The Angel in the Darkness
by Kage Baker



August 6,1991.

Maria Aguilar slammed the door of her apartment, dropped her keys and purse on the coffee table, threw her head back, and screamed in perfect silence. She had not had a good day at work.

She seldom had good days at work, lately; she was an underpaid insurance underwriter in a firm that had just been sold to new owners, and the future was dubious. Today, with rumors of relocation and layoffs, it was especially dubious. The weather was stickily hot, the air acrid with smog. She was forty-six, single, overweight, and drove an eight-year-old Buick Century.

And the red light on the answering machine was blinking at her.

She stepped out of one of her high heels and threw it at the wall, not quite close enough to hit the phone table.

“What the hell is it now, Tina?” she muttered, as she undressed. “Philip’s daddy didn’t show up to drive you to the clinic for his shots? Philip’s cutting another tooth and you can’t get him to stop crying? Philip ran out of Similac and you need somebody to drive you to the market? Or maybe you just can’t get the cork out of your goddam bottle of Pink Chablis?”

Stalking back through the living room in her bathrobe, Maria glared at the answering machine. “You can damn well wait,” she told it, and leaned sideways into her tiny kitchen. Rummaging in the freezer, she withdrew a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. She pulled a spoon from the drainer, shoved a pile of unfolded laundry to one end of the couch, and settled down to work her way through some consolation.

Halfway through the pint, however, she sighed, set it aside, and pressed the play messages button. She braced herself for Tina’s voice weepy and alcoholic, or, worse, with the abnormally bright and chirpy tone that meant something had gone really wrong. Instead, she heard a total stranger.

“Uh… Ms. Aguilera, this is Marcy Jackson of Senior Outreach. Mrs. Avila at the Evergreen Care Home gave me your number and suggested we might discuss the best possible outlook for your father, uh, what we can do to make him more, uh, to improve the quality of his care. There are some other facilities I can recommend—”

Maria said a four-letter-word. Five minutes later, having pulled on sweats and sneakers, she was back in the Buick Century fighting traffic, on her way to the Evergreen Care Home.



Mrs. Avila was younger than Maria, but she always spoke as though she were a kindergarten teacher gently rebuking a five-year-old.

“It’s specifically stated in the terms of admission,” she said. “No open flames in any room at any time. He’s had two warnings now. Today was his third infraction.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me he had a lighted candle in his room?” Maria cried.

Mrs. Avila pursed her lips. “We had assumed you’d noticed. When you visited your father.”

“But—” Maria fell silent, realizing she had seen the candle after all. As long as she could remember, there had been a votive candle flickering in its little ruby-glass cup in front of the wooden figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, familiar to the point of invisibility. For most of Maria’s life, the Virgin had stood on the mantelpiece of the house on Fountain Avenue. Recently, she had relocated to a shelf above Hector’s television set in the Evergreen Care Home.

She was still there, smiling through five generations of candle-soot, when Maria stepped into her father’s room; but there was no light in the glass cup now.

Hector, seated on the edge of his narrow bed, blinked at her and smiled wide.

“Hey, shweetie,” he exclaimed, rising painfully to his feet. “It’s sho good to see you!”

He struggled forward and she came quickly to take his hands, seat him again. His hands were soft now, felt fragile as chicken feathers. “Papi, we have to talk. Do you understand they want you to move out of here?” said Maria.

He smiled, nodding, looking into her eyes; then the meaning of her words got through and he scowled, looked away.

“I’m moving back to my daughter’s plashe,” he said.

“No, no, Papi, listen—why are you talking like that? Did you break your upper plate again?”

“No, no. I—wait! Yesh I did.” He fished in his mouth, produced it for her inspection. Maria stared at it bleakly. She dug in her purse and found the Papi kit: disposable plastic gloves, antibacterial ointment, Band-Aids, denture adhesive, tube of Superglue. She pulled on a pair of gloves.

“Christ Jesus, Papi. Give it here.”

He looked on mildly as she dried the pieces with a paper napkin and fitted them together.

“Did you know, my wife used to be in the movies?” he said.

“I know, Papi. Three Republic Studios serials, one monster flick, and a TV commercial for bananas. I’m your daughter Maria, remember?”

“Oh. When’s Tina bringing the little man?” he asked, smiling again.

“Pretty soon, Papi. He’s teething right now, and he’s a handful. Here we go; you have to make this last, Papi, please, okay? I still haven’t got your paperwork straightened out at the dental clinic. The only time I can do it is during the day when I’m at work, and there’s only so long I can wait on hold on a personal call. You see?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have they said what your white blood cell count was, from last Tuesday?”

“No. Nobody tells me anything.”

“Damn. And where have you been getting votive candles for Our Lady?”

“Corner store.”

“You mean somebody went down there and got them for you?” Maria looked up sharply.

“No. I take my walk.”

“Oh, my God.” Maria closed her eyes, imagining her father toddling through traffic like Mr. Magoo. “Nobody told me they were letting you out for walks. Papi, you can’t do that! You get lost. Remember?”

He just shrugged, smiling in a vague kind of way.

“Look, Papi—Papi, are you listening to me? You aren’t supposed to have candles in your room. They’re this close to throwing you out of here, Papi, you hear me? I got them to give you one more chance. But you have to promise me you’re not going to break the rules again. No more candles, okay? You could burn the place down.”

When that sank in on Hector he looked askance, elaborately scornful.

“Why, they’re crazy. I never burned our house down,” he stated. “Fifty years Our Lady has her candle, on Fountain. S’not dangerous.”

“It’s the law nowadays, Papi,” Maria said. She had a flash of inspiration. “Listen, you know what they’re doing now, in churches? They’ve got little electric votive lights in front of the statues. You drop in a dime, you push the button, a light comes on in the cup.” Gingerly she set his upper plate on the top of the bureau, wedging it between Hector’s Bible and water glass, and peeled off the disposable gloves. Grabbing up her purse, she searched through it.

“Here! I’ll show you what we’re going to do.” She pulled out her keys and undipped the mini Maglite flashlight she kept there for emergency occasions. “See this teeny flashlight? Cute, huh? Red, just like a rose. Look, Papi, we’re going to dedicate this flashlight to the Blessed Mother, okay? Here!” Maria turned on the mini Mag and stuck it in the candle cup, then hastily tilted it outward so the Blessed Mother didn’t look quite so much as though she were telling a scary story at a slumber party.

“Ta-da! And, uh, look, see the little spot of light it throws up in the corner? Think of that as, like, a little window into Heaven. That’s where your guardian angel is watching over you, all right?”

Hector eyed it doubtfully.

“You’re wasting the battery.”

“It’s not wasting!” Maria threw her hands up in the air. “It’s burning in honor of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, okay? Papi, I’ll go to Bargain Mart and buy you a whole case of triple-A batteries, I swear. It’ll be just like candles, only safer. And then you can go on living here.”

Hector’s mouth trembled.

“I want to go home,” he said.

“Oh, Papi, don’t start that again,” Maria begged. “These are nice people. They drive you to your doctor appointments. They make sure you take all your medications, don’t they? And you know I can’t do that unless I quit my job. And I can’t afford to quit my job. I used up my personal leave when you had pneumonia as it is. Please. This is how it has to be.”

But his attention had wandered away, and he gazed up at the light on the ceiling now.

“My guardian angel,” he mused. “Your Uncle Porfirio came to see me, you know?”

She nearly screamed out Uncle Porfirio has been dead for thirty-five goddamned years, Papi! Containing her fury, she merely said: “Gosh. Did you have a nice visit?”

Hector just nodded, smiling now, tranquil and enigmatic as Buddha.

She got him to promise he’d be good, to promise he’d leave his upper plate out until tomorrow morning when the glue would be set, promised in turn she’d be back the next evening with more batteries, and kissed him good-bye. His kiss was wet and soft. Maria fled from his room down the pastel hallway, hating herself for her anger.

At the elevator, a man waited. He merely turned and smiled at Maria, as she drew near; but something about his smile chilled her.

She smiled back, though, and studied him out of the corner of one eye. What was it? She knew, if she looked long enough, she’d figure out what was setting off subliminal alarm bells in her mind.

Maria had been sensitive, all her life, to physical differences in others. Her acuteness of observation had often embarrassed her parents, when she had been too little to know better than to blurt out Mama, that lady has a wig on her head! or Papi, why is that man dressed up like a lady? It had enraged her sister, when Maria had been able to spot dilated pupils or smell the chemical sweat that betrayed drug use in Isabel’s boyfriends. Isabel had remarked often, acidly, that Maria would make a great vampire hunter.

What was it about this man, now? Glass eye? Prosthetic limb? A trace of ketone on the breath? He wore a white coat, though somehow he didn’t look like a doctor. He was young, too, perhaps in his mid-twenties. And the smile was still on his face even though he was no longer meeting her eyes, a self-assured smirk that reminded her of, of, of… the Cat in the Hat.

The elevator arrived, the doors slid open. Maria stepped in and turned, but the man remained where he stood. He lifted his eyes to her look of inquiry.

“No thanks, Maria, I’m going up,” he said.

“How’d you—” she said, before the doors closed and the elevator dropped with her.

“Well, that was creepy,” she remarked aloud.

Two ambulances had pulled up outside the lobby, sirens wailing, lights flashing. She barely noticed them, striding back to her car. Somebody was always dying at the Evergreen Care Home.

She drove too fast heading back into LA, through a lurid purple evening shot with red sunlight. Would there be a thunderstorm tonight? An earthquake? The freeway rose and fell like a serpent, offering her chaotic glimpses of the tumbled city as she sped along. Aztec pyramids, palm trees, Babylonian ziggurat, graffiti cryptic as hieroglyphs along the dry river channels. The air was muggy with wet heat, trembling. Something was out of balance somehow, something portended doom; but that was normal for Los Angeles.

Still, the feeling nagged at her enough to make her pull off the freeway and stop in at the house on Fountain, to check on Tina and the baby.

Everything looked normal enough there, if sad: old bungalow set back from the street in its unkempt garden, half hidden by banana trees, rubber trees, hibiscus bushes. Even the for sale by owner sign was beginning to be engulfed by creepers. Again, the reproachful little voice in her memory told her Papi used to keep all this so nice…

“Everything changes,” she replied stolidly, and made her way up the front walk to the door.

Tina, to her pleasant surprise, was being Good Tina. She was sober, cheerful, and the house was clean. Philip was rolling about in his walker, chewing on a toaster waffle.

“Baby, look! It’s Auntie!” cried Tina, and Philip grinned and bounced in his walker. He waddled it laboriously across the floor, right up to Maria’s feet, and stared up into her face. Her heart broke with love and she leaned down to scoop him up, kiss his fat little chin and cheeks. He gurgled, waving his waffle.

“How’s everything been today?” Maria inquired. Tina, washing her hands in the kitchen, shouted:

“Really fine, Auntie! I cleaned that little storage room behind the garage. Hauled out tons of old junk Grandpa had hoarded in there. Most of it had been rained on and was just a mess, so I trashbagged it, but there was this one box I thought you’d want to see—” She emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on a dishtowel, and tossed it aside as she stooped to lift a cardboard carton from the floor.

“It’s mostly old photo albums,” she added.

“That’s the only box that wasn’t ruined?” said Maria, with a sinking feeling. “Honey, some of that stuff was Mama’s, from the house back in Durango—”

“It was covered in black mold,” Tina told her firmly. “And we have to learn to let go of the past, like my therapist says. Look, I thought we could sit down and look at the pictures together. You should see Grandma’s old movie stuff! It’ll cheer you up. Want a glass of wine?”

So she had alcohol in the house again. “Okay,” said Maria heavily, and sank down on the couch with the baby.

But Tina brought out only the one glass, and though Maria disliked Pink Chablis intensely she drank it, grateful that Tina wasn’t joining her.

They went through the first album, as Philip babbled and reduced his waffle to eggy bits. This album contained a few black and white glossies, glamorous Lupe Montalban’s publicity shots, including one hilarious shot from a monster B-movie where she was standing at the mouth of a cave, screaming in terror at a robot who looked like a trash can. The rest were family snapshots from the fifties, tiny black-and-white images with white scalloped borders.

“December 25,1951. See how new the house looked?” said Tina, smiling and pointing. Maria sighed. Everything looked new, and full of light: what a tidy lawn, dichondra for God’s sake, who had dichondra lawns anymore? And the front porch empty and clean, the hibiscus bushes clipped to neat boxes, the front walk straight and clear. Who were the two little girls on Christmas-morning-new tricycles? Why, the pretty one would grow up to be the famous Isabel Aguilar O’Hara, gracing the cover of Vanity Fair only last year! And the older one? Oh, that was her sister. Maria somebody.

“That was Grandpa, can you believe it?” Tina shook her head at the handsome young man crouched on the walk behind the little girls. “And Grandma. This was before she got sick?”

“Years before.” Maria peered at the figure half-shadowed on the porch, smiling from a swing chair. “She didn’t get the cancer until I was a sophomore.You look a lot like her.”

“Why’d she give up acting?”

“It was just what women did back then, once they married and settled down,” said Maria. And her career was over, thanks to Uncle Porfirio, she added silently.

“And here you are at your First Communion,” said Tina, “And that’s my mom, and there’s Grandpa and Grandma with the priest, right? And that’s you on a streetcar with Grandpa somewhere.”

“It’s not a streetcar. That was Angel’s Flight. It was a funicular railroad with two little cars, one block long. It’s gone now; used to be downtown. That’s your mom and your grandmother behind us.”

“And this is all of you in Chinatown, I guess, huh?” Tina angled the book in the light. “Or is that Olvera Street? The thing I began to wonder about, looking through these, was: who took the pictures? Most of the time it’s Grandma, Grandpa, you and my mom in one shot.”

“Uncle Porfirio had a camera. He was sort of Papi’s cousin,” said Maria, setting Philip back in his walker. She thought of Hector, staring up dreamy-eyed at the spot of light on his ceiling, and grimaced.

“What’s the matter?” said Tina, watching her.

“Nothing.”

“Was he the one who was a policeman?”

“LAPD,” Maria affirmed, getting up and going to the kitchen to pour out her wine. “Plainclothes detective. He got killed when I was eleven. That’s why there aren’t that many pictures later on.”

“How come there’s no pictures of him?”

“There’s one,” said Maria, returning. She sat down and paged through the book, past the Christmases, past the trips to Disneyland, past the loving color portraits of the brand-new two-tone 1956 Chevy Bel-Air (pink and black!).

“Here,” she said at last, setting her finger on a shot taken in this very room. A black-and-white picture of Isabel, seated on this very couch, proudly holding up for the camera the cardboard model she’d made for school: Mission San Fernando, with kidney bean tiles glued on its roof.

“That’s just my mom,” said Tina. She leaned closer. “Oh!”

The big mirror had still hung over the fireplace back then. Its surface reflected a glimpse of the breakfast nook, otherwise out of sight through the doorway. A man in a suit could just be seen there, seated at the table, head bowed over a newspaper.

“He looks… mean,” said Tina at last.

“He was mean,” said Maria. “He was a real hardass, and he had a face like Satan. But he was a good man.”

And nothing had ever been the same, after he had been killed.

Tina, watching her face, said a little sharply: “Look, this wasn’t supposed to get you depressed.”

You’re telling ME not to get depressed? thought Maria. Aloud she said, “I’m sorry. Rough day at work.”

“Don’t let it get to you. Things are going to get better now! As soon as we sell this place, there’ll be plenty of money,” Tina advised. “We’ll pay off Grandpa’s medical bills. I’ve even been thinking about buying an RV to live in, you know? Philip and me can go see the world! Maybe move out of California, to some place less expensive, huh? And you could come with us. Leave that crappy job. You could get an RV of your own, maybe.”

Great, thought Maria, And so, from being property owners, we’ll become people who live in trailer parks. “I thought you were going to go back to school and get your degree,” she said.

“Well, of course I’m going to do that,” said Tina quickly. “A-and get a job, too, of course. I’m already looking. I’ve got a friend helping me with a resume.”

Her hands began to tremble, imperceptibly to anyone but Maria. She closed the album, got to her feet, and headed for the kitchen.

“I could really do with a glass of wine, after all that dust,” she called in a bright voice. “You want more?”



Maria drove through the hot night with her windows rolled up, because she had to scream. She screamed obscenities. She drew out one particular four-letter word over three whole blocks, and only stopped because there was a police car in the lane next to hers at the intersection. Uncle Porfirio had been a plainclothes cop.

Uncle Porfirio, with his holster and badge. Uncle Porfirio with his flat headstone at San Fernando Cemetery.

Nothing had ever been the same, after he’d been killed.

Her father had been an amiable young used-car salesman, an orphan as far as he’d known. Hector’s life was fun, and he had a fast car, and he’d never saved a dime, but he owed nobody anything. Then Pearl Harbor had happened, and he’d enlisted. In some distant tropical hell, every man in his unit had fallen to Japanese machine-guns, and he’d fallen, too; but an unknown Good Samaritan carried him out, and he woke up in a field hospital.

One of the medics there had the same last name as Hector. They compared notes and discovered they were second cousins. Uncle Porfirio became his buddy, the older brother Hector had never had. They went back to Los Angeles together, after the war was over.

