Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  Calliope interrupted him. “Why? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, that’s the Zuni way. I don’t know what to tell you, mujer. It’s how the story goes.”

  “You could change the story.”

  He murmured assent. “I suppose. But that’s not how oral history works. At least not ours. We tell the story as it was told to us. We don’t always know the entire story. For Zuni, there is knowledge only a few privileged leaders of the kivas can know. Though I’m an initiated member of a kiva, there are many things even I don’t know. Entiendes?”

  She nodded. It was how she felt about Bisabuela’s stories. Although she didn’t necessarily believe, she had a deep appreciation for the sacred.

  Chance continued, “Anyway, three years later, his grandfather’s people had all disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Eunjoo said. “Like my parents?”

  “Well, I don’t know, little bird. That’s just how my brother Arlen tells it, but could be.”

  “You’re always scaring her,” Calliope said, reproachfully.

  “It’s scary times, mujer. Stories are for these times.” He looked hard at Calliope, his expression tinged with something like guilt or regret, a haze she couldn’t quite read. Then his face cleared, a kind of peace, and he said, “Mujer, you want another way of looking at the world than the beliefs you were taught. Well, I was fishing at Quemado Lake watching the sun skim the ripples in the water, nothing tugging on my pole, but I didn’t care, I was thinking of an equation. The numbers and letters dancing in my head like they were part of a ceremony—they knew what their part was and they had to embody it fully to call their Spirit forth.” He shook his hair back from his face where Eunjoo had scattered it, and Calliope imagined the equations dancing around the pair of them as he spoke, could almost see the shadows and shapes encircling the tall, two-headed statue they made against the slate of the mountains beyond, the impossible blue of the sky. His hair fell back in his face anyway. He spoke with the passion of a podium, his voice amplified by an invisible microphone. “There was a moment of light. The equation and the numbers became one and the same. They converged. The equation didn’t just represent the concrete reality. The equation was the reality. As if a veil had been lifted.”

  Apocalypse. Lifting a veil. Calliope’s heart beat faster, as on a dig, unburying fossilized fish scales from the sediment of a mountaintop and realizing it had all once been underwater.

  “I never caught a fish that day. Not one tug. But I found something better. It’s the same with the stories.”

  Her eyes stung from the cold wind, or his story.

  They walked along the cracked asphalt forest giving way to yellow grasses again. Calliope checked the map every once in a while, to be sure they were making progress toward Silver City, though it might have been futile; if the map hadn’t shown them the highway was actually abandoned and overtaken, how could she trust it at all? They were hamsters on a wheel. She’d never walked so relentlessly without breaking. Excursions for her dissertation she always had a vehicle and only trekked a few miles at a time.

  Even with hiking boots and thick socks, her muscles alternated between warped as gummy plastic melting into a fire and tense as the brittle, contorted shape it twisted into once that plastic dried. Her pelvic floor ached, and she kept her hands under her belly for support. A sharp pain needled the small of her back. She clenched her jaw and kept walking, the forest yielding to scrub and rocks.

  After several minutes of silence, Eunjoo asked, “What kind of animal was it?”

  “Huh?”

  “That your brother found, where the broken bone was.”

  “Oh that.” Chance laughed. “You know, I never asked him. What kind of animal should it have been?”

  “A coyote.” She pressed her finger to his face, said, “A coyote bit me.” She said this proudly. “It hurts.”

  “A coyote, oh yeah?”

  He looked to Calliope, his expression asking is that a tall tale? and Calliope’s gut twitched. She felt responsible, and explained as much, told him what had happened at the convenience store, how she’d found Eunjoo crouched in front of the pack.

  He turned his head back, craning to look up at Eunjoo. When he couldn’t twist that far, he pulled her easily from his shoulders, held her in front of him, face-to-face, and said solemnly, “Old Coyote is a trickster. He can’t ever be trusted. Not fully.” His lips curled into a sly smile, and he winked. “Coyote can also show you the deep mysticism of life and creation. He reveals truth behind illusion and chaos. Do you know what chaos is?”

