The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (43 page)

I took in big gasps of air, and the scents of car exhaust filled my lungs. The Chicago skyline filled my vision, and I slid forward on the BP Bridge, just a couple of feet from where I had entered through its reflection. My skin bled, and burns dotted my cheeks and forehead. I scrambled onto my feet, and every bone in my body hurt. I looked up toward the sky and felt its hollow air brush my lips. I took in big gulps of air until my breathing slowed down to its normal rhythm.

“Hey, bitch, I’m still here,” said a voice behind me.

He was dressed just like the men that struck my face until it cracked on the day of the Millennium Riot, but he wore no helmet. He wore the face of my uncle Jorge, and the eyes of a feral cat, and his mouth lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth. Jutting from the side of his neck, he wore the face of the woman who died next to me at Pritzker Pavilion. It was a tiny head, bulging and sick, like a tumor. The Ocullín opened his moth and the black needles extended toward me. He was smiling from ear to ear in lust and hunger.

“No,” I yelled, and I lopped off his head with a single swipe of my hand, which had a force it never had before
.

The headless body turned into thick liquid, and then smoke. The head stared up at me and winked.

“We’re not done with each other, Wanderer.”

I stomped on the head until it was pulp and my boots were covered in its pus, blood, and feces.

I ran in my T-shirt through the remainder of the ice storm. I didn’t care if I got frostbite; I was going home.

I dropped out of school that fall due to “illness” and I moved back in with my parents for a couple of months. I lay in bed. Fevers and sores raked my body, and I spoke to no one.

During those weeks in my parents’ house, I discovered something: my parents didn’t know how deeply I had gone into Mictlán. It occurred to me then that the Coil was part metaphor in their hearts and minds.

I also discovered that my father was more fragile than I had ever imagined. To touch José María’s room caused him physical discomfort, and even through his shouting matches with my mother, I knew that his obsession with keeping my brother’s room impeccably clean would never end.

At night, I heard my father walk through the attic. The sounds I heard sounded like coughs or sobs. I am not sure which.

I assured my mother that things would go back to normal, but she had many questions.

“Would you want to take a trip with your aunts to Mexico?”

“What for?”

“To keep learning the old ways. To learn from a teacher.”

My heart said yes
.
My mind said no.

“I’d be a danger to them, Mom. Trust me.”

“You need people,” she said.

And she was right. I probably did.
 

It was impossible to explain to her how I could physically look close to thirty while remaining twenty years old on the surface. But I tried.

“I see real age in my face,” I said.

She ran her fingers over my brow to smooth out the wrinkles in my skin.

“I would never tell anyone if you got a little more surgery to fix this,” she said.

“Are you saying get a facelift?”

We both laughed, though my casual tone left my mother looking hurt and sullen.

“Mom, what you need is a joint so you can relax.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Get the good stuff. You’ll feel oh so sweet!”

“You don’t sound like yourself.”

She was right. I noticed that over the weeks of my stay in their house, the sick sense of humor — something irreverent and wild — had found its way into my speech. In José María’s absence, I was learning how to find levity in things — including my relationship with my mother. Just like he did.

When I handed my mother a rolled joint as a gift at Christmastime, she took my temperature again, shaking her head. I hope she smoked it when she had some time alone.

I went back to the university during the last semester of that year, and on my way up to the campus in the middle of January, my father hummed a song to himself as we cruised along Lakeshore Drive.

“Minerva’s having another baby,” he said.

“Good, I love babies.”

“Maybe she’ll make you the godmother.”

“I’d pencil that in my calendar, sure.” I laughed.

“Promise me you’ll never leave Chicago, Clara,” he said.

“Promise.”

This was a promise I never kept.

Many of the things I did during and after university are not a big secret, and anyone who takes the time to look at the public record, or chooses to read books, can learn of what became of my life.

But of course, they won’t ever have the full story. I am not sure myself that I even have the full story.

I traveled far to continue to investigate the mystery of the gates that connect between our world and that of the Coil. To do this, I chose to go live in Mexico, the place that none of my aunts wanted me to visit permanently.
You can learn from your relatives there; just don’t actually stay and live there, OK?,
they said.