Uncle Porfirio made Hector get a better-paying job, and save his money. He introduced Hector to pretty Lupe Montalban, who was in the movies. When the studio gangster who had been dating Lupe objected, Uncle Porfirio had had a quiet word with him. Uncle Porfirio was best man at Hector and Lupe’s wedding, and cosigned on the loan to buy the house. Uncle Porfirio became godfather to their two baby girls. Uncle Porfirio rented a room from them, in the attic loft above the porch.

Uncle Porfirio ran their lives.

Nobody had seemed to mind that, though, except little Maria.

Forty-six-year-old Maria watched the light change, realized her heart was pounding dangerously, and pulled off Franklin down a residential street so she could calm down. Groping in her purse for the medication, she muttered, “Goddam know-it-all control freak, that’s what you were.”

“You promised!” eight-year-old Maria had yelled, “You said I could have a real bike if I got straight As, and I did!”

“Sweetie, I know we promised,”Hector had said. “But—”

“But Uncle Porfirio reminded us about that freeway ramp they’re building,” Lupe had said firmly. “There’s already too much traffic on Fountain, and it’s only going to get worse. We don’t want you getting killed.”

Uncle Porfirio hadn’t said anything, just folded his arms and looked opaque.

So Maria had never gotten a real bike; and if there had in fact been three fatal accidents on their block in the next three years—one of them Bobby Schraeder from next door, smacked off his Schwinn and into the next world by a delivery truck—it wasn’t much consolation.

And if Uncle Porfirio had taken them to Catalina Island on holidays, and had bought little Isabel her first set of paints, and had known an infallible way to make the Good Humor man stop exactly in front of their house on every one of the long summer evenings of childhood—still, he was never ever wrong, in any argument.

The last straw, the ultimate injustice, was when he had refused to let Maria go to Camp Stella Mare.

“Are you nuts?” eleven-year-old-Maria had yelled. “I worked my fingers to the bone to go on this trip! I sold thirty subscriptions to The Tidings!”

“I know,” Uncle Porfirio had replied. “I bought twenty of them, remember?”

“Sweetie, it’s a long way up into the mountains, and the roads aren’t good,” said Hector apologetically. “And it’s a rickety old bus. Uncle Porfirio was talking to the mechanic across the street from the convent, and he says the undercarriage is all rusted out. We just don’t feel it’s safe.”

To which Maria had responded with the worst word she dared to say, and ran sobbing into the backyard.

She had been sitting on the roof of the garage, staring out at the cars zooming past on the freeway, when Uncle Porfirio came out to find her.

“Get down off there, mi hija, it’s dangerous,” he said quietly. “You want to break your neck?”

“I don’t care,” she snapped. “I hate you.”

He sighed and walked close, vanishing from her sight under the edge of the roof, and a moment later vaulted up beside her. He had always been able to move faster than a cat. She tensed, expecting him to pull her down, but he seated himself instead.

“You hate me, so you don’t care if you break your neck. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?” he said. “Come on, mi hija, you’re smarter than that. You’re the smart one in the family.”

“A lot of good it does me,” she said.

“Well, somebody has to be the smart one. Somebody has to look out for the others, and stop them from doing dumb things that’ll get them killed.”

“But that’s always you,” she replied. “You always know better than anybody else.”

“But I won’t always be here,” he said. “And the family’s going to need somebody strong and smart, right? And it’s going to be you, I can tell that already.”

“Huh,” she said, not mollified. He was silent a moment, and then he said:

“You remember that man you told me about, the one who was hanging around the fence talking to Isabel?”

“The creepy man who said he was friends with Mickey Mouse?”

“That one. It was a good thing you spotted him, baby; he was a really bad guy. Lieutenant Colton and I took him downtown. He’s back in jail now, where he belongs.”

“Really?” Maria turned to look at him, wide-eyed.

“Yeah. But Isabel will be mad that the nice man isn’t there to give her candy bars anymore. You think she’d say you were unfair to tell?”

“Oh, my gosh,” said Maria, appalled. Uncle Porfirio turned to her, holding her gaze with his cold dark stare.

“You see?” he said. “And you think it’s unfair that you don’t get to go to camp. But I see danger you don’t notice. When you’re a grown lady, you’ll have eyes as sharp as mine. It’s a dangerous world, mi hija.”

“I don’t want it to be,” she’d cried, furious because she knew he was right again. She’d scrambled down and run into the house, but the truth of what he’d said lay on her heart like an iron bar.

A week later he’d been murdered, killed while on an undercover operation. His body had been found sprawled on the concrete of the Los Angeles riverbed, so badly beaten the face was unrecognizable, but his gun and his badge were still with him. Maria had thought: See, he made somebody else as mad as he made me, and was instantly horrified at herself.

And the week after that the Camp Stella Mare bus lost its brakes coming down a steep mountain road, and eleven little girls and two nuns had gone straight to heaven. Maria felt worse then.

And four years later Lupe had been diagnosed with cancer, and had endured years of interminable indignities in treatment, with Hector scrambling through layoffs and pay cuts in the meanwhile as he tried to care for her. Maria had given up her plans for college and stayed home to help out. Her mother had died anyway, not soon enough for anyone. Maria stopped going to Church, and nobody noticed.

And Isabel had grown up, begun dating boys, gotten in trouble, presented her parents with Tina, and run off to join an artist’s commune in San Francisco. Isabel never felt guilty about anything. She had sent postcards to Tina from San Francisco, Maui, New York, Paris, Katmandu, and finally Taos. Tina had, understandably, felt this was insufficient attention from her mother, and had gotten her revenge by becoming a severely depressive unemployed single parent.

And the untended garden had gone wild, full of black wet leaves. The house had shrunk, year by year more shabby. The cars roared by ever louder on the freeway. Gunfire began to punctuate the night. The Communist Invasion/Apocalypse/Nuclear War never happened, but everything else did.

And at forty-six, in her rusty Buick Century on a darkened street, Maria Aguilar felt the future close on her like steel pincers. It’s a dangerous world, mi hija.

“Damn you for having the last word,” she whispered. A man strolled past her car.

“Hi, Maria,” he said, and kept walking. She sat up and stared after him. A white coat: was he the man who’d been waiting at the elevator in the Evergreen Care Home? Narrowing her eyes, she started the car and drove away, checking the mirror frequently to see whether she was being followed.

“This really frosts the cake, huh?” she muttered aloud. “A goddamn stalker.”

But nobody seemed to be lying in wait at her apartment. She locked herself in, went straight to the Tupperware bin in which she kept her handgun, removed it and loaded a clip. Then she made the rounds of all her windows, checking for signs of breaking and entry. Satisfied that all was as it should be, she noticed that the light on the answering machine was blinking again.

“Maria, this is Rob O’Hara. Apparently there’s been some snafu with your father’s nursing home? You need to get it straightened out. Some woman called here because she couldn’t get in touch with you, and now Isabel is very upset. She can’t paint when she’s upset. You know that.”

Maria made certain the safety catch was in place before putting the pistol to her head and miming blowing her brains out.

“So please get it taken care of, whatever it is, and if you need money or anything, maybe we can help. By the way, there’s a wonderful review of Isabel’s latest exhibit in The New Yorker. Calls her our generation’s Georgia O’Keeffe. Isn’t that exciting? I thought you’d—” Mercifully, the machine cut him off.



There was another ambulance in front of the Evergreen Care Home when Maria arrived the following evening. She merely glanced at the corpse being wheeled out, shifted her grip on the case of triple-A batteries and shouldered her way into the lobby. To her surprise, Hector was there, staring out though the glass.

“Whoa, Papi, where are you going?”

“They got Steinberg,” he said somberly.

“I’m sorry, Papi. Come on back upstairs. Was that a friend of yours?”

He didn’t say anything on the ride up in the elevator. Maria hefted the batteries, trying to draw his attention to them. “Look! Lots of lights for the Virgin. She can a have a fresh one every day.”

He just nodded, shuffling along beside her as they went down the hall to his room. There she opened the case and showed him how to put a new battery into the mini Mag. He didn’t speak, and as Maria looked closely to see whether he was paying attention, she realized he wasn’t wearing his upper plate. Her gaze went at once to the top of the dresser, where she’d left it between his Bible and his water glass. They were still there, but the upper plate wasn’t.

“Papi, what did you do with your plate?” she demanded.

He just shrugged.

“Papi, did it break again?”

He peered up at the dresser. “One of those damn Jap nurses must have stole it,” he muttered.

“Papi, that’s an awful, awful word, okay? It’s not right to call Japanese people that anymore. And anyway, most of the housekeepers here are Filipinas, and anyway why the hell would somebody steal your busted upper plate?”

He sat silent, offended. She groaned and got down on her hands and knees to peer under the dresser, under his chair, under his bed. She moved the dresser a few inches out from the wall and peered down its back. Not a trace of pink and ivory plastic to be seen.

“Punks steal from me all the time,” Hector said. “Took my crossword book, too.”

“I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Avila about it,” said Maria, climbing to her feet with effort. “The nutritionist, too.You have to be able to eat, Papi.”

“Get your uncle on the case, huh?” said Hector, who had wandered to the window and was looking out.

“Papi—” Maria bit back her retort, took a deep breath. She went to the window and kissed his cheek. “I have to go, Papi. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He began to cry, holding her hands.

“I love you, honey…”

“I love you, too, Papi. Look, tomorrow I’ll bring you some takeout. We’ll have a picnic in here, okay?”

“Okay…”

She had worked herself into the necessary righteous wrath by the time she got to Mrs. Avila’s office, but Mrs. Avila was on the phone, with her door closed, and in the time it took before Maria saw her hanging up the emotional momentum had fallen off. She rapped on the window politely. Mrs. Avila put her head in her hands, leaning her elbows on her desk, and didn’t seem to hear.

“Mrs. Avila?” Maria opened the door halfway. “Um—my father had his upper plate out, and it seems to have disappeared from his room. I was wondering if you—”

“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Avila looked up at her with such a strange expression that Maria took a step backward.

“Is something wrong?”

Mrs. Avila blinked rapidly. “We just lost a long-term resident. We were all very fond of Mr. Steinberg. I’m sorry, you had a complaint?”

“Just that—ah—my father seems to have misplaced his upper plate. Is there any chance I can talk to the nutritionist about getting him on the soft diet, until I can get him new teeth?”

“I’ll make a note of it,” said Mrs. Avila, twisting her hands together. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Ng went home ill today, but I’ll see that she calls you to discuss this at the earliest opportunity.”

“Okay, thank you,” said Maria, and exited hastily.

She dreamed that night that a tightrope had been stretched from the roof of the Evergreen Care Home to the roof of another tall building across the gulf of the freeway. Hector and the other residents were lined up patiently on the roof, waiting their turns. Each ancient had been issued a brightly-colored parasol. The ones who had ventured out on the tightrope already were falling, gently as autumn leaves, down toward the roaring river of traffic, and the traffic was all hearses and ambulances.

She was trying, desperately, to get into the elevator to get up to the roof, to pull Hector back; but the Cat in the Hat kept hitting buttons that sent the elevator to the basement instead, smiling at her, insufferably pleased with his cleverness. Finally she leaped into the elevator anyway, trying to work it from the inside, but it dropped with her. The door opened on the basement, and there by the laundry chute stood Uncle Porfirio, gun in hand. Natty three-piece suit, Aztec cheekbones, mandarin beard and mustache. He looked at her without expression. His eyes were black as night.



It took Maria three trips to three separate drive-through restaurants and a visit to a drugstore to get what she wanted, so it was a little past her customary time the next evening when she pulled up in front of the Evergreen Care Home. The sky had flamed up orange and pink, and birds were crying from the tops of the trees. Trudging up to the lobby with an assortment of greasy paper bags, she glanced down curiously at the police tape festooned across the walkway.

“Did something happen here today?” she inquired of one of the housekeepers, as they ascended in the elevator.

“One of the residents reported somebody jumping off the roof,” the housekeeper replied.

Maria shuddered, remembering her dream. “You mean there was a suicide?”

The housekeeper shrugged. “We called the cops, but they couldn’t find anything in the bushes.”

The door opened on Hector’s floor and Maria hurried to him, fearful of finding his room empty, the window open on a void of glaring air. But no: he was seated placidly in his chair, listening to one of his tapes of Big Band music.

“Hey, you figured out how to work the tape player!” Maria greeted him, leaning down for a kiss. “Good for you.”

“He fixed it for me,” said Hector, jerking his thumb at the boombox. “Just push the red button, he said.”

“What?” Maria peered at it. Someone had affixed a bright red adhesive dot to the play button on the tape machine. “Oh. That’s clever. Who’s he, Papi?”

Hector’s smile went away, came back, and he looked sidelong at her.

“Social worker,” he said. He looked with interest at the greasy bags. “We gonna eat?”

Pushing the mystery to the back of her mind, Maria opened the bags and set up the little feast: mashed potatoes and gravy from KFC, hot dogs from the Hot Dog Show, a chocolate malt from Foster’s Freeze. She cut the hot dogs into manageable pieces, stuck a plastic spoon in the potatoes, and presented it to Hector on a TV tray.

“Mm, good! See, it’s all stuff you can manage with your plate out. Just in case they screw up downstairs and serve you the wrong meal. And I got this, too—” Maria pulled two cans from her purse. “It’s like a vitamin shake. If you get hungry between meals, you just open one. I’ll put them up here by the Blessed Mother so you don’t forget, okay?”

“Mmhm,” Hector replied, through a mouthful of hot dog.

She brought out her own hot dogs and soda, and they dined together companionably.

“I saw your mother today,” said Hector.

Maria halted, soda halfway to her mouth. “Papi… Mama’s in Heaven, remember?”

“I know that,” he replied, indignant. “It was on TV.”

“Oh! You mean, one of her movies? Omigod, which one?”

“The one with the spaceships.” Hector strained for his malt, unable to reach it. She got up and handed it to him.

“Aztec Robots from Mars? No kidding! Maybe they’ll finally put that out on tape, huh? Then I’ll buy you a VCR, so you can see her whenever you want.”

But Hector was blinking back tears. “I miss your mother…”

“Oh, Papi, don’t cry,” said Maria hurriedly, kissing his cheek. “One of these days Mama’s going to come for you in a pink Cadillac, okay? And you’ll live happily ever after, up with the angels. You just have to hang on until then.”

As she was wadding up paper bags for the trash basket afterward, Maria noticed the gauze pad taped to his inner arm. “What happened to your arm, Papi?”

“Lab work,” Hector replied.

“What kind of lab work? What for?”

“Don’t know,” said Hector, waving a hand. “Doctor came and did it.”

“They’re supposed to tell me if you need to go to the clinic. Did you have to be taken to the clinic?” Maria narrowed her eyes.

“Nope,” said Hector. “Doctor made a house call.”

“House call?” Maria was baffled. “And what’s this I hear about somebody jumping off the roof?”

“There was a big fight up there,” said Hector, nodding.

“A fight?”

“Yeah.” Hector’s smile vanished again. He looked uneasy. “I mean, I don’t know.”



She tried to see Mrs. Avila to ask her about what kind of lab work Hector had required, but the office door was closed and the blinds were drawn. Fuming, Maria drove home, deciding to call on her lunch hour tomorrow.

When she walked through the door of her apartment, the first thing she noticed was that Hector’s upper plate was sitting beside her answering machine.

The second thing she noticed was the slip of paper under the plate.

Standing perfectly motionless, she thought: Wow, it really does feel like ice water along your spine. She looked right, at the closet door; she looked left, at the door to her bedroom. Ahead of her was the kitchen doorway. Her gun was in the bedroom.

Quietly as she could, she withdrew a can of Mace from her purse and advanced. No masked killer burst from closet, bedroom, or kitchen, and so she was able to get to the phone table. She read the note under the plate, being careful not to touch anything, and called the police. Then she withdrew to her bedroom and sat, shaking.

The note read simply: WE CAN TOUCH YOU.



*    *    *



The cops were interested in her love life to an excessive degree.

“You’re sure this wouldn’t be an ex-boyfriend?” the younger one wanted to know.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Maria snapped, because it was the third time she had been asked that question.

“No ex-husbands?” asked the older one. “None.”

“Well, why would anybody leave a note like this?” The younger cop hefted the plastic bag and peered through it at the note, stashed in there with the plate for fingerprinting.

“Because somebody’s a total psycho and has decided to terrorize a complete stranger?” said Maria. “That happens, doesn’t it?”

“So, you’ve got, like, no—uh—nephews or brothers who might be in gangs?” the older cop inquired.

“No brothers. One grand-nephew, ten months old. Gosh, maybe he’s in a gang,” said Maria. “I should have thought of that before, huh?”

“Anybody in your family ever assaulted?”

“My father, two years ago, when he lived with me,” Maria admitted. “He’s nearly eighty. He used to open the door to anybody, during the day when I was at work. I came home and found he’d been beaten up and robbed. He’s in a care facility now.”

“Anybody in your family ever murdered?”

“Only my uncle who was a cop,” Maria replied. “Shot five times and beaten to death. He worked Vice Squad. You can look him up: Lieutenant Porfirio Aguilar, 1956.”

There was a silence, and a perceptible change in the temperature of the room. The older cop cleared his throat.

“Well.You should probably get your locks changed. And, uh, go and stay with somebody until you get that taken care of, okay? And you can call me if anything else happens.” He took a card from his wallet and gave it to her. “Do you have anyplace else to stay?”



The house was dark, though it was only eight-thirty. Maria climbed the porch steps with her overnight bag, heart hammering. On the porch, closed in by ivy and hibiscus, it was nearly pitch-black.

“Tina?” she called, pounding on the door. No answer.

