The Lies that Bind

by Judith Van GIeson

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Could we go somewhere a little more private?”

  “Where?”

  “The lobby?”

  “All right.”

  She followed me to the lobby, where she chose the spot—two cushy pink velvet armchairs in front of an artificial waterfall with an artificially soothing sound, the Muzak of the hotel lobby world. The water babbled down the front of a rock, got pumped up, babbled down again. I began to sit, but Ci put a hand out to stop me. “Wait,” she said. “I’m clearing the vibrations.” Like a dog, she had to circle several times before she got down.

  “I like muddy vibrations,” I said, but she waved her hand all around the pink chairs, up the front and down the back, tinkling her little silver ball.

  “There,” she said when she was finished. She sat and arranged her pleats around her legs and her streaks around her face. I happened to notice there was an ashtray on the end table and no No Smoking sign in sight. I lit up. Ci waved her hand in front of her nose. “Smoking is the modern person’s suicide,” she said. “If you went deeply into your purpose in life and found your true mission, you wouldn’t need to smoke anymore. You should start doing some soul work, because you are going to have to come back again and again until you get it right.”

  If you smoke in this lifetime, does that mean you’ll come back as an ashtray in the next? I wondered. But what I said was: “Did you know that there are over five billion people alive on earth, more people than have lived and died in all of recorded history?”

  “So?”

  “How can there be more reincarnated people than there were people to begin with?”

  “New souls and souls that have split,” she answered without missing a beat. I might have known that Ci would find some way to multiply the fishes to feed the masses. “Besides, you’re only talking about recorded history.”

  A family was checking in at the front desk. The little boy’s attention was focused on the palm of his hand, where he saw his future in an eighty-dollar Game Boy. The little girl had blond ringlets, wore pink overalls and carried a teddy bear. She wandered our way and was standing beside my chair, staring at Ci. “Ruthie,” her mother called, “come back here right now.”

  Ruthie slowly wandered back. “Mommy,” she said in a loud voice, “why is that lady wearing tinfoil?”

  “She’s from Santa Fe,” her mother said.

  Ci rattled her silver ball. “Did you come here to talk to me about reincarnation?” she asked.

  “No. About Justine Virga.”

  “Justine Virga. Why do you want to talk about her?”

  “I’m representing the woman who is suspected of running her over.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Ci. “Karma has brought us together again, just like karma brought Justine and your client together.” That was one possibility I didn’t want to consider. As Saia said, if I ever started believing in karma, I’d be out of a job. “Your client will reap more karmic justice in the next lifetime than in any court of law. Trials have nothing to do with justice anyway. They are merely a performance, and the best performer wins.” She ought to know; she wasn’t such a bad performer herself.

  “Did you see Justine?” I asked.

  “I saw her, but I can’t tell you what was said. I have to protect the confidentiality of whatever a client tells me. You must have some similar arrangement in the law.” She leaned forward. Her crystal pendant picked up a light beam from somewhere and shot back rays of fire. “I can tell you that Justine had the red energy. Her aura was extremely agitated when she came to see me. An agitated aura is like light moving across a rock, the reflection of sunlit water. If you move your hand through the water you stir up the reflection. Your client was stirring the waters of Justine’s aura. If someone wants you to die, it’s hard not to let that seep into your consciousness. Martha Conover wanted Justine dead.”

  “If you thought Justine was going to die, why didn’t you do something to stop it?”

  “I have the gift of true sight. What I see has already been written; it can’t be stopped. Postponed, maybe, with a very high level of consciousness and concentration, but never stopped. It was Justine’s time to move into the light.”

  She had also been blessed with the gift of true ego—that couldn’t be stopped either. “Did you give her a note in a sealed envelope?”

  “I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that if you don’t come to terms with the mother within, you’ll keep meeting her without. We choose our parents and our families when we incarnate, for the lessons we need to learn in this lifetime. The mother you carry within is the positive expression of motherhood; the one you project without is the negative. You have to build your own Saturn, your own internal mother structure inside, especially if you are a woman. Remember there is a ‘her’ in mother.”

