He was more like John-Paul Belmondo than John-Paul Belmondo, that 12-year old boy Roberto, who danced better than Baryshnikov but worshipped Michael Jackson. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in 30 seconds, but couldn’t explain why they always served limes and called them lemons, or why he never went down even on the hottest days through the Parthenon-like eye-hole to the moss-topped oasis 100’s of feet down called the cinote. He never explained anything in fact, for it would still the flow, confuse the mind with thinking. He kept four women moving, including his mother and autistic sister who knew everything, and despised most every man, except of course the Shaman who turned into a jaguar eyes-first. They lived in a village like a National Geographic diorama, a few huts inside a cornfield by some sacred ancient crossroads the Nazis and the CIA had sent teams to investigate because it was an opening to Agartha. They had taken off the day from school as they habitually do, because the teachers get so cruel on torrid days when you pretended you weren’t smarter than they were, to picnic at a partially excavated pyramid deep in the jungle. They put mango and pineapple at its pinnacle for the aluxes. When they returned a half-hour later (though time is different there) the fruit was partially eaten, and beside it was a long crystal finger with an amethyst point. Marina reached for it, but Roberto said “no, you can’t take that.” They climbed back down to dance to Justin Beiber with other naiads, devas, nixies, talking birds and trees, the iguanas with watermelon lips watching. Next day, Marina was taken to the hospital, she woke up with an infection on her toe. The mere thought, her mother said, of having the crystal had poisoned her. That’s how pure it is there, in scorned Yucatan, where everything is equal and on speaking terms, for that jungle has no water, it falls through limestone sieves back to sea level.
