The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (24 page)

My feet began to ache, and sometime around what I thought was our fourth hour, I patted José María on the shoulder.

“You would think our ancestors would have made a map of this place,” I said. “Make it easy to visit.”

“Oh, they probably did make maps,” he said. “But they probably got destroyed during the conquest. Lost forever.”

“You love buried treasure.”
 

“Because I love Indiana Jones.” José María said.

“And who doesn’t?” I said. “He’s fine.”

José María giggled.

“Whatever happened to that girl who used to come over to the house?” I said. “You two watched sat there watching YouTube all day.”

She was the only girl I had ever seen my brother hang out with. I couldn’t remember her name. I had met her once, in my senior year of high school, but after that, José María had returned to his favorite home companions: his headphones, his books and his laptop.

“Ah, you mean Joy,” he said. “She was all right.”

That answer meant he had been crazy about her.
 

“Why’d you stop hanging out?”

“She got boring, dunno.”

In translation, this meant he had gotten dumped. I couldn’t speak of a lick of the endless syllables and music that made up the language inside Mictlán, but I could read José María quickly and well. And I barely needed English to do this.

“Ever want to get married?” I said.

“Yep,” he said, hunching his shoulders, deep, becoming thin and sleek like a fox.

“And kids?” I said.

“Oh, my god, you’re tireless with your questions,” he said, but he wasn’t angry. He wanted to keep talking. “No kids, I don’t think. I think I’d rather just hang out, you know, if I was married?”

I nodded.

“A house?”

“Nah. My wife and I will be drifters. Live in a trailer in California. Hike. Live on berries.”

“A dog?”

“Freakin’ twenty. No cats.”

“You hate cats.”

“More than bros.”

“What job would you have?” I said.

“Clara, over there!” José María said, and ran to the right edge of the road. He peered up at the immense wall, and I saw both the wall and the rubbery plants move past me like a carnival ride.

“Where?” I said, and as I turned my head up, I didn’t see, but I heard, what he wanted me to see.

A sound like an electric guitar, followed by deep bells, like those of a cathedral.

On a cliff set into the wall above us, I caught the long jawline of a canine peering into the dark from a jutting rock on the canyon wall above us.

The Xolotl howled, and my brother and I dove onto the ground. The Xolotl cut through the air like a blade, ready to land on top of us.

A cloud of rotting fumes expanded above us, and the sound of the deep bells of the Xolotl became as loud as bombs. He roared.

The night before in my dorm room, José María had explained that the Xolotl greeted the dead to begin their journey into Mictlán. I had gone inside its throat once, and the despair I had felt inside made me never want to come close to such a creature. His eyes had scanned me, seen through me, and now, I feared he may take his final bite of us.

The humanoid shape of the Xolotl left a trail of smoke in the air above us. As he fell down toward us, feet-first, I braced for the worst.

But a long, thin flying object intercepted the Xolotl. The Xolotl wrestled with the object for a moment, and the two became entangled in a ball of smoke. Then two figures burst forth and up into air, joined together. The Xolotl emerged from the smoke riding a creature like a jockey, and I finally understood what I saw.
 

The Xolotl rode a hummingbird made of smoke, so thick it was as solid as flesh. The bird’s almond-shaped eyes flickered, and its wings emitted a thin layer of music as its powerful muscles defied the air currents. The hummingbird and the Xolotl dove around in a few circles, and then it became clear that the Xolotl hadn’t spotted us yet.

“Shh,” I said to my brother. I tapped my temple and waved my hands to make a gesture of emptiness.

Quiet your thoughts,
I mouthed to him. I knew the Xolotl had heard our thoughts before.
 

José María nodded, and he took out his portable camera from his back pocket.

No!

I shook my head, but it was too late. He clicked the shutter button.

The flash on the camera burned for a fraction of a second, and I expected it to fill the space around me, to perhaps burn through this darkness, maybe reveal more monsters.

But instead, the white light that poured from the tiny LED flash spilled forth like liquid. It poured out of the camera and down onto the floor, as if the camera had sneezed a gob of snot. The liquid pulsed with a weak silvery color, and it gathered itself like a worm, as if it had a consciousness. Then it dried up, until it dissolved back into the smooth ground that transported us.
 

“What the heck—” José María said.

“Hell.” I said. “He must have seen us.”

Then the Xolotl and the smoke hummingbird nose-dived. They flew just a few dozen feet above us, then moved past us.

The Xolotl rode his bird like a jockey down into the canyon.
 

The sound of the bells grew fatter, thicker, and then they were down in the canyon so deep that they only looked like pinpoints. I kept my hands at the edge of the moving road. I didn’t want to get too close to the lip. A fall from up here would surely kill us.

“See? I told you to trust in me,” said the voice we heard earlier coming from the depths of the road. “You’re safe now.”

“Hmm, okay, tell me more,” José María said into the dark.

“You’ll be safer this way,” the voice said. “Just walk closer, you two. Come toward me. You’ll see everything is fine down
here
.”

“
Down there
?” José María said as turned to me and bit his lip.

“Bring your box with its light magic. I want you to show it to me,” the voice said.

It’s strange to think one could fall in love with just a voice, but it’s true.