  “In father too.”

  “Exactly,” said Ci. “Justine left her mother too young, before she had had time to build the edifice. Martha Conover is the mother without, and their collision was foreordained. She was the instrument of Justine’s destiny.” Ci leaned back, smiled and rearranged her pleats around her legs. Life and death were just a living to her.

  “Why did Justine leave her mother so young? Did she tell you?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me; I knew. But that is confidential. I can tell you about your mother too, if you want to know.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  ******

  Ci went back to her table. I stayed in the lobby and had another cigarette. Why do people consult psychics, study the stars and get their cards read anyway? I wondered. To find out about the two areas of life where no rational rules apply: love and death. There’s no explaining love. As for death, you can eat right, stay fit, quit smoking and still drop dead tomorrow. Most people would rather talk about love than death. Justine was still young, Michael had been dead for three years; maybe she was looking for a new love. And if she was, she probably wouldn’t have told Emilio about it. Ci might have talked to Justine about her death and her mother. She might also have told her that love was just around the corner and happiness was on the horizon, that she was both the marble and the sculptor in her life, that her life’s work was to suffer and what better way to open yourself to suffering than to fall in love? Any successful psychic has to have the gift of true romance, and Ci was as successful as any. I hadn’t gotten an answer from her about the note, but I hadn’t really expected one. I had gotten a feeling. The feeling was that Ci was an opportunist capitalizing on people’s need to believe and I ought to go looking for Emilio Velásquez’s typewriter.

  12

  I PUT OUT the cigarette, left the Pyramid, got on the interstate and headed south. The Big I was as clogged as a Southern Baptist’s arteries. The diesels were pumping out nimbuses of black smoke. The clearer the air, the darker the exhaust looks. I hit the Seek button—top forty, country, golden oldies, classical love songs, Big O Tires, Garth Brooks. Albuquerque has too many stations and was having a radio war to eliminate a few, but I found nothing I wanted to listen to. I turned the radio off, abandoned the interstate near Central. Instead of going west on Lead toward my office, I turned south on Broadway, which was having a bad case of the orange-barrel blues. I negotiated my way through the barrels and the black arrows of road construction into a neighborhood that is only a few blocks away from Hamel and Harrison but way deeper into seediness, the kind of neighborhood where you find faith temples, thrift shops, soup kitchens, lawyers’ offices and a new café that believed in economic miracles, but the only miracle you can expect in a neighborhood like this is the roses that bloom in summertime. There’s always one house in the grayer parts of town with a porch or a trellis that drips roses in June and says that someone lived here once who loved this place. The windows in the lawyer’s office were covered with bars. The walls of the faith temple were covered with murals of gods and conquistadors. The pumps at Getty Gas had run
dry, La Esperanza market had closed for the day or forever, the Dead End Motel was offering videos and a room for twelve bucks. A guy and his dog sat on the corner behind a sign that said KOREA, VIETNAM, WILL WORK FOR FOOD, RENT. I’ve seen people in Santa Fe begging for money for Parvo shots for their dog, but these two were begging for survival. The dog lay in a patch of shadow between its master’s legs. It lifted its head when I stopped at the light, dropped it again when I stepped on the gas.

  The sign for the Last Chance Thrift Shop was large enough to read from a block away. An arrow pointed in the direction of the railroad tracks. The smaller print on the sign said VERY LAST CHANCE DISPOSAL BIN, but I’d turned in before I saw it. The building was a warehouse, long and low, with no windows. I followed where the arrow pointed, across the parking lot, behind the building, next to the place where the bridge started to climb across the railroad tracks. Back here they gave away what no one wanted. When I turned the corner I saw a row of plastic bags and bedrolls that told me someone had either taken refuge or set up house. A skinny woman dressed in a long plaid dress looked at me with depleted eyes sunk in an angular face. Her child sucked her finger and stared. A man leaned against the building with his head down, ignoring me and everything else. They looked like a colorized Dorothea Lange photo, like refugees from the thirties. I’m used to seeing sixties time warps in New Mexico, but this was the first time I’d found myself in the Depression. I was invading a sanctuary. I knew it, and so did they. I turned the wheel and spun gravel getting out of there, wondering as I did what makes the homeless and hopeless keep on going when the young and beautiful kill each other and themselves.

