Reunion (19 page)

“Skulls!?” Another sudden impulse to swing back to the curb, reach for the radio.

“You must be the only Kogi in Chicago,” said Buzz very proud of himself. This was a hard I.D., the guy could have been taken for someone from Kuwait, any of the United Arab Emirates.

“There's a couple. But I figured I better get out while the getting's good. Now with all the publicity … it's been centuries that the Colombian government has been trying to aniquilate us.”

“Not ‘aniquilate,' try ‘anihnilate,'” said Buzz.

“But how do you know Kogi words?” asked the driver as he pulled around the Field Museum, this big loop back north along the frozen lakefront. His girlfriend was right. It was a curse to get married in the middle of all this deep freeze.

“I'm just working on a book on the mother goddess cultures of ancient South America, and I'm tracing the Kogi back to the Old World, you know, Asia Minor, Middle East, North and East Africa … ”

“And the little woman?” said the driver, warming up now, looking at Malinche in the rear-view mirror.

“She's a Pakistani. She's a big help. Urdu is practically the same as Hindi and Hindi is Sanskrit-based … ”

The driver shaking his head.

“I just know to drive.”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Buzz, “you must have some big visionings too, the future, the planet, The Big Picture.”

“Well …” the driver getting embarrassed. Under the surface of ignorance all sorts of holistic mega-visionings. Buzz could feel them, could see Chicago through the driver's eyes, cold, dead, precarious, so very, very new, recent. Not a vision he shared or even wanted to share, pushing it out of his own mind and sensibilities. The driver sitting back now, relaxed, “this is so crazy, this whole thing … ”

“Only because everyone's so ignorant. They know all the football scores, but could care less about the Mamas … ”

Malinche laughing again.

“Not the Mamas again!”

“The Mamas are the Kogi wise men, that's all, the ones who are raised on a cocaine diet, full time in the dark, so that they have inner instead of outer vision … ”

The driver smiling.

“I really thought you were immigration. You know there are tons of not-legals here in Chicago. It's the best place for us, really. No questions asked. That's why I was so worried. I mean even to turn the sacred drug into, you know, business … ”

“I'd love to go back to the Santa Marta mountains,” said Buzz, “I love Cartagena, Puerto Hormiga, Monsú … ”

The driver shrugging his shoulders.

“I don't know. I know a small piece … place … but … ”

“How do you like it here?”

The driver eloquently sweeping across the vista of the Chicago skyline with his left hand.

“Why so much UP and so little OUT? It looks like they have an artificial mountain complex, no?”

Buzz impressed, but not surprised.

Mama speaketh to Mama out of the Great Darkness.

“You're right. And half the country's still uninhabited. Do a cross-country drive some time and you won't believe how dark most of the country is at night. Spooky … ”

“I have,” said the driver, lowering his voice, looking around outside as if there were “things” clinging to his cab,
vigilando, siempre vigilando
, watching, always watching, “I came into the country via California, but the word was out that Chicago [She-cago] was THE place, so a bunch of us bought a car and came here. Guatemaltecos, Colombianos, de todos los partes … ”

“De what?” asked Malinche.

“All different places,” translated Buzz.

“I like it, though, don't you,” said Malinche, “it's like a big international party all the time … ”

“Not too much a party,” said the driver, “there's more than a million [mealion] peoples in prison in this country right now. They're always trying to rob me. And this piece of shit [sheet] plastic between me and the customer [banging on the plastic guard between the front and back seats], you think that's going to stop bullets? I was already shot once,” right hand against his neck, you could see a scar that looked almost like a burn-scar, like someone had placed a red-hot poker on his neck, “only I swerved when he shot and instead of going in, it just cut [cot] the surface … I smashed the cab up that night. It was big
trouble for me. The company covered for me. We're like slaves. I read a lot now that I learned how. I used to just read, like, INSIDE, what THE INSIDE said, what the INSIDE UTERO would say, but without the sacred drug, in this puta fake-mountain pais, I donno … ”

Folding in on himself now.

Colombian Buddha sliding into the Om Sweet Om inside himself. That was it.

