AZTECHS

by Lucius Shepard

  The remainder of Childers’ story, his revenge against Rusedski, the slaughter of the innocents, how he became King of the Hill…I was taking such a beating, it came to seem like a bloody dream I was having. I saw the family burning atop the barbarously defaced ruin, Rusedski maddened and falling prey to a simple trick, his subsequent torment, as if I were part of those events and not involved in what was actually happening. I caught sight of Lupe every so often. She was alive, trying to stand, but she wasn’t making much progress. These glimpses inspired me to fight back, but the fight was essentially over. Childers pounded me about with the ease of a tiger swatting a bobcat…though he had slowed considerably. I could see the punches coming, but my arms might have been bags of cement, and I couldn’t take advantage of the openings. I derived no encouragement from his slowdown. It might be that he was merely taking his time. And if the machine dust I’d thrown in his eyes was working on him, I didn’t believe it would finish the job before I was finished.

  “Reason I’m telling you this,” Childers said, walking around me as I stood wobbly and dazed, trying to bring him into focus, “is I don’t like you. It’s not that you remind me of Rusedski. He was ten times the man you are. You’re nothing but a little punk hustler…but you’ve got that citizen streak in you. I really hate that, you know. I hate when people aren’t true to themselves. When they refuse to admit what total bags of shit they are. So what I’m saying, Eddie…This is personal.”

  He knocked me back against the side of the pyramid, and as he stepped close, I wrapped my arms around him. It was reflex. I had no strategy, I just wanted to stop the punching, but Montezuma must have seen it as his opportunity to get involved, deducing—I supposed—that I had wrapped my arms around his enemy. I had a deathgrip on Childers, and as we stood swaying together, birds descended from the sky and began to peck and claw at us. I have no idea how many—hundreds, I think. Maybe more. And I’m not completely sure if they were birds. I heard their wings and felt their beaks, and they smelled dirty. But I had closed my eyes against the attack and never saw them.

  Childers’ chest swelled to impossible proportions, breaking my grip, and he rolled away. I fell to the ground, face down, covering up as best I could. Even after Childers had put some distance between us, the birds kept pecking at me for a minute or two. If this was all the defense that Montezuma was capable of, I couldn’t understand why his enemy hadn’t already taken him out. Then I had one of those neon-letter thoughts like one I’d had the previous night, albeit more garbled, something about the expansion of kingdom and something else about my place in it. I didn’t get it. When the birds left and I sat up, blood trickled into my eyes. There were wounds on my face, my neck and hands. I fell back against the side of the pyramid, slumped onto my side.

  “That was pitiful,” Childers said, walking toward me. He had cuts on his face and hands, too, but not so many as mine. He shouted at the pyramid. “You hear me! That was pitiful!” He looked at me—fondly, it seemed—and drove the point of his boot into my side. The pain was a knife thrust, going deep. I heard a lung puncture, the hiss of air escaping inside me.

  “What’s beyond the door?” he asked.

  My eyes were squeezed shut, and each breath made me wince. “It’s a fucking corridor…I told you!”

  “Hey, I think your girlfriend’s ready to check out,” Childers said. “You want to take a look?”

  He turned me onto my uninjured side with his foot. Lupe was lying on her back in the grass about ten feet away. Her eyes were open but she wasn’t moving. Blood filmed her mouth. Grief and rage possessed me in equal measure. I rolled onto my belly, preparing to stand, and registered something black passing among the trees behind Lupe. Childers caught me by the collar and hauled me upright, spun me about to face him, holding me at arm’s length. His pupils were dilated, and his lips stretched in a grin. A spray of blood stippled his cheeks—either mine or Lupe’s.

  “What’s beyond the door?” he asked.

  He no longer had any leverage with me—I spat in his face.

  Childers broke three of my fingers. The shock made me scream, and I blacked out. When I regained consciousness I was staring up through the crown of a ceiba tree. Eye trash confused my vision. My head felt like a bead strung on a thrumming white-hot wire.