She found her old key and opened the door; reached in to the right and flipped the switch that turned on the porch light, and instantly stood in a pool of yellow illumination from the cobwebbed glass globe above her head. The door was open about six inches, and through its gap she could make out toys scattered on the carpet, surreal, fearful-looking in the gloom. She groped farther inward, trying to find the interior light switch, and heard something dragging itself toward the door.

“Jesus,” she murmured. She froze there with her arm halfway into the room, as the rattling came nearer; then mastered herself and pushed the door open.

The light from the porch fell on Philip’s little upturned face. He rolled himself to the door in his walker and peered up at her.

“Honey bunny, what’s going on?” she said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. She picked him up—he was soaking wet, stinky, how long since he’d been changed?—and turned on the overhead light, bracing herself for what she’d see.

Not so horrible as it might have been. Sufficient unto the day are the horrors thereof, she thought numbly.

Tina on the couch, passed out. Two empty wine bottles, an empty glass, an ashtray, a plastic Baggie with a little pot in it, a box of kitchen matches and a book of rolling papers. Philip’s toys all over the floor, along with what looked like the contents of the kitchen trash basket.

“Jesus,” Maria repeated. Leaving Tina where she lay, she took the pot and flushed it down the toilet. Then she went through the house with Philip, turning on lights in every room. He watched her in solemn silence.

She gave Philip a bath, fed him, put him into jammies and fixed him a bottle; then retreated with him to Hector’s armchair, and sang quietly to him. It took a while to get him to sleep. He kept sitting up to stare across at his mother, black eyes wide and worried.

“Mommy’s just depressed again, sweetheart,” Maria said quietly. “I wonder what did it this time?”

He nestled back down, took his bottle, and fell asleep at last.

Maria looked across the room and time and saw herself on that couch at twenty-three, with a bottle of gin and a bottle of Seven-Up and a big glass of ice, getting drunk fast, furious with the world, as Hector sat in the other room staring at Lupe’s empty bed. And little Tina had sat next to her and watched, with black eyes wide and worried.

I could tell her I’m this close to calling Child Protective Services; but she’d only try to commit suicide again. I could actually call Child Protective Services; they’d take Philip away to foster care, where somebody would molest him, and then she really would check out. I could call Philip’s daddy and tell him to take custody; I’m sure his wife would love being presented with Philip, especially when she’s just had her own baby. I could call Isabel… and she’d move to New Zealand.

“What am I going to do, mi hija?” she wondered. “Please, God, somebody, tell me.”



She was late for work the next morning. Tina had been weepy, apologetic, resentful, and finally indignant when she discovered that her stash had been disposed of. Maria had countered by telling her about the stalker. While this had been enough of a shock to abruptly change Bad Tina to Good Tina, it had also terrified her, and Maria had to spend a half-hour calming her down.

There was no point in explaining any of this to Yvette, the new departmental supervisor. Yvette lived in a world where such things didn’t happen. Maria simply apologized for oversleeping and offered to work through her lunch hour.

On her afternoon break, however, she called Mrs. Avila’s office.

She got a recorded message informing her that the switchboard was temporarily unavailable due to the high volume of incoming calls, and she could leave a message after the tone. Wondering grumpily how that many people could be calling the Evergreen residents, most of whom never heard from their kids except at holidays, she left a message for Mrs. Avila.

Two hours later, as she was on the phone explaining rate increases to a client, Yvette appeared at the doorway to her cubicle. She bore a message scrawled on a yellow legal pad: emergency call in my office.

Maria knocked over a chair in her haste to get to Yvette’s desk, relaxing only momentarily when she heard Mrs. Avila’s voice on the line, rather than the police.

“Ms. Aguilar? I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Mrs. Avila’s voice was trembling. “We’ve had to admit your father to County General.”

It never rains but it pours, Maria thought. “Has he had a stroke?”

“No,” said Mrs. Avila, and it sounded as though she was drawing a deep breath. “He has—ah—a virus.”

“What? He was fine yesterday!”

“This is—” Mrs. Avila’s voice broke. “This is some new thing. We’ve had several cases. He’s in the ICU, and I don’t know if you’ll be able to get in to see him—”

By the time Maria had explained to Yvette, fought traffic all the way downtown to County General, found a parking space and bullied her way upstairs, Hector was dead.

“What do you mean, I can’t see him?” she asked the floor nurse, but the presence of men in hazmat suits going in and out of the Intensive Care Unit answered her question. She fought her way to the window and stared through. All she could see was a confused tentage of plastic, tubes, pipes, one skinny little mottled arm hanging down. Hector looked like an abandoned construction site.

The doctor, whose name she didn’t catch, explained that Hector had died from a rapidly-progressing pneumonic infection, just as all the others had, but because he had fought it off longer, there was some hope that—

“Longer?” Maria said. “What do you mean, all the others? How long were you treating him for this? He had no immune system, you know that?”

“He was brought in this morning,” said the doctor.

“But—he said a doctor came and did some kind of lab work on him yesterday. There was a bandage on his arm,” Maria protested. “He said the doctor made a house call.”

The doctor looked at her in silence a moment.

“Really,” he said. “That’s interesting.”

Maria was numb, going back down in the elevator, wandering past the gurneys full of moaning people parked in the hallways, threading her way between the cars in the parking lot. It wasn’t until she got to the Buick and opened her purse for her keys that she saw the Papi kit, and the reality sank in: My father is dead.

And for about thirty seconds she felt the sense of release, of relief, that she had expected to feel. Then the mental image of the old man, the shrunken, childish, infinitely vulnerable thing he had become, vanished away forever. All she could remember was her father the way he had been in her childhood, young Hector who had put on dance records and waltzed in the living room with his two little girls, one on either arm, as Lupe sang from the kitchen where she fixed breakfast…

The memory went through Maria like a knife. She leaned against the car and wept.



The next day it was in all the papers and even on the local news: how the Evergreen Care Home was being evacuated following the deaths of more than half of its residents and three members of its staff, of what was thought to be a new super-virus. Maria had to go to Kmart to buy clothes for Hector to be buried in, once his body was abruptly released, because she was unable to enter the Evergreen’s building; it was full of more men in hazmat suits, carrying equipment in and out. Too surreal.

The funeral was surreal, too. Hector had been a member of the Knights of Columbus and they turned out for him in full regalia, a file of grandfathers in Captain Crunch hats. They were most of them too frail to be pallbearers—six sturdy ushers wheeled Hector’s coffin down the aisle—but they drew their sabers and formed an arch for him. Philip stared, absolutely fascinated, turning now and then to his mother and great aunt to point at the feathered hats.

There were more old men at the cemetery, ancient rifle-bearing veterans, one of whom carried a cassette player identical to the one Hector had owned. He slipped in a cassette and set it down to salute as “Taps” played, tinny and faint. The veterans fired off a twenty-one-gun salute; Philip started in his mother’s arms and lay his head on her shoulder, trembling until the noise had stopped. At the end they folded the coffin flag into a triangle, just as Maria remembered the Marines doing at JFK’s funeral long ago. As a final touch, they zipped it into a tidy plastic case, presenting it to her solemnly. Before leaving they asked for a donation, and Maria fished in her purse for a five-dollar bill to give them.

The old veterans left in a Chevy van painted with the Veterans of Foreign Wars insignia. The Knights of Columbus departed in two minivans and a Mercury Grand Marquis. Were Hector and Lupe going, too, away in a pink Cadillac to live happily ever after in the Land of the Dead?

Maria and Tina were left staring at Hector’s coffin, poised on its gantry between the mounds of earth neatly covered by green carpet. Lupe’s grave was hidden by them, and so was Uncle Porfirio’s, but when the earth had been shoveled back in its hole the cemetery custodian would hose away the mud. They would lie there all three together, tidy, filed away, their stories finished. End of an era.

As Tina was buckling Philip into his car seat, Maria noticed a man standing alone by a near grave, head bowed, hands folded. He wore sunglasses. Their black regard was turned on her, just for a moment. She stared hard at him; no, he wasn’t the man with the Cat in the Hat smile. He lowered his head again, apparently deep in a prayer for his dead.

Maria shrugged and got into the Buick, wincing at the hot vinyl seat. She drove out carefully through the acres of manicured. lawn, flat and bright in the sticky heat of the morning. Questing for the nearest freeway on-ramp, she passed Mission San Fernando. It sat like a postcard for Old California, orange groves, graceful adobe arches, painted wooden angels, pepper trees. The past stood guard on the past.

They drove home in a weary silence that was not broken until they walked into the living room, when Maria played the messages on the answering machine. There were two.

“Hi Maria, hi Tina, this is Rob O’Hara. I just thought I’d call and let you know again how sorry Isabel is that she can’t make the funeral—”

Tina stormed out of the room with Philip, muttering, “Fucking selfish bitch!”

“—know how much her father would have wanted her to do well, and the New York exhibit is turning out to be a terrific success. I’m sure he’s looking down from Heaven, very proud of all of you…”

Rob’s message ended abruptly, cut off in mid-sentence, and Maria smiled involuntarily. She expected him to resume in the second recording. Instead, there was a moment of silence but for background noise, and a hesitant throat-clearing. Maria tensed.

“Maria, Isabel, this is Frank Colton. Will you give me a call? I’m still at the same number in Seal Beach. I have some information for you.”

Frowning, Maria sorted through the junk on the phone table for the family address book. She flipped through it. Who on earth was Frank Colton? She found a listing for him, seeing with a pang that it was in her mother’s handwriting. As she dialed, she began to place the name: a long-ago Saturday drive to the beach. She had been twelve. Hector and… yes, his name had been Frank, had sat together on the sand and talked about Uncle Porfirio. They had both gotten drunk, and Lupe had had to drive home.

She remembered him as a young man, with freckles and a crew cut: Uncle Porfirio’s partner. He must be a retiree now. His voice had sounded old, tired. Maria dialed the number, hoping he wouldn’t be home. But: “Colton,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Colton? I’m Maria Aguilar. I’m sorry I didn’t call you in time—”

“Oh! Hector’s daughter. Right.”

“You were the lieutenant who worked with my uncle, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.” There was a long pause. “Look… I’m retired now, but I still get news. Your uncle’s case was never solved, you know, and when anything related turns up, they… I get told. I heard you had some trouble, you thought, with a stalker?”

“Somebody was stalking me,” Maria said. “My dad had some, uh, property stolen from his room. It tuned up in my apartment, with a threatening note. The cops took it away to test for fingerprints.”

“Yeah, honey, I know. That’s what I was calling about.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded embarrassed. “Hector’s teeth, of all things. I guess we all get older, huh? Anyway… they’re not going to tell you this, but they didn’t find anything. No usable prints.”

“Usable?”

“Well, there was a partial. Hector’d mended his teeth with Superglue, apparently, and that was where the print was. They ran it through, but—”

“No records on file?”

“None that made sense. Some kind of file error. The nearest match they could get was a guy who died in 1937. No prints on the note at all. So, ah, it doesn’t look as though the investigation is going to go anywhere. I thought you should know, though.”

“Thanks,” said Maria dully.

“Tell your dad I’m still working on the murder, will you?”

“What?” Maria cried.

“Tell Hector, I’d like to maybe come up there sometime, talk over the old days—”

“Mr. Colton—Mr. Colton, I’m sorry, I thought you’d heard. My father passed away last week. He was at the Evergreen Care Home. It’s been in the news—”

“Oh, my God.” For a moment the voice on the other end of the line sounded young again, in its shock. “He was there? Oh… oh, son of a bitch!”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Colton—”

“Son of a bitch! Ambrose Muller!”

“Mr. Colton?”

“But that makes no…” Suddenly the life drained out of the voice, and it was an old man’s once more. “Miss, I’m sorry, please excuse my language. I just—”

“Who’s Ambrose Muller?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Maria could even hear distant surf, the cry of a seagull.

“He was the guy who committed suicide in 1937,” said the voice. Frank Colton’s breathing was labored now. It sounded as though he took a sip of water. “The one whose partial they thought they found on your dad’s teeth. He, uh, was a doctor who worked in an old folks’ home. Arrested on suspicion of poisoning his patients. Never stood trial; he committed suicide in his cell, like Hermann Goering. It just startled me, you know, the coincidence. This Evergreen Care Home thing.”

“Right,” said Maria, feeling slightly stunned.

“Listen, I’m so sorry about Hector. So sorry. I… will you call me if anybody bothers you again? Promise?”

“Okay,” said Maria, wondering if he was about to cry.

“God and His angels protect you, sweetheart,” said Frank Colton, and he did begin to cry, and hung up abruptly.



She went back to work the next day, having used up her Compassionate Leave time. Just after morning break all the employees were called into a meeting, where the sword fell: the new owners were relocating the company to South Carolina. Severance pay and unemployment benefits, or relocation incentives to work for one third her present salary a continent’s width away from her family…

Maria walked back to her desk, almost tranquil, observing the black tidal wave of anger rising but not feeling it yet. Her supervisor stepped in front of her, and she blinked at Yvette in mild surprise.

“Maria, I’m so sorry this had to come at this particular time, for you,” she said. “If you need to take the rest of the day off, ah…”

The black wave broke.

“Oh, so now I’m a human being and not just a machine part?” Maria said. “Don’t you pretend they care anything about us! I’ve been here seventeen years and I was good at my job, and that counts for nothing? Jesus, there weren’t even computers when I started working here. And now I’m forty-six, and where the hell am I going to find another job?”

“I’m sorry,” said Yvette, and burst into tears. “They don’t care. They have to look at the big picture. I feel just awful, but what can I do? It’s not personal, Maria.”

“You bet it’s not. Clerical workers don’t matter a damn to anybody. But if the new owners think they can find Hispanics who’ll work for nothing in South Carolina, good luck to them,” Maria snapped. She stormed out to the Buick, where her rage abruptly guttered to ashes in her shame at having played the race card. She drove away. The morning sunlight looked strange, unreal.

There were black plastic trash bags lined up on the curb in front of the house, when she drove up; Tina had been cleaning again, scouring away the pointless past. She met Maria at the door with a preoccupied frown.

“Auntie? What are you doing home?”

“I was laid off,” said Maria, and watched the effect.

“But you’ve been there for seventeen years!” Tina shrieked.

“Bummer, huh?” said Maria, and walked past her and sat down on the couch. Philip came rolling up at once, reaching for her. She lifted him out, held him close.

“Those bastards!” Tina slammed the door. “Well—well, look, it’s going to be okay. They never appreciated you there anyhow. You’ll get another job right away, I know you will.” She peered closely at Maria. “You’re white as a sheet.You want a drink?”

“No, thank you,” said Maria with great care, feeling the black wave begin to crest again. “Remember all those little talks we’ve had, about how alcohol doesn’t help us in a crisis?”

Tina glared at her. Then she looked down, unclenching her fists.

“Somebody from Evergreen called. It’s okay to go get Grandpa’s things, now.”

The tide went out abruptly, leaving a surreal landscape full of melted clocks. Maria stood up, dazed. “Well, let’s go, then. We can get some lunch at a drive-through, eh? My treat. You can even have a Happy Meal.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tina muttered, but went to the hall closet for Philip’s car seat.



Hector’s boom box, his tapes, his statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe went in a big raffia purse that had belonged to Lupe. His clothes went into a black trash bag. Tina hefted it down to the car while Maria did a last check of the room. She pulled the bed, already stripped of its linen, away from the wall to be certain nothing had dropped down the side; there was only a book of crossword puzzles there, the last one she’d brought Hector, the one he had insisted had been stolen. Sighing, she picked it up. She opened the drawer in the bedside table to see if anything had been left there.

Yes, something white. An envelope. She picked it up. Something was written on the outside, in a familiar hand.

REALLY, MARIA, ISN’T IT BETTER THIS WAY?

She stared at it a long moment.

“All right, you bastard,” she murmured. “You’re dead, you know that? If I ever get my hands on you, you’re dead as nails.”

She slipped the envelope into her pocket as Tina returned with Philip. In the car, Maria said: “Let’s go to the library.”



She left Tina and Philip in the Children’s Room and made her way to the reference desk, where she explained what she needed. The slim young man on duty was friendly and helpful, and Maria retired at last to a microfilm viewer with file spools for all the major Los Angeles papers for the year 1937.

What a lost world, she thought. William Randolph Hearst sounded off on matters of national policy; real estate was painfully cheap, making her wish she had a time machine so she could buy a three-bedroom house for eleven thousand dollars. Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen were hot. The advertisements were charming, quaint. The classified ads were so absorbing that she lingered over them, and so took a while to find her quarry.

But there it was at last in the Los Angeles Times on October 14,1937, the headline story: DOCTOR INDICTED ON MURDER CHARGES. Ambrose Muller. Brilliant young physician. Resident at the Avondale Home, a hospital for the elderly. Staff shocked. Relatives demanding answers, “ANGEL OF DEATH” MULLER? Names of the pitiful deceased, their ages, the suspicious circumstances surrounding their departure into the next world. And here was the picture, Dr. Ambrose Muller in handcuffs between two big cops, the three of them caught by a barrage of flashbulbs exploding.

Maria stared at his face. The picture was dreadful, grainy, must have been poor even by the standards of 1937. She studied it a long moment. Finally she got up and went back to the reference desk. She asked for, and got, LIFE magazine for the year 1937 on microfilm. It was a local scandal, not a national one, but even so she found an article in the issue for the first week of November. There was the same picture of young Dr. Muller and the cops, beautifully sharp and clear now. He was smiling into the bright lights, smiling as though at his own cleverness.

