Guerrero
Remember, it growled...you have a choice. You can just walk away. You can find a better path.
I awakened to find myself standing under a street lamp, bathed in a cone of light raining down from above. In my right hand I held an empty rifle; the hot barrel was still smoking, flavoring the cool night air with the unmistakable smell of burnt carbon.
Before me, propped up against the post of the street lamp, lay a broken mirror. Its shattered pieces clung to the inside of the frame, islands of reflection separated by a web of cracks radiating from a small dark hole in the center, a hole from which a small, delicate plume of smoke drifted skyward. In the fragmented reflection, I saw both the dark silhouette of myself, and behind me, the unmistakeable gait of a wounded animal.
I spun around to find a wolf quietly limping towards me.
Like some mythical beast born fresh from a womb of pure shadow, it gracefully combed the pavement like a broken knife. White fur caught glimpses of the street light. Fresh blood dripped slowly from a wound in its side. And in its jaws, it firmly held a long shred of black fabric clenched between a collection of keen fangs. It stopped, slowly turning its head towards me. It stared directly at me with its kaleidoscope eyes.
I saw it, and it saw me. It was hurt, but so was I, in one sense or another. Weren’t we all? Maybe it had all the answers. Maybe? No, probably not…but perhaps it had just one.
Placing the empty rifle on the ground, I approached it, slowly. Like two entangled particles, we danced in the eternity of the moment, gazes locked in the timeless now. Whether it spoke with sound or vibration I could not say, but the words it said next, those words I will never forget.
Remember, it growled...
You have a choice. You can just walk away. You can find a better path.
Then the wolf broke our gaze and hobbled off into the night, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. Desperately seeking meaning in a world that offered none, I followed.
The wolf led me down a dark alley I hadn’t been down before.
It led away from everything familiar, into the unknowable, into emptiness.
We must have walked for miles. Miles and miles and miles. It seemed like we walked forever, but the moon and the neon and the streetlights lit the way, and so our journey, while quite lengthy, seemed to take no time at all. Perhaps we had walked so far that we had stepped outside of time itself. Who could say.
Eventually we reached the massive parking lot of an abandoned strip mall. Sparse dots of luminance from the occasional working light source peppered the cracked, wet asphalt around me. Empty tombs of concrete and glass anchored the broken lot to the ground - dead soldiers from a lost war, where massive retail golems, once thought to be invincible, were massacred by the delivery economy, leaving useless gargantuan paperweights such as these behind. The wolf walked to the far corner of the main building. There it paused, waiting for me to catch up, and when saw that I was still following, it walked around the corner, leading me to a place where the world ended and love was afraid to go.
There, between the loading docks and the dumpsters, a new reality was being constructed. I watched as dozens of men in a production crew removed boxes from a trailer, setting up lights, cameras and chairs, creating a semicircular stage underneath a single overhead light. And behind them, tucked away behind the trailer, a long dark limousine with tinted windows lay parked in the shadows, waiting in silence, like a monster hiding underneath a child’s bed.
As I watched from a distance, the limousine pulled forward. One of the back windows opened, slowly lowering down, and a skeletal hand in a tuxedo sleeve with glistening cufflinks reached out into the night, gesturing for the wolf to come near, which it did. The bony hand stroked the fur of the injured wolf, soothing the wounded beast. It reached over and took the black rag out from its jaws, and with its quarry firmly held, retracted back into the safety of the limo.
Then the window closed and the limo retreated into its lightless cove, and the wolf and I continued prowling the landscape of the night.
Finally we arrived at a cheap motel on the edge of town. I followed the beast as it lumbered up a flight of stairs, speckling the treads and risers with drops of its precious blood.
We stopped at room 11. I looked down. The wolf stood there, panting in the cool night air, bleeding heavily. How it was still alive was a mystery to me. It looked at me, urging me to knock on the door with its eyes. And so I did. A moment later, the door swung open. A man with a flannel shirt and sombrero greeted us.
“Hola, amigo. We’ve been waiting for you.”
The man ushered us inside. The room was like a scene out of a circus, a strange puzzling landscape of oddities and horrors and nonsensical entities. A fat man sat on the bed. He was impossibly large, just a big sweaty ball of humanity, clad in sweatpants and a tie dyed hoodie, reading a coffee table book on alchemy. Three rail thin women wearing black funeral gowns and pitch dark sunglasses sat on a couch nearby, chanting bleak hymns of cryptic origins while they worked meticulously on a jigsaw puzzle on a table in front of them, carefully inspecting each and every piece before attempting to place it, examining them like fine gemstones waiting to be mounted in an antique necklace. A nearby television flashed images of the nightly chaos against the walls of the room. The news was on. The war had started. Which one, I did not know. At this point, there were too many to count.
And in the far corner, barely visible in the shadows, a man in a dark suit sat in an ornate armchair. He had the head and hands of a praying mantis. Holding a baton in his left pincher, he drew a delicate network of phantom arcs in the air before him. He was in his own world, tracing distinct measures and swipes with great intent, as if he was conducting an invisible orchestra that only he could hear.
