The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (12 page)

I pointed down there so my brother could see the center of the coil, but he had passed out. His eyes were rolled back into his head, and the whites glinted as black marbles.
 

“You said I am a wanderer. Tell me about that,” I said.

X grunted, and he lowered itself onto the floor. With one clawed hand
,
he pinned José María facedown onto the rocks, while he held me down by the shoulders as I kneeled in front of it.
 

The dog head lowered itself toward me, and his rheumy eyes approached. He placed his forehead on mine, and then a lone bell rang out into the space, rattling my body like a toy.

Inside the music he emanated, X talked to me.

I saw you, wanderer. You were a half child when I first spotted you. You were the visitor who came here in a dream
.
You came from a city of concrete, wood and glass.

The night of my thirteenth birthday,
I said through the vibrations that rang where our foreheads met.
 

You know that the number thirteen marks the entrance to my gate, wanderer,
X said.

And then the creature showed me a thousand images, each one cutting in front of the other with the speed of a lightning bolt. I saw images of my father, my mother, our house in Little Village, all in the past. And inside these images, I saw myself sleeping in bed, at the age of twelve, tossing and turning. I felt shame and sadness as I saw my old face, my original face. Inside these exploding images, I caught my parents in the corner, watching over me on the night of my thirteenth birthday.
 

But what brought me to this place?
I thought through into X.

The creature snarled, and his stink of rot enveloped my shoulders, my back, with a single embrace.

She doesn’t know,
X said, and he craned his neck as if he were talking to someone else over his shoulder.
She can wander, but she doesn’t yet know.

Who else is here?
I screamed through my forehead.
Who are you talking to?

X pulled back, and I felt a hot spot where our skin had been touching just a second ago. He was scared.

“They will pull out my innards,” he howled. “They will bring me pain.”

“Who?” I said.
 

“They will be so angry,” it said. “You shouldn’t have spoken when we touched.
They heard you,”
it said.

“They who?” I shouted and my startling voice trilled.

“The Lords of the city. The Lords in the heart of the city,” X said.

I heard a bass sound pummel from below, like a steel drum destroyed by a hammer. I peered into the heart of the coil, and it pulled darkness toward itself, like a black hole in outer space. The thousands of slits on its heart-shaped surface parted open, then zipped close in perfect unison.
 

“What is down there
,
exactly?” I asked.

“Well, the city, of course. The city that rests under the nine underground rivers.”

“Bullshit,” I said. Calling his bluff—this was the only way I could tell if what he was saying was true.
 

His brow furrowed, and his eyes squinted.

“You challenge me,” X said. “I do not lie. You, with your red heart and its thin blood. Shall I take you down to the city myself so you can meet the Lords Who Devour All?”

I didn’t want to meet any lords who ate anything.

“How do you know my heart is red?” I said. “This world has no light for you to see color.”

“Because I have seen it on the other side, in your world.”

“Perhaps you’d like to see the Lords now, and experience your evisceration.”

“Hell no,” I said.

I punched him in the nose, and I wriggled from its grip as he recoiled. The cuts on my legs were ablaze with pain, but I didn’t care. I held onto José María’s foot to make sure X didn’t run away with him.

“How does one get down the coil?” I said. The tension in my voice became like a buzz saw of metallic music.

“Citizens of Mictlán can come and go as they please. I am not sure what you’re asking. Wanderer.”

There, he had said the word
Mictlán
. Even in his native tongue, it sounded exactly the way I remembered it. It had a musical tone, like the music the wind makes in the trees in the autumn.

“But I am not a citizen of this place,” I said.

The creature heaved in laughter, and tiny slits on its chest like the ones in the center of the spiral opened up, then closed. It was like seeing a shark breathe through its gills. He laughed and his eyes rolled back into his head.

“The delusions of the other worlds,” X said. “Sadness and laughter.”

I had to think of another tactic.

“What I mean, is, if I asked you take me there, how would
we
get there?” I said.

