Esperanza (20 page)

Then the piercing sounds abruptly stopped, but the fog kept rolling over the Hummer, hugging the sides as if to carry it away. Ian whipped off the headset, Tess turned down the radio volume.

“Like before, Slim. The silence.”

“We’ll get out of here.” She started the Hummer and backed away from the crumpled truck.

“I think we’re in comas, you and I,” he said, then a disconnected story spilled from him—what Paco Faraday had told him, what he had learned at the Incan Café, how he believed that Esperanza might already be a city of
brujos.

It alarmed her—not because he sounded crazy or that she believed him, but because she suddenly understood why he was so flummoxed by his discoveries in the café.

“Ian, what’s a DVD player?”

“A what?”

“What’s Wi-Fi?”

“Wi-Fi. There was a sign at the café about Wi-Fi. But I don’t know what it is.”

“What’s an iPod? BlackBerry? CD? Laptop? Windows? PC? MacBook?”

He looked terrified and shook his head.

“Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Stephen King? George Lucas? Indiana Jones?
E.T.
?”

“Never heard of them.”

Jesus.
“What year is it?”

He thought a moment. “Nineteen sixty-eight.”

“Dear God,” she whispered.

“Is that the wrong answer or something?”

“No.” She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, blinked back the hot sting of tears. “Has Nixon won the election yet? Have they assassinated Bobby Kennedy? He leaves the planet on June 5, 1968, the Ambassador Hotel, L.A. Or Martin Luther King? April 4, 1968. The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. What about My Lai? You know about My Lai?”

“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about, Slim.”

She cited dates, events, situations, driven by a fierce urgency to get as much said as quickly as possible. Already, she felt her consciousness flickering, and once again, she thought she heard her mother calling to her. “Ian, for me, it’s 2008. Forty years in your future.”

He looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach, eyes bulging, his pallor so extreme now that she sensed their time here was nearly done. A kind of strange acceptance coursed through her. “
Palo
means stick, Ian. The Río Palo translates as Stick River or—”

“The river Styx,” he whispered. “Slim, in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the river Styx separates the world of the
dead
from the world of the
living.
It’s the
bardo
where the soul takes inventory.
Hello, who the hell am I and what am I doing here?”

From the back seat came coughing, that wet, hacking cough that could mean Juanito was drowning in his own blood. Tess drove faster, certain that if she stopped here, the thick, ubiquitous fog would enter the Hummer and consume them all.

Through an opening in the fog, she spotted the church just ahead and turned erratically toward it, horn squealing. The door started to rise, the fog thickened, a tsunami that just kept rising, higher and higher, until it covered the roof of the church. Tess raced into the garage, a bank of fog pursuing them.

He and Tess flung their doors open simultaneously and stumbled out of the vehicle. Ian felt weak, dizzy, used up, and made his way toward Tess by using the car for support. Confusion everywhere, people shouting, firing questions, a crowd tightening around them, no one in charge. Two men lifted Juanito onto a stretcher and carried him through double doors.

When Ian reached Tess, he slipped his arm around her shoulders and they leaned into each other like cripples. Her face looked ashen, her smile seemed weak, unfocused, as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was.

“Let’s get out of here, Slim,” he whispered.

“Through those double doors. Into the bunker beneath the church. Can we make it?”

“If we hold on to each other.”

“I feel like I’m two hundred years old, Ian.”

“I think . . . we don’t have much time left here. One way or another I’ll find you again.”

She threw her arms around him, holding him, burying her face in the curve of his neck, and he shut his eyes. The rest of the world went away.

The next thing he knew, he and Tess were sitting on a couch in a softly lit room with Manuel, an elderly Quechua woman, and a woman he recognized from the article he had read on Esperanza. “I know you,” he burst out. “Sara Wells, cultural anthropologist from Berkeley. Won a Fulbright in the late sixties to study the
brujos
in Ecuador. Believed to have disappeared somewhere in the Andes. Presumed dead. What was the year, exactly?”

The astonishment on her face spoke tomes about the lengths people had
gone to in order to keep him and Tess away from information. “My last contact with my old life was on May 16, 1969, Mr. Ritter. When I called my sister from Quito.” She looked quickly at Manuel. “Will he remember that?”

She spoke as though Ian were no longer in the room. He resented it.

“Unknown,” Manuel replied, and gestured at the bottles of water on the coffee table in front of them. “Keep drinking water. It’ll buy us a few more minutes. If you both remember what has happened to you here and if you can make it back to Esperanza, you’ll be able to be together despite your separation in time.”

“How?” Tess asked.

Ian held tightly to her hand, but already it faded, flickered, brightened again.

“Because Esperanza exists both within and outside of time as we know it,” the old woman said.

“Wayra got left outside,” Tess said suddenly, her voice hoarse, thick.

“He’s preventing the
brujos
from following you,” Sara said. “We hope to keep them from following you back to your physical bodies.”

“But if they find you,” Manuel went on, “we won’t be able to protect you as we have here. They still won’t be able to seize you, but they can seize others and force them to kill you.”

“But . . . this isn’t our battle,” Ian protested. “It isn’t . . .”

Tess’s body suddenly turned transparent, and for a single, horrifying moment, Ian could see the water she was drinking as it moved down her gullet, into her stomach. He wrenched back. “What . . . what’s happening . . .”

