The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (7 page)

In the end I found out almost too much information. It was more I knew what to do with. There was so much of it--archeological evidence, scholarly work, Buzzfeed trash--that by the time I finished my research, I felt like I had not accomplished much at all. And as I stayed up at night in the library reading abstracts, I realized I should have consulted José María in the first place.

"Mictlán is the shiiiiit," he said. "It's supposed to have mountains made of poisonous spikes and rivers swimming with monsters. Hades has nothing on this place. It's about as
secret
as you can get. After all, you have to kick the can if you want to see it." He laughed, and his laughter infected me with giggles, even though I was the sober one. Each time we looked at each other, we snorted again. When we were done, José María put his finger on the screen.

"That guy right there is the king - Mictlantecuhtli. He's got this sick blade coming right out of his skull face. He's got a wife, too, and together they govern the place. So fucking dope!"

The figure of this god, whose name meant the Lord of Mictlán, showed a reclining figure with a human skull instead of a face made of flesh. His headdress rose into the sky with bird feathers, and a bloody obsidian blade jutted from the nostrils in his skull face.

It really meant nothing to me. José María had moved toward all things Aztec, Olmec, Teotihuacán and Maya since he was a kid, but I had been more interested in history, civics classes and math--the things grounded in tangible reality. I preferred the real world.
 

Tiananmen Square, the crimes of Pol Pot, the civil rights riots--those were concepts I could operate on. And all through the years, José María lived in his little bubble of mythology books, vampire novels and comics. But that's what made my little brother my little brother. The purveyor of all that was weird.

The image we were both staring at was a page from the Florentine Codex, created in the sixteenth century, and its creator, friar Bernardino de Sahagún, had chronicled the beliefs and habits of the Aztecs during their early conquest. In this particular image, a half dozen men surrounded a woman in a grassy field, while a warrior in headdress brandished a club. In the background, green mountains filled the horizon. Floating shapes like ghosts made of stone floated in the air.

"So, I can't stop thinking about this image, and here's why. That day at the hospital, Mom and Dad said there's something wrong with me. That I have been contaminated by something that happened when I was thirteen. This passage describes a grassy field drenched in death, and for some reason it reminds me the Millennium Riot. Mom and Dad said that I brought something full of death back with me. A creature."

José María whistled. He stretched his legs and the grin on his face lit up from ear to ear.

"Wow...Dad's dealer must have gotten him the really good shit."

"You know Dad doesn't smoke. I am serious. They really said this. This is why I was texting you so much over the past couple of weeks. I wanted to talk to you, to see if they mentioned any of this before."

"All they've talked about is your reconstructive surgery and uncle Teo's divorce. Oh, and Mari's ugly baby. Well, that and the mayor cracking down on OLF after the riots; there's that, too. But they don't mention you that much, not that way."

"Every time I look at this picture, with that warrior and his club—my heart begins to race so fast, I think I'm going to die. If I stare at it too long, I feel that panic of what happened in Millennium Park. Why, José María?"

"Those who make the trip to the city of Mictlán don't come back," my brother said. "That's just the way it works. Maybe you're worried about death, after what happened. Maybe this isn’t so literal. Maybe our parents just want you to get more in touch with our roots."

Roots feel so far away. My Spanish is barely remedial. I don't even know how to pronounce some of the names of the places and things in this research. Touching roots is a sad understatement.

"That's just it,” I said. “Mom and Dad said I have to go on a trip to Mictlán. To reach adulthood. José María, have you ever heard the phrase 'When you step inside the Palace of Skulls'?"

José María considered my words, and he glanced at me sideways, as if I were the one who was high on weed.
 

"You know, I'm not going to answer that quite yet. Mostly because I think I have heard the phrase, but I can't remember exactly where. But I can help you dig up info on the place. I'll look it up when I get home tonight. Of course, some of the stories conflict, and some details are lost with the people who died in the colonization of the New World. And one more thing--shouldn't you be consulting with some archeologist professor at school? I'm only fifteen, remember?"

"This stuff is so weird that I am embarrassed to bring it up to anyone. All I have done is pull up my own searches. And you are the one that's always reading up on this. You have to help me."

My brother and I had been sitting on the cold pavement for so long, we were going numb. We faced a gray wall that was part of the elevated tracks of the train, and several people had been walking up and down the line, chatting with friends, finding the end of the line or simply killing their boredom with a cigarette. Scalpers orbited the block, too, asking who needed tickets for the show. I was so focused on what my brother was saying that I never noticed the pair of workman's boots stop right next to where we sat.

"After all this time, you fuckers insist on this socialist shit, still?"

The owner of the boots was a short man, packed with muscle, his face taut with tension. He wore a Rhinoceros baseball cap and a flannel shirt.

I knew immediately he was referring to me. I wore an OLF armband on my left shoulder. It was a logo-less design, just white letters on a black background, but unmistakable. The armband usually sparked a lot of conversations around campus, but it didn't occur to me that it would anger someone like this outside the Aragon.

"Hey, we didn't come here to get yelled at," José María said. "We're just hanging out."

"All our taxpayer money gets sunk into doubling up on cops and riot gear, thanks to pieces of shit like the OLF, man. It all starts with the stupid fucks that join in on this shit. Do you really think the OLF is looking out for you?"

I had to say something. I remained seated, though I felt awkward. But I was scared of standing up. What if he started a shoving match, or worse? I remembered the pain I had felt for days inside my bones from being beaten physically. The man in the work boots looked ready to lunge, his thick neck puffed like a cobra.

