The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (25 page)

José María’s voice was strong enough: More details came into relief. The spiral of Mictlán’s topography was thousands of miles wide, but I could suddenly
feel
its ridges, its walls and the things that lived there. José María’s voice provided the map I needed.

I could now feel the cities that dotted the roads on the way down, and the forests, and the desert-like plains. This place was populated by trillions of things that I couldn’t name, but I felt their heartbeats and smelled their breath.
 

Now that I could feel that far into the canyon, I could now also understand our position in its nine levels.
 

“Oh, my god,” I said. “We’re in the upper parts of this place. This road goes so deep into the ground, so far down.”

“And not a single star in this world. Freeeeeeeeeeaky!” sang my brother.

A wind kicked up from inside the canyon, and it reached us in our upper level. It bit at my shoulders, and it felt completely different than any wind from Chicago. It was filled with the scent of tree sap and applewood smoke. I heard a buzz. Objects were rising from the canyon, moving up toward us. They were probably thousands of miles away, yet I heard their approach. They would be here soon. My heart pounded, and I broke into a jog again.

“The Xolotl’s coming back,” I said. “Run!”

“I hear them, too,” José María said.

Our boots held fast on the glasslike surface, and as we ran, we picked up more speed, just like before. The angle of our descent became steeper, and I struggled to not tumble forward as we traveled downward. The wall on our right whizzed by. We covered lots of distance in very little time.

And off to our left, I saw the Xolotl glide past us, seated on the hummingbird and leading a flock of the smoking birds, streaming smoke by the thousands, diving deep into the canyon. And then they were gone again.

The road curved around the wall, and I could no longer see around the bend. We would reach the bend within a few seconds.

“I see that you listened to your brother,” the voice at the bottom of the road said. The syrupy voice shimmered with a series of sharp sounds, like the vacuuming sound of opening a tennis ball canister.
 

“I am waiting for you,” the voice purred.

José María ran faster as the voice beckoned us further. He dropped his backpack.

“Hey!” I screamed. I stopped to pick it up. “You idiot!” I said. I slung the pack across my shoulder by its strap. By the time I got back up to a jog, José María was already heading around the corner and into the depths. My own cones were losing my brother’s location. If he ran farther, I would lose him.

No, I can’t lose him.

But José María ran fast, because he knew where the voice was coming from. It was a voice he needed to feel. He was gone. I heard him give out a yelp, and then he went silent.

I needed to go further to see where my brother had disappeared, and the wall curved. In my rudimentary sonar-like vision, I could see how it turned, like a highway.

I didn’t dare run around that corner, but I had no choice.

My feet pivoted on the smooth ground as I ran, and then I turned through the bend.
 

I pulled back before it was too late. The road dropped off in front of us, and below, I looked down on the tallest drop I had ever seen. And José María was completely gone.

I slid forward on the smooth road, and I wondered, if there were light, would this road have a color? In this place, only black ruled, and not even gray survived down here.

And then the voice at the end of the road hissed at me.

“You want to see your brother, yes?” it said.

I was hundreds of feet away from the drop, but since the floor moved, I would fall off the edge within seconds.

And then it hit me.

This is not a conveyor belt.

It’s not a road.

It’s not even a floor.

And it’s not made of glass.

“José María!” I shouted. “Get back! We have to go back! Where are you?”

He was nowhere to be seen, but it was too late for me. The ground slid forward, moving me to the precipice, and off in the distance, maybe ten miles away, I felt a single body move in the distance. It flowed gracefully in an undulating line, and it rose into the sky. It reached a point high up in the air, many miles above. And then it came toward me like a question mark.

This was the thing I hated the most. The thing I couldn’t tolerate in zoos, or the desert, or the woods.

The undulating shape beneath us—the very living thing that made this road possible—was a snake.

And all that time we had jogged on the smooth road, we had been traveling along her back. And if that back was big enough to make a flat surface, that meant that she had to be the size of—

Her head zoomed toward me.

She had four pairs of eyes, two on each side of her head. They emanated a hard sound from deep within their orbs, but even from this distance, I had a sense that her nostrils were more skilled at detecting my moves. Those nostrils were large enough for a grown man to walk through. The snake pulled its jaws apart, revealing a perfect, interlocking-triangle mouth made only for killing.

So many teeth.

She was unlike any snake I had ever seen on Earth. Inside her mouth, I counted ten rows of teeth, filling her gums and even her palate.
 

We had been traveling for hours on the back of this giant snake, and now this was the end. And who was “we,” anyway? I was now alone.

José María was gone, probably fallen into the pit beneath the precipice. The snake cocked her head to the side. Her eyes grew wide, and I cringed from the presence—the consciousness—I felt in them. Just one of the fangs in that mouth was easily three or four times my height.

“Welcome to the Coil, Wanderer,” she said.
 

MY MOTHER’S SKIRT OF SNAKES

“No, you wouldn’t actually want to glimpse one of these gods. The act would be too terrifying.” – Director Robert Hanig, on his film tetralogy
Kieślowski’s Dream in Four Colors.
New Yorker Video Channel, 2036.
 

“How do we rescue that which we do not know we lost?” – Arkangel, “Heartbreak of the Colossus That Moves Through the Water”,
Millennium Recedes,
2009, Reckless Records.

“Your problem isn’t that you’ve been beaten down by a racist, sexist government, motherfucker. Your problem is one of scale. You’re not
imagining
big enough. If you can imagine yourself out of this ghetto, your shit’s free. Now get.” –
Englewood and Dickens.
HBO series, 2015.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the snake. “I’m open and ready.”