  “What’s beyond the door, what’s beyond the door, what’s beyond the door?” Childers made a song out of it, and after a moment’s thought, he added a new lyric. “It really doesn’t matter, ’cause Eddie’s going to die.”

  Then his brutal features grew slack, confused.

  “If you…” He stumbled away, put a hand to his throat. “I don’t…what did…” He stood wide-legged, clutching his throat now, and took a clubbing swing, as though striking at an invisible enemy, and began to choke. He went heavily to his knees, still clutching his throat.

  It took me a while to stand, and by the time I succeeded, Childers had toppled onto his side. Without the birds and the delay they had caused, I realized, I would be dead. I limped over to Childers. The machines were doing their work at a quicker pace. One of his hands was convulsively opening and closing, and his eyes were bugged. The muscles of his chest twitched, making it appear that the tattooed ants were in agitated motion. Tremors passed through his limbs. His mouth was open. I believe he was trying to scream. I doubted he realized I was there, and I wanted to hurt him, to let him understand that I was enjoying the spectacle. But I couldn’t think of anything to add to what was happening. Glittering grains of machine life were swarming up from the grass. They filmed across his body and began to consume him. Bloody rents materialized in his skin, muscle strings were exposed and eaten away, as if by acid. His feet drummed the ground, his neck corded, and he made a fuming sound. If it hadn’t been for Lupe, I would have been a happy man. I turned away from Childers to tend to her and saw one of the black riders looming above her.

  Some things just own you. They’re simply too big for your brain to fit around. They steal your mind and heart, they stop your thoughts and freeze your limbs, and they just own you the way the sight of Lupe and the rider owned me. The rider was a huge black silhouette that had been burned through the paper on which the AZTECHS pyramid behind him was printed, and Lupe lay bloody-mouthed and broken, tiny beneath him. It was as if I were seeing it over and over again. Light burned the image into my eyes, and then the image was reconstructed inside my head and grew too large to contain, and then I was forced to re-see and re-reconstruct it, as if it embodied some fact too alien for my senses to interpret. Each time this happened, I felt more vacant and lost. I had no context for the sight, emotional or otherwise, yet it exerted a pull. I dragged myself forward and dropped to my knees beside Lupe. She was still alive. Her breath was labored, and she was straining to speak.

  “Gay…” she said.

  I realized this was the same syllable that Zee had spoken right before he died, but it wasn’t until afterward that I put it together with the word “gates,” with Zee’s declaration that the gates to eternity were all around us, and the stuff about organic distribution points. What I did, I did because I had nothing else to do, and no reason left not to do it. Lupe was dying, and I was so busted up and broke-minded and stoned on death, I didn’t care what happened. I glanced at the rider. He leaned down, displaying that eerie, fluid suppleness, and extended his black hand—it was fingerless, a big mitten of negativity. I could see forever into his chest and the dome of his head. Eternity minus stars and Bible stories. It looked at the time like a fine place to be. With only the slightest hesitation, and also with the sense that a terrible sadness was preparing to spike in me, I gathered Lupe to my chest and reached out to take the rider’s hand.

  It was like being switched off, then on, then off.

  Blankness.

  Then I would see something, think something.

  And then blankness again.

  The on-off process went faster and faster until it felt as though I were strobing in and out of consciousness. I
don’t remember much of what I saw, and I felt as objective as Frankie, removed from the tactical observances of Sammy and the less rigorous perceptions of Eddie Poe. First it seemed I was suspended high above a yellowish white plain, mapped by hedgerows colored bright green and magenta, all laid out in the manner of a garden. The patterns of the hedgerows, intricate as circuitry, were in a state of flux, changing constantly, reshaping themselves. I tried to think, to announce to myself what I was seeing, but all that came to mind were streams of images, scramblings of conception and word. Escaped down the incarnations. The incarnadine boulevards. Efflorescing crystal kingdoms of pure expansion. The expansion of kingdom is the only significance. Things of that sort. Identical to the sort of thoughts I’d had when I was making love to Lupe out on the desert. They seemed important but essentially incoherent, and I wasn’t sure if they were my thoughts or Montezuma’s. I had the idea I was seeing a basic structure, an evolving template upon which the kingdom was founded. I was in a kingdom—I knew that much—and I was somehow integral to its expansion, but what that portended in real terms, I had no clue.