  “No.”

  “I’m named after the theory, right? Chance.” He smiled wide, the furrows of his brown skin like ruts in the earth. “Oh, my mother didn’t mean to name me for an equation, but that’s the beauty of chaos. Aristotle said the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. If you don’t know the exact initial conditions of a system, any uncertainty will be amplified and you’ll lose predictive power. You follow me?”

  Eunjoo shook her head no.

  Calliope laughed. “She’s a child, Chance. You have to break it down.”

  “Kids are smarter than grown-ups, mujer.” To Eunjoo, “You’ve heard of the butterfly effect?”

  Calliope again laughed. “I don’t think they teach that in first grade.”

  “Hmm. Well they should. It’s like this: the beating of a butterfly’s wings can theoretically cause enough of an atmospheric disturbance,” he paused, corrected, “strong wind to alter later weather outcomes. Tiny things. Big changes. So, imagine big things, the changes those could render. My mother told it to me like this: if the dung beetle moves, it’s because someone has moved it. And when he moves, so too does the rabbit. And then the eagle. It never ends.” He let go of her shoe, blew a breath into his hands, opened it again as if releasing a butterfly. “Listen, little bird. The wisdom of Coyote isn’t straightforward. He’s tricky.” He reached for her hand, inspected her thumb. “This bite, he’s telling you something.” He lugged her back over his shoulders, and added, “If a small set of insect wings could change the world’s world, imagine what Coyote’s bite could do.”

  Calliope’s chest prickled. Despite herself, she walked closer to Chance, periodically glancing into the Gilas and the scrub-covered hills that were now surrounding them, searching for coyotes or Suuke or worse. She said, “Those ko’ko, then. Even if I accept that they’re no longer palm-sized dolls made of cottonwood and feathers, why were they after us? Aren’t they gods? What would your gods have against us?”

  “Back when the world was soft, the people climbed out of the underworld and crossed the rivers, joining the sacred lake Kothluwala’wa. But before we crossed the lake, mothers were warned their children would change, so hang on tightly no matter what. When we got to the middle and the children transformed into frogs, tortoises, snakes, dragonflies, they pinched and bit at the mothers, who, understandably, were terrified, and, despite the warning, let go. The children were lost to us. When we finally crossed to the other side, those children whose mothers held onto them became normal again, and the mothers who had lost their children in the water wept, but were told their children hadn’t died. They’d become the ko’ko and danced underwater. It’s like a dancehall down there. And when we die, we’ll join them, as ko’ko. The twin gods told the mothers to take heart. When their time on Mother Earth was over, they would rejoin their children in Kothluwala’wa. There is no punishment after death like the Anglos believe. Only continued survival.”

  “Then where did the Suuke come from? If there’s no punishment?”

  “No punishment after death.”

  He stopped walking, pulled Eunjoo from his shoulders, held her against his chest. Calliope turned and faced them, her stomach tightening from his abrupt halting, as when he’d crouched in the dirt outside the hangar and predicted the coming o
f the Suuke. Her throat tight, she asked, “What is it? Something coming?”

  “I don’t think so. Just, most ko’ko help the Zuni. Occasionally the Spirits come to us as clouds. That’s why we dance, to ask for their intercession.” He breathed out deeply. “But some ko’ko are like bogeymen. Well, bogeypeople really. Male and female, husband and wife.”

  “Where do they come from? I thought ko’ko came from the lost children?”

  “No, the children joined the ko’ko. The ko’ko have always been. And I can’t tell you how or why some are bogeys. Doesn’t every culture have its own version of a disciplinarian? For Zuni, it’s the Suuke couple, as ko’ko. Behave, or the Suuke will steal you away in their basket.” He sighed. “My wife used to say that to our daughter.”