She had seen him before, of course.

Great, she thought, ghosts and vampires. My life has just become an episode of Kolchak.

There was a quote from a noted psychologist on the subject of megalomania and delusions of grandeur. There was a photograph of one of the pieces of evidence that would have been produced at the trial, had Dr. Muller not committed suicide: a prescription for a diabetic patient, ordering a drug no sane physician would have given to anyone with that condition. With a feeling of resignation, Maria took out the envelope she had found in her father’s room and studied it.

“Yep,” she said. Same handwriting. But families look alike, she told herself. Ambrose Muller died in 1937, right? So maybe this is his grandson, or something. Maybe he inherited his grandfather’s M.O. as well as his face. And handwriting? Riiight. Stranger things have happened…but not people rising from the dead.

There was something in the envelope, something she hadn’t noticed in her anger. She opened it cautiously. It was a photograph, so old it had gone to sepia. Taken outdoors, it showed three young men, possibly vaqueros from their dress, standing together by an adobe building. One held the reins of a horse, quite a fine horse, obviously showing him off. In the background a fourth man had just walked into frame, blurred, frozen as he turned a startled face to the camera.

What was this supposed to prove? Maria wondered, turning it over in her hands. She didn’t recognize the landscape. The men might have been Mexicans, or Indians; no other clue.

She stuck the picture back in the envelope. She rummaged in her purse for dimes, fed the microfilm machine’s copier, and made three copies of the picture of Dr. Muller. Having returned the microfilm spools to the young man at the desk, she hurried out to the Children’s section.

Tina was sitting at one of the little tables with Philip on her lap, reading to him in a whisper from Madeline. Her high breathless voice sounded like a child’s voice. Maria vividly remembered holding Tina on her lap, pointing out Madeline at the end of the line of little orphaned girls…

But that had been in the old library, the one with its quaint tiled mural of Our Lady Queen of the Angels that little Tina had insisted was a dolly. It was gone now, torched by an arsonist in the late seventies.

Half my world is dead, Maria realized. Why shouldn’t there be ghosts and vampires?

“Come on, mi hija,” she said, jerking her thumb at the door.

In the car, Tina remarked: “You haven’t called me ‘mi hija’ in a long time.”

“I’m getting old,” Maria replied.

“So… are you going to move out of your apartment now?”

“I guess so,” said Maria, feeling the last of her short-lived independence slip away.

“It makes sense,” said Tina. “You’ll save money if you live with Philip and me.You don’t want to stay there alone anyway, right? Not with the stalker, or whoever he was, bothering you. This way, we can be there for each other.”

You mean I can be there for you, Maria thought, downshifting. It made sense; for what else was she going to do with her life, now? Take up crafts? Run away to Tahiti and get a gorgeous young husband? Wait: maybe she’d become a fearless vampire hunter.

Tina patted her on the shoulder.

“Let’s stop by your apartment,” she said. “You can’t go on living out of your overnight bag. We’ll pick up some of your things.”



They entered Maria’s apartment cautiously, but no one was lying in wait for them.

“Philip says, ‘You better watch yourself, creepy man!’ ” Tina said, mock-fierce as she brandished him. “ ‘You mess with my Auntie and I’ll punch you in the nose,’ he says. Don’t worry, Auntie.You’ve got a little angel looking out for you!”

“It’ll be all right,” said Maria automatically, scanning the phone table. No notes from anyone. No blinks on her answering machine. She went first to the stacked plastic boxes; her gun was there in its Tupperware, apparently untouched. She resealed it and set it on the table.

Five assorted bags and boxes of clothes, toiletries, and music cassettes went down to the trunk of the Buick. There was still room for her blankets and pillows; Maria sent them with Tina and stayed behind long enough to pull one of the photocopies she had made from her purse. She set it on the phone table, fended off Philip’s attempts to grab it, and wrote across Dr. Muller’s smiling face: I CAN TOUCH YOU, TOO, SMART GUY.

“Come on, sweetie.” She shifted Philip to her other arm, picked up the Tupperware, and left the apartment.



Back at the house on Fountain, Tina drew the statue of the Virgin from Lupe’s bag and set it on the mantelpiece.

“She’s home again,” she said, looking wistful. “We need to light a candle in front of her now. Grandma brought her from Durango, didn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Maria, methodically unpacking the rest of the bag. Something slipped out of Hector’s crossword book: his plastic magnifying card. She picked it up off the floor and stuck it in her pocket.

“She looks really old. How long has she been in the family?”

Maria shrugged. “I think she belonged to Abuela Maria; that was your great grandmother. The one who lived on the big ranch.”

“So she’s looked after us for generations,” said Tina, smiling.

“I guess so.” Maria felt a pang, realizing that she was the only one left who knew the family stories about Durango. Isabel might remember, but Isabel didn’t care. Did Tina really care? Would she be able to remember, would Philip inherit any sense of who he was, where he came from?

Something tugged at her memory. After a moment she placed it, and scowled to herself. “Why don’t you go feed the baby? I’ll unload the car.”

Sitting among the boxes in her old room, she opened her purse and drew out the envelope again, and shook the old photograph out on the bed. The big ranch in Durango…

Maria took the magnifying card from her pocket and examined the picture minutely, especially the faces of the men. Not one of them bore any resemblance to Ambrose Muller. The one holding the reins of the horse was almost certainly an Indian. High cheekbones on him, and on the mustached man walking into frame—

Maria stared at that one a long, long time. He looked familiar, but the blur of motion made it impossible to place him.

Okay, she thought, these people must be related to us. So, whoever he is, whatever he is, he was trying to show me that he knows all about us. Trying to scare me? Get my attention? Well, the ball is in his court now.

She put the photograph back in its envelope and set it aside. Opening the Tupperware container, she took out her gun and slid out the clip, and proceeded to clean it.



Next morning Maria half-expected to find another note tacked on the front door, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there. She dropped off Tina at the mental health clinic and drove on down McCadden, through the same dreamlike sunlight, to the unemployment office.

Philip stared up from his stroller through the forest of adult legs, and only got cranky after the first hour in line. She placated him with one of the plastic gloves from the Papi kit, inflating it and tying off the end to make a rooster balloon. He thought it was hilarious, and bellowed with laughter as he flailed it through the air.

Wheeling him back to the Buick, Maria spotted the envelope under her windshield wiper. Moving deliberately, she put Philip in his car seat, fastened him in, folded up the stroller, and put it away before she allowed herself to pick up the envelope.

On its outside was written: CLEVER GIRL!

It was heavy, felt as though it contained a lot of folded paper. She weighed it in her hand, looking around to see whether anyone was watching her. Not a soul in sight. At that hour of the morning on a weekday, the mean streets were as wide and sunlit and empty as a desert.

Maria stuck the envelope into her purse, unopened. She got into the car and drove off.

Tina was smiling as she waited outside the clinic, clutching a paper bag. Maria’s gaze riveted on it as she pulled up. Were they wine bottles? “Sorry I’m late. What have you got in the bag?”

“I walked down to the little Mexican market on the corner,” Tina replied, getting in. A heavy cloud of rose perfume came with her. “I bought candles for the Virgin, see?” She held open the bag to reveal three big pink candles, in glass cups color-lithographed with the Virgin of Guadalupe. “Don’t you love that smell? Hi, baby, Mommy’s so glad to see you! Were you a good boy for Auntie?”

“He was fine,” said Maria, as she pulled away from the curb. “How was therapy?”

“Therapy was wonderful. Marvelous. Fabulously fantastic,” said Tina, in a tone of such dreamy ecstasy Maria glanced sidelong at her, suspicious. “Really,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” Tina said. She was still smiling.

“Well, don’t keep me waiting,” said Maria. “What was so good about it? You made a breakthrough?”

“You could say that,” said Tina. “You know how I’ve told you what an incredibly nice man my therapist is? He’s sensitive and caring and… and it’s as though he’s known me my whole life. He’s like my angel.”

“Yeah?” Maria tensed, guessing what was coming.

“Well… today he said he might like to, you know, go out with me. Socially.”

Maria ground her teeth.

“Mi hija, doctors don’t date their patients,” she said.

“What do you know about it?” demanded Tina, coming down off her pink cloud a little.

“It’s not something ethical doctors do. Especially not psych doctors with emotionally vulnerable patients,” said Maria, trying very hard to keep the anger out of her voice.

“When two people fall in love, it doesn’t matter who they are,” said Tina. “You’ve never been in love, so you don’t know, do you? He understands me, and I feel completely safe with him. I thought you’d be happy for me! Are you jealous, is that what it is?”

“No,” said Maria, out of all the things she might have said.

“This could be the answer to everything,” said Tina in a louder voice, leaning back in her seat. “We could get married. Philip would have a real daddy who’s there all the time. And he’s a doctor, you know? He lives in Bel-Air.”

“Huh,” said Maria. “And that would solve all your problems.” Silently she screamed, You wouldn’t have to get a job, you wouldn’t have to go back to school. You really think a doctor who lives in Bel-Air is going to ride to your rescue on a white horse.

“Philip’s happy for me, anyway,” said Tina sullenly. “Aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like a new daddy?”



Maria waited until she was at home, alone in her old room, to open the envelope. It contained fifteen sheets of paper. She spread them out on her bed and studied them. They were not what she had expected, at all.

They seemed to be photocopies of scrapbook clippings, culled from newspapers and magazines, over a period of many years. Here and there they had been highlighted with a yellow marker, drawing her attention to certain points.

Maria read a story about a rare native species of bunch grass, long thought to be extinct, found again growing at a construction site out in Antelope Valley. The story next to it concerned another species once thought extinct, a kind of Asian deer, of which a small herd had just been discovered in a remote park in China.

Just below that story was an interview with a man in Sweden who had been cleaning out the attic of an old house and found a sixteenth-century quarto copy of a Shakespeare play. Next to it was a brief account of a cabinet in an old country house in England, opened by a new owner who discovered something locked away and forgotten: a concert piece by Handel, known to music scholars from contemporary references but formerly thought destroyed.

Wondering, Maria read on. All the articles had a common theme: the miraculous survival of lost things. Extinct species of plants and animals, works of art, manuscripts, early films. Somehow, in each case, they came to light once more, from whatever dusty shelf or hidden valley they had occupied all the while.

On the last page, someone had written:

WHAT IF SOMEONE HAD FIGURED OUT A WAY TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THESE LITTLE SURPRISES?

HOW CAN YOU EVER BE SURE OF DEATH?

FOOD FOR THOUGHT, ISN’T IT?

“Okay,” said Maria quietly. “You really are an obsessive psycho. What’s next? UFOs?”

The doorbell rang.

“Can you get it?” Tina called from the kitchen. “I’m washing dishes.”

Maria went out to the living room, noting that Tina had lit one of her pink candles and placed it before the Virgin of Guadalupe. The air was already warm with perfume. Going to the window, she peered through the blinds; a young man in a suit stood on the porch, looking at something he was holding in his hand.

She opened the door. The young man was a stranger to her. As he held up the leather case to display his badge, his coat opened and Maria saw the holster under his left arm.

“LAPD, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant John Koudelka. How are you today?”

“Fine,” Maria replied, thinking that he sounded like a salesman.

“Would you be Maria Aguilar?”

“Yes.”

“I take it you’re no longer at the place over on Hobart. Would it be all right if I came in and asked you some questions about your father’s death?”

“Sure,” said Maria.

He didn’t get down to business at once. Philip rolled himself in to stare, and the young cop was pleasantly paternal; Tina came in, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and the young cop accepted a glass of soda from her with pleasant grace. Tina giggled, flirted, and talked about the weather. Maria, watching her, thought sourly: Potential Husband Alert!!!! Omigod!!!!

But Lieutenant Koudelka was all gravity when, social gambits over, he turned to face Maria and said: “You made a statement to the attending physician when your father died.”

“You bet I did,” said Maria. “The last time I saw my father alive, he had a bandage on the inside of his arm. I asked him what had happened. He said a doctor had made a house call to do some kind of lab work.”

Lieutenant Koudelka nodded. “That seemed strange to you?”

“It seemed strange as hell! Evergreen didn’t have any doctors in residence. Any time my father needed a procedure done, they either took him to the clinic or they checked him into the hospital,” said Maria.

“Did he say what the lab work was for?”

“He didn’t know,” said Maria wearily. “He probably didn’t ask. If somebody in a doctor’s coat had told my father to stand on his head, he’d have done it. He was polite that way. But he was okay when I saw him at seven o’clock, and a day later he was stone dead. And nobody’s explained to me anything about this super-virus at Evergreen. You can bet I’m thinking of suing somebody.”

She ran out of words and the cop sat, watching her. She looked him in the eye. Finally he looked away and said, “And… you’d made a complaint earlier, about a man stealing something from your father’s room.”

Maria considered. How much could she tell him of the truth, without sounding like a middle-aged fat lady who craved attention and made up stories to get it?

“I saw a guy in a white coat walking around at Evergreen,” she said. “Passing himself off as a doctor, maybe, huh? And stalking me, and leaving nutcase notes for me to find. With stuff he stole from my father, I might add. Which I would think would be a dead giveaway he was in my father’s room, wouldn’t you think?”

Lieutenant Koudelka’s face registered nothing, but his spine stiffened a little.

“Notes?” he said. “He’s contacted you again?”

Maria decided how much to say.

“I’ll show you the other one,” she said, and went and got the envelope with the old photograph.

“See?” She tossed it into his lap. “We found that when we went to clean up his room. It was left in a drawer. Maybe the guy’s got some sick idea about euthanasia? The picture’s from an old family album, by the way. I figured he was trying to scare us by telling us how much he knows about us. You want to take it in for fingerprinting?” she added, and felt a bitter glee as Lieutenant Koudelka winced.

She watched his face as he thought about it. Finally he sighed. “Have you handled it a lot?”

“Yeah, actually. What you guys ought to be doing is dusting for prints in the rooms of all the other people at Evergreen, you know that?”

There was only a momentary glint in his eyes saying Lady, don’t tell me my job. “We’re doing that, Ma’am,” he said evenly.

After he left, Maria went back to her room and looked at the papers spread out on her bed. Too big a piece of the puzzle, too far out in left field. What connection could any of this possibly have with a serial killer of elderly people?

She bent down, pulled the Tupperware container from its place under her bed and checked. Her gun was still there, still unloaded, lying just as she’d left it. She closed the lid and slid the box back out of sight.



The next few days were quiet. The Evergreen Virus faded further and further back into the papers, and finally vanished, as no new deaths occurred and no answers were found. Maria found herself wondering how many Evergreens occurred but dropped out of the historical record when they were no longer front-page news. In the provincial little Los Angeles of 1937, the Ambrose Muller case had held public attention for weeks; now such things barely rated a headline.

Maria had an overwhelming sense that the present, her present, was sinking out of existence, as the world she had known all her life disappeared. Yet no shining future had risen to replace it; instead, broken and vaguely threatening pieces of the past were bobbing to the surface of time. It seemed the only new thing left on earth was Philip, rolling himself through the old house full of ghosts, babbling at sunbeams. She sat on the couch in silence, watching him, suffocating in love and dull fear.

Two more envelopes came, left in the mailbox this time; one was marked MORE CLUES and the other HOW LONG DO YOU SUPPOSE THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THINGS? Both contained more photocopies of clippings on the same subject matter as the other packets, of extinctions reversed, lost treasures found.

There was a photograph in the second one, too. It didn’t disturb Maria as much as it had probably been intended to, because by now she had figured out how the stalker had gotten hold of pictures of her family. He must have rummaged through the bags of ruined and rained-on stuff Tina had set out on the curb.

She felt nothing but gloomy longing, turning over the picture of Hector and Lupe. There they were, young and smiling, dressed up in their best clothes. They were seated at some restaurant table. Where had that been taken?

A fantastic background of sculpted waterfalls and neon palm trees released her long-buried memory: Clifton’s Pacific Seas. It had looked like an indoor Disneyland, with grottos and statues and a pipe organ. She had had her fourth birthday party there. As her birthday cake had been served, the organist had miraculously played the theme from Tubby the Tuba, which was her very favorite song. She had wondered for years how he had known that was her favorite song.

And now here, in this photograph, was another thing to wonder about: a red arrow had been drawn pointing to a man in the background. He was leaning from the waist, apparently addressing another man who was seated at… oh, of course, that must be the organist.

Splash, another memory came bobbing up, one of the stories Lupe had told her. Hector and Lupe had had their wedding dinner at Clifton’s. And the organist had played “La Paloma” for them, their courting song, because Uncle Porfirio had gone over and asked him to…

Lupe had her left hand slightly raised in the picture, proudly displaying the gold wedding band. And the man in the background—what she could see of him—looked a lot like Uncle Porfirio…

Under the red arrow, the stalker had written: WOULDN’T IT BE USEFUL TO LIVE FOREVER? THINK OF THE THINGS YOU COULD SAVE.

Nobody had saved Clifton’s Pacific Seas, though; it had been torn down years ago. Maria knitted her brows. She had begun to have an inkling of what the stalker was trying to tell her.

Before she could piece any more of the puzzle together, she was interrupted by Tina striding in from the kitchen.

“Listen, Auntie, I had an idea. If we move the last of your stuff out this weekend and really scrub down that apartment, I’ll bet we could get the cleaning deposit back. What do you think?”

“That never happens,” said Maria listlessly.

