time in the three years since my brother had died, I felt real tears arrive in my eyes. My vision was dead in one, and the other felt alive and ready to absorb the lights from the stage. Both orbs filled with water, and saline rivers ran from my tear ducts and down my cheeks in long trails.
The lights from the stage made endless circles in the air. Their loops interlocked, came apart, then moved away from each other again. They were endless.
As I cried inside the sound waves of the music, I smiled, and I laughed, too. These were tears of joy, and of a certain release. Indeed, there was a festive melody found in the return trip of dead souls. And it sounded like this.
There was so much I still couldn’t understand, but I felt the molecules of water slide down my skin, while at the same time I felt other particles — sparking particles — rise back up, defying the laws of gravity and screaming their song of joy into the night.
AFTERWORD
The novel you hold in your hands was originally serialized on Kindle in four parts. The serial was part of an experiment to find a new form for my narratives. I am publishing both the serial and the paperback through my imprint Solar Six Books, which places emphasis on digital. Both formats have been edited to mostly mirror each other, but it’s in the digital edition that you will find all sorts of bonuses: glossaries, alternate covers, and more. The experiences of the digital book shaped the final form of both the final e-book and the paperback.
The themes and mythological elements of this novel are explorations that I have been making in my writing for decades. I welcome all reader feedback, and rest assured, readers will get more glimpses and visits to the 13 secret cities volumes to come. If you had asked me just five years ago if I could write a novel about multiple generations of parents, children and families of the human and non-human kind, I am not sure I could have said yes. And it’s better that way. The universe is better when it has the element of surprise and novelty.
We live in an interesting time for adventure books — the young-adult genre (or rather, marketing category) is going strong, and we are seeing many new amazing stories being told by some great authors. And yet, diversity is lacking. I have two nieces under the age of five, and it is my hope that in a novel like this one, they will one day see their culture, heritage and story, even if it’s through the refraction of a fiction. Perhaps they will be inspired to tell their own fictions one day, too.
Cesar Torres
New York City
December 2014
BONUS MATERIALS
Who doesn’t love a good bonus? We like to treat the digital versions of our books as a living thing — and that means that we are constantly expanding the book. Look in this part of the book for periodical updates, including alternate covers, glossaries, and even bonus shorts stories from the author. We haven’t changed the novel itself (though we do fix any typos or formatting issues as part of our updates). Got a request for more bonus materials? Send us an email at [email protected].
ALTERNATE COVERS
We thoughts you might like to see some of the earlier versions of the cover we used in the Kindle serial, as well as the full color variations for parts 1 through 4. Keep in mind that some of these image
s may not look great on a black and white Kindle, but you can view on Android, iOS and other devices using the Kindle app. Be sure to click on each image to enlarge it on your Kindle.
Variant Cover by Nick Agin
This cover may be used in a future edition of the book.
Kindle Serial Part 1 Cover by Matt Davis
Kindle Serial Part 2 Cover by Matt Davis
Kindle Serial Part 3 Cover by Matt Davis
Kindle Serial Part 4 Cover by Matt Davis
Bonus Story: A Conversation with the Elephant (2010)
Author’s Note: The following story was written in 2009 and was published in The 12 Burning Wheels. If you are curious about some of the lore surrounding the band Rhinoceros in 13 Secret Cities, here’s a short story that describes what became of them.
By Cesar Torres
Rhinoceros ripped the audience to shreds at the last show of the last leg of the last tour they would ever perform. The show should have been historic, but the truth was, they did it for the cash, for the pussy and, mostly, to not be bored the fuck out of their minds by their shitty lives. They did it so they wouldn’t slap the shit out of their children, the product of their mediocre marriages back in the shitty suburbs. The better days of Rhinoceros had passed, but they would use every bit of professionalism they had to blow the house down.
For one night, they were going to keep their dream alive. The Olympia was sold out.
Rhinoceros, most well known for their top-forty hit, “Asphyxia” back in the late Nineties, had eventually been relegated to bargain bins and nostalgic pockets of drunken college memory. They did, however, have a single, effective trick up their sleeve at every show.
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 30