The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (27 page)

“Some of us,” corrected the man.

“Right. Some of us. Some of
us
never
learn.
What I’m trying to say is basically this. Each time you come back,
you gain a kindred soul, or more than one, like soul mates, but not
exactly like that. Souls can collect many Kindreds, on each return,
according to the sacred number order of the cosmos, the Golden
Ratio your friend Thomas told you about. Same as the Fibonacci
series of numbers. The pattern is zero, one, one, two, three, five,
eight, and so on, each time adding the previous two numbers
together, always growing larger. That’s the same pattern The Maker
of All Things uses for almost everything. The pattern of growth in
the center of a sunflower. The numbers of leaves on a branch, and
their spiraling pattern as they grow. Seashells. The orbits of the
planets. The curvature of a ram’s horn. Musical harmony. It’s all
the same numbers, in the same order. It is everywhere, and
permeates everything, including our souls. Euclid called it sacred
geometry. He intuited a lot of this stuff. So did Einstein. So,
your desire to be a scientist? It’s holy, Maria. In the truest
sense.”

He paused a moment to let this all sink in. His
perfect grammar stunned me. He could turn it on and off at will, I
realized. I nodded to let him know I followed what he told me.

“Your first time through life, your soul is alone.
You have no kindred soul. You have to figure things out on your
own. It’s a testing time. This is the time most people make their
biggest mistakes. Young souls. That first time around is a
dangerous time to live, the most dangerous, because if you don’t
figure it out, you might not come back better next time; you could
come back worse, and continue to worsen, until you aren’t allowed
to return ever again, and you might be doomed to be alone for all
eternity. This is how sociopaths are made, from souls that never
progress. They are given three chances at improvement, but they
don’t get another shot. They go directly to The Very Bad Place when
they die, and any Kindreds they had are erased forever.”

“So there is a hell,” I said.

He winced. “Sort of, but not quite. The definition
of The Maker, really, is change. It ain’t a person, or some old
dude in the sky with a beard. It communicates with each of us
directly if we listen. We’re part of it. But it’s not like humans,
or animals. It’s much bigger than that. It is growth, and energy,
with consciousness beyond our comprehension, and intent. Nothing is
perfect in process, only in outcome, and then only through trial
and error, and even then it is destined to change again.”

Again he paused, but I was having a hard time
following it all. He waited, and I eventually nodded.

“Simplify, dear one,” the woman told him, because
she realized how confused I was by all of this.

“Okay. The first kindred soul we get is our main
kindred soul, our Kindred Primary, the one that is our other half,
so to speak. We get two times around with them somewhere on the
planet with us, and then each of us begins to add others. Our
Kindred Primary’s kindred others are sometimes also our kindred
others, but not always. Imagine a woven cloth, but instead of in
three dimensions it exists in infinite dimensions; that’s kind of
how the intersections are for souls, threads crossing threads in
infinite directions, ordered and intended, but so complicatedly so
that no human can fully ever comprehend it. It would be like an ant
trying to figure out how to build the Taj Mahal.”

“Simplify, my darling boy,” begged the woman,
again.

“Okay. And none of the Kindred Others any of us gain
subsequent to the first will ever be as powerful as the Kindred
Primary, though they will all be vibrating in harmony with the
original soul. It’s like music. Your Kindred Primary is equal to
your spiritual tonic, or resolution tone. Together, you both
contain every harmonic of the other, and none that the other does
not have. You are, spiritually, identical, but not the same.”

“Simplify,” the woman said again.

Demetrio began to look rushed, and frustrated with
my lack of understanding.

“How this affects you, Maria, is
that I think you and I are Kindred Primaries. I never met you
before, but I think we were destined to meet, had I lived. Maybe at
St. John’s. Maybe at Stanford. Maybe we would have bumped into each
other at Wal-Mart. I don’t know. I cannot be sure what journey
you’re on, or I’m on, but I do know, from my studies, that
intersections of Kindred Primaries in the living body realm is
exceedingly rare, and powerful.”

“You think we’re soul mates?”

