The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (3 page)

Then a strong smell of chemicals and pats on my cheek.

"Stay awake; stay with me," the man in the helmet said. "I'll be right back."

He stood up and ran off into the distance, the letters SWAT glowing on his back as the noise of sirens, shouts and motor vehicles drowned my world out.

The pain in my head had become so intense, I forgot to cry. My pain threshold had always been low, and back then, small bruises and sprains could drive me to tears. But this pain muted me.
 

The edges of my vision were going fuzzy, and I hoped I could black out, to forget this all, to
unfeel
it all.

Something loosened beneath me, and warmth dampened my jeans. I had wet myself, or I was bleeding, not sure which. I was now on my right side, in a fetal position, wet, and my head and neck on fire in pain.

In the distance, I could see the turtle-shell shape of Pritzker Pavilion, lit by ambulance lights, and I took a moment to glance at the grass around me.

The sight in front of me made me scream.

Just two feet away from me, a tangle of flesh writhed like a living pile of garbage.
 

The shape the legs and arms made was sloppy, uneven, asymmetrical. Over the top of the heap, I spotted a portion of a torso and a chunk of parka, then one of its arms folded over on its back like a broken doll. The arm poked sharply through the sleeve of the parka, most likely from the break in the bone. The faces at the top were lifeless.

Something moved along the bottom of the pile.
 

A portion of a face poked out from under the pile. A man’s boot pinned the face deep inside the heap, but the eye stared out in wide open fear.

The eyes looked female. The cheeks looked swollen, the pupils frozen in terror. Beneath the chin, I saw her brown arm missing its hand, the wound jagged and ringed in black soot.

Then, a grunt from the mound. It was wordless but filled with pain. Inside its notes, I heard deep sorrow and loss.

"Awwwreh," the voice said.

"AWREEH," it repeated, weeping with every syllable. "SAWWW UHM AWREEH."

My eyes danced in circles, looking for someone to help me, someone to help this person. Her mumbles sent a chill down my neck, and I hoped the red lights washing over the metal skeleton of the park meant that ambulances would come help her soon.

The pain in my body grew white-hot. I swept my hand in front of me to touch the mound of people. I didn't know what I could accomplish by doing this, but I could extend my left arm without triggering more pain.

I felt under the brown boot, and I shoved it aside with the heel of my palm. It didn't move. Beneath, the voice continued.

"AWREEEH."

PUSH.

I used all my shoulder strength to shove the work boot, and the leg inside it finally gave way.
 

Just twenty inches away from me, I saw her full face. Older than mine, female, and
 
her ebony skin slashed to shreds but somehow still recognizable as human. The eyes flat like paper, barely holding on. Her ragged breaths escaped as steam through her matted hair.

"SAWW UHM AWREEH," the woman said.
 

There was something in her mouth obstructing her words. I put my index and middle finger between her lips and dug around. I found something firm, and I pulled. A chunk of her tongue, which she had bitten through, fell into my palm. The sorrow in the woman's eyes swelled. Now I could hear her words clearly.

"God, I'm sorry. God, I'm SORRY," the woman said, and she stared out at me, but her eyes looked through me. There was no focus there.

She was dying.

"Gaaa--" she said, and the last plume of steam left her lips.
 

I had never seen a dead body in my life, and I had never been this close to someone so brutally injured.

I screamed, and I tossed the lump of tongue away from me. My eyes were still making contact with the dead woman's, but now I was sure that she had joined the other three or four bodies on top of her in death.

I could see other injured people like me, laid out flat, some groaning, others silent as stone. The helicopters above me screamed dangerously close to the ground, and the words the woman spoke turned in my mind, downward and in circles, like a spiral.

"God, I'm so sorry," she had said.

Sorry for what? I thought. Sorry for... Sorry for all this death? Sorry for joining the march? Sorry for her sins?
 

I tasted a bitterness in the back of my throat that reminded me of insecticide, and I realized that traces of the tear gas must still be dispersing through the air. My eyes stung, too, and it hurt to blink. Wind whipped around my legs, and I felt coldness in the spot where I had wet myself. My eyes went there now to my gray jeans, and the stain that ran down their leg. There was no shame left in me, just pain, and a new creeping fear.

The woman's eyes had been online for one moment, and then they weren't. Is this what death was? Just like a circuit moving into the open position?

My father had warned me about these horrors, and I could see him now, seated in the living room, smoking his cigarette, reminding my brother José María and I, that "if you give men weapons, they become butchers."

The word “butcher” had felt crass when my father said it, but I thought of it now, as arms poked through piles of bodies and the metal from the blood scented the air. I didn't need to see the other dead people in this field. I had seen enough. The woman before me had no name, and I didn't want her to have one. The redness of her cheeks invaded the skin, and the matted hair, wrapped in blood around her cranium like a cocoon. It was a shade of red filled with chaos.

The massacre around me felt like it had no meaning, and I feared that this was all there would ever be. Pain, sorrow, the woman's sorrow, her sad apology to God, her body a broken pretzel under her.

I felt a stir in my stomach, and I remembered.
 

When I was a freshman in high school and José María had only entered sixth grade, he yanked me by the hand to the front porch of our house, away from our father’s close eye. José María fished from his backpack one of his treasures — the library books he liked to read. The title,
Devil’s Mask: The Richard Speck Story
sprawled in red ink over its grey cover. The nonfiction paperback had gone into great details about Richard Speck, who in 1966 entered a hospital in the South Side late at night and committed atrocious things to eight of the student nurses who lived there.
 

