Читать книгу Atomik Aztex - Sesshu Foster - Страница 9

I AM Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness of the Aztex and I am getting fucked in the head and I think I like it. Okay sometimes I’m not sure. But my so-called visions are better than aspirin and cheaper.

Perhaps you are familiar with some worlds, stupider realities amongst alternate universes offered by the ever expanding-omniverse, in which the Aztek civilization was ‘destroyed.’ That’s a possibility. I mean that’s what the Europians thot. They planned genocide, wipe out our civilization, build cathedrals on TOP of our pyramidz, bah, hump our women, not just our women but the Tlaxkalans, the Mixteks, the Zapoteks, the Chichimeks, the Utes, the Triki, the Kahuilla, the Shoshone, the Maidu, the Klickitat, the Mandan, the Chumash, the Yaqui, the Huicholes, the Meskwaki, the Guarani, Seminoles, endless peoples, decimate ’em with smallpox, measles and shit fits, welfare lines, workaholism, imbecility, enslave ’em in the silver mines of Potosí, the gold mines of El Dorado & Disneylandia, on golf courses & country clubs, chingados, all our brothers, you get the picture. The Spanish—I could explain this to you in a Mayan coffeeshop with full orchestral accompaniment (replete with yowls of anguish, agony, gurgling, choking from the Victimology Choir)—had this Sword and Cross strategy, Bible in one hand gun in the other, in other words fuck us over royally with their bullshit ideology, propaganda, the whole nine yards, massive media blitz, disinformation campaign, low self-esteem, dysfunctional self-image, voodoo ekonomix, war on drugs & terrorism, prison-industrial system, the whole works. … The Europians figured they’d wipe us out, Plan A, enslave our peoples down at the corner liquor store, crush all resistance thru germ warfare and lawyers, lie, cheat, kidnap, ransom, burn our sakred libraries, loot our kapital, install Christian theokratik diktatorships, slaughter us by the millions, MILLIONS (my emphasis), then claim it wuz all accidental, just their luck—they’d pretend they just happened by on their way to India to buy some cardamom, some nutmeg and spices—like you’d just accidently happen to decimate Whole Civilizations and Worlds just to set a nice breakfast table—hot coffee, cinnamon toast, chiming silverware; furthermore just by chance, as luck would have it they’d enslave our native brothers and sisters of all other Red Nations as well. Could we let that happen? Of course not. Did we care if they had a Plan B? Hell, no. Cuz in no way does that fit our aesthetic conception of how the universe is supposed to run. It’s just plain ugly. To think that they want to foist that vision of Reality on the rest of us. That’s the insult. Barbarik, cheap aesthetik based on flimsy Mechanistik notions of the omniverse as a Swiss watch set to ticking by some sort of Trinity. The Spanish believed they had superior firepower with their gunpowder, blunderbusses, crossbows with metal darts, steel body-armor, Arabian horses, galleons built in Cádiz. All that wuz true. But we Aztex had our ways and means. We have access to the meanest, nastiest, psycho Gods through voodoo, jump blues, human sacrifice, proletarian vanguard parties, Angry Coffeehouse Poetry, fantasy life intensified thru masturbation & comic books, plus all our armies, Flower Warriors, Jaguar Legions, Eagle Elite Units, Jiu Jitsu and of course the secret weapon. In a nutshell. The Spanish didn’t have a chance. Sure, the Spaniards rowed up in their quaint canvas-rigged galleons ready to conquer the world. The vicious leathery little rats crossed the Sargasso Sea come to find out indigenous peoples already had their number. We welcomed them to our land. They were not heard from again. And after the Spanish fell to our advance forces, who was gonna stop us? The Italians? Come on! They don’t even make second round of the World Cup.

The rest is history. One big fucking headache, I’ll tell you.

Luckily we Aztex believe in circular concepts of time, cyklikal konceptions of the universe where reality infinitely kurves back upon itself endlessly so all that has existed does exist and will always exist and so forth into infinity. It’s the only POV that makes sense in the end. Which is the Beginning. (Don’t worry if you don’t get it the first time, it all repeats, as you shall see. This happened to you already & it will happen to you again in the future.) I mean, how else to go forth fearlessly into battle, vanquish our enemies on a global scale for generations and offer millions (and millions) of still-beating hearts to the sun, the six thousand five hundred and seventy-four sacred steps to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun awash with layers of black blood, making the sharp granite steps slippery for the priests? We Aztek warriors can face our own death with komplete kool, knowing full well that on some plane of the spirit we go on living forever and ever, knowing that whatever torture, torment and travail the present finite moment brings us we exist simultaneously in all the happiest moments of our lives and these go on shining forever like the stars, as Mayan pop singer Juan Lennon put it, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you. We all shine on. I wanna hold your hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Who could’ve said it better? No matter what horrible fate awaits us at the hands of some momentarily viktorious enemy, we have altered the space-time kontinuum of the universe through our Aztek sciences and teknologies so that we shall emerge victorious on one level or another sooner or later, something which causes our enemies no end of anguish and horror once they realize that their own hearts are the key, the crucial item in the orchestration of our mastery of the time-space kontinuum. This great faith in the science and teknospirituality of our ancestors the Tolteka, who invented the Heart As Engine of Urban Renewal, the revitalization of Reality, while the Europian savages were scurrying around inventing toylike items such as the Wheel, the Cannon, the Stirrup, etc., and moderately interesting items like Macaroni, the Can Opener, Suicide, and so on, which explains of course our triumph at the present stage of History, the full flowering of our reign in the Aztek hemisphere. So goes the usual telling of that tale, of course. You should take everything with a grain of salt. I’m fairly liberal as these things go. I’m willing to grant the Spanish and other subjugated peoples their kultural values and so forth. I mean, they all have their place. I’m not saying that you have to think Spanish food is worth eating, I certainly don’t, well maybe some paella every once in a while, but I’ve listened many long hours to my Spanish slaves explain to me their quaint customs, their Katholicisms, their folkloric belief in the Linear God who is transfixed above them on the surface of the Heavens as they mope about the globe worrying about something they call Sin, and things of this nature. I am quite willing to grant Christianity konceptual validity in the marketplace of ideas; simply because they are Subjugated Peoples I don’t entirely diskount some of their insights into the obdurate and kraggy face of existence underlying the human condition. I think our own high priests would acknowledge that there are some fundamental questions of human (that is, Aztek) existence that qualify as unresolved and open and therefore perhaps within the tentative purview of alternate visions of the universe such as might fall under barbarian superstition. Not for nothing do our major universities have radikal departments of Barbarian Studies where savage, exotik, paranormal world-views are revisited. Everybody knows that atavism and savagery make the world go round. Certainly the professional ikonoclasts of the universities cause dangerous disruptions, explosions and lesions in the visible world, causing occasional death, destruction and even sometimes subversion of basik space-time elements of this, the Sixth World (or Sixto’s World, as I sometimes think of it), but so what? That’s the whole purpose of teknospiritual advancement anyway, isn’t it? That’s why we cut out millions of hearts every year, and a kostly boring bloody business it is, too, isn’t it? That’s why we’re the best at what we do, isn’t it? Cuz we have to. Cuz it puts everything right in this world, in the universe as it stands. Isn’t that right? Of course it is. So we can afford to have some egghead professors, four-eyed poets and bozo spiritualists getting red-faced, goggly-eyed and spastik about the Linear God, the pot-bellied Chinese man, the Muslim Scriptures on Numerology and Women-Do-What-Yer-Told. So what if these innovations kost lives on a daily basis? We can afford it. That’s why the Aztex rule, cuz we gotta do what we gotta do. If it takes a zillion hearts per anum to set the world right, we’ll raise our blades. If we got to cut out all the hearts to keep the world turning, we’ll cut out all the hearts, that’s the way it always has been, that’s the way it will be. The sacred ancestor Toltekas diskovered it for us. They laid the groundwork for the present munificence of global civilization ruled by Aztek science, Aztek teknospirituality and kommunist economiks. Life is good. Because of the applied Aztek Sciences of the Human Heart. There’s a world of things we’re doing something about; if it takes all the hearts in the world, we’ll do it. We’ll cut out all their hearts, we’ll cut out our own hearts. So the world can go on like this, in its Glory.

