Jemez Spring (29 page)

His neck hair tickled; he felt a shiver. What was happening to him? He was losing time. The clues were clear. Raven at the movies. Raven at Tamara's. Raven carrying on at the Hispanic Cultural Center. He had to move faster, but the press of the crowd hemmed him in. Or was it the thought of holding Naomi's dead body only minutes ago?

A troupe appeared. At first he thought they were actors celebrating old times in Alburquerque. They looked so real he could smell the cologne on the men and the rich perfumes on the women. But no, these were no thespians; these were ethereal characters from the city's past, spirits walking among the crowd and enjoying the day just as any living person might.

Sonny recognized Clyde Tingley and his wife, Carrie, sharp in 1940s proper dress, smiling and strolling down the avenue as they might have walked when they were alive. And Elfego Baca, Sonny's great-grandfather, El Bisabuelo of his dreams, cane in one hand and a gorgeous First Street prostitute laced around the other. He was the one who spoke of large-hipped, big-bosomed women.

“Abuelo—” Sonny stammered.

El Bisabuelo winked and said, Don't lose it, Sonny. Don't let the Baca name down. Honor above all things. That's our heritage, mi'jo.

Then he walked on, smiling cordially and nodding handsomely at the Tingleys. Other spirits from the city's past followed.

Dick Bills, saddlebags full of beans and jerky; and Mike London, who used to run wrestling matches; Miguel Otero, a former governor handing out “Vote for Me” cards to paisanos who came from Plaza Vieja to join the party. Tom Popejoy, the educator; Dennis Chávez, the famous senator from New Mexico; Erna Fergusson, the writer; Ernie Pyle, the World War II reporter; George Maloof; Julian Garcia; professors from UNM; Uli; and others. All as natural as could be.

Quite a show, the old man said.

Where the devil have you been? asked Sonny.

Around.

What the hell's going on?

A party. The old man laughed.

I'm losing it, Sonny stammered.

Why? Because some of these departed folks show up at the fiesta? Hey, everybody loves a fiesta. Besides, you've seen your Bisabuelo before.

Yeah, but in my dreams.

The biggest mistake those sico-ologists make is to separate dream from reality, the old man said, quite sure of himself, acknowledging his spiritual compadres. La vida es un sueño, y los sueños sueño son.

Sonny shook his head. Why here?

Why not? This is their city. They lived here, created its history, became memorable in the spirit of the city. Just be thankful you have no Nero or Caligula.

Sonny nodded. He had been trained by the old man to be a shaman, to enter the world of dreams as the principal actor, because a shaman cannot be tossed around in a dream, he goes there for a purpose, to help whoever is in need, so maybe something had stuck to him during all those long hours of initiation. He had learned to create his own dream and enter the door of the dream, and he had seen Andres Vaca, one of his 1592 grandfathers, and his Bisabuelo Elfego Baca, and Billy the Kid, Stephen Watts Kearny, the sonofabitch, and Popé, the leader of the Pueblo Revolution against the Nuevomexicano Españoles. He had met four of his own great-great-grandmothers at the origins of New Mexico history.

So why should he doubt, now, the depth of the old man's teaching. The world was full of what some would call magic, but for the ancestors, visiting the place where they once lived was as natural as prayer. So why call it magic, or worse, the “mystical” experience? No, it was as natural as apple pie. The spirits did not go away, as the old man said, and they loved a fiesta.

“Joven!” someone called. “Ephebus!”

Sonny turned.

“Aquí! Aquí!”

Someone dressed as a Cirque du Soleil clown was calling him into the movie house at the corner of Central and Second Street.

“Come on in, but don't lose hope,” the clown said, and disappeared into the theatre.

A large group had gathered outside, clamoring to get in, eager to be part of the movie playing inside, a remake of the old classic
Salt of the Earth
, the story of Mexican miners in the Silver City area who had the guts to strike for better wages and housing conditions. These were no Wobblies, no trained union activists, just oppressed Mexican miners and their wives whose humanity was being driven into the copperish dust of the open-pit mine. Theirs was a cry of
Huelga!