  Something sharp jabbed her. He was married? Why hadn’t he said anything before? Why did that realization make Calliope feel sick? The ring on his right hand. Wrong hand.

  “Used to?”

  He began walking again, still holding Eunjoo at his chest. He cleared his throat, “She’s underwater now, mujer. In that dancehall.” He looked up toward the sky, where a storm was forming past the mountains. “Or maybe that cloud over there.”

  A lump in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not the end.”

  She nodded. Thought of Phoenix. Quickened her step, her whole body raw with exhaustion. She couldn’t wait to hold her boy.

  She also thought of Chance’s wife. Back on the Zuni rez? Waiting for him? Then why was he detouring to help Calliope? Why not go straight home? She wanted to ask but couldn’t form the words. They fell in step again, side by side as the road stretched ahead, vast and empty as grief.

  * * * *

  Hours later, they’d found a car not shot through with branches or wrecked. Calliope, quivering with cold, was relieved to climb in and blast the heater. They would have driven the rest of the journey but for entropy. “We are ruled by the laws of nature,” Chance had said when the car had broken down and neither he nor Calliope could fix it. “Only, I’m afraid try as we might, we don’t always know those laws, though in our human arrogance we think we do.”

  Calliope would have been glad to discuss physics and wrongheaded scientists except that her limbs were red with frostbite and she was hungry enough to gnaw on tree bark, all their snacks from the campers’ tent already eaten. The distance between her pinched finger and thumb had grown teasingly thin—they were so close.

  She found blankets in the trunk of the rundown car, wrapped them around herself and Eunjoo, and for what seemed like forever, walked on. Thin snowflakes were flurrying—melting before they hit the ground, beautiful granules of ice, nevertheless, landing sometimes on their dark hair and faces—by the time Tía’s hacienda silhouetted into view. Sunset had turned the cloudswell on the horizon brightly purple, so the whole land glowed. Calliope was running even before she exclaimed this is it and Chance followed suit, calling, “Wait, mujer. Let’s make sure it’s safe.”

  “Safe?” Calliope called back, laughing with manic joy. She wiped the ice-rain from her cheeks like cold tears with her free hand, the other still under her belly, which screeched with labor-like pain she ignored. Panting, she said, “It’s my family. Of course it’s safe.”

  But she had to stop at the arroyo gushing across the dirt road. The log bridge Tía had built for crossing when the rains came and the waters rose had been knocked down, and though the wooden beams were partially damming it, the water still rushed swiftly.

  Chance at her side, “Is there another crossing?”

  “Hold Eunjoo,” Calliope answered, and stepped into the icy water. A shock of cold seeped through her boots and sweats, instantly numbing her legs and sending veins of ice-pain up her thighs and into her pelvis. She trudged forward, pushing her body against the rushing force, conjuring Phoenix with everything inside of her. I’m coming, baby. I’m almost there.

  “Ay, mujer,” Chance murmured, hoisting Eunjoo upon his shoulders again, and following Calliope into the arroyo.

  On the other side, her body was shuddering, her bottom half soaked and freezing in the ice-wind. She tried running, couldn’t. Moved haltingly, and when Chance emerged from the water, he helped her forward.

  As they approached the front porch Calliope’s chest thudded along with their boots tramping wetly up the steps, littered with grayish white she thought at first was snowflakes then realized was dead moths. She turned the doorknob.

  A gunshot pierced the air.

  Two images flashed through her mind. Susana in the hay. And Chance’s wailing bone.

  PART TWO

  FIRST PEOPLES

  “A line of stories has followed us to this present moment …

  All that is left is for us to record these images, these voices,

  so that those who follow in our footsteps may meet …

  the source from which we have all been birthed.”

