Psychic Detective 37 By: Jake Preston
This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html
Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!
Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com
Chapter 37 Aztec Cosmology, I
On the morning of Good Friday, while Salvador and Jack and Göran and Xiu were still on the beach, the heartless unmanned body of an athletic Aztec-looking Mexican was found in the desert south of Mérida, in a place where they harvested wild agave used to distill tequila. When Salvador, Göran, and Jack arrived at Police Headquarters, the Coroner told them that the killer had driven a knife through the victim's left armpit and reached in and pulled out his heart, and afterward severed his genitals.
Jésus and Xiu spent the afternoon visiting the Catédral de Mérida, finished in 1598 after 37 years of construction, an art gallery, and colonial streets and buildings in the centro histórico. In a modern neighborhood, they visited the house where Jacqueline Kennedy lived in retirement after her husband was shot down in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. They kept a lookout for Albino, but the reader will be relieved to know that he did not follow them on this occasion.
Göran asked to visit the body in the morgue. It was removed from the vault on a stretcher, and laid out on a table. Göran stood at the right side of the corpse. He placed his left hand on the place where his genitalia had been, and his right hand over the hollowed-out left side of his chest. Wounds in his groin and his axilla bled at his touch, a phenomenon which (the Coroner said) was an impossibilia.
"This is one of the Papantla acrobats," Göran said. "Pablo Labrador Rivera will be able to identify.... Pablo Rivera will make the identification."
An hour later in the morgue, Pablo Rivera wept over the body, which he identified as that of José Castellano, another Aztec with a Spanish name. The Coroner wrote it down together with information about his family in Papantla.
"We need a private conference," Jack whispered to Salvador. They met in Salvador's office- Jack, Göran, and Pablo. Officially this was Pablo's interrogation, but it was not to be held in the unfriendly quarters of an interrogation room. In the event, Pablo wasn't asked any questions at all.
"I asked for this meeting because Göran knows more than he told the Coroner," Jack said.
"How could he know more?" Salvador wondered.
"He touched the wounds and they bled," Jack replied.
Göran sat silent in his chair. At Jack's prompting, his reluctance gave way to terrible words. "I know something that isn't helpful to the investigation, but I must disclose it first. If I don't, my vision will be obscured." Jack could see that Göran was in a trance, like the day when he wept over unmarked graves at Buffalo Run and skeletal remains seemed to speak to him from below the ground. "The Coroner got it backwards, or perhaps he gave us a humane version of that happened."
"The Papantla acrobat was mutilated first, and heart-sacrifice came after," Jack said. Sometimes he could read Göran's mind.
"His scrotum was severed first," Göran said. "Then his penis. After that, heart-sacrifice was a mercy. He felt everything, and saw it, even Albino holding his still-pulsating heart in his face while he choked on his tongue."
Pablo wept like a boy who had been beaten. "O José!" he cried. Salvador and Jack were too mournful to comfort him except by adding their tears to his.
Horror and sorrow were followed by terror when Göran announced in a monotone clinical voice: "Albino, also known as Howard Coleman, has found a new accomplice, probably a man from México" (he meant Mexico City) "though they might be living in Mérida."
Jack gasped. Pablo looked bewildered. Salvador groaned at the implication. This was a new twist in an already complicated mystery.
"How does he do it?" Jack wondered, meaning, How is Albino able to recruit accomplices?
"Tell the Coroner to check for signs of rape," Göran said. He was right about one thing: the Coroner hadn't checked, being squeamish about digging into the anus of a corpse. Göran continued in his clinical tone: "After the Maundy Thursday performance of the acrobats, José Castellano went to El Flamenco." Göran named a seedy gay bar that he had neither visited nor heard of before. "There, at El Flamenco, José was propositioned by Albino's accomplice, who led him into an alley where Albino was waiting. Naturally Albino had to delegate this task, as a proposition from him would seldom meet with success. The rest is obscure to me, except for the murder. José might have been drugged. Blood-work from the lab will confirm that. They drove him to the desert where the accomplice screwed him from behind. The sex was consensual until Albino pulled a knife. Then it was rape, while Albino cut off his genitals."
"It's starting all over again," Jack said mournfully.
-
Yo no sabía que José era un hombre homosexual, Pablo said, ruefully.
