Our Blood in Its Blind Circuit Read online

  Figueroa snorted a line of cocaine from the dash. “Does it work?”

  Isidro squirmed in his seat. “I’m not sure. I feel like talking more. Things are funnier. I feel like I react to things faster, like I need to make fewer movements. It makes my bones feel hollow.”

  “Your bones.”

  “Yeah, like I’m empty or something.”

  Figueroa sniffed and rubbed his nose. “That sounds horrible.”

  “It’s not too bad. I met a girl this morning.”

  “Fuck yeah. Where?”

  Isidro thought for a second and shrugged. “Never mind.”

  The Tequila Rio nightclub sat between the Internet Frontera coffee shop and Agua Caliente grocers, across the street from ornate Spanish colonial homes surrounded by automated turquoise gates topped with barbed wire. The lights stayed off in the houses, ignoring the police cars, the forensics investigators, the women and men sitting on the curb, answering questions.

  The story from the witnesses was mostly the same: a couple narcos in good boots and cowboy hats hopped out of a red truck at about midnight, each of them carrying a black trash bag. They had waved pistols in the bouncer’s face and stepped into the club and reached into their bags, each of them taking a human head in each hand, and had rolled the heads onto the dance floor. The lights went up in the club, the drunks screamed, the DJ cut the music. One head rolled under the feet of the patrons at the bar, the other three came to a rest dead center on the dance floor, all of them grey and decomposing, as though they had been buried under the hot Chihuahua sand for days only to be dug up and used later.

  Figueroa and Isidro controlled the onlookers. Cell phone cameras snapped pictures, tourists jockeyed for position, the police held them back, told them to back up, and the tourists complied, holding their hands up, still taking pictures.

  The heads were identified as belonging to police officers, men that Figueroa and Isidro saw every day at the station. Isidro had joked with one of them just the other day, and Figueroa knew that Maria was on a speaking basis with the wives of two of them.

  Jose Figueroa rode his high as hard as he could. He puffed out his chest, waving his arms at the onlookers, shooing them away with chemical confidence.

  Isidro could not get the first thing he saw when he arrived out of his mind: the dance floor, empty except for police photographers, the heads cordoned off by tape, three of them on their sides, hair matted to the distorted skulls. Then, the head in the center of the floor, facing him, eyes closed and tongue out, with a tiny white placard placed next to it, a black number one, an evidence marker. He pushed back the crowd, he yelled through the bullhorn to disperse, he threatened to arrest. But he could not shake the thought that, in the corner of his eye, there was a little white placard floating just out of sight, marking his own head as evidence, waiting to be conjured into reality. He thought of his mother. He thought of the breakfast she made for him that morning. The eggs turned in his stomach. He pictured her, shopping at the grocery store, standing on the tips of her sandals to reach the food, then turning back to her cart and there was his head, and he was inside of it, in this fantasy, talking to her, telling her not to worry. She didn’t bat an eyelash. She combed his hair over and pushed the cart, occasionally reaching onto the grocery shelves, dropping shrink wrapped body parts into the cart, women parts, breasts and genitals.

  He felt the hands. The darkness. He saw it overtake the crowd. It snaked into the club and disappeared into the eyes of the dead men and came back out dragging their souls with it. It grabbed him around his neck, this ugly fear. He felt a pain in his neck and he dropped his bullhorn, the mike squealing as it bounced off of the concrete, and he felt his hands go numb and his vision go white and when he looked up Figueroa was leaning over him, calling for an ambulance, pupils big as saucers.

