Blood Lake (37 page)

Norma arrived and asked many things I can't remember, except, What hurt me? I managed to say the cold more than anything, and she said my blood pressure must be very low, and I trusted her. But then her face changed in front of me. She was someone else who had shown up tonight because Miguelito had alerted the entire underworld that he had gotten ahold of an out-of-her-mind
gringa
who was soon going to be easy pickings.

So I've got to keep going. But how? They're so much stronger than I am. They keep telling me everything's okay, the liars! They keep trying to get me to take a drink for God's sakes. If I could just get warm I'd be okay, but they just won't let me they they they

Blackness.

And she left me with Miguelito in a cold wet place, saying she was going to go get some medicine or something, and smiling an evil, knowing smile, then she left me alone with this evil man, her partner in this conspiracy, and I
realized that there was no way out of it now, I was definitely never going to find my way back and I was going to die of cold, far from my loved ones, with people to whom I meant nothing, and everything was slipping away into darkness. I don't remember fainting, but I did wake up with bruises on my cold, gray fingers.

I was lying on the floor saying
No puede ser
, and someone was above me, repeating what I said to somebody else.

Ñucaca Miguelmi cani
.

And then it was a voice,
Soy Miguel
, in the darkness, and then there wasn't darkness. Strange wobbly shadowy figures hovering over me, and someone wearing a very real Miguelito mask was trying to get my lighter, but the flesh was peeling off his face and falling to the ground. Blood on my hands. Raving. More blackness.

I woke up and kicked the blankets off.

Darkness.

I woke up and kicked the blankets off.

We were in a dark place, but light was coming from behind the big man, making him only a dark silhouette. Other dark figures were shoving blankets on top of me, perhaps telling me to get warm, but I was convinced that they wanted me to give in to the
soroche
, to embrace the warm sleep of death, and I preferred being awake and freezing, so I pushed them away. I wasn't going to give in to death that easily. The corona of light glowing behind them gave a convincingly otherwordly air, but I couldn't tell if they were servants of heaven or hell. They were angels and devils fighting over my soul, and I said I will only talk to God.

I would be happy to go off with Him, but not these unknown dark figures.

And there was more darkness.

And then a voice coming from a dark figure in a darker room was asking
¿Antonia es el nombre de su hija?
which only made it worse, an appalling attempt to get my confidence, trying to say my daughter's name to me, when I was convinced that the three figures dressed in black weren't real but
part of the bottomless psychic ocean I had entered way back on top of the ridge. And the one near me smelled of death …

Some people say that the unconscious is structured like a language, but it's not. The unconscious is structured like an ocean. I know. I've been there. And I was drowning in it.

I did not trust the men groping around in shadow. They were sucking the blood out of my legs, and I kicked away their rubber bottles, and I pushed him away telling him
No te conosco
. I don't know you.

And I kept passing out.

A dark room. A dark figure that smells of death is asking me, as if we've been talking for quite some time,
¿Antonia es el nombre de su hija?
Where am I? I refuse to talk.

Blackness.

Warmth. Praise God for warmth. I never want to be cold again.

I was willing to bargain, thinking about giving them all my money to let me live, but another voice kept telling me to be quiet, to keep it all to myself.

I kept waking up and another one would be there. Two men, one woman. The first guy, trying to talk to me and get me to take a drink. The others just waiting until I was somehow ready for whatever they were going to do to me. Something kinky. I couldn't even imagine. But they knew. They were smiling about it.

I woke up and stared at a massive orange blur near me. It was warm, glowing bright orange, but I did not recognize it. There were small reptiles crawling in the darkness beyond the fringes of the glow. They asked me how I felt. I was getting warmer finally, so I said I felt good about getting warm but bad as well because I still didn't trust them. It was something pretty direct. They had lizards crawling all over them.

More darkness.

