Blood Lake (36 page)

Welcome home.

My heart is pounding at about two hundred beats a minute and I'm filling my industrially scarred lungs to full capacity at every breath with the sharp, icy air, but it's not enough.

Dizziness.

I need to stop. To sit. To stare at a clump of quinoa trees that dredges up memories of the dark forests of my childhood, when my mind was so full of phantasmagoric visions I saw strange, threatening shapes in the dirty smears on a window, in the splattering of mud against a thinly whitewashed wall, in the rotted base of a dead tree, which all seemed like portals for the multitudes of evil creatures coming to seize me with their sharp claws and take me back to their world, a hostile and ever-changing world without friends or family. Monsters from the deepest trenches of the unconscious invading the conscious. Nowhere to run when the enemy is your own mind.

Fredo nudges me back to reality, offers to make me a
canelaso
.

“I'm all right, thanks. Let's keep going.”

But I'm clearly not as strong as I should be. It's taking longer than I was prepared to endure to get to the pass, and we just keep going higher and higher. Low, flat-leaved cactuses rip at my ankles. I'm not stepping around them like I should.

Purple heather. Nice color.

We enter a grove full of towering green columns of spiny San Pedro cactus, so deceptively innocent with its brassy fanfare of white flowers, but behind its many Spanish names lurks its original name, in Quichua. I just can't remember what it is. Or the Cañari word before that.

“Hey, Fredo, what's the Quichua word for
el gigantón
?”

He looks at the ground and says he doesn't know. After all, he's just a
costeño
.

I take out my water bottle and drink. The wind blows a low, hollow wail across the plastic bottle's open mouth.

The sun is low. Another half hour of light.

We reach a high ridge surrounded by still higher ridges spearing up through the ground like escapees from the center of the earth, and finally look down on the long-awaited lagoons of Cajas in the rocky valley below.

There are hundreds of dark lagoons, stretching in every direction. But we've made it.

I can barely move.

Fredo pitches the tent, makes the fire, warms the
canelaso
.

Achachay!
It's as cold as a warm day on Neptune. And the air feels thinner than it should be.

And I think about all those New Yorkers whose idea of a challenge is trying to catch a cab going up Third Avenue in the rain. I can barely orient myself. The North Star lies invisible below the horizon, behind a leaden curtain of clouds and mist.

Sheesh!

Must be the exertion and the altitude. This
canelaso
really knocks me

 

 

Cold.

 

 

I WAS
a cold and penniless eighty-year-old peasant, my feet frigid and useless, clinging to a torn, filthy old poncho and dying of cold on the floor of some muddy drinking shack in the bone-cold mountains, and all these younger peasants full of warmth and life were standing around drinking and laughing at what I was saying, which is that I had a lighter to make a fire up on the hill, and that something is happening to me, I don't know what. And when I kept saying that I really did have a life somewhere else they laughed, because everyone knew I was a penniless old beggar who had been saying the same crazy nonsense for at least forty years. Nobody knew me. I was alone.

And so cold.

I had been lured to that place by people who kept swearing they were helping me. That
Don
Lucho was coming, that they were going to take me to a
curandera
, and didn't I want something to drink? But the place felt like a graveyard and they were doing nothing to stop the warmth from slowly seeping out of me until I was stiff and rigid and chilled.

No puede ser. No puede ser. Morir aquí. De frío. No puede ser
. It can't be. To die here. Of cold. It can't be. And I kept repeating
this, lying on the floor of that muddy mountain tavern, when I finally realized that I had left everything behind, that no one would ever speak my name again, except in a cautionary folktale about cold. About crossing the mountains alone and letting yourself get too cold.

Ñucaca Miguelmi cani
.

A voice.

As I stumble through the rain, the spongy bright green moss and the squishy wet ground might as well be the jungle, snagging me, leaking cold water through my shoes, icing my feet.

I smell humans.

And I keep coughing up stringy, slippery crap that sticks to me and to everything I touch, creating a viscous, gooey webbing that clings like resin, which I can't wipe off my hands. My stomach's pretty empty and I'm coughing so hard that it's coming out of my lungs. A ton of crap from the city. Black tar.

Sticky black tar everywhere.

No. I know I'm not dead because I can still see and feel things. I'm still at the border between mortality and the neighboring country, I still have a ways to go before I am in the final place of Death, the central square of his kingdom.

Flutes and drums. Funeral drums.

Lights.

And they kept saying, Don't you want a drink? It'll warm you up. But I knew it was all lies. They had taken me to a lonely marsh near a lagoon or a river and they were waiting for me to die so they could rob me and dump the body. And he was still offering me a drink, as if he were my friend—
as if he didn't know the drink would make me even weaker and they wouldn't have to work so hard to do it
. This was the end.

Cold. Biting into my bones.

Ñucaca Miguelmi cani
.