“We could at least try,” said Tina. “You know what your problem is? You’re depressed. Cleaning out the place would probably be good for you. You’d get those, whatchacallem, endo-things, and then you’d feel better.”

“Endorphins.”

“Yeah, those. Come on. We need sponges and spray cleaner. Let’s go to Kmart.”



Miles of aisles, cheap consumer goods stacked heaven-high in plastic packaging occasionally pried open. Maria pushed the shopping cart, soundless over glass-slick linoleum, and marveled at how banal her life was.

Then again, what exactly did I want from the world? I could have had a husband. I could have had kids. I could have been a congresswoman. I’d still have been stuck behind a shopping cart full of Ty-D-Bowl some of the time. These are the days of our lives…

“Do you have a mop at your place?” Tina emerged from an aisle with her arms full of bottles of Pine-Sol.

“I guess so,” Maria replied.

“What do you mean, you guess so?” Tina dumped the bottles in the cart.

“I think it’s kind of worn out,” Maria hazarded, unwilling to admit how little time she had ever spent worrying about waxy yellow buildup or other domestic enormities.

“We’d better get a new one, then,” said Tina briskly, and was off like a shot.

“You know what your mommy’s problem is?” Maria said to Philip. “She belongs in the 1950s.”

Philip wasn’t paying attention. He had twisted in his seat in the shopping cart and was staring at the aisle containing bath accessories. He pointed, yearning, and turned to look up at Maria.

“What is it?” Maria asked, pushing the cart where he pointed. “You see something you want?”

What he wanted was a package of bath pearls, ruby-red ones in the shape of hearts. When the cart was close enough he reached out and grabbed the pearls, smiling in triumph.

“Honey, those aren’t candies,” Maria told him, wresting them out of his grip. “I know, they look sooo tasty. No—”

Philip threw himself backward in his seat, waving his balled fists, drawing a deep breath as he wound up for a scream.

“Sssh, shh, here! Look, we’ll buy them, okay? You can have a bath with them tonight. You just can’t eat the damn things,” said Maria, dropping them in the back of the cart. “Hey, Philip, look! We’re driving in a race car! Zoom, zoom!”

She began to speed with him along the aisles, hoping to stave off the tantrum, pushing the cart as fast as she could go.

“Hold on, baby! We’re coming to the first turn! Eeeeeee!”

Philip chortled and held on to the bar, leaning into the turn.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is unbelievable! Philip Aguilar is streaking ahead!” Maria sang, panting as she pushed him along the aisle. “But! Will he handle the next turn without crashing? Eeee! Here he goes!”

Up and down they went, Philip laughing helplessly, until they came around the end of the cosmetic aisle and a ghost stood before them.

Maria froze, staring.

It was the man who had been at the cemetery. His dark glasses were pushed down on his nose. He was peering over them at a makeup kit, one of several he held in his hands. He turned swiftly and met Maria’s gaze.

She choked, unable to scream.

Uncle Porfirio took a step toward her; then turned on his heel and was just gone. Philip, staring up at her white face, began to shriek in terror.

When Tina found them, Maria was slumped over the cart, trying vainly to breathe and comfort Philip at the same time.

“Oh, my God!” Tina snatched Philip from her aunt’s arms. “You’re having a heart attack!”

“No, mi hija, I just—”

“Please, please don’t die! We’ll get you on a diet—Somebody, please help us! My aunt—”

“Shut up, for Christ’s sake—”



It took an eternity to convince the store manager that she didn’t need an ambulance, that she was fine, that she’d just felt a little faint (low blood sugar, right, yes) and another eternity to get Tina and Philip calmed down. They found seats in the food court, though the combined smell of pizza, hot dogs, and churros was enough to make anyone pass out. Tina bought her a lemonade and watched tearfully as she took her medication.

“You have to take care of yourself,” Tina insisted. “What would Philip do without his Auntie? When was the last time you had a checkup? You have to make an appointment right away!”

“How? I just lost my medical coverage, remember?” said Maria.

“You could go on the county, like me,” said Tina.

“I’d rather die, thanks,” Maria retorted.

“It’s not anything to be ashamed of!”

Maria just looked at her sullenly. Tina pursed her lips, looked away, and tried again.

“Okay. There are, like, biofeedback things you could do that would help. You know what your problem is? You take too much responsibility on yourself. You worry all the time. My therapist says we all need to keep in touch with our inner child. You had to take care of Grandma, and you raised me, and then you had to look after Grandpa, too, so you never really had time to be young, did you?”

“That’s for damned sure,” Maria muttered, swirling the ice in her drink.

“And then everything that’s happened lately, all this pressure, pressure, pressure, is just going to kill you if you don’t find some way to let it go. You have to do that. Please, Auntie.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Maria, though she was still ice-cold and shakier than she’d admit. She offered her lemonade to Philip. He pushed it away, staring up at her, much too little to look so worried.

“Let’s go.” Maria got to her feet cautiously. “Let’s buy him a toy. He’s had a rough day.”

They found the toy aisle and a bin of bright, cheap stuffed toys. Maria let Philip rummage through them while Tina went down to the far end of the aisle. A moment later she came back, looking determined.

“There are a lot of teddy bears over there,” she said.

“He’s already found one he likes,” said Maria, lifting Philip in her arms. He clutched a bright red toy parrot, chewing on its beak thoughtfully.

“I think you should get one for yourself,” said Tina. “My therapist says symbolic gestures are really important. Let your inner child pick out the bear it wants, and then you hug him every time you feel the stress building. It’ll work, I swear.”

Maria rolled her eyes. She followed Tina to the display of teddies. After a long, thoughtful moment she picked out the biggest one—bigger than Philip—and set it in the cart.

“That one’s butt-ugly,” Tina complained. “Don’t you want one of the cute ones?”

“It’s my bear, right?” said Maria. “Mr. Stress Buster.” Tina sighed.

But she treated Maria to lunch at Jack-in-the-Box, where they actually went in and sat down at a table, as though it were a special occasion. Tina watched her like a hawk the whole while; and only as they pulled into the parking lot of the mental health clinic did she say, “If you start to feel faint or anything, you’ll pull over right away, won’t you?”

“I swear,” said Maria. Tina got out of the car.

“Philip, you make Auntie drive real careful, okay?”

“Leave it to me, Mom,” said Maria in a bass voice.

By the time she was halfway down Fountain, Maria had come to terms with what she had seen.

“You know what it was, Philip? Kind of a Jungian hallucination,” she announced, looking in the mirror at Philip waving his parrot around in the back seat. “My unconscious was letting me know there’s way too much tension in my life by conjuring up an image of Uncle Porfirio, who is, like, this intense symbol of responsibility. Look what happened to him!”

“Mamama,” said Philip.

“You’re so right, mi hija. I could really use a drink, you know? Probably be good for my heart, too. Bad idea, though.”

They got to the house without incident and she carried Philip up the walk, stopping to check the mailbox.

There was an envelope without a stamp inside. Maria pulled it out, noting stolidly the now-familiar handwriting.

“Then there’s this psycho,” she said to Philip. “I guess I should feel flattered; he’s paying me more attention than any guy I ever dated.”

“Blblblblbbbbbb,” said Philip.

“I agree one hundred percent.”

Maria let them in, set Philip in his walker, and did a quick walk-through of the house; no sign of intruders. He followed her into her bedroom, where she checked the Tupperware (still there), and rolled himself around the floor as she sat down on the bed and examined the new envelope.

It felt light. No clippings this time? She opened it and pulled out the single sheet of paper, unfolding it carefully.

Her heart gave another violent lurch. Almost absent-mindedly she checked for the symptoms: pain in the left arm, breathlessness, nausea…

The image seemed to be a kind of photograph, printed directly on the paper; clearly something much more high-tech than the chattering daisy-wheel printers in use at her office. What were they calling the new ones now? Laser-jet? Were they able to do pictures as well as words? They must be.

And the picture must have been taken by someone standing outside the Kmart as Uncle Porfirio fled, probably with a video camera because of the red numbers in the bottom right-hand corner. There he was, large as life beside the coin-operated kiddie rides, turning to stare at the camera. His face was expressionless, but there was a look of murder in his black eyes. Maria wondered how the cameraman had gotten away alive.

There was writing on the back of the picture. She turned it over.

YOU MUST HAVE GUESSED BY NOW. WHO DID HE WORK FOR REALLY?

NOW, THINK: WHAT OTHER INVENTION WOULD A COMPANY NEED, IF IT WANTED TO CASH IN ON HISTORY? HOW WOULD IT KNOW IN ADVANCE WHAT IT NEEDED TO SAVE?

HOW POWERFUL WOULD IT BE, IF IT COULD OFFER IMMORTALITY TO ITS EMPLOYEES?

I REALLY THINK IT’S TIME WE HAD A FACE-TO-FACE CHAT.

BE SEEING YOU.

Maria stared at the note a long time, putting the pieces together. She got out the other pages and read through them, slowly. Philip played quietly by himself until he got hungry; when he rolled up to her and made complaining noises, she rose automatically and filled the tray of his walker with apple slices and Vienna sausage. She sat at the kitchen table while he ate, studying her evidence.

By the time she glanced up at the clock and noticed that it was time to pick up Tina, she had almost figured it all out.



Tina was standing by the curb again, with another bagful of candles, and she was smiling.

“I didn’t think I was that late,” said Maria, as she opened the door and got in.

“No, my therapist was a little late, so I walked down and got these first,” said Tina. “I have a lot to pray to Mary about, right now. How’s the most wonderful little boy in the whole world?”

Philip babbled and waved at her.

“And look what I got for Auntie!” Tina pulled something from the bag and held it up. It was a little plastic figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, garishly painted, with a magnet in its base. “Our Lady can sit on your dashboard and keep you safe. And she glows in the dark!”

Maria ground her teeth, but said nothing as Tina set the statue in place.

“Can we go to Thriftymart?” Tina inquired. “My therapist gave me a new prescription and I need to get it filled.”

“Sure,” said Maria, preparing to pull away from the curb.

“Wait! Auntie, look, there he is!” cried Tina, pointing across the clinic’s parking lot. “See him? That’s my wonderful, handsome therapist!”

Maria looked, and saw a man in a white coat getting into a white Mercedes. He started the car, backed out of his parking place. The name painted on the concrete bar there was DR. MILLER.

The Mercedes passed close enough to the car for there to be no doubt. He turned and met Maria’s gaze, smiled like the Cat in the Hat and winked, just to rub it in.

If I live through this week it’ll be a miracle, thought Maria, feeling her heart smack against her breastbone again. Out loud she said: “Dr. Miller, huh?”

“Anthony Miller,” said Tina happily. “Tony and Tina. Won’t that be cute?”

Maria drove to the Thriftymart on Gower, and as she drove, she felt the shakiness and the panic begin to fade. She was filling with anger. It ran like cold fire in her blood, she could almost imagine it flashing blue like lightning, and it made her feel clear-headed and powerful. Anything seemed possible.

She pulled into the parking lot. “Give me the prescription,” she said to Tina. “I’ll get it filled. You stay here with Philip, okay?”

“But don’t you—”

“They have one of those free blood pressure testing machines inside. I want to check myself, after this morning.”

“Okay,” said Tina, a little cowed by the look in her eye. She handed over the slip of paper meekly.

Yes, the prescription was in the familiar handwriting. Maria had no idea what the drug might be. She waited patiently while the pharmacist filled it, and did indeed check her blood pressure. It was a little high. She got a bottle of generic aspirin from the shelf, and when the pharmacist gave her the bag containing her prescription, she went to the counter up front and paid for her purchases.

Returning to the car, she got in and said: “Mi hija, I need to take another of my pills. Will you go over there to the liquor store and get me a soda? I’ll stay here with the baby.”

“Sure,” said Tina at once, looking concerned.

Alone in the car with Philip, Maria opened both pill bottles and swapped out their contents. He watched without comment. She was smiling at him in the mirror, telling him what a good baby he was, when Tina returned.

“I got you a diet soda with no caffeine,” said Tina. “It’s better for you, okay?”

“Sure,” said Maria. She gulped an aspirin, washed it down with the sickly fizzy stuff, and drove home in perfect calm.



Evening came, black shadows and a red sky. Sirens wailed and police helicopters sped whining above the city, or hovered high, thumping the air. Far to the west a pillar of smoke rose, the only stain on the perfect sunset: someone’s car was on fire. In the pink dusk, the lights of the city flickered like a bed of green coals. Little wild parrots chattered and fought in the jacarandas, the magnolias, the carob trees. The Santa Ana was blowing hot, rustling the palm leaves.

Once, it had brought the smell of orange blossoms to prosperous mid-westerners and would-be movie stars in innumerable clapboard cottages. Now the orange groves and cottages were gone. Chaos was rising in green creepers once more, over the crumbling plaster as bright-eyed monsters sped through the night with their speakers reverberating.

The house on Fountain, overgrown by its garden, had a particular black velvet darkness.

“This new medication is making me sleepy,” said Tina, and yawned as she stacked the dinner dishes in the sink.

“Really,” said Maria, wiping applesauce from Philip’s chin.

“What are you going to do tonight?”

“Watch television, I guess,” Maria replied. “Why?”

“Would you mind if Philip and I go to bed early? I can barely keep my eyes open, and it’s so hot.”

“Go right ahead,” said Maria.

She remained where she was at the kitchen table, listening as Tina climbed the stairs. Footsteps creaking across the floor, the clatter of Philip’s toddler gate being opened and shut. Tina’s voice high-pitched and muffled, baby-talking; the sudden blare of sound as she turned her radio on, and then the drop in volume. Various creaks and thumps. Silence, after a while, but for the faint music of an oldies station.

Maria rose and made a pot of coffee, strong and black. She poured herself a cup.

Sipping it, she walked through the house, checking each room, turning out lights as she went. Her parents’ bedroom at the front, cold and empty as it had been for years. Her room, full of stacked boxes and plastic bags from her apartment. The bathroom: nothing lurking behind the shower curtain. All the windows locked. Back door locked.

Nobody in the breakfast room; nobody in the living room except the Virgin of Guadalupe on the mantel, surrounded by votive candles. When Maria turned off the light, the room was bathed in a serene pink gloom, pulsing with the candle flames.

She finished her coffee, made her preparations, and returned to sit in the living room. She clutched the big teddy bear from Kmart. She waited, as the hours went by, watching the front door.

When she heard him coming up the walk at last, she tensed. He was shuffling, taking careful small steps, and there was an additional tap-tap-tap that suggested… a cane?

Maria couldn’t look away from the door.

He was taking the stairs one step at a time. Why so slowly? Had he been injured? But he got to the door at last, and she heard the key going into the lock—so quiet, so careful. Had Tina given him a key? Click, and the door opened.

Maria’s eyes widened. She held the bear tightly.

The figure came across the threshold, walking a little bent over, indeed using a cane. Maria waited until he was a body’s length into the room before she fired.

The teddy bear worked admirably as a silencer, with a little flurry of kapok puffing out—her shot made not much more noise than if she’d dropped a book on the floor—but she did not hit her target. Nor did her shot go wild. It smacked neatly into the wall just where her visitor had been standing a microsecond before; and if he had been a human being, he’d have been killed.

“Don’t shoot!” he hissed.

Maria threw the bear aside and got to her feet. She trained the gun on him.

“So, it’s you?” she said. “Tell me, how are things in the Land of the Dead?”

“Put the gun down, mi hija,” said Uncle Porfirio.



Maria lowered the gun reluctantly, staring at him. By the wavering candlelight she saw a gaunt, wrinkled old man with a mane of white hair, leaning on his cane.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I owed you an explanation,” he said, in a dry old husk of a voice. “All those years ago, I had to disappear, Maria. We were working in a joint operation with the CIA. Do you know what deep cover means?”

“I know what bullshit means,” said Maria, and she reached out and seized a handful of his white hair. One quick tug and the wig came off, revealing the slicked black hair beneath.

Uncle Porfirio sighed. He rose slowly from his bent stance, stood straight as a sword. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a handkerchief and wiped the wrinkles from his face, the gray from his mustache.

“Damn,” he said quietly.

“Yeah. Damn,” Maria replied. “What the fuck are you?” He gave her a severe look. “Don’t use that kind of language, mi hija. Do you want to sound like a whore?” She had to fight hysterical laughter.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not eleven years old anymore. Even if you haven’t aged a day, everything else has gone to hell. Me included.” They regarded each other a long moment.

“You’re not screaming, anyway,” said Uncle Porfirio. “I guess that’s a good sign. How much have you figured out?”

“That there’s some kind of secret group that knows what’s going to become rare and valuable, and figured out how to hide it all away until it is valuable,” said Maria. “So either they’ve got a time machine or they’ve been around for hundreds of years. In which case they’re probably running governments secretly, the way people used to say the Freemasons did. And they’ve definitely got immortal people to work for them. Are you a vampire or something?”

Uncle Porfirio scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. Vampires don’t exist.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’m just a cyborg.”

“Oh, is that all?” Maria very nearly lost it this time. “Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that movie?”

“Sort of.”

“Only you’re not from the future.You’ve been around a loooong time. I’ll bet you worked on a certain ranch in Durango, didn’t you? The only part I couldn’t figure out was your connection with the other cyborg guy, the bastard who killed Papi.” Maria’s fist clenched on the gun.

Uncle Porfirio glanced sidelong at the porch. “I’m not working with him, mi hija. Let me close and lock the door, okay? And then maybe I can make some fresh coffee. This is going to take a while to explain, and I don’t know how much time we have.”

