Alice heard his warnings and walked past him into the tiny apartment so Lupe could tell her the same thing. She ignored them both and met Tiburon at the same club the following weekend; she walked with him down the streets as the cafés and bodegas swept their floors for the night, preparing to close. Tiburon talked an old man who ran a bodega into selling him a bottle of cheap wine even though they had long been closed. The man knew who Tiburon was and almost refused to collect any money, but he had pressed a roll of bills in the old man’s hand that far surpassed the value of the wine. The man looked grateful and frightened. Alice heard the words of the shaggy-haired Peace Corps guy in her head and quickly silenced them. She walked with Tiburon’s arm around her waist, and they sat on a dock overlooking the Guaire, the dark water gurgling beneath their feet. He popped the top off the wine, and they took turns sipping straight from the bottle. In his accented English, Tiburon told her about his home in Barbados, his mother, and the smell of couscous coming from the kitchen. He told her about diving for the myriad oil companies. He traveled out to sea as well as back to Lake Maracaibo, where the oil companies were king. Tiburon was paid to dive deep below the surface and cut the legs of the oil rigs when they were to be moved. The money was okay for the first leg but outstanding for the fourth, as it was up to the diver to dodge the falling equipment. Tiburon had already lost men on his crew, an accepted risk. Alice hung on every word, hoping this moment underneath the perpetual summer moon would never end. She felt her sense of self unraveling, and for the first moment in her life, she let go of her visions. Beneath the flashing dark lights reflected in Tiburon’s eyes, his path was waiting to reveal itself to her, but she willed it away—not this time, she didn’t want to know—and instead let herself fall.
He taught her to dive, first in a pool at a filthy rec center in the center of town, and then on weekend trips to Lake Maracaibo, weekends spent in a cabana by the shore. She let herself fall into his arms, knowing full well that she was intentionally ignoring more than she was seeing. But Tiburon’s arms around her, his soft voice in her ear as they lay together at night, watching the stars, the feel of movement as he swept her around the dance floor: all these things were as substantial as a dream, yet they were enough.
Every so often she got a glimpse of the other side of this life. He disappeared for two weeks, returning just long enough to tuck a package wrapped in butcher’s paper in Alice’s arm, flashing her a smile, asking her to keep it safe for a couple of days. Alice hid it under the sink. Lupe never noticed, but she had grown cautious around her anyway so would not have asked questions if she had. The oil rigs were but one part of Tiburon’s work, and Alice quickly learned that her handsome green-eyed man ran another side ring, running guns from Caracas to Georgetown in British Guiana, guns that were parceled out to the revolutionaries, the PPP and El Giro.
The black sedan lurched to a stop, throwing Alice forward in the space. The doors opened, and Alice heard footsteps outside the car. She wondered where they were and what would become of her now. The cold, sharp sensation of metal being pressed to her right temple made her body stiffen and her breath stop.
“What to do with you, parajito… what to do,” an inky-dark voice whispered in her opposite ear. “Dead, and we might never find your young man, he might dive so deep he joins the other tiburons. But, I’m so sorry, poquito, we cannot just let you go either. We would look soft-hearted.” At that, the voice chuckled, and Alice felt a sharp edge replace the blunt steel. “I think we’ll take an ear. It will only hurt for a minute, amor, and our mutual friend will be sure to call us after that.”
The steel pressed to her flesh, and Alice felt a thick line of blood trickle down her neck. She screamed in pain and surprise, but a stinking rag that was quickly shoved into her open mouth muffled the sound.
“Hush, little parajito, hush. This will only take a minute,” the voice whispered.
The steel dove deeper, and Alice thought she might faint from the pain. Her mind went blank, and in the place of physical agony a white wall of rage rose before her eyes. She heard another voice whispering to her now, and she leaned forward, placing both hands on the concrete sidewalk as the knife sliced still deeper. With a stifled cry of anger and outrage, Alice funneled all her pain through her hands. Her left wrist pulsed and throbbed, and she heard the clatter on the concrete as the knife dropped. The night was suddenly still; the katydids in the trees sang, and she could hear the water on the shore. Blood was streaming from her aching ear, streaming down her chest. Alice wriggled her hands up from behind enough to jostle the blindfold, scraping it off on her shoulder, wincing at the aggravation on her injured ear. She looked to see the still forms of five men, all dressed in ragged suits and lying with their dark eyes closed, as if knocked unconscious by an invisible blow.
Alice freed her bonds by scraping them against the corner of the brick wall behind her, her left wrist aching and pulsing with each action. The stinking rag spat from her mouth and her arms and legs freed, Alice tried to stand but fell back. The blood from the side of her face had slowed, but her head was swimming nonetheless. Touching her head gingerly, she knew that while she did, indeed, still have an ear, there was a deep cut from the top down. She needed a hospital, and if she did not force herself to move, she risked passing out right there on the empty street, leaving herself to bleed to death alongside the men who had meant her harm. With a great effort, she took a step and then another and another still until she heard laughing and music from a veranda.
“Help!” she screamed and saw several surprised faces look down from the balcony.
As the hospital bus sped along the narrow roads and the medics held a wrap to her injured ear, she finally let what had occurred back on the dark street sink in. She had not touched the men; there was no way for her to cause them this sort of harm on her own. A power that she had felt before in lesser measures had flowed from her hands and overtaken them. She tried to feel guilt, but instead her mind flew back to that classroom full of students, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and the lowering of the veil and their paths revealed. Alice might have felt no grief for the unconscious men in the street, but she was overwhelmed with the weight of what she had shown a room full of children on that very dark November day. It had been real, and she had left them with the knowledge of how they would die as penance for their callousness. It wasn’t fair, but even in shock and pain in the back of the hospital bus, she knew that fairness had little to do with what was right.
The policia came and questioned her in her hospital room, but she had no information for them and they did not seem surprised. When they awoke, the men did not remember anything of the evening; in fact, whole chunks of their memories had been wiped as if chalk from a board. They would never go back to their old lives again; never again would they recognize the faces of their loved ones. They were eternally in a fog, hints of remembrance and familiarity that did not connect to a solid reality. As far as the policia were concerned, this little American girl with a bandage on her head was hardly their problem. Thus, Alice went home to her apartment where the Peace Corps workers played quiet guitar and filled her tumbler with dark rum. Lupe sat beside her on the tattered sofa and held her aching hand. They lit candles; the electricity was out, as happened so often in this wild city. They sat, listening to the discordant guitar music, and Alice wondered about the stuff of fairy tales and how stories are told. She felt enclosed in this world and at the same time entirely separate.
Some months later, a riot at the prison erupted, and the shaggy-haired Peace Corps man with the gentle voice would be shot in the street as he marched with his fellow workers. The young man who had wiped the blood from her forehead and filled her glass would be hauled away by the policia as he rushed to his friend and never seen again. His family would write their congressman and send an investigator, but nothing would be found, no body to mourn, no closure. Lupe would leave the tiny apartment on Vente Quatro de Julio, moving back to Maracaibo, where she claimed the s
treets were safe. Alice would never hear from her again and so was left to hope that the city by the lake was safer than this city that seemed more dream than reality.
Alice had one last night with her Tiburon, before the riot and the death, before the end of all the things that had made the stars shine so brightly. Alice knew it was broken and not to be mended, and she had closed her eyes to the reality of life one last time. She allowed Tiburon’s hands to twine themselves in her hair, working gently around her healing wound, and she let her body sigh as his lips traveled over her neck and down her chest. She smelled the salt-sweet scent of his skin and knew it was goodbye. He promised to write and she promised to return, all the while knowing it was a lie. She didn’t want answers from him. She wanted this dream of another life to last one more night, and in that she was given everything she wished for. When the sun rose, she reminded herself that her path laid in a different life, and on the spectrum of terrible things, this was a drop in the ocean. But it didn’t make her feel any better.
Before she left Venezuela for good, Alice did one last thing. On the night before she was to board the plane to take her home, in a small shop not far from her tiny apartment, she had the symbol of the intersecting jagged lines inked onto her left wrist, a mirror of the tiny tattoo that adorned her mother’s left wrist, a mark Mum never mentioned or wanted to discuss. Alice understood it now, and the power it carried frightened her. Her blood pulsed in time with the tattoo needle, and she felt the weight of the symbol, the certainty of completion—the idea that there was something much more grand in this life that she was meant for, and never to allow the mundanity of living make her forget that truth.
Alice returned home to the mountains outside Colorado Springs and swallowed the life she had almost had. Tiburon wrote letters in scratchy handwriting, telling her that he loved her. The postman read nearly every one before they were delivered to Alice, and soon the whole town knew of him. Of course, they only knew a shadow of what he had really been. Alice tucked the few photographs she had kept of him into an album sleeve and so made him a part of her family story, a reminder that she was not to be defined by such ordinary expectations. Eventually the letters stopped, and Alice had to say goodbye one final time to the sweet memory of sea salt air and what-ifs.
AS THE CAILLEACH WAS watching the villagers reel from the cholera, her daughter was running across the rough field grass, her face streaked with tears and her arms and legs aching. Bruises and welts from the stones, some thrown by her own children, the babes she had nursed and cooed to sleep at night, made every step a torture, but still she continued on, the madness and grief tearing at her heart and alternately filling her with an anger deeper than anything she had felt before. She had come to the village an orphan. She remembered nothing of her past; she’d been found wandering the lane by the man who would become her husband. She did not remember where she had been before or anything that might have happened. On the underside of her left wrist was a small marking in tattooed ink, the rune Ingwaz, interlocking jagged lines forming a diamond at the center.
The old women of the village had clucked over her as they combed her tangled hair and gave her a small glass of mead to sip on her first night in the village. Fertility, they’d whispered, that’s what Ingwaz means. Must have come from over the hill, the others whispered, where there was rumored to be a sect of women who worshipped the old ways. She must have been a priestess, or maybe just a serving girl, they whispered. Some, the elders among them, mostly men, didn’t like her at all. Put her back on the road, they muttered; witchcraft it is, they said. But the girl was gentle and had an easy smile. She could soothe the fussiest babies, and although she did not remember how she knew, she could mix a compote of herbs to relieve fever. So she stayed, and the harvest was the best they had ever seen. The baker who had found her on the road married her, and her first child was born on the night of Eostre festival.
That child, and the others who slept in her arms and pulled at her raven hair with their tiny hands, had plucked stones from the ground and thrown them as the elders lit the flames of the pyre. The daughter of Cailleach raced on through the brush as the rain and wind raged behind her. Her grief and shock now turned to anger; she carried the forgotten magic with her as she ran, eventually reaching the sea where waves rose up to meet her, crashing down on the shore in a storm the likes of which the sailors had never seen. In that moment she remembered; she remembered the enchanted world of her childhood and the drops of indigo dye permeating all the layers beneath. In another world, on a level below this one, perhaps, she was milking the goats while her children played in the morning sun. Her life was simple and utterly complete. She looked to the sky and cried for her mother, her lost family, and the storm raged on around her.
The old women had not been wrong so much as they had been incomplete. Ingwaz was the rune of the Norse god Ing, a peace-bringer who would end a war that had raged for generations among the Viking people. The interlocking jagged lines were the birth of a new whole made from parts that had formerly been too ragged to fit together. Ingwaz did symbolize fertility, but on a scale that the old women in the village had no ability to comprehend.
ALICE WAS STATIONED AT her cashier’s desk at the entrance to Willow Caverns. She was earning summer money that she hoped might be enough for an apartment of her own before the school year started again. She was teaching at a neighborhood junior high school in Spring Falls and sleeping in the tiny bedroom where she had grown up, Mum and Aunt Polly treating her like she was still a teenager. So as soon as summer vacation began, she went back to her old boss at the caves and signed up to man the cash register again. The younger kids still had their cave parties and invited her to join, and although she had but a few years on the oldest of the lot, she felt a world away from them all. Some of the crew from her previous life there were still around. One of the accomplices in the great money-box heist that had led to the boy Paul’s dismissal from Willow Caverns was still cleaning the floors and hanging the lights in the limestone caves. He hadn’t been caught, and Paul hadn’t turned him in. He came to her early in the summer, a grin on his face: Did she want to give Paul a call? He was still single; some might say he’d been waiting for her. Alice had smirked and laughed. She knew what was to be, but no sense in rushing things.