The crowd was not drawn to the story but to the technology. Something called laser projection, far beyond digital or holograms, it was the first true reality film. A series of well-placed laser machines projected the story's images onto an ionized central stage. The characters, projections of congruent light, actually came alive. 3-D. They became players on a stage.

The moviegoer could step right into the center of the action. The union sympathizers could join the miners in huelga, the far right could join the repressive owners. The images evoked in the moviegoers the most primal instinct, the desire to change the outcome of the story.

Science had finally taken the image from its flat surface and made it whole. And he who could control and manipulate images could control the masses. Ancient cavemen knew that. The hunter painted the image of the hairy mammoth on the wall of the cave, then went out and killed the beast. That was the history of the species.

Raven had said, See you at the movies. He was waiting.

Sonny pushed past the mass of kids with spiked, psychedelic hairdos and leather outfits, smoking, gabbing about the philosophy of life, never having read a philosophy book. The girls in very short shorts, the guys in leather jackets with glistening steel studs and chains, all thought themselves artists but they practiced no art, unless it was the art of acting bored with life. Today they would identify with the striking miners and feel socially responsible, even though in ordinary life they had never marched for a good cause.

Sonny searched his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, paid the gum-chewing, red-haired girl for a ticket, and entered.

He smelled the dark. Yes, Raven was near. But why here? Did the miner's story have something to do his challenge? It didn't make sense.

He's theatrical, the old man warned. Patron saint of theater. A ham, a misguided actor. That's the role of the trickster, to act out the story. To suck you into his story.

That's where I want to be, Sonny replied. He moved toward the stage. Other dark figures milled around him.

“Raven!” he called.

The machines around the stage buzzed. Pale blue lights subdued the darkness, allowed some light. The movie was starting.

Sonny looked at his hands. They had turned blue.

Was he now only an image projected onto empty, ionized space in which the laser projection reintegrated itself and came alive? Some in the audience walked into the middle of the action. The moviegoer had finally achieved godlike status, become a prime mover who could change the course of the actors' lives.

Repressed emotions flowered on the stage. Lonely hearts could fall in love with the hero. The sociopaths could beat up the minor characters and murder the major characters.

Somewhere in the outer edges of the action Raven laughed. Hullabaloo! he called.

“Raven!” Sonny called again. He reached out to touch one of the actors. The woman flinched. She had not expected Sonny's touch. It wasn't in her script.

Sonny jerked back. He had not expected to feel flesh when his mind told him that the images being projected were composed of light.

He had never backed away from an encounter with Raven, but right then he felt he had fallen into a game that was more than he expected. Raven was in charge again. Raven the director. And Sonny? A petty player on the stage, one to be manipulated by the unfolding story.

Anthrax and smallpox, dirty nuclear bombs, flying airplanes into public buildings, and other atrocities aimed at the destruction of civilization had not worked. But enough images with their latent chaotic message could garble the nervous system. This was clear to Sonny as the audience in the darkened theater dove into the action and disappeared in the void.

Like a dream. But entering the dream without a guide could prove extremely dangerous.

Sonny! Raven called from the middle of his fantasy. Come on in.

Sonny turned and faced Raven. Handsome as the devil on Sunday at church, he presented an imposing figure. The women flocked into his new, light-based reality, thinking they were the anima to his animus, and he the answer to their bewildering dreams. The young men, those lost long ago to the chaos of the world, entered to be warriors at his side.

20

On either side of Raven stood two lovely girls dressed in satin white with lace fringes, white gloves, and vaporous veils on heads so innocent and lovely they brought tears to a man's eyes. Each girl held a prayer book in one hand; in the other hung a white mother-of-pearl rosary. They were obviously dressed for their First Holy Communion, and they looked up at Sonny with such longing that their gaze tore through Sonny's heart, deep into his soul, which expressed its grief with a deep sigh, a sigh that startled those waiting to jump into the laser-projected reality.

What has he seen? people whispered. And why does he tremble and grow pale?

My daughters! Sonny cried, a cry that came like the roar of a tiger that had just seen its mate burned alive by hunters who cared naught for transubstantiation, and what that might mean to a person's endlessly wandering soul.

