by Jadie Jang
“It’s not,” she said flatly.
I felt like she’d slapped me in the face. I started to react, but held back.
“I … I thought so too,” she admitted, finally. “I thought … I’ve been many places in the world—even in the U.S.—with strong supernatural guardianship, and … it makes a tremendous difference. I’d been aware for a long time that the Bay Area hasn’t had strong supernatural guardianship at all since the gold rush. The energy here is chaos, and has been my entire life. When I … when I came back here, it was specifically to try to fix that. … I was … very arrogant …”
I held my breath.
“There are sanctuaries like this in every place where there’s a large concentration of supernatural creatures. Sanc-Ahh’s become a locus, but we aren’t leaders … not in the way that you, for example, are a leader with your magazine, or with your organizing. We can’t envision, or guide, or … lead. All we can really do is comfort and clean up.”
Ayo took an audible breath. “I thought I could change our sanctuary into a center for guardianship, but humans can’t be guardians. They never are, I’ve never seen it, and my attempt hasn’t worked here. The energy here … it’s still chaotic, it’s still wild and unruly and dangerous. And the true wonder of it all is that no one has tried to take advantage of it for such a long time.”
“You mean, they have before?” I couldn’t help breaking in.
“What do you think caused the Loma Prieta earthquake?”
I took that in.
“Maya, I’ve had a bad feeling for a while that we’re vulnerable here. And I didn’t want to believe that this shadow creature, this nalusa chito, could create a huge problem. But it’s growing stronger, and we’ve been—without knowing it—throwing our strongest at it and y’all’ve barely made a dent. This is the thing I’ve been dreading. I have no idea what the end game is, if there even is one. But it doesn’t have to have a plan. It can destroy us through sheer hunger, sheer malevolence. And we have no guardian.”
“Ayo, what do you mean by ‘guardian’ then? If you’re not one, what could … what could Tez do that you couldn’t?”
“Maya, you know when you said the power in Tez’s walking stick felt ‘alien’ to you? And when I said how difficult it was for others to steal power from shapeshifters, because it wasn’t theirs?”
“Yes …”
“Maya, I have no inherent magic, except the Sight, and that’s … never mind right now. Human magic is a matter of learning the techniques to manipulate the ambient energy of the world. I thought a human could be a guardian of these energies because we can manipulate them, with adjustments, anywhere we go. But the magic isn’t inherent; and it doesn’t tie us to the land. Supernatural creatures have inherent magic, and it ties them to their location. They can live on land that is not in their region of origin, but the magic of that region … it takes a lot of time, to become a part of a new land. Generations, and hard work, and adaptation. The loogaroo, for example, come from werewolves that were created from non-European humans, and adapted over several centuries to the magic and energy of the Caribbean, and the cultures they helped develop there. Now they’re more vampiric than lycanthropic, and many of them have guardianship of pieces of the islands they live on. The Bay Area doesn’t have anything—anyone—like that.”
“And you think Tez can just … skip over all of that?”
“I don’t know if I’d exactly call it ‘skipping over,’ but yeah. The Huexotl sounds like it was created for specifically that purpose. I mean, it’s a walking stick, made for migration. If I had to guess, I’d say it was created during a time of migration or diaspora for the people who made it.”
This was so on the money that I gasped a little. Ayo heard it.
“I thought so,” she said. “Maya, you have to understand: Tez and Chucha coming back into contact with the Huexotl just as this strangely powerful nalusa chito shows up: it’s not a coincidence, you understand? There are no coincidences like this when it comes to magic. A problem was created, so a solution was found.”
“You’re saying the … the Bay Area is conscious and came up with this solution?” It had never occurred to me before that my fantasy of the spirit of the Bay Area might be something real … until just this moment.
“Not exactly. There is a spirit of a place, but it’s not conscious … exactly. If it helps to think of the Bay Area as an entity with a consciousness, go ahead. What’s really important here, Maya, is that if—when—Tez takes on this guardianship, I can help him, and so can you. This could be what … what this whole region needs. I mean, not just to weather this crisis, but for many many reasons and purposes.”
