Savior (17 page)

Fourteen
—Lightness and Unreality

If the Universe is spinning, then nothing has an essential purpose that has yet to be revealed. When the song ends, the play will be called. Until then we are running around the chairs trying not to be the ones standing when the music ceases. On the other hand, if the Universe is stable and we're the ones spinning, then this is a story with a beginning and end and the purpose of hell is to purify us for an eventual liberation. It would also explain all sorts of stuff such as the nausea, the feeling I get when I contemplate my imprisonment here.

Also, morning sickness, when the tumbling child wanting to be liberated calls out from the vacuum of the womb. Mary suffered tremendously with Ricky, or Richard, as she called him. I can picture her huddled beneath me
in the bathroom, my arms around her stomach, holding her up like a sack of potatoes, sometimes for hours it seemed, the sun coming up in the window with the orange tree outside it. It never gave any oranges aside from one year when we got some pitifully small fruit. But Ricky was as healthy as an onion. The little guy came out like a ball of fire, blathering, spewing his bodily fluids freely with the hospital cap on his elongated head, stretched from the difficult passage into this world through Mary's hole. She was our world tree, the axis around which our lives revolved. With her death we were cast headlong into the spinning vortex where we tried with all our might to hold on to what we had, our memories of the love, the faith that it would continue to grow and wrap itself around our hearts and develop into something resembling the image we had in our minds of her. I'd almost be capable of assembling my memories into a coherent picture except that it would serve no purpose. There's nobody coming for me in this place. I don't believe it anymore. There's nothing calling to me beyond the noises of the infernal machinery in this underground, viperous catacomb.

And yet she was above all else endowed with a sweetness of spirit, a rock meant to alleviate the spinning of whatever time and space we are sailing in. She never failed to pick me up when she smiled, and she smiled all the time
—in the morning, looking up from the bed with half closed eyes as I dressed for work, in the night when I stumbled around in the dark and switched on the light, unable to sleep from too much bourbon with the Myers staff at the annual Christmas party.

She and Ricky sometimes whispered conversations at the table and I couldn't quite make out what they were saying
; and she would smile at me and repeat what she'd said, sometimes not quite truthfully, just to rub it in, kind of harden me in her own way. She wasn't some kind of perfect wife, agreeing with me on every subject, God knows. But I could count on her honest opinions.

Odds and ends from the
hundreds and hundreds of mental images that come out: Mary and Ricky reading the Lorax in Ricky's bed. A card Ricky made for Thanksgiving—the orange-crayoned pumpkin and ridiculous stencil of a turkey. She had it up on the refrigerator for months. His class pictures on the refrigerator also. They stayed for years. The photograph on her bureau of the two of us on the deck of the Freedom standing in front of the big tuba of a ventilation shaft. The earring box covered in dust. The mole on her back, about an inch windward of the vertebra. Her long feet splayed naturally, the way she stood over Ricky when she was trying to get his cowlick just right for school. The day she cried when I came home and announced I'd lost the job at Myers, angry at them for not having given me time to even clear out my desk.

Ther
e is light and an electrical outlet and a bed. I have tried to position the bed so as to miss most of the drips. The cell I am in now has puddled water from the condensation dripping from the ceiling; but the pencil, the paper, all of these are meager, yet important improvements. The guard, Lucas, who brought them in on Chagnon's orders, is from Cucuta in the Andes, about twenty. He was studying business at the University of Bucaramanga before he joined the
Santos
, first as a courier and then a soldier. He wears all black, and the first time he took off his ski mask to reveal his face, I was startled by his youth, by his large, brown eyes that focus uncertainly, and by the spiderlike, curlicue tattoos covering his neck and cheeks. If it weren't for the tattoos, he would have an insipid, non-threatening appearance. He is fluent in English and interested in poetry. He says Chagnon is always looking to gain adherents. He likes to talk about the
Santos
and is obviously very proud of his membership in such a gang of outlandish thugs. There are even Americans in the organization, he told me. That's what he called it, an organization, like something larger than life, which I suppose it is, being dedicated to the pursuit of death in all things. The one thing they all have in common is they are all former drug addicts and have chosen to fight their demons by joining the struggle that Chagnon has painted as millenarian and involving the overthrow of all current, corrupted Western political systems in favor of a true rule of the people, without any centralized structure, just a sort of priesthood of adepts in the cult of the
Santa Muerte
. By choosing death, they are in fact glorifying a higher sort of life, in Lucas's view. He explains to me that the sooner I can learn the system of the
Santa,
the sooner I can join up and walk out of the cell into a new life. He is a true believer, Lucas is.

It's been about a week since the last session with the water, the brushing with death that is like an initiation into what makes their sadistic organization tick. I feel my mind beginning to fill out, to breathe a little deeper, putting out feelers of hope
like some unstoppeable force now that there is a light and some pain-free days behind me. I can still feel the train, rumbling overhead on some kind of random schedule. It shakes the bedrock and sometimes even shifts the bed while I am lying on it. I wonder what it is. I asked Lucas what went on above us, and he refused to say.

I am guessing we are somewhere either in Western Europe or North America, where Chagnon is able to use a work force of marginalized gang members
—the type of people who would tattoo their faces to claim membership in an "organization"—cut off from any of the surrounding society and, therefore, dependent on him for any and all validation of their worth. That is the entire trick of course, to break down all of individuality and then build a person back up again in the image of the strong man, the smart man, the fearless man with the magic touch, the leader, with his agenda fully internalized. You start with people who have already self-destructed and allowed the demons of self-hate to rule them, who have incinerated the seed of goodness, the original blessing that gets planted at birth when a baby is placed at its mother's breast.