The cry, loud and painful, echoed in the darkened movie house, its reverberations swayed the quantum particles of light, and even Raven's triumphant face for a moment reflected dread.

Sonny had finally seen the images of the two spirits lifted from Rita's womb, two daughters he would have raised, taken to school and on trips to the sacred ceremonies and magic mountains of the state, playful girls who would run to hug and kiss him after an afternoon of splashing in the water of the river, the Ganges that flowed through the valley, two who would sing and dance into young womanhood, with all the pain and joy that meant. Two to play piano and guitar, hear the cuentos of the ancestors, pray to saint and kachina alike, learn the old ways, and grow to bless his middle years. Two whose future he would watch unfold, even as his hair turned gray and he, abuelito, stooped to pick up his grandchildren.

Two dressed in the innocence of Communion white.

Naomi had pointed the way, prophesying the egg in the water would reveal the daughters who stole his heart. Now it was up to him to take them back.

Beelzebub! Sonny hurled the first insult that came to mind, thinking that if Raven could compose the movie's reality he could also hold the girls prisoners.

A murderous desire filled Sonny. He would kill Raven, even if that meant killing part of his own psyche, images that had hounded him since a time when the deepest seas were crystalline.

Sonny, no! the old man cried. It's a trick!

Of course it was a trick, as had been made clear in all the stories told about Raven. His taunting was to be expected, along with his sick way of drawing Sonny into his circle, just as he was now enticing an entire generation into the world of false images.

But rage clouded Sonny's good sense, and he didn't recognize the tools of the new technology as the same smoking mirrors used by the Aztec gods long ago to present false images. Tezcatlipoca came to mind.

Sonny struck at Raven, but the vampire who sucked not human blood but human energy protected himself by unfurling silken wings and tripping Sonny by stepping on his ankle, the same foot Sonny had broken years ago steer wrestling.

Sonny reached out to grab the girls, his daughters, one in each arm, hoping he was in time to pull them out of the laser fire, which burned like halogen, diatomic molecules gone wild.

But they were gone, evaporated, as the controllers of the projectors, Raven's cronies, expertly changed the scene, and in an instant Sonny was no longer in the midst of the miner's strike, but alone in a wide and empty desert of white sand where the restless wind blowing across the dunes cried like La Llorona as she wandered aimlessly down dry arroyos. Nothing lived in that desolation except a few spindly yucca plants, the lotus of the desert, flowers on which bodhisattvas dared not sit.

Do you like the movie? Raven asked. And where would you like to go next? The Iberian peninsula where some of your most recent ancestors lived, or Mexico where your Indian blood flows, or the court of Peter the Great, Napoleon's France, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the founding of Santa Fe—Ah no, you've been there. I can't think of a place you haven't been in your dreams. Unless it's this new reality.

He gestured at the virtual reality at his command. This is it, Sonny. The new soma holiday. No more of those chemical highs, no more ecstasy drugs, none of that caca the kids learn to mix from the Internet, just the world of images to dazzle you. Think of it, Sonny, the image is now returned to its rightful place as mover of the universe, ahem, as it always was.

Control, Sonny, he continued. This is the way to control the world. I give the kids a new fad every day, violent video games, action movies, images they mistake for knowledge.

Sonny shuddered. If Raven's tricks could move him from scene to scene, where would he wind up next? And why had the beautiful daughters suddenly disappeared? He had seen them, and for that he gave thanks. Now he had to learn to play Raven's game. Be coyote.

You would have me believe you're my brother, he said to Raven. Like the yin and yang enclosed in a circle, or the DNA double helix, the staircase whose genetic sequence has been reduced to four letters. ACTG. The four sacred laws of the dharma wheel.

Or the two snakes that bite each other's tails and become the circle, Raven added, for he loved to play at the analogies of life. The caduceus of Hermes, your guardian angel.

I pray to Santo Menos, Sonny thought, the patron saint of the Chicanos. And to my mother's Virgencita, la Guadalupana. La Wonder Woman of liberated Chicanas.