by Alisa Valdes
The whole scene was reminiscent of the dream, actually. Goosebumps scattered across my arms and legs, and I shivered to face the unknown. At worst, they might have been planning to sacrifice me, I thought. Or Buddy. At best, well, I had no idea. The only thing I could come up with at that moment, given the chilly reception of the man and woman, and the odd staring stillness of the animals, were worst-case scenarios. I played a few of them out in my mind, each time growing more and more anxious. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked, point blank. “And if you do, will it hurt? What if I call 911 first?”
The man ignored me with a tightening around his mouth, but the woman looked at me with sympathy.
“We’re probably not going to kill you,” she said, jokingly. She had a very nice energy to her, and seemed quietly peaceful and loving.
“Oh,” I replied, sarcastically. “That’s comforting.”
“He shouldn’t be doing this to her,” griped the man to the woman. “Or himself, or any of us. It’s ridiculous. And you seem to condone it. I’m surprised.”
“It is his choice.” She looked steadily at him.
“It’s a foolish choice,” he said.
“Perhaps, nonetheless, it is his foolish choice to make and your duty as a mayordomo is to accept and respect it. The truth is, we don’t know what sort of outcome there will be.”
“What is a mayordomo?” I asked.
“Silence!” cried the man, stabbing a small golden knife with a turquoise handle and black scrolling script across the blade, through the air in my direction, though several feet away. I cringed with a yelp, and recoiled.
“Easy there,” the woman soothed him. “It’s not her fault.”
The man lowered the knife.
“Thank you,” said the woman. “If you continue to overreact, I will have to ask you to leave. I don’t want to do that.”
I held a trembling Buddy on my lap, and tried to sooth him with slow strokes along his back. He was beyond hope, however. Once the trembling began, it would be hours before it stopped again, especially in a room as cold as this.
I was about to inquire about Demetrio, when he strolled into the church from a back door, swaggering as though he were heading to the basketball court for a pickup game. He wore the same outfit he’d worn earlier in the day, at my school, and a grin.
“Hey, mamita,” he said casually as he came to sit next to me on the pew. He cocked his head to one side and smiled at me as though we had just happened across each other at a movie theater or something. “Wassup, shorty? You look good. And scared.”
“Where did you come from?” I asked, startled. He laughed.
“You should know by now that you ask a question with a pretty complicated answer.” He grinned at me, that crooked, glorious grin, and I went weak-kneed. I felt soothed, though, by his comfort level. He was happier here than I’d ever seen him before, other than in the dream. He was bubbling over with happiness, in his own laid-back way.
“Honor’s student, huh?” I asked him now. “I saw some articles about you. About who you used to be, I guess.”
He blinked slowly, with a small smile. “I did okay in school, sure.”
“You’re hardly an ignorant country boy,” I said. “Full ride to St. John’s College. But you played it off like you were some ignoramus.”
His brows shot up in alarm. “I did? Nah, mami, I didn’t. That was your interpretation of me. Just like your mom and Logan, and everyone else.”
I thought about this. He was right.
“People see tattoos, hear me use a double-negative now and then, see you wear a certain style of clothes, they make assumptions,” he said. “It’s one of the uglier sides of human nature. I like to let them people assume, because you can learn a lot about people by the assumptions they make.”
“You said you were homeschooled,” I said. “I’ll assume from that that you’re a liar, then?”
He laughed at me, drawing a scornful look from the man. “It wasn’t a lie. It’s actually very hard for me to lie anymore. I told you the truth. I’ve always told you the truth. I’ve learned a lot these past two years, from them. Homeschool.” He jutted his chin toward the man and woman now. “There’s been a lot of schooling.”
“Who are they?” I whispered. The man and woman shot Demetrio cautionary looks now, having heard me somehow.
“My mayordomos.”
“What does that mean?”
“Can’t tell you yet,” he told me. “Soon, though. You’ll know.”
“We’re ready,” the woman called out to us, as she struck a small chime with a mallet. “You may approach the altar.”
“C’mon,” Demetrio told me, as he stood up and held a hand out for me. “Leave Buddy.”
“But he’s scared,” I said.
“He’ll be fine. Ain’t nothin’ but love here. Just leave him on the seat.”
I did as he told me, and took his hand. Together, we walked to the table at the altar, and stood facing the man and the woman. The woman took a cane of some sort from the side of the table, and held it in her left hand, while raising her right hand to us. The man beat a small drum with a stick, in a hypnotic, monotonous rhythm, for about three straight minutes, while chanting a song in a language I couldn’t make out, and stopped.
“In the name of rain and sun,” he said.
“Let us mix the corn and water,” she told the man.
The man, still scowling, removed what appeared to be corn flour from one container, and handed it to her. She murmured in that unknown language, as though saying a prayer of the flour, and placed several handfuls into a large empty pottery bowl. To this the man added water of different colors, from several of the vials, after saying a similar prayer-chant. Together the man and woman stirred the mixture with their fingers, until it made a thin batter. Then they rinsed their hands in a basin behind them, from a clay pitcher, and dried them on clean white towels.
“Demetrio,” said the woman, smiling benevolently at him now.
