It was like being switched off, then on, then off.

Blankness.

Then I would see something, think something.

And then blankness again.

The on-off process went faster and faster until it felt as though I were strobing in and out of consciousness. I don't remember much of what I saw, and I felt as objective as Frankie, removed from the tactical observances of Sammy and the less rigorous perceptions of Eddie Poe. First it seemed I was suspended high above a yellowish white plain, mapped by hedgerows colored bright green and magenta, all laid out in the manner of a garden. The patterns of the hedgerows, intricate as circuitry, were in a state of flux, changing constantly, reshaping themselves. I tried to think, to announce to myself what I was seeing, but all that came to mind were streams of images, scramblings of conception and word. Escaped down the incarnations. The incarnadine boulevards. Efflorescing crystal kingdoms of pure expansion. The expansion of kingdom is the only significance. Things of that sort. Identical to the sort the thoughts I'd had when I was making love to Lupe out on the desert. They seemed important but essentially incoherent, and I wasn't sure if they were my thoughts or Montezuma's. I had the idea I was seeing a basic structure, an evolving template upon which the kingdom was founded. I was in a kingdom—I knew that much—and I was somehow integral to its expansion, but what that portended in real terms, I had no clue.

After the strobing stopped, I believe I was shown sections of the kingdom. I had a sense that the totality of the structure, which I couldn't fully comprehend, had qualities in common with a beehive or a crystalline formation, hexagonal volumes in close contact, and that it was being displayed for me cell by cell. On several occasions I saw people, each in their own environment. One of them was Dennard. He was standing with his eyes closed at the center of what appeared to be a temple with columns but no roof. Soon it all started coming at me too quickly, and my mind wilted under the assault of light and color and image, and at last there was a light so bright it penetrated my eyelids and burned through me, illuminating me within and without, so that I became almost insubstantial, myself no more than a pattern and part of that patterned place. I lost track of seeing, of feeling, and finally of being … and then I was with Lupe again.

I was still holding her gathered to my chest, but she was not dying, she was very much alive, and we were making love … really making love, not going halfway as it had been on the desert, but totally immersed in one another, every inch of liquid friction, every kiss, every drop of sweat, a kind of speech. We were lying on a bed inset in a marble floor. There was no ceiling, and high overhead was the template of the garden that had been my first glimpse of the kingdom—it flowed above us with the speed of clouds in a strong wind. The kingdom, you see, was under construction. Skies had not yet been installed. That, too, was something I knew. There were no walls, either. Only the floor … though from its edge you could see a city against a field of darkness, its lights stretching away on every side and from horizon to horizon. We might have been in the midst of El Rayo, except the red fire of the border was nowhere in evidence. But I was too focused on Lupe to give it more than a passing consideration.

There were still barriers between me and Lupe, matters of personal history and distrust, but they weren't important to the moment, and in the act of love we came to look so closely at one other that differences and barriers and the concept of distance itself seemed elements of the geography of a country we had left behind. The things she said to me in her passion were things I might have said—she said them for us—and when I pulled her atop me or turned her onto her side, I was enacting the mechanical principles of our singular desire. Nothing is perfect. No object, action, or idea. Yet in the brilliant ease and intensity of our union we felt perfected, we felt each other give way completely in the service of a heated oblivion where we lived a certain while. I remember there was music, and yet there was no music, only whispers and breath and the background drone of some machine hidden beneath us, whose cycles came to have the complexity and depth of a raga. I remember a soft light around us that likely did not exist, or else I do not know how it was generated, other than to speculate that our skins were aglow or weeping melanin. What did exist, what was made of us, what we were for that time.… Love's creature lives beyond memory. I only recall its colors.

We lay for a while embracing; we spoke only infrequently and then it was no more substantial than the communication of animals when they settle next to one another, issuing comforting growls. Soon we became lazily involved, and as we moved toward completion, I experienced again the brilliant light that earlier had burned through me. This time it illuminated us with the intense clarity of an X-ray, and I saw how beautiful we were, how we had discarded the myths of ugliness, the false shroud of imperfection. I imagined our perfect skeletons picked clean of flesh and set out for display—advertisements for god. When I looked at Lupe, it seemed I was looking along the corridor of her life, past the career-business hustle, past the legend of her youth and the lie of her fairy-tale princess childhood, past moments like stained glass windows and others like boarded-up doors, past tics and tempers, minor disorders, all the pointless behaviors that seek to define us, and I saw her as she might hope to be seen, the true thing in her revealed. Whether what we had become to one another was a side-effect or part of Montezuma's plan, it was what I wanted, and I didn't care how it had come to pass.