The Wurlitzer of the Universe is packed with 78 rpm realities side by side. Get ready to drop your dime.

Heads pile up on a wet concrete floor. Bloody meat slaps the wet concrete. The blade spins, zinging thru the air till its tiny teeth bite into the pallid skin, the circular blade sinking out of sight underneath, descending to the bone, rubbery thick skin wrinkling and leaking fluids with a wobbly flatulence.

The frosty little window of the chilling room. Put your nose to the glass, you can make out what is hanging inside. It may look like the meat’s moving, mottled red and white carcasses jostling for position in line, but it’s just the overhead track oscillating, a hum in the freezing fanblown air.

Most days I worked the Farmer John killing floor with 3Turkey, Ray (“CIA agent in a former life,” he told everybody, “you heard right, a company man”), Zahuani (“Pirate”), and a short thick guy, Nakatl, a black Central American Taoist happy fat man. Usually I paired off with 3Turkey. We switched off; whenever one of us got tired of cutting throats with the big knife, he’d take the “electrolethalizer”—the zapper—from the other, or if we were at the next station, eviscerating the hogs into a rolling vat, we’d trade off as a team, move a hog into place, situate the vat in front of it, then push it on to the next station where somebody (maybe Nakatl, maybe Ray) worked the saw, the other one “shagging”—hook the hog’s rear leg, insert the hook through the flesh, snug around the ankle-joint so it won’t tear thru & pull loose, cause that 400-pound pig to land headfirst and flip ass-backwards on top of somebody, hit the red button to lift it off the floor, stabilize it mid-air for the sawyer, get the head out of the way when it comes off, just before the carcass gets lifted thru the air, lickety-split, to the skinner. The line moves all the time. An overhead conveyor drags the hogs forward and up, each on a hind leg, swinging thru the air at 300, 400 pounds, still sort of alive, twitching, newly naked flesh shuddering with convulsive reflexes, jerking as it moves thru a wafting steam, clouds billowing around us, vapors emitted from newly opened body cavities, blood spattered on your plastic goggles, mists swirling in the air-conditioning that regulates the inside of the plant at 50 degrees or lower. Big hogs swinging at you, one after another, hour after hour, you had to swing with them, like a dance, a rhythm you cannot break, you can’t stand around or daydream—keep your wits about you—you couldn’t get too chilly or tired or slow, otherwise you might get hit. You don’t want to get body-slammed by a 350-pound hog and fall on your knife or the spinning circular saw with its yellow spring-coiled electric cord, or bump somebody else with the knife or saw. USDA inspectors came thru checking the line once in a while, four signs on the wall say, “THIS DEPARTMENT HAS WORKED 154 DAYS WITHOUT LOST TIME. AVOID ACCIDENTS ON THE JOB. SAFETY

BEGINS HERE” in English, Spanish, Chiu Chow & Vietnamese. Thru the big plastic doors the line workers push empty vats onto the kill floor, taking out tubs of heads or guts, internal organs, wheeling the vats of hogs’ heads off the kill floor into one room, internal organs into another. None of it is thrown away, including the blood flowing into the grating, sticky, viscous and black under our rubber boots. All of it is sold.

(I supposed, standing atop the steel grates that get hosed down at the end of each shift—still a bit treacherous because stainless steel, slippery underfoot, and your sweat-soaked feet also shifting slippery inside the waffled boot itself—I was thinking of how the gunk sloughing off down the drain is dried somehow, I really don’t follow all these details so I couldn’t really tell you for sure, but these thoughts occur to you, standing on the kill floor all night, I bet [Whoa! Fuck! Nakatl came too close, watch out!] all this blood is dried out and packaged, sold by the metric ton to some feedlot outside Bakersfield, fed to all those milk cows under the dairy sheds perfuming the breeze along Highway 5 with a momentary stench as you drive by.)