“Yes, Mayordomo Guadalupe?”
“Demetrio,” said the man.
“Yes, Mayordomo Diego?”
Together the man and woman chanted, “You know what you must do now.”
As the woman began to sing in a language I didn’t know, Demetrio nodded, and approached the table. From among the many items there, he selected the sharp, small knife with the turquoise hilt. As he lifted it, I saw the writing along the blade begin to move, snakelike. My heart thundered, and I gulped in horror. Was he going to kill me now?
“No worries, mami,” he said softly, over his shoulder, with a comforting smile. “I didn’t want to hurt you before, and I won’t hurt you now. I won’t never hurt you.”
Instead, he stood directly next to the table, placed his left hand over the pottery bowl of newly mixed gruel. With the knife in his right hand, he pierced the skin in the center of his left palm, deeply. He turned the hand sideways as he twisted the knife gently, his face grimacing with the pain. Dark red, nearly purple blood oozed from the wound, across one side of his hand, and dripped into the bowl with large, glisteningly dark drops. Together, the man and woman counted them, in Latin - a language I had studied during eighth and ninth grade.
“Unus, duo, tres, quattor, quinque, sex, septum, octo.”
They stopped when eight drops had fallen. Demetrio promptly pulled the knife tip from his flesh, and the hand was quickly wrapped in a clean white cloth by the man.
All three of them had their eyes were on the bowl now, so I looked, too. A wisp of pale blue smoke rose up and twisted around. I gasped softly, as the smoke grew to the size of a small dog, twisted and turned through several disturbing shapes, each one seeming to make the others more nervous than the last. Finally, it formed itself into the likeness of a long, snakelike serpent with feathers and wings. It held that form for several moments, before glowing hot white, and evaporating away.
Demetrio smiled at me with unb
ridled joy, the apprehension gone from his face now.
“Quetzalcoatl,” said the woman, with relief; I assumed she was referring to the snake-thing. Next to her, the man inhaled deeply, and released the breath in guarded relaxation. They all grinned at each other, breathing a bit easier now.
“Is that good?” I asked. “The, whatever you called it.”
“Quetzalcoatl,” said the woman again.
“Right,” I said.
“Very,” said Demetrio, ecstatically. “It means that we’ve passed the first of two tests fort the day, and I can now tell you everything you’ve wanted to know.”
“Good,” I said.
“But not without risk still,” intoned the man. Demetrio ignored him, so I did too.
“C’mere, mamita,” Demetrio told me. I walked to the table, facing the man and woman; Demetrio turned me to face him, staring deeply into my eyes.
“You know I’m not like you. I’m not a human being anymore. You figured a lot of that out on your own, but I helped, and for that,” he looked at the man and the woman, “I am sorry, though as the test showed, I was correct in assuming it was safe to let her know.”
“Duly noted,” said the woman. “Your time is running out, Demetrio. Talk.”
Demetrio nodded to her, and continued to talk to me. “I began to tell you the other day, about the Fibonacci numbers, and their relation to the realm of souls. I didn’t know none of this when I died, either, Maria, so don’t feel all bad or nothing. Okay? I learned it here, with them, the mayordomos. I’ll tell you who they are in a minute. First, I want you to understand, and I’ll put it in real simple terms...”
“Right. Because I’m an idiot,” I joked, nervously.
He smiled, gently. “No, because it’s real complicated, and I’m not sure I understand all of it myself. You’re perfectly smart for a human.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He laughed. “Okay. Here’s the situation. Everyone has a soul, the same soul for all eternity.”
I interrupted him. “I get that, but if you’re dead, why do you still have a body?”
“I’ll get to that. Be quiet. I know that’s hard for you.” He winked at me affectionately.
“Sorry.”
“Silence, human,” said the man horribly, his eyes narrowed to slits. “You heard the boy.”
I glared at the man and rolled my eyes. I turned my attention back to Demetrio, and he went on with his lesson.
“The soul can come back, after you die, in another body, but it’s always the same soul. Some people call it reincarnation. It’s not exactly how it works, though. None of the world’s human faiths have gotten it all completely right, Maria. They all come close, and they are all good in their own ways. And we know a lot of this stuff instinctively, as human beings, and a lot of faiths, philosophies and science come close, but it’s not until after that we learn it in a way that we fully understand.”
“Some of us,” corrected the man.
“Right. Some of us. Some of us never learn. What I’m trying to say is basically this. Each time you come back, you gain a kindred soul, or more than one, like soul mates, but not exactly like that. Souls can collect many Kindreds, on each return, according to the sacred number order of the cosmos, the Golden Ratio your friend Thomas told you about. Same as the Fibonacci series of numbers. The pattern is zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, and so on, each time adding the previous two numbers together, always growing larger. That’s the same pattern The Maker of All Things uses for almost everything. The pattern of growth in the center of a sunflower. The numbers of leaves on a branch, and their spiraling pattern as they grow. Seashells. The orbits of the planets. The curvature of a ram’s horn. Musical harmony. It’s all the same numbers, in the same order. It is everywhere, and permeates everything, including our souls. Euclid called it sacred geometry. He intuited a lot of this stuff. So did Einstein. So, your desire to be a scientist? It’s holy, Maria. In the truest sense.”