Ayo was landing every punch tonight and, for Tez’s sake, I couldn’t stand it.
“Ayo, I’m not trying to be a bitch, but you just said yourself, you’re not a supernatural creature. I understand that you’ve dedicated your life to the supernatural and feel a stake in it, but you can walk away. It’s not like chaos among supernats is going to cause that big a stir in the human world … unless someone causes an earthquake, which I don’t think Slim Shady can do.”
“Maya!” Ayo cried, suddenly passionate. “Have you learned nothing? We don’t exist in separation; we’re entirely interdependent! We both draw from the energy of a place, and the place is ordered and affected by the energy of both! Why do you think we’re in a drought? Why is violent crime on the rise in the Bay? Why are so many people living on the streets? This region is out of balance, both the humans and the supernaturals! That is why I’m here! That is why I do what I do! Because humans and supernats living side by side, in ignorance of each other, not caring for each other, inevitably destroy themselves!”
She stopped and I could hear her gasping. I was shocked. This was a familiar lecture, but it was one I had never really … understood. At least, not in a visceral way. I had always thought of it more as Ayo’s own hobbyhorse, her own little set of morals and ethics. I had never thought of it as something that controlled the big picture… or even my own little picture.
“It’s true, what you thought about the stick,” I said hurriedly, before I could change my mind. “It’s all true.” She started to speak. “—and I talk to it sometimes … no, it talks to me: the spirit of the Bay. I think.” She was silent. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it talks to me.”
She paused for a moment, to see if I was going to say anything else. I could almost hear her tamping down on her desire to ask for more.
“And Tez knows this?” she asked.
“Not all the stuff about guardianship; not about the spirit of the Bay … but he knows the stick stuff. Amoxtli told us the whole story. It’s like you said.”
“So he’s going to go through with it,” she said, sounding relieved.
“No!” I cried. “He just called me before you did! He’s not going to go through with it! He’s going to try to destroy It!”
“What? Maya, and you didn’t try to stop him?”
“Ayo, don’t you remember? Once he’s performed the ritual, it bonds him to the stick and them both to the land, so he can’t leave again. Ever.”
She sighed. “So that part’s true. I thought it was just … an amplification of the story.”
“No, it’s true. Did you know …” I felt like I was betraying him, but in for a penny … “that he’s always dreamed of traveling the world?”
She sighed again. “Of course he has. A young male beast shifter—a predator—not attached to any indigenous land. Of course he has wanderlust. He’ll settle down once he’s bonded with the land.” She said it in a dismissive tone, but I didn’t think that Tez’s dream since childhood could be put down to just a biological imperative. “It’ll be fine, Maya, you just need to talk to him.”
“Me? Why me? I’m not his elder. You should be the one to talk to him. You can tell him all about … what you just told me. It’s a far better argu—”
“Maya, he doesn’t listen to me.”
“He came to you for
help.”
“He was desperate. But he wouldn’t take any of my advice.”
“Well, why should he?” I burst out suddenly. “You’re not exactly trustworthy. You’re the one who sold Juice the instructions for the stick!”
There was a dead silence down the phone, and I felt how unfair the accusation was. I opened my mouth to take it back, but then Ayo laughed bitterly.
“Jesus, Maya. I just gave you a lecture about the spirit of a place and how I’m not a guardian, but even I didn’t get it. Ha!”
“What are you talking about?”
“All this time, I’ve been a tool of The Bay, as well. It used me to bring Tez to the stick. I’m just a pawn, as are you. I thought I’d passed him on to you as a last resort. Then later, I thought he might be persuadable to impress a pretty girl. But it worked better than I’d hoped. You’ve been a tremendous influence on him; and a tremendous support. Clearly, something else was at work here.”
“He’s not really listening to me about anything involving the stick, though. Not this whole time. And he’s not going to listen to me now. He basically kissed me off earlier.”