As I lay there afterward staring up at the fake sky, I recalled what Papa had said a few nights before about my having no future, how he had been right—albeit not sufficiently expansive—in his judgment. It seemed fairly certain that none of us had a future. Montezuma would see to that. Glittering machines purifying us and scouring us clean, wedding us to holy purpose, as Lupe and I had been purified, scoured, and wedded. Though I didn't understand its particulars, I could feel the shape of new purpose inside me. But I did not feel like Zee had appeared to feel. Blissed-out and babbling biblespeak. I felt like Eddie Poe with a fresh edge on him, a few extra facets revealed. That was what mattered to me then. That I was still myself. You had to serve some master, be it employer, overlord, president, corporation, god. It was the way of the world. And I decided, as if I had a choice, that Montezuma couldn't screw it up worse than whatever god he was replacing. So long as I had the power to pretend to be myself—which is all people really have of themselves—I was fine with it.

"You know what's goin' on here?" Lupe asked me as we lay facing one another, so close the tips of her breasts grazed my chest.

"With this whole trip? I think I got a line on it."

She toyed with the ends of my hair. "It feels weird to love you. I mean, I always did, y'know … but it was like, Okay, I love him, but fuck it. I got stuff to do. And now"—she gave a shrug—"it feels weird."

"But it feels good, too," I said and pulled her closer.

"Yeah, it feels good." She sounded doubtful.

"What?" I said. "What's the matter?"

"We didn't have a lot to do with gettin' here," she said. "If we hadn't done the story on the Carbonells, maybe things woulda stayed the same."

"Hey," I said. "If my papa hadn't been such a screw-up, we never woulda met. If you were a guy, we wouldn't be havin' this conversation. That kinda shit's true anytime."

"I know, but …"

"What're we gonna do? We're stuck with it."

"I ain't stuck! I can do what the hell I want!"

"You think that's ever been true?" I asked.

She pushed herself away from me, folded her arms and looked up toward the flowing template. "You startin' to remind me of Zee … with all his everything-is-everything else bullshit." Then less than a minute later, as I caressed her shoulder, she came back into my arms, apologized and said she loved me. But I was glad to have learned that Lupe was still Lupe, still contrary and willful.

"Y'know what really bothers me?" she said. "It ain't about me lovin' you, it's wonderin' how come you love me … if that's just Montezuma doin' it."

"I been in love with you since I was kid," I told her. "Since I saw you in church in your white lace dress."

She pulled back and gave me a stern look. "That was all bullshit."

"That's who you wanted to be," I said. "So that's who you are."

She turned onto her side. "It's that easy, huh? We get to be who we want to be?"

"I saw you," I said. "I saw who you are. You never were the Border Rose. That was your hustle … it wasn't you."

"You saw me?"

"Yeah … didn't you see me? When the light got real bright?

"Sure, I did." She grinned. "You're still a dick."

I grabbed her, wrestled her into submission. The contact restored my erection, and she said, "See?"

We made love again, and afterward I felt subdued, restless, ready for something new.

"What do we do now?" Lupe asked. "Can we get outa here?"

"Maybe we should find out," I said in answer to both questions.

"This little son-of-a-bitch makin' us famous," Dennard said, gesturing with his rifle at Frankie. "I was listenin' to the radio. Whole damn world been watchin' your show."

With his tattoos and muscles, he remained a scary-looking individual, but he seemed thoroughly relaxed and un-Sammylike. I wasn't sure what he was doing there.

"What's goin' on?" I asked him.

"Waitin' for you is all." He said this amiably, and waved at the hills behind the carrier. "Some of Ramiro's people followed us from the barrio. Took 'em a long time to find us. They didn't get here till an hour ago."

"Where are they?" Lupe asked.

"I dealt with 'em." Dennard straightened. "I put one in back 'case you wanted to see."

He led us around the side of the carrier and flung open the rear door. It took me a moment to recognize Felix Carbonell. Most of his hair had been burned off, and the skin of his face was bloody and blistered. His flat black eyes, shiny and full of crazy rage, gave him away. His clothing was foul, tattered, but he still had his gold rings and necklaces. When he recognized me, he let out a string of enfeebled curses. His spittle was bloody.

"Man's had a rough week," Dennard said.

Frankie scuttled into the carrier to get a close-up of Felix.

I was more interested in Dennard than Felix—he seemed much the same as he had been before visiting the kingdom. Just like me and Lupe. I recalled what Zee had said about him being the same as he was before he met his Father, only purified. I was beginning to suspect that Zee had always been a religious nut. Montezuma had made him into an efficient nut—which might mean that the religious gloss on what was happening had been applied by Zee. What did that make me and Lupe? More efficient hustlers, I supposed.