  After the strobing stopped, I believe I was shown sections of the kingdom. I had a sense that the totality of the structure, which I couldn’t fully comprehend, had qualities in common with a beehive or a crystalline formation, hexagonal volumes in close contact, and that it was being displayed for me cell by cell. On several occasions I saw people, each in their own environment. One of them was Dennard. He was standing with his eyes closed at the center of what appeared to be a temple with columns but no roof. Soon it all started coming at me too quickly, and my mind wilted under the assault of light and color and image, and at last there was a light so bright it penetrated my eyelids and burned through me, illuminating me within and without, so that I became almost insubstantial, myself no more than a pattern and part of that patterned place. I lost track of seeing, of feeling, and finally of being…and then I was with Lupe again.

  I was still holding her gathered to my chest, but she was not dying, she was very much alive, and we were making love…really making love, not going halfway as it had been on the desert, but totally immersed in one another, every inch of liquid friction, every kiss, every drop of sweat, a kind of speech. We were lying on a bed inset in a marble floor. There was no ceiling, and high overhead was the template of the garden that had been my first glimpse of the kingdom—it flowed above us with the speed of clouds in a strong wind. The kingdom, you see, was under construction. Skies had not yet been installed. That, too, was something I knew. There were no walls, either. Only the floor…though from its edge you could see a city against a field of darkness, its lights stretching away on every side and from horizon to horizon. We might have been in the midst of El Rayo, except the red fire of the border was nowhere in evidence. But I was too focused on Lupe to give it more than a passing consideration.

  There were still barriers between me and Lupe, matters of personal history and distrust, but they weren’t important to the moment, and in the act of love we came to look so closely at one other that differences and barriers and the concept of distance itself seemed elements of the geography of a country we had left behind. The things she said to me in her passion were things I might have said—she said them for us—and when I pulled her atop me or turned her onto her side, I was enacting the mechanical principles of our singular desire. Nothing is perfect. No object, action, or idea. Yet in the brilliant ease and intensity of our union we felt perfected, we felt each other give way completely in the service of a heated oblivion where we lived a certain while. I remember there was music, and yet there was no music, only whispers and breath and the background drone of some machine hidden beneath us, whose cycles came to have the complexity and depth of a raga. I remember a soft light around us that likely did not exist, or else I do not know how it was generated, other than to speculate that our skins were aglow or weeping melanin. What did exist, what was made of us, what we were for that time…Love’s creature lives beyond memory. I only recall its colors.

  We lay for a while embracing; we spoke only infrequently and then it was no more substantial than the communication of animals when they settle next to one another, issuing comforting growls. Soon we became lazily involved, and as we moved toward completion, I experienced again the brilliant light that earlier had burned through me. This time it illuminated us with the intense clarity of an X-ray, and I saw how beautiful we were, how we had discarded the myths of ugliness, the false shroud of imperfection. I imagined our perfect skeletons picked clean of flesh and set out for display—advertisements for god. When I looked at Lupe, it seemed I was looking along the corridor of her life, past the career-business hustle, past the legend of her youth and the lie of her fairy tale princess childhood, past moments like stained glass windows and others like boarded-up doors, past tics and tempers, minor disorders, all the pointless behaviors that seek to define us, and I saw her as she might hope to be seen, the true thing in her revealed. Whether what we had become to one another was a side effect or part of Montezuma’s plan, it was what I wanted, and I didn’t care how it had come to pass.

