by JL Bryan
“You're fucking him, aren't you?” Tommy asked. He sat on Esmeralda's bed in his underwear, drinking a pint of cheap whiskey and watching an A-Team rerun on the small TV. His eyes flicked over to Ashleigh as she stripped out of her professional wear.
“Who?” Ashleigh asked.
“Come on. The politician guy. Eddie for Senate.”
“First, I am not doing that.” Ashleigh took off her shoe and pointed her sharp high heel at Tommy. “Second, even if I were, it would be none of your business.”
“But you're my girl.”
“Esmeralda is your girl.” Ashleigh pulled on a linty polyester nightgown, possibly the least sexy thing Esmeralda owned. “I'm my own person.”
“But you're using her body,” Tommy said. “You can't go screwing around with other people. I bet she wouldn't be happy to hear about it.”
“Tommy, just relax. I'm not doing it anyway. I just wanted to point out that I have the right do it if I want.” She laid down on the bed and turned her back to him. “Good night.”
“Good night?” He turned her toward him and kissed her—he tasted like bad liquor, cigarette ashes, and six-day-old morning breath. His hand pawed at her breasts.
“Stop it!” Ashleigh pulled away from him.
“Just let Esmeralda out for a minute.”
“No. I'm tired.”
“Maybe she's not.”
“We need our sleep, Tommy.”
“Damn it. You know, I can't just go out and get laid. Most women don't like the fear. You know why I wear these gloves?” Tommy held up a hand. He wore black leather gloves, with the knuckles and the back of the hand cut out.
“Because you're a gay biker?” Ashleigh asked.
“Because I can't be normal around people if they touch me. They're afraid of me.”
“I thought you liked making people feel fear.”
“It can be useful. But I wish I could turn it off sometimes. Just be normal instead of making everyone feel fear.”
“So sorry for you.” Ashleigh closed her eyes and pulled the comforter over herself. She could feel Tommy's eyes glaring at her, but she stayed still and didn't say a word.
“Fine,” he said at last. He stood up, and she heard rustling as he got dressed. “I'm going down to Jack's Spot.”
“Of course you are. Drink the night away.”
“Hell, yeah. One of us needs to remember how to have fun.”
“Shooting pool in a dark hole with the lowest of the city's lowlifes,” Ashleigh said. “Sounds like a barrel of fun.”
“Lowlifes? You hang out with politicians. What exactly do you do for him, anyway?”
“Social media coordinator. I told you.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You know. I keep up his Twitter and Facebook accounts, his blog...”
“Sounds real tough.”
“At least I get paid,” Ashleigh said. “I don't have to rob meth heads just so I can afford to hang out in a sleazy bar.”
“Fuck you, Ashleigh.” Tommy slammed the bedroom door as he left.
“Not until you take a shower,” Ashleigh whispered. She turned off the bedside lamp and closed her eyes again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jenny and Alexander hiked along a narrow, steep trail through the jungle, heading up the side of a mountain. Jenny was soaked with sweat in the steaming afternoon heat. Alexander's two zombie jaguars were ahead of them on the trail, spooking off any man or beast who might bother them.
“Need a break?” Alexander asked. They'd been hiking for more than an hour up rough terrain.
“No,” Jenny said. Her legs and feet were aching. The pack on her back had felt light at first, but she could swear it grew heavier with every step. “Why? Are you tired or something?”
“I'm great.” Alexander sipped from his canteen and passed it to her.
“That's what you think of yourself?” Jenny put the canteen to her lips and tried not to slurp the whole thing down.
“It's what I think of you.”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “I'm great at killing people.”
“Some people need killing.”
“According to who? Who decides who lives and who dies?”
“You,” Alexander said.
“Why should I be the judge?”
“You are, whether you want to be or not. It's always your choice.”
“I'm really trying not to do that anymore, Alexander.”
“How does it make it you feel?”
“How do you think?” Jenny snapped. “Sick, guilty, hating myself...”
“And...?”
Jenny didn't answer.