Chagnon came in one night when I had just finished writing. I had been unable to write down anything of any value, no memories of any note or immediate significance had come to me, just random images like a surrealist film, somebody's knee and a background of a fire hydrant open and the flow full force and children racing through it, and voices, dismembered voices, like ghosts from long ago. I had written down the images with the idea that later I would go back and claim them, give them names and places, a context that could take me out of here. But, as I said, it was nothing much, a meager output, and I really doubted that there was any value to the exercise. In other words, I was vulnerable, full of self-doubt. And then he walked in. He circled the bed and observed me putting the journal down beside me. I swung my legs so that my feet were on the ground again. I had a brief and debilitating moment of metacognition, wondering how I looked, how I seemed to him, my slumping
, decrepit old body. Then he smiled. And I realized that his smiles, his attempts at sympathy were all a ploy. He did nothing, not even breathe, without an ulterior motive. It was one of the admirable things about him, that he was so transparently full of himself, not like most people who feel the tug of mediocrity, the need to love their neighbors so that they too will be loved, that herd-like swoon that we wrap in names to disguise the self-interested weakness that also is our birthright. But some, like Chagnon, are born with a social blindness that can be perceived as strength, and thus are vaulted into greatness on the welcoming backs of the mob.

How are you liking the new
habitation?

It's great. Much better, thanks.

You see we are not all bad.

You can let me go anytime.

No. We can't let you free. You see, once your son is located we will bargain for the tablet.

That Mayan thing? Tell me it has anything good on it, Chagnon.

The Mayans knew the secret of the Safira, the levels of structure that make up the quantum universe. It was recorded in its purest mathematical form on the Chocomal by the priests of Caracol during the golden age of Mayan science and learning.

Really?

Yes, really.

He stepped towards
me. His eyes were black pinpricks of hate, hard and unflinching. It was not hard to imagine that he could lead any group of crippled and unsound men. He was capable of great cruelty that he used to instill fear and respect.

I hear you are building a big weapon. But you already have us by the
cojones
with all the drugs you sell on our streets.

The drugs are the anaesthetic. We need to finish you. You don't believe we can do it?

No.

He nodded and backed away, pacing around and around the bed.

Once we have the Chocomal, the guts of our enemies will stink in the streets, from Amsterdam and Istanbul to Washington and Bogota. It will be the new age of Mictecacihuatl, the goddess, as I prophesied.

You? A prophet as well. My, oh my, Chagnon.

I will bring you the book where it is recorded. The visions came to me in Rio Negro after we finished off the
Septicos
.

Who were the
Septicos
?

A cartel of low
-class Medellin ruffians. They were ruling us. Kidnapping our women and raping them and leaving them in the parks of Bucaramanga. I killed Rajon Tulio, his wife, and two-year-old daughter with my bare hands. You see this?

He showed me a scar on his hand, raised pink flesh on the thin, fish-like slab.

This is where the little girl bit me after she watched me assassinate her father. I stabbed him in the neck and took his head off. And then, after she had the nerve to bite the hand that had killed her father, I held her on him and drowned her in his blood. It was good. The hand was infected, though. The little bitch was with the syphilis. I almost died, and the visions came to me then.

I'm sure that was very exciting.

You know what it is to create, Mr. Lyons. You are a writer. All the best are creative ones. Stalin was a priest. Hitler was an artist. One must be giving birth to one's ideas to be a true man. Perhaps yours are too timid. The visionary man is in touch with the deepest forces. It is the truest, fullest path to exist.

He had his hands behind his back and was facing the wall. I could hear the guards behind the metal door, shifting their weight. They too, listened, although they did not understand. I could have jumped him, killed him. I should have. Then he turned and stared hard at me. I almost thought he was reading my thoughts. I swallowed hard, expecting him to call the guards in.

I do not understand what you people fear so much about death.
Verdad.
Is like we are different especies. Take for instance the symbol of the zombie you find in so much of your television. What is that but fear of
la Santa
. This is why your health care costs are so high. I would become a great reformer, but instead I am how you say it, a root and branch man. That is what the English call it. We need to clean out the
hojarasca
and start with a fresh, clean
plantación
.

Chagnon, you couldn't get elected dogcatcher in my world. Your best bet, seriously, is to plead insanity when you get the chance.

I will show you what am talking about.
Una demostración
. I feel you are a man of science, of reason.

Reason is just anoth
er cult, Chagnon. I don't make it my god.

No, of course not. You are right. The true man worships only what he can validate
por experiencia propia
. I will feed your heart before we eat you. This is why you shall fly tonight. Lucas, Guajiro.

He called for the guards and instructed them to cover my head with a hood. I was bound and led by my tied hands out of the cell. Then I was marched for what seemed an interminable length down long corridors. I sensed the other prisoners behind thick walls, seething and tortured souls. Then I was on a lift and we were climbing to the upper floors and marching down more halls, footsteps echoing and the voices of the guards
, and Chagnon lecturing, patronizing them with bits of his fool's wisdom and stories from his legendary past as the founder of the
Santos Muertos
. Then we were out in what felt like a large empty space and more hubbub of voices and another lift, this time going down. Automatic doors with rubber edging closed behind me. It was quiet except for the barely audible, high-pitched humming of the engines. This must have been the train I felt every night in my dreams. The hood was removed. I was seated on a metal ledge and in front of me was the pilots' console. The two pilots were in black uniforms. Their faces were covered in the
Santos Muertos
tattoos. Samael Chagnon had his hand on my shoulder. In his other hand he cradled a snub-nosed automatic rifle equipped with a large sight. He spoke swiftly in Spanish to the pilots. I couldn't understand. They nodded and turned to the instrumentation, and we taxied for a short distance and then lifted straight up into the air and took off with so much force I could feel the blood gathering in my feet and lower legs.