The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (6 page)

"In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost. Once your authority, now your parasitic host. Motherfuckers grab their scepter and pull the trigger." –Arkangel, "Lyra Destroys a Shrunken God",
The Violet Album
, 2008, Reckless Records.

"She caught the shawl as she spoke, and looked about for the owner. In another moment, the White Queen came running wildly through the wood, with both arms stretched out wide, as if she were flying, and Alice very civilly went to meet her with the shawl." –Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking Glass,
1871.

I ran my card through the reader, and I walked up to the platform to wait for my train. The wind whipped my face, and my hair lashed my skin. It felt good.

This is my strange new skin, and it takes some getting used to.

The Loyola stop on the red line was the place that served as my entry point into other parts of the city. It wasn't the prettiest of stations, but the sun came down in fat yellow beams in the late afternoon.

I was free of the hospital, able to breathe the city air. I wore my lucky brown boots and a plaid skirt that matched my vintage blouse. My makeup was a simple gash of black across my eyelash line and a layer of mascara. I could walk now, though many spots across my back and my legs were still tender to the touch.

I sat near the sliding doors. In my mouth, the taste of Edgar's mouthwash.

The Millennium Riot was weeks behind me now, and since then, I had crept up to Edgar's dorm room in the early mornings, when it was still dark out. His roommate slept right through my knocks at his door. Edgar would open the door, his face a moon in the dark of his room, his boxers hanging low on his hips and the thatch of hair on his chest wild like reeds.

Once I was inside his bunk, the sex was short, sweet, pungent. The pain in my back faded away when I came, and I kept my panting short and shallow so we wouldn't wake up his roommate.

I had been visiting his dorm room in this manner for weeks.

In those moments before the sun came up, we didn't talk about what happened at the Millennium Riot. We didn't talk about the media frenzy around us, and we didn't talk about the heightened security around the campus. Edgar was no longer part of our chapter of the OLF, and I didn't press him for details why.

Today had been different, though. When we finished, and he lay in my armpit, sweating, I decided to ask him to talk about what happened. I needed us to talk.

I asked him what he remembered from the Millennium Riot, but when I did, he just stared at me.

"How dare you ask me?" he said. His body stiffened with anger.

He’s trying to simply forget.

It was fine by me. I didn't ask any further. Once was enough today. I left.

I went to my classes later in the morning, then to my job at the library for a couple of hours. At dinnertime, in the dining hall, I ran into Edgar again. He was smiling again.

He looks happy. What a change.

"Maybe we could go to a movie? I can introduce you to my friends in crew," he said. "We can all hang out."

I had no idea where he got this idea that we could start “hanging out”. We no longer socialized anywhere--not in the dorms, not in class. This was new.

"I'd rather not," I said.

"But why? We get together virtually every day. We're always doing
that
together."

Not as together as you think.

“Oh, that,” I said.

"I'm fine with the way things are right now," I said.

"You mean where you just use me for sex and then you leave me?"

"I don't know how to answer to that."
 

"I know things haven't been easy since what happened--but we can still be close, Clara."

"It's just sex," I said.

"Just sex," Edgar said, as he finished a glass of soda. He went up to the self-serve machine for a refill. When he was done, he walked past my table – his smile was gone --
 
and went to sit on the other side of the dining hall, his back turned away from me.
 

Maybe when he walked away, he called me a whore under his breath, but I knew that in the past two weeks, I had lost interest in what I had imagined to be my infatuation with him. Before the Millennium riot, I had trailed Edgar like a shadow through the lecture halls, the student union and dorm hallways, but now, I could only think about Mictlán and whatever I could learn about it.

I needed to keep some distance from Edgar myself, now that I had pieced together some of the events of the riot.

I had learned that when we got separated as we held hands, Edgar too ran off to find an exit from the rounds that were being fired in the Pritzker Pavilion, and he successfully ran onto the street before the tear gas arrived. Police officers arrested him on the spot, but he was released later that night. He had survived unscathed by the violence. He never visited me in the hospital, and when I returned to campus, I expected to find messages from him.

There were none.
 

I learned he had quit the Occupy Liberation Front altogether. He removed my name, as well as that of many others in OLF, from his Facebook account. I asked him in the dorm one day how we had lost hand contact and become separated during the riot, but all he said was "You were the one that let go of my hand, Clara."

Those words hurt me, but the further I pressed him to talk, the further away he moved.

Had I been dumped? Or had nothing been there between us in the first place? And why did Edgar think that my morning visits meant so much?

Maybe I really was a whore. I considered this idea for a second, then I laughed to myself. Of course I was not. But I would probably never find out what Edgar really felt for me.

During my return to campus, I had dealt with police interviews and my classwork, as well as short meetings at our OLF chapter. Our attendance was not the same anymore. Besides Edgar, we lost forty other members. I knew fear kept many of us away, but even after what had happened, I wasn't going to give up. In fact, I knew that the Millennium Riot only confirmed for me my path. I had to continue with OLF and the movement.

I ignored my coursework, putting off my reading and skipping discussion sections. I spent my time instead in a corner of the library, deep in a sea of information. In the mornings, I read every news post about the OLF and the Millennium riot investigation.

I read every blog and every tweet, and watched all the videos I could about the riot and its aftermath. I stayed up till four in the morning, reading, absorbing, and reading some more.

The latest death count was 309, and the debate over who shot first was not over. Those protesters who had brought firearms were either dead or in custody, and a federal investigation was underway.

At night, I slept in pain, my back aching and my skin breaking out in a sweat. When I slept, it was only for a couple of hours. I avoided taking too many painkillers. I had always disliked pills, but as a result, I stared out of my room into the orange-black glow of the city lights and cuddled my insomnia. My roommate Morgan slept soundly, as usual. Fog rolled over the bedroom window each night, and the darkness pressed behind it. Winter was approaching.