The kill floor’s hard heavy work, but I’d found out I couldn’t do other jobs with the finesse and speed required farther up the line. I cut myself and fucked up department safety statistics when they put me in sausages or hams. Other crews wouldn’t want their holiday bonuses reduced cuz I cut myself & screwed up their record. But mama raised a big boy, she fed me well, so I can wrestle whole 375-pound hogs all day better than any, while those unassuming women, boys and old veteranos on the disassembly line just can’t take it. Each broadback hog descends toward the kill floor through a chute with its huge head first, the sides of the chute pressing and holding it as 3Turkey zaps ’em in the neck, delivering massive voltage direct to the spine. He hits a button, and the chute opens, dropping the hog to the floor. 3Turkey steps over it & hooks a leg. It swings upright (trusting he hooked it fast), I reach my left arm around the hog’s shoulders as I lean into its girth, the warm, grizzly skin prickling worse than your old man’s two-day stubble, I give it the last firm goodbye hug, pressing the knife into its throat at the same time, drawing it diagonally down, slicing the carotid with one motion, then on out the other side. The blade comes back at me soft as sliced cornbread. It’s a one-two movement, that dance step. Convulsively, sometimes the animal kicks or jerks, shuddering as it rides up the chain. Sometimes the electricity hasn’t really put the animal out, and the whole time it’s been squealing that shrill high-pitched porcine shriek, but I can’t bother to notice stuff like that any more. You got to keep your wits about you. In the fog of fatigue, the warm moist red air we’re always wiping off our nose and mouth with a sleeve or the back of our hand, you got to keep a mental fix on the location of the guys next to you, blades in hand, somebody stepping in with the saw nearby, the general outline of the hog swinging up and away from you. I step back, out of the spray of the sheet of blood. It doesn’t spurt out of the neck like it would if you cut a limb off, it doesn’t drip or run out; it jets out in a black sheet. It’s like turning on a pressured jet. It splashes my rubber boots and my black apron. Lofted on the chain, the hogs tremble, some aimlessly running in space, blood frothing and spattering as the whole hot heavy mass ascends to hog heaven. The heads come off as the line carries them to the chill room where umpteen twenty tons of hogs chill for 12 hours. There’s a little hose if blood gets on your hands; you can’t afford to fumble the next ones with a slippery grip. Every motion—leaning in, hugging each hog to me, then the cut—all of it has to come at once, without a thought—sure, quick, exact. I have to be able to do it in my sleep. Soon as I stand back, ready, steady, go: 3Turkey hits the button for the next one.

When we switch, I do the same for him.

Blood flows thru the floor grating.

This is where my days (my nights) go.

Where you think your bologna sandwich comes from?

Try to tell your kids that. My daughter works for the county probation department, spends all her time hanging with white people at some church in Glendale. When I show up, they all act like I’m covered in invisible blood from head to foot. They’re very polite & cold, those people. “I’m glad they’re polite! Imagine if they weren’t!” my wife would say, tall plastic cup of wine in her hand. She said you got to expect that with girls, going off with boyfriends, getting married, ending up in somebody else’s household. But my son and I used to be real close. When he was little we did everything together. One year somebody hit me with a saw, took out my knee, I had to stay home for six months, I took care of him 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I even took him to my physical therapy sessions at Kaiser. He was only four, and I’d be working a machine and he’d sit on the floor or on a chair nearby, talking to me the whole time. The nurses’ assistants would cuddle him, coo, say what a beautiful kid he was. He really was beautiful, too, a round-headed dark-eyed boy. The nurses fell in love with him. He showed such a good heart, and he was open to people. He and I talked all the time, about everything. People told me they never saw a little kid only four years old, a boy especially, so well behaved. Whatever that was between us, it got lost in the past four or five years. He won’t say anything real to me these days, or when he does, half of whatever he says turns out isn’t true. He doesn’t want anybody to know what he’s up to, his hair cut off his head like a hardboiled egg, running the streets all the time with his so-called homies. Last time I saw him, I pulled up to a stoplight in my van and I looked down, there he was, sitting in the passenger seat of some little car with his buddies. I watched him there, sitting in the car, talking & laughing, the music playing so loud it rattled my van; he didn’t notice me watching. “Hey!” I shouted. He turned his head fast, with a hard-mouthed look, a rough look, who wuz the motherfucker who dared to say ‘hey’ to his ass? He saw it was me, got a little half-smile and gave me a nod. We looked at each other for a second. What the hell was he thinking? I was gonna ask him what he was doing these days, then the light changed and the car took off. That was it. I was thinking, that’s my boy? All the years I spent raising him, for that? That’s it?

Some time later I went to the supermarket and filled two boxes with every Farmer John product I could find. Bologna, salami, head cheese, foot-long hot dogs, ballpark franks, pepperonis, summer sausage, Polish sausage, breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, hot links, canned ham, sliced ham, honey-baked ham, ham hocks, ground pork, bacon, you name it. I stuffed two boxes full. I tossed in other stuff too, stuff that comes from the same animals under a few other brands. Chicharrones, pickled pigs’ feet, smoked pork chops, even a little handstitched souvenir football I found by the check-out stand that said Raiders. That’s pigskin, you know. I put all this stuff in boxes and delivered them one night. Neither of the kids was home, of course, cuz I didn’t call ahead. They’re never home, anyway. I just left it on their doorstep with their names on them. The boy doesn’t bother to call and say anything, of course, so you don’t even know if he ever got it. My daughter called and left a message on the machine; she said thanks. Maybe she was puzzled. But I could tell neither of ’em got the message.

