The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (16 page)

“So
,
that’s what this is about. You’ve made this about you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Clara.”

We crossed into the suburbs of Palos Hills.

She was really angry now. The tires slid on the ice as she parked.

“Just be sure not to tell Vanessa a single word about what’s going on, ok?”

Vanessa was my father’s oldest sister. My mother only used Vanessa’s real name when she was really angry.

That’s the “you know who” she was talking about.

“You mean La Negra?” I said.

“Yes, La Negra.”

We walked up to the driveway of the wide suburban house of my aunt Minerva.

I took a deep breath. Going into the void of Mictlán had been a perilous journey. But entering a party of Mexican relatives during the peak of intra-family conflict was far, far worse.
 

Clouds rolled above the house in waves. They churned into a black ball as a snowstorm headed our way. I distinctly saw a pair of eyes in those clouds. They examined me, my mother, the rolling streets of the suburb, and they felt as cold and black as those of the Xolotl.

Cumbia music pumped out through the windows. My mother put her arms around my shoulders, and we walked in together.

LA NEGRA

“My husband is white, and I am black. When our son was born, his family never failed to make racist comments about the color of my child’s skin. Forty years later, my mother
-
in
-
law still talks about what it means to have ‘good’ skin and hair. See how much we’ve improved as a species?” –Political Scientist Kyra Driskell, United Nations Commission on Genomics Ethics, 2047.

“Daddy, what does regret mean?” –Video meme, origin approximated to the Orbital Surf Video Channel, 2014.

“The Lord and Lady of Mictlán do not care. They will eat your dog, your grandmother and your newborn child. They will eat you, too. They devour everything.” –Arkangel, “Tunnels that Lead from the City of the Dead to the City of Dust”,
The Golden Architect: Full Sequence,
2010, Reckless Records.

Arms exploded outward with every step we took inside Minerva’s house. Mom and I were the insects, they were the Venus flytraps.

“Clara!”

“Juliana!”

“Clarita!”

“Juliana and Clara!”

Every hug came with kisses on the cheek, the forehead, and just as I finished that hug with a cousin, aunt or uncle, those arms ushered me toward another. We had to move around the dance floor, which had exploded into applause. All adults and most of the grandchildren danced, but when the toddlers decided to join in for the cumbia, all of my relatives went wild. Whooping, hollering, laughing. I soon lost sight of my mother, who ended up at the back of the house, near the kitchen, while I looked for my aunt Minerva and her newborn.

Minerva was the youngest of my father’s six sisters. She and my father had always been inseparable, and now they sat on a sofa, side by side. He took her newborn from her arms and brought him over to me. My father kissed me on the cheek during the exchange, and then he was gone, to go drink beers with the men in the living room. He kept his eyes distant, far away from mine. He didn’t want to let on that anything was different.
 

I took the baby in my arms, and he stirred for a moment, brushing his nose and then falling back into sleep. He was still red and lumpy, but his clean smell and the big eyes on his round head stirred something in me. He was a beautiful baby cousin. Jonas.

“He’s so pretty,” I said.

“He’ll be a lawyer, just like his dad,” Minerva said. She liked to predict, and often.

(There’s only one prediction that’s true. You’re learning that now
,
aren’t you?)

I pushed the thoughts aside, and I squinted under the throbbing colors of the blue baby blanket and the walls of the green living room.

Just days before, this tiny infant had emerged from my aunt’s body. I had never stopped to think much about babies, not until now. After everything I had seen and witnessed, I wanted to find a place where there were only brand new babies and their smells. If I could forget about places like Pritzker or the gate to Mictlán, I would do so now.
 

“Maybe you’ll let me babysit sometime,” I said.

“Only when you are off during the summer. You have school to think about,” Minerva said. “After all, you’re going to go law school, too.”

I let her words hang in the air for a moment. I gritted my teeth. I had never talked to my aunt Minerva about what I intended to do when I finished school.

