The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (19 page)

“You let that girl keep on terrorizing the US and you’ll see she’ll end up behind bars like a damn
cholo
from 26
^th
Street,” Horacio said.

Horacio’s just knocking one, after the other.

My parents still lived near 26
^th
Street. That neighborhood had split the family in many ways. It was the place we came from, but for some of us
,
we never wanted to go back there.
 

My father brushed off the hands that held him back and stuffed his hands into his jean jacket. The gesture said,
It’s safe not to touch me,
and it worked. The cousins receded and let him walk over to the rows of beers and soda on the table.

My father tossed back a plastic cup full of Patrón and he walked away, stumbling, talking to himself.
 

“Where is your mother?” he shouted at me. I wasn’t scared of his tone. I pointed over behind him. She stood behind him with her arms crossed, and she didn’t have to say a single word. Her look was enough to bring him to a neutral state, even if he was wasted.

Horacio continued to shout in the corner of the room. He had married Minerva at the age of eighteen, and three years later, he had served in Iraq. After an improvised explosive device blew off his fingers, he came back to Chicago. He attended law school, and somewhere during that time, he became bolder in his words. Very bold. I envied that.

Someone turned the cumbia back on the stereo, and suddenly, toddlers were scurrying past my legs again, screaming, smiling.

And that is how the men used to fight in our family. Just thirty minutes after the shouting match, Horacio looped an arm over my father’s shoulders. My father crouched next to the wheelchair, and they shared a can of Old Style, reminiscing about things that made them laugh. This pairing created distance between them and the women, who had seen this type of behavior many times over.
 

I ate some cake, and the pink sprinkles on its surface sparkled like jewels. Colors continued to throb, but I was learning how to live with their intense flashes in my eye.

A hand grabbed my by the elbow. Even in his sixties, my father’s wiry strength coursed through his hands.

“Follow me,” he said. “You won’t believe who’s here.”

He smiled like a child. Now that I had seen the vastness of Mictlán, I began to worry that he would go down there one day, and he would no longer be here. No more smiles, no more trips into the redwoods, no more mushroom trivia.

Stop thinking about that. It’s morbid.

But it’s true. He’ll be gone one day. And he’s not a young man
,
either.

The Lords at the bottom can consume him, too.

I pulled a lock of his long hair back from his brow, which was hot to the touch. It warmed up every time he drank tequila.

We walked to the back porch of the house, which overlooked a gigantic wooden deck for summer parties. Snow covered the deck. The porch was lined with narrow couches. My aunt Veronica stood up when she saw me enter the enclosed porch. She and my father exchanged smiles, sly and fun smiles.

Her arms enclosed me with the same strength of my father’s. She led me back to a spot next to her on the couch.

“I need to see this girl more often, Adán
,
” she said to my father. He was sipping water now that he had established he had drunk too much booze.

La Negra did things her own way. After working as an actuary for decades, she had quit to become a playwright. She took no shit, and though she commanded respect from all her brothers and sisters, she put distance between herself and the siblings. That’s about as much as I knew about her. Her plays popped up sometimes in the city, and she had even broken into a season of the Steppenwolf Theater on Halsted. But she remained a recluse in her Logan Square apartment, accompanied by her husband
,
Octavio
,
and the plants she raised. Octavio did not attend parties, and he wasn’t here tonight.

“Your father told me what happened to you after the Millennium incident,” she said. Her eyes evaluated me with serenity. She made me feel nervous sometimes, but never judged.

“It’s been pretty bad. I have to find my tonal, and maybe then all this weird stuff won’t trail me anymore.” I said.
 

Be vague but useful in your answer,
I thought.
Be precise.

“Well
,
not stuff; it’s more like visions and bad luck,” I said. “And I am missing my tonal.”

“That’s the problem,” La Negra said. “Traveling to find the tonal at thirteen
may
take a child to Mictlán, but dream travel is safe in that way. You are not meant to go there with your physical body.”

“But is it possible to do so?”

“Anything is possible, Clara,” She said. “But it doesn’t mean it should be done.”

“What would happen if someone did so? What if they went into Mictlán on purpose?”

My father moved in closer to our corner. His T-shirt glowed with a deep crimson color, like blood. I wanted to stop the colors for a moment, but I bored through it.

“You shouldn’t even speak of that,” La Negra said.

“Your aunt is right,” he said. “My first impulse was to send you there, but Veronica reminded me that our mother taught us differently.”

“It’s okay; I knew her longer and better than the rest of us,” La Negra said.

“What do I do, then?” I said.

“You wait for us to figure this out. Together. As a family.”

After everything that had happened to my body, my mind and to actual people inside and outside of this world, I had had enough of the secrets of this family, and the elephant in the room.

“Is this a family of witches, then? Why won’t anyone tell me anything?” I said. I kept my voice controlled
,
just like my aunt. I would be more authoritative and earn more respect if I built my argument with logic and coolness.

“No, there are no such things are witches here,” La Negra said. “But we have a long history of knowledge of the cosmos. And this element of nature that concerns what happens when living things move on—”

“You mean death, Negra,” I said. “Let’s call a spade a spade.”

She liked my response. She nodded and sipped her black tea.

“Yes, I like what you’re doing there, Clara. Getting down to the essence of things. Yes, death is indeed an aspect of nature. And the rites we learned from your Abuela Blanca
describe
aspects of death and the beings that live in that realm.”

“Then why keep it secret? Why all the hushed words? Shouldn’t we tell other people?”