He smiled joyously. “Yes! Sort of
that. Yes. We all have the potential for multiple soul mates. All
of our Kindred Others can potentially be soul mates in life, if we
find them. But none of the Kindred Others is as powerful or
important a connection, none vibrating at perfectly the same
frequency as our own soul, as the Kindred Primary. Maria, we won’t
find out today, but I believe you are my Kindred Primary. Today we
will find out you and I are kindreds, of any relation. We must wait
until the next season for the next ceremony. It is the way of
things.

“Humans and other living creatures often run across
their Kindred Others in life, the Kindred Second, or Third, or the
Kindred Eighth or Thirteenth, etcetera - and this feels magical,
too. These are the cases, almost always, of love at first sight, or
some other instantaneous connection. Parents and children are
almost always Kindreds some great distance removed. All strong love
is formed from Kindredness of souls. Some we get along with better
than others, harmonize with better. It’s like in music. A Kindred
Second, if you know anything about musical intervals, is usually
someone you love but hate at the same time, very close to your
frequency, but dissonant against your tones, of a related scale,
but incompatible, like do and re played together. Most crimes of
passion among humans are committed against people who are Kindred
Seconds. With the Kindred Primary, the harmony is not only perfect,
it is identical, at the octave perhaps, infinite octaves of
harmonic resonance. In these situations, a person is said to feel
an incredibly synchronicity of events and connection.”

“The coincidences.”

“Yes! That indicates a strong likelihood that we are
Kindred Primaries. We’ve stumbled into each other, and our
harmonies have unfolded as a result. Our world have literally
shifted dimension, a tiny bit. As I’ve told the mayordomos, I feel
that with you. I’m sure of it. I never felt it in life, with
anyone. I never felt it until I found you.”

I was speechless. There was a name for what I’d felt
when he touched me, and looked at me, and made me laugh. And a
scientific explanation.

“Today we find out if we are Kindreds, period, but
we have to wait for the spring equinox to do the ceremony for
Primaries.”

“Okay,” I said, confused.

“Now, the nuts and bolts of how you see me, even
though I’m dead. Don’t look so sad. I’m cool with it, mami. Death
is sad for those left behind, but not as terrible as we think when
we’re alive, for the ones who died. It’s part of the journey we all
must make.

“Now the hard part to explain. I’m able to take
human form during daylight hours, for now. When I died, I was
involved in some bad activities. Ordinarily, a person who has done
such things is automatically sent to The Very Bad Place at death.
But in my case, and in my brother’s case, the Maker was willing to
give us both another chance. We weren’t supposed to die young. It
just happened. So we were allowed to linger, to prove ourselves
worthy of The Very Good Place, to redeem ourselves if we chose
to.

“The people you see here, my teachers, the
mayordomos, they’re the gatekeepers to the Great Beyond. Every
cemetery has a set of gatekeepers. They’re spirits. They have a
house here, you’ve seen it, just over the hill, where I stay with
some of the others who linger.”

“The assignment, Demetrio,” prompted the woman.
“Time is nearly gone.”

He nodded, exasperated. “My
assignment, Maria, is to do 1001 good deeds along Highway 14,
haunting it in a good way basically, but in human form during the
day and equipped with a host of lifesaving skills. I rescue people
and animals, and other things - bugs, trees, whatever - because The
Maker of All Things doesn’t differentiate. Life is life, souls are
souls. Spirit is spirit. There are rules to being a revenant.
Strict rules. There are lots of them. The one rule that applies to
you is that I am forbidden to tell any human what I am, unless,” he
paused for effect, and smiled, “
unless
they are a Kindred. If I
break this rule, I face harsh consequences.”

“Whoa,” I said. “But what if
I’m
not
one of
your Kindred Others? What happens?” The man answered for him,
chomping at the bit. “Then he faces the eternal damnation of his
soul to The Very Bad Place, with no chance of escape or the
redemption he has been valiantly working toward.”

“You shouldn’t have told me any of this, Demetrio,”
I said. “It’s too big a risk.”

