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Trafficking in Stolen Gods
Maybe she should have left her ID in the car—then she thinks, no, it's good that she has it. She's in a war zone, and she might get stopped, although, actually, the war zone is far north of San Francisco, beyond Marin County. The Navy keeps the Bay Area peaceful, or so she's heard, except for skirmishes in Golden Gate Park and the seashore, and that's six miles away. She can't even hear gunfire. She's not quite alone. I'm with her in spirit, which I hope will be enough. I've taught her everything I can and have given her more courage than she knew she had. She had to pass through three checkpoints to get from her home in the Walnut Creek to the city, and the search at the toll booth at the Oakland Bay Bridge terrified her. But the soldiers were looking for weapons, not for the stolen art in a shoebox in her totebag. They were hardly older than her high school students and just as bored. They didn't even ask why she was headed to the city, so she didn't have to explain that she was visiting her sick mother, a lie that her husband had believed. San Francisco's skyscrapers, hills, and touristy bustle have always fascinated her. Walnut Creek's bland malls and ranch homes provide a nice place to raise a family, but her son now lives with her ex-husband in Ohio. When the telephones work, the boy can talk about nothing but the Icon War. "They should call it wars, it's so big," he says, as if "big" means "good." Her current husband won't talk about it at all. She walks up the gloomy streets near Telegraph Hill, where only a few streetlights work, and passes a burned-out storefront. Its sign, warped by the fire, reads "First Church of Christ, Scientist, Reading Room." Although she never much cared for Christian Scientists, she suddenly feels sorry for them. She had gone to a Methodist church as a child and learned that Jesus could console her in times of trouble and pain but couldn't seem to prevent them—a very limited god, basically harmless, she realizes now. Religion isn't worth so much destruction. At the corner of Kearny Street, she looks south toward the financial district. The skyscrapers barely glimmer against the night sky. A year ago, lights had blazed in thousands of windows as employees worked late stock brokerages and corporate offices. Now there's no need to work round-the-clock. She's a history teacher, and she knows that wars are good for very few businesses. She shakes her head, turns the other way, and starts to climb the sidewalk, which is really a long concrete stairway. It's like a Maya pyramid, she suddenly thinks. The pyramids imitated mountains, and with stairways that led to the temple at the top. She's never actually seen one, and she hopes they survive this war. So do I. A siren sounds only a couple of blocks away. She grips the tote bag with white knuckles. The siren fades, but she doesn't relax. Kearny Street is too steep for much traffic. In fact there's hardly any traffic anywhere, and the city seems empty without tourists. She's alone and obvious, slightly plump, slightly wrinkled, slightly gray, a rebel against modern medical marketing, and she worries that this might mark her as a free thinker. She's not on anyone's side; does that mean she's an enemy of both sides? She spots her destination in the middle of the block, a narrow wooden row house three stories high with bay windows and a fancy arch over the front door, painted powder blue with navy trim. She marvels at the price the house would fetch in normal real estate prices, and realizes that she had expected a warehouse or something like that, not a home. At the door, she worries about a trap, glances around but tries not to act suspicious, takes a calming breath, and thinks about what it will be to meet another ... art lover? Free thinker? Rebel? Could she be a rebel? She knows she's a nice, middle-aged high school teacher—but she could be a rebel, too, couldn't she? She likes that idea because she was raised at a time when rebellion, even radicalism, seemed romantic. To some, she supposes, she might be the enemy. She doesn't like that idea. She's for peace, isn't she? No more wars, no more enemies, no more us-versus-them. Those were the radical ideas of her youth: everyone nice, friendly, and happy. A peaceful rebellion. The sound of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusic filters through the frosted glass of the windows, which suggests that the inhabitant might have a sense of history and culture and art, like herself. That's what she really is, she decides, an art lover. Someone well-off can keep the vase in her totebag safe, and the money paid for it will rescue more art and books. She would love to keep the vase, even a photo, but her town sometimes searches homes for contrabands. She rings the bell. No