“Well actually, I was thinking of changing majors—”

“Don’t even think of it. You’ll be just like your uncle Horacio. Where is he? Go get him, would you
,
Clara?”

I didn’t particularly want to go find her husband Horacio, but I sure did want a break from her. I sniffed my hands as I walked away.
Keep that baby smell.
 

“Hey
,
Clara—” Minerva said, one hand in the air to make sure I didn’t stray too far. “You doing okay after, you know—the tragedy—”

“Yes
,
I am. Thanks for asking.”

“The plastic surgeon did an incredible job, and—”

“I’m still not used to it.”

“And your eye? How is your eye?”

I had explained to all of my father’s sisters many times over, but it never seemed to stick.

I don’t want to talk about my blind eye.

“It’s dead,” I said. “But the other one still works.”

Minerva recoiled, and satisfaction allowed me to keep walking away from my aunt. Problem solved for now, but she’d be back later to prod me some more.

“You know, your father knows a lot of things about dead things,” she said. That caught my attention. I glanced over my shoulder, playing with my cell phone to pretend my interest was low. However, my ears were alert for every syllable she spoke.
 

“What things are those, Minerva?”

“He learned the old ways from our mother, Abuela Blanca. You know, the very old ways, from Oaxaca. Surely Abuela showed you some of that when she was alive—”

“No, she never showed me
anything
,” I said. It was true.

In my mind, spirals of lichen and fungus exploded, expelling the fumes of death, stink and rot. I heard the sound of bells, the sound of the Xolotl ringing from the top of the mountain with his black human eyes set into his dog head.
 

“Well, I am surprised,” Minerva said. “Your father knows those old ways best. Can’t forget them.”

“Guess you’re right,” I said.

“You sure he hasn’t taught you the songs your abuela used to sing? Those songs could help you after the tragedy from Millennium—”

She’s getting bolder. She wants to get right down to it.

Jonas kicked in Minerva’s arms, and she brought him closer to her breast. She flipped down the flap in her blouse and fed him. He suckled with his eyes shut, in absolute innocence. Jealousy and revulsion churned inside me. But my curiosity burned.

“What songs?” I said.

“Well, after a tragic death, or in this case, many tragic deaths, you sing special songs to send the souls off to the next place.”

“What place is that?” I said.

“You should ask your father. He’ll tell you. Then come and tell me what he said, okay?”

She suspects already. Mom was right.
 

I had no idea why my father asked me to conceal things from his sisters, and it made no sense to me. This was a family of paradoxes.

I squeezed past relatives through several rooms, looking for José María. I found him in the den, kneeling before an Xbox, surrounded by eight other cousins around the glow of the screen. José María ignored me.
 

Uncle Pirulí nursed his tenth rum and Coke in the La-Z
-
Boy in the corner. He traveled for a living, selling marketing services to insurance companies, but he was more of a fixture in this room than the Xbox or the furniture. When he didn’t travel, he lived in this basement, and though he tolerated nephews and nieces during parties, this was his kingdom, and we all knew it. I still wasn’t sure why my aunt Minerva allowed him to live in the basement this way.
 

“Clara,” croaked Pirulí. “Go get me another cuba libre?”
 

Even at nineteen years of age, I still hadn’t shaken off the obligation to run small errands for all my uncles and aunts in this way. No one needed maids as long as the kids were there to refill ice buckets and deliver bowls of chili peanuts to the adults at the party.

I glanced one more time at my brother. I was invisible to him while he lanced demons through the flat screen.

At the top of the stairs, I ran into Minerva again. I thought of making an excuse for not going to find my father, but instead, I just scooted past her, hoping to avoid more questions. In the hall, I walked past the portrait of my grandparents, which took up the whole surface of an ebony mantel.
 

Just as soon as I thought I was free from her gaze, she said, “Did you go ask your father yet?”

I bumped into a doorway, and I stumbled forward.

Man
,
I want to go back to school right now. Get me out of here.