  Figueroa clocked out early. Isidro had been taken to the hospital, so Figueroa got to ride the bus. He stood at the station with an old man in a plaid shirt and a mother and child. The pneumatic doors hissed, he got on the bus, and watched his city slide by him in the purple morning glow. Suburbs gave way to shanty towns, shacks set up on sloppy foundations, children playing soccer in the dirt street, ads for Coca-Cola everywhere, printed on the sides of the skeletons of long dead homes, mingling with the graffiti that crossed itself out and painted over itself. He thought about the heads, and the amputated legs. He pondered the violence he saw daily, and the violence he and his partner were guilty of inflicting. Picking nervously at the stitching of the bus seat, Figueroa held his head in his other hand. He stepped off the bus and looked up at the giant star illuminated in the side of the mountains to his south, rubbed his nose, and went inside. Maria was asleep on the couch, drooling lightly on her shoulder. Jose heard his stomach talk and touched the side of his wife’s face. He walked into the kitchen and opened the box and pulled out the rice cooker and plugged it in. He got the rice from the cabinets and set the bag on the counter and measured out some water. Maria woke up to the smell, and she walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his stomach, and he put his free hand over hers and brought it to his mouth and kissed her.

  “I saw something terrible tonight.”

  Maria pulled his shirt over his head and brushed the dried chicken blood from his chest. “I’d rather not hear about it.”

  “Tonauac fainted. He just couldn’t handle it.”

  “Tonauac will be fine. His mother looks after him.”

  “He’s my friend. But I don’t know if this is good for him.”

  “It isn’t good for you either.”

  “I’m protected.”

  Maria looked at the flakes of dried blood on the floor. Figueroa turned to go to the bathroom and she grabbed him by the arm. Ran a hand along his back. From the base of his neck to the bottom of his spine he was covered in a tattoo. A baphomet, a devil with goat legs, one hand raised as though in greeting, flanked on either side by pentagrams.

  “Are you talking about the magic?” she asked, pointing to the tattoo. “Or the drugs?”

  Figueroa closed his eyes. Stayed quiet.

  “Because when you started this was all the protection you needed.”

  The two of them stood there in the pale blue morning glow. The rice bubbled in the cooker. Jose scratched his shaved head and nodded. He reached into his pants pockets and held the baggie of coke in his palm. The morning broke and the chickens pecked at the ground.

  The same morning Tonauac Isidro lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Fear and embarrassment struggled for dominance in his guts. He thought about the girl he met a few nights prior. He had seen prostitutes before, and had been able to do his work and leave without much of a second thought, but something about this most recent girl weighed him down, consumed his mind when it eased up on the self-loathing enough to think clearly. He thought about the girl’s room, about the books neatly arranged on a shelf under a Frida Kahlo print. There was something intelligent behind her eyes and something determined about the set of her jaw. He thought about her face, and slowly his mind drifted to the young white woman abandoned by her boyfriend. He thought about her legs and how he had wanted so badly to touch them, to feel powerful in front of her, to be inside of her, and this thought greased the slide his psyche was slipping down. He cried into his pillow, horrified by the realization the only sex he’d ever gotten in his life was paid for or taken by force.

  His mother entered his room once to bring him breakfast and, seeing him in the state he was in, took matters into her own hands. She opened the door slowly, supplies bundled into her arms, and she knelt at the foot of his bed by the altar of Santa Muerte. She told her son to get up. She told him to kneel. She prayed to Jesus. She prayed to Mary. She sifted cornmeal from a bag and spread it on the floor, etching patterns with her fingers. She spoke Nahuatl, she called on old gods. She had no animals to sacrifice so she left raw meat and blood in a clay bowl at the altar. She arched her back and bucked to a rhythm that Isidro could not hear, but then he
felt it, too, the pulse, emanating from a distant space, and he felt his chest swell and he felt dizzy. His mother swayed on the floor and called out to the spirits and Isidro felt the darkness slip in through his nostril, all of his prior concerns washed from his mind, and he stood up and went to the bathroom and laughed, laughed until his sides hurt, and when he washed his face and looked in the mirror, for a split second, he could have sworn that his face was covered in white and black paint. Painted to look like a skull.

  III

  Jose Figueroa awoke that evening and said a prayer to Santa Muerte. He stuffed a dollar bill in the skull on the altar and walked outside. On his back porch he watched the sunset. He filled two empty milk jugs with water and dropped rusty nails inside. He pulled on yellow rubber gloves and dumped coal tar creosote in the water, capped the jugs, and shook them up. He took the war water and set it in his front yard.