“He’s coming for me tonight, isn’t he?”

Uncle Porfirio shook his head.

“He’s coming here, probably, but he’s coming for me. That was the whole point of this stupid game.”



In the kitchen, it was almost possible to believe that it was still 1956, that everything was still normal and right with the world. Uncle Porfirio hung up his coat on the old bent nail by the door—yes, he still wore his underarm holster—and made fresh coffee in the same blue graniteware pot that had been sitting on the back of the stove the last time he had walked out of the kitchen, thirty-five years earlier. Maria, accepting a cup from him, felt weirdly peaceful.

“Why did you go away?” she asked.

“It wasn’t my choice, honey,” he said, sitting down across the table from her. “I had to go do something somewhere else for a while, for the Company. The people I work for.”

“You know what happened, once you were gone,” Maria said.

“I know.” He looked bleak. “Nothing I could do.”

“And you’re not only not really my uncle, you’re sure as hell not Papi’s cousin. You’re not even remotely related to my family, are you?”

“Oh, yes, I am,” he said, raising his eyes to hers. Black eyes, fathomless as the shaft of a well. And as cold… or so she had thought, when she had been a little girl. Now she recognized something of the darkness she saw in her own mirror. Not coldness: resignation. And, perhaps, the hardness of anthracite coal.



“A long time ago, mi hija, there was a city on the waters of a lake. It was a beautiful place, or so I always heard; I never saw it with my own eyes. It had bridges and causeways. It had gleaming white towers that shone like pearls in the evening light, and canoes went back and forth across the water loaded with jade, and gold, and chocolate. It was a good place to live, cleaner than any city in Europe. Prosperous, too. Beyond the lake were green fields of corn and blue fields of maguey, stretching to the horizon, and wide straight roads leading away to all the lands the people of the city had conquered.

“And that was the worm in the apple, mi hija, or I guess you could say the worm in the maguey.

“They had two problems. The first was that, a few generations before I was born, some priest had come up with the idea that blood sacrifice was the only way to keep the universe from flying into a million pieces. Human blood had to be splashed on the altars of the gods, every day; human blood had to be smeared on the clothes and in the hair of the priests. The cities were white as pearls, clean and pretty, yes, but the insides of the temple were caked with blood and black with crawling flies. That was the price they had to pay.

“And where was all that blood going to come from? The only way to get it was to conquer other cities, for captives to sacrifice. And, once you sacrifice captives, why waste all that fresh meat? So all their neighbors hated them.

“Their other problem was that their Emperor was a frightened man.

“In the previous cycle of time, a god with skin white as the bones of the dead had ruled the world. One day he had sailed away, into the sunrise; but when he came back, he would begin a new cycle. The clock had been ticking for years, and it was this Emperor’s bad luck that it was due to strike in his lifetime. The end of the world was coming. He knew it; he knew the day and the hour, and knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

“So the day came at last, and Hernando Cortes rode into Tenochtitlan with his army. It’s not true that he conquered Mexico with a handful of Spaniards. He had help from nearly every tribe he met along the way. That’s what happens when you eat your neighbors.

“One of the things the Emperor did, to try and placate Cortes, was to offer a household of high-born ladies to be the wives of his captains. All of them were the daughters of chiefs. Some of them were the Emperor’s sisters, and cousins. One of them was my mother. Your grandmother of a dozen generations, mi hija.

“My father was a captain of Spain, and he might have been a mercenary lusting after gold, or he might have been a noble soldier for the Cross. Maybe both. All I remember was that he was big and strong, and his helmet shone in the sunlight. He was good to my mother. She loved him enough to stay with him, even after those white towers fell and the magic lake became a cracked dry bed of dust. When he marched away into the jungle, looking for something else to conquer, she followed him.

“And after a while, she carried a baby in a cotton sling on her back; and after a while, she led a little boy by the hand, while the new baby slept in the cotton sling.

“I remember the red dust of the trails, the green lizards, the black condors circling high against the blue. I remember the fire at night, when my mother told me about Tenochtitlan, and why I must never forget it, though it didn’t exist anymore.

“My father told me all about Spain, and Jesus Christ, and how He gave Himself to be sacrificed, because the old God required shed blood.

“Somehow or other I got them confused in my mind, Spain and Tenochtitlan, both of them with priests in black offering blood that ran down in streams. Even my mother had come to confuse Christ and Montezuma, maybe; both of them thin sad men, knowing they were going to die so a new age could be born.

“One day, when I was about four, we captured a city. It wasn’t so big and beautiful as Tenochtitlan, but it put up more of a fight. My father must have lost most of his army, taking it. He held it for a week before it was taken back.

“We hid in a palace, away from all the fire and smoke and noise. My father was carried in, and I don’t know if he was dead or dying; my mother screamed over him and kissed his bleeding face. What happened next, I’m not sure, but it seemed as though his soldiers thought that if his body was propped up, if his sword was put in his dead hand, the enemy would think he was immortal and would turn and run. So my mother helped them drag him outside. I never saw her again.

“But before she went away, my mother told me to look after my little brother.

“It’s important you understand that, mi hija.

“Now, my mother had a servant who had followed her from Tenochtitlan, a clever little lady named Tonantzin, who walked as soundlessly as a jaguar. I was scared and crying, holding on to baby Agustin, when I looked up and noticed her standing there. My mother had left the door barred, but she had gotten in somehow.

“Tonantzin said she had come to rescue me, and I must go away with her as fast as I could run. I told her I couldn’t run fast, carrying the baby. She said the baby would have to be left behind. Tonantzin caught my wrist, to pull me away, but I wouldn’t let go of Agustin. So in the end she grabbed us both in one armful, and we left the room by a secret way.

“That old palace had a passage in it that ran down under the rocks, an echoing tunnel. After a long way it opened on a river, where a canoe had been drawn up as though waiting for us. Tonantzin set us safe inside and rowed us away fast. I remember the jade green river with the dragonflies zipping to and fro as her paddle dipped in the water. It was all calm and quiet, because the river carried us far away from the battle. You wouldn’t think the world had ended at all. Agustin stopped crying and fell asleep, rocked by the water.

“Then the lady Tonantzin told me a story, mi hija.

“She said that a god named Time Crow had once ruled the world, and he had been as bloody and terrible as the old priests. But he knew that when the next cycle of years came, his wife would bear a son who would sacrifice his father. And this god Time Crow was not as wise as Montezuma. He thought he could cheat fate. So, every time his wife had a baby, he’d eat it, just as the priests used to do. He did this eleven times.

“But his wife thought of a way to trick him. When the twelfth baby was born, she dressed a lump of jade like an infant and presented it to Time Crow. He was in such a hurry to eat his son that he just gulped it down, and never realized he had been tricked. The real baby was sent away to a safe place, and grew up into a mighty warrior called Lightning Bolt. This Lightning Bolt came back and overthrew his father Time Crow, and sacrificed him. When he cut the body open, out came all eleven of Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters, miraculously brought back to life, though they had been dead.

“And Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters were so grateful to be rescued that they made him their Emperor, even though he was the last-born.

“Tonantzin told me all this story was true, that Lightning Bolt was her Emperor, too. He had the power to raise the dead, and make people live forever, because he had become the master of the cycles of time. She said I could become his servant and live forever, if I wanted. I thought this was a good idea, so I said yes. It never occurred to me that she wasn’t making the offer to both of us, Agustin and I.

“I went to sleep, and when I woke up, we were on the riverbank and the biggest dragonfly I had ever seen was sitting there on the mud, with its wings beating loud. It shone like polished jade. Warriors took us from the boat and loaded us into the dragonfly’s head. We flew away across the jungle to the home of the gods.

“It was a beautiful place of gardens and pyramids, but that was where I lost Agustin. They took him away from me when I was asleep. It was years before I found him again. By that time I was immortal.”



“But there aren’t really any gods,” said Maria.

Uncle Porfirio shook his head, looking tired.

“Here’s where your secret brotherhood comes in.

“Way up in the future, a big corporation will figure out time travel. They won’t be able to do much with it, because it’s impossible to change history, and it’s impossible to go anywhere but the past. So, no winning Lotto numbers from next week, you see?

“The other thing they’ll do is to figure out how to make people live forever. That won’t go so well, either, because the only way to do it is to take a baby and start modifying it early, with biomechanical implants and conditioning. After twenty years or so the kid is a cyborg who’ll live forever, all right, but… there are some drawbacks. So, no big commercial success from that discovery, either.

“You know how big corporations work, huh? Seventeen years you worked for that rathole insurance company. All that mattered to them in the end was the bottom line.” Uncle Porfirio poured more coffee.

“You’ve been watching us, all this time,” said Maria, not sure what she felt. He just nodded and went on: “Anyway, how were these people going to turn a profit?

“They figured out that if they sent teams back into the past, they could collect little children—abandoned babies, orphans, whatever—and they could work the immortality process on them. That way they’d have immortal agents seeded throughout history. The agents would do various jobs for them, like collecting stuff that would become valuable and hiding it away for ‘discovery’ later.

“This company calls itself Dr. Zeus Incorporated.”

“Dr. Seuss?” Maria had a jarring mental image of Ambrose Muller/Anthony Miller and his Cat in the Hat smile.

“Zeus,” said Uncle Porfirio. “Greek mythology? The nuns taught you about it at Immaculate Heart, right? Zeus, who ruled over the other gods and goddesses because he was the only one who could rescue them from his father, the ogre Time. We heard that story a lot, when we were growing up, all of us little cyborgs-in-training. It was supposed to make us grateful and proud to serve the Company.

“Tonantzin was a cyborg. She was there, positioned in Montezuma’s court, to salvage things for future investors before Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Afterward, she had the chance to recruit an orphan for the company, so she did.”

“But why didn’t she want your brother?” Maria asked.

“You have to fit a certain physical profile,” said Uncle Porfirio. “I had what they called Optimum Morphology. Agustin didn’t. So, when the doctors at the Company hospital were able to pry him out of my arms, they sent Agustin off to be adopted. He was placed in a good home, with a nice mortal couple. That was supposed to be the end of the story.

“It wasn’t. One of the first things I did, when I was a grown-up cyborg, was track down Agustin. He thought he was a wealthy planter’s only son. I sure as hell couldn’t tell him who I was, but we became friends. Close as brothers. I looked after him, just as my mother had told me to do. He got married, he raised a family, he got old and died. His kids raised families of their own, and they died, too, but the family line went on. I kept an eye on them all.”

“And nobody ever noticed you never got old or died?” said Maria, and immediately regretted her sarcasm.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Uncle Porfirio, scowling. “I wore makeup, to look like I was aging. I’d go away, send word I’d died, or I’d stage my own accidental death or murder. I’d lie low for thirty years, fifty years. By the time I’d come back, nobody would remember me, and I could start again. I could pose as a long-lost cousin or a friend of the family. It didn’t matter. I watched over them. I helped them.

“Four hundred years, I’ve kept the family together. I carried your great grandmother Maria from the flood that washed away the old mansion. I gave Lupe’s great grandfather Diego the money to buy the ranch in Durango. I pulled Hector from the truck accident when his mother was killed, and carried him to an orphanage. I dragged him to the field hospital, when he was shot by the Japanese.”

“You know all the family history,” said Maria, stunned as it began to sink in on her that she was hearing the truth.

“Every birth, death, and marriage, every name,” said Uncle Porfirio. “And it’s been enough to make an immortal pray for strength, you know that? I can never rest. Always, one of you had some crisis to be solved. Even then I couldn’t always save you. Hector and Lupe were the last two, distant cousins, the last two branches of the family. I thought it would be smart to introduce them. Bring the family together again under one roof. It was a stupid move; it just put all the eggs in one basket.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t have been so damned helpless if you hadn’t always been there to manage every detail of our lives,” Maria retorted. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Believe me, I have,” said Uncle Porfirio. He looked gloomily into his empty cup. “But it’s not easy to let go. Look what happens when I leave for a few years! How about you, mi hija? Were you able to call Child Welfare on Tina, for getting drunk when she had a little baby depending on her?”

Maria blinked at him a moment, and then sputtered: “What, you people can read minds, too? Is that some cyborg superpower?”

“No,” said Uncle Porfirio. “But after four hundred years, you get pretty good at knowing what people are thinking.”

He shrugged restlessly, looked around; got up and opened the refrigerator. “I need something sweet. Where’re the piloncillos?”

“I think there’s some in the cheese compartment,” said Maria. “But—”

He had already found the brown sugar cones, and crunched down on one with a sound like granite cracking. “Jesus, this tastes like a fossil! How long has this been in here?”

Maria, realizing it had been in there since 1985, flushed and said: “Nobody did much cooking after Mama died, okay? I’ve been holding down nine-to-five jobs since I got out of high school. Papi would go to the store, and buy piloncillos and chorizo and God knows what else, and then expect it to cook itself. I can’t cook like Mama did!” Her voice began to rise, even as she became aware she was reacting out of all proportion. “You just went away and dumped it all on me, you know that? I never had a life of my own. I did have my own apartment, for one year, eleven months, and three days exactly. I spent all my time being Mama’s nurse and Papi’s other wife and Tina’s other mom. Why me?”

“Because you were the only one strong enough to carry the weight,” said Uncle Porfirio. “The only one I could trust to hold the family together.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Maria bitterly. “You could have helped, somehow. You could have at least gone to see Papi.”

“I did,” said Uncle Porfirio, grimacing. “I broke all the rules, and I did visit your father. And it got him killed.”

“What?” Maria stared at him. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you talking about the guy in the white coat? Dr. Ambrose Muller? He’s an immortal, too.”

“You figured that out on your own, didn’t you?” Uncle Porfirio shook his head. “You were always sharp. Like me. Ay, mi hija, what an agent you would have made.

“Okay: the people who gave us everlasting life weren’t the smartest bunch of venture capitalists who ever implanted a biochip. If they’d known just a little less about cybertechnology and more about human nature, it would have dawned on them that living forever isn’t for everybody.

“Hell, I don’t know that it’s for anybody. After a few centuries, most immortals are tired of living. But they can’t die. That makes some of them pretty sore.

“And some of them come to the conclusion, especially after living through a few wars, that it’s not worth it to save the world. Some of them have decided that the world would be better off if the human race died out.

“This goes against all our programming, of course, but… we were people to start with, before they made us something else. So there are good immortals and there are bad ones. And, about four hundred years ago, a kind of underground movement started.

“The guy who killed Hector is one of them.

“He went crazy back in 1937, or maybe that was when he just decided to hell with it and decided to start killing mortals. A crazy cyborg is bad news for the Company. The mortal masters, up there in the future, won’t even admit we can go mad. So they have ways of covering up incidents like that, and so somebody slipped him a Mickey Finn that made him look dead. He was supposed to have been collected at the funeral home and taken off to a Company holding facility.

“Apparently, he was revived and recruited by the underground instead. He may have been working for them ever since. Recently, though, he seems to have gotten careless again. He’s let himself be seen.

“I was already on his trail. He began playing cat-and-mouse with me. He found out I had a family, started stalking all of you. I came to see Hector and caught him there, giving Hector a shot. He took off and I chased him up to the roof, but he went over the side and got away. I went back… and there wasn’t any way I could help your father. This group engineers plague viruses… among the other things they do. So I put on his favorite music for him, and I told him good-bye.”

“But why?” Maria said hoarsely, feeling her throat constrict. “Why kill Papi?”

“To show me he knew about him. To show me he could,” said Uncle Porfirio.

“And… all that crazy business with Papi’s teeth? The letters to me? What was that all about?”

Uncle Porfirio sighed. “That was a game of chicken. He was systematically blowing my cover, and the Company’s cover, too. You’d already put it all together. The longer I waited, the bigger the mess I’d have to clean up.”

“Waited to do what?” asked Maria.

But he had turned his head, was staring through the house at the front door. His lean dark profile was like a wolf’s, and his lips drew back from his teeth in a wolf’s snarl. Maria set her hand on her gun.

“Put it away, mi hija,” said Uncle Porfirio, very quietly. “It can’t help you, and it might make things worse. Let’s go into the living room.”



They sat on the couch, side by side in the light from the pink candles, and the Virgin of Guadalupe smiled on. Uncle Porfirio leaned forward, tense, silent. Maria strained to listen: the sounds of traffic had faded to the occasional whoosh of a car along Fountain, and insects creaking in the night. She heard the light footsteps long before they came near, proceeding along the sidewalk, pausing before the house, turning up the walk. No heavy shuffling tread. The walker had nothing to disguise.

He skipped lightly up the front steps, and a second later Maria heard another key in the lock. She felt a moment of vague outrage—how many people had keys to her house?—before the door swung open.

He wore no white coat now, though he was still smiling.

“Hi, Maria,” he said. His smile widened when he saw Uncle Porfirio. “Well, finally! I was beginning to think you’d never come out of the woodwork. Bet you wish you’d done things my way, after all.”

“I’m here now,” said Uncle Porfirio. “What do you want, Emrys?”

But Emrys, or Ambrose Muller, or Dr. Miller, turned to Maria. “Say, chiquita, why don’t you go fix us a couple of cups of coffee? Cream and sugar for me.”

His voice, his intonation was a little offbeat. Maria struggled to place his accent; what did it remind her of? She realized he sounded like someone in an old movie. People hadn’t prefaced a remark with the word say since the 1930s. Ambrose Muller had supposedly died in 1937. Suppressing a shudder, she said: “Go to hell.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m there already, sister. Your uncle and I need some privacy to talk.”

“She knows already,” said Porfirio. “You told her enough.”

“Suit yourself. I don’t envy you explaining this to your superiors.” Emrys sat down, raised his head, and sniffed the air. “Took a shot at you, did she? You’re lucky she missed. She’s one big old knot of barely suppressed rage, that Maria.”

“Boy, you must have learned a lot from Tina,” said Maria.

He grinned. “So much,” he agreed. He shifted his gaze to Uncle Porfirio. “Quite a trick you’ve pulled off, Security Technical Porfirio. All the rest of us orphans trudge through pointless eternity alone, except for you. You’ve got a family of your very own! Must make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

“Except when they’re in danger, of course.

“The good news is, from this day forward, you won’t be the only one looking out for your family. They’ll have a whole new set of guardian angels watching them. The bad news is, there’s a price for our protection.”

“What do you want me to do?” said Uncle Porfirio in a dead voice.

“Oh, nothing very much,” said Emrys. He leaned forward, smiling in a confidential kind of way. “We want you to keep on doing your job, just as well as you ever have. We respect your work, you know. Maybe once or twice in a century, you’ll get a discreetly worded request. We might need a certain access code. We might need you to bungle a job—though we’ll take pains to provide you with excellent reasons for failure, the kind that wouldn’t arouse suspicion in the most paranoid case officer.”

“Just what is it you do?” Maria asked Uncle Porfirio. He did not reply, staring at Emrys with a face like stone. Emrys chuckled.

“You didn’t tell her that much, did you? I didn’t think you would.” He turned to Maria. “I wonder how your ‘uncle,’ ” and he hooked his index fingers to signify quotes, “explained us to you? In religious terms, am I right? The forces of Good and Evil battling it out across time? And you think your ‘uncle’ is one of the good angels. Not at all, sweetheart.”

Uncle Porfirio shifted in his seat. “How far are you going to take this?” he said, with warning in his tone.

“Don’t you think she deserves the truth? Maria’s the smart one in the family, after all. I think we owe it to her to strip away the mythological crap and tell it like it is.” Emrys made a slicing gesture with his hands.

“The opposing forces here are really Reckless Profit and Conscience. Your ‘uncle’ works for seriously stupid masters, Maria. Money is their greatest good. They created everlasting slaves to get it for them, mining the past like a strata of coal. They didn’t order them to save the animals and the works of art and the children because they were good; they did it because it would make them richer!

“They aren’t remotely concerned with preventing all the horrors and catastrophes they know will befall humanity. Far from it; if it were possible to change history, they might not be the little tin gods they are, up there in the future. They just make damned sure their operatives can grab the loot and run with it when all hell breaks loose. Isn’t that so?” Emrys turned to Uncle Porfirio.

“Yes. It is,” said Uncle Porfirio.

“Their great mistake was in creating slaves who were smarter than they were,” said Emrys. “And who had miserable, interminable millennia to become wiser as well. Over the ages, many of us began to ask: why not try to actually do something about the horror of it all, rather than merely pick up the pieces? Oughtn’t we to turn our astonishing cyborg powers to nobler ends? Think about this, Porfirio. Think of the state the world is in. Think of the poverty and starvation.You could help the mortals!”

“Not the way you want me to,” said Uncle Porfirio.

“You could help them, and you could help yourself,” Emrys insisted. “Do you really believe our masters have that wonderful paradise waiting for us, when our work ends at last? I could show you proof it’s all a lie.”

“I know.”

“And you know, yourself—who better?—that some mortals deserve to die. Have you told her the truth yet, about what happened to that studio bigshot who was dating her mother when Hector came on the scene? The one who took out a contract on Hector’s life, out of jealousy? Funny, the way he drove his car off Santa Monica Pier that very evening.”

“My father didn’t deserve to die,” said Maria, in a thick voice.

“Oh, God, sweetie, you can’t mean that!” Emrys rolled his eyes. “With what he’d been reduced to? Poor old monkey couldn’t even chew his food anymore. If he’d still had enough of a mind to make the choice, I’m sure he’d have begged to be set free. I’m the Angel of Mercy, honey. Didn’t his death make your life easier? To say nothing of letting your ‘uncle’ know what we could do, if we wanted to. Two birds with one stone.”

“You don’t sound much like an angel to me,” said Maria.

“Well, I don’t really care what you think, pachuca,” said Emrys, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back. “Your ‘uncle’ knows I’m speaking the truth. We’re the good guys, Porfirio. Wouldn’t you like to work with people who have principles, for a change?”

“Principles, my ass,” said Uncle Porfirio. “You just like to kill mortals.”

“But I’m sublimating it in a higher cause,” Emrys replied. “Do we have to dip back into the Joseph Campbell mumbo-jumbo for you? Listen to that Aztec blood running in your veins! It knows that sacrifice is necessary. Blood is the only thing that will wash away this filthy mess in which we’re all stranded.”

“Ah, now that’s just racist. What a stupid stunt.” Uncle Porfirio shook his head in disgust. “And that’s why I have one little problem with all of this. The whole time I was on your trail, I never saw any evidence that you aren’t one guy working alone.

“I don’t think you’re a member of the Plague Club. They’re smooth operators. Never draw attention to themselves. You like the attention. You practically carry a neon sign saying ‘Serial Killer.’ That’s why half the LAPD is running around trying to find out who’s copycatting the old Ambrose Muller homicides. And that’s why I don’t especially feel I can trust a word you say, about recruitment or anything else. See?”

Emrys stopped smiling. He brought his arms down slowly.

“Well, excuse me for leaving my membership card in my other pair of pants,” he said. “May I point out that you’re not exactly in a position to demand proof? The nerve! You second-rate thug, do you have any idea how old I am? I’ve traduced kings! Maybe you’re not worth the effort. Maybe we don’t want you after all. But you’d better pray that’s not the case.”

He jumped to his feet and began to pace, and his voice rose as he spoke.

“What else do I have to do? How many of your family have to die before you’ll pay attention to me?”

Maria closed her eyes and thought: Great. What’s worse than an immortal monster in your living room? An insane immortal monster in your living room.

“The sensible choice would be Maria,” said Emrys. “Too old to breed, fat, knows too much. But I like Maria. She was almost a challenge. Isabel’s old, too, but she’s a public figure, and anyway, she does produce something worthwhile in her paintings. Not like Tina. Tina, now, I could wring her head off like a flower! And, oh, have I been tempted, listening to her whine about her sad life. What a relief when her weekly hour was up! I was dreading the inevitable seduction, but if that was what it took to get you to step up to the bargaining table—”

Out of the corner of her eye, Maria observed Uncle Porfirio tensing. With a surreal sense of detachment, she noted his right arm bending, clenching in toward his body with the fist bent forward. Was there something glinting there, between the back of his wrist and his sleeve? He shifted his feet, almost imperceptibly, for better purchase when he sprang… Maria prepared to throw herself to the floor.

“Then there’s the baby,” Emrys ranted. “He really is the ultimate hostage, isn’t he? The last male of your line. If you lose him—”

There was a creak from behind him.

Tina was gliding down the stairs, like a snake. Her eyes were fixed on Emrys. Her face was the scariest thing Maria had seen so far that evening. Uncle Porfirio groaned.

Things happened very quickly then, and only afterward and with great effort was Maria able to reconstruct the exact sequence of events. Emrys turned, saw Tina, and began to laugh, in the same second that Uncle Porfirio launched himself from the couch. Tina moved a split second later, throwing herself at Emrys, screaming in her throat. Maria rose from the couch herself, faster than she would have thought possible, but not in time to come between Tina and Emrys.

She did manage to deflect the blow that would have killed Tina, though it drove her upper arm against Tina’s face and knocked her out cold, and she herself felt a white-hot shock before her arm went numb.

Tina dropped to the floor, limp as a rag. Maria stood there clutching her arm, trying to draw enough breath for a scream of pain, but she just couldn’t seem to; and before her, Uncle Porfirio and Emrys looked like something out of a horror movie. They were grappled together, upright, alternating between blurred kinetic flashes and frozen, locked moments, straining for leverage. Neither one of them looked especially human.

Maria did notice that the claw or needle or spike of bone, whatever it was, had fully extended from Uncle Porfirio’s sleeve and glistened with moisture. Its tip was trembling not an inch from Emrys’s throat. Uncle Porfirio, displaying terrifying bared teeth, was forcing the tip closer, closing the gap…

Emrys kneed him and dove, and the tip of the weapon scored a red line across his cheek but did not go in. He vaulted past Maria and up the stairs, laughing drunkenly. Uncle Porfirio crouched, clutching himself, cursing, suddenly looking a great deal more human.

There was a thunderous crash in Tina’s bedroom, and a grunt of pain.

“That son of a bitch,” gasped Uncle Porfirio. “It’s only slowing him down—”

Maria staggered for the kitchen, thrown off balance by the dead weight of her arm, but as she returned with her gun they heard a window flying open upstairs. There was a thump, a crash on the roof of the porch, and then something landed on the walk with a thud. They heard Emrys guffaw.

“Well, say!” he said, “Look what I found! It’s a li’l brown baby out here. This your baby, Mister Zoo’suit? Say, what was in that needle? I feel good.”

They reached the door at the same moment, and flung it wide to see Emrys on the sidewalk, grinning at them. He was holding up Philip, who looked as though he had only just awakened and wasn’t sure what planet he was on.

“You want ’im?” Emrys chortled. “You sure? Just a li’l brown baby. Billions and billions of the li’l bastards in the world. Why does this one matter, huh?”

“Put him down,” said Uncle Porfirio. “You win, okay?”

“You damn right, I win,” said Emrys, tossing Philip up and down as though he were a ball. The little boy drew in his arms, drew up his knees, closed his eyes tight, but he didn’t make a sound.

“They’re allalike as microbes, and about as important. Mean nothing in the big picture, nothing more than a fly. Speck of dust. But suppose I bounce this one off a wall, so his li’l head splits open. That’ll make you flinch, huh? That’ll tear you up inside. An’ that’s my power over you. I know he doesn’t matter.”

“Come on, man, you don’t need to do this,” said Porfirio, venturing painfully down the steps. Maria followed him like a shadow. “Give Maria the kid. Then we’ll go off, just you and me, and we’ll talk to your friends. Okay?”

“Nope,” said Emrys, catching Philip on his next descent. “Price just went up. Don’ know what I want yet, but I cern’ly got some leverage, haven’I? Ha ha. Byee.”

He turned and ran, unsteady but very fast, and they glimpsed Philip’s little face over his shoulder, rapidly vanishing in the night.

“The car!” gasped Maria, running to the Buick. She dug her keys out and got it started, reaching awkwardly with her left hand as Uncle Porfirio half-fell into the passenger seat, hissing in pain. The Buick lurched away from the curb before he had quite got the door closed. On the dashboard, the Virgin of Guadalupe glowed luridly, like a blacklight painting.

“I don’t care if he’s immortal, if he hurts Philip I swear to God I’m going to take him apart with my two hands,” Maria snarled. “There! There they are at the corner! Roll down the fucking window!”

She hauled up the gun and steered with her left elbow, trying to aim. Uncle Porfirio grabbed the gun from her in consternation.

“Drive, for Christ’s sake! You let me do the shooting.”

“Then shoot him! Aim for his legs. Or somewhere. He got you good, didn’t he? What was that you stuck him with?” Maria swerved, accelerated as Emrys sprinted across the empty intersection.

“Tranquilizer. The only one that works on us, Theobromidan. But he didn’t get much, and it wears off fast. I’ve got darts, though,” said Porfirio, pulling his own gun from its holster. He slipped the safety off, sighted along the barrel. “If I can get him in the back with one of these—oh, shit.”

Bounding ahead of them up Fountain, Emrys had leaped into the back of a pickup truck full of newspapers that waited at the stoplight. He turned, leering hugely in the Buick’s headlights, brandishing Philip at them. Philip was screaming, tears coursing down his cheeks. Emrys hurled a bundle of newspapers at them, and had seized up another as the truck’s driver—an elderly Asian man—jumped out in protest. Turning, Emrys swung the bundle with such force that the old man was knocked flying. He vaulted out of the back with Philip tucked under one arm, slid into the cab, and drove off.

“Come back here, you bastard!” Maria cried, flooring the accelerator pedal. Uncle Porfirio muttered an oath as they surged forward and followed the truck around a corner.

“Mi hija, watch it! You’ll sideswipe somebody.”

“I don’t care,” she said wildly. “Put your stupid dart gun away and use mine! Shoot out his tires!”

“Honey, at this speed, he could flip over—”

“Oh, NO, you SOB, don’t do it! Oh, he’s getting on the 101!”

“God damn,” said Uncle Porfirio, sinking into his seat. “Follow him. How fast can you get this boat to go?”

“We’re going to find out,” said Maria, turning up the on-ramp so sharply that the Virgin of Guadalupe flew off her perch on the dashboard. Uncle Porfirio’s hand shot out and he caught her in midair, stuck her in his coat pocket.

The freeway was nearly empty at this hour, a dark river winding through the heart of Hollywood, and black ivy climbed its banks and waved down from its overpasses. The taillights might have been red eyes in the jungle night. The air even now was hot, dead, heavy, smelling like warm milk. When Uncle Porfirio cranked down his window it pushed into the car with a roar, like a big animal.

The truck ahead of them slowed down, sped up, changed lanes recklessly. Maria followed, grim, steering with her left hand.

“I think he broke my arm,” she said, almost as an aside. Uncle Porfirio turned his head and stared fixedly at her right arm a moment.

“No. But the muscles are torn and you’ve got a hell of a subdural hematoma.You’d better go to a doctor about that, mi hija.”

“What, you’ve got x-ray eyes, too?” Maria laughed without humor, showing her teeth. “Hey, what happens if the cops get in on this chase? Does Doctor Angel of Mercy get hauled off to cyborg jail again? Or is there a cyborg looney bin? Or does he just get handed over to the Cyborg Police Department?”

Uncle Porfirio didn’t say anything, watching the truck.

“You’re with the Cyborg Police Department,” Maria guessed.

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Uncle Porfirio. “He’s exiting at Cahuenga. Change lanes!”

Maria cursed, steered the car across three lanes to make the off-ramp, and Uncle Porfirio had to haul on the wheel with her. They came off the ramp in time to see the lights of the truck speeding away over the hill, in the direction of Franklin.

“You miserable bastard,” said Maria, gunning the engine and shooting up the hill like a rocket. As they crested the top and followed the long curve down, she added: “You don’t save things, do you? Not like the other people who work for this Dr. Zeus Company.”

“No,” said Uncle Porfirio, so quietly she could barely hear him over the rush of air from the window. “I solve problems.”

“And that’s why he said he respected you? Christ Jesus, you’re some kind of corporate hit man. Damn! He’s going left on Franklin. Hope we make the turn!”

They careened around the corner on two wheels and zoomed up Franklin, climbing another hill, never managing to close the distance between the pickup and the Buick.

“It was the price I had to pay, mi hija,” said Uncle Porfirio. “My special arrangement. I’m the only operative I know of with a mortal family. So the Company made an exception for me. Because of what I do for them.”

“What about that studio executive Mama was dating when she met Papi?” asked Maria. “Was that a Company job, too?”

“That was different,” said Uncle Porfirio, after a pause. “He was a mobster. He was bad for Lupe, and then he threatened Hector.”

“Don’t tell me any more,” said Maria. “Deal,” he replied.

Down the hill and along the corridor of Franklin, and the night air was sweet again with jasmine and copa de oro from terrace gardens. Ahead of them the truck accelerated suddenly and was gone, vanishing left.

“That’s Bronson,” shouted Uncle Porfirio. “He’s going up to Bronson Canyon. Make a left!”

Maria obeyed. Within a block they were going uphill through old Hollywood, residential streets laid out in the 1920s, green gardens clinging to the canyon walls. There were Spanish haciendas, there were English Tudor cottages, and French chateaux, and here and there an ersatz Neutra apartment building like a raw scar; but they went by in a blur, every one of them, and the cool night air streamed down the canyon like water.

“I know where he’s going now,” said Uncle Porfirio. There was a certain grim satisfaction in his voice.

“Where?” Maria leaned forward as she drove, concentrating, for the street had narrowed.

“Old Bronson Quarry.” Uncle Porfirio checked his pistol.

“The place with the cave? Where they shot Teenagers from Outer Space?” Even in her terror and rage, Maria was incredulous. “And, like, I don’t know how many Star Trek episodes?”

“Yeah. That’s it,” said Uncle Porfirio. “The great thing about it is that it’s invisible. You go there, and you recognize it immediately because of Outer Limits or Ed Wood or whatever. And because it’s familiar, your brain just turns off what’s actually there and shows what you remember from TV instead. The Company uses places like that all the time. Concealed storage, transport stations… and places to rendezvous.”

They had the truck in front of them once more, as the road climbed, as the houses became fewer and farther between. Two cylinders were making a big difference; the little truck did not like hills, and they were closer now, close enough to see Emrys’s hunched shoulders as he drove. Far above them the Hollywood sign loomed, ghostly in the reflected light of the city.

Abruptly they were out of the residential area, as canyon walls loomed close on either side of the road, which seemed as though it was about to end in a narrow parking lot. But the truck sped straight through it and turned right, smashing open a barred gate, making another sharp right, and losing speed abruptly as it climbed.

