Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  They stopped for water at a flat crag two-thirds of the way up. Calliope watched Mara and Eunjoo passing the clay jar, the older woman and little girl reminding her of Bisabuela and her younger self; they must have been nearly identical ages as when she’d made the trek, a true parallel. Watching the pair, she wondered, Why us? Why had they been pulled through? Chance she understood, his Mother had brought him; this myth was his reality. But Mara, Eunjoo, and Calliope? Her stomach ached with shame at the thought of those she hadn’t been able to keep safe here, in this world—Susana, Buick, and Amy. All of them together, those hiking beside her now and those she’d lost over the past six months, why had they come through? Was there an intention for them? Or had they all been an accident? A cosmic happenstance, flotsam and jetsam caught in the quantum stream? Could Bisabuela have orchestrated their journey? And for what purpose? Just to show Calliope that Bisabuela had been right? The lesson didn’t seem worth the cost. Or was there still something Calliope was missing, some message she hadn’t quite deciphered? Was it a fool’s errand to search for purpose in a random world? Only, she wasn’t in her world anymore, was she? Perhaps things weren’t quite so random here.

  They started up the mesa again, passing a clump of sage growing like tufts of hair from the rock faces. Atop the tabletop earth, a figure on a stone bench leaned toward the fire, back slumped toward them. Bisabuela? But before the figure at the fire could solidify into her great-grandmother, Mara called in a tone of childlike wonder, “Chaiwa?” and Calliope realized her mistake. A ghost to more than just Calliope, it seemed, the figure at the campfire was a woman, a flesh-and-blood woman, her long black hair braided to her waist, though she wore modern clothes, jeans and a T-shirt. She turned around, her sepia skin dewy and clear. This was not the older San Ildefonso nanny Mara had described disappearing from Los Alamos in the 1940s nor Calliope’s own great-grandmother. In fact, Calliope didn’t recognize the woman at all. She blinked the dust and disappointment from her eyes.

  “Doctor?” Mara asked.

  The woman’s face warmed in recognition, as if she’d been expecting them. A thin smile formed across her mouth, and creases gathered around her dark eyes. “So you’ve made it,” she said, her tone composed, almost welcoming.

  “How do you know each other?” Calliope asked, the buzzing of cicadas loud in her ears. Could they trust this woman? Even Chance seemed suspicious, his arms folded across his chest.

  “We met, briefly,” the woman said. “In the hospital.”

  Mara introduced Dr. Toya and explained that she worked at the hospital where Trudy’s son, Calliope’s cousin Julian, was a patient. Right after the light, the splitting of worlds, Mara had met her in the abandoned hallway, and Dr. Toya had given Mara the stone necklace she now wore around her neck. She pulled it out for the others to see. A smooth piece of turquoise. Calliope had noticed it around Mara’s neck before and thought nothing of it. “Dr. Toya is from Acoma.”

  Sky City. Bisabuela’s people. Calliope and this doctor were connected somehow. She searched the doctor’s face for familiarity, some resemblance to Bisabuela. Dr. Toya bore a turquoise stone similar to Mara’s around her own neck. She smiled warmly, but guardedly, invited them to sit with her at the fire. Calliope accepted, though sweat pearled down her back and between her breasts, extra heat radiating from the corn girl’s body pressed against her skin. Calliope drank from her water pot then poured the tiniest drops onto the corn girl’s head and neck. “What are you doing here, Doctor?” she asked, searching the rock surface for the three stone slabs that would indicate the sun dagger’s location. She couldn’t quite remember from girlhood where it was. Had Dr. Toya already checked?

  “Same as you. Trying to get back to the previous world.”

  Calliope’s pulse quickened. If Dr. Toya believed they had come to the right place, then this added credence to Arlen’s tale. Chaco wasn’t a trap.

  Chance raised his eyebrows. Calliope could still see the skepticism on his face and sensed that he had a reason to wonder—after all, why would one of Mother’s people choose to go back to the other world, where their people and way of life had been so devalued? She wondered if Dr. Toya was silently asking the same of him. More troubling, Calliope wondered if Chance was doubting his own plan. She knew there hadn’t been time for sentiment but his demeanor had definitely changed since Arlen’s mob had attacked them; something felt different between them.

