The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (20 page)

“You’re going to have to pay me so much money,” José María said as he sipped a can of PBR in my dorm room. He took slow, methodical sips from the beer, trying to stay composed as the alcohol hit his liver.
 

“I will have to owe you,” Dennis Cho said.

The game of poker was ending, and Dennis was dozing off. He scratched his balls through his basketball shorts and shuffled off to his room.

“Nice meeting you
,
José,” he said.

José María glanced sideways in the room, as if invisible friends were there, meeting his approval. He took another sip and let out a belch.

Trying to be a grown little man among us. Always ready to prove something.

My roommate Morgan was gone for the night, so he took her bunk.
 

“Now,
you
are going to have to pay
me
,
reina
,” José María said.

“Pay you for what?”

“For being like Reddit to you. I am an Aztec myth nerd. Ask me anything.”

He was insufferable.

“I need you to tell me all you know,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time before we have to go down there.”

“I realize that,” José María said.

“Your tonal—how did you find it?”

“I dunno—it was in my dream. On my thirteenth birthday. Just like everyone else. I fell into a dream of red
-
and
-
white clouds, and then it was next to me. A flint knife.”

One of the twenty tonales.

My mother’s tonal was grass. My father’s was movement.

And none of it made any sense to me.

“
The tonalpohualli should tell us,” my brother said. He pulled out books from the stacks next to the bed. This was his collection. The tonalpohualli was the sacred Aztec calendar. Anyone could find their tonal there, like a zodiac sign. We had looked mine up. Technically
,
it was supposed to be the house.

“Why didn’t Mom and Dad just tell us our tonal
before
we turned thirteen? Why all the mystery?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” José María said. “You can know it, but you have to find it. Really find it.”

“I have never seen a house. I have never felt a house. And I certainly saw nothing like a house at the gate.”

“Well, you at least know what you need to find,” José María said.

“Do you know how this wizard would have opened a gate in Lake Michigan?”

“Not exactly, but there is something out of the norm with stats for that year. Lake-related murders and deaths in the lake happen in the years before and after 2007. In fact, 2007 remains mostly death-free as far as I can tell
.
Unless you don’t count the people that off themselves. There’s a few suicides in the lake that year.”

“You sure are casual about all this death,” I said.

“Hey can we order a pizza? Munchies.”

I ignored this request for a moment.

“One thing bothers me,” I said. “Why isn’t the gate in Mexico City itself?”

“Maybe these are gates out of space and time,” José María said. “Like wormholes. You know, from physics. You open a door in one place, and it appears in another place and time This gate in Lake Michigan is secret, I think.”

José María looked older suddenly, and I could really imagine him as a man, maybe with a family and a trustworthy wife someday. José María had real imagination and a lot of heart. Not to mention all this knowledge he jammed in his memory.

“Tell me about secret gates,” I said.

“No, not yet,” he said, sounding even more adult than before. “Let me sleep on it, and when we get downtown tomorrow, I’ll tell you my theory.”

“Fine,” I said. I went to brush my teeth, and he followed after me.

We both slept soundly, though I don’t know how. We were more wired than ever.

Snow pelted the streets and the roof of the El train. José María wore his hoodie over his down jacket, and he looked like a puffy doll.

“If I told anybody this, they would laugh me off the street,” he said, “but I think Arkangel was right. Mictlán is just a place. One of many.”

“Many what?” I said.

“Many cities. Cities in other worlds. Places out of space and time, but cities nonetheless. Cities that can be
visited
.”

“And what does Arkangel have to say about Mictlán? It’s too late for me to learn all their music,” I said.

“Well, all their songs are stories, you see,” he said, “and according to the trilogy of albums, the gates opened not too long ago.”

“They were sealed before?”

“Not exactly, not how you think,” José María said. “Gates to the other worlds were always accessible, but that was a place for the priests and the wizards to squeeze through. According to the second album,
The Golden Architect,
a change in the cosmos is allowing more stuff to seep back and forth in our time.”

“When did that happen?” I said.

“It started in late 2012, but it’s almost irrelevant, because Arkangel says it’s gradual. It doesn’t just open up overnight.”

“That means more people can step into the other worlds more easily,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So if a wizard made a gate in Lake Michigan in 2006, maybe it’s easier to open smaller ones, like the one at the Aragon.”

“I can’t believe this all sounds so normal to me, but hey, I’m listening with full attention,” José María said.

“And how many worlds are there?”

“Thirteen. Says it right there in the liner notes, and the closing song.”

He showed me the Arkangel CD and its kaleidoscope of red and purple shapes, the liquid lettering dripping off the edges. Its gold border.

“And that would mean there are—” I said.

“Yes,
that
many
cities.”

“And are all the cities in…the Aztec world?” I said. I knew that there was also an overworld for the Aztecs, and other gods and creatures that lived there.

“Oh
,
no,” José María said, giggling. “The only city that maps to the Aztec myths is Mictlán. The other cities are—more terrifying than that. And not Aztec at all.”

“How can that be?” I said.

