Paquime

The great city of the north was already a ruin when I arrived. Abandoned seventy years before me, they said later - the living Rarámuri who kept to the higher ground, the ones who had opinions about where I could and could not go. At the time I did not know its history. I only knew what the ruins offered: bone. The kind of bone that accumulates in a place where people have practiced ritual death with care and long repetition.

I recognized the care immediately. The sacrifice deposits, the elite tombs, the arrangement of everything according to a logic I did not know but could feel the edges of - this had been a people who understood that the dead required specific handling. Who believed that specific handling mattered. Who had organized their understanding of death into architecture. The shapes of their knowledge were different from mine, but the shape of the impulse was not.

I have always recognized my own.

The Mogollon dead received me with something I did not yet have a name for. Not welcome - I would not know welcome from the dead for another seventy years, at the ruins on the desert floor. Not expulsion either. The Hopi mesas would teach me what expulsion felt like a decade later; this was not that. What it was: the specific quality of attention paid to something in the same category as you but not of your tradition. The way a craftsman watches another craftsman work. Assessment. Wariness. Familiarity without warmth.

We recognized each other as the kind of thing that does not rest.

The living Rarámuri had a name for what I was. Not my name - not tlahuelpuchi or tlacatecolotl, the names my own people had given to this thing I was made into. Their name was simpler: the lower world. The ones who descend. Their souls, they believed, ascend after death toward the light. Non-Indian souls descend to the lower world - devil’s country, the territory of what gathers rather than rises. I had come out of the south with my necromancy and my six skulls and my five-year-old grief and walked into a taxonomy that put me underground.

I thought about this for some time.

The thing about being named wrong is that wrong is not the same as inaccurate. The Rarámuri name was not inaccurate. I do not ascend. I have never ascended. I am made of the lower world, of the dead and the dark and the things that persist after the animating heat has left. The part that was wrong was the word “devil.” I am not the adversary. I am not in opposition to anything except the forgetting. But the shape of the category - the thing that goes down instead of up, the thing that gathers instead of disperses - yes. That much they had right.

The ruins gave me five years. I spoke with the Mogollon dead in the register below language - the image-register, the pressure-register, the one the very old dead use when they have been in the ground long enough to forget the specific language they died in. We had no tongue in common; we had the older thing. I learned what empire-collapse looked like in this particular pattern. A different shape than Tenochtitlan’s collapse, but the same fundamental grammar: the thing that was built, and the failure, and the leaving, and the long silence after.

I had left. They had left. The ruins held both of us. That was the only fellowship on offer and I took it.

When I went north again I was still carrying the mystery from the canyon - the light I had not been able to approach, the two figures below, the not-knowing of whether they had seen me. The Mogollon dead did not explain it. I had not expected them to. But I had hoped, in the way that you always hope when you find the willing dead, that one of them would have touched something adjacent to the thing I could not name.

None of them had. Or if they had, it was too far outside their idiom to translate.

The exile and the empire’s remains: the bone and the ruin of it, the name and the not-quite-wrong of it. I kept walking.