  He slaughtered a chicken and covered himself in its blood. He waited for Isidro to show up. The sun went down and the night became cold and he saw no sign of his friend. He picked up the jugs of war water and walked to the bus station. He rode to work and when he got there his captain pulled him into his office and told him to have a seat.

  Figueroa set the jugs on the ground. The captain nodded at them. “What’s that?”

  “War water. You break it on the doorstep of an enemy. It’s a curse.”

  The captain sat at his desk and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Figueroa took a seat in the hard wooden chair in front of the captain’s desk. The old man stared at him with big brown eyes. “Tonauac is dead.”

  Figueroa’s mouth opened and the room spun. He leaned forward in his chair and placed his trembling hands on his forehead. “How?”

  The captain took out a pen and chewed on the end of it. “Found him dead in a whorehouse. Whore that works there said he showed up in the middle of the day, swearing and telling dirty jokes. Laughing like a fucking crazy person. They told him to come back later that night but they said he just kept laughing. The pimp got rough with him and Isidro got rough back. Isidro shot the pimp,” the captain poked himself in the eye, “right in the fucking head. Then the whore shot him in the back. Severed his spine. Dead almost instantly.”

  Figueroa nodded into his hands.

  The captain rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Take the day off. Tomorrow you leave the voodoo water at home. This is a police station, Officer Figueroa, not a sweat lodge. Not a church. We’re police. If you’re scared or something you deal with it.”

  Jose Figueroa stood up and steadied himself against the chair. He walked through the waiting room and his vision blurred. He saw a young man handcuffed to a radiator, screaming at everyone that he would kill them all. He saw a toothless woman talking to herself. He saw rolling heads and severed limbs and he felt the fear grab him in his guts and he swayed as he pushed the chipped wooden doors to the cell block. A tired guard pointed him to the last cell on his right.

  The hall was quiet, quieter than the waiting room. The prostitutes and murderers and thieves slept or stared at the wall. He stopped in front of the young woman’s cell and peered in. She slept, curled into a ball in her cot. He wanted to shake the bars. Wake her up. Scream at her for killing his partner. His friend.

  He was still thinking of the perfect thing to say when he heard a growl from the corner of the cell. His eyes glanced over it but they did not register the apparition until he focused. He could not move. The shadow approached the bars, and he felt cold, and he felt his guts tighten, and he experienced memories that he never lived. It reached a hand out, blue feathers wafting from where its palm should be, stretching outwards toward Figueroa. The shadow stopped an inch from his heart. Figueroa felt his back tingle like a sleeping leg. The tattoo, his protection, stirred. The baphomet. He heard something come from inside him, felt the ink moving under his skin. The shadow backed away. It stood facing him a moment longer, then climbed into the cot and curled up next to the sleeping girl.

  It took everything Jose Figueroa had not to run out of the station. He stumbled down the steps, watching the cars pass along the narrow streets, and he heard someone yell something in the distance, in an alley. He heard the distant cadence of a mariachi band and he looked up and watched the moon hide behind the clouds. He missed his friend already. He shoved his hands in his pockets. Every alley he passed, a shadow. A feathered serpent. He turned down a dark street and saw a group of young men sitting on the hood of an old rusted car. They hopped down and asked him what he needed and he told them, and he paid, and when his wallet was empty and the drugs were in his brain he ran as fast as he could down the streets, ignoring the shouts of passersby, until the pain in his chest was too great. He slumped against a wall and sat heavily on the concrete, breathing fire into the cool night, and he held his head in his hands, and he came down from his high, and he saw the long, dark night stretched in front of him, and he cried.

  ZIPPER'S KNEE

  Zipper Cottom stuck to a strict RICE regimen at home, foot propped up on an old chair with a heat pack pressed firmly into his knee, not getting up but for the fridge and the bathroom. He kept to his seat when he saw his wife staring deeply into the bowl of oatmeal, and he straightened his back, became alert, but did not pursue when she threw it on the floor and walked out of his life. He didn’t know why she did it. They never talked. He cried for days.

  He took some control over his situation. He picked up the crutches and hobbled around his apartment. His knee was still inflated but he worked out how to maneuver, how to hop down the steps, how to angle himself into his car and run errands.

