The Babylon rite

52

Tepito

Monroy was dying. The blood erupted from the vivid grin in his neck, spurting, joyous and plentiful. He barely had time to moan, to whisper; he clutched his fingers to the gaping wound but the blood kept spraying between them in merry little fountains: quite irrepressible.

Seconds later he slumped forward, like a post-coital lover, on to Jessica, she was naked and drenched in his blood. She stared at him with a languish of affection or desire; then she pushed his twitching, trembling body on to the floor.

Adam fought his own arousal; he couldn’t work out whether it was Monroy’s death or Jessica’s nudity that made him so desirous; it was both, they were blurring. He needed an end to this: his own end.

An enormous crashing noise came from beyond the room. Jessica was standing, and rifling Monroy’s pockets, taking the gun from his holster; but Adam was looking through the noble windows at the large courtyard: the noise came from the steel gates — they appeared to have been crushed by an armoured car.

Men were vaulting from the vehicle, crouching, firing rifles and revolvers in all directions. Military yet criminal: the Zetas, for sure. Again Adam swooned at the eroticism of the idea: he could walk into those bullets, he could just do it, pirouetting like a dancer as the bullets impacted his body, spinning him…

‘Adam — wake up! Adam!’

Blooded, wearing Monroy’s jacket, and nothing else, Jessica was standing over him, holding his handcuffs in her hand, and the keys in the other. ‘I unlocked you. Get up, get up.’

He looked at the soft hair at the top of her legs, the red blood that had caught in her pubic hair, tiny red berries in a golden bramble. He wanted to lick the hair, lick her flesh where the blood was, taste it Nina pulled him to his feet. Jessica handed him a gun, Monroy’s gun, and slapped him twice on the face. Very hard. ‘You have about five hours to last, then I believe the ulluchu will wear off, you just need to get through the next five hours- ’

Nina seemed more self-possessed than Adam. Why? Because she had attempted suicide a year ago? Was her thanatos, her death wish, already exhausted? His mind spun into turmoil once more.

Nina grabbed Jessica. ‘Tell us!’

Jessica smiled and frowned. White-skinned and almost nude and smeared with blood, her eyes were resigned and bright, obscurely serene. A marble statue scrawled with red graffiti, in the misty dawn. Still standing.

‘I am dying. I thought if I could kill Monroy I would do one single good thing, something very good at the end of my life. That’s why I didn’t bargain with the Zetas: I wanted access to Monroy. El Santo. Something that would make my death worthwhile. He was too clever, he was going to use this drug to destroy my country, he had to be stopped. Your lives are just two lives… I am sorry, he was going to kill so many, if I could kill him first then my short life would mean something — I wouldn’t die flailing, and futile, like my father; but the time is coming anyway, I am dying, it is good, not sad, not sad at all, it is good…’ She was laughing. Yet not hysterical. But laughing.

‘But-’

‘I condemned you both! Your deaths were inevitable, no? Yet now here you are alive! So what are you waiting for? Run — go now — you have a chance, remember the Moche, they took this drug all their lives, at enormous doses, yet they lived on.’

‘How?’

The noise of shooting in the courtyard was intense. The unnerving jangle of shattered glass, and the cackling rattle of automatic gunfire, men shouting, coming nearer.

‘There is a chance. Eros and thanatos.’ Jessica closed her eyes, and swayed, ‘Eros and thanatos are entwined, that’s what Freud said. The libido and the death wish cannot exist without the other, even though they are in opposition. And maybe sometimes love defeats death, maybe God is death plus love. I do not know. Maybe. But why not try? Go now. Go now and make love…’

Adam watched: stunned and intoxicated. Jessica went to the sofa and lay down in the red puddles of Monroy’s blood. A door slammed open: he swivelled. It was the guard, Monroy’s bodyguard, saying ‘Senor Monroy, capitano’ — then the guard gazed in bewilderment at the scene.

The urge was orgasmic. And irresistible. Adam lifted the gun, and he fired, exultantly. He had never shot a gun in his life: but this was so good. The bullet slammed the man to the wall, silhouetting him with a corona of his own blood, another Jackson Pollock on the wall, the abstract expressionism of death.

He raised the gun again. But Nina pulled him away, saying enough. Yet the desire was so strong, he could shoot some more, or he could lie down here — touch the blood, lie down quietly…

‘The stairs!’