She smiled. “Oh, Maya, you’d be surprised. He’s stiff-arming you because he feels somewhat ashamed of his decision. Go talk to him.” She grew serious. “You can’t let him destroy the Huexotl. We have no idea what will happen, how much power is bound up in that stick. If he releases it, it could be disastrous.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t know, but if it’s more than a century old—”
“Try five. It’s from the Conquista. From the fall of Tenochtitlan.”
She was struck dumb for a moment.
“Jesus, five centuries of power, and God knows how many generations of naguals adding their blood to it? It might not be the cataclysm, but it won’t be small … and it could be Loma Prieta all over again.”
I made an inadvertent noise of denial, but she rode over me. “Maya, do you really want to find out? Look—” and her voice became brisk, “I need to manage some things for the aswang coterie—help smooth over the transition of leadership. Go talk to Tez. Let me know if you need any help.”
And she hung up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Monday, October 24, 2011
San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco
I went straight to SF General and approached Amoxtli’s room cautiously in case Tez had come here. But he was alone, except for his roommate, who was asleep.
He looked a lot better, although his skin was still somewhat faded looking, and the wrinkles that had seemed small when he was well looked deeper.
He brightened when he saw me. “Maya! Good to see you!”
“How are you feeling?”
“Much better,” he said, touching his abdomen lightly and then wincing. “They’ve moved me off the serious drugs, so I’m feeling it, but it’s not as bad as I expected. They’re gonna release me tomorrow morning. I think Tez bringing the Huexotl around must’ve helped.”
I wanted to ask about this, but the urgency I felt pushed all questions of curiosity aside. “Have you talked to Tez today?”
His face grew serious and cautious. “Yeah, he called.”
“So he told you he’s not going through with the ritual tomorrow?”
“Yeah, he told me,” he spoke carefully, as if to betray no emotion.
“And you’re okay with that?” My voice was rising, and I checked the roommate, who hadn’t stirred.
“Maya,” Amoxtli said calmly. “It’s his life. It’s his choice. I have no right to feel … any kind of way about it.”
“You’re his too! You helped raise him! Of course you have feelings about it.”
“Yes, of course I do, but Tez is a grown-ass man, and he can make his own choices without me butting in. And straight up: my feelings about it are none of your business.” He didn’t say “young lady” at the end of it; Amoxtli was too chill to say things like that out loud, but this was him pulling age-rank. And it worked.
I wasn’t chastened enough to let it go, though.
“Are you just going to let your clan lose this treasure?”
“Yeah, of course that worries me, Maya. Tradition is important. But this is the 21st century. The very fact that we’re living up here should tell you that we’re no longer a people that is bound to the land. Our clan is scattered over millions of square miles on both sides of the border. We migrate, we travel, and nowadays, we do it several times within a lifetime: several times within a year. Tez is getting into a career that could send him all over the country—all over the world! Yes, we lose our connection to the land and that kind of power. But we gain something in exchange.”
“Freedom,” I said dully.
“Not just freedom. There’s a power that comes from being mobile. Speaking two languages, living in two cultures. Combine that with an education and an important skill set: that’s power! Those are the people who are going to rule the 21st century. Look at Obama’s people: it’s all folks like that, people who grew up moving between places. Hell, look at Obama! He’s like that! And my Tez, he’s like that, too. He’s smart, educated, he’s starting to be well connected, and he has mad computer skills. He’s completely bilingual—a poet, in two languages—and right now, when Latin America is globalizing. Tez is gonna have the whole world at his feet! He could be anything, do anything. He could run a Fortune 500 company. He could be fucking president!”
He broke off, gasping, and holding a hand to his wound. I guess today was Gen-Xers-make-passionate-speeches-about-the-big-picture Day. He really should date Ayo. They’d make beautiful, declamatory babies.
“It frees you, too,” I suggested, not judging.