But I lived in Mexico City for two decades, and in between, I traveled to other places that showed me glimpses of the
other
cities, those thirteen places that José María and I knew existed, currently exist, and
will
exist. These glimpses were seen sideways through a ramen stall in Shibuya, or inside a shaman’s hut in the Himalayas. That’s when I saw shadows, reflections, and blurs of places. Sometimes, I could glimpse these cities in a single gold reflection of the sun on the Black Sea, and in an instant, it would vanish.

During the twenty years I lived in Mexico City, I searched for a young man named Alan. His uncle Guillermo had disappeared years ago, and like me, he was in search of knowledge and what became of his relative. I will one day write a book about how I finally found this young man, and how he found me. We had his uncle in common, a man who built a living tunnel of insects that he shouldn’t have.

I will also write one day about how I discovered symmetrical slits on my breastbone, and how they make music when I dream at night and the sun goes down. These slits don’t bleed, and they give me no pain.

I have lived long.

Time has become my ally, but as a result, it has been painful to outlive many of my relatives. This is pain no one should ever feel.

This is the first time I have ever written about what I did atop the Tribune Tower, so in a sense, it’s a bit of a confession. The only crime was trespassing, I suppose, but it doesn’t matter. The video footage I shot lives on. Of course, those who could complain, and those who might seek retribution against me for what I did by broadcasting those images, are dead at the time of this writing. All of them are dead.

DOTS AND LOOPS

“Food nourished my body; travel fed my soul.” – Tumblr meme, origin circa 2019.

“Heartache smells of moss, licorice, and flowers.” –
Princess Kami: A Horror Tale for Children,
Studio Gibri Films, 2017.

“We are bold and bright. We are a celebration.” – Karyn Andersson, lead singer of Arkangel, upon the announcement of the band’s breakup. Twitter, 2020.

In the spring of 2017, almost four years after the Millennium Riot, Arkangel announced a single stop in the Midwest for their world tour. I read about the update on my computer, and though I was in the middle of a lecture, I stood up and walked out into the street. Using my smartphone, I ordered myself a ticket for their concert.

I kept the ticket in my phone for weeks, and I stared at it every day. I dreamt about that ticket often, and though I was tempted, I didn’t sell it.

On June 19, 2017, I rode my bike down to Millennium Park, and I entered Pritzker Pavilion from its western side. The attendant scanned my phone, and I moved up to the front, directly in front of the stage. The metal wings of the pavilion shone bright, and the hot air on my bare shoulders meant summer was actually arriving. I was the only person there.

Above me, tiny dragonflies made of aluminum, glass, and silicone swept through the air, fighting the Chicago air currents and glinting in the sun.

An attendant in a ponytail inspected the aisles, glancing at me a few times until I noticed her.

“You must be a big fan to arrive this early,” she said.

“It’s Arkangel or nothing,” I said.

“I used to listen to them, until I started having strange dreams. Now I listen to nicer music,” she said.

Over the next three hours, thousands of people filled the seats and the lawn beyond the turtle shell of the pavilion. I took short breaks to reply to my mother and father, who still wanted to know if I could make a trip with them in autumn to the Yucatan to greet the passing of the seasons in the jungle. This was my father’s idea.
 

“We all need this,” my father wrote.

“I’m surprised you didn’t suggest we go during summer solstice,” I said. “Isn’t that when everyone goes?”

“That’s for tourists,” my mother added. “Your father’s choosing these dates because he wants us to get a glimpse of the jaguars.”

“Funny, I thought there were none left,” I wrote. “I thought they abandoned the Maya cities, just like the humans did.”

I sometimes got the sense that my parents were aware that something was different about me, and if we traveled often on these journeys into nature, they likelier I would be to tell them what I really knew about a place called Mictlán. I agreed to the short vacation and stopped texting them back when the DJ arrives on stage to warm up the crowd. At no point did I tell my parents where I was that evening.
 

When Arkangel arrived on the stage at 9 p.m., the crowd’s screams reached a hysterical pitch, and the purple lights on the stage bloomed into the night. Arkangel used new holographic technology, and that meant they could project images into the air above the stage with the solidity of physical objects.

Their favorite image, a mouth filled with many buildings instead of teeth, opened and closed.

It took the brother-and-sister duo a full thirty minutes to arrive on stage, and by the time they strolled on stage, I felt electric shocks on the back of my neck. The warmth of all these bodies in the pavilion felt right, and I heard the music of all their heartbeats.