James Frey - Existence

Tiempo only laughs. This is how they talk to one another, this is how they have always talked to one another, and Jago never saw anything wrong with it, until now.

Or, not wrong , perhaps; just less than . They know one another so well, love one another so much—why can they only communicate in jokes and insults?

“So what does Mama Tlaloc think of your gringa—sorry, Alicia ?” José asks.

Jago shifts uncomfortably. “She doesn’t know about her.”

Now they’re all laughing. “Your mother knows everything, amigo,” Tiempo reminds him. “She just takes her time. Remember when we broke her bathroom window and blamed it on the gardener? And she pretended to buy our story?”

Jago doesn’t like to think about that. What his friends don’t know is that before his mother fired the gardener, she had him beaten bloody. His pain is on your shoulders, she told Jago. This is what happens when you’re too cowardly to tell the truth .

“She bided her time,” José remembers, shaking his head in admiration. “Waits six months, then—”

Chango slaps his hand against the pavement. “ Bam . The Tlaloc hammer comes down. At the worst possible moment. She makes us all cry in front of the Laredo sisters.”

José smiles, sighs. “Ah, the Laredo sisters …” He tuts his finger at Jago. “What I remember most about the Laredo sisters is that you kept both for yourself. Always so greedy, Feo.”

“My point,” Tiempo says loudly, “is that you can bet everything that your mama already knows about your gringa, and you might want to deal with it before she does.”

“Or get rid of the problem,” Chango says, with what could almost be genuine concern. “You know how these tourists work, Feo. You’ve dated enough of them.”

“You’ve dumped enough of them,” José puts in, laughing.

“She’s slumming it,” Tiempo insists. “This is her vacation, but it’s your life. Don’t be so blind you do something you’ll regret.”

The only thing Jago regrets is joining his friends today, imagining that they could be happy for him, that they could accept that he’s no longer the person he used to be. He’s different now.

Or at least he wants to be.

He takes her to the desert.

He takes her to see the Nazca lines, those ancient glyphs that, for more than a thousand years, have spoken their ancient truth to the sky. He shows her the lines from above, hovering in a Tlaloc helicopter that he pilots himself; then they land and hike to the lines themselves, so she can feel the ancient dirt beneath her feet.

He doesn’t tell her that the lines scraped into the earth are messages from the Sky, that they symbolize an oath between an ancient people and their gods.

He doesn’t tell her that he once stood on this sacred ground and pledged his life to his line, and to a game that might end the world. That he slipped a knife across his palm, let the blood drip into the ancient lines, became one with his past and his future.

These things are forbidden.

Bringing her here now, when the tourists have faded away and they can breathe in the silence of a starry night, is the closest he can come to revealing his secret. He says it without words: This place is my heart. This ground beneath us, this sky above us, these messages from the dead—this place is my soul .

They lie on a blanket side by side, their hands linked, their eyes on the stars.

“Do you think there’s anyone up there?” she asks him.

“Do you?”

“Are we talking about God or little green men?”

“It was your question,” he points out.

She sighs. “I think … all those millions of stars, all those planets, we probably can’t be alone. But I kind of hope we are.”

This isn’t the answer he expected. “Why?”

She turns onto her side to face him, and he rolls toward her.

“I don’t like the idea of someone up there watching,” she says. “Judging, or whatever. I like the idea that we get to choose for ourselves what it all means. Who we’re going to be. And I guess …”

“What?”

“I … I don’t really know how to say it. I never talk like this. Or I never did before.” She touches his face, so gently. “You turn me into someone new, Jago. Every day, you make me a stranger to myself.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

“It’s the best thing,” she tells him, and then, for a time, there’s silence, as her lips meet his and they find a wordless way to speak.

It’s not until they’re nodding off to sleep beneath the stars, her delicate body folded into his sturdy arms, that she finishes her earlier thought. “I guess I don’t want to believe in UFOs or in, you know, some kind of higher power, because I think it’s beautiful that we’re the only ones. Billions of stars, and only us to see them. Like a single spark in the darkness, you know?”

He squeezes her, gently but tightly, to say, yes , he does know. And he wishes she were right.

“You never answered. What do you think?” she asks. Her breath is warm on his neck. Her head lies on his chest, and he wonders if she can hear his heart beat.

It’s strange—this is the place where he became the Player. It’s saturated with memories and blood. But he’s never felt less like Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec line. He feels like just a boy, lying beside a girl. He feels like nothing matters here but the two of them, their even breathing, their beating hearts, their warm bodies, their dreams, and their love.

She asks him questions no one has ever bothered to ask.

She trusts him to be gentle, to be kind, to be so many things he never knew he could be.

She thinks him beautiful, and here in the dark, he can almost believe it’s possible.

“I don’t know if we really are alone,” he lies. Then he says something true, the kind of thing Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec, would never admit. “But that’s how being with you makes me feel. Alone in the universe. Only the two of us.”

“A spark in the night,” she whispers.

“A bonfire.”

Jago takes his friends’ advice about one thing: He tells his mother about Alicia. She pretends to be surprised.

“Invite the girl over for dinner,” she says, and it is not a request.

He obeys.

He always obeys his mother.

Jago picks her up in one of the family’s bulletproof Blazers. Alicia draws in a sharp breath as they approach the first of the guard towers, then seems to hold it for the entire long, winding drive up to the hacienda. He tries to see it through her eyes, this castle on a hill, and wonders if she’s judging him for living like a king despite the teeming swarm of poverty below. The Tlalocs do a great deal for the poor of Juliaca, but they could do more—they could always do more.

“This is amazing ,” Alicia breathes, as they pull up in front of the beautifully manicured grounds and he opens her door. There’s something new in her eyes when she looks at him, and he realizes she never thought of him growing up in a place like this. He’s told her so much about the Tlaloc power—less so about the money that enables and derives from it. Other than that disastrous first date, he’s refrained from giving her lavish gifts or taking her out for expensive meals. Alicia isn’t that kind of girl.

But there’s a radiant smile on her face that he hasn’t seen before. “What?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I just … I didn’t know.”

Dinner is exactly the disaster he expects it to be, although Alicia has no idea. Jago’s mother, Hayu Marca, is expert at appearing sweet and nurturing—but beneath these layers of maternal fluff is impenetrable steel. This is what strangers never seem to see.