“Don’t you see? When our Mother shook her troublemakers off, she took us with her.”
Calliope glanced at Chance, who nodded reassuringly.
Arlen continued, “Your family aren’t the ones who disappeared.” He picked up a ko’ko known as a mudhead from a low shelf, its doughnut-shaped mouth and disfigured, knobby bucket head, harrowing. It held a knife. Calliope shivered. Arlen placed the mudhead on one of the wooden chairs beside Calliope. “You are.”
They’d argued that night, nearly six months ago, after Arlen’s terrifying words. Arlen and Chance agreed that the previous world still existed; only it had been split apart, and their world, which belonged to Mother Earth and her people, had been given back, restored to its proper balance. They speculated that those left behind in the previous world believed the splitting was a nuclear explosion, but it had come from Mother herself, so the scientists and politicians there would see it as the irrevocable consequence of stored nuclear waste in the land, which had been building since Trinity Site and had finally come to haunt them, causing volcanic eruptions and spurring a series of climate events and earthquakes. Mother splitting herself wouldn’t appear Spiritual to them because they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. It would be like the shadows left behind in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They would believe the incredible but plausible idea that the few who had disappeared had been annihilated by the atomic bomb. Their shadows burned into the ground.
Calliope was a shadow burned into the ground.
But on the level of Spirit, what Mother’s people understood, this was the unfolding of Mother’s reclamation—which began millions of years before, when the first people started emerging from the fourfold underworld of her womb in their reptilian form. This was merely the next phase of evolution, of never-ending creation, what the Zunis had always known about levels of existence. They’d passed through several worlds before. Now they’d simply moved to the next.
The Zuni people, and all the Puebloans who were of the same Mother, would understand this. They wouldn’t need it spelled out. Malia and Nala and Wowo łashhi, all of them. They’d understand what Mother had done for them. Protected them as she’d protected herself. As she’d promised them she would so long ago.
Arlen said, “They’ll believe you dead, but you’re not dead. No deader than any of us.”
If she wasn’t dead, then there was the possibility of return.
Calliope still didn’t know if she could believe. Maybe Andres and Phoenix were alive, here, in this world. The only world she’d ever known. All the unexplainable phenomena could be explained—only she hadn’t found the right equation, the underlying principle. Her family was somewhere else in New Mexico. The eastern part of the state, maybe, near Roswell or Carlsbad? Or anywhere at all in the US. They could have been anywhere. But another world?
She could cross a state line or a country. Those borders she understood.
But crossing worlds? It didn’t make sense.
Yet Bisabuela’s voice … the Ancient Voices she heard in the cicada song on the rocks …
Since girlhood she’d understood there was so much more than she understood.
The worlds had split. And she had disappeared.
Her pulse had fluttered at her neck and wrists, insects scuttling inside her, burrowing through her skin. She’d turned toward Chance. “You knew. You knew what had happened. Why didn’t you tell me this before?” She wept, bitterness sludging her throat. “Why did you let me believe they were here … if you knew they weren’t?” She’d slapped his face, so hard it hurt her own hand. “You lied to me. You lied.”
He hadn’t reacted to being slapped, even as Arlen spoke under his breath in Zuni, his tone repulsed, and Calliope wondered briefly how different she was from Chance’s wife, as he was so different from her own husband. Chance had remained still, his expression not angry or guilty but searching. His voice level, his storyteller’s lilt, he said, “Mujer, what you’ve crossed has been much more than worlds. What you’ve carried, heavier than doubt. You wouldn’t have believed me. You wouldn’t have listened to Bisabuela’s words, allowed me to guide you, to keep you safe. I’m sorry that you’re angry, but I’ve done what I’ve been tasked with. No more or less.”
Phoenix was alive. He was alive but believed his mama was dead.
Had they held a funeral for her?
Their lives had gone on—as hers had gone on. Separately.