-
Quizás Xiu vio el cómplice en Uxmal, Salvador said. -Él podría saber má de lo cree.
Jack started to translate Salvador's words for Göran, but stopped when he saw that Göran was still in a trance. He signaled for the others to wait in silence.
- Los acróbatas de Papantla deben bailar su certamen Azteca creación de esta tarde, en memoria de José Castellano, Göran said, and it was evident to Salvador and Jack and Pablo that the words were not his but came from José Castellano.
"They're saying that the show must go on," Jack said, and by 'they' he meant both Göran and José.
"If the Policía knew I was taking counsel from a North American mystic, they'd send me to a psychiatrist," Salvador mused. Then he saw blood from José Castellano's wounds on the palms of Göran's hands. Göran had hidden the stains under clenched fists, but now his hands opened and Salvador saw the blood.
Göran ignored the comments of Jack and Salvador, or else he didn't hear them, as he was still in a trance. Göran continued: "The vultures will attack the cosmic serpent at Chichen Itza. Then they will fly to the ya'axche at the sacred cenote. Not for them the river below the roots of the ya'axche. That journey will be for another."
When Göran came out of his trance, Jack and Salvador repeated everything he said. He remembered most of it, but he couldn't explain the part about the vultures and Chichen Itza. "I don't know what ya'axche means," he said. "My guess is that it's some sort of tree." A cenote, of course, is a sinkhole that leads to an underground river, the only kind of river found in Yucatán.
"So we come to the most important part of the message and we don't know what it means!" Salvador exclaimed.
"It was a message from Manitou," Jack explained. "The first part is clear because it tells what already happened. The last part is obscure because it's a prophecy. Göran may not look like an Ojibwe shaman, being a Scandinavian farm-boy, the great shaman of Crane Lake, the shaman we call Dark Eagle, recognizes Göran as a kindred spirit. Whenever a shaman utters a prophecy, it's the responsibility of others to interpret it. That's the way Ojibwe mysticism works. That's why Göran can't explain it. But if the oracle is valid, someone will be able to explain it."
"Maybe we should ask Xiu," Salvador said. Intrigued by the oracular riddle, he forgot his doubts and cast skepticism aside.
On departing the Policía, Göran declined an invitation to wash his hands. "I must wear the blood of José Castellano until his memorial has been fulfilled in the Creation pageant of the acrobats of Papantla," he said. He raised his right hand and inscribed new bloodstains on his forehead and on each cheek. Quite remarkably, the blood hadn't dried, but it didn't leave stains anywhere else except on his forehead and cheeks.
Back at the Juan Carlos Hotel, Jack, Göran and Salvador learned that Jésus and Xiu had gone for a self-guided tour of Mérida. For this reason, the bar was closed, as the manager had failed to reach an accommodation with the bartender and his staff. "It's too early for booze, anyway," Jack said. They took coffee at a Starbucks on the opposite side of the Square. There they were joined by Pablo and two other acróbatas. Pablo had failed to dissuade the acrobats from cancelling their Good Friday pageant. They were in mourning for José Castellano, and also they feared for their safety, they said. "Someone is kidnapping Papantlas for rape-murder," one of them said.
A fourth acrobat joined them. Pablo told them the story of Göran's trance at the Policía, assisted by interjected comments from Salvador and Jack. Skepticism showed in their faces, until Jack explained about Ojibwe mysticism and Göran's status as a shaman among the Ojibwe people. They had never heard of the Ojibwe tribe before, but they knew that Jack was Lakota and they accepted him as one their own. Göran's shaman-like silence persuaded them, too. He spoke not a word in defense of the ya'axchte-oracle when Jack and Pablo asked if they could tell its meaning. "It sounds like a Maya word, but I don't know what it means," one of them said. "The Maya languages are completely different from Nahautl." And now they were intrigued by the oracular riddle, just like Salvador, and Jack understood that this, too, was a miracle from Manitou, for the riddle had united them in a common purpose.
Then they went silent and looked at Göran. It was time for him to say something, and when he did it would be a shaman speaking. Göran understood shaman-etiquette and played his part with a cryptic, authoritative utterance:
"For reasons unknown to me, the azteca creación is required by the Great Spirit as a memorial to José Castellano and as a prerequisite to retribution for his death."