  Mara, never one to beat around the bush, asked, “Why are you going back, Doctor? Aren’t your people here?”

  “They are. But one of my patients was left behind. I don’t know how or why.” As the doctor spoke, she burnished the turquoise stone between her fingers. Calliope thought back to the day her family had disappeared—the day she’d disappeared. In the foyer of her house, Phoenix’s rock collection had been scattered. She’d stuck a piece of his turquoise into a duffel bag, but on the journey, she’d lost it. “I need to make sure he’s safe, bring him back …” Calliope raised her eyebrows, unable to hide her skepticism. Dr. Toya would risk leaving her people, getting stuck between worlds, or on the other side, for a patient? It hardly seemed worth the risk. Dr. Toya must’ve read the cynicism on their faces because she added, “My sister’s son is schizophrenic. He needs me.” The way she inflected needs, the way she rubbed the turquoise around her neck, Calliope felt the familiar tug. Did Phoenix still need her? He’d gone six months without his mama. She’d gone on, six months, without him. She couldn’t waste another minute.

  “Do you know how to get through?” Calliope asked. “Have you checked the sun dagger?”

  Dr. Toya nodded, motioned for them to follow her as she stood and walked toward the northwest face of the mesa. At the edge, three slabs of slanted rocks. The sun was not yet overhead.

  “I’ve been up here three days,” Dr. Toya said, “watching the dagger move across the sun spirals. Today, at noon, it should cut through both the larger spiral and the smaller snake, which means equinox. The middle of time.”

  They should have been early. They should have had several more days. Time was stringier here. They had come just in time.

  Dr. Toya nodded down toward Pueblo Bonito. In the center of the flat roofs, a hole, a skylight. It would be blindingly dark in those unventilated rooms. No windows, no lights. But in that center, there would be a pinhole cascading light, especially at noon when the sun would glare down from its highest point in the sky. Calliope knew without being told—Room 33.

  Dr. Toya said, “The Ancients likely built this place to protect the portal. Or control it. But there’s no controlling what’s only theirs to guard.” Calliope thought about the bodies buried in Room 33. It was an airless room, preserving the artifacts; the cotton shrouds encasing them had not decayed in a thousand years, which meant no air circulation at all. In the soil and yellow sand, beneath planks of wood, the Chacoans had buried bodies with their grave goods. Calliope remembered Susana buried in the straw inside the barn, the rock in her hand. The grave goods in Room 33—raw turquoise, jet, and gold, those bright and unrefined rocks—had they been more than offerings? Turned to stone. Had it happened to the Ancients? Had they meant it to happen? Were their grave goods never offerings but methods of communicating with the gods, of summoning them? Was the bridge through Chaco a portal of the gods? Based on the age rings of the pillars and wood in the walls, they had built Room 33 before any of the seven hundred others in Pueblo Bonito. They built the remaining rooms around it. Archaeologists had speculated it was an elaborate show, a theatrical exercise. But what if the Ancients had originally built Room 33 to protect the portal to the other world, the world Calliope was now a part of? And the bodies? Were those sacrifices to allow the Ancients safe passage? Or perhaps those who couldn’t get through? Those who didn’t survive the journey? She pictured Susana in the straw, her corpse rotting. Calliope should have brought her friend’s body with them. And Buick, who’d said there was nothing left o
f Albuquerque, not even the South Valley—it was all covered in black rock. And Buick’s body, rotting in Tía’s cabin. This version of the world was beautiful, yes. But as any world, it was also a graveyard.

  A wheeling sun circled bedrock. Broken potsherds scattered in the dirt. A crumbled band of red rock sandwiched between solid gray brows of sandstone. A branch of dead juniper ledged like a fence. The sun cut through the slabs, slitting through the shadows on both the snake and spiral. The doctor had been right. Their calculations had been off. The portal—if there was a portal, if Room 33 was more than a burial shroud or elaborate stage—should have been open now. Calliope glanced at Chance, and he nodded, though Calliope still couldn’t quite read the look on his face. Apprehension? Doubt? Something else? She reached out for his arm. His muscles tensed.