And I was totally curled in upon myself, trying to ward
off the icy vacuum of deep space, of coldest darkness, trying to fend off the toothy, gaping jaws of a legion of fiery-eyed fiends from hell trying to devour me. And there were just a few droplets of warmth left in me, and the forces that thrived in this dark realm were talking to me, trying to convince me to give up that last bit of warmth and go with them and be theirs from now on, and it was a struggle between a part of me that began to say, Well, hey, what's life anyway, just one form of energy becoming another, so I'll go on as something else, and another part that kept saying
¡No! ¡Hasta el último!
Until the end.

I was a weak, cold, disoriented animal, and these killers knew it.

And I was never going to be warm again.

I called out to family, friends, all creation.

That last switch was still working

Ñucaca Miguelmi cani
.

My name is Miguel.

Tiaca, ima shutitac canqui?

What's your name,
señorita
.

Fi … lo … me … na …

Canta imata nanan?

Where does it hurt?

Mana nanachina
. Me no hurt.

Bad Quichua.

Chiri
. Cold.
Chirina
. Me cold.

Mai uncushca
. Very sick.

Ari
. Yes.

Spanish.

Un soroche tremendo … un frío … como me voy a morir
. Terrible mountain sickness … cold … as if I'm going to die. I felt strange saying it, but I had to say it. And then he felt my wrist and said
No hay pulso
as he shook his hand in the local gesture of being empty-handed, of having nothing.

No pulse.

No no no …

And I go mad trying to withdraw from the evil place. It's squeezing the blood from my veins.

Got to keep the blood contained. Inside. Where it's warm. Warm …

When will I see my daughter again? Will she recognize me? Or will I be two hundred years old and withered from the eternal cold?

I remember him helping me, and that I could barely walk. I told him, even then, that he had saved my life, that he was a friend, repeating it as I held on to him for support, my arms stiffening.

I wake up cold. Wearing pants and a shirt, a sweater, a thin, dirty blanket wrapped around me. No tent. No Fredo. No fire. Nothing but what I've got on. I get up. I walk around. Trying to get warm. So cold. Have to make a fire. Can barely hold the lighter. And then this ridiculous paranoid feeling that I had started a wild fire. I tell myself, Come on, you're not losing it that much, you know you didn't set the underbrush on fire. But then I'm not sure. And I realize—I'm not sure if the mountain is on fire or not? Man, that's outrageous. Get back in bed.

And at some point I was curled up on the ground, energy dripping out of my body, slipping into a very colorful but somewhat disturbing otherworld complete with particolored flappers in sheer tube dresses eating creamy hot dogs, whores with gaily painted faces sprouting eyelashes whose tips end in wet black dots, bearded transvestites dressed in mod-influenced negligees and bowler hats, smiling sideways at me in front of the striped wallpaper, and me saying, Okay, I'm another energy form in another dimension, but there's got to be a way back to my body and my life, and if it takes me forever, I'll find it. My only concern was how much time
would pass back on earth before I could get there … but then I found myself curled up in darkest, coldest space, my hands aged, arthritic, the skin burst and bleeding, yet holding on to some impalpable life-warmth, holding it within my chest. And voices were telling me to give up, already, that this was it. That I was part dead anyway, and that it wasn't so bad. My legs did feel lifeless, and no, it wasn't so bad.

But it was just so empty, it was nothing to head into willingly. No long, glowing corridor of warm, white light with a friendly figure at the end beckoning to me.

You know, if I had seen that, I just might have gone.

But it was just such cold, dark nothingness, and I was holding on. I was saying, No, not yet.

Not
never
, just not yet.

This is what I will see at my end, and I know it, but this is not the end for me, not yet.

And I think that is when I got up and said to myself I am sick, and went to find help.

They wanted me to give them the lighter and I wouldn't because the lighter was the only “proof” that I was still sane, that there was still a physical reality out there and that I was connected to it. The fact that they wanted me to give them the lighter proved that it, at least, was
real
.

The last shred of sanity I had left was
knowing
that I was going insane.

The still-warm fires of my heart were retreating to my innermost core, but the periphery had dissolved. I was not in my body, or on the hilltop, or anywhere. I had permanently lost my way in Death's lonely land.

And yet I knew that they'd find my body, all right, but that my mind would be somewhere else, madly lost twenty-three universes away. But the madness meant nothing next to the nearness of death.

Death was bodiless in the blackness, just a voice, coming from all around.

And then there was the unwelcome impression that various parts of my body were splitting open. Fingertips
hopelessly crevassed and oozing sticky-thick blood into the canyons of my palms.

No stars.

Just blackness.

But now the sleep is just as cold, so I keep going, keep fighting, keep resisting, because as long as Miguelito wanted the lighter from me, that meant it was real, and they were just waiting, wearing me down, just letting me get weaker and weaker, knowing that I was on the way out, on the frozen road to death.

I was outside on a rainy night, hugging the cold, wet metal fence in front of her house. They said her name was Norma. I remember asking rather loudly what was taking so long, and turning away from her house to shout her name to the distant mountaintops lost in the thick, wet blackness. And Miguelito said, Relax, and one time it helped, I did relax, but another time it didn't, he said, Relax, you're among friends, and I stepped away from him, saying,
Ningún amigo
, you're no friend of mine.