one answers. Should she ring again? Then she hears faint footsteps, and a young-looking man opens the door. He's astonishingly handsome, with high cheekbones and wide shoulders. "Hello," she says. "I'm looking for Michael." He smiles, not very genuinely. "You must be Irene. Please come in. Don't worry, there aren't any surveillance cameras in this neighborhood, I make sure of it." The code marks art lovers. In 740 A.D., Byzantine Emperor Constantine V ordered the destruction of religious icons to prove that he headed the church as well as the state. The Iconoclasts, the icon breakers, went to war with the Iconodules, the icon makers. Empress Irene temporarily suppressed the Iconoclasts in 787, and Emperor Michael III finally stopped them in 843, but much art had been lost, and Byzantium and Rome had parted ways for good. The New Iconoclasts have more ambitious goals: Get rid of all religion, erase its symbols, and the world will be a better place. The war began in earnest when atomic blasts razed Jerusalem, an assault against all three big monotheisms at once. The teacher, "Irene," rejects the 'Clasts and their simplistic arguments, but she feels no better about the 'Dules, who get inspiration from one faith or another or from a mere will to power. Most people, like her husband, try to remain neutral and alive, and until recently, she had tried to do that, but the loss of art and culture, of the artifacts of history, ate at her soul. Inside Michael's house, the living room is crammed with antique furniture and works of art, none of them religious, and the window glass that had looked frosted from outside is clear from the inside and shows a view of the dark street. He turns off the music with a gesture at a remote sensor and directs her to a sofa upholstered in gold-colored cut velvet and framed with inlaid wood. She feels underdressed in her practical tee-shirt and jeans, and overwhelmed by the opulence. Michael sits beside her, dressed in a tailor-made blue business shirt and dark wool slacks. He is flawless, from his haircut and teeth to his weight and smooth skin. Ageless. He has used every medical miracle that she has spurned. She's sweating despite the night's cool ocean breeze and would like to ask for a glass of water, but she wants even more to share the wonderful treasure she's brought. She sets the shoe box on a low, gilt-edged table in front of them, pulls on cotton gloves, and unwraps the silken tissue paper around the vase. He leans forward. What a treasure: a worn and stained seven-inch cylindrical vase made of painted clay. When she first saw it, she had to strain to make out the red and black figures from what remained of a white background. From a distance, the vase looks mottled pink-brown and unimportant. She picks it up gingerly and glances at him. He seems disappointed. "It's Maya," she says hastily. "Around 600 A.D. It was in the Princeton Museum." "Someone got in? Through the sniper fire? For this?" She turns it to show a particular part of the scene painted on the vase. "These two standing figures are the Hero Twins. They've gone "Is this important?" Believe me, it is very important. I said I'm here in spirit. That's because I am a spirit—a god, actually, one of the Hero Twins depicted on the vase. I'm Ix'balanké, or First Jaguar in your language. I'm the vagabond magician on the left. The curator and Irene didn't mean to invoke me, but they did when they risked their lives for me. I need followers to join the side of the gods. The world has enough art lovers. It needs soldiers. If she decides to follow me, she will not hesitate to fight, and I believe I can convert her. "This is one of the central myths of the Maya," Irene says, annoyed. "The story of the Hero Twins is very long. This is just a single scene." "I mean this vase. Is it important?" "It's history. It tells you what people thought about themselves and their world." "Demons and hell, that's something to think about." He smirks. "And heros. The Twins were heros." "Look, I collect art." "It's not just art. We're destroying what makes us human." "You're not one of those true believers, are you?" I'm starting to worry that Irene has learned nothing of my ways: resourcefulness and even deceit. She should look at my image on the vase. I pretend to be a showman and my face is disguised by a catfish mask, for I can be utterly humble when I need to be—but I am a glorious god. If Michael wants art, we can sell it to him. Believe in me. Think beyond your frustration, Irene. "Well?" Michael says. "These are guys in loin cloths. Is that important to humanity?" She looks up, startled out of her thoughts. "Art. I believe in art." She remembers what the curator had told her about my trip to hell. She had come here with a purpose. "The work of the artist is exceptional. His name—here, you can see the signature on