The Fifth Sacred Thing (23 page)

“I’m not a cynic,” Maya protested. “I admit the beauty of this city. It has a beautiful beating heart. It cares for its own, and for the stranger. Its streams run with clear water, and the trees that line its pathways bow under the weight of fruit anyone is free to pick. And yes, we had a hand in shaping it. But what does that mean if it can’t survive?”

“It means it existed once,” Rio said, “and so it is possible. Undeniably possible.”

“But that’s not enough for them, the young ones,” Maya said. “They’re different from us. They don’t see this city as some precarious achievement, like attaining the summit of Kanchenjunga. To them, this is base camp. Just a starting point toward heights they have yet to reach. And it’s home, all they know. They can’t philosophize about its destruction; they just hurl themselves in front of the avalanche. What do you think Madrone is doing? How else do you account for Bird?”

“They’re preservationists,” Johanna said. “They have something to save. We were more arrogant. We wanted to remake the world according to our vision of what should be.”

“And we did it,” Rio said. “Partly.”

“That’s like a partly successful pregnancy,” Maya said.

The kettle whistled. “Stop wallowing, girlfriend,” Johanna said. “Bring us some tea and quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

Maya put dried mint leaves into the Chinese pot she had bought fifty years ago on Grant Avenue. It was yellow, with a curving dragon wrapped around its side. She set cups in front of her shadowy friends.

“This is an early visitation,” Maya said. “It’s not even Rainreturn yet.
El Día de los Muertos
is weeks away.”

“Madrone’s got a wedge stuck in the gates between the worlds,” Rio said. “So we took advantage. You seemed so lonely.”

“I am lonely. Why shouldn’t I be? You’re dead. Madrone’s semiconscious. Everybody else is gone.”

“Strike up the sad violins,” Johanna said. “Why don’t you feed my granddaughter, pull her back from the edge?”

“How do I do that?”

“Surely you must have learned something in your overlong life that can help her choose.”

“Choose what?”

“Whether to live or die.”

Maya fixed a tray for Madrone. She spooned soup into a porcelain Japanese bowl and set out toast and butter and napkins and a rose from the garden in the little Limoges vase she had bought many years ago on a trip to France. Maybe the little luxuries of life could seduce Madrone back. Or maybe Prince Charles and Lady Di could do it, their faces staring solemnly out from the surface of the bed tray.

Madrone lay in Nita’s big four-poster bed. They had moved her down to the same floor as the kitchen, so Maya wouldn’t have to climb so many stairs. Maya set down her carefully balanced tray. Madrone’s eyes were closed; she was either asleep or determined to appear so. Where is she wandering? Maya wondered. What strange dimension between the worlds? She looks so small, like an ant carrying a burden too heavy for her. And I ache to share it, Maya thought, but I can’t. For one thing, she won’t let me, and for another, she’s grown beyond the stage where she can hand her burdens over to the older ones. I’m part of her burden now. And Maya suddenly wished she were light, a husk of herself, easier to carry.

Or maybe I’m too much husk already, all shell, no meat. Maybe that’s why I’m not reaching her. I hold out a cartoon of myself, old and crotchety and faintly amusing, mothering her and badgering her. But that role, too, is just another of the disguises we all cling to, posturing and scrabbling and marshaling our achievements so as not to have to look into reality’s raw heart and see the wheels of the universe grinding down into dust. I know that, even if I can’t seem to stop doing it. I knew it at seventeen, on one too many hits of that pure 1960’s Owsley LSD. Far too young. I would have gone crazy for sure if Johanna hadn’t come to me in the locker room and cupped her hand around my naked breast and saved me with the one thing that could cross the abyss. Touch. The touch of the heart. How can I bring that to Madrone?

Madrone opened her eyes and looked up at the canopy embroidered with moons and stars. They made dancing patterns, networks of light in colors impossible to translate, that merged with the crystal webs behind her eyes. She wanted to stay where pain and weariness and emotion were only twists in the kaleidoscope of light. Her work was here, on this plane, now. The spirit knife in her hand allowed her to change the patterns, stirring them up to fall in new designs. Changing lives, changing fate. Easy.

She felt Maya’s presence intrude on her peacefulness. The older woman’s worry and fear burst around her like fireworks, exploding from a center to
rain colored stars. Madrone watched the lights dance with detached fascination. It was so unnecessary, if Maya could only understand.

“Sit up,” Maya said. “It’s time you ate something.”

Madrone didn’t really want to eat; food took her away from the patterns. But the force of Maya’s determination gripped her and propped her up. Arguing would be even more of a distraction, and while she was distracted, people would die. Maybe that didn’t matter, really, but then that was why she had the knife, to fight off death. She couldn’t put it down. Bright sun was streaming in through the big bay windows. Nita had hung crystals on the glass, and the sunlight made rainbows dance around the room. Rainbows of light, like in the web world, and when Madrone closed her eyes she could still see them, feed on them. They were better than bread.

Maya opened a window and hung out a card on a string.

“What’s that?” Speaking was a great effort. Madrone could see the words as she could see her own breath on a cold day. They wove a pattern of color and then dissolved.

“A sign announcing your unchanged condition. Just as if you were the Queen of England. Saves me running up and down stairs five times a day.”

“I’m sorry,” Madrone whispered. She was sorry that Maya couldn’t understand the lack of need for her fear. She was sorry that the colors around Maya’s body were so disturbing she couldn’t help but will the old woman away.