“Part of it feels good, doesn't it?” Alexander said. “Expressing your power. Letting your inner goddess out.”
“Don't say that. It sounds like something from Oprah. 'Let out your inner goddess!'”
Alexander laughed.
They continued onward, Jenny trying not to think about Kisa. Jenny and Alexander had attended the funeral at the big stone Catholic church in Zinacantan. Jenny missed her terribly, and tried not to cry about it until she was alone.
Noonsa had left, unable to work in the place where she'd seen her nephews and niece die. Alexander had hired a couple of middle-aged mestizo women to replace Noonsa and Kisa's housekeeping and cooking, and he'd brought a couple of other Mayan men who'd previously guarded coca patches to help provide security at the compound. Jenny tried to avoid speaking to the new people, or to anyone. She didn't feel like making new friends yet.
The trail widened and they reached their destination.
“Here we are,” Alexander said. “The lost city of Paochilan. What's left of it, anyway.”
Jenny took in the crumbling stones walls, carved with reliefs and full-size animal statues. Everywhere she looked, the land was terraced, with wide stone steps choked with weeds. Entire trees grew up through the largest building, a towering pyramid like a mountain, with steps leading up to a narrow stone building at the top.
“This is amazing,” Jenny said. “Doesn't anybody know about this place?”
“Just one more Mayan ruin,” Alexander shrugged. He approached the pyramid. “Come on. We want to reach the top before sunset.” He stepped on the first of many steep, broken stone stairs. The jaguars sat down on either side of the staircase like guards.
“Is it safe?” Jenny asked.
“Is anything?” He climbed a few more steps. “There's only two hundred steps.”
“Great.” Jenny placed a foot on the lowest step, and then she looked up. The staircase was so steep that it seemed like she'd be walking almost straight up. A number of the stairs were cracked and eroded, and they were all very shallow. She could barely fit her foot on one.
“Scared?” Alexander asked.
“No. If something breaks loose and I fall, I'll deserve it for listening to you.”
“That's the spirit, Jenny.”
They ascended. Jenny was fascinated by the carvings set into the pyramid, lots of birds and jaguars. She could have stopped to study them every step of the way, but the sun was low in the sky and she didn't want to be looking for steps in the dark.
Panting, she finally reached the top, hundreds of feet above the ground. They faced a building with three empty doorways, Mayan hieroglyphs carved into their stone lintels.
“This was the holiest place in the city,” Alexander said. “Only the highest priests allowed. They received messages from the gods here.”
“Didn't they do human sacrifice?”
“Some of that, too.”
Jenny looked down the steep slope of the pyramid—it was a long fall to the shadowy ground below. For a moment, she could imagine thousands of Mayans standing below, looking up in awe as priests performed the ceremonies.
Then she looked out to a breathtaking view of the sunset over the Sierra Madre mountains. She could see a waterfall here and there off the mountains, disappearing into rivers that slinked away below the dense green
canopy. A flock of brightly colored birds passed nearby.
“How old is this place?” Jenny asked.
“About twelve hundred years, give or take,” Alexander said. “It's not one of the famous, touristy places. Most of the old ruins aren't well known. The government just picks a few, runs a lawnmower over them, and charges admission. But nobody ever comes here. We've got the place to ourselves. Let's check out our room.”
Alexander led her through one of the portals, into a room lined from floor to ceiling with hieroglyphs. A thick layer of leaves and debris had accumulated on the stone-tile floor. Alexander swept an area clear with his foot, then shrugged off his hiking pack and set it down. Jenny was grateful to set hers down, too. She stretched her arms and back, all of which now felt incredibly light.
“Got any more coke?” Jenny asked him.
“Why? We're done hiking.”
Jenny shrugged. “Just an idea.”
“We're not doing any more of that tonight.” Alexander laid out a bright, geometric-patterned Mayan blanket that covered a large portion of the cover. Then he took out a woven pouch the size of a grocery bag.
“Dinner?” Jenny asked.