For the benefit of the other acrobats, Pablo translated Göran's words into Spanish: "Por razones que desconozco, la creación azteca es requerido por Ometéotl-Omecíhuatl como un monumento a José Castellano y como requisito previo a la retribución de su muerte." Except that instead of 'Great Spirit', which should have been 'el Gran Espíritu', he substituted 'Ometéotl- Omecíhuatl', an Aztec name that was more meaningful to them and gave them the impression (not entirely unintentional) that Göran was acquainted with the Aztec Creator-God.
"Five acrobats are required for the Creation pageant," one of them said. "Without José Castellano, we'll have to include one of the women in the dance."
"María Santana," one of the acrobats said. "She's a feminist, and she's been asking why women can't dance the azteca creación. Besides, she's one of José's closest friends."
Pablo explained the dance to Jack and Göran. Salvador had heard it before but now he paid closer attention: "The acrobatic dance of Papantla is a moral allegory, a genealogy of gods, and a Creation allegory. After the unsuccessful rebellion and death of Moctezuma's nephew, Cuauhtémoc, it was rumored among the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán that the conquest of their city marked the end of the Fifth Age. 'Today our sun has been canceled', they whispered; 'our sun has gone hiding and left us in complete darkness'. ? Hoy nuestro sol se ha ocultado, nuestro sol se ha escondido y nos ha dejado en la más completa oscuridad."
"Good Friday is a Christian Day of Darkness," Pablo continued. "That's why we perform azteca creación on Good Friday in the colonial town of Mérida, because Mérida was an ancient Maya city, called Ichkaanzihóo, the 'City of Five Pyramids', until 1542 when El Mozo the Conquistador enslaved the Maya and colonized the town for Spain."
"El Mozo?"
"Francisco de Montejo y León. He renamed the town after his Spanish hometown in Extremadura," Pablo replied. "The Spanish Mexicans come for the acrobatics, but they don't understand why we do it in Mérida on Good Friday. It's subversive political theater, signifying the end of the Maya, and symbolically of all Indian cultures, and the beginning of Spanish oppression. It's subversive to Christianity, too, as it presents an alternate myth of Creation. The Aztec Creation myth is similar to that of the Maya."
"And you play the part of the Creator-God?" Jack asked Pablo.
"Yes, I'm the central figure in the pageant. My dance impersonates Ometéotl- Omecíhuatl. That's another Aztec subversion. Ometéotl is male. Omecíhuatl is female. Ometéotl-Omecíhuatl is transsexual. I dance on top of a thirty-meter pole while supporting acrobats who swing from four ropes. I start out as Ometéotl and we dazzle our macho homophobic spectators with our acrobatics and then I become Omecíhuatl and then Ometéotl again, and Omecíhuatl. Through my erotic impersonation, the Father-Mother of Creation reveals Himself and Herself as both genders."
"Thirty meters!" Jack exclaimed. "That's 33 yards?"
"That's the height of the pole," Pablo said. "A bit more than 98 feet. It's a combat-dance in the air. The other four acrobats impersonate North, South, East, and West. They take turns knocking me off the top of the pole and taking my place, but I come back at the end. By this means I signify the Fifth Age of the cosmos. Maybe Xiu can explain the rest of it during our performance. Most Maya understand the Creation myth."
While all this was going on at Police Headquarters and then at Starbucks, Jésus and Xiu climbed a narrow sixteenth-century stone stairway to the balcony in Catédral de Mérida. The cathedral is Renaissance Gothic, but the stairs were stones quarried from one of the ancient Maya pyramids. Indeed, the exterior walls of the cathedral were built from stones quarried from the pyramids. It was just as well that Mérida was no longer called Ichkaanzihóo, since then it would be embarrassing to answer tourists who asked 'Where are the Five Pyramids?'
At the third step in the stairway was a chain with a red sign and white letters that read: 'Balcón cerrado', 'Balcony closed', but the chain was unhooked and the sign was turned inward facing the wall. When they got to the balcony and saw no one else there, Jésus clambered back down the stairs and hooked up the chain, so that now when visitors came to the cathedral and wanted to see the Mass from the balcony, a chain blocked their way and a sign read 'Balcón cerrado'. For this venal transgression Jésus was rewarded privacy with Xiu. They sat through two and a half Masses, or rather, the same Mass repeated from dawn to midnight by different priests in rotation on Good Friday.
