Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (6 page)

And who is ever going to read this? As far
as I can tell, I am the only human being within a hundred miles of
the Pen. According to the spirits that come through on their way to
the afterworld, I am the only human being in the Western world.

If a half-breed reads this, assuming they
can still read, they will use it to destroy George and me. Our
fates will be sealed by all the time spent typing away at this
typewriter.

I hate this “journal” for reminding me how
much I miss everything. I miss computers and cell phones. I miss
the casual conversation between strangers. I miss my great-great
grandmother and my people.

I loathe to admit this, especially since I
am a shaman, but, in the middle of the night, sometimes, I pray
that things will return to normal. I pray that the next morning,
food will arrive at eight in the morning. I will be one day closer
to release. I will read my books, take my exercise with George, and
plan my return to the Pueblo. My son will have children of his own,
my infamy will have grown, and I will take my great-great
grandmother’s place as spiritual leader of the Tewa. But this dream
will never come to pass.

Instead, George and I are following some
ancient prophecy.

We will leave the Pen with enough food and
water for a month. We have found a nineteen-year-old, cherry-red
off-road vehicle in a garage in Santa Fe. The fellow who owned it,
some guy name Kevin Costner, kept the vehicle in great condition.
It looks like he never drove it. He must have been some
make-believe cowboy because he had all kinds of pistols, shotguns,
traditional bows, compound bows, a thousand arrows, and riding
gear. We took most of this stuff from that guy’s house.

George learned how to work on cars in
prison. Before he was shipped to the Pen, he was the mechanic for
the prison vehicles. I didn’t expect him to remember how to work on
cars, but he has completely recreated this vehicle. He’s replaced
anything with high-desert dry rot. He even found a machine to make
sure the computer parts are working. He spent six months developing
puncture-proof tires. Over the last year, this vehicle has brought
George so much joy.

On his own, without encouragement from me,
George began modifying the vehicle to fight the wasps. He’s
attached propane tanks to the back to spray fire. He’s created
arrow stands for our salt-tipped arrows. He attached weapons to the
wheels and doors for drive-by wasp killing.

Because we don’t know if we will find
gasoline on our journey, we have added an additional twenty-gallon
tank to the off-road vehicle. The Pen had its own gasoline supply.
Over the last ten years, we’ve used much of the reserve. We will
have enough for our journey.

We are heading to the Pecos Pueblo.
Unbeknownst to the white man Park Service that made the Pueblo a
Historic Monument, there is an entire area of the Pueblo that is
hidden. According to the prophecy, the shaman who will save
humankind from the brink will find what he needs there.

What do I need? I roll it over and over in
my mind. I worry that I will have to ask for what I need, and I
have no idea. None. I assume I’ll be required to draw upon my deep
wisdom, the wisdom of the ages. At this moment, I can only think,
“What wisdom?”

Who picked me for this job? Why did I get to
be so lucky?

When I read over my entries, I see that I
talk about my great-great grandmother a lot. She’s the one who
picked me. She’s the one who set up my entire life. She raised me
after my mother died, trained me, sent me to learn from the
spiritual healers and shamans. She was the keeper of the prophecy,
and she chose me.

I don’t really know why she chose me. She
never really said. I wonder why I went along with her. And
honestly, I don’t know.

Sure, there was a huge ego boost when I
learned that I was the prophesied savior of humankind. And I did
enjoy the training. Every bit of it. I loved listening to those old
men and women talk about the spirit way. Even in the last years in
Mexico, I felt like a sponge, soaking up every tidbit, every fact,
and every lesson. I couldn’t wait to try out new things. Nothing
thrilled me more than spending a day trying out a new path, talking
to a new spirit guide, practicing a new healing method.

And I was good at it. I was better at the
shaman way than I was at anything else. My United World College
guidance counselor had planned for me to work at the UN or possibly
become an international lawyer. Her myriad of tests had indicated
that I was destined to be an influential person. She recommended
that I continue at Harvard or Yale. She had even secured
scholarships for me.

I remember the day I told her that my
great-great grandmother was sending me to Mexico to study with the
shamans of the Wixaritari. She was disappointed. She even cried.
She told me that I was throwing my life away. I could do more for
my people in Washington, DC than I could in Mexico. And, as if it
were written on my forehead, she said, “You could be a savior to
your people.”

It’s like everyone knew, and could see, my
path long before I took a step on the journey.

Now that my ego is no longer involved, now
that there are no women to impress, now that I am about to set out
upon the journey to “save my people,” I don’t want to do it.

We could spend the rest of our lives here at
the Pen. We could live in peace, continue hunting the elk and deer
that have returned to the wild regions around us. We could farm our
fields. For the last 477 days, George and I have been happy --
happier than I remember being in a long time.

George would follow me anywhere. He would
stay here and work if I said so. He will go with me to fight along
the way if I said so. As long as we are together, he knows that
everything is going to be all right.

Why go? There are no plush maidens waiting
to warm our beds and feed us fry-bread and beans. There are no
friends waiting to hear what we have to say, listening to our
experiences and wisdom. There are no babies to play with, children
to tell tall stories to, and friends to drink beer with. Hell,
there’s no beer.

There is only death and wasps in front of
us. We may not make it ten miles out of the Pen, let alone all the
way to Pecos Pueblo.