Arlen had seen through their facade. “Chance’s clan, his kiva, the Medicine clan … none of them will look kindly at what’s happened here. You can’t let anyone know. Chance is in trouble enough as it is. How many taboos must you break, brother?”
Calliope bristled at Arlen’s chastisement. In her mind, Chance had done nothing wrong. Nothing except keep the truth from her. But he’d protected her, he was right about that. The Suuke would have killed her otherwise, killed her corn girl. She asked Arlen, “Why were the Suuke after us? If they are gods, what reason had we given them to inflict harm? Is it such a taboo to help us?”
Arlen reached for a ko’ko on a far shelf, pulled out from behind rows of figures, the Suuke with the bow and arrow that had killed her friend. She remembered it lying dead in the snowy road beside Amy’s body, a track of arrows from its neck to groin as Chance shot it again and again then kicked it off the precipice. It seemed so innocuous as a wooden statue in Arlen’s hand, yet she knew its true form, its terrible power.
“Chance has told you of Zuni heaven?”
“The dancehall of the dead?”
Arlen nodded. “He’s told you how it was created?”
“The children crossing the water in their mother’s arms became amphibian, scaring their mothers, who let go, and the children drowned.”
“But that’s not how Zuni heaven was first created. The sacred lake, it already existed. They only fell into it, which is why they did not die but became ko’ko.” He picked up the mudhead from the chair beside her. “As he was leading them on their search for the Middle Place, the speaker of the religion, Kā-wi-mō-saw, put in charge by the twin war gods told his two children to find a place to build a village. They ascended a peak and the girl was tired. She told her brother to go on and continue searching without her while she slept under the shade of the juniper. When he returned he watched her sleeping, her dress lifting above her thighs in the evening breeze, and he thus had relations with her. She awoke and realized what he had done and began screaming, distorting her face so that it became swollen and distended and puffy, turning her into a monster. Immediately she was pregnant and gave birth to dozens of hideous beasts for children. These are the mudheads you see, their bumpy helmet-shaped heads, doughnut-swollen lips, and protruding eyes. And their mother died, her Spirit releasing from the misshapen body and hurtling herself at her brother for thrusting himself on her and causing her such a fate. At that moment, their father Kā-wi-mō-saw climbed to the top of the ridge and realized what had happened and was most grieved. He yelled out for his daughter not to kill his son. And she could not. She went away, screaming and weeping. The brother in his shame descended the mountain and dragged his feet across the plains below where a river flowed and a lake appeared. In the depths were houses and a center, a great kiva with windows to view the dance within. Both brother and sister were transformed into ko’ko and their children with them. Thus, through sin and shame was Zuni heaven created. But even this darkness and evil were transformed into something good, saving the rest of Mother’s people from a restless death and allowing them instead to live in peace after death. No matter what wrong one has committed in life, it is not too wrong to be forgiven and made right. But from that darkness, evil was released and gave rise to the demon ko’ko, like the Suuke. For though there is no punishment in death, there is always a price to pay for breaking taboo, as the brother broke taboo.” He glanced at Chance, who stood straighter, shrugging back his shoulders, as if brac
ing himself. “Not one of us can escape the price.”
Chance said, “I thought the Suuke was trying to root out anyone not of our people.” He cleared his throat, his shoulders slumping now. “I couldn’t let that happen.”
“It wasn’t up to you.”
Chance’s eyes were inexplicably sad, his voice low, nearly a whisper. “You don’t know that.”
“You skirt heresy, brother.”
“I know.”
* * * *
In the bedroom they shared in Malia’s house, the wool blankets Chance had nightly spread onto the floor where he slept by himself each cool night were now folded inconspicuously on the bed so no one would know the difference. The baby they’d been raising together all these months lifted her head, stuck her fist in her mouth, drooling. Calliope hadn’t known she was going to say it until the words were coming out. She reached for Chance’s stiff arms, looked carefully into his eyes. “Come back with me.”