The balcony was furnished with wooden folding-chairs because the stairway was too narrow to get pews up there. Jésus and Xiu sat side by side and their legs touched and Jésus flung an arm around Xiu. At their distance and height it felt like watching baseball from top seats in a stadium. Two priests were in attendance and were wore red vestments. Two altar boys had red vestments, too. "Nicer than the black they usually wear," Jésus whispered to Xiu. The music was a cappella, the organ being covered with a great black blanket.
A mass was in session but it had only begun. The priests were transitioning from passages in Isaiah to readings from the Psalms. "Soon we'll get the Prayer of Humility, then readings from Hebrews and two chapters from John and a Prayer before the Crucifix," Jésus said. "It's not really a Mass. It's Bible readings and prayers, embellished with a cappella music, except that the music isn't really music, it's chanting. Afterwards there's Communion, but before you do that, you have to confess your sins to a priest in one of those little closets at the left."
Xiu looked down at men and women, mostly grave older women at the doors to the confessionals and they seemed embarrassed to be seen there. "Why would those old ladies need a confessional?" Xiu asked. "What sins could they have done to need confessing?"
"Bless me Father for I have sinned I kicked my sixteen-year-old boy out of the house and it was Papa who did it but it was my idea because the neighbor lady who's a terrible gossip told my cousin Rosa who lives on a farm in the country that he's a mariposa, my son's a butterfly-boy, as a niño he was marica and now he's maricopa but before we kicked him out of the house I sat on his chest while he was down on the kitchen floor and Papa kicked him in the groin so first we kicked him in the groin and then we kicked him out of the house for good and those were my only sins since my last confession which was Sunday because I'm here in the cathedral every week as you must know, blessed Father"- rapid-shot breathless words from Jésus.
Xiu looked at Jésus and saw that his face was angry when he thought it should look sad. "What does the priest say after that?" he asked.
"Recite three Ave Marias for not bringing your niño to me earlier for an altar-boy," Jésus smirked.
Xiu counted seven birds that looked like sparrows, only smaller, flitting above the pews in the cavernous cathedral, one for each deadly sin or maybe it was the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. "Let's leave this dreadful place," he said.
"Stay for a while, I like it here, it's cool," Jésus replied. The sparrow-like birds started chirping above the priests chanting and Xiu thought the birdsong was better. "If we can barely see the priests, we're almost invisible to them," Jésus continued. "I want to hear all about your game of 'spank and spunk' with Göran."
"Are you angry with me, Jésus?" Xiu asked.
"Not at all. I just want to hear the details," Jésus said, so Xiu told him about how Jack and Göran were punished for swimming with the sharks and about spankings that graduated to paddling and breeding. He left out the part about the flowers but Jésus reminded him.
"We exchanged flowers," Xiu said. "I gave Göran a sprig of white sac nicte and Göran gave me a sprig of red xukul nicte. It was an oath of brotherhood that we took so that we could always regard each other as equal no matter what depth of erotic submission Göran sunk to, but the truth is he didn't go that far. But why do you ask me questions when you already know the answers?"
Far below on the floor, people were lined up like cattle in the central aisle to kiss the cross and taste bread and wine from a common cup and the sparrow-like birds flitted and chirped above them in the barnlike cathedral.
"Göran thinks it was a Yucatecan wedding, but I told him that wasn't so, as there were no witnesses," Jésus said. "He wants you to come to America with us."
"I know. I'd love to come for a visit. I've never been out of México. But how would I live in America? All I know is tour-guiding the ruins of my people," Xiu replied.
"You know four languages," Jésus said; "more than four if you count three Maya dialects besides Yucatecan. You could study linguistics in college. It would be easy for you to get a student visa. There are people in America who get paid for studying and teaching Maya languages. They're called anthropological linguists, or linguistic anthropologists depending on your point of view. You have a mind that has not yet been challenged."
"I thought you were jealous, but now you're trying to talk me into America," Xiu said.
"We love Göran in different ways and I think he needs both of us," Jésus said. "With me he's Ometéotl the Father-God...."
"Even when he's taking it up the ass?" Xiu interjected, and by now he was fondling Jésus's crotch and Jésus was fondling his crotch.