  They climbed down the mesa with Dr. Toya, Calliope’s heart knotting, hemp and wick. Her skin bloomed with sweat. They were going down into the recesses of Pueblo Bonito. She knew from the viga rings, the rafters in the ceilings, that the ponderosa pine had been hewed and dragged from a forest hundreds of miles away to build the Great House. Tree rings in the charcoal from fires in the ceremonial kivas revealed how long it had been inhabited. From an aerial view the kivas would appear as crop circles. She knew the textbook material. Archaeologists had named it for a city since they believed that over a period of two hundred years, Pueblo Bonito had grown and expanded like a modern city, though always retaining a half-moon structure. But she couldn’t believe it had ever been inhabited. Not in these cramped, cave-like rooms. Or not by the living.

  She feared she wasn’t going back to Phoenix but to her death.

  A great sandstone wall, made of the same ocher sand bricks as the rest of the building, surrounded the entranceway to Pueblo Bonito. Calliope brushed her hand against stone. The group stooped into the low, dark interior of the Great House; they could have been any excavation party she’d been part of at the University of New Mexico: Dr. Toya and Chance as guides, Mara as photographer, Eunjoo as research assistant, and Dr. Santiago with her corn baby strapped to her chest as historian. Her stomach flipped with an almost manic apprehension. They were so close.

  Room 33 stretched toward the northwest section of the Great House. They entered in the crest of the moon shape and headed toward the apex. They needed a flashlight, the low first rooms pitched black through an endless corridor of doorways save one pin of light in the direction of Room 33, approximately 350 feet away. She’d been right. There was a skylight.

  Eunjoo began whispering as she had been in the truck. Calliope couldn’t make out her words. She grasped the girl’s hand and asked, “What are you saying, chica?”

  In her bird’s trill, “I’m calling Coyote.”

  “You want Coyote to come home with us?”

  Eunjoo said nothing, but continued whispering under her breath, an incantation Calliope couldn’t discern.

  “Do you have your stones?” Dr. Toya asked, her voice an echo from somewhere nearby though Calliope couldn’t make out more than faint shadows in the darkness.

  The stones. Arlen had told Calliope and Chance that among the sacred bundles when the Zunis emerged was a stone, within which beats the heart of the world.

  In Calliope’s fever dreams, Phoenix had been showing the stones to his mama, hadn’t he? He wasn’t hurling rocks in anger. He’d been showing her the path back to him. It was as Bisabuela had predicted.

  The rock baby and Amy. They were Calliope’s stones, weren’t they? Her keys through the portal.

  She’d always meant to take them back to the other side, but she hadn’t fully realized their power. She’d need to take them with her, if she hoped to make it through. When they’d hiked up the mesa, they’d been too heavy to carry. She thought they’d have more time before equinox. She’d meant to go back to the truck. But then, in her rush to get home to Phoenix, she’d left them behind. “They’re still in the truck,” she admitted, her cheeks burning, ashamed she’d almost left her rock baby and Amy.

  “I’ll get them,” Chance said, his voice near enough behind her that she could feel his breath on her neck.

  She wanted to grab his hand, tell him not to go, afraid he might not return to her in the tunnels winding toward Room 33. Instead, she said, “See if there’s a flashlight.”

  “I’ll be right back, mujer.”

  She could hear him walking away swiftly toward the entrance.

  They stepped down further into the airtight rooms. The floors alternated dirt and wooden planks. She knew that in Room 33 the layers of floor varied; the initial layer was sand and then black soil atop, alternating back and forth, white sand, black soil. This was supposed to represent the layers of earth growing again. Now she wondered what else it could have meant. It was a record of something. How many times Mother had taken people through her belly? The hole in the floor, the sipapu, represented the emergence of their ancestors from the underworld—like climbing a tree, they’d exited the underbelly through a small hole in the earth. They were heading toward Mother’s birth canal.

  Calliope shivered.

  Was it her imagination or had the air gotten colder? Eunjoo kept mumbling, squeezing Calliope’s hand tighter. A rustling. Like leaves scuttling in a windstorm.

  “What’s that sound?” Mara asked, her voice tense. “One of you gals scratching the walls?”

  Calliope turned toward the pinhole of light from where they’d just come; Chance’s shadow emerged as he ducked back into the sunlight.

  The rustling grew louder. It wasn’t coming from the entryway but from deeper inside the rooms. She imagined the bodies buried in Room 33. Were the remains there now, as they’d been on the other side when archaeologists first exhumed them for study? She’d read the lists of findings many times, knew exactly what had been recovered: the first skeleton on its back, lower jaw detached. The second skeleton, bones scattered through the sand. The third, only a skull covered with fragments of cloth and turquoise. Several other skulls and pitchers and bowls. A skull with three strings of yucca cord hemmed through the left eye socket. The body on its back, head turned. Most of its bones in place, beside a black bowl with a lifeline design on the edge. More jaws strewn in the sand, and a fragment of corrugated jar. Another skull, crushed, the bones of the head broken, the jaws held together with something like mud. The victims allegedly the elites of Chacoan culture, buried in the recesses of the Great House for protection.

  The rustling turned to footsteps, followed by the swooshing of—birds? Bats?

  She clutched Eunjoo closer in one hand, untucked Susana’s gun from the pouch around her waist. It was probably scavenging animals. Vultures, crows, maybe even coyotes. If Calliope’s party stayed quiet, together, the animals would leave them alone.

  Still her voice was shaky. “We should stop moving, wait for Chance to catch up.”

  She stepped back toward the stone-cragged wall, her foot crunching on something; it snapped onto the sand. A stick. She let go of Eunjoo’s hand, picked up the stick. It was bent in half, as the crook of an elbow. It wasn’t a skeleton but a ceremonial stick. There were eight of them in Room 33, she knew. She scrolled through the catalog in her mind; all the grave goods they’d found.

  Her gut lurched. A bow. There had been a bow. And eighty-one arrows.

  The rustling was moving, swirling in the sand toward them. The footsteps familiar. Gamboling. As in the hangar.

  She dropped the stick.

  Her lungs constricted. She gasped, then screamed, “Run!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  GUARDIAN

  The Suuke pummeled through the darkness. Calliope threw her body and Eunjoo’s toward the doorway, sun striking a white dagger of light in the sand. Calliope glanced over her shoulder. Splintered arrows pinstriped the Suuke’s gnarled body, great mounds of scar tissue securing the serrated edges in its skin.

  The doorway loomed
brightly ahead of them.

  The Suuke was too close. They wouldn’t make it out.

  From beyond the Great House, someone was screaming. A man’s voice, not a terrified scream. One of anger. “Come back and face your consequences. You need to make it right.”

  Beside the truck, a hundred feet away from the doorway separating them, Calliope made out Arlen’s face, twisted in anger. He was not wearing a mask.

  “No, brother. I am taking them to the other side.”

  Arlen plunged into Chance, pulling his gun off his shoulder, knocking him to the ground.

  Her heart thrumming in her eardrums, her lungs burning, Calliope pushed Eunjoo against the wall. They wouldn’t make it out in time, but Calliope could distract the Suuke so the others could get out. She turned her back to the demon/god, shielding Eunjoo and the corn girl, shimmying out of the woolen sling so it wouldn’t take the corn girl too.

  Mara caught up, yelled, “What are you doing?”

  Calliope squeezed the gun in her hand. It wouldn’t kill the Suuke, only anger it further. She dropped it to the sand, thrust the corn girl into Mara’s arms. “When it gets to me, take the children to Chance. Take them through the portal.”

  Eunjoo yelled, “No!”

  “Turn away, chica. No te preocupes, remember.”

  Tears in her eyes, Calliope stepped between the others and the doorway; in the Suuke’s path, she braced herself. As its scraggly white hair swept against her skin like coarse grains of straw, she clenched her fists, set her jaw. Closed her eyes and thought of Phoenix.

  The Suuke plowed past her, lunging at Chance and Arlen fighting in the dirt.

  Calliope’s body, still rigid from bracing for the attack, slackened. She let out the breath she’d been holding.

  The demon hadn’t been coming for her, but for Chance.