A shard of lucidity entered his mind: Jessica. He turned. Jessica Silverton was naked again, on the sofa, and blood was draining from the deep wound across her throat. Her eyes were wide open. Staring at the ceiling, half rapt, ecstatic, saintly; the white arm dangled from the sofa, her gentle fingers lightly caressing the prone body of Carlos Chicomeca Monroy.

Nina pulled Adam out of the room and away. The stairs were at the end of the wide landing; they ran down. Adam tightly clutched the gun in his hand, weighing the comforting metal hardness of its lethality; the stairs descended to the mayhem, the shooting, the Zetas and the Catrinas, kneeling, and firing, and dying.

‘There must be a side door.’

They took the stairs in three leaps and then shrank back into the shadows of the courtyard. Adam could hear the bullets flying, a sizzle in the air, delicious, coming for him, he wanted to walk into the middle of it all, be devoured, in the wounding air.

‘Here, look, this is a door, it must be!’

But Adam was not for using it. A Zeta man had spotted them. They were protected by a high-sided pick-up from the shooting in the wider yard, yet this Zeta had seen them, he was running over, gun raised, but not shooting, obviously he wanted them alive ‘Kill him!’ screamed Nina. ‘ Shoot the fucking gun. Kill him!’

Adam raised his arms, waiting to be shot by the Zeta cartelista, wanting it, wanting to yield. This is was it, the deliciousness of the end. He would die here, slip between the bedsheets and rejoin Alicia, kiss her cold lips once more.

Nina was firing. She had grabbed the gun from his hand and she was shooting the Zeta. The man gazed, perplexed, then doubled over, dead. Nina twisted on a heel and shot at the lock in the door in the external wall; Adam was too stoned to understand, he was a sexualized zombie, he couldn’t move. The door opened, Nina pushed him through and they stepped into the whirling streets of Mexico City. She hurled the pistol over the wall.

The lucidity again. He had a moment of clarity. Adam recognized these streets. He had been to Mexico City before: the green Volkswagen Beetles, the smell of tacos fried in rancid oil, the vibrant ugliness and the brown polluted air, the unmistakable thrum of the Distrito Federal: a truly vast city, a place they could hide in.

The shooting was still loud: Nina grabbed his hand and they ducked along the low streets — a left and a right, they sprinted another road, making a truck driver yell at them ‘ Hijos de putas! ’ They crossed again, left and right, past a staring woman in a window, a cantina on the corner, a Superama supermarket, a beggar on the corner clutching a cross… a beggar with a cross?

He looked around. Tepito. He knew exactly where they were now: the infamous, Mexico City suburb of Tepito, the home of Santa Muerte, the home of the city’s outlaws since Aztec times, perhaps the home of the Aztec worship of death, hidden here, underground, over the centuries.

Adam saw it all. Of course, this is where Monroy would live, in a big old house in the most dangerous old slum of the city, hidden in plain sight. Protected by the dangerous and villainous streets. He and Nina, were too conspicuous, sweating and scared and gringo-pale and flecked with blood.

But then the haziness took over his mind, once again, Adam felt the burning desire to join in. To join the strange Babylonian rites of Holy Death, to mingle with the street worship of Tepito.

People were crawling on their knees in the carless yet crowded boulevard. Mestizo and Indian alike, ex-prisoners and junkies, hookers in red pencil skirts, lowly criminals in cheap sneakers, youths in T-shirts with more tattoos than skin, were all crawling, slowly, along the street, towards a large platform on which was raised a grinning skeleton, adorned with a white wedding veil: Holy Death herself, the white lady, the skinny girl, the princess bride, with a reefer lodged between her shining teeth.

And when they reached the statue the crawling people prayed and bowed and sang little songs and made their offerings to Death. In the hot fresh pungent sunlight of the slum prostitutes were spraying perfume on the bones, or offering liquor to the skeletal mouth; and all around the White Lady other skulls sat smiling amidst the candles and tea-lights, skulls adorned with hats and football scarves, anointed with raw tequila. Adam felt the sweet delirium descending on him once again: he wanted be one of these people, to worship the skulls. Why not? Death was supreme: it was the democratizer. Death was the New World, waiting for the Old World to come, waiting for both the conquered and the conquerors.