Somewhere in here I had dreams about more psychedelic goings-on involving twiggy ladies with British accents sitting on odd contraptions in their nighties, corpulent black folks working in a fish restaurant on the Mississippi River, huge serpentine arms of flesh slapping the muddy water, a living catalogue featuring a dark-skinned smiling woman named Terry Traynor (according to the voiceover) with a slightly bulging middle modeling skintight park ranger pants with a loose green shirt, and ultra-high-tech weirdness where executives made phone calls from the roofs of computer-generated buildings while triple laser beam beacon light sources played on them for their amusement, and the number of people on those roofs and the myriad light sources made it look like something from a high-tech twenty-first-century Depression-era musical. Got that?

The roosters crowed.
That
brought me back. For the first time all night I was sure that I was
not
in another dimension, that I was in—or had made it back to—this one. That night was becoming morning, that I was still in Cajas, and that this probably was Doña Norma's house, like the guy kept telling me. They still wouldn't let me see the roosters, to verify. But after a while I accepted it. I was so grateful for the realization that I was alive, that I had succeeded in finding my way back, as I swore I would back on the hilltop while I fought against what I have fairly good reason to believe was Death. And I was so happy. I accepted the drink. Talked to the man in black. Told him I had a life to get back to and that with his help, I was going to get back to it. Not for my sake, because I was a worthless skank who had brought this all on myself, but for my special girl, who still needed me, who still deserves a mother. For her sake, I need to get back, still talking as if I had “gone” somewhere. Which, as I say, maybe I did.

I just opened right up. It all flooded out, as if my brain were unfreezing. Maybe that's what happens when you get your life back, or at least when congealed hypothermic blood starts to pulsate and run again. I talked in my
still-somewhat-strained Quichua, but I know I switched into Spanish for a long while, and I have no idea what he made of
la loca
from the valley who was calmly, quietly cursing and gently slapping the hard adobe wall with her palm and fist to help her “concretize” things. I was even able to converse calmly despite the fact that the man in black had a three-foot lizard draped over his shoulders, hanging down next to the crucifix around his neck, trying to blend in. I even switched back into Quichua and I was able to be quite coherent in Quichua and I knew I was fine at that point. But it just felt so good to be just plain warm. I didn't want to move from that nice warm bed, ever.

By the time Doña Norma came in to see me the next morning, I was fine. I could tell them a lot, but there were many gaps. They filled some of it in for me so now it flows like this. But in some sense, this is a lie, this is not what happened, because now it almost makes sense. But at the time, it only made the most twisted “sense” of paranoid delusion, and that was the scariest part of all.

Coming back from the dead is a little like being reborn.

And I never want to feel that cold again.

The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights.

—J. Paul Getty

ALLILLACHU CANQUI?

Ari, allillami cani. Canca?

Ñucapish
.

Better now you are?

Yes
.

Norma pours the simmering herb tea into a glass. It's a bright, rosy pink.

It's warm.

I cradle it in my hands, put my face to the rising steam, drink in the warmth.

The warmth.

Thawing brain trying to think. Fredo. He knew I had money. Must have figured I had more. Did he … ? No. Money … doesn't seem to matter … now …

And I drift off to sleep murmuring something.

Warm hands on my forehead.

The sun is nearly directly overhead when I wake up and finally see my surroundings clearly, a one-room mud-walled shack with bedrolls for four. Two brothers with rugged Incan
features stare down at me. Francisco and Hernando. They've got me wrapped in every cloth, blanket and poncho they could lay their hands on, and I am lying in the one real bed in the place, too. Even at high noon under the equatorial sun, it is cool indoors at this altitude.

What name you are?

I Filomena am
.

What you are?

I traveler am
.

You pretty woman are
.

I smile.

You hungry are?

“Yes.”

“You need more
mote
,” says Francisco, pinching my bony arms, and laughing.

The middle knuckles on my right hand are bruised and sore. I don't know how that happened.

They bring me a steaming bowl of soup with a side of rice and
mote
. I refuse the rice, feeling bad about what a tremendous sacrifice it is for them to feed me, but they will not hear of it, and I'm too weak to insist.

“There was no blood in your hands, your feet,” says Francisco. “You go crazy.”

“Yeah. I sure did.”

“You tried to hit me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“That's okay. You swung at me and then you stopped yourself one inch from my face.”

Oh. Then who did I hit?

Norma says they tried to get me to come into her house, but at the door I said that they were going to rob me, and I refused to go in.