He paused a moment to let this all sink in. His perfect grammar stunned me. He could turn it on and off at will, I realized. I nodded to let him know I followed what he told me.
“Your first time through life, your soul is alone. You have no kindred soul. You have to figure things out on your own. It’s a testing time. This is the time most people make their biggest mistakes. Young souls. That first time around is a dangerous time to live, the most dangerous, because if you don’t figure it out, you might not come back better next time; you could come back worse, and continue to worsen, until you aren’t allowed to return ever again, and you might be doomed to be alone for all eternity. This is how sociopaths are made, from souls that never progress. They are given three chances at improvement, but they don’t get another shot. They go directly to The Very Bad Place when they die, and any Kindreds they had are erased forever.”
“So there is a hell,” I said.
He winced. “Sort of, but not quite. The definition of The Maker, really, is change. It ain’t a person, or some old dude in the sky with a beard. It communicates with each of us directly if we listen. We’re part of it. But it’s not like humans, or animals. It’s much bigger than that. It is growth, and energy, with consciousness beyond our comprehension, and intent. Nothing is perfect in process, only in outcome, and then only through trial and error, and even then it is destined to change again.”
Again he paused, but I was having a hard time following it all. He waited, and I eventually nodded.
“Simplify, dear one,” the woman told him, because she realized how confused I was by all of this.
“Okay. The first kindred soul we get is our main kindred soul, our Kindred Primary, the one that is our other half, so to speak. We get two times around with them somewhere on the planet with us, and then each of us begins to add others. Our Kindred Primary’s kindred others are sometimes also our kindred others, but not always. Imagine a woven cloth, but instead of in three dimensions it exists in infinite dimensions; that’s kind of how the intersections are for souls, threads crossing threads in infinite directions, ordered and intended, but so complicatedly so that no human can fully ever comprehend it. It would be like an ant trying to figure out how to build the Taj Mahal.”
“Simplify, my darling boy,” begged the woman, again.
“Okay. And none of the Kindred Others any of us gain subsequent to the first will ever be as powerful as the Kindred Primary, though they will all be vibrating in harmony with the original soul. It’s like music. Your Kindred Primary is equal to your spiritual tonic, or resolution tone. Together, you both contain every harmonic of the other, and none that the other does not have. You are, spiritually, identical, but not the same.”
“Simplify,” the woman said again.
Demetrio began to look rushed, and frustrated with my lack of understanding.
“How this affects you, Maria, is that I think you and I are Kindred Primaries. I never met you before, but I think we were destined to meet, had I lived. Maybe at St. John’s. Maybe at Stanford. Maybe we would have bumped into each other at Wal-Mart. I don’t know. I cannot be sure what journey you’re on, or I’m on, but I do know, from my studies, that intersections of Kindred Primaries in the living body realm is exceedingly rare, and powerful.”
“You think we’re soul mates?”
He smiled joyously. “Yes! Sort of that. Yes. We all have the potential for multiple soul mates. All of our Kindred Others can potentially be soul mates in life, if we find them. But none of the Kindred Others is as powerful or important a connection, none vibrating at perfectly the same frequency as our own soul, as the Kindred Primary. Maria, we won’t find out today, but I believe you are my Kindred Primary. Today we will find out you and I are kindreds, of any relation. We must wait until the next season for the next ceremony. It is the way of things.
“Humans and other living creatures often run across their Kindred Others in life, the Kindred Second, or Third, or the Kindred Eighth or Thirteenth, etcetera - and this feels magi
cal, too. These are the cases, almost always, of love at first sight, or some other instantaneous connection. Parents and children are almost always Kindreds some great distance removed. All strong love is formed from Kindredness of souls. Some we get along with better than others, harmonize with better. It’s like in music. A Kindred Second, if you know anything about musical intervals, is usually someone you love but hate at the same time, very close to your frequency, but dissonant against your tones, of a related scale, but incompatible, like do and re played together. Most crimes of passion among humans are committed against people who are Kindred Seconds. With the Kindred Primary, the harmony is not only perfect, it is identical, at the octave perhaps, infinite octaves of harmonic resonance. In these situations, a person is said to feel an incredibly synchronicity of events and connection.”
“The coincidences.”
“Yes! That indicates a strong likelihood that we are Kindred Primaries. We’ve stumbled into each other, and our harmonies have unfolded as a result. Our world have literally shifted dimension, a tiny bit. As I’ve told the mayordomos, I feel that with you. I’m sure of it. I never felt it in life, with anyone. I never felt it until I found you.”
I was speechless. There was a name for what I’d felt when he touched me, and looked at me, and made me laugh. And a scientific explanation.
“Today we find out if we are Kindreds, period, but we have to wait for the spring equinox to do the ceremony for Primaries.”
“Okay,” I said, confused.
“Now, the nuts and bolts of how you see me, even though I’m dead. Don’t look so sad. I’m cool with it, mami. Death is sad for those left behind, but not as terrible as we think when we’re alive, for the ones who died. It’s part of the journey we all must make.