  As I lay there afterward staring up at the fake sky, I recalled what Papa had said a few nights before about my having no future, how he had been right—albeit not sufficiently expansive—in his judgment. It seemed fairly certain that none of us had a future. Montezuma would see to that. Glittering machines purifying us and scouring us clean, wedding us to holy purpose, as Lupe and I had been purified, scoured, and wedded. Though I didn’t understand its particulars, I could feel the shape of new purpose inside me. But I did not feel like Zee had appeared to feel. Blissed-out and babbling biblespeak. I felt like Eddie Poe with a fresh edge on him, a few extra facets revealed. That was what mattered to me then. That I was still myself. You had to serve some master, be it employer, overlord, president, corporation, god. It was the way of the world. And I decided, as if I had a choice, that Montezuma couldn’t screw it up worse than whatever god he was replacing. So long as I had the power to pretend to be myself—which is all people really have of themselves—I was fine with it.

  “You know what’s goin’ on here?” Lupe asked me as we lay facing one another, so close the tips of her breasts grazed my chest.

  “With this whole trip? I think I got a line on it.”

  She toyed with the ends of my hair. “It feels weird to love you. I mean, I always did, y’know…but it was like, Okay, I love him, but fuck it. I got stuff to do. And now”—she gave a shrug—“it feels weird.”

  “But it feels good, too,” I said and pulled her closer.

  “Yeah, it feels good.” She sounded doubtful.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “We didn’t have a lot to do with gettin’ here,” she said. “If we hadn’t done the story on the Carbonells, maybe things woulda stayed the same.”

  “Hey,” I said. “If my papa hadn’t been such a screw-up, we never woulda met. If you were a guy, we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation. That kinda shit’s true anytime.”

  “I know, but…”

  “What’re we gonna do? We’re stuck with it.”

  “I ain’t stuck! I can do what the hell I want!”

  “You think that’s ever been true?” I asked.

  She pushed herself away from me, folded her arms and looked up toward the flowing template. “You startin’ to remind me of Zee…with all his everything-is-everything else bullshit.” Then less than a minute later, as I caressed her shoulder, she came back into my arms, apologized and said she loved me. But I was glad to have learned that Lupe was still Lupe, still contrary and willful.

  “Y’know what really bothers me?” she said. “It ain’t about me lovin’ you, it’s wonderin’ how come you love me…if that’s just Montezuma doin’ it.”

  “I been in love with you since I was kid,” I told her. “Since I saw you in church in your white lace dress.”

  She pulled back and gave me a stern look. “Tha
t was all bullshit.”

  “That’s who you wanted to be,” I said. “So that’s who you are.”

  She turned onto her side. “It’s that easy, huh? We get to be who we want to be?”

  “I saw you,” I said. “I saw who you are. You never were the Border Rose. That was your hustle…it wasn’t you.”

  “You saw me?”

  “Yeah…didn’t you see me? When the light got real bright?”

  “Sure, I did.” She grinned. “You’re still a dick.”

  I grabbed her, wrestled her into submission. The contact restored my erection, and she said, “See?”

  We made love again, and afterward I felt subdued, restless, ready for something new.

  “What do we do now?” Lupe asked. “Can we get outa here?”

  “Maybe we should find out,” I said in answer to both questions.

  Our clothes, as newly fresh as we were, lay beside the bed. We dressed and went to the edge of the marble floor and then, because it seemed the only logical way out of the kingdom, we stepped forward. Once again I experienced that strobing effect, that flashing in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t as disorienting as before. But when our feet touched ground and my vision stabilized, I was startled to find that we were in the desert. The stars were out, and the moon high. Sand and rock glowed palely. The personnel carrier in which we had fled the Carbonells was directly ahead of us, and Dennard was leaning against the hood. Frankie, who had been perched on the fender, jumped down and began shooting us as we came up.

  “This little son of a bitch makin’ us famous,” Dennard said, gesturing with his rifle at Frankie. “I was listenin’ to the radio. Whole damn world been watchin’ your show.”

  With his tattoos and muscles, he remained a scary-looking individual, but he seemed thoroughly relaxed and un-Sammylike. I wasn’t sure what he was doing there.