Way it started, I was walking along the kanal outside Xochimilko, down along a sort of empty lot reeking of human excrement and tropikal vegetation exhaling humidity in the heat. Across the kanal was the kapital, bustling multitudes on raised causeways, jam-packed subways and crowded avenues into the city, haze of cookfires rising above the residences, marketplace din and everyday rumble of the metropolis. In the distance, the immense pyramids peach-tinted by the early morning light hovered above the smog. I had been driven out of my house at an early hour, driven to distraction by my confusions and whatnot, lost in thot, or what passed for thot for me personally, wandering about preoccupied, late for an appointment with Clan Elder Ixquintli, one of the kalpulli administrators I am answerable to, who was about to, in spite of my objections, recommend me for a spot of brain surgery, Kranial Boring to release Xtra spirits from inside my head. It had saved the sanity of hundreds of thousands, I was to be told. Just the thing for headaches! It improves your looks and your disposition, your chances of winning the lottery, experts verify in report after report. Ah, well. So be it. If they wanted to take a flint drill and puncture my skull at one or two precise points they must have their reasons. It would cure the headaches and they promised it would solve my continual problem of unwanted visions attacking me at all moments rendering me overly thoughtful inhibiting my spontaneous bloodlust and subsequent poetry. Who needed unwanted visions of vast concrete rooms, scrubbing them down with buckets of disinfectant and high-powered hoses, plastic & steel vats of flesh & body parts pushed up against the wall? And so it was that I was wandering that morning, lost in thot … I watched a snowy egret flying off over its reflektion toward the Tezkakoak Gate across the kanal. I tried to think of a good excuse to get out of Aztek brain surgery, tho I knew it was in my best interest. (“Drugs,” I’d insist, “drugs are available. Medicinal cures, ayahuasca, yage, kurare, cokaine, peyotl, Rainbow Rocket kaktus, the thorax of krushed stink beetles, psylocibin mushrooms, red & black ants known as Short People, mota, tobacco, great stinking funguses of the Rain Forest, mezkal sweetened with the tears of Spanish children, I can have all of these brought to me and I will eat them all.” “Zenzón, my son, you and I both know you’ve messed with these cures your entire life. They didn’t do a thing for you! You’re the same as you always were, worse even. You spent years engaged in painful sex rites with raving captive Catholic Spaniards, curative exorcisms with Mixtek googoo-eyed Maria Sabinas and her various disciples, the kult of Jaguar Squadrons where you rose to bloodthirsty prominence as one unequalled in imbecilic fury in pitched street battles against the Tlaxcalans and the Apaches, I know about all of that. I know all your former komrades and friends flee when they see you coming and I know why. I know you’ve worked assiduously, tried all kinda hokey cures including burnt peach pits inserted into your nostrils as you chant Afrikan songs by Stevie Wonder, you’ve gone down all routes into the Dark Places looking for ancestral spirits who flee like everyone else when they hear you coming. I know you’ve done your part, and now it’s time to let us do ours. I don’t have to warn you what the consequences might be if you fail to heed the whims of our burgeoning bureacracy.” “Fucking Spaniards, chingao! This is what they’ve done to us,” I grumbled. “They’ve reduced me to this for participating in the destruction of their flimsy Messianic worldview and the elimination of their so-called civilization from the Index of Possible Worlds. I can understand that. I accept all manner of smaller sins, incisions into my foreskin, aches and pains, rheumatism at my age, parasitik maggots hatching in my scalp, various other indignities because of it. I understand there’s a price to pay for doing one’s part for the People. But is this the thanks I get from my own brothers and sisters, the Great Aztek Socialism? Shit, I mean, really?” “Oh, Zenzón,” my Clan Elder murmured, “I know that part of you will enjoy it. You may even get a few last-minute visions out of the whole affair which will make you even more beloved among the musicians, amputees, Mayan defectors, losers and slackers hanging out in the pulque bars along the alleys behind the Eastern Market.” “Great. Just what I need,” I whined. I knew that whining was mighty low on the list of Aztek attributes and only the fact that my previous actions (which paradoxikally would take place in the future) had endeared me to the Clan Elder and allowed him to look upon my sniveling with clear dispensation. But I was disgusted with Myself. So I expected to kapitulate to the brain surgery koncept with a shrug (as the old buzzard knew I would, becuz he recalled how the future wuz gonna turn out), even as I fretted, “You know, my wife’s grandmother went loko, tried to run away with some Spanish explorer, was sadly dejected when they brought her his head to use as a pillow, and they tried this surgery on her, those self-elekted surgeons. You know what happened to her? Her damned head swelled up and her hair fell out so that her skull looked like some kind of French pastry with chocolate icing flaking off, pus squirted like egg kustard out of all the orifices in her head, including the new ones, her whole body swelled up like an inflated pigskin and then she died screaming French prose poetry, trying to swim north out of a puddle of her own piss like a beached dolphin. I don’t like French literature. I don’t want to end up in the same afterlife with her, Clan Elder. I don’t deserve all that Baudelaire & Mallarmé.” “Ha ha ha. Nice story Zenzontli. Shut up now and leave. I gotta toke a little mota and recombine elements of the sixth universe into new utilities to produce better trade with the EZLN in Chiapas.” “Gee, thanks, Chief.” “You and me, babe, you and me.” “I’ll be back afterwards, my Clan Elder, afterwards you can feel the phrenology. I’m sure I’ll be getting new interesting dreams out of the whole affair.” “You can tell me about it later. I knew you’d see it our way, my son. We depend on you. I did tell you we’re sending you and your unit to Russia, didn’t I?” All of that was to come later in the day.) I had a full day ahead, even as I wandered along the tepid Southwestern kanal lost in pseudo-thot. I was wondering if some possible rekombination of elements, like the extraktion of the stoic sexual appetites of a Jewish-Arabic-Andalusian princess delivered to me while parts of my foreskin were burnt on the balcony by one of the priests who still owed me supernatural favors, along with jug and klezmer musik played by Chamula renegades would allow for some relief. If not, I could insert Chinese fortunes I had written myself into incisions in my torso while breathed on lightly by Conquistador eunuchs who’d had their eyes removed and replaced by large Amazonian sapphires, while masturbating in several separate realities in a treehouse overlooking the sea. But then I realized I’d tried all that several times already. Just then some big black dusty ratty looking contraption of a bird flapped over my head—a raven I guess—flew by as I wuz humming. I sang out: “Who’s the dick making all the chicks?”—then a big shadow flew over me & away, ragged black wings swishing audibly through the unmoving heat. “Shaft!” the big bird squawked before it disappeared. What the hell wuz that supposed to mean? Sure, it did seem like a signifying augury of awesome import. I looked up in the general westerly direktion of the disappearing bird, trying to avoid falling forward into the greasy green waters of the kanal as it fell on my head again. Like a black curtain of rain. Another Vision.

Oh, Maria.

Oh, this wingéd world.

I catch Cuzatli (Weasel) giving me the eye sometimes around the taco truck—especially since he only has the one left, which he usually likes to keep fixed on the voluptuous chavalita in the skin-tight shirt, particularly while she’s leaning her chest across the counter to hand someone their order thru the little window over his head, maybe at night time with vapors rising into the night from the smokestacks lit from below here and there by spotlights, steam rising from styrofoam cups the men stand around holding on break, steam issuing from their mouths like feathered plumes of speech in Aztec codices. Generally I choose not to believe in paranoia, per se, I don’t go for Ray’s conspiracy theory of the universe that says everything is the result of three jokers meeting in a hotel room in Miami in 1961 and the rest is all just domino theories, Gerald Ford’s presidential pardon after the fact, smoke & mirrors. But there is something in Cuzatli’s glance that gives me pause, “Fuck you, Weasel, what I got that you want?” I’ll be thinking while smiling at la Sonia, who’s handing me the paper plato de carnitas con guacamole, which I’m careful to keep level lest it drip the grease down my front and make me look even more like another used-up hardworker motherfucker in front of la chula teengirl, who’s handing me a fistful of change with an unnerving dark-eyed smile that seems to recall something more important to be remembering than any of the rest, but I step over to the picnic tables provided for this 3 A.M. repast with a last glance at Weasel; in fact he is nonchalantly watching me as he leans against the truck like he’s taking his sweet time to order. As I sit down I nod to him, as if I do appreciate his support in our bid to certify the pinche union, sure—here’s to you, Cuzatli—and I tear off a bite of savory crisp pork flesh, tortilla soft as the skin of a woman’s belly in the moonlight, with aromatic picante roasted chile salsa filling my sinuses. At 3 A.M., you’ll find nothing will ever beat a bellyful of heart-attack carnitas topped with smoky hot salsa, swallowing hot coffee if you have to head back to the plant and go another eight-hour shift. What do I know about Cuzatli? He’s an okay worker, works hard and fast but sloppy, so they’re always shuffling him around jobs that can’t be screwed up too bad, or pairing him with someone more reliable. Maybe somebody’s looking out for him; certainly if I had his rep I’d be looking over my shoulder. In the glare of the roach coach fluorescents against the absorbant dark, Cuzatli lifts his face to jive la Sonia, and any passersby peering thru the plant gate not too far away wouldn’t see any distinguishing marks, even at that distance, nothing to set Weasel apart from the rest of us, no matter the grinning patter of witticisms, a raffish charm that had 3Turkey, Nakatl and even Pirate you could say on his side, stiff black hair in a boyish spiky cut, only the dark scar rising from an empty eye socket indicating a bit of trouble in his past. That indication, too, almost exactly like any of the rest of us—you can’t go this distance and come this far without a scar of some kind. So what if you knew, heard he kept women with families on both sides of the border, lost the kids from one when he gambled his way into a debt with gangsters on the lookout to kill him till this very day, so he told his friends and relations that he was going to commit suicide, then ran away, never to be seen by anyone again? Then here he is in a blue Farmer John jumpsuit, looking just like any one of us.

