The Sky Below (27 page)

I didn't understand anything, but the sensation was curiously pleasant. In fact, it made me feel hopeful. Upside down, so much was possible that might be impossible right side up. I might see my father's face in a pool of water, come upon him sitting in a meadow. Did Mexico have meadows? Could Jabalí really be Julia's father? Who was her mother?

We left the cinderblock buildings behind as well and bumped
down a long, quiet road with fields on either side. We stopped at the tall iron gates of a church. Jabalí got out of the truck and Julia scampered after him in a blur of colors and lace. Slowly, I climbed down from my side, got my dusty suitcase out of the truck bed. “Here?” I hesitated by the truck's rear bumper. Dusk was coming in; the air grew chilly. From far away, I heard traces of the pounding music. I looked back down the long road. No cars in sight. A white dog loped along the empty field. The wind wound itself around us.

Julia jumped on one of the tall gates and rode it as it swung open. “
Aquí! Sí!
”

Jabalí, the headless baby doll and feathers and model cars bouncing in his shaggy white hair, was standing at the open gate. The church rose behind him. He held out his hand to me. “Come on,” he said. “It's all right.”

Now, here, any reasonable person might well ask, Why did you go in? What were you thinking? The answer is, I don't know. I wasn't thinking. You might say that the echoing wind made the decision for me, carried me through the tall gate into the stone courtyard. That's not quite right. It's more like the wind had entered me long ago in Arizona; it was part of me. It had already happened. I had already gone in with Jabalí and Julia, gone through the little sanctuary where a clutch of local women were praying aloud in unison in the pews, gone back behind the gilded altar, gone down the hallways with broken plaster walls, past the stone rooms stacked with boxes, past the radio playing softly on a card table (a rhyme with mine, good sign), already gone into the interior courtyard, sky-roofed, ringed with the small, wood-beamed stone rooms that felt, even after I'd been there a while and understood more, penitential.

Jabalí led me to a room in the corner. I put my suitcase down. It smelled dank. There was one little window at the back, a bare bulb hanging from one of the beams, a single bed, a few
open wooden crates stacked on top of one another. I looked around as if I were deciding, but the wind had already nodded my head, the wind had already said,
Thank you. Gracias.

 

Here's the odd thing. No one ever called it anything but “the ex-convento.” Which means what it sounds like—the small, crumbly rooms that ringed the church's interior courtyard had once been a convent, and it wasn't one anymore. Behind the church was a ruined library that was also a chicken coop; a compost heap; and a small stone building that had been an ice house, then a fallout shelter, and was now a toolshed, and most of the tools were rusted and broken. The church was built in the sixteenth century, so many generations of nuns had slept where we slept, ate where we ate, passed through the halls we passed through. The last nun to live in the convent had died there in 1943.

Mexico is actually full of ex-conventos; they're not rare. If you said to someone,
It happened at the ex-convento,
that person would reply,
Which one?
And yet, for all his vision, his many, often contradictory visions, Jabalí never gave the ex-convento or the ragtag group that inhabited it a name. Maybe he thought it shouldn't be limited to one name. Or maybe if he named it, that might give the group a starting point and, potentially, an end point, a moment when he would have to know whether or not he'd failed. Or maybe he just didn't get around to it. So it was always “the ex-convento.” If you knew about it, you knew which one it was.

 

I set my father's radio on top of the stack of wooden crates and turned it on. A man speaking Spanish in the deliberate cadences of a speech, arguing some point. I turned it off. I sat down on the bed and looked up at the rough, uneven plaster on the ceiling. It was dull red in some places, yellow in others, and it was falling down. It looked like scabs. In the corner of the
ceiling, the building's lath was exposed. The walls seemed to be made out of papier-mache, layer upon crumbling layer, and they were cold. My bed was made up with clean white sheets, a modest pillow, a blanket folded at the foot. I was tired. I'd been traveling so long. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. The gravity in my body was still shifting; I felt as if I was spinning.

“Hey.” I opened my eyes. Julia stood in my doorway in her many skirts and shirts, folding one dusty bare foot against the floor. “Hi.”

“Hi, Julia. You can come in.”

She did a sliding step into the room, picked up the radio. “Did you bring this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“From where?”

“New York.”

“New York,” she repeated. “I knew that. That was in my dream.” She jumped and her colorful skirts flounced, then she sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. “Do you want to pray?”

“I'm not religious. Do you have to be religious to be here?”

She shook her head decisively and smiled broadly at me. For the first time, I saw her buckteeth. I hadn't noticed them in the church, and in the truck she had kept her veil across her nose. Her teeth were terribly uneven and practically perpendicular to her head. “You can be here,” she allowed. “I dreamed you.”

“Oh.” Along with everything else, I couldn't understand why no one had asked me who I was or what I was doing here. They had just taken me in, as if I was expected. “So, do you like to pray in that big church in town?”

“I have things I have to do there,” she said.

I tried another tack. “Julia,” I said, “what did you mean that I can't have a name yet? Do you give people their names, too?”

She regarded me as though I were an idiot. “Of course not. You pick your name. When you're ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To stay with us.”

“Oh,” I said, “honey, I'm not planning to stay here. I'm . . . looking for someone. But then I have to go back to New York.”

“Maybe,” she said in the imperturbably superior tone that only an eight-year-old can take. “You don't know.”

I began to feel annoyed. “No, Julia,” I said, “I do know. I live there. I'm going back.”

“Who are you looking for?”

I didn't want to go into it. Who were these people? It seemed best to change the subject again. “Is Julia the name you picked for yourself?”

“I haven't picked my name yet. It's almost time. I have a list.” She paused. “You can't see it, Stranger.”

I was so tired. There was a fog in my head. “Stranger? No, my name is—”

Julia cut me off with a laugh, jumped to her feet, hopped up and down a few times in her skirts, and did a little heel-toe dance. “Here,” she said. From her dirty fist she produced a red jujube. She set it on the blanket. “This is for you.” Then she scampered out of the room. Her footsteps pounded away down the hall.

I ate the red jujube, which was delicious. A bell that wasn't inside my head rang; I later learned that it was the dinner bell, but that night I fell asleep sitting up in my clothes. Wherever it was I had ended up, I didn't care. They were a bunch of weirdos, but so long as I didn't get beaned by any falling sixteenth-century plaster, I'd probably be all right.

I woke up a few hours later, chilled, hungry, my belt buckle cutting into my waist. I undressed and got into bed. The cool night air seemed to get cooler as it drifted across the stone floor. A coyote howled outside. In the courtyard, a few people were speaking Spanish in low tones. What did the nun think about, lying here so long ago? Did she really think only about
Jesus? At least she knew what her life was about, that Mexican bride of Christ. I imagined she was short, serious, studious, with an unfortunate nose. I pulled the surprisingly soft, dense wool blanket around my cold shoulders. It was scented with lavender. I wondered if everyone had gotten my e-mail and if they'd written me back yet. Even if they were mad at me, I hoped they missed me, too, a little. Surely they understood the pressure I was under, and that I had to do what I had to do.

 

I remember the sacred tree. It was a tall, spreading tree in the middle of a field that could be seen for miles around. Caroline would have liked it.

And I remember—still, with such happiness, such delight, were they not the biggest sign of all that I was doing the right thing?—I remember my wings. My wings! How they arched above my head. Their weight on my shoulder blades. Their conductivity: heat, cold, wind. Like getting a seventh sense.

But days spent in the sacred tree were long, and trying to find a spot on the branch that didn't stab me in the balls, the ass, or the thighs was a continual head-on collision with futility. The wings didn't help; my shoulders ached from the leather straps, and I was sure something was living in the tip of the left wing. Something with a lot of legs and antennae that also could bite. The wings were filthy and they smelled of old glue and the sweat of the person who'd used them last. They were also heavier than shit, made of real white feathers from what must have been an entire flock of birds, and highly sensitive to wind currents. Every time a breeze came up, I almost fell out of the damn sacred tree altogether. Julia, who was generally perched on the branch above me in her pretty, ultralight, modern moth wings that were made out of polyester and silk thread, never tilted as the breeze merely ruffled her hair, shimmered her moth wings.

When Jabalí had put the big wings on me in the courtyard of the ex-convento and explained the project that first morning, I was thrilled, flattered that he'd let me participate, but I also suspected that this was a test, which amused me. Here was Jabalí's explanation: “We're pantomiming the animal origin in the sacred tree of Ixtlan. Another time, we would do this as part of a
velada,
but CNN wants to shoot segments around the world on eco-protests, so . . .” He shrugged. “We'll be an eco-protest. That they can understand.” He rummaged through a bin on the east side of the courtyard.

I rolled my shoulders around in the wings. They were heavy and reached down to my knees. They stank. They were real. The straps already, satisfyingly, hurt. “It's not an eco-protest? What's a
velada?
”

“Yeah, sure.” He pulled a moth-eaten monkey mask with eerily lifelike fur out of the bin and held it to his face. “Phew. We're protesting, our whole
life
here is a counterargument. If they can see it if we call it a protest, it's a protest. Do you know the work of Maria Sabina?”

Was that Julia's mother? “No.”

“Very, very important shaman. I came here to study with her, to experience
velada.
Extraordinary woman.”

“But what is
velada?
”

He shook his head. “It's hard to put words to it. Come on, let's go. Don't trip.”

By day four in the tree, sweating, shoulders aching, I was exasperated enough to venture, “I don't think they're coming. Did anyone call to confirm?”

Jabalí, eyes closed, leaning against the trunk on a lower branch with his monkey mask on, murmured, “You have to be patient.”

Malcolm X, who was short and plump with very large breasts and wore a squirrel tail, said, from near the top of the tree, “Julia, go get us some sodas?
Por favor?
”

The others, in their bits of fur and fin, were quiet. Meditating maybe. Or simply bored speechless. The wind rocked us in the branches. Julia, in her ultralight moth wings, clambered down onto my branch. She leaned against me, smelling of sugar and sweat and jalapeños. A mosquito bite by her knee was puffy and red. “How are you doing, Stranger?” she said. “Do you want a name yet?”

I adjusted the strap that was making me sore. “I like my old name.”

“Ha!” said Julia, swinging down to the next branch, and the next. “Idiot.” She jumped, flying lightly to the ground, her skirts billowing. She began hopping and dancing. The tree folk applauded.

“Geronimo!” cried Julia, stretching out her arms and running down the field toward the ex-convento. The spots on her wings, the colors of her skirts, flew above the scored dry dirt.

One of the others, a skinny kid in a frog head with a high voice, said, “Maybe he's right. CNN couldn't care less about us, or the planet for that matter. How do you even know that guy was for real?”

“Do you think Julia will bring us back the sodas?” said Malcolm X.

Jabalí laughed. “Listen,” he said. “They're coming. Julia dreamed it.”

“Did she dream she'd bring us sodas?” asked Malcolm X.

“Did her dream say when, exactly?” asked the skinny kid in the frog head.

“Forget the sodas,” said Jabalí. “Listen to the wind.”

My wings were killing me. Maybe
velada
meant “to stagger around like a sweaty fool.” I pulled a bug out of the left wing and squashed it against the branch. That was one, anyway. The day got hotter. Julia didn't come back with soda.

An hour went by. Another. The road remained undisturbed by any CNN trucks. A few motorcyclists went by, engines roaring. As they passed out of sight, the wind gusted, but all
at once I was able to ride it. I felt the lift. I moved my shoulder. The wing flapped. I moved the other shoulder. That wing flapped lightly, with perfect control. I moved both wings at the same time, rolling my shoulders, arching my neck, the wings flapping, flapping, flapping on my back, the heavy tips tracing parabolas in the air. I laughed out loud. I didn't think CNN was coming, I didn't think the tree was sacred, the branch didn't stop stabbing me where I lived, another bug bit me on the neck, but I flapped my wings and was so fucking happy. Let the bugs bite. Let the wind blow. I had been truly transformed at last. I was a bird, a glorious filthy white bird. I stood up on my branch, clutching the branch above me, and crowed.