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Maya

I found Maya while wandering through Mexico: there were bits and pieces of it in Guanajuato and Uruapan, in Merida and Catemaco. In Xalapa, laid low by a recurrence of malaria, whole scenes reverberated in my fever. I made furious notes, most of which were indecipherable the next morning. As I wandered down streets and plazas, I kept seeing odd little events—a soldier, for instance, peeing in an alley—which immediately struck me as parts of the novel. It was a strange experience.

The novel itself is an overlapping palimpsest of media violence and real violence placed ambiguously in the studios of Hollywood, the jungles of Vietnam, and the myth-saturated backlands of Mexico. Three actors—two aging men in the twilight of their careers and a blonde, perennial starlet—journey to a distant tropical country to perform in a film. The film apparently depicts the Mayan people of Yucatán, and their brutalization at the hands of European invaders. While waiting for the production to begin, the three actors are caught between opposing forces in a war—and abandoned in the large church-cum-museum that serves as the film’s set. At the same time a crew films a movie on a sound stage in Hollywood. It is about three actors left to their fate in a large church-cum-museum that may be located in South Vietnam, Laos, or even Cambodia. A brutalizing invasion rages around them. The forests are defoliated. Helicopter gunships howl in the air. Napalm flows brilliantly over the earth, which itself shudders at the assault. In an apocalyptic scene every plane from the Vietnam war passes overhead, unloading ordnance. The church-cum-museum, wherever it is, is obliterated.

Maya focuses on an America fascinated with violence and fearful of fertility. Invasions, whether military, sexual, or cultural, occur and recur. The fecundity of nature vaguely threatens. Vegetation rots; the earth swells. Bomb blasts resemble flowers bursting open. The title “Maya” refers not only to the meso-American people described in the novel, but also to the Hindu doctrine of the delusory nature of reality. The world is mysterious, very beautiful, and very dangerous—and America is more a part of it than we have imagined.

Although Maya was my seventh novel, it was the first of my books to be published, by FC2, first as a paperback and hardback, and then as one of the novels in Mexico Trilogy. It is available through your local bookstore, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, and from the publisher.

AT THE HOTEL SHE ASKED THE BLOND MAN where he was from. He grunted something incomprehensible in reply. It did not sound like the name of a place. They were in the room of the man who looked like a priest. He had instructions, vouchers, tickets spread over a table, but he seemed confused by the whole display. The blond man pouted, and kept muttering his incomprehensible words. A map was spread on the table also, but nothing on it was recognizable.

“Wow,” she said. “Did you see those men? At the airport?”

They turned their faces towards her.

“In the blue uniforms. They were cute. You know, sexy. But they had these funny guns—all black, like pistols, but big—”

“MAC-10s.” It was the blond man, whose single eye now transfixed her. “Machine pistols, my dear. A slight pressure on the trigger—and you are cut in half. Verstehen sie? But you are right. Very sexy.”

“Ugh,” she said—to herself; the two men had turned back to the map. “No one told me they were real.”

 

GARRED HURRIES PAST, PAST MEN HOLDING UZIS and MAC-10s, past men holding clipboards, past diesel trucks filled with black rubber bags, past spitting children, past Congressmen with sweaty faces and rotund bellies, past a steam engine hissing on rusty tracks, past railroad cars filled with whores, past cages holding prisoners of both sexes and several races, past cook shacks where T-bones are frying, past piles of rags that women are picking through, past graves marked with sticks, crosses, and plumeria flowers, past piles of ears, some of them plastic, past briefing rooms, past pilots with “Air America” tattooed on their biceps, past marines sleeping in the shade of ceiba trees, past television reporters in safari shirts, past wrecked helicopters and APCs and Caribous and six-bys and T-54s sagging on their treads. Finally he pauses at the last row of railroad cars. “Hey, GI! You want fuckee-suckee?” Women whistle and lift their sarongs, their saris, their skirts, their legs, their asses, their breasts. Garred goes up to one. A small boy lies with his face in her lap. The woman has dark, thin lips. Her eyes shine like polished copper. “GI got dollar?” “I got dollar.” “You want fuckee-fuckee?” “I want fuckee-fuckee.” “You give me five dollar.” Garred taps the boy’s rump. “I want fuckee-fuckee boy.” For a moment the woman says nothing. The boy does not stir. “You give me ten dollar.” She holds out her hand. When Garred finishes, the little boy is crying. The woman watches Garred walk away. Then she turns to the boy and slaps him.