Multiplex Fandango (26 page)

He was so close to h
ome, so close to his wife and child
—
he couldn't lose himself so near the end.
Here and there homes still stood, battered and beaten, but still a home where the occupants could count on the protection of the walls and the comfort of a sturdy ceiling.

Skins swooped and grasped at him, but he wouldn't let them attach.
His family had once been samurai, so he wielded the metal as if it was the finest sword, and he was the strongest warrior.
The skin birds tripped him once, but he managed to get back to his feet with only the memory of a recipe for
kuromame
to remind of how close he'd come.

When he turned onto his street, it was with a scream of joy.
He found himself laughing as he swung and batted away the skin-birds that seemed increasingly desperate to attach to him.
He spied his house halfway down the block, still standing and barely damaged.
Warm shards of joy skewered his doubts as he realized that he was almost home.

Everything was going to be okay.

I am Itoro Haruki.

I am Itoro Haruki.

My wife is Katsumi.

My son is Mynami.

Suddenly a skin-bird struck him full in the face.
He dropped the metal bar.
As it clanged to the street, he used both hands to claw at the skin as foul memories intruded.

...taste of her sweet clean skin.

...smell of jasmine at the hollow of her throat.

...stickiness of the blood seeping from my slash across her stomach.

No! He screamed.
He didn't see a face in the memory, but it reminded him too much of Katsumi.
His torso lurched and twisted as he grasped the skin with both hands and jerked it free.
A window had broken on the house next door and Itoro impaled the dread thing on a spike of broken glass.

Then he dashed for the front door.
He tried the latch.
It was unlocked.
He rushed inside.
Slamming the door behind him, he placed his back to the door.
There on the mat against the wall were his wife and son.
Huddled together, they stared at him.
He experienced both delight and panic in the single second that their gazes locked.

The memory of the murder had nothing to do with Katsumi.
She and his son were alive.
But the look in their eyes.
Was it the scar?
Was it so bad?
He turned to check it in the mirror near the door and saw that it was indeed a horrific wound.
A palm-sized piece of skin had been ripped free when he'd disengaged himself from the man he'd been behind at the train station.
But perhaps it would heal without much scarring if he took care of it.
In the meantime, if it scared her so much he'd keep it covered.

"Katsumi, I was so worried," he said, turning back around.
"Mynami, my son, how are you?"

He stepped towards them, causing his wife and child to draw their feet up as they huddled closer together.
The abject terror in their eyes didn't match the joy that had come home to his heart.

"What's wrong?
Are you worried about this?" he asked, pointing to his cheek.
"We can get that fixed."
He stepped closer and Katsumi opened her mouth to scream, so he stepped back.
"My darling, what's wrong?
Why are you so scared?"

"Get out of my house," she stammered.

"But Katsumi
—
"

"I don't know how you know my name, but stop using it!"

Thoughts swept through his mind.
Was there someone else in the house?
Was she trying to warn him?
What had happened for her to act this way?

"Daddy is on backwards, mommy."

"I know, honey.
Don't look."

On backwards
?
He felt his naked chest and back and couldn't decipher the meaning of his son's cryptic statement.

But the child wouldn't be hushed.
"Daddy's tattoo.
It's on this man's chest.
Did he steal it, mommy?
Did he steal daddy's tattoo?"

Itoro's eyes shot wide.
He examined the skin from his chest, remembering how he'd had to peel away from the man in front of him.
And there in the center of his chest surrounded by blackened skin was the line-drawing of a dragon, wings folded in, claws wrapped around a sword.
He'd had that tattoo done on his eighteenth birthday to match his father's.
Haruki men had dragon tattoos going back to the reformation when they'd once been a powerful clan.
Having the symbol tattooed on their backs was to remind them that they'd once worn the symbol proudly on the backs of their armor.
He remembered how much the tattoo had hurt and how he'd bloodied his lip by biting down on it, damned if he'd show pain in front of his father.

Daddy is on backwards
, his son had said.