“You haven’t looked around outside long enough, have you, Clara? The world is collapsing. The police shot innocent people in Pritzker Pavilion. The president is deporting Mexicans again with a new Immigration Act. The creationists want to take away evolution from the classroom—”

“But creationists believe the Bible is literal and that a God with a white beard made our planet with magic. I mean, doesn’t that make us all hypocrites in this house with our stories about a land of the dead? It’s anti-science.”

“But do the creationists have direct experience with the earth, the mountains, and the energies that move them? Do they really understand that we cannot fight death and the decay of things? Last time I checked
,
they still buy beauty creams and get hormone replacement therapy. They still think time stands still. If they worked directly with the cosmos, they would understand more about the things that are out there. The
creatures
that are out there.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

“That’s the reason we stay hidden and we keep the word Mictlán away from prying ears. Because if the outside world understood what’s on the other side of the gate, it would flip everything upside down.”

“How do you know that? How do you know it wouldn’t make things better?” I said.

My father grabbed me by the shoulders, and I was glad.
 

“This is why heretics were burned at the stake, Clara,” he said. “We live in parallel with other beliefs about politics and ethics and religion, and that’s okay.

“That’s not okay with me, I don’t think,” I said.
 

I felt the thin knife poke me in the ribs inside my sweater pocket, and I moved my eyes away from La Negra. Could she know I had stolen it with my mother just minutes ago?

“A slow and methodical approach is best,” she said. “If you can hold out and go back to school as if nothing has happened, then we can figure out things for you.”

“But don’t I get a say in this?”

“You’re not twenty
-
six yet, and frankly, you’ve shunned all this knowledge for years,” La Negra said. The tears in my father’s eyes confirmed his agreement with his sister about this statement. “It’s probably too late to teach you all you need to know.”

But they didn’t know what my mother knew, what José Maria knew.

They might never understand what
I
knew.

La Negra and my father didn’t know how close I had come to the Xolotl and how he had shown me the chasm of darkness that could eat planets like candy.

“Dad, can I be excused?” I said.

“Sure thing,” he said.

“I’m glad I got to see you, Clara,” La Negra said.

“Me
,
too.”

“Oh
,
and by the way,” said La Negra, “The Parade of Lights—your father’s convinced me to take a break from writing. Want to go together? He and I can tell you by then what we intend for you to do to shake off the stink of death from you.”

“Okay,” I said.

I’ll see you there, for sure. So will the OLF.

I walked around the party like a ghost. None of my cousins asked me about school, my surgery
,
and definitely not about Millennium. I felt the heat of their young bodies emanate into the room, fogging the windows and reminding me they were full of life.

Now that you heard my name, you can give me each of their names, too.
 

If you give me their names, I’ll know how to welcome them into this kingdom of death. And we can call each and every one tribute. You give me tribute and I give you something back.

That’s also called a trade, a swap.

A trueque.

Trueque is what your ancestors called it.

Give them to me, Wanderer.

The alien voice screeched in my head, and I put my hands on a windowsill to keep myself from tipping over. I felt dizzy.

I needed to talk to the voice, but I had nowhere to do it.

I pulled up my cell phone to my face and pretended I got a call. This way
,
I could talk to the voice out loud without looking batshit crazy.

“What is trueque?”

A trade. A swap. I eat your eyes out, you eat mine. Or my lungs. Your pick, Wanderer.

“
Shut up,” I said.

Its voice swelled like a symphony in climax.

I like them young. I like their blood, and what do you need all these cousins for? I will take them when they get the deadly flu. Or maybe I’ll take that one when she’s hit by a car. I’ll take the other one when she loses the fight with leukemia.

I walked with the phone up to my ear, pretending to laugh at the caller’s joke.

Act as natural as you can.

I was almost at my destination. I marveled at the sheer size of this house.

“Tell me more, okay?” I said.

You think you’ll come and find me, but the truth is, I’m going to find you, the way I find everyone. I find them when they are not looking for me. I find them, and I caress their hair, and I cut the skin, just a little at first, and—

I jammed the phone in my pocket and shook off the voice from my thoughts.

I found the room I was looking for.

There he was.

José María hadn’t changed positions since I had last been here. He was shooting arrows in the last level of an epic, and the cousins around him hovered, waiting for the outcome. His fingers danced on the black controller. Of course, Gregorio, who trailed José María like a puppy, would be my target.

“Time to switch,” I said. “Everyone gets a turn.”

I hit the pause button on José María’s controller, and he snapped out of his trance. A roar of boos from the five
-
year
-
olds on the sofa crashed in on us. Without hesitation, I handed the controller to Gregorio.
 

“You finish the game. Don’t mess it up,” I said.

Gregorio licked his lips and got to it.

Giving orders like this was easy if you were one of the older grandchildren.

“Let me guess,” José María said, “things just got cray cray?”

“Oh they’re cray, all right. Crazier than Dad trying to punch Horacio
.
”

“What?”

“You missed it.”

“For real? Who won?”

“That’s all you care about,” I said as we walked back out of the crowded room and its stink of Cheetos, apple juice and beer.

“Will you help me go back inside?” I asked José María. “No one can know.”

“Sure, I’m up for some more world of tar-craft.”

“No, just me this time. You stay outside, keep guard while I go into Mictlán.”

“Oh
,
that sounds way too simple. Come on, spill it. What’s the
whole
plan?”

“Mom told me what we have to do. What
I
have to do.”

I showed my brother the green handle of the knife in my pocket.

“I think it’s time that you had your first sleepover to visit your big sister on campus,” I said.

José María smiled like a Cheshire Cat.

“I’ll bring the weed.”