Apparently some passersby pulled over in a couple kanoes to make sure I didn’t slide into the muddy waters when I slid down the embankment, foaming at the mouth with my long hair in the kanal and, after a moment, peed in my shorts. When I came to some ten minutes later (they tell me), I rested there a moment with the blood flowing to my head because of the angle, a flock of children being kept back by an elder using the flat of an antiquated Spanish saber and by the stern demeanor of two warriors who no doubt knew who I was, standing above me but at a certain distance, looking off toward the smoke and din of the Eastern Market and no doubt konversing about more pressing matters, as if taking no notice while allowing their svelte, befeathered presence to have the necessary Effekt, as a group of Women of 3 Generations, grandmother to granddaughter, knelt at my side and used their clothing to wipe the mud out of my right eye. As I blinked with confusion, I recognized instantly what had happened, it had become so commonplace even in the mental fog and haze such spells would leave me. The younger women leaned over me so close that I could smell them, their sweet breath and slight perspiration (a soaplike fragrance) in the Teknotitlán heat and humidity, the tips of their long hair brushing my face my neck and my chest where their elders had loosened my tunic. Their eyes were fixed either on my mouth or on some point off to the side as they awaited with bated breath my first words (which were accorded immense currency among certain circles of young, rebellious or confused Aztex who fastened upon such words and treated them with even greater gravity than their elders did the latest Central Committee gossip). I wished they’d all go away, flee instantaneously, in spite of the vague gratitude I felt to them for keeping me from sliding headfirst into the kanal muck. I struggled to breathe, to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth, to oxygenate some part of the curlicues of my brain murky as the depths of the canals. “A big black … black … bird …” (They listened, rapt.) “Who’s the private dick who’s got all the chicks? Shaft … John Shaft.” (“Ah!” one teen sighed involuntarily. An old woman clucked, “Shush!”) Out of a failing sense of gratitude, I muttered a few words about the vision, “I saw … saw a highway … a highway like these that run the courseways into the capital … it was jammed with trucks and cars, horseless carriages of Europian and Asiatik style … they were being mercilessly strafed and bombed by jets and helicopters … all the way from one country to the next stretched a string of burnt-out vehicles driven motionlessly by the stinking, smoking charred corpses of an entire army … The horror, the horror! … This occured on 1 world in 2 places simultaneously … In the hilly mountain towns of another country, tiny sticklike Afrikan children, insectile in the heat but with hideously human movements pursued each other through the streets, hacking and beating each other to death, roving mobs organized for the purpose … on this same world (what a place!) entire Mayan villages were razed and everyone wuz slaughtered … people were packed into town halls and churches and the buildings set on fire … anyone attempting to escape the burning buildings was shot or hacked to death … marketplaces packed with milling shoppers were fired upon by snipers, by mortar positions … entire populations were packed into trains and trucks, taken into the woods and shot or funneled into prison camps of barbwire where they were tortured to death or exterminated en masse…men, women and children, entire families and clans and communities were slaughtered, disappeared from existence without ceremony, proper ritual, or sacred prayer! … The Indonesian army fired point blank on funeral processions in a cemetery, machinegunning them as they ran … East Timor … East Oakland … while this happened, entire populations of Spanish-style nations went about their daily business like sleepwalkers like zombies … conscripting leftover children of the dead and raising them as ghosts with no ancestral knowledge … the children shooting each other, parents murdering their own children and committing suicide in existential agony … in centuries of Darkness, death and destruction, junk food in styrofoam boxes … an age when This World in question was being slaughtered and the people were to wander its surface like ghosts in hell perishing in their sheepish Desires … This was the civilization those Europians sought to bring us … this was the reality they sought to invoke upon our land … and while it all was happening as they delivered it across the world they would have watched it replayed in movies to musical accompaniment! Auschwitz, the Musical! Mauthausen Off-Broadway!” The older women were weeping. I was weeping myself, overcome, I could no longer speak. The teenage girls, sickened and shocked, stepped back a few paces. I was secretly relieved. I was, in fact, becoming used to the extremity of the Visions. I knew they shocked and sickened your ordinary, normal, healthy Aztek. In fact, as the women stood me on my feet, used cloth purchases from the market to clean my hair, my face, my hands, as the warriors stood off a ways pretending not to notice, as an old man explained to a knot of kurious children the nature of my visions, I knew what was going to happen to me. It had already happened to me in the future.