“According to Arkangel, some of the cities are friendly to visitors. Those places can get a little spooky, but—”

I knew I could complete his sentence, because that was definitely one Arkangel chorus I knew by heart.

“Some of the thirteen cities are much, much worse than the others.”

It was my suggestion to walk through Millennium Park, and even now, after everything that has happened, and all that pain, I still regret having done so.

We were stopped twice as we walked across the park. Once by security. A second time by police. They checked out our IDs
,
and for now, I wasn’t yet flagged in their database. My heart didn’t stop racing until we reached the center of the park.

The city had announced that the park would be remodeled into a memorial for freedom in 2017. The Pritzker dome was already being dismantled to make way for the spear-shaped tower that would take its place.

The snow hid the grass, and I was glad. The layer of ice helped me keep some distance from the memories of all that death on the ground. The color green was an instant reminder of the Millennium Riot, and I welcomed the lie that the snow told me.
 

Temperatures were dropping fast, and we inched along the BP bridge. Memories blasted my mind, and the colors of the city screamed as if they were made of neon and fire. I shut my eyes for a few seconds at a time.
 

Breathe.

I fought off nausea and fear, and José María smoked a joint, whistling to himself and sliding down the last twenty feet of the bridge as if on a slide. The rock salt on the ground impeded his movement, but he looked happy anyway.

We walked along the bike path, headed to the very spot where my father had burned twigs over the water on my birthday. We didn’t talk as the gray clouds rolled over the water of the lake.

“If that is where we go to die, it seems too sad,” I said.

“Mictlán, you mean?” said José María.

I nodded.

“Well, other Gods have been down there; you know that,” he said.

“Quetzalcóatl?”

Quetzalcóatl
.
The most iconic of all Aztec gods. Perhaps the only one that people recognized in America. He was the feathered snake. The bearded white man. The progeny of the sun.

“They called him the White Tezcatlipoca,” José María said. “He’s one of the four Tezcatlipocas.”

“That makes no sense. How could four separate gods be the incarnation of a single god?” I said.

“Well, you heard of the trinity in the Catholic Church. Doesn’t take a genius to see how it works.”

“And he went down to Mictlán, then?”

“Sure, he went down there to restore life to humankind. Because all the humans had died out already.”

The way they die when a flu pandemic wipes them out. Or when meteors hit the Earth. Or when nuclear blasts pulverize us off the planet.

“But he’s not down there at all now, is he?”

“He went there once, and whatever he did there allowed man to be reborn. He got the fuck out, like any sane god with superpowers would do.”

I laughed, but I had to know for sure.

“Couldn’t he
still
be there?” José María said.

“Not sure what Quetzalcoatl looks like, so I don’t know.”

“Well, he’s not made of darkness, so if you saw him, you would know. He’d maybe be radiating light. And you know, it’s not like he could hide—being a feathered serpent and all—”

“Shut up,” I said. “If he was down there ages ago, it doesn’t matter. That’s not gonna help us. I have one thing to do, and it’s my tonal.”

“Good deal,” my brother said, respecting my anger and confusion.

We rolled off our packs from our shoulders and found a spot right north of Chicago Avenue. From this curved part of the bike path, we could lean over the concrete and see the gray waves leap toward us.

“You’ll wait for me here, then,” I said. “If I’m gone too long, well, you’ll know what happened.”

“You’re coming back; don’t worry.”

I wanted to believe everything my brother said.

He removed his winter coat and got down to his hoodie. He rolled up the sleeves and his tattooed arms got to work. He set a thin blanket on the ground and placed a set of tools on it in even rows.

We performed the ritual according to what we remembered hearing from our grandmother Blanca when we were children, stories my father told us and the books that José María carried in his L.L. Bean pack.
 

The ritual hurt. We sat cross
-
legged, drumming the concrete at first with wooden spatulas—it’s all we could find—José María smoking his cigarette and invoking words in the best Náhuatl he could muster. We burned herbs that José María stole from our parents’ house.

It was weak drumming in terms of volume, but we both felt it and heard it.

And the longer we drummed, the more the sounds of Lakeshore Drive faded away.

We drummed in a steady beat, and the waves of the lake got quieter.

I worried we’d break the wooden spoons, but they skittered on the concrete over and over.

I was scared of the Xolotl and even more scared of the creature called the Ocullín, but I saw the face of the woman at the Pritzker haunting me. I saw her eyes go flat again, and I wanted to fix the emptiness I saw in them.

The drumming felt steady, but our arms grew tired. What was I supposed to hear or see?

We gave it a go this way, risking hypothermia and frostbite for an hour. Nothing worked. The sun would rise soon, and I felt frustrated.

“Not working,
reina
,” José María said. He laughed.

“Stop laughing; fix this.”

“Fine,” he said.

He reached into his pack for a headphone splitter, and he jacked both of us into his iPod. He put his giant headphones over his head, and I stuffed earbuds into my ear canals.
 

He tapped the playlist named “#13SC
,
” and it started to play.

We had drummed on the concrete
,
convinced that would help us find the entrance, but we had been wrong. What we needed besides beats was to
feel
the sound, to feel music.