This monster of a house went on forever. It was easily triple the number of rooms of my parents’ house in the city, and I knew I could go sit for a moment in the TV room upstairs. The magnetism of the Xbox would ensure none of my cousins would be up this far in the house. My head was starting to pound, and gray spots floated in my vision. Headache time.

In the 1980s
,
every single one of my father’s sisters had left Little Village, trading in their bungalow rentals and apartments for homes in the suburbs.
 

Even when they had the chance, my father and mother refused to leave our house on 26
^th
Street and Kedvale.

“It’s a love for cities,” my father had told me once when I asked when they were going to move to a nice neighborhood. At the time
,
I was only about nine, and I coveted the giant bedrooms of my cousin’s homes and the long driveways where they could play without fear of a car or a bullet.

But now that I was at the university, I was glad my parents had stayed put in the city. Every single one of my new friends at school had grown up in suburbs like the one Minerva chose when she bought this house. They were homes filled with space and light, dramatic and filled with Pottery Barn furniture, but I no longer related to those things. Maybe I was like my father. Maybe a city was better. As a result, I still felt at home in Chicago, in its alleys and its anonymity.

Was my father upstairs
,
perhaps? I took the stairs.

Most of the lights were turned off in the upstairs portion of the house.

My footsteps echoed, and beneath them, the bunny-hop beat of the cumbia vibrated through my shoes and socks.

Minerva decorated every room in the house with two types of images: Monet prints or cats. Jungle cats. House cats. Siamese. Garfield. Every room except the TV room. In this room, the walls were bare, and the TV and DVD player’s black surfaces made austere shadows. Portraits of her cats dotted the bookshelves, and I got ready to flick off the light and head back downstairs when an object caught my attention.

At the far end, I spotted the rocking chair.

My grandmother Blanca’s rocking chair.

When she had been alive, she planted me in her lap in this very chair, and I screamed. I screamed again, and I kicked out my legs. I jammed my elbows in her soft belly, and my sobs finally forced her to let me off.

I had been scared of Abuela Blanca back then. Her face looked old and different. And the chair’s creaking noises reminded me of the dark gap in the basement of my parent’s house.

But she was dead now.
 

Now I was alone with the chair. I brushed my fingertips on its arm rests and relished the smooth feel.

BUT SHE’S DOWN THERE.

ABUELA BLANCA WAS THERE, IN THE DARK WORLD.

YOU KNOW WHERE, DON”T YOU?

SHE WAS DEAD AS DIRT.

SOMEWHERE IN THAT WORLD OF SOOT AND STINK.

SHE WAS DOWN THERE.

“These are shitty thoughts,” I said out loud to myself. “Stop it.”

Of course she was dead. But was I to believe she had gone down into that land of black mountains, black dirt and air?
 

Even if my grandmother had scared me, I didn’t want to think of her as a corpse or a trapped soul moving into the vast abyss in the bottom of a world shaped like a spiral.

She had been my father’s mother
,
after all. The woman who taught him everything he knew.

But your father will go down there too, you see, and he’ll rot belly first, split open like a melon, and he’ll sink into the stench of that place. You know this, too.

Had that been one of my thoughts? Could I really think that? Or was there someone else saying those words?

Was it a voice? It was a voice.

Though I heard no sound, that voice that spoke to me felt close and real, as if it were whispering in my ear. Its rhythms were lascivious, and its tones like the sound of night swamp.

The way it filled my head reminded me of the language of music that the Xolotl initiated me into with his blood. It had felt that close to my thoughts.

I took a seat in my grandmother’s rocking chair. My feet pushed me back, and I rocked for a few moments.

For the first time
,
I considered that it was only mental illness—a progression of mental illness—that was making me hear voices. A mental illness that had started when I had the shit kicked out of me at Pritzker.

But it’s not in your head, Clara. I’m right here. Can’t you hear me?

I’m in the room with you.

Don’t you see my teeth?

Can’t you hear the rumble in my gut?

Can’t you feel my blood thumping in my body?