Their minds practically communicating with each other, Buzz sitting back, “watching” the driver's mind. It was all mountains now. He was ascending up from the coast, up above the snowline, to the world of the lost tribes that still called their chief priests Siva-Lamas, clear-air and hardly a touch of Man, the water-reservoir of the world, the sanity reservoir, what kept the earth and sun in equilibrium, the holiness of their eclecticism … isolation …

Malinche looking at Buzz, shrugging her cute little shoulders, Buzz putting his hands up a little, palms toward her, closed his eyes, puckered his lips, a mute, sign-language THAT'S OK, RESPECT HIM, THEY HAVE THEIR OWN WAY OF DEALING WITH THINGS …

Both of them sitting back as they sped past the lake, totally engulfed in the grey sky, turning left, down past Passavant, Wesley Memorial Hospital, Buzz thinking, but not saying anything, not wanting to ripple/crack the seamlessness of the meditativeness that filled the cab, thinking how about your getting a job down here at Passavant or Wesley Memorial, we could get a tiny little highrise apartment, come back ‘home,' start
making phonecalls, all my cousins, reactivate Thanksgiving and Christmas, let my soul come back to my Real World …

Only not “hers,” her Soul was saying, this world wasn't hers, her mind back in the crowded streets of Karachi, bazaars and heat, saris and the smell of curry, an endless hack and chop of voices, horns, her mother's face bending down over her in her bed/crib, the edge of her sari brushing against Malinche's face, her father, grey and grave, drinking cardamom-spiked coffee, looking very solemn, talking to her about career, future ….. mixed feelings of longing and triumph about her having married him in the first place, her mother still never having come to visit, her father once, her youngest brother still in Grand Junction in a TV-Computer sales and repair place …

“This is the new modern art museum!” the driver broke into The Vision, passing by a grey stone building, nice size, “it's supposed to open this next summer … spring … take a little pressure off the Art Institute … ”

“Very nice,” said Buzz as she pulled in to the back of Water Tower Place.

“Is that good here or do you want I should go in front?”

“This is great!” said Buzz, looking at the meter, $15.00, giving him a twenty dollar bill, Malinche wincing a bit. No matter how much she/they made there were always those humble, pressed beginnings. “And thanks so much,” he said, getting out, the driver opening the front window, shaking hands again, more like family than just-made not-even-friends. Some sort of mystical brotherhood, Mama speaketh unto Mama across the Great Void … wishing he could have said goodbye in Kogi, but all he knew were loose words like NI (water), HAGI (stone), ABI (blood),
never getting colloquial, always just etymological, words like radioactive tracers, an injection of radioactive iodine into the arm, 3, 2, 1 … and voila! there it was in the thyroid …

“Take it easy.”

And he was gone, unable to really understand how the driver could have left his sacred mountains at the top of the world and come to Babylon … although … funny … for Buzz Chicago was, if not sacred mountains, then sacred swamp, sacred stones, even sacred cold … and if he lived here … sacred death … in a way something inside him tentacularly, protoplasmically reaching out and wanting to grab on to, engulf a Dying Place, as if his wanderings had been enough already, it was time to come back to his own particular origins, die, dissolve, and return to the elements …

Air.

Earth.

Water.

Fire.

Pushing his way inside the back door of Water Tower Place, up to the second floor food court, more of a crowd (if that were possible) than the Art Institute, more swarm and frenzy.

“My God, look at this!”

“It's impossible,” she said, “it's going to be an hour's wait. The time. It's … ”

Looking at her watch.

At my back I hear Time's winged chariots hurrying near …

“OK, so let's go somewhere else, there's all kinds of places around here,” turning around and going back downstairs, back outside, remembering Madame Galli's down on Chicago
Avenue, Vera Zivney and Barbara Bubon, two of his old college buddies, Loyola (Lewis Towers) right across the street from Water Tower Place, suddenly whooshed back not 50 but forty years.

He'd tried to keep contact with Barbara, but she'd written back/called back a couple of times, then stopped. Like there was something wrong (dangerous) for them to keep ties going. Illegal, immoral, out-of-bounds.