“For what?” I asked.

“To have you share your knowledge with me,” the snake said. Her neck swelled, and her skin took on a braided appearance, as if her muscles were flexed so hard, they serrated. The head weaved around me, and her eyes locked in on mine.

“I don’t have much to share,” I lied. My heart raced in my chest, and my legs felt rubbery.

“Every being has much to share,” she said. “I don’t understand your tone. Surely you will share your knowledge with me?”

“First tell me what the Coil is,” I said.

“Why it’s this canyon of poetry, flowers and blood. The Coil is what we citizens call Mictlán.”

“I need you to take me to my brother,” I said in my hardest, coldest tone.

“You speak to me in a strange manner,” the snake said. “A guarded manner. Because you
fear
me. Odd.”

The absolute darkness of this world reminded me that my parents’ Catholicism said nothing about what Mictlán could really be. Was this hell? I couldn’t be sure. Was this snake like the snake of the Garden of Eden? I began to think I should believe in something good, something filled with light. Maybe it was better to believe in a God up in the clouds, a God who could take people away from places as dark as this one. I still had the little laminated Virgin of Guadalupe in my pocket.

Cold air whipped around me, and I remembered how adept my father had always been at meeting strangers when we traveled. He did this with charm and wit, and I had an idea.

I opened up my backpack. I removed my cell phone, my notebook and the knife. I also took out the remainder of my clothes. I took my time, despite the impatient hiss of the animal. Her breath was imbued with the smell of the ocean, and it rolled over me in waves. Surprisingly, it was a pleasant smell, long-lasting and clean. My heart screamed in my chest.

Her eight eyes blinked, and I felt the air shift as their membranes flickered over her eyeballs.

I wanted to cry in frustration at not knowing where José María had gone, but I had never felt a presence so powerful inspect me in the way the snake did.

“These are my things,” I said, and I held each object up. “My phone. My notebook. The shawl my mother gave me. My sweater.”

The snake emitted pulsing bursts of music, and as she did so, her eyes widened. She was understanding these objects, even if she wasn’t seeing them with her eyes. As the bits of her music filled the air, her skin emanated a sound sparkle that allowed my mental representation of her skin understand that it was as smooth as a polished stone.

“These tools you show me—they are hard objects, vibrating objects,” she said. “Are you a warrior?” she said.

“I am confused by your question,” I said. “I am just a person. You don’t have tools down here?”

“This place —what you call Mictlán—has no objects. All we have down here are
beings
. The mountain, the trees, the smoke owls. Every being here has a spirit, or what you might call an essence. But we have no
objects
to speak of.”

I felt the snake’s body shift beneath my feet, and the conveyor-belt motion almost toppled me off my feet. She was bringing me closer to her, and I had no choice. I wouldn’t be able to move off the back of her body in time.

“I would like to travel with you, friend,” the snake said.
 

Friend?

What the hell. Maybe you can work with this. Just play along, Clara, play along.
 

Her tone confused me. Her face was the most terrifying reptilian horror I had ever seen, but the velvety tones of her words made me feel as if she were asking me for something private and intimate.
 

That snake head and its movements reminded me of the currents in the depths of the ocean. Moving slowly, in the dark. Gargantuan.
 

“Sure, take me with you. I want to learn more about this place—the Coil,” I said.

This seemed to make the snake very happy. Her head dove down into the canyon, and soon, the length of her body closest to her head was gone. The thick body beneath shifted, and we were gliding over the cliff. We were about to slide straight down the wall.

I had nothing to grip, and if I went over the precipice, I would slide off the smooth scales and tumble down to my death. But as soon as I came close to the edge, the snake’s body throbbed and its flesh liquefied in front of me.

Two bony ridges, covered in tiny scales, rose up from her back. I grabbed onto them, and they grew longer, sliding under my armpits and wrapping around my legs like limbs.

We slid over the wall, and I screamed as we dove. The ridges held me in place like a harness.

How to describe the terrible vision of the depths of the canyon? I felt my stomach tighten and quiver, and adrenaline shot through my body. We slid past several thousand miles of canyon wall. I saw more hummingbirds made of smoke in a structure that looked like a beehive, and farther down, we passed a lake swimming with scorpions. We zigzagged through a vast plain inhabited by mushrooms the size of skyscrapers, and we even came upon a grotto of creatures that resembled rabbits on stilts.

She lowered me to a clearing, and I drank water from the grotto. My thirst was incredible, and I felt the coolness ease my throat. I felt hungry, and I ate from a plant shaped like starfish. Its flesh was sweet and salty, like a pineapple dusted with lime and salt.

“We rest here until you’re satiated. Then we continue,” she said.

The snake did not speak while I rested in the grotto. Her head floated about fifty feet above me, still as stone. She blinked and came toward me.

She returned me to her back, and the ridges and protuberances held me in place. We traveled along the walls of the canyon again, and flowers sprouted from its wall by the billions. Black flowers, whose petals looked as soft as baby skin.

The snake’s flesh felt good under my hand, and I stroked her scales. Was I the first human ever to do this? I felt electricity in my arms and a tingle in my breastbone.

I still had too many questions, and though José María’s safety was still on my mind, I didn’t want to anger this being.

She spoke again, and the proximity of her voice felt good. She said, “Tell me about your mother, eh…—”

“Clara,” I said.

“Clara,” she repeated. The way she said my name sounded like a flock of seagulls combined with a lullaby. The word left her jaw and spun through the air in waves of sound.