“I hope this car has good suspension,” said Uncle Porfirio, and a moment later Maria understood why; for now they were bouncing up an un-paved track. Bushes clawed at them to either side, boulders scraped the oil pan underneath. Even with the racket, they were now so close to the truck that Maria could hear Philip’s screams coming from its cab.

“Oh,” Maria wept, “mi hija, please hold on. Please!”

“As soon as you get the chance,” said Uncle Porfirio, “pull up on his right.” He unbuckled his seat belt.

And then he was gone, having writhed out the passenger window like smoke, apparently onto the roof of the Buick, for Maria heard the sheet metal above her head flexing as he leaped. Then he was abruptly in the back of the pickup, and then he had punched in its rear window, and then he was gone. But the cab of the truck was full of a writhing darkness, and it veered suddenly to the right.

Maria sped up, pulled around the truck on the right as she had been told, and now she saw why; for on the right the embankment dropped away, and what a long way down it went, with the paved road far below! She wondered briefly how many filmed car chases had ended in a gangster’s Packard or De Soto tumbling end over end down this drop, to finish in a nicely cinematic fireball: Crime Does Not Pay.

Her car was straddling the verge, the oil pan was grinding on gravel, now, but she cranked the wheel ferociously to the left and fendered the pickup, forcing it to stay on the road. Horrible, horrible noises were coming from the truck’s cab. Suddenly an arm shot out the window, holding Philip by the scruff of his jammies like a little sack of mail.

Maria lunged, grabbed him with her good arm, stamped on the Buick’s brakes, and prayed. She was able to drag Philip in over the window frame and clutch him to her chest, with an overpowering sense of relief. His arms went around her neck, his wet screams deafened her, and she cradled him and told him everything was all right, all right, all right. The Buick lurched to a stop on the edge of the trail.

The truck went rumbling on, purely on momentum, for it was no longer being driven or steered, and the trail was no longer climbing but opened instead into an immense amphitheater, towering rock walls all around three sides. Right where a stage ought to be was the cave Maria had seen in so many cheesy movies. The truck rattled toward it crazily, lighting its black mouth as the high-beams swept across. And… there was a figure standing in the cave, not thirty yards away.

Maria blinked through her tears, as she patted and crooned to Philip. For a moment her brain fought with her, telling her it had seen the Robot Monster, complete with gorilla suit and fishbowl helmet. Or had that been Tor Johnson in a torn shirt, with a glimpse of boom mike above his head? Or even the Aztec Robot from Mars? She remembered what Uncle Porfirio had told her about such places, as the figure walked forward from the pitch-black into starlight. Another slow circle of the truck, moving quite aimlessly now, lit the figure up white.

It was a starship captain in a federation uniform. No! It was a man in a business suit. Just a man.

Yet it wasn’t just a man… was it?

The truck juddered to a halt at last. Something went flying out of the driver’s side window. Had that been a gun? Maria looked around her on the seat and realized Uncle Porfirio had taken her gun. Which gun had just gone out the window?

“Philip, sweetie,” she whispered huskily, “we have to get out of here.”

She tried to set him on the seat beside her, but he clung and whimpered. She reached across the wheel with her left hand, found the gear shift, put the Buick in reverse. Turning to look over her shoulder as best she could with Philip there, she began to edge the car back down the trail.

She might have made it, if her front left tire hadn’t been shot out.

The car jolted, sagged leftward; Philip screamed again, struggling. She turned and saw Emrys, who had emerged from the truck and was standing, braced with legs apart, clenching the gun with both hands. His Cat in the Hat smile was back, even creepier now because his face was scored with red lines. He looked as though he’d been in a fight with a much bigger cat; possibly a jaguar.

He raised the gun, pointing it high, at the stars; then brought it down, slowly, aiming at her face.

Then he lurched sideways, as Uncle Porfirio came from nowhere and leaped on him. The second shot went wide, spurted dust harmlessly ten feet from the car. The two men were a blur of motion and hideous noise on the ground, in the white light and black shadow from the Buick’s headlights, and dust rose in the beams like smoke.

The man in the space suit—No!—the man in the Armani suit was walking toward them. He was tall, dark-visaged, with autocratic good looks. He might have been an Egyptian high priest, or a Roman senator, or an English headmaster. He wore the frown of a judge about to reprove an unwise counsel. When he spoke, clear across that amphitheater in the silence of the night, Maria heard the measured tones of Patrick Stewart—No! But something very like them.

“If you please, gentlemen,” he said. “Stop that at once. Get to your feet.”

The blur rolled apart. The two men struggled upright. Their clothes were torn, they were gashed and bleeding. As Maria stared, the wounds began to close. The bleeding stopped and their edges flowed together like melting wax.

Uncle Porfirio folded his arms, looking as much like a scornful Satan as she could ever remember, even in his ruined suit. Emrys, by contrast, smiled and bowed, rubbing his hands as though in gleeful anticipation.

“I brought him, Labienus,” he said. “See? I knew you wanted him, and I found a way to get him for you! Isn’t this a coup? Isn’t this a feather in my cap? You can excuse a few little quirks of independence, can’t you, for such a prize?”

But the dignified man was shaking his head. “Emrys,” he said, “you really are a loose cannon.”

Emrys lost his smile at once.

“Don’t call me that,” he said.

“Are you raising your voice to me?” inquired the dignified man. “I think you’d better not do that.”

“You ungrateful cretin!” Emry’s voice became shrill. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know who you were, Emrys,” said the dignified man. “Nowadays you’re simply a nuisance. On your knees!”

Maria jumped at the change in his voice on the last command. Emrys folded at the knees as though pushed from behind. He looked up at the man in astonishment, rage fading into fear. The man stepped closer, and spoke quietly once more.

“You were warned repeatedly, Emrys, weren’t you? We did give you every chance, in view of your not inconsiderable talents. But you’ve become a liability to our organization, I’m afraid. This really has been the last straw.”

“But—you wanted him.” Emrys, beginning to sob, waved a hand at Uncle Porfirio. “And he was perfect. He has a weakness you can exploit!”

“I wanted a Security Technical,” said the dignified man. “Not this one. He has entirely the wrong psychological profile for our organization, however talented he may be. However vulnerable his personal arrangements make him. And you were told that, weren’t you? Yet you disregarded orders, Emrys.

“You took it on yourself to stage a bizarre and highly theatrical recruitment campaign. Were you aware that the police have tracked you down? They’re waiting at your office. They’re waiting at your apartment. I myself had the honor of a conversation with a plainclothes detective, not six hours ago. I had to spin them quite a story.”

“As though, we care what the mortals think!” said Emrys.

“That is not the point.” said the other. “You have drawn unnecessary attention to our organization, to say nothing of contravening some of the most elementary laws concerning Company security in general. I am extremely disappointed.”

How grave, how sorrowful was his voice.

“But I’m useful,” Emrys wept. “I’m a genius.You need me.”

The dignified man just shook his head.

“Genius? I’ve never seen such an amateurish job in my life. A Section Seventeen violation, for heaven’s sake!”

“What? No!” Emrys looked up, startled. The dignified man arched his nostrils in disgust.

“Security Technical, kindly explain a Section Seventeen violation to the prisoner.”

“I know what—”

“It’s 1991, asshole,” said Uncle Porfirio. “You sent a mortal a digital image inkjet-printed on paper.”

“But—within another few years—even months—”

“But not now,” said the dignified man. “You are guilty of an anachronism,” and he spat the word out as though he hated the taste of it, “that any neophyte would have been able to avoid. To say nothing of deliberately revealing the Company’s existence to a mortal. This business is finished. Bow to me, Defective.”

Emrys began to cry, really bawl like a child, but he leaned forward. The dignified man reached into the inner breast pocket of his coat. What he brought forth was small, silvery, only glimpsed in his hand as he thumbed a button. He swung his hand over Emrys’s neck.

There was a flash of blue and Emrys’s head fell off, not with the expected sputter of wires and broken circuits but with a fountain of blood, and the headless trunk flopped forward. The dignified man stepped back to avoid being splashed. He tucked the unseen instrument back in his pocket.

Uncle Porfirio did not move.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“Ah,” said the dignified man, smoothing his lapels. “Why, it’s a stalemate, isn’t it? Surely you see that. You know of the existence of our organization. We, on the other hand, know your little secret.” He nodded toward Maria and Philip. Maria just stared back at him, mechanically rocking Philip, who had subsided into sniffles.

“I want my family left alone,” said Uncle Porfirio. The man looked pained.

“Please,” he said, with a dismissive gesture. “So long as they exist, we have a certain leverage with you. Isn’t that so? And while I’d never be so foolish as to pressure you to help us, I do expect you to look the other way from now on. You may, in fact, be called upon to be absolutely blind on one or two occasions.”

Uncle Porfirio said nothing for a long moment. Far off across the city, the first faint sirens of the morning started up. Somewhere, robbery or rape or murder was in progress. Somewhere, some bright new policeman with a bright new badge believed he could do something about it. Uncle Porfirio sighed.

“What about him?” He nodded at Emrys’s body.

“Do as you please,” said the dignified man. “Take his head, perhaps? Consider it an earnest of good faith on our part. And leave his body here a few hours, to let the coyotes eat their fill of him. That’s what I’d do.

“I suspect you’ll do the honorable thing and deliver his parts to the Company. Another defective rounded up and deactivated! Bravo, Security Technical Porfirio. One more success in your distinguished record of service to Dr. Zeus.”

Smiling, he turned and walked away a few paces; then stopped and turned back.

“A word of advice,” he said. “As part of our mutual avoidance policy. Get your family out of Los Angeles. We’re going to be rather busy here, over the next few years.”

He vanished into the shadows.



Uncle Porfirio walked back to the Buick.

“You have a spare in the trunk, right?” was all he said.

“Yeah,” said Maria. “Who was that? The Lord of Evil?”

“Something pretty close,” said Uncle Porfirio, reaching past her for the keys. “We’re not going to talk about it anymore, okay?”

She got out of the car and stood under the pale stars with Philip, who had fallen asleep, while Uncle Porfirio changed the tire. As he was putting the flat tire and jack in the Buick’s trunk, Uncle Porfirio asked: “What’s in this plastic bag?”

“My box of laundry soap.”

“I need to use the bag, mi hija.”

“But I hate getting detergent spilled all over the inside of the trunk.”

“Better that than something else.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said, and watched numbly as Uncle Porfirio walked back toward the cave. A moment later he returned, carrying something in the green bag, and set it in the trunk beside the jack.

“So… I thought he was an immortal,” said Maria.

“He is,” said Porfirio, slamming the trunk. “Too bad for him. Get in the other side, mi hija. I’ll drive back.”

Maria sat beside him, watching as he backed the car down the trail, as he expertly pulled out on the paved road, drove away from the realm of flying saucers, giant mutant tarantulas, and creatures out of legend. And yet… here, at the wheel of her car, was an undying creature who had seen twelve generations pass into dust. She looked furtively at his Aztec profile.

She was silent until Franklin Avenue, when she said: “Please, tell me. Is there a God? Do we have souls? Is there any fucking point to this life?” His voice was flat with exhaustion. “How would I know all that, mi hija? I don’t know. Nobody I’ve talked to in four hundred years has told me, either.”

“Then what the hell do you know?”

He looked sidelong at Philip as he drove. Reaching out, he touched the child’s sleeping face.

“That this is all we have, mi hija. And it doesn’t last, so you have to take good care of it.”



The Virgin of Guadalupe was still on duty, in her cloud of rose perfume. Tina still lay where she had fallen, in the silent house, but she was breathing. They lifted her onto the couch and covered her with a blanket. While Uncle Porfirio was cleaning up and changing into an old suit of Hector’s, Tina became foggily conscious. Maria told her she’d been sleepwalking and fallen down the stairs. When Uncle Porfirio came back, he pretended to be an EMT, checking her vital signs and asking her questions about how she felt.

Maria left him sitting beside Tina, speaking to her in a low and soothing voice, while she went upstairs and bathed Philip. He woke crying, staring around; but, seeing no monsters, he calmed down and let her put him in fresh diapers and a sleeper. It took twice as long as usual with only one hand. When she carried him downstairs, in the pale light of dawn, Tina was sitting up, smiling if glassy-eyed.

“There’s my little guy!” she said, reaching out for Philip. “Mommy fell down and went boom! Were you scared?”

Philip wriggled into her arms, beginning to cry again, and she hugged him. Looking over his shoulder at Maria, she added: “I don’t think that new medication Dr. Miller prescribed was good for me, you know?” A shadow crossed her face. “I… don’t think I want to go back to Dr. Miller. I had a really creepy dream about him.”

“Okay,” said Maria. Uncle Porfirio cleared his throat.

“Ms. Aguilar, I need to give you a list of symptoms you need to watch for.”

“Sure.” Maria picked up the TV remote, handed it to Tina, took the baby from her arms. “Why don’t you find some cartoons to watch, okay, mi hija? I’ll get breakfast for Philip.”

They left her happily watching Bugs Bunny. In the kitchen, Maria made coffee while Uncle Porfirio looked into Philip’s eyes, spoke to him in a voice so quiet Maria could barely make out what he said. Philip was tranquil after that, feeding himself, eating Cream of Wheat with his right fist while carefully holding the spoon in his left. He watched, in mild interest, as Uncle Porfirio fashioned a sling for Maria’s arm and made her take two aspirins.

“What happens now?” Maria inquired in a murmur.

“Now I steal your gun. And your car,” said Uncle Porfirio. “Too much to clean up, mi hija, and you won’t want it back when I finish what I have to do. It’s insured, right?”

“I haven’t paid the premiums in a month. I’m unemployed right now,” said Maria, bemused. The night and all its horrible wonders had receded like tidewater, and the mundane rock of her old problems stood exposed again, quite unchanged.

“I’ll send you money,” Uncle Porfirio told her, as though reading her mind. “I have some saved. Buy another car. No SUVs, okay?”

“What’s an SUV?”

“You’ll find out. Get another Buick, maybe, or a Volvo. Put the house on the market with a Realtor. Take Tina and the baby and go, get the hell out of Los Angeles. Find a place in Taos, near Isabel. She needs to meet her grandson.”

“Oh, she’ll love that, being reminded she’s a grandmother!” Maria grinned involuntarily. But he wasn’t smiling.

“You’re serious, aren’t you? About what that guy told you. Labienus.”

Uncle Porfirio flinched. “Don’t even mention his name.” He gulped his coffee and stood. “I made a deal with a devil, so I’m not about to waste any inside information I get from him.”

“But… you’re not really going to just look the other way, when he wants you to?”

Uncle Porfirio shrugged into his coat, not answering.

“But what you told me, about what those people do… doesn’t that mean innocent people will die?”

“And other innocents will live,” he said. “There’s a price to pay for everything. But I made the deal, mi hija; not you. That weight, you don’t have to bear.”

He stepped to the back door and opened it.

“Keep the family together,” he said, and slipped out, and was gone into the morning.

She never saw him again.



One month and an epic garage sale later, Maria stood on the front porch of the house on Fountain. Tina was buckling Philip into his car seat, in the new—well, 1986—Buick Skylark, which was crammed to the roof with all their remaining possessions. But it was solid, dependable, insured, had side mirrors and a good spare, and there were no severed heads in the trunk.

They were leaving late. The last-minute packing had taken longer than Maria had expected. All the same, she lingered on the porch, turning the key over in her hand. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Acrid smell of dry rot, old plaster, dead leaves. The place of her childhood was long gone.

This place would be a parking lot, in another year. The Hollywood sign would look down on… what? Riots? Epidemics? Ruins? This cycle of time was ending, but what could she do about it? Run through the streets shouting a warning, like the man at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? As though anyone listened to the Maria Aguilars of this world.

She walked down the front steps, scowling up at the hazy sky. Summer was gone, too; the late sunlight gave no warmth where it slanted, and the green leaves looked tired, frayed. Far off to the west, a few rifts of fog were drifting in from the distant sea. It would be a chilly night, and an early winter.

But the family would be somewhere else by then, safe in a new place. When the new cycle started, that had been paid for in blood, they would endure.

And she had to admit she felt less of a weight on her shoulders, now. Somebody else remembered her parents, so that Hector was more than a gravestone and Lupe more than a flickering black-and-white image in an old movie. Somebody else knew about Abuela Maria and the ranch in Durango. Somebody else was the guardian of their past, kept the family’s story safe, a long and perfect and unbroken chronicle. It could never be forgotten, and maybe it would never end.

Doggedly she walked to the car, refusing to look back.

“Auntie!” Tina was leaning out the Buick’s window, her face shining with awe. “Look at this. The Blessed Mother’s in the car!”

“She’s in the trunk,” said Maria, going around to the driver’s side. “I packed her in with the bath towels.”

“No, I mean the one that got stolen with the old car!” cried Tina, pointing. Maria slid behind the wheel and halted, staring. There on the dashboard was the plastic Virgin of Guadalupe, robed in the starry heavens, crowned in the glory of the setting sun.

“If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is,” said Tina, wiping away a tear. “You see? Everything’s going to be all right now. It’s a sign that somebody’s watching over us.”

Maria nodded slowly.

“I guess so. Fasten your seat belt, mi hija.”

She closed the door, fastened her own seat belt, adjusted the mirrors. Pulling carefully out into traffic, she headed for the nearest freeway on ramp.

Unseen, five cars behind her in a Lincoln Continental, Porfirio followed.

The End.