X scratched his armpit, and I realized then and there that he was only humoring me. I was nothing but a plaything for him.
 

“Enough, charlatan,” X said. "You are supposed to have all this knowledge already. If I can’t eat you, I can excrete you like the feces you are.”

X shouted. The music of that shout rang with hate, disease and despair.

Pain shot through my ear canals. I cried hard sobs, and they emerged from my throat like the song of starlings. Metallic, polyphonic, desperate.
 

He took hold of my neck again, and we were climbing up the mountain, soaring up its walls as the creature’s haunches sprang us forward. He held the limp body of José María in his other arm. We moved at an incredible speed, yet time passed in slow motion before my eyes. At the top, a starless sky and a jagged peak waited for us.
 

“I’ll never tell anyone what we’ve seen,” I said. “I promise.”

“You like making deals,” X said, and he showed me his teeth. The gums bled in black, and I spotted about six canine teeth. It was a shark’s jaw inside a dog head. “But you don’t seem to understand. Nothing can be
unseen
. You know this. Do not barter with me, wanderer.”

X’s voice echoed through the sky, and it occurred to me that I must be dreaming.
 

You idiot, you know you can snap out of it.
 

The grit that scraped my knees felt real. My nostrils on fire with the smells of rot and dank water, and the sight of José María, still wearing his hoodie and the tattoos he made on his arms still reminding me of his immense geekdom—they had the solid quality of reality.

Just a dream, is all, in these walls.

We had easily climbed thousands of miles within seconds, and now we rested atop a flat outcropping of the mountain. Black snow fell on X’s shoulders, and I heard more music coming from inside his chest. The razor
-
sharp cuts at its center swelled open, and shut again.
 

I reminded myself to come out of the dream. And nothing.

Wake up.

But nothing.

X laughed at me as he scraped his claws along the black snow. He drew runes in the powder. He no longer held us down. He knew that if we ran away, he’d capture us again.

“I see what you’re doing. You tell yourself you are in a dream,” X said. “You are some sort of idiot.”

“How do you know what I was thinking?”

“Your mind has a voice and that voice makes its music—they all give you away, imbecile. Stop announcing yourself so loudly. Learn how to quiet your thoughts.”

I took a seat next to José María, who was still unconscious. I pulled back his hair, and the loss of privacy—the sheer intrusion of this beast into my thoughts—made me feel as if something big, menacing and unforgiving was ready to take me and kill me for real this time.
 

My brother came back to consciousness, and his eyes peeled open. He screamed again, but when he made eye contact with me, he stopped. He pointed toward his heart and made looping circles around it with his finger. Then he pointed at X.
 

What are you telling me? What should I do???

I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t tell what my brother was saying. I wanted to give him the power to speak, but there was no time.

Then X barked like a real dog, a feral wolf, like an animal.
 

“All sound and all thought are music, wanderer,” he shouted. “You must be careful what sound you make, with your body and mind. Even in your breathing, your music announces you. You know, when they bring the humans to my gate, none of them—none ever—have made such a cacophony as you. They are always silent. You are as loud as the oceans. Vulgar bitch.”

“Who brings you the humans?” I said.

“Death, of course. What do you think I have a gate for? Death delivers them to me, and I take them down through the nine rivers to the Lords. Their journey begins with me.”
 

FUCK THE OTHERS, KILL THE MOTHERS

“Do you know what it’s like to watch more than 800 people drown, for all that death to pour into Lake Michigan like bile? Lord I pray you are listening. My consciousness will always bear the scar of that cursed Eastland disaster in the Chicago River.” –The diary of Jack Woodford, November 1, 1915.

“Every song we’ve ever written is a fiction, but trust me, it’s a lattice work. Our trilogy of albums, starting with
The Violet Album
and ending with
2666
, was written as a map. Thankfully
,
it’s out of Google’s reach.” –Sergio Andersson, lead singer of Arkangel, “Slicing Deep, Screaming in Quiet: The Rise and Fall of Scandinavian Indie”,
Vanity Fair,
2013.

