ch. 20 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 20 of 20: Coda

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ch. 19 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 19

Epilogue, Journal entry, Circa 2000 A.D., found in the bottom drawer of an old oak armoire, in a house by the Gulf of Mexico, South Texas maybe, the other side of the moon:
While I am waiting, I fall asleep in a kiva. In this place there are no maps. There are days of walking without direction, though it seems my head was facing North, and in the West a flock of ravens eclipsed the moon.
This is what I know now: that lessons thousands of years old are learned in the world above the rim of the kiva. The raven tries to guide me in a way of silence. The glide of wings is the message to keep flying; the rest on the telephone wire is the message to stay still.
In this lifetime the lesson is about boundaries: trip over an invisible edge and fall forever. My heart wants to be clear, to rest in itself and fly free. The raven says Go to your dreams and I’ll meet you there. I’ll take your Heart, for She is one of us, and belongs to you no more.
I remember something about another place when I look at the night sky, before I fall asleep in the kiva, before I leave this world. Ravens and space ships–are they one and the same? Aunt Opal said something about not forgetting our roots. She said the only thing true is what is born in us, what runs in our blood. That blood drums in my ears, my eyes are blinded with stars. For a moment the heart stops, and I fall into the dark place where it is safe, where the medicine woman makes no mistakes, where the raven is eye to eye.
There is another side to this, where ravens have clipped wings and medicine women make snakeroot potions for the spirits of those afraid of the dark. I have been there without a map, hidden behind rocks, wide awake.
Before they sent us, we were given maps and dreams, but some of us lost them on the way. We are the ones who sit in the kiva until it is time to go home. We are the ones whose hearts race with each shooting star. We are learning to draw maps with stars, we are learning to dream.

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ch. 18 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 18

They sat outside the laundromat in metal chairs, sunning themselves. Zoe closed her eyes and remembered. She began to talk to Antonio, in a lullabye tone, in a sweet soft chant, as if he were right there with them:
In Oaxaca everything is lost. Direction, connection to body. The soul, with its head suspended, hovers like a crucifix near the golden doorway of Santo Domingo Cathedral.
We are safe here, drones the old curandera in her lisping Zapotec chant. I disembody into dirt floors stained brown with old blood. My knees sink into the past, my arms fold in a familiar gesture. Say a prayer, she insists, but I cannot ride my words out of here, they buck and sway. A woman with my profile kneels before the altar of a saint whose feet are stained with blood. She turns to tell me something, to lean close, to whisper. Mother of God. The words corral in my heart, wild horses circling in a fitful intuition of storm.
The night we arrived to the hotel Los Golondrinas from Mexico City you could not sleep. “I saw the Angel of Oaxaca,” you said, “She is brilliant as a sapphire. She is a star of blue light blessing the city. But no one sees her. They have forgotten she is here.”
We go looking for the Angel of Oaxaca early the next evening, following Calle de Hidalgo, Macedonia Alcala and Garcia Vigil as they narrow under shadows centuries old. We find the clever skeletons of Antonio Guadalupe Posada posing in self-portraits of artists exhibiting at Le Mano Magica. Their inscrutable faces, their wicked laugh and rustling bones. Dozens of skeletons–on bicycles, wearing sombreros, toting guns, lifting the young woman from the death of sleep. We do not find the Angel of Oaxaca.
Later, sipping mescal margaritas in a balcony suspended above a gathering of revolucionarios on the zocola you say, “At the mercado in Mitla today, the women selling handmade dresses, hats and bags, they picked at our clothes, our forearms, their fingers pinching so softly.”
Yes, I recalled, they pinched, then the wings sprouted, and they began to peck and draw blood. They followed us past an old ruin surrounded by barbed wire, they followed us to the door of the church. Mister, Seniorita, they cajoled. I give you good price. Quanto Peso? Five dollar? No. $2.50. No. We tell them No. It is hard to say no. One of the birdwomen closes in. I give you good price. Shirts and baggy shorts gathered at the waist, thin white cotton blouses, she shoves them at us. We will suffocate, I think, in warm cotton, nostrils full of zigzag weaves of green and yellow and tiny embroidered dancers.

