Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (9 page)

So I’m waiting in the dark. I’ve made encouraging progress since I weaned myself off solid food and punctured my eardrums. I must lie still, so that my pulse becomes regular enough to hypnotize me. Soon, I will lose the use of my eyes, weakening them with mild acidic irritants until I see only black, then red. I must dive into myself and slow the dismal thunder of my heartbeat until I can hear her voice again in the place where she hid inside me before, until some remnant mote of her teaches my blood to sing. I must lie still and whisper into myself until I hear a response. Soon, I know, there will be two less lonely souls in the world.

I am an ugly man. Women seldom look at me, and never in the eyes, unless I’m giving them money. So I go to strip clubs.

Let me tell you about my favorite.

The Black Box used to be called Strip Search, and before that, Freaky Kiki’s Cockpit, but nothing else about it has changed, except the cover charge. It’s a topless dive next to the airport runways. The overpriced, watery drinks keep the sailors and bikers away, and the hardcore perverts go to the all-nude shows at Les Girls and Pacer’s. Only hardcore losers and conventioneers go there, before hitting their flight home; people who can’t or won’t tell what happened to them there. Most of the locals know about the Black Box. I heard the warnings; that’s why I went.

You think you know me. I’m the sad, sick, deluded loser in the darkest corner of the club, who believes if he just keeps tipping, one day, maybe he’ll pay enough to do more than look. I am all that, and less. I keep coming, I keep paying, and they can barely bring themselves to touch my hand long enough to take money from it.

They know my name. They all shout it out when I come in, pretending to fight over me, but I always get Brandi. We have something special, she and I. She understands what I want.

She is not the prettiest, or the nicest. Drugs have made her scrawny and mean, but they have opened her to me.

She doesn’t fuck around. “Let’s get you started,” she says, grazing my crotch with a champagne bottle. It’s always open when I get there, and I’ve never asked to open it, like the other customers often do. I don’t want to know what’s really in it.

The first time, I was scared, like anyone would be. Sydni was my dancer. She had a weave and atrocious fake tits and a dangling tampon string. I dropped fifty on her for a private show, and another fifty for champagne. The only thing I remember after that is that she didn’t drink any.

I came to on a bus bench across the street from the club a few hours before dawn. A plane roared overhead, touched down and sucked newspapers off my body. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, beer-soaked rags from the lost and found box at the club. My gold chain was missing. My wallet was cleaned out, and four hundred dollars was gone from my account, the limit I could pull out of an ATM.

There was only a hole from the first drink to when I woke up, a total void. Anything could have happened, before they robbed and stripped me. With such a vacuum, anything was possible.

But Nature hates a vacuum.

I waited a week before I went back. I wore shabby clothes and carried only a two hundred dollar roll. I cancelled all my credit cards and moved all but one hundred dollars out of my checking account.

They gave me to Brandi. She took all my money.

I woke up walking in a glade in Balboa park as the sun bled over the horizon. They gave me another glorious hole, but this time, dreams came bubbling out. Visions. Memories.

Slivers of what they said, when they thought I couldn’t hear, and what they did to me. What they did to each other. Her bony ass crushing my tiny cock, her long yellow teeth and dry gray tongue, the mouth of the bottle; her zombie eyes, sucking mine into a perfect void that ate me up and spit me out into the empty morning.

I go back about once a week. The drugs they use on me each time have the permanent effect of a heavyweight prizefight. Whole parts of my brain are going to sleep and waking less each time I recover. They get more brazen, milking me, steering me to the ATM until the bouncers cut me off and dump me on the street. I really believe they’re selling my blood.

The visions get richer, which is how I know my mind is not dying. They go on longer each time, you see, blending into waking life, so when I close my eyes, I can relive every moment in the hole, and more.

Because I could see things that I shouldn’t have seen, I started to wonder. I saw Brandi after they rushed me out, saw her shower and snort coke or go down on another stripper in the dressing rooms, and it made sense. I was seeing all of it through her eyes.

