The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (15 page)

“Get fucking real, Cho,” Mercy said. “After hundreds lay dead on that grass, you have the gall to posit this idea still? STILL?”

Dennis wasn’t going to let it go.

“There’s been so much analysis. The tear gas on the Pritzker stage. Five minutes pass. Then shots are fired. The YouTube recordings—there’s about thirty that have usable footage—they show protesters firing with handguns—”

“But who shoots first, Dennis? Who?”

“There’s not enough evidence,” Dennis said. He bit into his Monte Cristo, but the cold stare from Mercy stopped him in mid-chew.

“If any of you want to follow these theories to their tired end, you can step,” Mercy said. “We came here to cause change, not to side with Mayor Amadeo’s political machine.”

“So
,
where’s the event?” I said. I wasn’t going to let Mercy bully Dennis.

“Parade of Lights on Michigan Avenue.” The parade took place every year the weekend after Thanksgiving.

“And the goal?” I said.

“To put on a show. They bring the lights, we crank them up. We make them burn,” Julian said.

“Good way of putting that. I’m gonna use that,” Mercy said. She jotted a note.

“This time, we’re being tailed by the cops, so the plan’s different than during the Millennium event,” Mercy said. “Everyone breaks up into their own mini-pockets of groups, and they get a few kicks whatever way they want. Shut down web sites, prank the cops, spook the tourists, whatever.”

“Whatever,” Julian chimed in.

Julian’s frizzy hair floated above his shoulders in a wiry mass. The wisps of hair evoked the thin essence of the owls made of smoke who flew inside Mictlán. I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
 

You need a shrink, girl. Get back to business and focus.

“I think we need to make a statement against the lack of investigative journalism,” I said. “Kayla and I were just talking about this recently. When I was hospitalized, I found virtually no decent coverage explaining what really happened to those of us who were there, marching.”

“This sounds good to me,” Mercy said. “And your plan?”

“Dunno yet; I need to make one,” I said.
 

“Good,” Mercy said. “Can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

I wasn’t sure I liked her tone of approval.
 

“Let’s meet here next week. This is enough of a plan to get us started,” Mercy said.
 

We paid for our breakfasts, and when we opened the door, winter had arrived. Ice pelted our faces, and the cars maneuvered just a little more slowly than in autumn. Ice brought on caution on the slick roads.
 

I felt proud of our little group, but something in my belly stirred. Something I didn’t like.

For a moment, I remembered a world made up of darkness, shaded only in the color black. It was a place guarded by a man with a hairless dog head and teeth that bristled in the dark. The images pulled at me, dragging my mind into their world without light.

I made additional plans with Kayla and Dennis on our way back on the Clark bus, which would get us back to campus. December 7th was going to be a significant milestone for the OLF and the movement.
 

We made a couple of stops along the way, and the police checkpoints along Clark Street made me shiver in my long coat.

When we arrived, I put my key in the front security gate of my dorm, and a horn honked behind me.

“I think it’s for you,” Kayla said.

There was my parents’ Honda. My stomach sank. Couldn’t my dad arrive a little late just once? He was always fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

I took a step closer to the car and realized my father wasn’t behind the steering wheel.

“Take your time,” my mother said. “I meant to give you a little more time, but your father shooed me out the door to prevent my lateness. As you well know.”

I ran up to my room and grabbed a backpack full of stuff for the overnight trip. I also grabbed my hamper full of dirty clothes. On my way out of the suite, I pushed the swinging door and struck something hard.

“Clara,” said Edgar.

The door divided the space between us, but I could see his fine stubble, the hard lines of his shoulders, the radiance inside his eyes. Now that I was back in a world full of color, I lost track of time as I studied the way reds and yellows and greens pulsed and throbbed in sync with the shadows.

After everything I had witnessed last night inside Mictlán, I felt like a different person. Edgar put his hand on my forearm.

“I came looking for you,” he said. “I heard you went to a meeting today. Dennis told me.”

“Of course he would,” I said. Dennis and Edgar. Indivisible, held together by the glue of a bromance. “What do you want?”
 

“No need to be nasty, Montes.”

“It’s been a rough week.”
 

I’m not apologizing. He has no idea what I’ve been through.

“I’ll be gone a few days from school,” he said. “My mother passed away last night.”

When I heard the words from Edgar’s mouth, the sounds became music again, and I remembered a place

(Mictlán)

(The Lords at the bottom of the coil are waiting)

where the words of a person became notes to a song.

“I didn’t know that—”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I just—I don’t know how to say this, but—”

I didn’t know what to say to a friend whose mother died. This was the first time it happened to me.

I slowed down for a moment and set down my two bags. The staircase stank of male sweat and beer, as it always did on a Saturday morning.

“Go on,” I said.

“I did a lot of thinking last night, after my brother called me to give me the news. I feel I owe you in some way,” he said.

“For what?”

“Dunno. I wanted to say I am sorry,” Edgar said. His baritone filled the white walls of the staircase.