"Especially when he's taking it up the ass," Jésus said. "He's a macho getting fucked by another macho, like Apollo with Admetus, but that's only half his identity. The other part is Omecíhuatl the Mother-God, which he wants to almost be when he's with you. The Ojibwe call him Niizho-manitou, a two-spirited man. He wants you to try to feminize him, but of course he won't let you succeed because a shaman, like an artist, is half man and half woman and the woman is insufferable."
By now their mutual cock-frotting turned serious until Jésus and Xiu were interrupted, quite unexpectedly, by a Sister from the Antiguo convento de Neustra Señora de la Consolación, a nunnery as old as the cathedral itself. The nun who intruded on their Good Friday devotions was younger by four centuries, an aristocratically pretty girl, but timid. She mounted the stairs to the balcony not on her own initiative, but because she was sent by her Mother Superior, or perhaps by a priest, to warn off two visitors who were now sitting through their third Mass.
-¿No viste la cadena y la señal que dice que el balcón está cerrado? asked the Sister in a sweet tentative voice: "Didn't you see the chain and the sign that says that the balcony is closed?"
"Ah, Sister, when we first arrived, the chain was down and the sign was turned toward the wall," Jésus replied in truthful English.
Sister switched to English: "Are you visiting from America?"
"Yes, Sister."
"Perhaps you could sit in one of the pews in the cathedral below, the better to hear the Mass and take Communion, if one of the priests has heard your confessions," Sister said.
"Thank you, Sister, but the balcony is closer to Paradise," Jésus said.
"Then I leave you to your devotions," Sister said.
From the top of the stairway, Jésus watched her descend and quietly replace the chain, so the sign continued to inform visitors, 'Balcón cerrado'.
In the privacy of the forbidden balcony, Jésus and Xiu freed each other's cocks from the rigid confinement of denim and sank into the irresistible pleasure of mutual fondling. "Tell me what you like best about Göran," Jésus prompted Xiu.
"He's the kindest man I've ever known," Xiu said, "and godlike-athletic, a Germanic Apollo. In my job at Uxmal I've met a lot of men from Germany but he has more sex-appeal than all of them, and he's the only one who reciprocated my interest."
"That's true, but tell me something I don't already know," Jésus said. "Tell me what you like best about him when you're making love."
"His colors," Xiu said, "I like his colors. I like the rosebud-pink color of his portal with not even the slightest trace of brown, and the way his face turns red, and his neck and the top of his chest when I penetrate his culo."
"Have you noticed that he's got the same rosebud-pink in the seam that runs down the middle of his scrotum, at the intersection of his ball-sacs?" Jésus asked.
"That, too," Xiu replied, regretting that he hadn't thought of it. "And now you must tell me what you like best about Göran."
Jésus hesitated, his thoughts interrupted by the urgency of lust that increased with Xiu's hand on his cock. "It's embarrassing to come up with something so predictable, but I like fucking guys with big dicks and he's got a nice one. Each time it feels like a conquest. Even more than that, he's got a tight culo so he's always snug and it hurts a little. I've tried to give him an anal gape as a way of marking my territory, but it never lasts. The next time we're together he's as tight as before, almost as if he were getting screwed for the first time."
"The mystery of perpetual virginity!" Xiu exclaimed, "just like the Virgin Mary."
Their bawdy talk about Göran gave way to the ecstasy of orgasm and for both of them the first shot of spooge sailed over the balcony and down to the central aisle in the cathedral, where worshipers were waiting in a long line for their turn to kiss the Cross and take Communion. To judge from the commotion just below the balcony, one gob of spooge hit a middle-aged man on the shoulder, and another landed in an older lady's Easter hat, which out of vanity she had chosen to wear two days early. All seven sparrow-like chirpy birds flew over the scene and people pointed up at them as the source aviary retribution for the transgression of wearing an Easter bonnet on Good Friday. But as no one could testify as to which two almost-sparrows had committed these crimes of scatology, all seven birds escaped prosecution.
Jésus and Xiu clambered down the Renaissance stairway, the one built with stone vandalized from one of five Maya pyramids. They took care to fasten the chain with the sign that said 'Balcón cerrado', assurance to all that no one had been in the balcony. As they exited the front door of Catédral de Mérida, the narthex crowded with two disgruntled worshipers and some helpful supporters who appeared to be helping a lady wash birdshit off her Easter bonnet with holy water.