  After a few days the crutches started to bruise his underarms but he sucked it up and hobbled to the corner store, iron bars and faded beer ads. The door chimed. He stepped to the fridge next to the magazine rack, the gentle suck of the rubber lining against gunmetal steel. Mist. The cans all lined, arranged by size, a reverse pyramid, the tallest and thickest at the top and the babies on the bottom. He picked out the big can, the walrus mascot winking at him, and shut the door. He bought Lucky 7s and light cigarettes and made small talk with the clerk, a small Indian man with a mustache, about workman’s comp, about the crutches, about the freedom to watch TV whenever he wanted.

  He hobbled home, slipping briefly in the black diesel stains around the pumps. He wedged through the fence and hopped up the stairs and threw himself into his computer chair. The aluminum tab hissed and he tipped it back, the drink vibrating under his ears.

  Zipper felt the niacin flush. Fingers itching. He washed his dishes. Dumped a load of laundry in the machine. Vacuumed. He did not think about his wife, or about how for the last ten years of his life she had been his only friend. He threw away pictures from the mantle. Each time it hurt.

  He crutched towards the restroom and his metal leg caught on a blanket pooled across the floor and his armpit, sore as toothless gums, slipped from its cradle and he tumbled to his left, his foot flying out to catch him, instinctual. The pain came immediate and sharp with the cartilage pop and he crumpled to his left, landing hard on his shoulder, laying there for a moment, letting the waves crash and ebb. He felt his face getting hot and the self pity blanketed the pain, and he crawled into the bathroom, the smell of tile grout, and he ran a bath and nursed his fat knee.

  He lowered himself into the bath and massaged his leg. He thought about his wife’s bad luck with cars. He thought about her tendency to buy tickets to the wrong movies, for no apparent reason whatsoever. The pain in his leg took his sadness by the hand and led it center stage in his mind. He felt the slight lift of the B12 in his blood, felt the energy drink soothe him, level him out, and he closed his eyes and focused on breathing.

  He heard a flapping in the water, heavy. His eyes opened, he looked at his wound and saw that a large grey flipper sprouted from the swollen kneecap. The appendage seemed to be connected to his own skin, when he pulled at it the thing did not move. His tonsils vibrated and he felt a strang
e panic, a flurry of prayers written and mailed over microseconds, already nostalgic about his time pre-flipper, remembering the good old days, the additional limb bringing with it a numbing sense of loss.

  A blue light came from the flipper, shapes and numbers materializing in the air in front of him, and soon there was half of a grey leathery body in the bathroom with him, then a giant whole body, a full-sized walrus, white tusks clicking against the tile, reeking of fish, rolling a quarter one way then a quarter the other, its growth halting, its tail sliding to a stop at the mound of Zipper Cottom’s knee injury and evolving no further.

  He awoke the next morning on his floor. A sliver of broken wood impressed a divot into his cheek. He grasped frantically at his knee. Nothing.

  His dresser was tipped on its side. He opened a drawer long ways and everything fell out. He picked out a new T-shirt and some basketball shorts, slipping them on carefully, his knee aching. Wandered into the living room, thoughts drifting to a bowl of cereal. He was momentarily distracted by the sight of his computer, smashed to pieces and shoved into the fire place. Big black bruises on the machine and the long metal lighter discarded on the floor gave Zipper that feeling like when you narrowly avoid a car crash. That, and regret. The computer would be expensive to replace. And the TV. He’d placed it next to the fireplace, and had forgotten about it when the computer refused to light. He’d taken a hammer to his television stand. And to his computer desk.

  He remembered the walrus, huge in his tiny bathroom, blocking out the light, great shadows thrown on his scrambling, panicked form, the thing twisting its head around, blubber spilling into the sink and cracking the toilet, and winking at him.

  Rubbed his head.

  His table lay on its back in the dining area, its black metal legs twisted, a giant dead spider. Turning into his kitchen, the truth hit him: he’d wanted cereal the night before, too. That or he wanted to kill cereal. The evidence was inconclusive, but the cereal was definitely everywhere except for the bag, which sat poked full of knife holes in the sink.