Your usual busy morning. Power breakfast with Clan Elder. Yummy cactus salad, nopal, green beans, rings of red onion, Mayan corn chowder, Inka fried potatoes with krispy golden fried guinea pig, octopus ceviche on cabbage, numerous delicacies which I failed to appreciate but ate anyway in a self-preoccupied funk. Clan Elder, he says, you gotta go get a hole in your head. I say, yes yes of course. Clan Elder Ixquintli [Hairless Dog 21] says that he will convene a Blue Ribbon Commission of scientific experts to slay hundreds, offer the pure hearts of Spanish warriors and virgins to whichever gods go well with cokaine, along with the upcoming possible dates for my surgery, and they’ll consult the kalendarial gods, figureheads and scary items that appear in the sky whether we like it or not. Clan Elder Ixquintli offers me and another guest—I never caught his name, a 300-year-old Olmek spirit who looks like an Afrikan Buddha wearing a leather helmet of an Aztek flying ace—to each of us a Spanish slave princess for sexual favors as dessert, specializing in manual or podiatric manipulations to the tasteful accompaniment of a panoply of singing parrots and rainforest birds, but I’m so full. Another time, Clan Elder. (The Olmek spirit tries to get in on the conversation, but the konnection is no good, he’s breaking up, even if we understood his dialect it’s all garbled, so Clan Elder Ixquintli and I just nod and laugh, cuz we don’t want to piss this spirit off since he’s been so kind as to show up for breakfast three centuries later. I’d just realized that the Clan Elder had said that I was being transfered to the Russian front as special candidate for War Hero against the bad Nazis, liaison to our anarkosyndikalist allies, causing me to choke and to cough up coffee thru my nose.) Some things are more scalding than bitterness drowned every morning with coffee. I told as much to the Clan Elder. “!protest!” I request re-assignment to another Theater of War, someplace with coffee shops, sidewalk cafes, cultural events, a happening night life, efficient and affordable public transportation, a higher quality of life, better schools, a few remaining shreds of civic pride. According to my research, that’s either San Francisco or Paris! I respectfully request, sir, that you send my Jaguar Unit to Paris! We shall invade Paris, drink wine, learn to paint like a Cubist, look like Picasso, read Celine, hang out on the East Bank with North Afrikans, boogie in jazz clubs with expatriot Negroes, write manifestos, walk along the Seine, acclimatize ourselves to French cuisine with a view toward preparing ourselves to become ready to strike a death blow into the heart of the Nazi War Machine at the first possible Opportunity! Sir! Who said James Joyce has a lock on interior monologue?” “What did you say, Zenzón? I wasn’t paying attention to your dismal chatter.” “Sir, I respectfully request that you prevail upon the Council of Tlatoani to re-assign us to the Europian Theater, out of the Eastern Front where from all accounts casualties are extremely high—due to limited intelligence provided for us—it seems entirely likely that you are sending us on a suicide mission.” “Now Zenzón, I won’t deny this is a suicide mission…” “Run that by me again?” “There’s nothing wrong with a suicide mission every now and then. It’s good practice.” “Sir. I wish you’d consider Paris.” “Fuck Paris, Zenzón, have you ever seen any French movies? Have you? There you have it. French civilization in a nutshell. It’s not worth discussing. All talk, no action. Cream sauce, high calories and fatty foods. Mayonnaise on their sex clubs. They love complicated syntax; they don’t have any sense. They couldn’t be direct with you if you nailed their dick to a Bikini atoll and set off an atomik bomb.” “A what, sir?” “Nothing, Top Secret, don’t mention I said anything about it. Forget I mentioned it.” “What about the famous pussy they all talk about? Even Celine mentions it.” “Paris? Listen, Zenzón, we’re not opening up a second front in Europa till the major cities have been reduced to rubble, prices are lower, and whole suburban populations starving across the continent can be bought for cases of nylon pantyhose, bushels of watercress, cilantro, celery, cartons of Mohawk tax-free cigarettes.” “Sir, are you suggesting that the lives of my men, the lives of millions of innocent civilians on three continents, entire cities and the ancient cultures embodied in them are to be forfeited simply so that you and elite councils in power in our nation can enjoy cheap if not free access to untold masses of slaves?” “That’s a fact. Which is why I expect you to do your damnedest, cuz it’s god damned important to me and my personal well-being, my stock portfolios, my investments, my umbrella of business enterprises sheltered by statute, legislators & a phalanx of high-paid attorneys.” “I think I could be of some use to you in Paris, sir.” “I’m quite willing to consider it, Zenzón, I assure you. But after Stalingrad. Not before. Perhaps if you survive Stalingrad, we’ll have opened the Second Front in Europa by then and your unit can rotate thru the Western Theater on their way home.” “Let me say then, sir, for the record, that I voice my objection to the whole strategy, to sending my men and me to die on the Eastern Front for the chance that your portfolio returns may increase a point or two, that the Aztek slave trade be expanded to a few more two-bit ignorant underdeverloped countries.” “Two or three percentage points? Are you kidding Zenzón? I’m looking for a double-digit increase at the very least! If the gaping vortex of chaos and apocalyptik disaster continues to widen, we won’t be just talking about horseshit little nations in the Balkans, Albania, Scandinavia, the Arab Emirates & shit like that! Our plans will make the Belgian Congo look like a tea party! IMF Bailouts will look like continental breakfasts! The Annexation of East Timor will look like Lox & Bagels! Argentina’s Dirty War will look like low-cholesterol eggs & tofu sausage! The Rape of Nanking will be fresh as ground roasted coffee! The Final Solution will look like half a grapefruit! We’re talking major markets, entire civilizations, worlds of opportunity beyond your imagining.” “Wish I was in on it,” I sighed. Then I brightened, “Whatever did happen to my life savings, that nest egg I had you invest for me in the Burmese opium trade, the Golden Triangle? What happened to that company, Air America, the CIA front?” “I’d been meaning to bring that up with you Zenzón, so I’m glad you finally mentioned it. Unfortunately—I can explain it in fairly simple & straightforward terms in a second—that entire fund was lost. That company went down the drain. Zippo. All your money’s been lost. Completely, totally, just like that!” Chuckling, Clan Elder Ixquintli snapped his fingers, grinning sadly, shaking his head at the terrible suddenness with which these accidents do sometimes occur. “You just got fucked on that one, my boy.” “But, Clan Elder, you said you could explain, at least. I mean, if I recall correctly at the time, you said that investment strategy was 100% guaranteed.” “Oh yes. Let me see now … How to explain it to you … Let me put it this way Well, let me see if I can put it in terms you might understand Do you know much about the Index of Leading Ekonomic Ko-efficients & the Marcos-Suharto Guaranteeship for Investment Maximization?” “Can’t say I ever heard of ’em, no sir.” “No? Amazing. Astonishing, really. Zenzón, how could you suggest that we put your life savings into the heroin trade when you don’t know the first things about the mysterious Oriental Paths to True Investment? You must read Daisetz T. Suzuki on IRAs, 401 & 402(k)s, three-tiered mutual funds & money market transfers. Obviously, you’ve been led astray by the turmoil of your day-to day desires, bamboozled by the dark clouds of your inner emotional conflict, made mincemeat by the your lack of Chinese Wisdom when it comes to keeping tabs on the hard cash, loko! I bet you never consulted a Taoist certified investment banker at a reputable feng shui brokerage firm in your life, have you, karnal? Have you bothered to have tea made out of your lapsed insurance policies so that you could read between the lines & find out what it says in the small print inscribed on the astrology of your financial plans? No? I thot not. See, that’s your problem right there. Thanks for coming to me with your problems, tho, son. It always does make me feel better somehow. It’s always good for a chuckle. I don’t know why. I guess I just like you, that’s all. Somehow these things just can’t be rationally explained. I don’t give a fuck how super-intellectual our scientists think they are.” “But in regards to Stalingrad sir—” “That’s right Zenzón. You and your unit give ’em hell at Stalingrad for me! If I could only be there! I know you’ll do great things there. It’ll be a hell of a time! By the way, come over here and shake an old man’s palsied, pasty, noodle-limp, jerk-off hand. I may never see you again and I wanna remember you the way you are, heading out my door for good, one last time, I hope.” “Thank you, sir.” “Don’t thank me yet. Thank me when you’re out on the street so that you don’t take up any more of my time. Ciao, kid. Been good to know ya.”

