Her eyes darken,
as if a drop of ink fell into each one. Fear surges in him
again.
You should have shot
her!
But tears like water mixed with
charcoal well up, spill over, draw dark gray tracks on her white,
sloping cheeks. “Please—it is not true, tell me so. I have nowhere
to go. The machines that are loud and smell bad come and tear the
trees from the soil, break mountains and take them away. They draw
the water away from the sweet dark places under the earth. Poison
comes into the water everywhere, how I do not know, but creatures
are made sick who drink it. I tried to stay by the spring, but the
water was gone, and the machines came. There was no room for
me.”
“There’s no room for
you here,” he snaps. But he thinks, You’re so skinny, Jesucristo,
you could live in a broom closet. There must be some place to fit
you in.
She shakes her
head fiercely, smears the gray tears across her cheeks with her
fingers. “Here there are places where the machines do not go. I
know this. The People here are
inmigrantes
from the cold
lands—they must know how it is. They will understand, and let us
help them guard the land.”
Already there are...empty spots
,
the blonde by the pool had said. But just this one little one?
Would she be so bad?
No. All of his targets were each
just one. Together they were hundreds. “They’re guarding it from
all of you, so you don’t use everything up. Like
locusts.”
She goes still as a freeze-frame.
“Mortals use. The People guard and protect. Surely they know
this!”
What is she saying? “The power.
Whatever it is, in the land. It’s drying up.”
“The People let the
magic run through us like water through our fingers. We do not
hoard it or hide it or wall it in. If we did, it would dry up, yes.
Who told you this lie?”
“They did. The
ones like you.”
Have you seen
many who are just like me?
he hears the
blonde saying, in that voice that made everything wise and
true.
She hasn’t moved, but she suddenly
seems closer, her eyes wider, her hair shifting like dry grass in
the wind. There’s no wind. He wants to back away, run.
And he remembers
that night in his grandmother’s house, after the fight about the
tamales. He remembers being tucked up in blankets on the floor, and
not being able to sleep because it stayed in his head—the angry
voices, his
abuela
crying, his
mamá
cleaning up after dinner
with hard, sharp movements. Nobody’s mad at you, he’d told himself.
But he’d still felt sick and scared. So he was awake when
the
tap, tap, tap
sounded on the window across the room. On the
glass bought with money his mother had sent home. And he’d raised
his head and looked.
The next morning he’d told his
mother he’d had a bad dream. That was how he’d recalled it ever
since: a bad dream, and a dislike for the little house he never saw
again. But now he remembered. That night he saw the Devil, come to
take his mother and grandmother for the sin of anger. He’d frozen
the scream in his throat. If he screamed, they would wake and run
in, and the Devil would see them. If it took him instead, they
would be safe.
What he’d seen, before he’d closed
his eyes to wait for death, was a white face with a high, flattened
forehead, gray-disk eyes, and a lipless mouth, and thin white
fingers pressed against the glass. It was her, or one of her kind,
come down from the spring looking for the offering.
“It is not true,” she
hisses, thrusting her face forward. “None of my kind would say that
we devour and destroy. This is mortals’ lies, to make us feared, to
drive us away!”
He
is
afraid
of her. He could snap those little pipe cleaner arms, but that
wouldn’t save him from her anger. It rages in the room like the
dust storms that can sand paint off a car.
She has to be wrong. If she isn’t,
then for three years he has—He had no choice. Did he? Three years
of things, hundreds of them, that should have lived
forever.
“Your kind want you
kept out,” he spits back at her. “You don’t get it, do you? They
sent me to kill you.”
He’d thought she was still before.
Now she’s an outcrop of white stone. He can’t look away from her
wide, wide eyes. Then her mouth opens and a sound comes out, soft
at first, so he doesn’t recognize it as laughter.
“You will drive
us back or kill us? You are too late. Jaguars have come north
across the Rio Grande. The wild magic is here. We will restore the
balance in spite of the ignorant
inmigrantes
. And when we are all
strong again, they will see how weak they are
alone.”
She moves. He thinks she’s standing
up, all in one smooth motion. But her head rises, her arms shrink
and disappear, her bent legs curve, coil. He’s looking into her
transformed face: longer, flatter, tapered, serpentine. The flyaway
hair is a bush of hair-thin spines. Rising out of it are a pair of
white, many-pronged antlers.
Their points
scrape the ceiling above his head. The cloud of tiny iron needles
fills the air between him and her and he thinks,
Did I fire?
But by then she’s behind him.
There’s a band of pressure around his chest. He looks down to see
her skin, silver-white scales shining in the street light, as the
pressure compresses his ribs, his lungs. She’s wrapped around him,
crushing him.
Chisme will know when he stops
breathing. When it’s too late. The room is full of tiny stars.
She’s so strong he can’t even struggle, can’t cry because he can’t
breathe. He wants so much to cry.
The room is
black, and far, far away. He feels a lipless mouth brush his
forehead, and a voice whisper, “
Duermes, hijo, y despiertas a un mundo mas mejór.”
The next world is supposed to be better. He
hopes that’s true. He hopes that’s where he’s
going.
•
He lies with his eyes closed,
taking stock. His ribs hurt, but he’s lying on something soft. Hurt
means he’s not dead. Soft means he’s not on the floor of that
office in the jewelry district, waiting for help.
He listens for the names. Nothing.
He’s alone in his head.
He opens his eyes. The light is
low, greenish and underwatery, and comes from everywhere at once.
He’s back in their hands, then.
At the foot of whatever he’s lying
on, a young guy looks up from a sheet of paper. Brown hair,
hip-nerd round tortoishell glasses, oxford-cloth button-down under
a cashmere sweater under a reassuring white coat. For a second he
thinks he was wrong and this is a hospital, that’s a
doctor.