He opened the bag to show her. It looked like a couple of pounds of raw mushrooms. They smelled pungent, like earth and decay.
“Tell me that's not what we're eating,” she said.
“It's the only thing we're eating.”
“Ugh. They look sick.”
“We're not eating them for the flavor, Jenny.” Alexander tossed a mushroom in his mouth and chewed on it, and he was obviously trying to hide a grimace at the taste. “These are sacred mushrooms.”
“Oh...I've never done those.” She looked into the bag again and wrinkled her nose. “Those can make you crazy, can't they?”
“If you use them like a party drug. Used correctly, they can open hidden doors in your mind.” He held out a mushroom to her, but Jenny didn't take it.
“What kind of doors? Hallucinations and stuff?”
“In your case, the doors to who you really are,” Alexander said. He popped the mushroom she'd refused into his own mouth and chewed it quickly. “After tonight, you'll remember everything, Jenny.”
“You mean my past lives?”
“All of them, if we do it right. You'll remember the different ways you can use your power, too. And then you'll be fully awake. You'll remember yourself, you'll remember me, and we'll both be fully ourselves again.”
“All that from a mushroom, huh?” Jenny asked. She was starting to feel afraid, but she didn't want to show it. Her real self, as Alexander called it, the primordial part of her that had reincarnated so many times, had often acted as a monster. She'd glimpsed that much already. “I'm not sure I want to see my past.”
“The truth is the truth whether you learn it or not,” Alexander said. “So you might as well learn it. That's my philosophy.”
He offered her another mushroom.
Jenny could only think of the difficult life she'd had so far. Her father's struggle to make her a good person, his depressing disillusionment when he realized he'd failed. Ashleigh's manipulations—which might even include Jenny and Seth's entire relationship, according to Alexander.
She did know one thing—she was sick of being in the dark about what she was, and she didn't want to go through life depending on Alexander to tell her. She needed to know for herself.
Jenny took the mushroom into her mouth and bit into it. It tasted the way cow patties smelled.
“Delicious, huh?” Alexander asked.
She raised her middle finger at him while she chewed the mushroom. Then she accepted another. And another.
They walked out of the temple and sat on the highest step, watching the sun fade away while they ate their way through the mushrooms, washing them down with water. Jenny grew nervous, then anxious, then bored. The corona of the sun slid out of sight, and an ocean of stars became visible.
“I don't think these are doing anything,” Jenny said.
Alexander grinned. “Tell me about your earliest memory.”
“Like Egypt? Or Africa?”
“This lifetime.”
“Oh.” Jenny thought. “I was outside in the yard, like two or three years old. I don't remember what I was doing. But I saw this snake—a huge rattler—crawling around below this log. And for some reason, I thought it would make a fun little toy.”
“You liked the rattle.”
“Maybe. I thought it was kind of cute. But when I picked him up...” Jenny looked at Alexander. He could probably guess what came next, but he just waited attentively, his eyes watching hers. “Well, he died. The Jenny pox made him bleed everywhere. My dad got really pissed at me for playing with rattlesnakes.”
As she told the story, she thought she could hear a sound like rattling, but at first it seemed like an echo of her childhood memory. Then the rattling grew louder and multiplied, as if the forest were filled with diamondback rattlers.
“Do you hear that?” Jenny asked.
“The sound of the jungle?”
“Not exactly...” Jenny heard the rattle behind her, loud and strong, and she whirled around to look at the temple.
A feathered serpent was carved above the doorway on the far left, its squarish jaw open and pointed tongue protruding, its scales rectangular with a dot carved inside each one. When they'd arrived, the serpent figure had been folded in on itself in stack of coils.
Now the serpent's head was sliding forward across the front of the temple, towards the middle door, while layer by layer its body unfolded and stretched out behind it. The serpent opened its jaw wide and ate the hieroglyphic birds carved on the lintel of the middle door. Then it flowed on across the face of the temple, towards the door on the right.