I mean, sometimes the Aztek fetish for feathers even gets to those of us who take pains to be the most Aztek of all; it just dulls the appetite hiccupping & spitting out the feathers of tiny species. I left the sumptuous winter dacha of the Clan Elder, joined by my bodyguard 3Turkeyvulture, who’d been playing mumblety-peg with household children in the courtyard entranceway. I was not surprised that 3Turkey had found me after my epileptic peregrinations of the day, since that wuz his job, but I was pleased to have him accompany me. Terrorism by the subject peoples had been limited of late, the main bombing targets being Federal Buildings & Twin Towers, having the politikal effect of incensing our well-educated Aztex, with the effect of further discrediting the cause of dissident Mayan sects, Chumash, Hawaiians, Taino, etc. I appreciated 3Turkey as a man who could take time out from his numerous duties as my Chief of Staff, instead of take himself overly seriously, engage in public displays of martial arts performance and practice, kill low-ranking passersby in fits of low self-esteem, reek of unwashed blood for weeks, etc. All that professional military caste behavior so stereotypical and tedious. 3Turkey was easygoing, he could be counted on for kongenial company and advice, something I desperately needed in my time of solitary flights of lunacy. “3Turkey,” I could say with a straight face, “I’ve been dreaming that I kill pigs. And I am not talking one or two pigs. I’ve been dreaming of cutting the throats of tens of thousands of pigs.” “Let’s do it!” he’d say. 3Turkey could both make light of my fits and seizures and make sense of my visions according to the lights of his somewhat limited education. He was not well-read, it’s true, preferring the exotica of modern European romances to classical Codices, but he was always honest forthright and direct. Like a breath of fresh air, as they say. Not that I, however, paid him any undue attention passing through the courtyard and out of the entranceway, moving down the steps as he took up a semi-watchful position beside me. It’s not merely that I greatly outrank my guard, nor that I’m a generation his senior, but simply that I left the Clan Elder’s quarters feeling overfed, dazed and strangely expectant. You know the way life is, a little torture and the risk of death in the near future is probably a good thing. Sometimes one even envies the Spanish their cults of Katholicism and Inquisitional self-flagellation, which is why you can see such ideologies have been adopted as part of the stage persona of various wannabe rock stars and teen groupies. Still, even in my muddled state I found pleasure in the summer’s afternoon, the day mellifluously perfumed by the hanging garden of the Clan Elder as we descended the steps in dappled shade to the level of the sun-kissed street. You’ve seen it in pictures, I’m sure, even if you haven’t had time to visit our kapital in person, so you know that neighborhood streets in Teknotitlán are strictly limited to foot and animal traffic, with most of the mass transit on waterways, subways & Ho Chi Minh bike paths hidden under the trees, therefore, every neighborhood retains an appearance of lively tranquility, thriving pedestrian community interspersed with animals of all types who are our brothers, our nahual spirits, feedstock and pets. Which is to say, the dust in the street had the tang of llama dung, the afternoon resounded with the squawks of peacocks, cooing of doves, chirps of geckos, not unpleasant given the tremendous perfume of surrounding estates and their lush foliage. Occasionally, too, the throaty growl of big cats could be heard above the quotidian rumble of the vast kapital. Such pets were common among the well-off; I myself happened to live in a more modest, mixed neighborhood, because, though I wouldn’t admit it to the faces of my elders, because their aesthetik sense is reputed a sign of spiritual status on more planes of reality than this one [a whiff of—could it be?—pig shit? the fear of pig sweat broiling inside transport trucks?], so you can’t mess around with it, but I often find that and other Aztek orthodoxies and strictures to be dull when carried too far.

Then someone tried to kill me. At first I didn’t notice a thing. Typically, I was descending the steps, worried about myself, weighing the concerns and consequences of empire, wondering how to get out of this existential fix I was in (maybe those Doktors could work wonders, maybe those Metaphysicians could actually release my soul one way or another from its own entrapment, somehow, in some Other world, quizás) when I noticed the commotion—vaguely—as a blurred motion in my peripheral vision. “Fucking 3Turkey,” I started thinking to myself, “some woman—” but 3Turkey wasn’t chasing the fleeing woman down to speak to her, berate her in the street for some personal indiscretion, past affair or what have you as I first thought; he didn’t try to talk to her at all. The woman ran with the inspired swiftness of holy terror, and she was carrying something like a ball under her arm, weaving and dodging through the pedestrians who parted, and turned to see—as I myself finally had turned to see, 3Turkey kill her. I suspect he meant to slow her down, as he later protested when I berated him for his stupidity, but he outweighed the woman by 150%, overtaking her amidst the parting of the crowd, some of whom had to fling themselves backward out of the grand elliptical motion of his arm as he brought down the war-club onto her cranium, which cracked like a hummingbird’s blue egg under your thumbnail at a state luncheon, and the woman flew headlong, face-first into the dust like a puppet whose strings had been cut as she swung. She looked like a pitiful girl as 3Turkey de-accelerated over her, huffing in his furious adrenal rush, glowering and hefting his thick dark heavy-flanged club and casting glances on every side as the crowd fell back, not wanting to come within striking distance, not wanting to be the next to lie—as everyone in sight become suddenly aware—still and dead as this thin, middle-aged, long-haired Aztek woman. “Pulpo en su tinta,” whispered a passing Spanish slave. She was obviously dead, face half-rolled in yellow dust, mouth pressed open into the dirt as if caught in partial attempt at swallowing the actual world, jaw slack and eyes half-open, glazed over, her long black hair spread around her like the night of the underworld, as 3Turkey knelt to rifle her bag frantically. I strode up nonchalantly, as if indifferent to the frantic cursing of my bodyguard, who turned to me as my shadow fell across him, his face upturned in anguish, crying, “It’s not here! It’s not here! She had an accomplice! Zenzontli-Master, you’ve just been assassinated!” I knew what he was looking for, dumping the contents of the Guatemalan bag on the paving stones as the murmurous crowd looked on—the Kodak Instamatik Camera was not in her possession. I scanned the crowd for any telltale signs in any of the faces, but there was only the polite inquisitive Aztek diffidence in the face of sudden death. It wasn’t them this time. So it goes. I had some professional role to uphold, I felt, and admonished 3Turkey with caste-hardened severity, “Shitbird! How dare you kill her? What the hell were you thinking?” My bodyguard rose, useless papers from the woman’s bag fluttering away from his body as he stood before me, his perfect horror all-apparent as was his wish that it would have been him instead of me, as he gestured with supplicant hands empty at his sides, mouth open, crying inside himself as he stared at me with a tumultuous empathy. I could read it in his eyes. The woman had snapped my photograph and passed it on to an accomplice in the chase, in full knowledge that she would be captured, tortured and killed. It had been a suicide mission like others in recent months. The photograph would be posted on milk cartons and post office bulletin boards in hellish underworlds throughout the universe, and my end would be swift, rank and horrible. My visage would be duplicated and plastered across shit holes and low-rent barrios in the worst alternate parts of the known omniverse; assassins would emerge from the woodwork, they’d descend upon me like flies to the the moisture of an open wound. 3Turkeyvulture knew this already, he grieved for me even as he contemplated his own failure as my bodyguard strewn at his feet, and so did I. I’d just been assassinated.