Edgar had been one of the first people to see my new face when the bandages came off after the cosmetic surgery. I was never going to be happy with the new nose and eyes and lips that the scalpel gave me, and yet—he had kissed the subtle scars under my jawline and kissed my reconstructed lips. Of course, that felt like it was a long time ago, too. We had stopped touching, seeing each other. I understood now that we had even stopped being friends. But on those early mornings, weeks ago, when I had crept to his room, he had seen and touched my new face in a very real way.

“I am sorry, too,” I said. “What happened?”

“My mom went in for a routine surgery to remove a cyst. She had complications from the operation. No one saw it coming.”

Time began to drip again. I had felt this before. The slow travel of each second, elongating into longer moments. I had never known Edgar’s mom. Never would.

I expected him to cry, but he just stared off into space.

“I knew I had to come see you, Clara. My brother’s picking me up later today. I’m going back to Ohio to stay for a while,” Edgar said.

I bit my lip and gave him an awkward hug. I kept my body mass as far as I could from him. I had lain on top of Edgar and ridden his hips. Now, the touch of his body gave me a sickly chill down my arms and legs that I did not like.

You’re supposed to say you’re sorry, girl.

His mother is dead. If your hallucinations are true, she’s moving down that spiraling valley right now, descending while the smell of rot rises.

Soon
,
she’ll rot.

She’ll be sent down into the black chasm, and her innards will float on the water of the nine rivers.

Tell him you’re sorry.

Why? Sorry for what? Never knew the woman.

“I don’t know what else to say,” I said.

I felt the urge to press our bodies together, to kiss with our tongues, to strip off our clothes and forget how we didn’t know what to say.
 

Instead
,
I took a step back with my left foot. I didn’t like feeling horny—it was wrong. I took another step back. to get myself out of that line of thinking. I pulled up my bags by their nylon straps.

“It’s fine. You don’t need to say anything,” Edgar said. “See ya later, okay?”

He walked out of the hallway before I had a chance to do so. He darted out through the heavy doors, like a ferret squeezing through the gap between two tree trunks.

I was more confused than ever. When I got in the car, my mom kissed me on the cheek. Her eyes looked too brown, and suddenly, the dusting of flurries on the ground sparkled too brightly. The colors were making my head hurt.

My mother drove down Ashland Avenue until we couldn’t anymore. The snow drifts made our drive slow, dangerous. She chose another route. And the trip became longer.

It gave my mother time to ask me lots of questions about the night before.

“The concert was pretty good,” I said. “I think José María had a good time.”

“He seemed content today. And you?”

“Glad I went,” I said. I played with the radio until I had flipped through twenty or more stations. When I settled on the Top 40 station, she pressed the power button and the sound died.

“You know that deflecting only works with your father. So
,
let’s cut right to it. Talk to me Clara; I am here to help. What happened?”

She knows. How does she always know?

This moment had some of the weirdness of the first time my mother talked to me about having my period. That morning she had broken into conversation just like this—with the violence of cracking an egg.

How do I talk to my mother about a world of owls of smoke and a crater the size of a planet?
 

Because she knows, you idiot.

“
Last night on our way out of the Aragon, José María and I fell—that’s the only way I can describe it, I think—we fell into Mictlán. Just like you said we would.”

Her eyes peeled open and she bit her lip. I explained how we ran toward the doors of the Aragon, and how the creature Xolotl found us.

“That’s all wrong,” she said.
 

“But I went into Mictlán, you said I had to—”

“You were supposed to do it alone.”

“But José María fell through the reflection in a piece of glass; how wouldn’t we go together?”

My mother’s tears welled up in the corners of her eyes, and the glare of the white snow lit her face up.

“It should have only been you,” she said. “How did you learn to go through the glass?”

I was dumbfounded.

“I didn’t learn
anything.
It just happened.
”

“There’s ritual, Clara, and you bypassed it. I’ve never heard of someone entering that world in the way you did. It doesn’t even seem possible. Your Abuela Blanca would have mentioned it, if it was an option. In fact, it was your father that wanted to show you the method he was taught by Abuela Blanca.”

“When we landed, there was just darkness,” I said. “And the Xolotl found us. He hunted us, Mom. He treated us like trespassers—”

Except he called you “wanderer.” Why?

My mother took the ramp onto the Stevenson Expressway.

“Your father’s family accessed the realms of the gods and goddesses through very simple means,” she said. “Through dream divination and magic ritual. Two ways. Not through running into a glass door. You entered illegally.”

“All we did was run toward the glass,” I said.

That’s when my mother’s tears broke.
 

“That goddamn Montes family. If I had never met your father, I would still be safely in the Catholic Church.”

“But Mom, we survived—“

“You’ll see when we get to Minerva’s house today that your father’s sisters suspect something. He and I are trying to resolve this problem before the news travels up their channels all the way to you know who.”

I had no idea who she was talking about.

“But why; can’t my aunts help?” I said.

“Get real.”

“But why not?”

“Because they think you’ve got the stink of death on you. You carry death around you like a necklace. And they will think that your corruption is my fault, for your father not marrying the right woman. They like me a lot, but not
that
much.”