Existence (3 page)

She makes him ashamed of the things he's always been most proud of, and he should probably resent that too.

But it's not resentment, the thing that burns in him when he looks in her eyes, when he speaks her name.

It's a thing that has no name, that's too big and powerful for words.

But if he had to pick a word, it would be
love
.

He likes her because she doesn't want anything from him, because she doesn't want him for his power or his money or his family name. But the bigger feeling, the one that wakes him up in the middle of the night, sweating and gasping from a nightmare in which he's lost her—the all-consuming feeling that, as she once put it, has swallowed his life—that's not because of what she wants. It's because of what she sees.

She looks at him and sees a person he didn't know he could be. Not Feo, not the Player, not the heir to the Tlaloc fortune. She sees
Jago
, the boy she loves, and this boy feels both like a stranger and like the truest version of himself he has ever known. He loves her because she sees not simply what
is
, but what is possible.

She asks to hear the stories of his scars. She wants to know who's hurt him, she says.

“You should see the other guy,” he said the first time she asked, but she didn't laugh, and he knows she understands the meaning behind his words.

“It's not like I
enjoy
it,” he added quickly. “I don't hurt people for
fun
.”

“I would never think that. It's just . . .” She kissed the scar on his face. “I don't care what you've done in the past, Jago. What you've done
doesn't have to define you. What your parents want doesn't have to define you. Who are you
now
? Who do you want to be?”

“You say that like I get to pick.”

“You think this ugly life is all you can have, Jago, but you're wrong.”

He wishes he could tell her the truth. That his aunts and uncles train him for more than the family business. That the reason he spends so many hours in the gym or at the firing range, the reason he speaks so many languages and knows how to make a computer do whatever he asks of it, isn't simply for commerce and brute force. For all his life, being a Tlaloc and being the Player have seemed two parts of the same whole. Yes, he divides his time between training for Endgame and helping the syndicate. Yes, sometimes he wields his weapons in defense of the Olmec people and sometimes to preserve his family's turf. But he's been taught that these are the same: that Playing is a sacred family duty. That in return for their centuries of Playing, for the sons and daughters they've sacrificed to the cause, the Tlaloc family deserves compensation—they deserve respect and power.

But now, he wonders.

Perhaps he's mistaken two duties for one. His family, his business, his bloodline . . . is it possible these are extricable after all, that commitment to one doesn't necessitate commitment to all?

Alicia doesn't like what she knows of his duty, because she thinks it's about intimidation and corruption, greed and crime.

If she knew who he was beneath that, the solemn oath he's sworn, the harsh gods he serves, she might think differently.

Or, he considers, she might not. Endgame is still about violence—war and blood. Alicia has no love for such things, and doesn't want them for him, in any form. She wants to make his life beautiful.

She introduces him to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, to the love poems of Pablo Neruda and the folktales of nineteenth-century Russia, all beautiful things she's learned to love through ballet. He asks her, “How can you say ballet has blinded you to the world when you've seen so much?” and she says, “I want more.”

He plays Mudra for her, and Almas Inmortales and Sanguinaria and Hand of Doom, all his favorite metal bands.

“Ugly,” she pronounces the music, her word for anything she doesn't like.

But for love of him she listens, watches carefully the look on his face as he turns up the volume and thrashes to the beat of the noise. It
is
ugly, and full of rage, and this is what he likes about it. This is the music that plays in his head and heart; this is the sound of his life.

“There's no room for bullshit in this music,” she muses. “Nowhere to hide.”

“Exactly.”

She gets it; she kisses him, and though he is supposed to have left for the gym twenty minutes ago, though he's already missed his last three weight-training sessions, he kisses her back, and knows he's not going anywhere, not anytime soon.

So what if he's neglecting some of his duties? Alicia's only in Peru until the end of the summer. Everything else can wait for three more weeks.

Even Endgame. He hopes.

No one approves.

“Look who's coming—it's the invisible man!” Tiempo crows, as Jago joins his friends for a game of dudo, which he hasn't done since he met Alicia. She's taking an exam in her Spanish class—he spent all night helping her study, but still, he misses her for the two hours she's not at his side.

“We thought you disappeared on us,
Feo
,” Chango says, shaking his cup of dice. Everyone in Juliaca plays dudo, from the little kids on the street to Jago's great-grandmother. Jago has been playing it with his buddies ever since they were young enough to be betting with chocolate coins. Now they use real ones, and Jago almost always cleans up.

Once in a while, he suspects his friends of letting him win. They've known each other for more than a decade, yes, but he's still a Tlaloc;
their parents work for his. He tries not to think about it.

“Finally ditch
la gringa
?” José teases.

Jago scowls at them. “Don't call her that.”

José holds out a cup of dice for Jago. “You blind? That's what she is, Feo.”

“She's Alicia,” Jago says. “And I'm not ditching her.”

“She probably ditched him,” Chango says. “Or she's getting ready to.”

Jago has been looking forward to this afternoon, imagining that he would tell his friends how everything looks different now, how the world has changed—but now that the moment is here, he doesn't know what he was thinking.

Chango, Tiempo, and José have fought with him—they would die for him—but they're not interested in hearing about his feelings.

“How come you never bring her around, Jago? She embarrass you?” José asks.

Chango elbows him. “
We
embarrass him.” Chango has always been the smartest of the three.

“No way is that true,” Tiempo says. He, on the other hand, has always been the most loyal. “Tell him that's not true, Feo.”

“That's not true, Chango.”

“So you're keeping her your dirty little secret because . . . ?”

“If you ever found a girl who could stand your ugly face, you'd know why Feo wants to keep her to herself,” Tiempo says. “See, little boy, when a man and a woman
really
like each other—”

Chango rears back. “Shut your mouth,
cojudo
, or I'll ram these dice down your throat.”