I could’ve sworn I saw someone looking at me out of the corner of my eye. I was leaning around the side of a carcass, stamping the rump, suddenly I stopped doing what I was doing and stood and looked up and down the line. No way somebody could duck out, instantly, like that, disappear behind the racked carcasses into the shadows in a corner of the room! I don’t think….

It was a common method of assassination. In fact, it was the fashionable rage of late. Moktezomah 4, whose skin became transparent as his flesh turned to pink translucent jelly, his bones to chalk, his greenish nerves dissolving in puddles as he perished in screaming delirium; Tlotzin 2’s entire body wracked with fever & chills and swaddled in blankets as he lay in bed, his purplish torso swelled up to twice its previous size and rocked violently from side to side, his mouth finally peeling back to emit a huge vile cloud of poisonous black wasps leaving his corpse an empty sack speckled with larvae, causing the evacuation of fourteen city blocks; the well-respected Minister of Edukation and Kulture under Kuatemok 5 led blind and keening from place to place until one late afternoon when his rotten head literally exploded and kollapsed in on itself, his once-proud pale body lying in the courtyard of the house beside a pile of greasy rotten fruit, like the emptied white sack of a frog’s skin after molting. Of course, it was a method of assassination the Aztek High Command had authorized against the Nazis in World War 2, when General Rommel’s photograph was purchased from a French agent in Morocco for 200,000 Aztek Tzotzils, and the General found himself suffering from one of the most unspeakable cases of genital elephantiasis unlike anything Saharan Afrika had ever seen, such that when his death actually occurred when his Daimler-Benz staffcar was fired upon by an Aztek Imperial fighter, the General would have been able to save his own life had he been able to exit his vehicle at all without the help of two personal aides pushing the small wheeled cart containing his delicate sexual apparatus alongside the General’s own specially designed folding gurney. As it was, the Germans buried Rommel’s boar-sized genitalia at an oasis outside Tobruk with great pomp and ceremony, meant to impress their Italian, Moorish and Vichy allies with the long history of Aryan sacrifice on the Dark Continent; and for the home audience, the rest of Rommel was buried in his hometown, the spiffy northern kommercial city of Brandenburg, far from his heralded desert campaigns. … Which the Azteks under Kuatemok 5 overran anyway, six months later, from the west, as hordes of their allies, the Anarkist Forces under Russian Generalissimo Makno took Berlin from the East. Some similar ill fate was in store for me —all that was in the infinite future, so much vaster in its prospekts, Good and Bad, than the Limited Present. Even now, my photograph, that image of the human soul, was making its way to the hands of my Enemies, whoever they were. I didn’t know who they might be, but obviously I was doomed. I was history; that’s what I saw in the harrowed stare in 3Turkeyvulture’s eyes. I was a ghost already. I could see he held himself together through main force as he assembled the woman’s possessions and held them ready, even as he scanned the crowd in renewed (if belated), redoubled effort not to let anyone else assault his Master. “Shitbird, you fucked up, I don’t even appreciate it,” I thought to myself. But outwardly, I muttered, “Don’t worry about it, 3Turkey, this could befall any warrior of reknown, these days. We live in dark times. Enemies of our way of life are everywhere. You did well,” I lied, and told him, “I’ve been expecting something like this, anyway.” 3Turkeyvulture stiffened, his face brightening somewhat, as he searched my face to see if it was true. “I’ve already got some people following the accomplice, to find out who these enemies of the Aztek State are.” He wasn’t fully convinced. I nodded, “That’s right. We’ll take care of them. You shouldn’t have killed her, though. We needed her alive.” His head fell in shame, momentarily, and then he stiffened, recalled his duty and began alertly scanning the crowd once again. I sighed. “Oh, you Shitbird,” I thought, “I wouldn’t want to be you when my wife hears about this.” As the crowd dispersed, excitement over, and we waited for the konstabulary to arrive and secure the scene, the fluted melodies of a Mayan ensemble wafted through the air. Somewhere in the neighborhood, Mayan musicians were being paid to entertain a wedding reception or a gathering of some kind. Fucking Mayans, I thought, they’re everywhere. Their own civilization collapses and so they come to take over ours. That’s the problem with the Aztek way. Our generosity amounts to the sin of self-indulgence, we civilize the world and the get the dekadent dregs of failed civilizations like the Mayans and the Spanish—people who didn’t have the heart(s) to appease the Sun and therefore never had a batshit chance in a hurricane wind of surviving as a kulture. Now everywhere you go you find Kakchikels, Tzotzils, Mams, Pokomams, Kiche, and Kekchi. Even now, there were Spanish slaves among the passersby watching my every move. The Mayan music was airy and transparently elegant, as many of the Mayans are themselves. But on the eve of my own assassination, I considered the music a bad omen. Mayans, with their affected nobility of bearing, affected homoeroticism, affected Bay Area high culture, affected stylization of the sakred game of football. It was all so disgusting, that and the poverty of their jungle-infested pyramids, mocking our stately kapital. The flutes soared sweet over soft percussive bongos, making me wince. Mayans give me the kreeps.