“Come,” the first man said, but not to me - to the wolf. It lowered its head and hobbled across the room, where it collapsed on the carpet in front of the tv. Blood flowed from its wound like a gently gushing stream. Its eyes drooped. Tired, like a warrior after a long battle. Bled out and beaten, like some mangled boxer staggering home after losing a fixed fight.
Sombrero knelt down and stroked the beast’s fur, offering it water from a bronze pitcher.
“Guerrero,” he whispered, shaking his head with clenched teeth.
“Can’t we get him some help? Take him to a vet?” I asked, not really knowing what I was saying, but wanting to help nonetheless, but without - of course - considering the complications and consequences and requirements of my preposterous suggestion, but still, having a desire to both feel significant and a longing to be recognized as - at best - a caring, helpful individual - and, at worst - a person who at least pretended to be one, favoring an illusory facade of contribution and ‘being supportive’ over more a more mature course of action, such as remaining silent and getting out of the way.
The man looked at me with a curious expression. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was a genius or an idiot. As he began to laugh hysterically, my uncertainty in that matter was quickly demystified.
“What vet would see him now, amigo? He’s a wild wolf, a feral animal, not some lujazo Instagram poodle mix.” The fat man looked up from his book and chuckled too. The two of them shared a good laugh, and for a moment the air in the room seemed a shade lighter. Even the three women paused in their chants and puzzle solving, enjoy a sliver of comedy amongst themselves. Then Sombrero spoke and it was back to business as usual.
“The only thing that can help him now is death,” he said. He reached down, and sensing the animal’s waning energy, placed his hand over its face, gently closing both eyelids. He held his hand there as the wolf’s breathing crawled to a stop, and its last breath left its body forever.
Sombrero removed his hand from the wolf’s face. Slowly he turned around, letting his eyes drift up from the dead wolf to me. The fat man looked at me as well, sizing me up like a rack of ribs. The ladies too. Even the mantis was staring at me, pausing his silent symphony as he glared at me with his strange bug eyes. For some strange reason, all of the attention in the room was now on me.
“What brought you here tonight, amigo?” Sombrero asked. His tone had changed.
“I followed the wolf. He brought me here.”
The man looked back at his companions, then back at me. He smiled and then spoke again. “But something else, no? Why would anyone follow a wolf in the middle of the night to a place like this?”
I shook my head, speechless. Rummaging through my mind, I dug for an answer.
“I...sought meaning,” I began, wondering if I sounded mad. “I sought meaning in a world, in a world...
“In a world that offers none,” Sombrero said, finishing my sentence for me.
I nodded in agreement. Sombrero smiled. He turned to the fat man and nodded, and the fat man stood up and walked towards the back of the room. He returned a moment later with a large camouflaged military-grade duffle bag.
“I think maybe you can help us, amigo.”
“How?”
“The beast is dead. We need somebody to take his place.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“We need a new actor, a lead for our play.”
The fat man opened up the bag, removing a wolf mask, a rifle, and a box of ammunition. He took the wolf mask and handed it to Sombrero. Then he ejected a magazine from rifle, loaded it with fresh rounds from the box, and slapped it back into the gun, pulling back on the bolt to load the first round into the chamber. Satisfied, he placed the loaded rifle on the bed.
And while he was doing this, something strange has happened on the television. The news was gone, replaced by what appeared to be live footage of the location the wolf and I had passed through earlier that evening - the production set behind the strip mall. One by one, the lights on the set popped on.
Sombrero put his hand on my shoulder and handed me the wolf mask.
“It’s showtime, amigo.”
And that’s when I noticed it. Each of them - Sombrero, the fat man...the three women. They each had the exact same look on their faces, that look people have when they are trapped in a situation that has grown beyond their control. Even the ladies were showing it - their sunglasses could only hide so much, and an expression such at this was beyond the scope of their concealment. The only exception was the mantis, who continued his invisible symphony, intensifying the speed and punctuation of his movements with each gesture.
Sombrero reached up and tipped his hat towards me. I could see the sweat on his eyeballs. I could smell the fear in this teeth.
“Amigo, it is time,” he said, holding up the mask. It looked ferocious. It had springy whiskers, knifelike teeth, and eyes that looked like the moon the day after a massacre. Sombrero nodded at me, licking his nervous lips as he waited for me to put it on. The fat man began to bounce his knees up and down, which made his enormous body jiggle like a bag full of gelatin, causing the entire bed to shake. A building excitement filled the room. Even the mantis was on his feet now, thrusting his wand out in front of him, carving his mysterious dictates to unseen musicians. And the ladies, the ladies were now almost finished with their puzzle, with only a few pieces remaining to be placed.
The air began to feel thick, hot, accelerated. An aroma of madness bombarded my senses.
“But why me?” I asked, hesitating. Fat man just shrugged. Sombrero shook his head, trying to offer some spark of wisdom.