How had the tattoo moved from his back to his front?

That's impossible unless...

He stared imploringly at his wife and son.

"I am Itoro Haruki," he said.

They shook their heads.

Then he realized that Itoro Haruki had died in that train station.
Perhaps by heart attack or by the explosion sucking the oxygen from his lungs or by the sheer weight of the men who'd melted together, the man who'd once been Itoro Haruki was dead.
He'd died, but his spirit had lived on, needing desperately to return to his family.
Like the skin from the little schoolgirl or the skin-birds hanging from the line, his mortal remains had lived on after his death, striving to find a home for his memories.

His body was that of the man behind him.

His soul was his own.

So who was he?

He became as frightened as the woman he'd thought was his wife as he realized that he did not have the answer, might
never
have the answer, and was as lost as the woman on the bridge who could only sing that song as the bodies bobbed past and Hiroshima fell all around them.

***

Story Notes: I was invited to an anthology called A Dark and Deadly Valley. The idea was to write horror stories based on different events of WW II. I wasn’t given a choice. The editor assigned the bombing of
Hiroshima
to me and I was daunted. Not only was it a terrible thing for the Japanese, but it was also a terrible thing to have done. It was a lose
-
lose
,
and I was supposed to write about it somehow without doing a pastiche or inadvertently being disrespectful. Consequently, I spent a lot of time researching the event. What happened in the train station actually happened, hundreds of men melted together as they waited to go to work. So I began there and focused my story on the nature of identity.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 12

The Crossing of Aldo
R
ay

Starring Aldo Ray as a father who only wants
to

return to
America
in order to save his child

“Puts the whole mess of illegal border crossing and desperation in a whole new light.”

–
Homeland Security Weekly

Soundtrack by Blue Oyster Cult

“
Deep in each man is theknowledge that something

knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot

be fled nor hid from
.”

—
Cormac McCarthy,
The Crossing

In the long cold evening with the darkness dripping from the sky, I stood among them all. I, Aldo Ray, was ready to cross. I was ready to die. I was ready to do anything so long as I could get home. I had to get to my son. He had been taken and here I was, caught on the wrong side of the border.

A breeze smelling of sage and tumbleweeds swept across us. I swayed with those around me, allowing the wind to push me as if I were a stalk of wheat or a wildflower along the side of the road. To do anything else would be human, and they were far removed from human.

So was I.

We moved forward into the fence. We pressed as one. I could feel it give. I could feel it groan. In answer, we all groaned, adding our miserable symphony to the wind that raced along the thin barrier of metal all the way to the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other.

We had walked for two days, dragging, tripping, stumbling through torpid heat and bone-chilling cold.
El muertos
did not feel anything anymore, but for us
animados
it was all too real. We wanted to wipe the sweat from our faces and clutch our arms to our bodies, but we could not.
El caminar muertos
never would. The walking dead felt nothing. Nothing except the need to feed, to find that which they had lost, to move towards something they could no longer understand. And because they would not, neither could we—to survive meant mimicking as best we could this dance of the dead across the roiling sands of the
Sonoran
Desert
.

Los Vaqueros
began following us on the second day. They rode far out in the shadows of our crossing, careful not to let the
muertos
see their movement. Some said they were Mexican Army. Others that they were
enchantadors
and the reason for the
muertos
. Whatever they were, they could not really stop us. They just hovered on the edge of my vision, lean mirages twisting with an equine grace that left me longing to be alive once more.

But that was not to be. I was dead, or at least the
muertos
thought so. And that was the secret. They could not smell, nor did they seem to have any supernatural ability to realize that I was alive. But they could tell by movement the difference between
animado
and
muerto
. They could hear us and know from our speech that we were alive. The trick, as I had discovered on my two previous crossings, was to move like them, regardless of what might happen.