Eight women, raped and tortured and killed, all at the hands of one man. When I had finished that book, I felt sick inside, as if I had swallowed a dozen needles. I slept in my room with the light on for weeks, and each time I remembered the murders, the sharp pains came back to plunge into my midsection.

The needles of pain solidified. Richard Speck had nothing to do with the massacre before me, but I felt something tenebrous, something sick on this wide lawn beneath the Pritzker Pavilion, and it felt just like on those nights I thought of that awful book my brother handed to me.

The woman’s face went slack, and the wind picked up, blowing her hair over her lips.

More voices shouted, and I saw an ambulance creep toward me, driving right over the sidewalk and onto the grass, its red lights dancing like pinwheels. How they whirled.

My vision went grey at the edges, and then I fell into unconsciousness.

My eyes came into focus.
 

Everything’s gone white and blue.

The halogen lights burst in a wash of blue, and they drew sharp shadows over the bed, the machines at my sides, the food on the tray before me, and the pale flowers at the far end of the room. A television hung from the corner like a single black eye staring into the room. The IV in my arm throbbed, and my lips felt dry as dust.

My mother walked into the room, and I felt relief wash my insides.

As far as I could remember, she had always looked this way: rail thin and her hair pulled behind her as if to say, “Let's do this.” As she took each step into the room and toward my bed, her eyes widened like saucers, and despair distorted her face into long lines. Her hands flew up to her temples, and her tears came down, the droplets braiding themselves into her hair, staining her blouse and beading up on her leather jacket.

I felt my own tears come up, but something was wrong. I felt a throb inside my chest, and I realized it hurt, a lot, a whole fucking lot, to cry. My face was frozen into a mask. Why couldn’t I wince?
 

My father trailed right behind my mother. He did his best to not let his eyes widen in shock, but I knew by looking at him that whatever had happened to me was a lot to bear.

Every part of my body felt puffy and stiff. I tried moving my arm to prop myself up, but instead, pain greeted me. My parents took places on each side of my bed, their faces hovering over me while machines beeped behind them in a steady rhythm.

"What time is it?" I asked.

“Ten in the morning," my mother said.
 

She leaned over and kissed my forehead, eclipsing my view of the room. When she pulled away, I could see my father's tears coursing down his face.

She
 
interlaced her hands on mine. I felt the tiny bumps of the rosary beads looped around her wrist as they touched my skin. I couldn't stop staring at my father, though. I had never seen him cry, not like this.

"If it's ten, where's José María?" I said. I really wanted to see my brother.

"José María's at school," my father said.

"But isn't it Saturday?" I said.

"Clara, you've been in the hospital for six days," my mother said.

I looked down at my body in the powder blue sheets. Only my arm poked out. A bruised brown arm. The rest of me lay underneath.

"Pretty soon, your aunts and uncles will be arriving," my mother said. "Your father and I wanted to spend an hour with you alone first."

“Before they take over —” my father said.

“Because they will take over,” my mother said.

“They always take over,” he said.

My mother checked her phone, ran to the door to see if they were here, and once she was satisfied enough, she came back to the bedside.

"Have a seat, Juliana," my father said. "You know my brothers and sisters never arrive on time. Clara, how do you feel?"

I cracked a smile. It's as close as I could get to laughter.

"Like a champ," I said.

My father chuckled and handed my mother a coffee. From my vantage point, my mom and dad looked small to me, like miniatures of themselves.

"Your injuries..." my mother said. "The doctors say your recovery will be slow."

"Juliana, let’s start at the beginning. Clara deserves to know what happened," he said.
 

My father took shallow breaths, and the wrinkles in his eyes bunched together.
 

"Dr. Ecker, was just here, before you woke up,” he said. “Whoever did this to you broke three ribs. Punctured lung. You also bled internally. That is what almost killed you. The blows to your head fractured your skull in two places. You’ve suffered a brain injury, and the doctors did their best to work on your left eye. But you may not be able to see out of it again. They have reconstructed your face, and Dr. Ecker assured us their cosmetic surgeon is one of the best."

I raised my left hand to touch my face. The texture of the bandage was soft, feathery. My whole face was a bandage.

This is when the horror movie gets really good,
I thought.

José María would like that joke. My parents would not.

"Don't touch it, Clara," my mother said. "The swelling will go down soon. But don't touch it."

"Could have been worse, right?" I said. The face of the woman under the pile of bodies flashed in my mind, and I knew that could have been me, exhaling for the last time on the grass.

My father took out his slender hand from his jean jacket and pointed his index finger at me. His eyes went flat and cold.

"YOU," he said. "You had to go to the march at Millennium. What the fuck where you thinking, Clara? Do you not have a brain up there?"
 

He tapped the side of his cranium hard enough to make a solid thud. This was a serious matter if he was swearing. He never did so in front of us.
 

"I was going to tell you," I said.

"When, exactly? At your funeral?"

"I don't even know what happened!" I said.
 

"The body count right now is at three hundred or so," my mother said.

"Not to mention the thousands of injured," my father said.

"This was the way to make change happen," I said. "I know that, and you know that." It was my turn to push back.
 

"You think that armed forces gunning down people makes change happen?" my father shouted. "You learned nothing from history, then."

He pulled up a plastic chair, and he propped one leg up on it so I could see it up close. He loomed over the room, his short breaths thickening the air. He tossed his jean jacket over the chair and rolled up his right shirt sleeve. Then he rolled up his pants leg.