But Nina was still quite alert.

‘Think,’ she said, turning him to face her. ‘We just have to get through the next few hours and we will be OK. Jess said. We need somewhere to hide, it’s not safe here, where — where can we go? You know this city, don’t you? You told me. We need somewhere away from everything, somewhere with lots of tourists, where we shan’t be spotted. Ach, Ad, fucking think, please think. We need to get as far away from Monroy. From all that.’

‘Teotihuacan,’ he said, surprised by the eloquence of his own words. ‘Teotihuacan. The temple complex. An hour from the city. Tourists there.’

Nina dragged him, as if he was an unwilling animal on a lead, to the corner of the street where the cars began. She hailed a taxi. It was green. They piled into the little car, with its ripped upholstery. ‘Teotihuacan. Por favor. Rapido! ’

The driver nodded without a word and the car pulled, rattling and old, into the hurling kinetic madness of Mexico City traffic. Adam closed his eyes and fought the lust: he wanted to push open the car door and jump out, into the racing traffic, but instead he held her hand, Nina’s hand, her hot damp hand, squeezed it so hard he could see the pain on her face, but he liked that pain, he liked seeing her in pain… he could throw her on a floor and fuck her, rape her and hurt her, turn her over…

The struggle was obscene. His mind was filled with intense images, of love and destruction. His eyes tight shut, he focused on the noise, the honking, roaring drone of the traffic.

Then he woke up — somewhat. They were there: Teotihuacan. The great site of the pyramids, or at least by the enormous car park next door. Tourist buses were parked in a row. Americans and Europeans were wandering around, in hats and sunglasses, buying presents, peering at souvenir stalls, haggling over Diet Pepsis sold from metal buckets. The incongruity of it all was stunning.

Nina showed him: she had their little bags — the stuff they had been allowed to take. Passports. Grabbed from Monroy’s house. How come she was so lucid? How had she managed that? It must have been her recent suicide attempt. She had some resistance. For the moment.

They moved down a lane and found the first hotel, Los Pyramidos. In the lobby the tourists in shorts and new straw hats gazed at the two sweating young people in bemusement and alarm. The concierge looked at them likewise. Nina slammed their passports on the counter and the middle-aged receptionist shrugged, and sighed, and said Vale and handed over a key.

A corridor. Death. A hotel door. To yield. The door opened. Death. They fell into the room, and immediately Adam threw himself on the bed and curled into a ball, foetal, enclosed, fighting the persistent images, the insistent desires. He didn’t care what Nina was doing. He wanted to relish and ignore and explore the thoughts that erupted inside him, the kaleidoscopic cascade of daydreams… Alicia talking and naked, blood running from her mouth, his hand between her legs, there, the softness, the redness, the surgical incision, the Moche amputation, the vampire fish under the skin, in his heart, eating his heart. Why hadn’t he drunk some of the blood, just a small cup, an espresso cup of blood, a tiny delicate china cup full of red blood? Delicious. Maybe he could throw himself from the hotel window: they were on the second floor, that would probably be enough, then it would be done, at last, then the whole fucking sadness, the pointless struggle, the bleak and godless agony, the grief over Alicia and his family and everything, the stupid getting and spending, then at last it would be over, all the suffering of human life would be finished, concluded, enacted, contracted. Stamped with a fat red royal seal of blood-red wax, and signed by the lady herself, her imperial whiteness, the Virgin Queen: his royal death warrant.

Adam stirred. How long had elapsed? An hour? Could have been two. It was still daylight. He could still hear the murmur of tourist business out there, in the car park, as Teotihuacan complex welcomed and disgorged its many thousands of visitors.

The hotel room was silent. Nina? He realized, with a painful start, that Nina wasn’t there.

He had to use this moment of consciousness. He didn’t know if this was the ulluchu wearing off or just another brief interlude before the madness began again. But he had to find and save Nina.

There. A noise. Panting? Someone was softly panting, gasping even, gulping fine breaths. The noise was muffled by a door: she was in the bathroom. He rushed across the room and pushed at the door and it was firmly locked: and he knew at once what was happening.

‘Nina!’ He thumped on the door. ‘Nina!’ He began to kick at the door.

She was locked inside the bathroom, probably dying.

He was too late.