“Maya, it’s too late for me,” Amoxtli said. “I was raised to do what I was raised to do. Clinging to the past has made my life what it is, and it’s fine. But I won’t have that for Tez or the kids.”
He just breathed for a while, slowing down. “When Ome died, I thought he’d been irresponsible by not bonding with the Huexotl right away and giving our people a home. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I have to wonder, what good would it really have done? Ome felt the pull of the land and that magic. He felt what kind of responsibility it would burden him with. Our naguals have never taken on a city, much less a group of cities like the Bay Area. No, they’ve only ever taken over villages, towns, farmland. The kinds of places naguals used to be tied to naturally. Taking care of a land that so many different kinds of people lived on? People we didn’t share language or customs with? Could he have done it? Would it have driven him crazy? I don’t know. And I don’t think it’s right to force anyone to find out. Not in this day and age, when there are so many better options.”
I thought about bringing Ayo’s guardianship argument to him, but really, what was the point? He’d made his feelings clear, and his perspective was a … good one. An interesting one. One I’d have to think a lot about … later. He obviously believed it, wanted it, and I didn’t have the heart to argue an injured man out of his dream.
But he was dead wrong, I could feel it in my gut. My gut, unlike, apparently, other people’s guts, did not speak to me often, nor did it speak to me clearly. But when it spoke, it was never wrong. And it was saying: Tez needed to bond with the stick. Period.
As I said my goodbyes and left the room this instant certainty was shaken again, as all my certainties were shaken. The usual: who was I to think I knew—
All these people were different from me, older than me—
The arrogance, to think that I could decide—
But unlike my usual, I couldn’t quite dissipate that “certainty” in a rain of insecurities.
Then, in the middle of the hallway, a stronger thought arose: Amoxtli’s view of the world was one that explicitly excluded me, wasn’t it? I wasn’t bilingual, or bicultural, despite being, possibly, biracial. I’d spent half of my growing up just trying to survive, and here I was, twenty-five years old, and barely
able to make my way in the one culture I had. I was one of those ugly Americans being left behind by the Obama century, one of the ones that wanted a wall built on our southern border, to keep people like Tez out. Was that where my certainty of what was right came from?
I doubted Tez was thinking globally, or had anything but the information at hand to decide with. But I had a little more info at hand—and a little more perspective—than Tez. What did I see? Really see?
I walked to the end of the hall and looked out the window there: it looked out over rooftops in the valley of the Mission district. But I didn’t see the cityscape.
Because, for the first time, I was looking inward, looking out from my own limited life with my mind’s eye, looking at the Bay Area, and beyond it, the whole, huge, confusing world. What I strained to see snapped into focus, and suddenly, with a dizzying inversion, I became aware that I was looking through a magical eye at not just the world of my imagination, but the world as it truly was.
This was a new ability. In that moment I could see the world at a glance: not the entire world, but the world of my awareness; not just places, but the things that were important. I saw San Francisco—the Mission, and SOMA, and Chinatown—I saw Berkeley and Telegraph Ave., from the University down past La Peña and Sanc-Ahh, to downtown Oakland. I saw Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza, spiky with anger and hope. I saw my friends, the knots of bright action and thoughtful power. I saw the supernatural world, overlaid, a parallel universe.
I saw the lights of Silicon Valley and the shadow its brightness cast; the creeping shadow of greed over the vividness of the City’s clashes; I saw the dryness of the drought and the frustrated, dying life of the Bay; and creeping like a rat through this giant maze, the deep blackness of—somehow I knew—Slim Shady distorting and fading the light all around him—but not destroying anything … yet.
And I could see all of this laid out like a three dimensional map, like a holographic diagram in a superhero movie. I could see … I could see their energies, their magic, in colors of light, bright and dim. And I understood, for the first time, that here, where I stood, on a 7-mile-wide spit of land turning a shoulder to the Pacific Ocean, was a powerful nexus of energy and magic. It wasn’t the only one. I could see many others in the distance, some even brighter.