She started choking. Ian leaped up and slapped her on the back, but his hands went through her. He could see his flesh inside hers, his hands inside her organs. Then Manuel thrust himself between them and wrapped his arms around Tess.

“What’re you doing?” Ian shouted, stumbling back, his legs so weak that his knees buckled and he struck the floor.

Sara crouched in front of him, leaning in so close he caught the honeysuckle scent of her skin and hair. “Remember, Ian. Remember everything.”

Red poured across his vision. He could still hear Tess choking, Manuel speaking to her, the words garbled, a thunderous roar echoing in his head. He lurched to his feet to get to Tess. But as he did so, Manuel’s body shredded apart like Kleenex. An arm, a leg, gone. A shoulder struck the floor and disappeared. His head fell away. And then a man with white hair and Ben Franklin glasses held her in his arms. A huge smile lit up Tess’s face.

“Dad?” she said. “Is it really you?”

Ian gaped. Was Manuel the virtual form of Tess’s dead father, Charlie Livingston?

His vision went black and he felt himself falling, a meteorite hurtling toward earth, burning as it plunged through the atmosphere. Then there was only the soft, fading echo of a distant howling.

Dominica felt it, a tremendous shift in power and balance, as if tectonic plates were sliding apart beneath Esperanza. She shoved Wayra away from her. His sweet talk, his caresses, their lovemaking in the orchard beyond the fog: it had been a ploy to keep her from pursuing the transitionals as they fled back to their physical bodies.

“I will kill you for this,” she hissed, straightening the clothes on her seductress body, the body he’d loved so well in Spain.

“I doubt it,
mi amor.
But I’m pleased to know you are so easily duped, Nica.”

He combed his fingers back through his thick hair, his smile both joyous and tragic, this tall, beautiful, unattainable man who had betrayed her once again. “I’ll find them, Wayra. You know that I will, I have resources . . .”

“As do I. As do others.”

“Others?” Did he mean the liberation group? “What others?”

He smiled slyly. “We aren’t alone in our battle against your kind.”

Fear surged through her.
He knows. He knows about this group. Betrayer, I hate him.
“I’ll order my tribe to sweep through Esperanza, to seize every man, woman, child.”

“If you actually believed you could conquer in that way, you would’ve done it already. Face it, Nica. Your time is past. It’s the dawn of a whole new age.”

Then he turned away from her and ran toward the fog filled with
brujos
who would not be able to touch, seize, or harm him. He shifted as he moved, the man becoming the black dog with the golden eyes. Seconds before he plunged into the fog, his triumphant howls echoed across space and time.

Dominica stood there in her phony human form, sobbing uncontrollably.

We are in a time so strange that living equals dreaming, and this teaches me that man dreams his life, awake.

—Pedro Calderón,
Life Is a Dream

Such stillness. He has never known anything like this. It’s as if the universe has not yet taken its first breath, its heart has not yet begun to beat, all is unformed, unstructured, mere potential. He waits, an observer observing himself. He is consciousness, nothing more.

Then the stillness shatters with the universe’s first shuddering breath, the first beat of its heart. He feels cold, stiff, uncomfortable. He aches all over, an undefined, nonspecific ache that extends to every part of his body, infecting his blood and bones, organs, cells. He’s aware of everything that is wrong in his body, in his throat, lungs, heart. He tries to wiggle his fingers, but cannot. He struggles to move his mouth, head, toes, legs. Nothing works. His eyes beg to open, but the lids feel thick, cumbersome, like mud. He wonders if he has been buried alive.

A bubble of panic works its way up from his burning lungs, up through his aching throat, and spills into the air as a bead of spit on his lower lip. He can feel it, sitting there, perfect in shape, neither cold nor hot, just wet and indestructible.

Other details come to him, sounds and tastes, sensations that he knows he should recognize but does not. He has no labels, no categories, no names. I am . . . What? In pain. Uncomfortable. No, no, no. Go deeper. Remember, remember.

Who said that to him? Who told him to remember?

He fights his way back toward the stillness, but can no longer recall what it feels like. He can’t block the sounds, the tastes, the sensations. The stillness is a flame that has been blown out like a birthday candle.

I am . . . A game. He knows this game. I am a bird.

What kind of bird?

Condor.

And for a moment he sees himself staring upward, watching a pair of condors cruising on the air currents, their tremendous wingspans casting shadows.
Then the image is gone and he wants to weep, to scream, please, come back, don’t go away, please . . .

He hears a familiar voice. A man’s voice.

“Mom,” the man shouted. “Mom, get over here. I think he’s conscious.”

Warmth covered Ian’s right hand, his cheeks.

“Dad? Can you hear me? Your fingers are twitching.”

Luke. That’s Luke.
Fingers lifted his eyelid, light stabbed down like a dagger through his retina, into his brain. Ian turned his head away from it.

“Mom. Call the front desk. Where’s the call button? Christ, Christ, he’s back. He’s conscious.”

Now: a woman’s voice that Ian recognized. Louise, his ex.
Please go away, Louise.
“Calm down, Luke.”
Tap tap tap.
High heels against a floor. “It’s probably just an involuntary reflex. We’ve seen this before. It doesn’t mean anything. It . . . Oh my God. His eyes are opening.” She leaned in close to him, the cloying scent of her perfume nearly choking him. “Ian? Blink if you can hear me.”