Which was what he was always afraid of if he had come back—first of all to find himself in a necropolitan City of (dead family, dead friends) Dead Bones, and then to forever lament his separation from his children, former wives, wanting to go where they all were, make it a kind of supra-geographical spiritual place where he was always visiting, sharing, touching bases, hands … if only he had the money … and not wanting to leave Malinche alone on the job, she was too much to him for that, some basic ring of sanity fastened to the rock of his existence as the winds howled around him, trying to shake him free and plunge him to his death in a rocky gorge of confusion over which he felt he hung day and night, had been hanging for most of his life …

“So where can we go?”

“Oh, just down Chicago Avenue, there's tons of places,” he said.

Wind, oh, my god, the wind and the blowing snow. Not that it seemed to bother anyone, the streets filled with shoppers, tourists, merrymakers, like it was the annual Polar Bear Fest, the annual Festival of Freezing Winds and Eternal Grey, impossible to imagine that the summer before scores of people had died from the excessive heat, from the frying pan into liquid nitrogen.

Past Loyola, feeling for a moment that if he went inside, downstairs to the basement lounge, they'd be there, Vera and Barbara and Kathy Coughlan and Andy Carney, Frank Gazzolo, another lost world forever lost …

Down Chicago. Riley's Bar and Grill. Why not?

“Let's try here!”

And in they went. Just a crappy little bar. Lots of students. All the waitresses obviously students. A table by the window, looking out at the crowds, a little less elegant here off Michigan Avenue, another dip down into the unmelted ethnic melting pot, of Blacks, Poles, Chicanos, a few Koreans and Chinese, an Egyptian (?) with five kids and husband, the perfect day for total Purdah, wrapped up cocoonishly against the punishing cold, some Aymarás beginning to stream by in his imagination, and Uros, out of their boats, actually walking, Condorhuasi people and Valdivia ancient Ecuadorian-Japanese, Diaguitos, and weird ominous devil-people, following by jaguar-spirits, snakes sprouting out of their ears, strands of hallucinogen-produced mucous streaming out of their noses … from Chavín …

“Are you alright?” asked Malinche, shaking him, bringing him abruptly back into The Now, just some old bum outside on the sidewalk, long grey coat and grey tweed cap, a face like he hadn't washed for years, screwing around with a cigarette butt he must have picked up on the street, like he was trying to pull it out and make it normal size again.

“Fine,” he answered as the wide-faced (Hungaro-Polish?) came up to them.

“Ready to order?”

Buzz always ready when it came to ordering.

“If I may order for both of us,” he said to Malinche, her smiling, acting, as always, as if she'd just stepped out of the Enterprise onto the exotic, alien soil of some planet on the other side of the galaxy.

“Sure, why not… ”

“OK, two Italian sausage sandwiches and two beers … ”

“Alcohol …” she said quietly. Number Two on the verboten-forbidden list.

“OK … you wouldn't have any non-alcoholic beer, would you?” asked Buzz.

He wasn't going to give up that easily, wanted to create, with as much fidelity as possible, the exact tastes and smells of all those college years here in this arrondissement, these streets, for all he knew (except for the waitress and that whole younger strata that she represented) maybe surrounded by some of these same faces, like that very red-faced guy wearing the brown tweed coat and fedora over in the corner, munching on a basketful of fish and chips, wasn't that the way Bill Foley would have looked, for god's sake … nah, he'd seen Bill twenty years ago in New York … although who could say he hadn't come back home like Buzz himself would like to have done …

“Two non-alcoholic beers and two Italian sausage sandwiches,” said the waitress. A comfortable woman. You looked at her and you thought Goulash and Kielbasa, knitted afghans, a houseful of kids and Kolachkis …

Buzz getting up, going over to the red-faced guy in the corner.

“Bill … ?”

The guy looking up. Drinking a real beer. Beer mug in hand.

“I'm afraid you got the wrong guy, buddy,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“No problem, I just wish I was Bill,” a broad smile, lifting up the mug, silently toasting Buzz.

Buzz sitting back down.

“Who was that?” asked Malinche.

“You can't go home again and all that,” he said as the waitress brought their non-alcoholic beers, Buzz quick to sample his. Not bad. Maybe it lacked that little extra alcoholic ‘edge,' but you could hardly notice the difference.