  When I reached the front of the warehouse, I saw that the thrift shop was on the street. I parked the Nissan and went in. The shop was handicapped-friendly and had a wheelchair ramp marked for the otherly abled. NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE, NO OFFER REFUSED, a sign said. A TV was playing, and a panel of women were talking about empowerment and standing up to their men. A guy with a fat belly sat behind the counter, bending his elbows, resting his bald head in his hands and reading a paperback. A bell rang as I came through the door, but he didn’t look up. I walked past him through the racks of clothes: men’s, women’s, children’s; pants, dresses, shirts, and a T-shirt that said I HATE NEW YORK WINTERS. In a back room I found the velvet art (a bullfighter and a flamenco dancer in orange on black), the dishes and appliances. There weren’t any microwaves, CD players, computers, Cuisinarts or Nintendo games here. Last Chance sold the old, fat eight-track tapes, records, record players, black-and-white TVs, toaster ovens, Waring blenders, the detritus of a world in high-tech forward motion. The furniture was yesterday’s discarded styles: a canvas butterfly chair, a Naugahyde sofa, a lamp with a campfire painted on the shade, which flickered as the bulb heated up. There were stacks of drapes, pots and pans, wineglasses, salt and pepper shakers, dish towels, a full set of china for one hundred bucks. This is the place where your belongings end up when you have no kids, where everything you’d loved and saved to buy would go—out of style, out of date, marked with a white tag, sold for a pittance. “You came here to look for a typewriter,” I reminded myself. There weren’t any.

  I walked back through the clothes racks to the front counter. “Got any typewriters?” I asked the guy, who had sunk a little lower on his elbows, gotten a few pages further into his book.

  “No,” he said without looking up. The light from the window behind me reflected on his bald spot. I peered into it as if it had something to reveal, but all I saw was that I was about to tell a lie.

  “I had an old manual that I liked a lot,” I said. “It wasn’t worth much, but it had been my father’s, and I had a sentimental attachment to it. My boyfriend and I had a fight, and he brought it down here yesterday morning. A Hispanic guy in a wheelchair?”

  He dog-eared a corner to mark his place in the book and looked up. “All the typewriters I get go to Santo. He collects them. Made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Why does he collect them?”

  “He’s a writer.”

  “What does he write?”

  “Fiction,” the guy said.

  “Do you have any idea where I could find him? I’d like to get that typewriter back.”

  “He lives in Coldwater Arroyo.”

  “Does he have a phone?”

  “Lady, he don’t even have a light bulb. You want to find him and his typewriter, you’re gonna have to hike in.”

  “Okay, so I’ll hike,” I said. “What was the offer you couldn’t refuse?”

  “Nada,” he said.

  ******

  The places I don’t go to alone are the places where you’re all alone until you confront your nemesis. The mantra of a single woman is that it’s safer to be alone in a crowd than alone in the alone, on the dubious theory that one’s fellow citizens are witnesses who will keep each other in check. Coldwater Arroyo is city-owned property, but that doesn’t make it safe. It just gives you someone with deep pockets to sue if you get hurt, or for your relatives to sue if you get killed. It’s at the base of the Sandias, close enough to town to attract troublemakers, far enough away for no one else to hear you or them. One deterrent is to make yourself repulsive, and it has been proved that skunk odorant repels men faster than any other. The best a skunk gun can do, however, is buy time, although not enough time to get out of Coldwater Arroyo, unless you’re in better shape than I am. Someone who would venture up there in search of trouble might not care what he smelled like, might not smell that good to begin with. Santo could have some unfriendly dogs. Santo could be unfriendly himself and crazy besides. On Sunday I asked the Kid if he’d go with me.