On that early June day, the road to the cave was empty, and Alice slipped a newspaper listing out from under her clipboard. She had several apartments circled: one-bedroom units; a space they were calling a “bachelor,” and she grimaced at the description. Landlords would be hesitant to rent to her, a woman alone. She shuddered as she realized that Mum would probably need to co-sign her lease, and that would raise more questions than Alice cared to answer. Even in Los Angeles, at the apartment she shared with her roommates, the girl who had held the lease had to get a co-sign from an uncle. If she were a bit older, then it wouldn’t be such a fuss; she’d be labeled a spinster school-teacher, and no hint of scandal would follow her. But as it stood, the idea of a woman living alone, unmarried, needed validation. Alice wondered if the world would ever change, but she didn’t see those sorts of paths.
A long black car was winding its way up the hill, and Alice snapped back to attention, shoving her newspaper back under her paperwork. It proceeded slowly, and Alice saw that there was a second black car behind it and still another behind that. Curiously, she watched as the car in the front paused and then proceeded, as if unsure of where to go. All three pulled in perfect unison into the closest spots in the nearly empty parking lot. As though a cue was signaled, eight men wearing identical black suits jumped out and jogged to the cashier’s booth, flanking either side. Alice was flustered, confused by the formality of the scene.
“Sir?” she managed in a voice that sounded too high-pitched to be hers.
“One moment, miss,” a dark-suited man began and then paused, watching the middle car intently. “One moment, miss,” the man repeated and then stepped back, arms behind his back, matching the others.
The rear car door opened, and a man in a jaybird-blue suit and red striped tie jogged past the black-suited men, straight to Alice, who found herself staring at the young senator from New York. His wavy hair was brushed back from his chiseled face, and his sky-dark eyes crinkled at the edges as he offered a genuine smile. Alice was struck dumb. She stuttered a bit of nonsense that made him smile wider, revealing perfect ivory teeth.
“Excuse us, miss,” he said in his clipped New England accent. “We have found ourselves with just about thirty minutes to see a few sights.” He paused, waiting for Alice to respond, and then softened his voice to add, “Didn’t mean to give you such a shock.”
Alice shook her head, trying to find her voice. “It’s not. No need to be sorry, sir.”
He reached up and pushed his dark brown hair off his forehead. “Is this a sight you would recommend?”
“No,” Alice blurted and immediately regretted the word. The senator laughed, the sound free and natural. “What I mean, sir …” Alice continued, fighting the stunned paralysis her vocal cords were experiencing. “What I mean, sir, is that if you only have thirty minutes, I wouldn’t do this. Most of the caves are false, anyhow; they made the structures out of plaster to trick the tourists…. It’s all in the lighting, and they’re terribly ordinary really.” Alice found her previous paralysis wearing off, and she stopped herself from rambling further.
The senator nodded, a grin set on his handsome face. “Thank you, young lady. Your honesty is refreshing. If I might ask, what would be a better use of our time?”
Alice returned his smile, a deep urge to freeze this moment forever in her chest. “I would drive up to the red rocks if I were you. I can draw you a map. There’s a spot at the top that, especially this time of day, catches the light, and, well, if you want to see the beauty of the place, that’s what I would do.” She locked his eyes for a long moment, and then set about scratching out a map on the back of a Willow Caverns information sheet. Alice reached forward and held out the map. The young senator smiled a slightly lopsided grin and handed the map to the nearest suited man, who nodded as he received the paper. Then he reached out and clasped Alice’s hand in his. The feel of his smooth, cool skin made the blood rush to her head with so much momentum that it blinded her for a moment. His path hit her in a flash of light. She saw the young senator with a flood of people, their eyes rapt, the sort of hope that hadn’t been familiar enough in this time. She heard his voice booming, promises of his brother, and promises of peace. She squeezed the senator’s hand tighter and heard the clatter of metal and saw the flash of fluorescent lights; she heard screams; a young man, a kitchen worker, covering the senator’s body with his own, tears falling from his eyes; men in suits clamoring; chaos and blood, so much blood. She saw the emptiness of his young wife’s eyes. She saw the end of an era; she saw those same crowds standing at attention with damp eyes, leaning against one another for fear they might fall.
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