the bottom of the vase—is Eighteen-Rabbit." She points to a hieroglyphic. "Each bar stands for five. Three bars and three dots. Each dot stands for one. That's eighteen altogether, and this is obviously a rabbit." "Signed by the artist? You can read this?" He leans in closer. "That much." She tries to cinch the deal. "The museum's probably going to fall soon and its collection will be cleansed. There's going to be a lot less Maya art in the world when that happens." He shrugs, smiling. "How do the 'Dules hang on?" She realizes that she should feign friendliness. "I heard that in the European Union, they agreed to hand everything over to the tourist boards." "They lost?" He smiles wider. As she had heard it, they won, or at least the faction that was willing to sell out to business interests. Internal dissent fragments the 'Dules. Michael's smile makes her nervous. "The tourist industry wants things intact, whatever's left." "Is there a lot?" "Enough, I suppose. It's hard to get news you can trust." "They're still after the Pope." He seems to consider that good news. "He's in Nigeria, but he won't last long because ebola's there now. It makes a great weapon, and his soldiers are defecting for medicine. So much for faith in the afterlife." I have faith. I traveled to hell to fight the demons who spread illness around the world. Irene thinks about that and notices that the demons on the vase seem rather handsome, like Michael. She decides to test him. "They say that Russia's front is growing, but I wonder if they're really doing it for the Orthodox Church or if they want to recapture their old territories." He laughs and claps her on the shoulder. "For a minute I was afraid you were going to be some whiny New Ager or something. I work in medicine, so I run into them all the time. Nurses are the worst." At the high school where she teaches, no one dares to say much out loud, but when they whisper in groups of two and three in the parking lot, they talk politics. An art teacher hooked her up with the artifact-rescuing underground. She knew enough history to doubt the shibboleth that religion has caused nothing besides wars and atrocities. After she saw the vase, she learned about the Maya religion. Nothing had prepared her for a glimpse of me, of a splendor eclipsing the god she had learned about as a child. That deity was just a warm and fuzzy higher power who mostly seemed to help people in Twelve Step programs. I slay demons. "I teach history," she says, not willing to say much more that might identify herself. "History? Okay, teach me about this vase. What's the history here? What were these people thinking?" She takes a deep breath. "The Maya personified forces of nature. One of the Hero Twins, this one," and she points to me, "will become the sun after they defeat the king of hell." "The sun?" Michael laughs. "The sun, that's right," she says, falling into her familiar role as a teacher while she fights an urge to flee. I hope she has learned from my example of courage. "The sun is a golden jaguar. A jaguar was the most powerful being the Maya knew of. At night, the sun turns into a black jaguar and crosses the sky from west to east, and sometimes it crosses paths with the moon and causes eclipses." Michael laughs harder. Irene laughs in self-protection. Apparently he has no idea of how much math, what a leap of logic went into figuring out that the sun plays a role in lunar eclipses. She does, and I'm at her elbow, invisible and powerful as a shadow. "The myths say there was a false sun," she says, and closes her eyes to remember the story. "A bird called Seven Macaw claimed to be the sun, but it really wanted to make itself rich and take over the world, and its light only reached to the horizon, not everywhere. The Hero Twins had to get rid of it to prepare the world for people." I remember. My brother and I fought hard and got seriously wounded, but we didn't defeat vainglorious greed once and for all. It took me a long time to realize that. And I became the true sun without knowing what eternity meant and how long I would have to fight for humanity. Our legends say that the people of the Earth rejoiced at the first sunrise. Yes, human beings existed before I became the sun. You waited anxiously for the first dawn, and danced and wept for joy and burned incense as you saw the eastern sky grow slowly brighter. Lions roared, birds sang, and fish climbed up on the riverbanks to watch. Don't scoff. You've actually seen the first sunrise through telescopes. The first stars lit the universe less than billion years after the Big Bang. NASA burned rocket fuel like incense to carry the Hubble Telescope to the sky. With it, you saw the first stars flash into being like fireworks. The sight spread joy at CalTech, SUNY, and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. The sun won't