We are safe. We are turistas, suspended above this world. We have climbed up to the balcony in search of the Blue Angel of Oaxaca. We have gone into trance on mescal margaritas, but we have not met her yet. A man cries on the zocala, face down on his arms, belly in the dirt. His sandals are worn thin as his new soul. He has no food, no home. His wife lies beside him, face covered with a child’s soiled white t-shirt. Her huge stomach heaves, the new life inside curving against her heart. The man in the dirt cries loudly. In the next life he may be blind, or he may be a swimmer who tracks the shark beneath the darkest wave. In Oaxaca the karmic wheel budges slowly, so slowly we begin to stall in this momentary time-warp. And we begin to remember.
Next morning we ride a bus to the sacred site at Monte Alban, still looking for her. “I saw her,” you keep saying. “She is blue and incandescent. I want to try and bring her back from the dream.” I am afraid you will accost people on the street with your quest. That you will upset the woman selling mango, papaya and pineapple on Calle de Hidalgo. That you will ask the clerks at Bamby’s bakery where we buy the pastries we will have with our cappuchino at La Guernia Cafe. That you will wander everywhere in Oaxaca asking Donde est the Angel of Oaxaca, por favor?
The view from Monte Alban is hundreds of years old–and it has changed. Oaxaca is an apparition surfacing through fecal clouds that lift from Mexico City. Without pretending, now, I can see every lifetime that led to this moment. I remember the scars on my feet and the paper house, the mercado where chickens dangle in rows skinned as a stillborn breechbirth, the tiny limons like hard pale green hearts, the mysterious fragrance of remedios, the blood red bouganvilla blooming against the peeling paint, the dead stone, the soldiers with cocked guns and black coyote eye, the crying man in the dirt.
Travel is the only way to come home, I tell you. I don’t want to disappoint you, I whisper, but the Angel is not going to show her glistening face. She is not going to hold us in the large flat palm of her perfect hand. She is going to wait for us, over there in the dream, the sweet pink and blue dream that we die into every night, as we did centuries ago, as we do in our wishful hearts every day. She is going to wait.

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ch. 17 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 17

Antonio told Reggie that he should’ve married Zoe when the moon was full, when she was ready for him, when she would have acquiesed to his influence and waned under his spell like wings folding as an angel enters into physical form. She would have merged with him naturally, without question, she would have never needed to leave.
You were stupid to let that girl go, Reggie told him as they neared the drowsing pink flesh of the Sandia Mountains. Clouds full-breasted with storm hung over the mountains, moving slightly, caressing. For someone who knows the way of this sky, its moods. For someone whose compass is his soul. For someone who can shapechange his way out of trouble, two-stepping through dimensions. For someone like you, Antonio, you were stupid. Now you will pursue her forever, riding in old cadillacs, being picked up by strangers in Dodge pickups, holding your thumb out, traveling through your dreams.
Antonio said she saved my life once, in Oaxaca. Did she tell you?
Reggie remembered the story Zoe told her when they were at the laundromat in Espanola. Zoe had recently met the Indian saint Asha Ma, and attempted to cross time and space to be with the woman in India. It didn’t work, Zoe said. It was like a bad dream. First I followed her down a narrow path in Delhi, followed the fragrant desire of incense. Her eyes were so seductive! But I kept curving around the twisted streets. It seems it was the same street. So I imagined she was Consuela Osage, thinking this would get me closer. But it made her mad. She didn’t want Consuela’s dirt-brown fingers or her sturdy walk. The red flowers I carried began to drip blood. Why is it so hard to get to these places without pain?
Reggie said, have you ever got close to it? You know, really knowing, seeing, becoming one with the past?
Zoe was folding her grandmother’s embroidered dishtowels, the ones that were found in the bottom drawer of the grandmother’s oak armoire, after she died. The one’s that had hidden the old photographs of other dead people, dead pets even, and houses that neither Zoe, nor Reggie, nor Lucy would ever see. Victorian houses, lived in by people with their own secrets.
Zoe was silent a long time before she answered. You know you have to die to get the vision, Zoe said. I’ve done it so many times I’m almost tired of it. But there’s a lot more times to go. However, the time I remember most acutely was in Oaxaca, with Antonio. I wasn’t sure we’d get back. And even on the other side of it, when we had been born again and woke into the new day, the flowers were so waxen, and the thoughts of the people were chattering in my head like some wierd music. Even now, I can hear them. Can’t understand a word of it. But I hear them all the same.
And Reggie wondered to herself, What do they sound like?
I’ll tell you the story, Zoe answered to Reggie’s thoughts. I’ll tell you from the beginning, as I know it. If you want to hear the voices, you will. And I think you will, because you always have had your ear cocked to something besides the one still voice that murmurs and murmurs all day long in the same language.