"What you want to do with him?" asked Dennard, and Lupe said, "Leave his ass. Maybe Montezuma can use him."

Felix struggled as Dennard helped him from the carrier, but he was too far gone to cause any trouble. "Puto maricon!" he said. "Chu cha!"

The accord among Lupe, Dennard, and me struck me as peculiar. For three people who had recently been at odds, we were getting along extremely well. No apparent distrust or doubt. It seemed we had been together for years.

Dennard propped Felix against a boulder. I scanned the hilltops for riders. None were in sight, but I knew one would be popping up any time to sniff Felix out. He sat there dribbling blood and curses. If we saw him again, he'd be a lot more reasonable, but I doubted I'd ever warm up to the guy.

"El Rayo?" asked Dennard, wiping some of Felix's blood off on his fatigues.

"Where else?" I glanced at Lupe, who spread her hands in a gesture of bewilderment.

Dennard piled in the driver's side of the carrier, and Lupe sat between us. We didn't talk much on the drive to El Rayo. I assumed Lupe and Dennard were, like me, assessing themselves, trying to understand where we were going and why we were going together, and I was also wondering what this whole thing had been about. Had Montezuma actually been negotiating with the Carbonells, or had his real intent been serious media exposure, an announcement of his presence? Gods were given to that sort of big opening. Burning bushes, virgin births. All that lightning-bolt-from-Olympus crap. Montezuma's birth had been as virgin as they could come, and his blissfully mad prophet had been right in step with John the Baptist and the rest. You had to figure the Son would be along any moment. Maybe we had that to look forward to. But unlike Zee, I had no certainty. Who could say if Montezuma was a machine chumping itself into playing god, or if this was how gods happened, or if god was just mindless process, an incarnation of principle working things out over and over until he got it right … and you knew he was never going to get it right. We drove past the stone head. In its glowing eyes were speeding images of the personnel carrier. Signs of our advent. Dennard switched on the radio, tuned in a border station. A call-in show. People were asking what was this deal about an eternity, this for-real paradise? They asked who was Dennard? Was he Sammy or what? They asked personal questions about Lupe and me. Were we truly in love, or was it just for the show? Was Frankie a puppet? We weren't just tabloid creatures now-we were celebrity heroes. The host talked about the party going on in the streets, celebrating the notion that the God's kingdom might be real, and that El Rayo, this unimportant residue that had collected at the bottom of America, this thin red line of poverty and madness, might have a destiny to fulfill. Then he played an interview with Papa, who was his usual supportive self.

"My son is not unintelligent," he said, doing his professor delivery. "But he doesn't use his intellect. He mistakes bravado for true courage, and he's less competent than lucky. But he is very lucky. I think that what's happened proves my point."

"Asshole!" Lupe switched the radio off.

When we came to El Rayo, I needed a moment to pull it together. I told Dennard to stop on the outskirts, a weedy patch extending from the backs of two ruined houses, fragments of their whitewashed walls still erect. We climbed out, and Frankie scuttled off to get a wide shot of the three of us. Dennard took a stand, rifle at the ready. Lupe and I held hands and stared at El Rayo, at the fiery fence dividing the sky and the violent places beneath it, the sewer worshippers of Barrio Ningun and the cartels and the gangs, the dog men and the wasted women, the wretched and the insane, all the delirium and grief of that least of cities …

Our city.

Between buildings some 200 feet away, the lights of Calle 99 burned in crumbling gold bars. I heard a faint riotous music and joyful shrieks. Frankie must have been transmitting live because before long people started coming out from the backs of buildings and alleyways, realizing the picture they'd been watching was being shot close by. They kept their distance, probably worried about Dennard, but they shouted our names.

Lupe waved at them, our welcomers, and they shouted louder.

I felt a quickness of self I'd never before known. Some things were coming clear, the little glittering pieces fitting into place, the fragmented thoughts I'd had since entering the kingdom beginning to cohere into a structure. But I didn't need to think about any of it. Even if the future was pre-ordained, written in silicon, I was never going to understand what was happening. Not even god could understand it all. Everything was different, but everything was more-or-less the same, and I'd had enough of the unfamiliar, the incomprehensible, the strange. I wanted to walk the streets of El Rayo, have a drink at Cruzados, join the party that was being thrown in our honor, and I gestured toward the lights, the music, the fire in the sky, and to Lupe who was looking at me happily, as if I were something she truly liked to see, I said, "Hey, what about it, girl? You 'n' me … a little fiesta? It ain't such a bad night to have no future."