last forever, and five billion years from now, I, Ix'balanké, will explode and die. But the universe is built better than that. Time flows in endless, complex cycles. I could be reborn as a new sun with new planets. Will you follow me or will I die forever? And forever is a long, long time. Metaphors, you say, proud of your generosity to primitive faith, but I was created by scientists using the tools they had. We have since learned a lot, and I have forgotten nothing. When I cross the path of the moon, I cause eclipses. You know that's true, you just use the word "shadow." And you know so little of what "shadow" really means. Irene knows, though. She thinks about me, stops laughing, and looks at the vase, searching for a detail that will distract Michael. She has been willing to follow me this far, into the lair of a demon, but now that she has seen one, will she go farther? All I can do is persuade her with my example. "Here's something interesting," she says. "Here's the artist himself, Eighteen Rabbit, a rabbit-scribe, recording the scene." She points to a timid rabbit sitting cross-legged on the floor, brush in hand, paper ready. "Really?" Michael forgets his skepticism for a moment and leans over, grinning. "Oh, yeah, with a little loin cloth and everything. Self-referential. Great." "And here," she says, "a single line depicts the posture of the demon. You can see his arrogance. Very fluid artwork, utterly graceful lines, and you can count every bead on this servant's bracelets. This owl that's perched on the hat of the king of hell, it's a masterpiece. The artist was a genius." Indeed, he caught the malignancy of the owl perfectly, but there's more to it than that. "Eighteen Rabbit took plenty of liberties," Irene says. "He shows not just religion, he shows you history. What you see is really a depiction of nobility watching a performance, very sanitized and prettified. It's not hell at all." She remembers the story, duly reported in the only sacred book of mine that wasn't burned by the Conquistadors, and she shudders. Michael grins and puts a patronizing arm around her shoulders. "Is hell that bad?" It was. I remember. Every breath reeked of pus and blood and smoke and decay. "It smells awful," Irene says, "and there's a sort of sickly twilight in the caverns, because hell is in caverns beneath the earth, and animals prowl the shadows. They hunt down souls and rip them apart, and the screams echo constantly." "No flames? No people being roasted?" "Yes, that, too. When the Twins first arrived, the demons tortured them and burned them alive and then dumped their ashes into a river, a river full of pus and blood." Michael squeezes her shoulder. "Cool." She wants to push off his embrace and his cologne irritates her. For a moment she ponders the pain of being burned alive, but she continues. "The demons won the first round because the Twins were overconfident, but the Heros were cunning and knew they had to outwit the demons or every human soul would wind up in hell eventually. There was no one else who could protect humanity. So they re-formed their ashes into fish." "They were magicians, right?" "They were gods." For a moment she realizes that, for my brother and I, our failure hurt more than the flames. It's one thing to fail yourself, but it's another to fail all humanity. "First they became fish, and then men, and they disguised themselves as beggar magicians whose souls had just arrived into hell. That's why they have the catfish masks, because they had been fish." Michael studies the vase, seeing more now. Irene sees how much isn't depicted on the vase. The vase shows us finely dressed, but actually we wore rags. "The demons heard about the magicians and sent their guards to get them, and the guards entertained themselves during the trip by beating the Twins." "Some things never change." "The twins put on a show, and they killed a dog and brought it back to life. Then the king had the guards bring them a man." "That's this man here?" "That's right." "Turn the vase. Let me get a better look." Irene complies. The prisoner is bound tightly but looks well otherwise, and magic flows from my brother to him. But she realizes that reality must have been different, and it was. The prisoner had been whipped and starved. Ropes bound his hands and feet so tightly that gangrene blackened his fingers and toes. "The demon king ordered the magicians to sacrifice him and bring him back to life, like the dog, so they cut open his chest and took out his heart." She wonders what is it like to kill a man. Would it be easier knowing he will be brought back to life? No, it wasn't. We laid him on an altar and I raised the knife. The man watched it descend with defeated eyes, too dumbed by agony to scream as I tore open his chest. I held up his heart, still beating, for my sadistic audience. I was