  VANISHING VOICES

  SIXTEEN

  EMERGENCE

  What was happening in the world hadn’t come yet. Hadn’t come to Calliope. The ceasefire fails, how the world didn’t truly want freedom—at least it didn’t seem that way to those in the rubble, amidst the water cannons and blizzards and roadblocks, amidst the genocide of the Ancients. It was always coming, she knew. The country had been scrubbed of science and common sense, so she’d planned with Andres: in the occasion of the roundup they’d threatened, the wall they were building, the explosion of another pipeline, the droughts-turned-floods devastating the states, he would stay behind and give medical attention, and she would flee with Phoenix to her tía’s.

  She hadn’t shut out the horror. She’d sent supplies bought on Amazon: heat lamps and emergency Mylar thermal blankets, thick wool socks, waterproof parkas, milk of magnesia, buffalo jerky, water pouches. But she’d had fossils to sort in the lab, notes to jot, classes to teach. The world broke in segments, as a piece of bone at the joints. Her piece of world-bone had still been intact. How could she, pregnant, with a mortgage, seeking tenure, gallivant toward danger to hold the lines? Though she sympathized, though the news each night churned her gut and she saw Phoenix’s face on every child’s, she did not get involved.

  Perhaps she was fooling herself, and it was simply easier to bury one’s head in the past. About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters, Auden had written in his famous poem about the fall of Icarus: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. Calliope had argued back in an undergrad paper on postcolonialism how the “masters” had misinterpreted suffering—how those joined together in blood and pain and heartache understood the impossibility of turning a blind eye when that eye was shared.

  But the years had turned her fire lukewarm, and she’d gotten comfortable in her cushy office chair, clacking insights at the keyboard, little ticks and tocks like notches in the flint; only her weapons had dulled, and she wasn’t sure anymore what good they would do anyone.

  What was happening in the world hadn’t come yet. Until it had.

  * * * *

  The gunshot rang in her ears. She hunched in the doorway, the door swung partway into her tía’s cabin. Chance pushed Calliope and Eunjoo toward the front wall, beside a moth-covered porch swing, shouldered his rifle, and called out, “Stop shooting! We aren’t here to fight.”

  A woman’s voice. “Who’s there?”

  Calliope’s heart raced. She shouted, “Tía? It’s Calliope,” and rose from her crouching place.

  Chance whispered, harshly, “Wait, mujer. We don’t know it’s her or if she’s …” He paused, grappling for words. He finally settled on, “Changed.”

  “She’s not a zombie, she’s my aunt,” Calliope said, rising the rest of the way and standing beside Chance in the doorway.

  “Tía,
I made it!” A woman in bright yellow overalls, her silver hair draped across her shoulders, appeared in the doorway, holding a rifle. Her usually friendly expression pulled into a tight grimace, eyebrows raised. This wasn’t Tía, but the artist who lived in the trailer down the creek. Tía’s girlfriend. “Oh, it’s you. Mara, you scared the shit out of us.”

  Mara’s eyes darted past Calliope, toward the yard. “Come in,” she said, her voice hushed, laced with panic. Calliope looked closely at Mara’s overalls, red stains smeared across the bib and thighs, more bloodlike than paint. Blood handprints. And dried, caked mud. Her boots were stamped with mud as well. The hairs on the back of Calliope’s neck prickled.

  She stayed rooted to the porch. Her voice smaller, she asked, “Where’s my aunt? And everyone else?”

  The furrows at Mara’s eyes deepened, her expression pained. The artist was a white woman, but her skin had always appeared sunbaked and leathery to Calliope. Mara had seemed tough, and Calliope liked that Tía had a partner and wasn’t alone on this big hacienda. Now Mara seemed waxen, nearly opalescent, unstable. She gave off the aura of a radioactive isotope. Calliope thought of the crazy hunter, the rapist. Chance’s words echoed through her mind, what if she’s changed? Calliope wished that mentirosa Amy hadn’t taken her gun. A sick swishing in her gut. She’d trusted Amy. She couldn’t trust anyone—not even her tía’s girlfriend.