Hopi Mesas

The Rarámuri had named me wrong. Wrong is not inaccurate, but it is not precise. They placed me in a category I did not quite fit, because I was not in their story - I had walked into their cosmology from outside it and the closest shelf they had was devil’s kind, and they put me there, and the name held some of me and missed some of me the way any name given without adequate time will.

The Hopi dead did not have this problem.

I came to the edge of the mesa territory in the early morning, before the light, which is how I traveled then - the early morning was the safest hour, the coolest, the most private. I came to the edge and the dead I found were not waiting for me the way the Mogollon dead had been, in their layered patience, in their not-quite-welcome that was still something. The dead I found at the edge of Hopi territory were not waiting at all. They had made a decision before I arrived. I understood this after, when I learned enough of their cosmology to reconstruct what had happened. At the time I only knew the quality of the response: a wall, but not hostile. A wall the way a closed door is not the same thing as a door blocked with furniture. This was a recognized category producing a recognized response.

They knew what I was before I announced myself.

Powaqa. That is the name. Not a name for me specifically but a name for the category I fit, and I fit it with a precision no other name on the road had managed. Powaqa: the one who prolongs their own life by consuming others’. The two-heart - the person who walks in the world as a person but carries a second heart beside the first, and that second heart is predation. The thing that ends worlds. Because every previous world, in Hopi understanding, had ended because of this thing. The witches - the ones with two hearts - had accumulated and the accumulation had broken the world. The prior worlds were the evidence. The world we stood in was the world that came after, and the memory of why it had to be created was written into the dead the way all true history is written: into those who had survived the ending.

I would like to tell you I argued. I would like to tell you I explained myself - that I had not chosen this, that I had been made into it by someone else’s hand, that I took what I needed and no more and that the dead I kept were kept with their consent or something close to it.

I cannot tell you that. Not because it is false - most of it is true - but because it is irrelevant to what the Hopi dead were doing. They were not making a judgment about my personal conduct. They were applying a cosmological rule that predated my arrival by however many worlds. A two-heart is a two-heart. The category produces the verdict. The verdict is: not here.

I was expelled at dawn, not by force but by consensus - the dead, the land itself, the quality of the air on the mesa becoming what it had been in the canyon when the light of that other thing pressed on what I was and I could not go forward. But colder. Without light. Just the clear statement of the territory: you are the category that ends worlds. You will not end this one.

The stone and the door of it. The verdict and the correctness of it.

I descended and went around the mesa territory and did not attempt it again. I have not been back in five centuries. Some expulsions are verdicts. You do not re-litigate a verdict from the oldest memory of the world.

I thought about what the Hopi name meant for the rest of that decade. Not to dispute it - to hold it. It was the most accurate thing anyone had called me. It was the thing I am, stated without ornament. The only part that did not fit was the “end worlds” implication. I have watched worlds end. I have not ended one. But I have also been alive for five centuries and the question of what I might do in the right wrong circumstance is not closed.

They were right to expel me. I knew it then. I know it now.