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ch. 16 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 16

Reggie pulled over to a roadside park outside of Clines Corners, New Mexico. She was having a hard time remembering who she was. She looked over at Antonio who appeared to be sleeping. But then he grumbled, Tell me. She asked him, You want to hear Zoe’s version, or mine? Antonio said it didn’t matter, their voices were the same. Reggie looked into the rearview mirror. In the moonlight her eyes were wide and clear and deeply green as a puddle of rain gathered in a rift of oilfield soil after a surprise thunderstorm. Like Zoe’s. Maybe she had always been looking at the world through Zoe’s eyes. Lucy’s eyes were gray-green. And maybe if she had lived, they would have darkened to that moss color like Reggie’s. Like Zoe’s. Tell me, Antonio said again. So Reggie looked into her own eyes and she told him.

In African dreams, white rhinos rush through the shimmering grasses of a veldt curving wide as the face of the moon. They call to their mates, push chalk-colored bodies through darkness, nudge themselves like nomadic stars through this altered state of grace. Morning becomes the other side, my hand curled around a remnant of rhino horn: my fingers slipped around it, held tight, as I rode the great white beast through foreign territory, into the state of grace.
They say some parts of the state of Texas have the brown-toned vision of Kenya, but I’ve yet to see it. Drove hundreds of miles looking for the shape of white, for the sure-footed tracks of animal knowledge marking a trail hidden deep in a bend of Buffalo grass. Sometimes the instinct returns in a dream. You follow the scent of rhino in the clear night air. You sense the air shift on the horizon. You don’t have to see them to know they are near. You travel on intuition through a state of grace.
My great-grandfather inherited Cherokee gut hunch from his mother. She taught him how to cure snakebite. He got rattlesnake bit, said his daughter. So he killed it with a rock, and went into the woods and cut that snake open, wrapped around the wound on his leg, and this pulled out the venom. I know about that. How to wrap the poison around myself and let it suck out the root of itself. You can’t get away from it, I hear my great-grandfather say. You’ve got to go right into it, meet it eye to eye.
Before I remembered how to trick poison, it got me in its grip, threw me out of sync, caught me up in its spell. I’d just endure it–that deep slow burn in the lungs, and the way the heart rushed, and how the third eye spun on its axis! Then the African dream, the sweet smell of earth in Kenya and the white rhinos calling, Come find us. Snakeskin path through a state of grace. Cut through it. Let in bleed. Poultice the heart with it. Weave the snake fangs into your hair and begin to cast spells of your own.
So that was my rite of passage, long after leaving home and thinking the leaving was the ritual. Now I’m not so sure. The snakeskin sheds through my dreams. I wake with my hands on my face, expecting the rough touch of another skin, of something so new and soft and clean. I wake to expect something different each day. And when I look in the mirror, I see her multifaceted pupils, how they are beginning to round, how they are beginning to see in all directions. From the peripheral vision of this new self I see her shadow growing longer next to me, soaking into me, closer and closer.