Tiempo only laughs. This is how they talk to one another, this is how they have always talked to one another, and Jago never saw anything wrong with it, until now.

Or, not
wrong
, perhaps; just
less than
. They know one another so well, love one another so much—why can they only communicate in jokes and insults?

“So what does Mama Tlaloc think of your gringa—sorry,
Alicia
?” José
asks.

Jago shifts uncomfortably. “She doesn't know about her.”

Now they're all laughing. “Your mother knows everything, amigo,” Tiempo reminds him. “She just takes her time. Remember when we broke her bathroom window and blamed it on the gardener? And she pretended to buy our story?”

Jago doesn't like to think about that. What his friends don't know is that before his mother fired the gardener, she had him beaten bloody.
His pain is on your shoulders,
she told Jago.
This is what happens when you're too cowardly to tell the truth
.

“She bided her time,” José remembers, shaking his head in admiration. “Waits six months, then—”

Chango slaps his hand against the pavement. “
Bam
. The Tlaloc hammer comes down. At the worst possible moment. She makes us all cry in front of the Laredo sisters.”

José smiles, sighs. “Ah, the Laredo sisters . . .” He tuts his finger at Jago. “What I remember most about the Laredo sisters is that you kept both for yourself. Always so greedy, Feo.”

“My point,” Tiempo says loudly, “is that you can bet everything that your mama already knows about your gringa, and you might want to deal with it before she does.”

“Or get rid of the problem,” Chango says, with what could almost be genuine concern. “You know how these tourists work, Feo. You've dated enough of them.”

“You've
dumped
enough of them,” José puts in, laughing.

“She's slumming it,” Tiempo insists. “This is her vacation, but it's
your
life. Don't be so blind you do something you'll regret.”

The only thing Jago regrets is joining his friends today, imagining that they could be happy for him, that they could accept that he's no longer the person he used to be. He's different now.

Or at least he wants to be.

He takes her to the desert.

He takes her to see the Nazca lines, those ancient glyphs that, for more than a thousand years, have spoken their ancient truth to the sky. He shows her the lines from above, hovering in a Tlaloc helicopter that he pilots himself; then they land and hike to the lines themselves, so she can feel the ancient dirt beneath her feet.

He doesn't tell her that the lines scraped into the earth are messages from the Sky, that they symbolize an oath between an ancient people and their gods.

He doesn't tell her that he once stood on this sacred ground and pledged his life to his line, and to a game that might end the world. That he slipped a knife across his palm, let the blood drip into the ancient lines, became one with his past and his future.

These things are forbidden.

Bringing her here now, when the tourists have faded away and they can breathe in the silence of a starry night, is the closest he can come to revealing his secret. He says it without words:
This place is my heart. This ground beneath us, this sky above us, these messages from the dead—this place is my soul
.

They lie on a blanket side by side, their hands linked, their eyes on the stars.

“Do you think there's anyone up there?” she asks him.

“Do you?”

“Are we talking about God or little green men?”

“It was your question,” he points out.

She sighs. “I think . . . all those millions of stars, all those planets, we probably can't be alone. But I kind of hope we are.”

This isn't the answer he expected. “Why?”

She turns onto her side to face him, and he rolls toward her.

“I don't like the idea of someone up there watching,” she says. “Judging, or whatever. I like the idea that we get to choose for ourselves what it all means. Who we're going to be. And I guess . . .”

“What?”

“I . . . I don't really know how to say it. I never talk like this. Or I never
did before.” She touches his face, so gently. “You turn me into someone new, Jago. Every day, you make me a stranger to myself.”

“That doesn't sound like a good thing.”

“It's the best thing,” she tells him, and then, for a time, there's silence, as her lips meet his and they find a wordless way to speak.

It's not until they're nodding off to sleep beneath the stars, her delicate body folded into his sturdy arms, that she finishes her earlier thought. “I guess I don't want to believe in UFOs or in, you know, some kind of higher power, because I think it's beautiful that we're the only ones. Billions of stars, and only us to see them. Like a single spark in the darkness, you know?”

He squeezes her, gently but tightly, to say,
yes
, he does know. And he wishes she were right.

“You never answered. What do
you
think?” she asks. Her breath is warm on his neck. Her head lies on his chest, and he wonders if she can hear his heart beat.

It's strange—this is the place where he became the Player. It's saturated with memories and blood. But he's never felt less like Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec line. He feels like just a boy, lying beside a girl. He feels like nothing matters here but the two of them, their even breathing, their beating hearts, their warm bodies, their dreams, and their love.

She asks him questions no one has ever bothered to ask.

She trusts him to be gentle, to be kind, to be so many things he never knew he could be.

She thinks him beautiful, and here in the dark, he can almost believe it's possible.

“I don't know if we really are alone,” he lies. Then he says something true, the kind of thing Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec, would never admit. “But that's how being with you makes me feel. Alone in the universe. Only the two of us.”

“A spark in the night,” she whispers.

“A bonfire.”

Jago takes his friends' advice about one thing: He tells his mother about Alicia. She pretends to be surprised.

“Invite the girl over for dinner,” she says, and it is not a request.

He obeys.

He always obeys his mother.

Jago picks her up in one of the family's bulletproof Blazers. Alicia draws in a sharp breath as they approach the first of the guard towers, then seems to hold it for the entire long, winding drive up to the hacienda. He tries to see it through her eyes, this castle on a hill, and wonders if she's judging him for living like a king despite the teeming swarm of poverty below. The Tlalocs do a great deal for the poor of Juliaca, but they could do more—they could always do more.