“It’s not,” said Demetrio. “Not if
you feel for me what I feel for you. That’s why I couldn’t kiss
you, Maria. Because kissing a human is forbidden, unless it is a
Kindred.”

“So it wasn’t that I’m ugly.”

“Hardly.” He bit his lip and looked me up and
down.

“Not now,” said the woman.

“I got eight minutes from the time the first drop of
blood falls and the Quetzocoatl appears to tell you everything. If
you agree to complete this ceremony, you will have to sacrifice
eight drops of blood to the bowl, and see what appears.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, no hesitation.

“But be prepared,” said the man to me with great
solemnity. “If it goes right, we know you are one of Demetrio’
Kindred, and he can continue on his journey of redemption.”

“But if it goes wrong,” said the woman, “he will
turn immediately to dust.”

I gulped. I looked at Demetrio. “Are you sure we’re
Kindreds?”

“I am.”

I looked at him. “I don’t know. We could stop this
all right now, right? And we’d both be fine?”

He smiled patiently. “It wouldn’t matter for me,
mamita. I’ve already taken my chance, by telling you all this. If
you choose not to participate, I will be dust anyways, and you will
be fine.”

“Give me the knife,” I said.

“Atta girl,” said Demetrio, gratefully.

The woman handed me a different knife, one with a
red handle and a silver blade with lime green writing on it. I
stepped up to the table, placing my left hand over the bowl as I’d
seen him do. With my right hand, I drove the tip of the blade into
my skin, and through to the meat below. The pain was horrendous,
but nothing compared to what I went through after the crash. I bit
my lower lip and tried to think of happy thoughts, as I tilted my
hand and let the bright red blood flow into the bowl. Again the
mayordomos counted the drops, in Latin.

After eight drops had fallen, the woman wrapped my
hand in a clean white towel, and I backed away. We all watched as a
red smoke formed this time, and moved, and to my astonishment, took
the shape of our solar system, with the planets orbiting the sun,
and tiny moons orbiting the planets. One of the planets grew
larger, and larger, pulsating as though it were a human heart,
crowding out the others. I counted the planets, and tried to
remember which one it was. Venus. It was Venus. The other planets
faded out, and only Venus remained, beating and glowing, bigger and
bigger, brighter and brighter, before flaming out and dying away in
a puff of smoke that took the shape of a heart before dissipating
into the cool air of the chamber.

“Xolotl,” said the woman, peacefully, pleased.

“Booya! I
told
you!” cried Demetrio to the man
and the woman, jumping up and pumping his fist into the air with
joy. He turned to me now, and embraced me. “I knew you were a Close
Kindred,” he cried. He spun me around and around.

“A Close Kindred,” I said to myself.

Demetrio set me down and did a dance of the sort you
often saw NFL players do in the end zone after making a
touchdown.

“I
told
you,” he said to the pouty man,
gloating now. “How ya like me now, homie? How ya like me
now
, boy?”

“This journey is not over yet,” said the man
skeptically. “You don’t know if this girl is your Primary, and
acting as if she is might still get yourself into a terrible
predicament with this. No one knows. That’s the thing. You’re
reckless. Both of you.”

“Can I tell Kelsey?” I asked Demetrio. “Is it safe
now?”

“You
can
tell her, but
I
can’t,” he said. “As long as you think she’s a Kindred to
you.”

“Oh, she is,” I said. “She’s been my best friend for
eleven years.”

“Then go for it, mami, but know that it has
risks.”

The woman’s face burst into a warm, beautiful smile,
as she came around to embrace me and Demetrio. The man visibly
relaxed, but could not stop pouting. The woman touched a clear
ointment to my wounded hand, and it healed instantly.

“And now,” said the woman, stepping away from us,
and sprinkling a handful of pale gold dust over us. It twinkled
like stars as it fell. “By the powers invested in me, I announce
that you may kiss one another without negative consequence.”

“But not until I leave,” groused the man. “I don’t
think I can stomach it.”

“You’re just bitter and jealous,” said Demetrio.

“I’m not jealous,” insisted the man. “I’m
logical.”