sorry to do it, but I had to keep up my disguise if I was going to defeat them. "Too bad that's not shown here," Michael says. "Then they brought the man back to life," Irene says, shrugging off his arm. The mortal, finding himself alive again, didn't thank me. In fact he looked at me with hatred—because he was still a prisoner being tortured in hell. "Then the king had the Twins kill each other and bring each other back to life." What is it like to die? It hurts more than you can imagine because the body resists death as hard as it can, with resources you even don't know you have. "The king was so impressed he had them kill himself, but the Twins didn't bring the king back to life. The other demons were so frightened that they agreed to a truce. They can send out disease and death, but they can't leave hell. And they can't have everyone to torture, only violent, worthless, guilty people." "I suppose that made the Maya feel better about themselves." Irene notices that I haven't made her feel better. I'm not a feel-good god. She can't travel to hell and back with me and not be changed, can she? But I may be asking too much. I showed her hell and how to fight it and what it costs to fight it. Who would volunteer to suffer? "This vase is part of history," she says. "We're destroying our understanding of human history." Maybe she can help stop it—stop the 'Clasts, win the war. "War is part of human nature," Michael says with a sigh as if he were wise. She sets down the pot, her mind a jumble of ideas, possibilities, and doubts. "What will you do with this after the war?" "Maybe I'll open my own museum," he jokes. "Yeah, I'll take it. The price ... They said it was expensive. What is the price?" She thinks a moment, and her mind suddenly becomes clear. "Seventy thousand dollars." The real price had been twenty thousand dollars. "Seventy thou!" he says. "Wow, I mean . . ." A siren begins to sound far way. "Religion," she says, "has been responsible for endless repression and destruction. The world will be better off without it." She's quoting the 'Clasts now. Perhaps another church has been torched, or a mosque, a stupa, the Pantheon. "Seventy thousand," she repeats firmly. He sighs theatrically, having gotten the message: buy now while there's still some left. He stares at the vase. Even before the war, it would have fetched a high price. "I'll be right back." He heads upstairs. She looks out the window. She can't see the night sky from this angle, but she imagines the stars and me, a black jaguar, prowling among them. Where will she go? What will she do? Seventy thousand dollars won't buy a lot of weapons, she knows, but she couldn't have asked for more and gotten it. Wars are expensive, and war is hell ... She has learned something about hell. Does she really want to go there? I don't wish it for her, but we have to fight. She has my blessing. Michael returns promptly, carrying a large cardboard box that he sets on the table next to my vase. He opens the lid to show her stacks of bills. "You can count it," he says. "That's all right." She looks at the box, originally for medicine, and reads out loud, "Erythromycin." "Oh, I sell pharmaceuticals," he says. "War is good for business. A lot of injuries, a lot of displacement and bad water. Big markets. I keep the prices reasonable, for the good guys, at least." "Lots of disease." She has no more doubts. "Exactly." She feels like she is waiting for the sun to rise, knowing that much needs to be done first. "Enjoy the vase. Take good care of it." "If there's more, I'm interested." "We'll let you know." She picks up the box of cash, surprisingly heavy, and leaves. Music sounds faintly through the frosted windows as she walks away, an ordinary woman on her way back to the suburbs, but she doesn't belong there now and she won't stay long. Far away, a gold chalice is being filled with wine in a cabin in snowy mountains, the verses of a holy book are being recited in a remote cave, and a serene Buddha of the Promised Land is being buried in a rice paddy. Long ago Conquistadors smashed my temples, burned my books, and hung my priests. Look what good it did. She'll find allies. Fog has moved in and will protect Irene on her journey to Walnut Creek. The fog among the skyscrapers reminds me of the rainforest of my homeland. The Transamerica building tapers self-consciously toward the sky like one of my temples—a pyramid, an artificial mountain reaching toward heaven. I leap into the sky and journey toward the east and dawn.
Sue Burke was born Wisconsin and honeymooned in the Maya Yucatan. She and her husband moved to Madrid, Spain, in 1999. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and she has worked for decades as a journalist and editor. For more of her writing, visit www.sue.burke.name.
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