“No one knows. It just is what it is.”
I took the mask, and raised it to my face. As I did, the mantis accelerated his symphony, carving the air with a frenzied scramble of the wildest gestures. The ladies paused; the final piece of the puzzle now waited for them on the table below. And the fat man continued his nervous bob, shaking the bed with a motion so violent that it tossed the pillows onto the floor. Then, with one final bounce, he landed so hard that the bed frame broke, sending the mattress and its occupant crashing to the ground with such a tremor that it shook the foundation of the building with the strength of a small earthquake.
With that, the mantis reached a crescendo and thrust his pinchers into the air. Then he pointed at me and gave me a nod. A moment later, one of the ladies put the final piece into the puzzle. As she snapped it into place, there was a bright flash of light. She screamed, thrusting herself back into the sofa, towards the safety of her companions. The puzzle, now completed, had transformed, mutating from a network of conjoined wooden pieces into the smooth, metallic surface of a mirror.
Taking a quick bow, the mantis walked over to the bed, grabbed the rifle and the mirror, and flung open the front door, marching off into the cool night. Two of the women, the spectators of the final transformative move, grabbed pillows from the sofa and hid their faces, sobbing. The one who had completed the puzzle rose from the couch and, following the mantis, departed, sauntering out into the nocturnal abyss.
I pulled the mask on over my head and a new me was born. Suddenly I could smell meat and blood all around me. I felt alive, vibrant, savage. Ready to go. My heart shifted gears, leaping from a placid flutter into a raging, throbbing dynamo. I was going to become a hero, a martyr. I saw going to become meaning in a world that offered none.
“Are you afraid of death, Amigo?” Sombrero asked.
I pondered his question with my animal intelligence. Death seemed like a joke now, like a bad hand in a card game that went on forever.
“Never,” I growled.
Sombrero smiled and smacked me on the shoulder. Then he held up a piece of black fabric in front of me. I opened my mouth and grabbed it with my fangs, growling as I clenched it in my wild jaws.
“You know where to go, and you know what to do,” he said.
I stepped outside and walked down the flight of stairs. Dried spots of old blood from a wound I hadn’t suffered yet led me out onto the asphalt plane, towards the edge of the parking lot, towards the back of the strip mall where I would meet my destiny. Everything was ready now. Lights, camera, action. Even the mirror was setup, already leaned against the pole of the streetlight. In its tiny frame, even from such a great distance, I see my own reflection.
*You know where to go...* Sombrero’s voice echoed in my head.
I began to walk towards the set. The limousine pulled out from its hiding spot. The driver stepped out and opened up the back door, and a monstrous lot of skeletons emerged, all clad in top hats, tuxedos and canes. Several other limos showed up, and their grotesque inhabitants did the same. The deceased audience clambered out through into the makeshift theater, taking their seats in the chairs surrounding the stage. Then the silhouette of a man with a rifle in hand stepped into the cone of light, a noir cutout of death awaiting his prey.
*You know what to do...*
I began to approach the stage, ready to claim my moment of fame in whatever flavor it was offered.
“Wait,” said a soft voice from behind me. I looked back. It was the third woman, the one who had fled the room. The puzzle solver. She stepped towards me and kneeled down in front of me, gracefully moving her head close to mine.
“Remember,” she said, whispering into my ear, careful not to let her voice travel too far. “You have a choice. You can just walk away.” As she spoke, I could feel her body slipping away, as if she was losing her grasp on the physical realm.
“You can find a better path,” she said with a final breath.
Then she dissolved, vanishing like a specter, her entire body unweaving like strands of fine gossamer in a windstorm. The only part of her that remained were her sunglasses, which landed on the ground with a slight but audible clatter, a sound which in any other situation might have been purely harmless, but which in this case was just loud enough to alert the production crew to my presence.
“There he is, look!” one of the crew said, pointing at me.
“Don’t just stand there, go after him! We’ve got a show to put on!” another one cried out.
I bolted, exploiting the abilities of my new anatomy to dash across the parking lot, away from the set, away from the cameras, from the production crew and the necrotic patrons awaiting their ghastly show. I spit the black rag out from my mouth and sprinted up and out of the parking lot and across a road, darting up a small hill where the road ran along the edge of a dark forest. Eventually I came to a path on the edge of the woods. It led somewhere else, somewhere I hadn’t been before. Out of this city, perhaps. Out of this city, and away from the broken mirrors and smoking guns and strange motels, off to a place where maybe I could find a new life.
A good life…maybe?
Behind me, I could hear the production crew giving chase. I had to decide. I closed my eyes, and familiar words helped me find my way.
“You know where to go...you know what to do...”
I dashed off the road, into the woods, down the unfamiliar path. Off in the distance, beyond the dense trees and the far off horizon, I could see a sliver of warm light. Was it the sun, teasing the sky just before dawn with its golden hues? Perhaps it was a distant star, or a missing part of my soul.
At this distance, it was impossible to say. But I was determined to find out, or die trying.