“Do you see that?” Jenny whispered. She looked at Alexander. His face kept shifting and melting in front of her eyes, changing from one face to another to another, all of them somehow familiar to Jenny. The only constant was his dark eyes, watching her while the rest of his face kept changing.
“I see you,” Alexander said. “All of your faces like masks, nested inside each other like a Russian doll.”
“I see you, too,” Jenny said. “All of you.”
The snake rattled again. It swallowed the hieroglyphs above the third door, then turned inward and began flowing away into the temple wall, as if it had found some hole in which to burrow.
Then its head and body curled down into the doorway, but it was no longer a stylized relief carved in stone. Instead, it was a live snake, its head as big as a lion's, its body as thick as a man. It was identical to the snake from her first memory, except that thousands of actual diamonds glittered among the scales on its back.
“Tell me you're seeing that,” Jenny whispered.
The snake extended out of the doorway, its head gradually dropping lower as more of the body flowed out of the doorway, until its head was just above the stone floor.
“What are you seeing?” Alexander asked. His voice seemed to echo around her, along with the thousands and thousands of snake rattles.
“A snake,” Jenny said. “It's huge. And it's coming toward us.”
“Don't be afraid.” Alexander took her hand.
“It's not real, is it?” she whispered. The snake moved silently across the stone tiles, towards her feet.
“It's more than real,” Alexander said.
“That's not what I wanted you to say.” Jenny watched the huge head approach her. The snake rose up in front of her like a charmed cobra, its bottomless black eyes staring into hers. Its rattle sounded as loud as a drum in her head.
“Don't show it any fear,” Alexander's voice said, somewhere. Jenny couldn't see him, only the vast snake raising up above her now.
“Yeah...I don't know if I can do that,” Jenny whispered.
The huge diamondback's head rose a few feet above Jenny, and then the snake froze, its eyes still locked on hers.
“Nice snake,” Jenny
whispered. Her whole body was shaking, but she knew better than to make sudden moves around a poisonous snake, even if it was just a hallucination. “Good snake...”
The snake's jaws opened, revealing fangs the size of butcher knives. Then its head darted down at Jenny, and its venomous fang sank deep into her right temple. She could feel it skewering her brain, flooding her head with hot poison.
“Alexander!” Jenny cried out. The snake tore loose, ripping away a sizable chunk of her face. Jenny screamed and toppled forward, toward the steps.
She caught her balance and found her feet sliding forward on stone. She was reminded of moments when she'd been about to go to sleep, when suddenly she would feel her feet slip out from underneath her and then feel herself falling, even though she was lying in bed. Then she would regain her sense of balance.
When Jenny regained her balance, she found herself walking along a crowded cobblestone street that reeked of horse manure, human waste and baking bread. She wore a long, rough skirt and a stiff, scratchy blouse, as well as a pair of gloves to her elbow. Her hair was tied back with a length of ribbon. The crowd jostling around her wore similar archaic, handmade clothing.
All at once, she knew that this was Paris, but not the modern city of wide boulevards and classical architecture. This was more of a medieval warren tucked behind high walls, the streets as narrow and twisted as rabbit-trails in a thick forest. It was the early seventeenth century.
Jenny heard a pained wail behind her. She looked back over her shoulder, and suddenly the crowd was gone. Instead, people huddled in doorways, shivering, their bodies swollen with thick black growths. Corpses littered the streets.
All around her, the dense crowd had turned to scattered individuals staggering their way down the street, afflicted with the horrific disease. She watched a hobbling old man drop his cane, then fall to the street motionless. The city was filled with cries of despair and muffled weeping.
“What do you see?” Alexander's voice said beside her.
“The plague,” Jenny said. “Paris.” She turned to look at Alexander. They were standing just where they'd been, on the top step of the Mayan pyramid. Though Jenny had been part of the street scene, it now appeared to float before her, like a television screen glowing in the vast open darkness in front of the pyramid. She could see herself in that life, pulling the hood of her cloak over her head as she hurried through the plague-ridden city.