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ch. 15 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 15

Reggie burned rubber 90 mph down Highway 84 in her daddy’s red Dodge pickup, air-conditioner full-blast, Patsy Cline wailing “I Fall to Pieces” on the eight-track. That old pickup whizzed by the slump-shouldered men waiting on the side of the road, casualties of dried up oilfields and a mean market on Wall Street. Only thing moved was the outstretched arms, coming down, as she passed them, one by one.
Zoe’s postcard was shoved down deep in the purse she kept close beside her like a lucky charm, the purse full of pawn cash from a turquoise necklace and the wedding set stashed from her first marriage. The postcard featured a huge white polyethlene jackrabbit decorating the lawn in front of the Odessa City Hall. Something for the townfolk to mention at civic events, as in “Odessa, proud home of the white jackrabbit, yessiree!” Zoe must have filched that postcard from another time zone. She hadn’t been near Odessa for 20 years, Reggie knew for a fact. The postcard was dog-earred, soiled on the white part, and cancelled in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Zoe had scrawled across the back in purple ink, Get your ass over here. It’s time. Reggie felt her heart quicken when she first read this message…It’s time, it’s time…the muscles in her shoulders crimped up with the obscure force of unfolding wings. The lifeforce of her breath pressed against her lungs and she had to lie down. Zoe said when a person took sight of a vision that would stick, the body might suffer a shock. Zoe called it a “spell.”
She told Reggie, When I experienced my first spell, he thought it was a heart attack because my chest fell in on me inside, and I started gasping and I grabbed his arm, right there in the KMart. He sat me down on the floor by the dog collars and plastic petfood bowls and ran for help. Shook him up more than me. Then I’d just stare and stare. And I’d get angry because I’d had a glimpse of something so beautiful and wondrous I didn’t want to let it go. And my dreams wouldn’t let me have it back. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I was desperate to come up for some air, that’s how it felt. He called it a “spell.” He’d say, “Aw Honey, here you go having one of those spells again” with that whine squeaking on the edge of his voice. He had this thing about poison in the night air, so we’d fight about leaving the window open so I wouldn’t suffocate , or closed so he wouldn’t die. I got so tired of arguing about this that I left him at the Warren Inn in Santa Fe. See him every now and then and I don’t know why I bother.
So Reggie rested herself on top of her great-grandmother’s Texas Star quilt while she looked into the variegated brown and gold matrix of a chunk of jasper she kept on her bedside table, looking deep into a vast landscape that led directly into a very distinct possibility for redemption. Then while everyone else in her life was sleeping, she filched her daddy’s keys and slid out the door under the cold light of the new moon. Because it was time. And this time, at last, no one could stop her.
She headed West, toward dawn and beyond, watching the sun lift and burn past the horizon into the pure heat of midday. Drifters waited for grace all the way to the border. Reggie had been told as a child not to pay such people any mind, but she always looked hard anyway, looked for something, a sign perhaps, a glint in the eye. Her mother would shush, Don’t you look at them. By the side of the road! Now what kind of person ends up by the side of the road? It’s not right. Don’t look! And don’t you ever, ever feel sorry and pick up such a fool, because then you’d be the biggest fool yet, or worse, you’d be dead.
Then she saw him. Resting cool as you please on a black suitcase, wearing a pink western shirt, polished cowboy boots, tight faded jeans. Even at 90 mph his eyes glittered from the shadow beneath the brim of his white Stetson. Highway and land beyond were white in that unforgiving midday sun, but the man seemed to reflect that heat, an aura of gold hugged his slouched back, radiated around his curly black hair, Reggie noticed, when he took the hat off as she passed, and wiped his face.
Before she knew it, she had put on the brakes, careened across the narrow dirt road opening in the median, and backtracked enough to turn around once more and pull over in a cloud of dust to where he still sat on the suitcase. He got up with an easy stretch, picked up his suitcase, and ambled over to the truck. His eyes were blue as Bizbee turquoise and smooth as the sky. Not a clue.
Where you going, lady?
West.
What’s your name?
What’s your name, mister?
Antonio.
Odd name for a man with blue eyes. What’s your last name?
It don’t matter. Say, you have an Indian look to your bones.
That’s kind of a personal remark. Well, my great-great-grandmother was Chiricaua.
She kept her eyes on the road. Didn’t dare look at the man. Felt the heat rise from him like the sun off asphault in hundred degree temperature. Why are you out here, anyway. On the side of the road.
Antonio said he was working a rig east of Midland, part of a line of wells funded by a rich dentist. The drills hit dust and the dentist lost his ass. Then Antonio shacked up with a woman in Ozona named Sue, helped her out with the cafe, but something was pulling him West. He said he didn’t know what moved him, but Reggie had a notion he did. You didn’t tell me your name.
My name is Reggie-short-for Regina.
How far you going West?
I’m going to see Zoe. She felt her heart catch in her chest, a bird wanting free, its wings caught in the network of veins and bone.
Well how about that, he laughed. So am I.
Did she ever tell you the dream about the white rhinos?
No.
I dreamed about them, too, just the other night.
He leaned back in the seat, pulled his hat over his face. Tell me.

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ch. 14: journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Friday, May 16 2008

Chapter 14
Reggie was always the one who thought she’d get away. Driving backroads under a dome of thunderstorms, she dreams of heading West, maybe to Los Angeles, across the desert, past rows of hitchhikers, the ones her daddy said she never better pay any mind to. In this vision, she’s picking up Jose in Santa Fe. They’ll drive on to L.A. in a day, if they’re lucky, pitstopping at MacDonald’s off the freeway, or hunching over black coffee in some remote cafe, if that seems to be on the map. The letter home will be sweet, yes it will, with that L.A. postmark. Like a foreign country. Like someplace nobody else she knows will ever go. Zoe told her once about Los Angeles, about the men winging their ambition and the women with tanned hands and plenty of time to weave on them. She told Reggie:
The women on Planet Los Angeles are beautiful. They wear tight pants. They carry amethyst crystals in their purses. They watch an incandescent brown sun drop behind the edge of tall industrial buildings. They eat couscous and aduki beans at a metaphysical convention on Saturday. On Sunday, they put on rose quartz earrings, high heels and rush to breakfast at MacDonald’s. The Planet Los Angeles, just like the rest of the Universe, is a place of extremes.
In another life I was a woman from Los Angeles. Before the city itself, when the earth was only desert to the lip of the ocean. The sun awakened in purples and pinks, the dolphins rode the waves in tandem. We ate seaweed and dried roots. No one had to wear clary sage for heart trouble.
The woman in Los Angeles sits in traffic for hours listening to country music under the static and smog. She thinks country music promises a hell of a lot, so much she can’t believe it. Country music makes her guess there might be hope somewhere beyond this planet, and that’s a dangerous guess, at best. She will drink too much coffee, she will ride the waves.
I have a Kirilian photograph of my fingertips taken circa 1989, Los Angeles. They are splayed into the golden cellular memories of amoebas. I flew West through a time window and lived a weekend under a half moon. Anything could happen, so it did. I met an African woman with agate skin. She said to buy the green stone, the one from another place. I found moldovite under my pillow the next morning, with a note: “Wear carefully. Don’t expect to come down.” I lay in the dark in a hotel built by a dead man from New Mexico, I drank tequila in my dreams to avoid the fear of going too far in. Fifteen stories up in a hotel full of mirrors made of quartz and sand. Everywhere I look I see myself on this strange planet.
When I was a woman in Los Angeles and I kept meeting the same faces I saw in New Mexico. The same faces that turn towards a pink sunset will face one so dirty the stars give up.
I didn’t know about this before–the long line of cars like bones on a dinosaur’s back, the absence of stars, the city of hungry people in MacArthur Park, the barred windows which turned homes into prisons, the moon like a skull over buildings that will splinter when the Earth gives in.
I didn’t know about it till now, and I’m here to tell you — to tell you how it was before: Blue water, desert, sky full of planets, a great sleeping beast underneath all this, and a dead man from New Mexico blueprinting his luck in rooms full of mirrors all over the Planet Los Angeles.

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