We hope to find horses along the way. We
hope to ditch the vehicle at the Pueblo and head into the hills. We
hope to make a place there, a homestead that we will use as a home
base for our explorations to find other humans. My hope is that the
Navajos, Hopis, and Apaches survived. Until we look, we won’t
know.

Ten years ago, there was a major highway,
the 285, between here and the Pecos Pueblo. By the highway, it was
only a little more than thirty miles. At 75 miles per hour, we
could be there in less than a half hour. But we have no idea if the
entire highway is still intact. We can get across the valley but
the mountains? We don’t know what will happen in the mountains.

Another reason I’m the worst person for this
job -- I hate to drive. My cousin was 4-wheel driving from the time
he could drive. He could have gotten us there. No problem. He knew
the Pecos Pueblo like the back of his hand. I don’t even remember
what’s there.

Why did my great-great grandmother pick me?
Why did she use her magic to make all this happen?

Why am I the only living human? Some days I
want to kill myself. Some days I look into George’s vacant eyes and
long for that kind of silence inside my own brain.

The answers never come. Not from spirit
guides, not from the undead souls, not from the earth or sky or
mountains or clouds or empty prison. I’ve asked my great-great
grandmother when her spirit visits me. Like she had for most of my
life, she tells me to do what I’m told. “Don’t question so much,
Emil. Do what you’re told.” That was her answer for everything.

There’s no one left to tell me anything.
Some stupid prophecy controls my life. Some days, I feel such
desperate despair and hopelessness that I can barely move. I sit in
the old prison yard and watch George work the fields.

Outside of the most basic -- anger, love,
fear -- George doesn’t feel emotions. He can no longer understand
despair or hopelessness. Even if he did, he’d have no use for it.
Life lies out in front of George like a highway. He knows he’ll die
someday, but, until that day, he can’t (literally) worry about
it.

And I can’t seem to get the question out of
my head -- What if I fail? What if I cannot do what is in front of
me?

What’s hardest, for me, is that I never felt
this way. I never had this kind of fear or insecurity. I never felt
unconfident. I always did what was next -- down to wasting my life
way in the Penitentiary. I was told to come here, and here I
am.

Now I’m consumed with doubt.

11/08/2056

I probably haven’t said this, but I taught
George to read. Of course, it’s possible that after some of his
brain went to mush, he remembered how to read. Anyway, it took
about a year.

I wanted to be able to communicate with him.
I wanted to hear what he thought without reaching into his brain to
listen. Mind reading is a delicate art fraught with
misunderstanding. When I would look into George’s mind, I’d find
chaos, fear, anger and frustration move through him like breath.
The next moment, he might feel something else. It’s much clearer to
communicate -- verbally or in writing -- than to do all the mind
work.

George has a white board that he uses to
“talk” to me on. After all this time, we have developed a shorthand
I like to call “George-speak.” It reminds me of the cryptic
language people developed for texting and IM conversations. “C U
later.” That kind of thing. I let George make the language, which
he enjoys.

He’s become a voracious reader. I guess with
no television, movies, computers or people, books seem more
interesting. Over the last three years, he’s read about half of the
Pen library. He likes comedies the best. He refuses to read books
by African-American authors because they make him homesick for a
life he never had.

His favorite book,
however, is
The Invisible
Man
. (A book about a black man written by
a black man.) He told me that he always felt invisible. Most of his
violence was a way of insisting on visibility. He never knew that
other people felt invisible like he had always felt.

It’s amazing how much we have both learned
about human beings now that they are all gone. And how much we miss
them.

I started talking about George and his
reading to say that he’s read my entries so far. Last night, he
told me that he thinks that I shouldn’t worry about writing these
entries the right way or wrong way. He thinks my great-great
grandmother wanted me to do it. Whatever way I write them will be
perfect.

I’m not sure why that made me feel better.
It just did.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my
great-great grandmother. I guess because I feel she “made” me write
this journal, it forced me survive all of this.

My great-great grandmother had her first
child, my great-grandfather, when she was fourteen years old. Over
the course of the next twenty years, she had ten children. She told
me that my grandfather was her favorite, born of her first, and
only, real love. But she was the kind of mother who whispered the
very same words into every child’s ear. I have no idea if he was
truly her favorite.

For a woman who left such a wide mark on my
life, she was a tiny person. I doubt she ever weighted over a
hundred pounds. She stood less than five feet tall. She never
drank, ate sugar or smoked. She cut her hair only once every
decade. All of my life, her hair flowed deep white and gray down
her back, almost to the ground. She used to say that she was like
the white man’s Samson. Her power was in her hair. Of course, that
wasn’t true. She just didn’t like to get her hair cut.

My great-grandfather had his first child, my
grandfather, when he was 18 years old. My great-great grandmother
was 32 years old. When my great-grandfather went off to war, she
invited my great-grandmother into her home and raised my
grandfather as her own. My great-grandfather never returned from
that war. Over time, I honestly believe my great-great grandmother
forgot that my great-grandmother was not her flesh-and-blood
child.

Maybe not. On her deathbed, she cried over
my great-grandfather’s death. It was the first and only time she
openly mourned the loss of her child.

Like his father, my grandfather ran off to
war leaving a pregnant girlfriend behind. The pregnant girlfriend,
a white girl, dumped the baby, my mother, on my great-great
grandmother’s doorstep. The note read, “My parents want to kill the
Indian baby. They say they are going to press rape charges. Please
care for her. She’s not safe with me.” There was no signature and
no way to track the mother. My great-great grandmother was 49 years
old.