In front and behind me, I knew of four other
animados
like myself. Two of us were trying to get back to our families. Another worked for the
Zetas
out of
Nuevo Laredo
.
He was a
sicario
and muled drugs across the border. The last was an
Americano
who had gotten drunk, been robbed, and sought to return to his home. It was an irony that he had to pretend to be a dead one of us in order to get back to where he belonged so he could live.

He had approached me a week before, after having sought me out in Puerto Peñasco, on the Sea of Cortez, where I was trying to earn enough money to pay the
Coyotes
for safe passage across the fence. A shrimp-boat captain I knew pointed me out as one who knew how to cross.

“I need to get back,” he had said.

“No way.
Usted está en América. Usted no puede pretender estar muerto muy bien
.”

“But I can pretend to be dead,” he argued. “I’ll do what it takes. All I want is to go home.”

I still turned him down. How can someone from a land that is so alive be any good at pretending to be dead? And I would have never have shown him had I not gotten the call from
mi esposa
telling me that my son had disappeared from the playground. Some predator had stolen him and I needed to return. So I taught the
Americano
, also knowing that I might need him to help me if it came to that.

“Are you sure they can’t tell I’m alive?”

I remember how remarkable it was that he never once disbelieved in the
muertos
. He took it for granted that they were real—so American to believe so easily.

Then we had lain on the ground pretending to be dead, our bodies covered in pig’s blood and entrails until the herd had appeared. They came from the Black Sand, heading inexorably towards a lonely spot in the desert where it looked like the dunes met sky. When they came grunting and groaning over the top of us, the hardest thing was to keep still. We let them stagger above us, taking us for fellow
muertos
. The herd was halfway over me when in a state of electric terror I slowly lurched to my feet and joined them in their northbound shuffle.

That was two days ago. Two days of sweating and shitting and crying as I cramped and stumbled, so many times almost giving away my living condition. They never stopped so I never stopped, until we came to the fence the Americans had built. So many thought it was to keep people like me out. They had no idea about the Black Sand that was growing like a cancer through the old country, infecting all of those who walked across it, turning them into mad, hungry creatures.

We kept pushing against the fence. I felt the press of dead and rotting bodies against me. Teeth snapped near my ear. I watched beetles burrowing into the skin of the woman directly in front of me, someone’s mother who was forever changed. Here and there pieces of them were missing, as older bodies had risen up while the Black Sand crept across the land. Some were nothing but dry bones and guitar-string tendons. Others had blown open, the heat expanding their bodies until the stitches along their torsos had snapped, peeling back the skin like their flesh were a strange, rare fruit that blossomed only on the march.

Suddenly a man screamed. It was the
sicario
. He had lost it. He shouted for the
muertos
to get away from him, for them to let him through. There was an uncomfortable rustling as they began to turn towards the flailing movements of one they had thought of as their own.

He screamed again, this time using my name.
If you want to see him again
, he shouted.

I turned with the
muertos
, just in time to watch one of them chew his ear off, as casually as a cow would munch a wild flower in a field.

The
sicario
pushed the thing that had once been a woman away and drew a pistol from beneath his poncho. He fired several shots towards the knees of those nearest him, sending them tumbling to the sand. He turned towards the barrier and did the same thing, until a pathway was cleared for him.

He hollered for me once again, but I could no more help him than I could help myself.

He leapt upon the dead, writhing bodies, using them as steppingstones for his last, desperate jump. He dropped the gun and grasped the top of the fence all in one gallant move. He began to heave himself up to the top, when one of the things grabbed his foot. It held him there, as a
muerto
child crawled up its back and sunk broken yellow teeth into the mule’s leg.

The
sicario
screamed and kicked, but could not break free. The
muerto
child wrenched back its head and came away with meat, leaving red, shiny bone free to be tickled none so gently by the hot desert air. The
sicario
screeched incoherently. This time when he kicked out, he lost his grip and fell backwards. He hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud and was quickly lost from sight amongst the crush of the dead.

His screams were abruptly silenced, only to be replaced by the hungry groans of the
muertos
who were too far away to feed, but realized that a meal was being missed just beyond their grasp.