"Have you looked around this place recently?" I said. "The city is close to being insolvent, and we've got one of the worst murder rates in the country. And our school system's going down the hole and fast. You have faith in the traditional way of doing things, then?"

"This is the same shit I get from all of you fucking hipsters every time I bring this subject up. We wouldn't have this shit if you all you losers just got jobs and we kept illegals from stealing jobs."

José María stood up. I dreaded this moment already.

"You want to watch what you say," he said.

The man in the work boots crossed his arms and laughed in José María's face. He texted on his phone for a second and laughed at us again. "Fucking beaners. I'm sending YOU my damn tax bill next time it arrives."

The man peeled away toward the end of the line, laughing at us as he walked away.

My heart was racing, and the scars inside my cheeks hurt. My back pulsed with electricity.

"I get so angry, and yet I never know the right thing to say," I said.

"Forget it," José María said. "We came here for the show. Look, they are opening the doors. Tell me the rest of what we were talking about inside."

As the line of concertgoers went through the glass doors of the Aragon, I looked over my shoulder to see if I could spot the man in the work boots. He was nowhere to be seen. I felt as if he was somewhere near, watching us. As I handed over my ticket at the door, my hand shook uncontrollably, like the hand of an old person.

"Relax, Clara," José María said off to my left as security searched him. "You look like you've seen a ghost. When we get upstairs, I'll tell you how to get to Mictlán."

Suddenly, the cavernous entrance of the Aragon, with its Spanish motifs, felt like a suffocating tomb. I put my hand on the OLF band on my jacket and considered taking it off, but I knew José María wouldn't let me. I walked through the turnstile. As we joined the hundreds of people in line in the concert hall, I got the distinct sensation that whatever I felt was watching me was not the man in the brown work boots. I was being watched by something or someone feral and dark. I felt an ache come over my joints and face, and it took me several seconds to get my heart rate down through heavy breathing. If I could have bought a beer, I would have.

José María waited for me at the bottom of the double staircase, and we ascended into the dark together.

My brother and I pressed our bodies against cold metal, and
 
hundreds of bodies closed in behind our backs. We had nowhere to go. This space, our little slice of room right by the stage, was going to be ours for a while, and though other conversations surrounded us with noise, I felt like we had the best privacy I could ask for. This was the anonymity of the city, and I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me earlier to hold important meetings in the pit of the Aragon in between acts while surrounded by thousands of people.

José María pulled out his wallet and unfolded an old concert flier. The image at its center showed a gaping maw filled with white teeth. Inside the cavernous mouth, small stalactites shot upward toward the creature's palate. I looked closer and noticed those stalactites were buildings--little skyscrapers. There was a tiny city in that predator's mouth. Above it, in ragged white script, it read "Arkangel: Murderous Tour, 2009" The lower half of the flyer showed stops in North America, Europe and Latin America. José Maria turned it over and drew a single vertical tube. On the tube, he plotted a single black dot, and labeled it "Earth." Above the dot, he plotted thirteen empty circles, evenly spaced. Below, he drew nine more empty circles, pointing downward.

"It works like this," José María said. "These stories go way further back than the Aztecs. The civilizations before, like the Toltecs and the Teotihuacans, were, in my opinion, even wiser and more interesting than the Aztecs. They had notions about what else was out there in the galaxy and how the planets moved. And they had a very detailed religious belief about the universe. In general, it went like this: There are thirteen levels in the overworld and nine levels in the underworld. The numbers sometimes vary, depending on the source, but what you need to know is that there are nine levels in Mictlán, the world of the dead. The end of the journey is the city of Mictlán. Souls travel down through all nine to meet the lords of death. So, when Mom and Dad talked to you, did they get specific about what they meant by 'going there'?"

I shook my head.

"They want me to take a leave of absence from school so they can train me for the trip. There's no way in hell I was going to take time off."

"I see," José María said, resting his chin in the palm of his hand. If he could have used a pipe as a prop, he would have. I had survived all his affectations for years, including this one.

Little Sherlock Holmes.
The thought made me want to giggle, but I stopped myself.

"Surely you don't think they actually mean that it's a literal journey. Right? I mean, Mom and Dad believe a lot of stuff, but surely they can't believe in this underworld business?" I said.

"Why not? They believe in Catholic hell, right? And don't they also believe Jesus went zombie and flew up from a cave, leaving behind his Calvin Kleins, right?"

"Mom does, yeah. I guess Dad does, too. Good point," I said.

"And they still take me to mass each week to remind me not to go there. So, if they can believe in that..."

"José María, if only Mom could hear you, she would flip. And she would flip a table on you."

"Well, the issue is not belief," José María said. "As far as I can tell, Mom and Dad believe in what the Catholic Church says, but also all the stuff they told you and me about over the years. You know, all that
cosmic
shit."

I had stepped through the rites of the Catholic church, just as everyone else in the family did. I was baptized, made my first communion, was confirmed, and so on. But through these years, there were other kinds of trips: voyages to talk to the ocean, cross country drives to visit the California redwoods (but only at night), hikes in snake-covered hills that led up to the cascades in the state of Veracruz. Each time we had made those trips, my father had also performed rites on us. I didn't know what these were when I was a little kid, but my father called them rites. An anointing with sap from the trees, the little packets of amaranth he made us carry for "protection," the emerald beetles he made us hold in our hands in order to connect with the things that lived inside the soil--those little rituals had made José María and me a little different over the years.