Her real name is Rhonda Elaine Scroggins. I see her go home to a trashed apartment and a boyfriend turning fat and bald, ripening into the spirit and image of the stepfather who taught her to do things to men for money. I see him hit her, make her suck off his friends at poker parties, see him feed her coke until her head is a buzzing hole of infinite possibility, and she will do anything. That’s when she is closest to me, closer than when I feed her bills at the club. I am the only thing she truly owns, the only one who’d miss her if she disappeared.

Like a moth with its antennae singed off, I blunder through the cavernous, lightless hole where the rest of my life used to be. I start to forget things—stupid shit, like my PIN number, my mother’s name, how I make a living. But for every light that goes out in my head, for every dollar I pay, a little gray light goes on inside Brandi’s, and we are closer together. I am closer than her hogbitch boyfriend, closer than any man who’s ever had her. I look out of her eyes for hours at a time, now. When she’s sky-high, I can make her hands do things, and my control is growing.

I am building up a tolerance. It takes more every time to black me out, more to get me inside her. I can control her body better than my own, but I worry that they will cut me off for good, or that my money will run out. But I keep going. What we have is something special. She is almost paid for.

On the highest, holiest night in Tenochtitlan, it was unseemly for the people to be out in the streets celebrating, and the jaguar-priests feared that so much joy could only arouse the wrath of the god they honored.

At the head of the procession, flanked by his eight companions and four warriors, his four concubines and a horde of cheering spectators, the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca capered and piped skirling plumes of languidly ecstatic song down the avenues and alleys of the imperial capital. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his suit of feathers and bells jingled a merry rhythm for the crowd to clap in time, and Ahuac, the high priest of the Smoking Mirror, noted with bored horror how they dared to look directly upon him, and hid their faces only when Ahuac marched past on the bed of crushed flower petals in the ixiptla’s wake.

Chosen from the prisoners taken in flowery combat with one of the neighboring cities, the ixiptla became the living vessel of Tezcatlipoca for a year. Showered with comforts such as the lords themselves could only covet, and bearing at the end of his reign the quetzal-plumed crown of the king himself, he paraded through the streets each night to remind the Mexica by whose grace they lived and prospered.

The ixiptla was a figure of dreadful authority, the god incarnate, and never so much as when he raged at his captors, cursed the Mexica, pleaded for his life or tried to escape. Tezcatlipoca was the arch-sorcerer, the Great Night who wrought the doom of Tula when the Toltecs denied him human flesh. In his palm danced the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, who drove the Mexica from nomadic poverty to lordship over an empire uniting the shattered Seven Tribes of Aztlan. But he was also the Smoking Mirror, god of deceit and contradiction, and lived to sow disaster among the gifts he brought, to remind the people that the world was unjust.

For his part, Ahuac was most displeased with this year’s ixiptla, and began to doubt the value of the entire ritual. This avatar of the god, a lewdly handsome captain from Tlacopan, confounded them. In battle, he had split thirty skulls before he was captured, yet under the raiment of Tezcatlipoca, he had become meek and mad as a village shaman. He was never seen to eat, yet he gave gifts of food from his robes, stolen from the lords’ banquets, for the poor. He blessed beggars and children, and gave them tiny toy jaguars carved from the walls of his luxuriant cell.

The people flocked to him tonight, and sang blasphemous songs begging for him to be spared, or at least shared out amongst the mob, and Ahuac waved the soldiers closer for fear they might lose their minds and take him.

He still harbored the hope that this year’s incarnation might grant him that moment of essential communion with the Smoking Mirror, and a momentary glimpse of the future, which the king so desperately craved and feared. But after months of fasting and bleeding and mutilating himself, of maguey thorns in his tongue and penis until he could taste or feel nothing, Ahuac simply lusted to cut out his heart, visions or no, and nearly drooled at the prospect of dividing his flesh among the lords of the city.