“In the Aztec cosmos, the god of duality created the world. The god/goddess bore four god children, all named Tezcatlipoca: The red, the white, the blue and the black. These children, too, embraced the power of duality.” –Jane Morrigan,
Clara Montes: A Biography in Four Parts,
2074
,
Castor Books
.

I didn’t want this reality anymore.
 

I didn’t think it was possible to find any more adrenaline on which to run. My arms ached, and I waited to catch my breath for a moment. But there was no relief.

Pressure nagged at my temples and ate away at the base of my neck. Around me, every shade of the darkest black brought the world into sharp relief.

My father had wanted to show me something about this place, about this window into the dark, and I had refused. He and my mother had called it Mictlán since I was a little girl. My mother tried, too, and now I stumbled, clumsy and lost. I still held on to the idea that I might actually be dead, but where was the light at the end of the tunnel?

In Mictlán, time was melting.

I felt it. It moved slowly, very slowly. It reminded me of the times I crashed through the deep end of the pool at my high school: the seconds that melted into whole minutes as I waited to break the surface.
 

Maybe I have been inside this place for weeks. Maybe months. Who knows?

I stared into the eyes of X, a creature that made every nightmare I ever had—every boogeyman I had cringed from—a reality. Those human eyes blinked at me through its dog head, as it took a moment to decide my fate.

A few summers before, my father had saved up his vacation time, and he took José María, my mother and me down to Oaxaca on vacation for four weeks to visit the Montes family there. My father’s collection of Luis Miguel and Rolling Stones CDs drenched our ears every mile of the way there. José María blocked it out with his iPod, drumming on the back of my father’s seat all the way.

It was the worst trip of my life. The drive took so long—it was endless
,
in fact. Each time we stopped along the road for a bathroom break or to get something to eat, things got dirtier, more weathered as we crossed over into Mexico.
 

We arrived on a late Sunday afternoon in the city of Oaxaca. Relatives pinched my face, squeezed my shoulders, examined my hair. At the age of fourteen, the last thing I wanted was touch from anyone. And to top it all off, my mother asked me why I couldn’t be more like my cousin Nadia, who didn’t seem to mind this physical invasion from every relative. Nadia took me for a walk through he city. We walked under its colonial church towers and cut through the mercados. Nadia’s cordiality unsettled me. She was graceful, long
-
haired and perfectly suited for this place. I was not.

My Spanish language skills were broken, and I felt they always would be. I fumbled in Spanish in Oaxaca, and I felt like no one forgave me for not having a better accent in Spanish. The air had an earthy quality that repulsed me. Nadia left me alone in my guest room, and I thanked her in broken Spanish. I lay on the lumpiest knitted blanket in a room the size of a closet in Oaxaca, overlooking an avocado tree grove.

I didn’t know how I could spend four weeks in that place. I cried in silence, and then a smack to my head made me bolt upright in a scream.

José María darted past the doorway like a fox. The object he tossed at me flopped onto the floor. A book. It was his way of giving me a gift without having to speak. Before I could call out his name, he ran off into the maelstrom of our cousins in the courtyard, laughing.

I picked up the book.
The Grimoire
, by Stephen Knowles-Reading. I opened it, and within minutes, I was gone, drifting off into a world of water-based magic, imprisoned fairies and the quest for Merlin’s lost talisman, the Gold Finch.
The Grimoire
saved me during my stay in Oaxaca. It yanked me far away from that house on a dusty hill and the daily trips we took to visit every relative in town. Aunts and uncles and cousins stopped accosting me with the question “Do you have a boyfriend in Chicago?” during these visits to their houses during the mornings. In the afternoons, I dissolved into
The Grimoire,
sipping a bottle of Jarritos in the side garden of the house, away from everybody.

Inside the book, Hugh Bright, no older than me at the time, had conquered a dragon from King Arthur’s round table with a single kiss to its forehead, rendering her his servant forever after. After I finished the book and I had returned back to Chicago in September, I had preferred Hugh’s journey over mine.