I groaned with them, at once both horrified by the death and relieved that it was not me.

Then I spied a camera atop the barrier. It sat several meters west of my herd and focused on the incident. The Americans saw everything. That they did not do anything was so much a part of who they were. I imagined them in some sort of immense building with a million monitors, watching everyone do everything, but doing nothing about it themselves. What good, I wondered, was all that technological superiority if it was never used?

As the weight of a dead old man pressed against me, I became aware of the packets taped to my ribs and chest. They contained I knew not what, but getting them to the other side was what the
sicario
told me would keep my son alive. They had found me soon after the
Americano
and co-opted both of us into their crime. For it was their car that my son had entered.

The barrier began to creak and bend. It was not designed for the weight of the herd. The excitement of the feast had brought more
muertos
forward until the press drove all the air from my lungs. I was desperate to breath, inhaling shallowly as I pushed with the rest. My head swam. For a moment I was no longer there, but transported to a time before.

“Aldo,” came the plaintive cry down the telephone. “José is taken.”

“What do you mean, taken?”

“He was at the playground with the other boys, then on the way home, he got into a car.”

“What kind of car? Whose car?”

“A big one. A town car I think.” The unspoken question was—did I know to whom it belonged?

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course not.” She cursed through her sobs. “Aldo, you know we can’t do that. Why such a question?”

“Have there been any calls?”

“Why would there be calls? Who would call?”

“I don’t know.”

My lie lay there, expanding into the silence. Finally she spoke once more.

“Get him back, Aldo. Do what you have to do to get him back. ¿
Comprende
?”

“
Si
,” I had said. I had been about to tell her how much I loved her when the dial tone hit me like a blow in the gut. Do what you have to do to get him back, she had said. So I had.

The
Americano
began to sob. He was several feet to my left and I could feel the shudder of bodies as they turned towards him. The stress of being dead was too much for him, as I knew in my heart it would be.

He too had packets taped to him, as did the other like me who was returning to her family—a young woman who had been picked up in a raid on a processing plant in
Illinois
and deported. She had the longest way to travel, but her determination was that of a mother who had to return to her children. If I had to wager, it would be on her. If I had bet on the
Americano
, I would have lost.

I saw what would happen before he felt the teeth sink into his shoulder. A
muerto
, who reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Nogalas who sold overpriced rugs to
touristas
, began to chew on the
Americano
as if he were a rack of prime meat. First one bite and then another. The
Americano
screamed, the sound barely registering amidst the groans around us, as the herd once again pressed itself into the fence.

The obstruction before us began to shriek in protest. Reinforced metal, backed by
rebar
and steel-pilings, it was no match for the combined press of the dead. With a metallic scream, a section tore free and gave way. The first rows of
muertos
stumbled through the gap, as those behind trampled them to the ground. Limbs were crushed and broken as those who had fallen sought to stand while the others above them continued to shuffle forward.

I was far enough back to keep my balance. The groans increased as the
muertos
found the way ahead open. Like the cry of cattle about to stampede, they raised their heads and moaned towards the jet-black sky. I groaned with them, and in my lament felt compassion for those who were dead and about to die once more. The unfairness of it struck me, even though I could do nothing about it. That is what made me human, I supposed—the realization of what was being lost.

After the fence was breached, I lost sight of the
Americano
. We surged forward onto a flat plain. I had been here before. The terrain and location of the Black Sand almost ensured that the herd would end up at the same position along the border. To our left and right metal walls had been constructed like chutes in a cattle yard, guiding us onward to where I could see the
arroyo
begin. We shuffled and lurched forward. As always I wondered if the
muertos
knew where they were going. Did they have a goal, or were they as mindless as they seemed? What were they hungry for?

Then it happened.

I stumbled and fell to my knees. I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I had forgotten that I was supposed to be mindless and dead. A clumsy foot planted upon my back drove me into the ground. Another struck the back of my head and I must have blacked out for a moment.