The ixiptla waved to the crowd, and a shower of corn and chocolate fell from his sleeve, inciting a stampede. His concubines clucked at his trickery, and wondered too loud how he had kept his flesh so robust, if he took no food for himself. His prowess with the women had shamed the legends of the god, himself, they crowed. His ritual companions hissed at the waste of such fine fare on the peasantry.

“Ah, my servants,” asked the ixiptla, “will my flesh be devoured only by the lords of the city, and by the king and all the priests?”

His companions laughed and sang in slurred monkey-chatters. “Only the finest will eat you, O lord.”

The black and gold-painted face of the ixiptla split in an unseemly white grin. “Then what will the poor have to eat? On what holy day will they have the honor of eating you, and so sharing in the gift of my flesh?”

When the last of the city lay behind them, they made their way through the crush of peasants to the waters of Tezcoco, where a canopied canoe awaited the ixiptla’s party. Behind the phallic water-dog mask of Xolotl, executioner of the gods to feed the sun, Ahuac gulped blood from his mangled tongue and forced himself through the prescribed sermon: on the midnight glory of Tezcatlipoca, on the vital symbolism of his final journey to the shrine of Tlapitzahuayan, where he shed his godhood and offered himself up for the holiday feast. He had to shout to be heard over the sounds of the people weeping.

The party made haste to the canoe, and Ahuac ordered the soldiers to harrow the crowds after someone shied a stone at him. The ixiptla climbed into the boat and took his place on the jaguar mat as if he had done this every year. As they pushed off, the rotted golden light of the moon dazzled the priest so he stumbled at the gunwale, and the ixiptla steadied him. Ahuac shrank away, sneering, “Glut yourself on their fickle worship, O Great Night, for you’ll find no such fare on your journey beneath the earth.”

The grin of the ixiptla was the moon multiplied. “But will I not rise to hear them again, as I do every year, for am I not your god?”

At the far shore, Ahuac saw that the crowds had already encircled the ancient shrine. The peasants swarmed the ixiptla as he set foot on the mud, and the priest’s heart faltered as he lost sight of him for a moment. But the living god gently pulled himself free and urged them back, taking his place in the ritual with a feverish glee. Ahuac thought he saw something pass from the crowd into his hands, and had him searched, but found nothing. No unclean blood must soil this holy ground, so Ahuac merely ordered the crowd beaten back, and cleared the path to the pyramid.

The ixiptla performed his part of the ritual well enough, breaking a reed flute on each step as he climbed towards Ahuac, who awaited him at the sanctuary atop the shrine. The priest was glad for the mask of Xolotl, for he feared what others might make of the look on his face as he beckoned the ixiptla up to the sacrificial stone.

There were no litanies to sing here, no sermons to waste on the shameless mob of children besieging the shrine. No mere words could brand them with the truth of what it meant to reach out to the gods; to them, a god was a clown bearing gifts. If the annual cycle of the ixiptla dragged on agonizingly, at least its culmination would be swift, the moment of ascension so eagerly anticipated would wash away all uncertainty.

As the ixiptla climbed the last step, legs trembling with fatigue, he murmured, “You must envy me, priest, for I shall go to the warrior’s paradise denied your kind.”

“I doubt it,” Ahuac answered, giving vent to all the gall of a lifetime. “I have communed with the heart’s blood of more men than you have in your city, and have tasted only fear of the black cloud that hides their faces. I think we have fallen from favor with our gods, and I cannot say whither your nagual will fly when I let it loose. Most likely, it will merely rot in the bellies of the lords.”

“Then whence came the order of the god to raid Tlacopan, O my priest?”

“I gave it myself,” Ahuac made the mask grin, thinking this last would melt the ixiptla’s bravado, but he only nodded and smiled back.

The ixiptla meekly lay down on the altar, baring his chest to Ahuac’s obsidian blade. The priest noticed that the ixiptla’s flesh was indeed not so withered as he had expected, given that he took no food for a year. His lips and tongue were stained black, as if he’d eaten his face-paint.