He groaned softly with something like apprehension mixed with desire, mirroring her own, and slid his arms around her waist, now cinched and curvy, no longer swollen with baby weight, her body flat against his, clicking into place between his hips and thighs. She pressed her forehead against his chest, breathing rapidly at their nearness, after so many months of nearness. He smoothed back the hair curling around her neck, then kissed her neck, shoulders, collarbone, the warmth of his breath tightening her breasts into rose-shaped knots. He hardened against the folds of her dress, gathering at her thighs. He pulled her closer, though they were already locked together, as if he could shape them into one creature, connected like clay to each other.
Sundown filtering through their bedroom window, Chance’s limbs tangled with Calliope’s own, he kissed her mouth, kissed her with the thirst of a man in a desert and she, finally, no longer mirage but coconut water, she was breaking open for him. She slid the sleeves of her dress down her shoulders, slipped it along her waist and hips, shimmied it to the floor. From a string around her neck dangled the wooden coyote he had whittled for her. He met her eyes, smiled, then peeled off his shirt, revealing his muscular chest, a coyote tattoo across his left pectoral, over his heart; it howled at the moon. Calliope had seen him undress countless times over the past several months, had watched his sunbaked skin, the coyote skulking, by lamplight. She’d often been aroused by his rugged beauty, his gentleness. This evening, she dared put her mouth to his skin, roll her hands down the masa of his chest and stomach, unclasp his jeans, the same jeans she had washed for him again and again since she was his Zuni wife.
He spread a wool blanket on the floor beside the bed. The corn girl had rolled onto her back in the center of the mattress and was busily kicking toward the ceiling and sucking on her fists. She paid her mother and Chance no notice.
They knelt on the blanket facing each other, breathing heavily into each other’s skin.
She didn’t need to push aside thoughts of unfaithfulness or guilt, for in that moment she had given herself fully to story. The worlds had split. She could never understand how, though they had discussed bubble universes, their worlds like membranes floating trillionths of a trillionth of an inch apart from each other; dark matter separated them from the world they had come from, that Mother Earth had unfolded herself from, spiraling them here, across some hidden fourth dimension of space and across space into this parallel. They collided into each other, energy converting energy into hot matter and radiation, their impact no accident nor fate but part of the endless saga of creation and destruction and recreation. Two bodies pinned together with the force and mystery of a singularity.
She lay atop him, curled into him, as they finished, panting and slick against each other’s bodies. He held her as if he were afraid she would again become mirage, turn figment and float away. She breathed out deeply, her laughter surprising her. “Why weren’t we doing that the whole time?”
He laughed wryly, squeezing her, kissing her atop her head. “I didn’t know it was an option, mujer, believe me.”
She slid onto the wool blanket, and he turned sideways, facing her, their legs entwined, her head resting in the crook of his arm.
“You would leave your people for me? Though you’re meant to be here? I sometimes feel like this is your myth, your people’s story, and I’ve just fallen into it by mistake. I’m not meant to be here. I’m an intruder, not sure how I got pulled in …”
“You’re my story, mujer. I made you a promise. I’ll stay with you as long as I can. We’ll figure out what to do next once we get there. First, we have to get you home.”
Her pulse quickened at the word home. Here on the floor, lying with Chance, their whole lives seemed to stretch in front of them. It could stay this way. It didn’t have to end.
She didn’t have to rise from the dead.
He said, “It shouldn’t take more than half a day to get up to Chaco.” Arlen had suggested they try it and Calliope immediately agreed. It was a spiritual center for the people she’d been studying her whole life. Bisabuela had taken her to the sun dagger. And she’d been hearing her voice since the worlds branched apart, that light on the bridge, merging in her mind with Bisabuela’s voice on the mesa. Arlen had confirmed her suspicion. Equinox, the middle of time. And Chaco Canyon had been the Middle Place for the Ancients. Calliope had found her path. The bridge seemed to have split open in the fall equinox. Best they could figure, the spring equinox was coming March 20—three days away, give or take. Time was strange here; it didn’t work the way it worked in the previous world. It wasn’t faster or slower, didn’t evince any perceptible difference just felt different, thinner, maybe, stringier. Chance continued, “Even so we need to get moving. We can’t account for weather or other … events.”