  “Okay,” he said.

  We found the path to Santo’s easily enough; it was marked by hiking boot footprints and dog shit. It followed a sandy arroyo bed where boulders had been dumped by the mountain runoff in its persistent rush to the lowest level. Water is the ultimate bottom-seeker. Higher up the walls of the arroyo were pink rocks that had a hard-earned, exposed-to-the-elements character, like the faces of craggy old men. Lizards scooted across the sand. A jumping cholla jumped some spines in my direction. The brown leaves of scrub oaks hung at the edges of their limbs and gave a death rattle when they fell off. There were places where we had to climb over the boulders to follow the arroyo. Few things in life are more satisfying than climbing rocks, but I wouldn’t want to do it every time I went out for a pack of cigarettes. After we’d gone about a mile up the wash, dogs heard us coming and started a loud and cacophonous barking, a once-familiar sound, the background music of every Mexican town and some in New Mexico as well. Either Santo wasn’t home or he liked the sound of yapping dogs.

  “I don’t know about this, Kid,” I said. “They sound mean.”

  “Don’t worry, Chiquita.”

  “In a setup like this they could be dogs who haven’t had their shots.” That was also endemic to every Mexican town. You got bit down there, and it was ten days of shots and pain or the risk of losing your life, which to a Mexican is no big deal.

  We kept on walking. Eventually a footpath led out of the arroyo. We followed it around a boulder and over a rise and came upon the dogs. There were about ten of them, and they weren’t chained up. They ran to within a few feet of us and stopped, snarling, barking and flashing their fangs. Some were gray, some were brown. Some were small, some were medium-sized. They had ears that stood up or flopped over, long curled tails or no tails at all. They all had the concave stomachs and protruding ribs of street dogs. They were looking for love, food or trouble, depending upon your perspective.

  “Cálmate, perrito,” the Kid said. He knelt down, extended his hand and spoke softly to the dogs. In a few minutes they had shut up and clustered around him, sharing their fleas, getting scratched behind the ears. If he’d had any food, they would have been eating it out of his hand.

  The quieting of the dogs gave me a chance to look around. Santo’s yard had been scraped raw by his pets
and the elements, except that here and there plastic flowers and pinwheels were in bloom, stuck into the ground on wooden stems. A yellow pinwheel caught the wind, whirred and shivered. A red flower danced on its stick.

  Santo’s home was tucked into the boulders. It was made out of wood, stone, plastic, old road signs and cardboard held together with hope and spit. It reminded me of the cardboard hovels in Mexico, except that this close to a Mexican city you’d never find just one. The entire hillside would have sprouted shacks and dogs and children. Santo’s hovel was surrounded by a bunch of tumbleweeds stuck together by their prickers, nature’s own barbed wire fence. “Anybody home?” I called. His wind chimes tinkled back.

  “Santo?” No answer, so I made my way through an opening in the tumbleweed fence and went inside. I saw a pile of dirty rags in the corner that resembled a bed. Santo had one chair and several rickety tables made out of planks balanced on rocks or cinder blocks. The tables supported his collection of manual typewriters and candles. He had Olivettis, Royals, Underwoods and candles in all colors, shapes and sizes. Like the guy at Last Chance said, there wasn’t a light bulb in sight. Apparently Santo did his writing at night by candlelight. He probably spent his days scrounging for food for himself and the dogs. The typewriters all had white paper sticking out of their platens, the empty canvas, every creative person’s challenge. In one sense, Santo had met the challenge—the canvases were not empty, I noticed, as I walked around and inspected the typewriters. Each piece of paper had at least a few lines typed on it. The Olivetti:

  Fire in the drainage ditch

  The setting sun

  Drips water

  From its mouth blood red

  The Underwood: