He fell on his knees next to Stephanie. His weight knocked her little rigid body sideways. She would be a praying fool forever. He looked up at Christ. How could you let this happen?
Murphy had sawn Christ’s ivory-colored head off. He had replaced it with an ivory-colored flying octopus. The image that the whole world had watched on television and feared. The image that had been in the dark spiral tower of their DNA. If there was any part of Nat that was holding his world together, this was its last moment. Nat felt the world stop, he heard a snap inside his head, and his psyche dissolved into shock. He actually felt no amazement when the little flying octopus relaxed its grip on Christ’s body and began flying so slowly, ever so slowly on its stubby wings toward Nat. Nat’s last thought was that it couldn’t move that slowly and stay in the air. He was trying to scream.
He heard Father Murphy entering the church and continuing the strange chant he had begun outside. He saw the green banner Father Murphy carried with the strange yellow design. Nat felt the tentacles as they surrounded his head. He almost laughed because they felt like something familiar—IcyHot(r) muscle rub. He felt them slip over his open eyes and push their way into his nose. He felt one wriggle through his mouth and crush his larynx.
After that there was no more linear thinking. What had been Nativiad Moreno was now another art object. A tiny part of the Remaking of the world.
(
For Robert M. Price
)
Wilbur Whatley’s Twin
We lie here beneath the bee-filled
bee furious ruin of a rotting orchard
My mother and I.
Even as a tale the old women tell
We are no longer told.
We hear the sobbing and sucking
And the tales of the dead men,
But we are not interested in human recitation.
We dream of other places
Other spaces, not the spaces of men
But between them.
She dreams of my Father in his cosmic glory
And I dream of the world I will make.
Come then and say the words
That will set us free.
We cannot work through bees
Or whippoorwills
Or the Caw! Caw! Caw! of crows.
Come, dreamer, and eat the fruit of
This rotting orchard.
Come, poet, and cast the words as
Word that sets all free.
Platinum Hearts
On the window sill there was a fossilized clam shell, a piece of sulfur, a quartz crystal, a bronze figure of Ganesh (“ruler of the sexual center”), a geode, a piece of auric quartz, a micaceous schist, and three seashells from a souvenir shop in Crystal Beach, Texas. Outside the window (and nearly perfectly framed by it) was the dead volcano Popocatepetl, power center of the Aztec religion, and the green neon sky of tornado weather. Inside the window are three nervous male United States citizens and lots of Mexican beer. A spider had begun to weave a web between Ganesh and the quartz crystal. It glowed green like a fiber-optic cable. The men’s attention was fastened upon the green sky.
“You know,” said Lew, “the Aztecs used to build fires up there. It was like a signal tower. The fire signals would be seen from other high points—natural or artificial—and they would build their fires there. And the signal would pass through all of Mexia.”
“Is that why you settled here?” asked Jeff. “So your signals could spread to the whole of the world?”
“I’m a receiver, not a sender. I receive a check from home every month so I won’t go back. I receive a script from the Mexican government for my morphine. I receive adulation from the upwardly mobile Mexicans I teach English to.”
“That doesn’t answer the question of ‘why here?’” said Mark.
“It’s forty-five miles from Mexico City. It separates me from the smog, the crowds, the sense of end times. Besides, the land’s cheap and American money goes far here.”
“We noticed that,” said Jeff, “on the way in. Your little American house with its lawn and its sundial. A little piece of American suburbia right here in Tepotzlan.”
Lightning played among the clouds. It had rained earlier. Blown fiercely earlier. But now it was calm. A bright yellow salamander (greened by the sky) darted about in the wabe.
Mark said, “That sky—it reminds you of something. Sometimes a burning sunset will hit you the same way. When the sky’s like the wing of an angry angel, it reminds you of another sky, a bigger sky, somewhere beyond. Or sometimes a tower framed against the sunset reminds you of some other world where things are built differently.”
“You getting any work done here?” asked Jeff.
Lew said, “No. Maybe I made this place too American. I was going to kick the habit here. I get too damned depressed. All my past comes back to haunt me.”
“What were you working on?” asked Mark.
A church bell rang.
“I’d started a history of Mexico. I spend days studying the codices or just staring at the volcano.”
“Mind if I check something?” asked Mark.
“Go right ahead.”
Mark left the rickety table and went outside. He began pacing the perimeter of the house. The green light shone on his balding head.
“You think you’ll be here forever?” asked Jeff. “That your friends from the U.S. will always have to make this pilgrimage?”
“Lately I feel like I belong to this house. To this valley, rather than the other way around.”
“You mean you belong to the morphine.”
“I’ve always belonged to the morphine. I thought about raising poppies down here. You know, cook your own— back to nature—lots of vitamin tablets.”
“Well, at least you’re taking vitamin tablets.”
“What’s he doing out there?”
“Mark’s got sort of weird since he left school. He had a brief affair with Jeena Normal about a year before she killed herself.”
“The rock star?”
“Yep. He carries around a couple of Nembutals from the bottle by her bed. And there’s other stuff. When he worked on that irrigation project in Egypt, he—”
Mark re-entered. Pulling a yellow notepad from his breast pocket, he did some rapid calculations. He nodded to himself and walked back into the room, then opened another can of beer and sat on the unpainted wooden chair. “It’s as I figured,” he said. “The house is trapezoidal in shape. Certain shapes—trapezoids in particular—obtuse angles have a deleterious effect on mankind.”
“Sounds hokey to me,” said Jeff.
Mark shrugged. “I’ve been aware of the angular for a long time. I’m not the only one. The Chinese practiced
feng shui
—careful placement of the corners of houses to protect the emperor and energize his ancestors. Hundreds of millions of houses in the Middle Kingdom organized to further that principle. A huge central system not unlike here,” Mark nodded to the volcano.
“Well, if there’s anything in that I guess I’m doomed,” said Lew. “I built this place and I know there’s not a straight wall in the place.”
Mark said, “You built this as therapy. You were taking a reduction cure for the morphine at the time. You failed because of the negative architecture. You probably didn’t have a chance in this witch-haunted valley.”
“You may be getting too personal there, Mark. This whole reunion has become morbid,” said Jeff.
“What did you mean about ‘this witch-haunted valley’?” asked Lew.
“Tepotzlan is known for its
brujeria
. Surely you’ve felt it here. The lines of the valley. The hills like the hieroglyphs of some ancient gods,” said Mark.
“You’re beginning to sound Lovecraftian,” said Jeff.
“Lovecraft tapped into something. The weird angles of R’lyeh or the mysteries that Brown Jenkin teaches.”
“Enough. We’ve got real things to be fearful of. When I was a kid in Dallas I saw the sky turn green like that. I was out on my bike, a new ten-speed. I’d pedaled out to a Dairy Queen for a cone. Some of us took shelter at a covered picnic area in a park. I’ll never forget the sound of hail on that corrugated iron roof or the way the summer air turned ice-cold when the hail began to fall. But that was nothing compared with the sound of the twister. It was like a freight train passing inches away from your head. It was huge and black and came out of a low cloud. It touched down, bounced, and then touched down again. It was on the ground maybe five minutes. When it was over, I raced home. There wasn’t even a pile of rubble. Just trash. My mother’s carnival glass punch bowl was sitting unbroken on our driveway. Set down ever so carefully. It took a day and a half for them to dig out what was left of my mother and father.”
Jeff walked to the tiny refrigerator. Same size as the one they had had in their dorm. Same decorator harvest gold. Seems if a man’s really growing—really progressing—he should have a bigger refrigerator. “You,” he announced, “are out of beer.”
“We could go get some before it starts raining again,” said Lew. A soft wind had started to blow and the cottonwood tree in Lew’s yard had begun to throw raindrops from its leaves onto the windowpane.
“I’ll go get it,” said Jeff. “I want to stretch my legs. It’ll give me a chance to exercise my Spanish.”
Lew pulled a thick pad of pesos from his jeans pocket. “Here. Get the storeowner to lend us his record player. We’ll play some old tunes.”
Mark asked, “How much is that in money?”
“Nothing. Damn near nothing. Money’s nothing here since the crash of the Mexican economy. Except for one-centavo pieces.”
“Why?” asked Mark.
“Many years ago the government bought up surplus pay telephones from the States. They fixed the change slot so it would take the big copper coin. They put telephones— at least one—in every Mexican village. Tying poor
Indios
into the world grid. I’ve seen one-centavo pieces go for thirty pesos. The phones have been worked on so that the coin drops through. Most people have just one. For long-distance you feed the coin again and again. When I first got here, I had a long-distance fetish. I’d call up friends in Yakota, Japan, or Oslo. Just to see if I could do it. Just to be plugged in.”
Jeff placed the money into the pocket of his khaki slacks. “Any requests for beer?”
Mark said, “Tecate. We’re living in thunderbird weather.”
“Right.”
They watched Jeff pass by the window and into the mud and gravel of the street. Lew asked, “Is he for
real
with those cowboy boots?”
“You’d better believe it. He’s a professional Texan these days. He practices law in south Austin and strives for the ‘bubba’ look. So his clients will trust him. Say, do you know how to keep a lawyer from drowning?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
Lew made the appropriate groan and went to the cupboards along the back wall. He pulled out bread and cheese. Lew said, “I think it’s clearing up.”
“Not as green as it was.”
“Is that true about his folks?”
“First I’d heard of it. I was his dormmate for three years. You were with us for two. His folks were dead. Some aunt was sending him to school, but he never came out with that dramatic tale till now.”
“Until he had a dramatic setting. Speaking of being on the level, were you serious about that angle stuff?” Lew broke the crumbly white cheese with his fine surgeon’s hands.
“Very serious. I’ve been studying the phenomena for almost twenty years. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians all used ritual architecture. Some twentieth-century architects have come across those techniques—Hans Poelzig in Germany, or in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright. When Wright built his Mayan Temple house, he studied Mayan proportions. When he finished the house, his house boy (back at Taliesin) went crazy and killed seven people.”
“I’ve seen the Mayan Temple house.”
“Oh?”
“Not in person. On video. Edgar G. Ulmer’s
The Black Cat
.”
“Must’ve been a strange movie.”
“Yep. So how did you begin your angular study?”
“Oh, I guess I’ve always been interested. When I was eight I stole a paperback from my thirteen-year-old brother and read ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ and the image of a man swallowed by an acute angle he believed to be obtuse has always haunted me. But my interest really picked up when . . . when I met Jeena. She wasn’t Jeena then. She wasn’t even blonde then. About a year after we graduated, I was discovering the true commercial value of a degree in archaeology by managing a bowling alley in L.A. She came to sing in our bar. She did some real avant-garde stuff then. Half the time the audience would leave scared or ecstatic. Sometimes while she was singing there would be a rumbling outside the bar as if she was calling to something. So I asked her about it. She said I was a real bright kid, and that started our affair. We were together for about two months. Making love to her was like making love to a volcano. I was sore and tired and happy.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then she got a recording contract. She got a name. She got blonde. She went on tour. We talked to each other a couple of times—swearing to get together. Then she got involved with the ambassador. Then the CIA killed her.”
“I thought she—”
“—killed herself. No. I knew the county coroner. I’d helped put him in touch with a physical anthropologist when he needed one. She died of Nembutal poisoning all right, but there wasn’t any Nembutal in her stomach. There was a little hole, an injection point, near the base of her spine. If she’d taken the pills, she would have had tetanic convulsions. She’d have died with a pillow clutched to her middle in a tight little ball. But she lay there peacefully with her face against her pillow. That’s why I keep these.” Mark pulled a small green glass bottle from his jeans pocket. Two very worn pink pills rattled inside. “From her bedside. To remind me that establishment reality is a lie.”
“Why would the CIA kill her?”
“She was going to come out about her affair with Ambassador Theisenov.”