“Hey,” says the guy.
“How do you feel?”
Come on, lungs, take in air. Mouth,
open. “Crummy.” He sounds as if his throat’s full of
mud.
The guy draws breath across his
teeth—a sympathy noise. “Yeah, you must have caught yourself a
whopper.”
This one’s remarkably human,
meaning damned near unremarkable. But the lenses in the glasses
don’t distort the eyes behind them, because of course, they don’t
have to correct for anything. He’s never seen one of them so
determined to pass for normal. Is there a reason why this one’s
here now? Are they trying to put him at ease, off his
guard?
“Actually,” he
answers, “it was a little kid who turned into a big-ass constrictor
snake.”
“Wow. Have you ever
gotten a shape-changer before?”
Bogus question. The guy knows his
whole history, knows every job he’s done. But there’s no point in
calling him on it. “Yeah.”
A moment of silence. Is he supposed
to go on, talk it out? Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress
therapy they’ve decided he needs? Or worse—is he supposed to
apologize now for screwing up, for letting her get by
him?
The guy shrugs, checks his piece of
paper again. “Well, you’re going to be fine now. And you did good
work out there.”
Careful. “Any job you can walk away
from.”
“Quite honestly, we
weren’t sure you had. Your ‘little kid’ put out enough distortion
to swamp your connection with us. As far as we can tell it took
almost thirty minutes for it to dissipate, after you...resolved the
situation. Until then, we thought you’d been destroyed. Your
handlers were beside themselves.”
Handlers—the names. He wonders what
“beside themselves” looks like for Chisme and Biblio and Magellan,
or whatever those names are when they aren’t in his head. He’s
never heard emotion out of any of them.
He stares at the
young guy, handsome as a soap opera doctor. He starts to laugh,
which hurts his ribs. Has he dealt with shape-changers before?
Hell, which of them
isn’t
a shape-changer? However
they do it, they all look like what you want or need to see. Except
the ones, bent and strange, who can’t pass. “I wasn’t sure I killed
her.”
The young guy winces. “Killed” is
not a nice word to immortals, apparently. “The site was completely
cleansed. Very impressive. And I assure you, I’m not the only one
saying so.”
“That’s nice.” He’s
never failed to take out his target before this. He doesn’t know
what punishment it is that he seems to have escaped. For this one
moment, he feels bulletproof. “I talked to her, before I did
it.”
Surprise—and alarm?—on the young
guy’s face. “By the green earth! Are you nuts? You must have been
warned against that.”
“She said her
kind—your kind—aren’t a drain on the local resources. Or aren’t
supposed to be. She implied you’d forgotten how it’s
done.”
The soap-opera features register
disgust. “Just the sort of thing one of them would say. They’re
ignorant tree-dwellers. They have no idea how complex the modern
world is. You know what they’re like.”
He doesn’t, actually. He’s supposed
to kill them, not get acquainted with them. “Her folks were here
first,” he says, as mildly as he can.
The young guy frowns, confused.
“What does that have to do with it?” He shakes his head. “Don’t
worry, we understand these things. We know what we’re doing. You
can’t imagine what it would be like if we let down our
guard.”
Pictures come into his head—from
where? A picture of jaguars, glimmering gold and black like living
jewelry, slipping through emerald leaves; of blue-and-red feathered
birds singing with the sweet, high voices of children; of human men
and women sitting with antlered serpents and coyote-headed
creatures, sharing food and stories in a landscape of plenty; of
the young white-coated guy, on a saxophone, jamming with the piano
player in the Koreatown bar while a deer picked its way between the
tables.
“You’ll be fine now,”
the young guy repeats. “Get some sleep. When you wake up you’ll be
back home. I think you can expect a week or two off—go to Vegas or
something, make a holiday of it.”
Of course, “get some sleep” is not
just a suggestion. The guy makes a pressing-down motion, and the
greeny light dims. He can feel the magic tugging at his eyelids,
his brain. The young guy smiles, turns away, and is
gone.
It’s a good
plan—but not Vegas, oh, no. He’ll wake up in his apartment. He’ll
get up and pack...what? Not much. Then he’ll head south. Past the
border towns and the
maquiladoras
, past the giant
commercial fields of cotton and tomatoes scented with chemicals and
watered from concrete channels.
He wonders if they’ll be able to
track him, if they’ll even care that he’s gone. For them, the world
must be full of promising, desperate mortals. He’ll lose the names,
the senses, the fastlane, but he’ll be traveling light; he won’t
need them.
Eventually he’ll get to the wild
places, rocky or green, desert or forest or shore. Home of the
ignorant, superstitious peasants. That’s where he’ll stop. He’ll
bake tortillas on a hot, flat stone, lay out sugar cane and
tobacco.
Maybe nothing will come for them.
Maybe he won’t even be able to tell if anything’s there. But just
in case, he’ll tell stories. They’ll be about how to get past
people like him, into the land where the magic is dying because it
can’t flow like water.
Then he’ll move on, and do it
again. Nothing makes up for the ones he’s stopped, but he can try,
at least, to replace them.
Sleep, child
, she’d said,
and wake to a better
world
. He’d thought then she’d meant the
sleep of death, but if she’d wanted to kill him, wouldn’t he be
dead? He relaxes into the green darkness, the comforting magic.
When he wakes this time, it’ll be the same old world. But some
morning, for someone, someday, it will be
different.
What Used to
Be Good Still Is
Emma Bull
Porphyry is a volcanic rock. Maybe
that's why it happened. Maybe it was because the hill that became a
pit was named Guadalupe, for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared
in a vision to a Mexican peasant a long time ago. Maybe it's
because walls change whatever they enclose, and whatever they leave
out.