“You don’t think there’s anything else like the Suuke out there?”
“This is Zuni land now. Could be. You saw how many ko’ko there are.”
“They aren’t all demons though.”
“No, they’re almost all benevolent, in their own ways. But we still should be careful. It’s not just ko’ko I’m worried about …” He sighed deeply, buried his face into her neck. He stroked the indent of her waist, ran his hand along the curve of her hip and thigh. She coiled herself tighter against him, and he groaned into her ear. “We need to pack. Yet all I want is to get back inside you.” He spread her legs with his knees, burrowed his hand in the wetness there, opened her mouth with his.
She was breathing shallowly, digging her fingers into his arms as she rocked against him, swaying against the rhythm he created for her body, on the brink of finishing, when a quick tapping on the door snapped her back, and standing in the open doorway was Mara, red-faced, wide-eyed. She stammered an apology and shut the door.
Calliope and Chance looked at each other and burst out laughing. After a few seconds Chance said, “She’s right though. We should get a move on.”
“Is that what she said?” Calliope was still laughing.
“I don’t know, I couldn’t understand her, she was so embarrassed.”
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“Me neither, Hom:il’ona.” And it was true.
THIRTY-TWO
RIPPED AWAY
Calliope had put on the black yoga pants and sweatshirt she’d brought from Tía’s and the camper’s trusty hiking boots, tired of wearing a dress in the night air. She found Mara out back, smoking homegrown tobacco. Chance was inside packing. The corn girl was asleep. Calliope stood beside Mara, breathing in the sweetly pungent smoke. “I didn’t realize you smoked.”
“Old habit. I quit, but tonight it smelled so good.” She breathed out a puff of smoke. “I’m too old, really. Guess I’m nervous.”
Again, Calliope resisted the urge to ask Mara how her chest felt. She’d nearly died. Calliope still didn’t understand how the Medicine clan had saved her without the use of a hospital. She added it to the mile-long
list of what she didn’t understand but had come to accept.
Like the rock baby still buried in the threshold of Malia’s house, which Calliope still stepped gingerly over or around, or avoided altogether by coming in through the back door. She could’ve sworn she could hear a faint heartbeat through the floorboards, as through a fetal heart monitor, a telltale heart. She was half tempted to dig it out each day and check for a rotting corpse. But she never did.
When Mara recovered, Calliope had told her what she’d learned from Arlen and what had become of her rock baby and Amy’s body—or rather, what had unbecome of them. Mara had a less difficult time accepting the reality. “I knew my mother wasn’t crazy. I knew Chaiwa had been right all along. Lizard’s Tail was true. Only this time, I was Chaiwa. We all were.” She said this through tears, her voice part amazed, part desolate. “I’m the one who left Trudy.”
Calliope thought of Susana, the note she left: turned to stone. She’d watched her beloved Reina become a rock before her eyes. Only now that she’d given birth to a rock child did Calliope begin to comprehend the confusion and grief that had taken her friend’s life. What had caused the few people they’d encountered to seem so insane, like the hunter. They were shell-shocked. In some ways, Calliope still felt shell-shocked, like she was wandering through a dream. She was still waiting to awaken.
At Mara’s insistence, they’d buried the rock of Amy Denver behind the house, and that’s where Mara was now smoking, beside Amy’s grave.
“She should be going with us,” Calliope said.
Mara nodded, stubbed her cigarette out in a small clay ashtray, set it on the back porch. Their silence filled with the chirping of night insects. It was summer come early, the buzzing of cicadas in the wild grasses. Mara finally spoke. “I’m sorry I barged in on you like that. I didn’t realize you and Chance were …”
Trinity Sight Page 26