“Hmph.” Maya snorted. “You’re not sorry. If you were, you’d pull out of this half-astral state, get some food in you, and stop doing whatever it is you’re doing.” You would let me in, you would return to human form.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You lie. I can’t see exactly what it is, but I see you doing something. Half the city has nominated you for sainthood. They leave offerings on the front steps, burn candles. Sick women claim they dream of you and wake up healed. Mothers about to give birth see your face and their wombs open. Meanwhile, you lie here, going into a decline in the worst Victorian manner.”

“I’m just having … conversations. Really, I’m fine.”

“If you say that to me one more time, I will personally slit your throat.”

Madrone closed her eyes again. She wished Maya would just go away and leave her alone. Maybe if she drifted back to sleep.…

“Don’t go back to sleep on me now, young lady. I’m talking to you. And besides, you need to eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“The hell you’re not. Eat your soup.” But this isn’t how I want to be with her, Maya thought. She is fading away, dying, and I can’t break through. I can’t reach her with my anger or my love.

Madrone obeyed, sipping the soup in grim and determined silence. Food
was an anchor, chaining her back to the world. Lightly, and only for a short time. The energy the soup brought her was a pattern as hunger was a pattern as each disease was a pattern as life was one and death was another and they were all, each of them, so beautiful and complete in themselves that it took enormous will to choose one over another.

She had that will, but it was flagging. And maybe that was okay.

“It’s okay to die,” she said to Maya, setting down her spoon. She said it to make the fireworks stop, but it had the opposite effect, setting them whirling and bursting around her.

This is my karma, my
suerte
, Maya thought. I should have been nicer to my own mother, should have understood why she didn’t want me taking drugs and sleeping with strange men.

“No,” Maya said, and burst into tears. They were great spheres of light dropping from her eyes, opening into fields of white on white, like snow falling on a glacier. “Please eat. Eat something. One more bite.”

“But the snow is so beautiful,” Madrone said.

“But the snow is cold, baby.” Maya had no idea what she was talking about, but she reached forward anyway to clasp Madrone’s hand. Her hand was cold; it felt like one of the flexible ice packs they used to keep in the freezer for Alix to lie on when her back gave out. “Where you are is so cold.”

The touch of the heart, Maya thought. If Madrone could feel that, it could save her. And if not, there was truly nothing Maya could do except to let her go. Losing and finding and losing again. Loosing her.

Cold was a pattern too, like a pinwheel of lace spinning in her back. And suddenly, Madrone wanted to reach for the warmth of Maya’s hand. Maya’s touch was a glow of fire that shattered the ice crystals around her. It was a living pattern of its own that throbbed with a red-blood beauty, beating like a heart. She could feel Maya’s pulse. Her own blood sang weakly in her body as it moved and traveled the web of her veins.

“I’m cold,” Madrone said. “I’m so cold.” She wanted to be warm again, and human, wanted to taste hot soup and walk on two feet over the dry autumn grass. But that isn’t for me anymore, she thought. In letting it go she could save it for others and stay here, in the cold place between the worlds. Yet even here, Maya’s terrible pain pierced her.

“Eat,” Maya said. “The soup is hot. It’ll warm you.” She sat on the bed beside Madrone and slid her arm behind her shoulders, cradling her.

But soup was not what she wanted. Maya’s arms held her like chains, dragging her back to the heaviness of form. And what she wanted was the warmth of light, the burning, flesh-dissolving white heat, the center of the flame.

Maya’s arms clasped her like twined serpents. “How dare you?” Maya said. “How dare you believe there is nothing more for you in life?”

But that’s not what I believe, Madrone thought weakly. The serpents tightened their grip. She only wanted to shed her skin, to break free.

“I don’t want soup,” Madrone said. “I want—”

“I know,” Maya said. “You want what we all want, the breakthrough, the total dissolution of boundaries and separations, enlightenment by the great straight upward path. And I am so angry at you!”

“I took the knife of Cihuacoatl,” Madrone said, so softly that Maya had to lean close to hear her. “But I can’t cut the cord. I can only make designs.”

Maya had no doubt that Madrone made perfect sense to herself. “You had a vision?” she asked.

Madrone nodded her head, slowly, and then squeezed her eyes tight, as if the motion had pained her.

“And now,” Maya said, “you’re trying to refuse it.”

“No,” Madrone whispered, “I’m trying to carry it. But it’s heavy.”

“You would prefer, maybe, a lightweight vision?”

“This is how I’m carrying it.”

“Bullshit! This is how you are trying to drop it like a hot potato. You’re running so hard from it you’re running straight out of life. I’m so disappointed in you! I thought Rio’s granddaughter would have more guts, and Johanna’s granddaughter would have more sense.”

“I have guts.”

“Then turn around. Oh, I see exactly where you are, Madrone. You’re a long, long way down a long, long road, and at the end is that beautiful beckoning light. And it seems so easy—no, not just easy but right, and dramatically perfect, to leap right through the center of it. I know. I’ve been there. And behind you is nothing but the shit that’s heavy to carry.”

“What are you talking about?” Madrone whispered, because now Maya had her confused, and the lights were spinning and swirling in a way that hurt her eyes.

“I’m talking about that sweet seductive white light. We all face it, sooner or later, in some form. For Bird, it was a bad dream urging him south. For Rio it was alcohol and revolution. For me it was—oh, I don’t know—I think more like it is for you. The seduction of my own great importance. You are so much like me,
ahijada
. But what good does it do? I can’t give you my life. I can’t give you your life.”