But I had still wanted and needed sex. The mornings with Edgar helped me start my day; they helped me feel like I was free, like there were no shadows pressing down on me through the sky and no blades of sharp pain running down my spine and inside my skull.

The train stations whizzed past me, and a gush of cold air filled the subway car each time the sliding doors slid open. On the streets below, the police cars saturated traffic. Since the riots, all eyes were on Chicago, and it was now common for anyone to get stopped and searched during all hours of the day.

Thorndale, Bryn Mawr, Berwyn and finally Lawrence. I had arrived at my destination.

I walked down the greasy stairs and turned onto the street. It was much too early for the doors to open, but there, lined up around the corner from the entrance of the Aragon Ballroom, a hundred fans sat with their backs against the wall, checking their phones, complaining about the wind and the cold, anticipating their entrance into the concert hall. The Aragon eclipsed the whole block with its Moorish architecture style and the deep layers of soot and grime that had tarnished it over the years.
 

As I walked up to the line to look for my brother, I was already regretting my clothing choices. These were the most hardcore Rhinoceros fans, and here I was, caught in the cross hairs of the fashionistas who waited in line. I didn't have any tattoos to speak of, and the indigo of my blouse and the red checkered pattern of my skirt were all wrong for this crowd. It was too late to go back home and change. It was what it was. I walked quickly down the line, avoiding the pressure of the eyes that bore down on me.

Three fourths of the way back in line, I spotted my brother José María. I had been waiting three weeks for this moment, where he and I could see each other alone, away from our parents' house, and I away from campus.

José María smoked a cigarette under his hoodie, letting out big gulps of smoke, one leg kicked out directly in front of him, the other one bent so he could rest his cell phone on top of it in case. He looked up at me with wet, red eyes. He was high already.

"Grab a seat, reina," He said. That's what my father called me when I was a little kid.
Queen
. Hadn't heard that in a while.

"How much longer till they let us in?" I asked.

"About another hour and a half. This way, we'll be at the very front."

"That's a lot of work just to see some dinosaurs."

"Hey, it's Rhinoceros. Some things are worth lining up for."

Rhinoceros had been playing the Aragon for decades now, and José María had never missed any of their Chicago stops, at least since our parents had allowed him to attend concerts. And that wasn't very long ago—it was barely a year. He was allowed to go if I went with him, and that meant I got to see a lot of shows.

"How much do I owe you?" I said.

"Just gimme thirty," he said.

I handed him three tens. I had ninety minutes, maybe a little more, if we could chat a little inside the Aragon.

"I thought it would take me an eternity to be able to talk to you without Mom and Dad poking in," I said.

"It's no problem; if you want, I can text Dad to turn right around. He just dropped me off thirty minutes ago. He can come hang with us all night," José María said, giggling, threatening to text on his phone.

Oh god, no. Please don't call Dad over here. I'll die.

"Okay, in all seriousness. Let me show you something. Okay?" I said.

I pulled out my phone and brought up all the saved searches I had found online, but also the academic materials I had gathered at the university library since I had been released from the hospital. I found a lot of information, but I organized it as best I could in a folder, because I wasn't really sure if any of it was useful for what I needed. I handed my brother the phone, and he scanned for almost twenty minutes until he handed the phone back to me. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I passed.

"So?" I said.

"So what? You know how to Google. Congratulations to you, Stephen Hawking." José María flourished his right hand and took a small bow in my direction. His sleek eyebrows and his hoodie, his thin stubble—they reminded me of a medieval court jester. He would never, ever stop making fun of me, as long as we lived. With a sigh, I turned the phone's screen back in his direction.

"Did Mom and Dad talk to you about their visit to my hospital room?"

"Not really," he said. "Mom stayed up crying every night, and during the whole time you were in the hospital, Dad went up to the attic and reorganized the whole thing. He put every book and tchotchke we have up there into little plastic crates, and he labeled every single one of them. He did this over and over, a real shitload. He did a good job, just like a psycho should, but no, he didn't say anything, either."

"José María, I am still having nightmares about the Millennium Riot. The reporters won't stop calling me, and they show up on campus, looking for those of us who were there. And my face--"

"What about it?"
 

José María had never been prone to coddle me when it came to my looks. He awaited my answer.

"I don't look the same. Probably never will. Feels ugly.”

He nodded.

"What does your face have to do with any of this?" my brother said.

"Well, you're not going to believe me until I show you, so take a look here, at this image I pulled up on the World Digital Library."

"Ah, you went and dug up the Florentine Codex. Nice!"
 

José María sat up straight, letting the wall support him. He pulled his hoodie back and spikes of his hair rose into standing, while the longer locks fell back . He grabbed the phone from me.

"The Florentine codex is cool as shit."

"It talks about Mictlán. That's why I wanted to talk to you while it's just the two of us."

"Awww... I thought you came out to see Rhinoceros with me because you recognize a person with great taste. You bitch!"

"Relax, I'm here for the show, too. But you're the only person who obsesses this much about...well, this stuff."

This stuff. Legends of gods, statues bathed in sacrificial blood, deities whose internal organs fell out of their stomachs like a Hannibal Lecter trophy. These were stories of old rituals, superstitious crap.

Three weeks ago, in my hospital bed, my parents had warned me about a place called Mictlán. Up until then, they had never mentioned the word much, except in nighttime tales. Or in some books in their library in our small living room. But that wasn’t enough information.

I had started my searches in the university library. I learned Mictlán was the realm of the dead in the times of the Aztecs, a place ruled by the two lords, the god and goddess of death, blood, and sacrificial tribute. Mictlán was the place where souls were said to travel when they left this world.