When I was 31 years old, I got a phone call late at night after coming home late from work in the Loop. My hair was tangled by the winter air, and my belly ached with hunger. My lips had split from the cold as I stepped out of my car, and as I ran my tongue over the wound in my lip, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, and to this day, I am not sure why I picked up the line.

“Is Morgan there?” the voice said. The silky, deep texture of sound that insinuated itself into my ear made me sit up as I poured myself a tall glass of water and multitasked to order takeout.

“You must have the wrong number,” I said. “There’s no Morgan here.”

“Morgan who went to Western Chicago University,” he said. “This isn’t her number?”

I had a roommate at the university once, and her name had been Morgan. I explained this to the caller.

What I didn’t say then was that Morgan had also been patient with me when I had been part of the OLF, and she had been kind when my face emerged from the bandages after the Millennium Riot. Morgan had been there when I needed her most, and though her life in teaching meant that we lost touch over the years, she had been important to me. She had met José María the night before we went into Mictlán as she prepared to visit her boyfriend across campus. Morgan had been red-headed, bold, a good friend.

“So, she’s not there?” the stranger said. I wanted to hear that voice, to know it.

“Morgan has never lived at my address,” I said.

“But clearly it’s the same Morgan.”

“Honestly, this feels like coincidence,” I said. I should have been alarmed, creeped out, in fact. Instead, I was intrigued.

“Well, it’s a good coincidence. Surely you must be a good person, if you know her. I was hoping to get a group of people together to go to dinner for the holidays, for those of us who don’t have family in Chicago.”

Chicago winters were searingly cold and lonely, if you let them be.
 

“You live here?” I said.

“It’s where I do my work, and I have an apartment in the south Loop. You could say that, yeah.”

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Ken.”

His voice danced through the mobile phone. I wanted that voice the way that people want to smoke a second, third, and fourth cigarette.

And so Ken and I started a conversation. Our relationship started during that call, and it continued for a decade, in all its forms and shapes. He was a good lover, despite the things he did when he learned about my history. But on that day, it was his voice that brought him into my life. A sensuous voice that I wanted in my ears forever.

And just like I fell in love with Ken’s voice, I saw how the voice coming from the darkness in the path below seduced my brother José María in the upper parts of that canyon in Mictlán.

“We have to see
who
she is,” José María said. He yanked up his jeans from his hips and ran a hand through his nonexistent beard. The textures of his skin remained smooth, hairless, and the color of onyx.

“I think we should be careful,” I said.

“That’s not like you,” he said.

“Is that so?”

“Of course. I can’t think of anytime you were actually careful., You always act on impulse.”

“Strange that you see me that way,” I said. It was true. I had always thought of myself as cautious, but José María saw something else.

“Hell, you went to that protest at Millennium, and you stole a family heirloom,” he said. “All I can say is badass.”

He had no idea what I saw in Millennium.

“Well, I still think we should be careful of the thing down there,” I said. “When I was at Minerva’s house, something else spoke to me, through the walls. And it wasn’t good.”

“Oh, snap, and what did it say?” my brother said.

“‘Give them to me, Wanderer,’ among other things. Terrible things.”

“The Xolotl also called you a Wanderer,” José María said. “What does that mean?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Our family also warned me about the Lords,” I said.

“Well, duh!” José María said. “They have to. The Lords are the kind of things you only see once, if you catch my drift.”

“Are the Lords really down there, at the bottom of that canyon, you think?” My own words felt thin,and brittle. I was not prepared for this journey.

The Lords of Mictlán were supposed to be a couple, a man and wife. I hoped I could find my tonal without actually having to face them.

José María walked to the edge of the road, and he pushed a few of the rubbery plants aside so he could get closer to the voice. As we glided along, he let out a bellow.

“Yo!” he said.

The cones around his head swelled in size, and though we couldn’t see a single shard of light, I could suddenly
understand
the objects around us better, and in more detail. José María’s voice was lighting the way around us in the sonar of the music.

“You sound like those dinosaurs in that movie,” I said.

“
Raptor World!
” he said. He bellowed again.

“But that thing with the voice will hear us—the Xolotl will hear us, too! I told you to be quiet!”

“Not loud enough,” he said. “Wish I had Dad’s voice. Needs to be deep.”

I pulled at José María’s shirt, but he fought me.

“Do you want to see what’s up ahead or not?” he screamed.

“But how?”

“The louder we can get, the louder we can sing, the better we can see in this world. Bats and whales do it; why can’t we?”

And it made sense.

“But to call attention to ourselves—” I said.

“We won’t get killed, silly. We just need to shout a little to get more details. But you need to sing it like you mean it.”

He was right. The deeper he went in making his sounds, the farther the cones expanded. Thanks to José María, I could now see farther down the canyon, as if a fog had lifted from it. The immensity of the place gave me the chills, and the soft scents of the place rose all the way from its depths. I expected the smell of dead flesh, but instead, the notes of flower petals and moss rose from the canyon. Much to my surprise, I liked this smell.

Those were the smells of the specimens on my father’s desk at the house in Little Village. All the petri dishes with fungi, lichen and many fuzzy things I couldn’t name.