Tzitzimimeh

The Fifth Sunset. Aztec myth says it will happen when the stars fall from the heavens to attack the Sun. Destiny, I suppose. You can’t fight it; one can only await the cold hour of reality, gird their loins through preparation. Maybe the stars, the Tzitzimimeh, are just idle threats, more jealous venom through word and rumor rather than rage incarnate into fist and blade. Maybe they’re far worse, or they will be far worse when they reach full power. The myth, legend, prophecy, whatever you want to call it, says the tug of war between day and night is a staging battle between the great Fifth Sun, Huitzilopochtli, and the envious stars led by their bitch commander, The Moon. The final battle comes when humanity stops pleasing the gods.

Or when Huitzilopochtli tires of fending off trillions of screeching warriors every night.

You’re tired, Luchador. I see it in your eyes when you look at something other than your phone. You’re exhausted. The long nights, the betrayal, the inability to course correct. Destiny weighs on you heavily, as if you carry the earth itself on your shoulders like another figure from another mythological tome. You try, you really do. But at every turn, you can never get to where you need to get on your own volition.

It’s always on someone else’s terms.

In a world where they build one-way thoroughfares by design, you continue to sacrifice. When do they pick another chest from where they rip the heart to appease the gods? You are one of four who have not stopped since the fight began 30 months ago, and your hearts are running low.

You got what you wanted, but you didn’t get what you wanted.

I can see how you might think your gods have forsaken you if this bastard destiny is yours.

-

Every time he looked at the video Pom sent him, the idyllic, peaceful feeling of a world where the industry was a sporting exhibition turned a little more rancid. He manufactured harmful intent behind Nobuo’s arm drags. The invisible aura around Pom turned red and evil. The Shogun’s smile remained wide, but his face morphed more and more into a fright mask with each viewing.

And looking at his past self, Tom ascribed every single nasty, shitty little sin he committed in the name of advancing a pro wrestling career to his movements. Even in PRIME, the self-proclaimed shining knight manipulated a woman to feel a semblance of penance for things he did years prior.

Even he started to believe he developed the superpower of bilocation and assaulted Jason Snow while he was in his locker room, stewing over the fact that Jason Snow would not give him his match at Tropical Turmoil.

The video stabbed him, slashed at him, poked and prodded him and raised his inner agita exponentially with each view. Yet he couldn’t turn away. The lie he told himself that he could do this for wrestling proved itself a lie. Malicious and virulent. It sliced through his soul until he actually believed it.

Now all he believed was that the lie would make him stronger. So he watched it over. And over. And over.

-

The funniest thing about the prophecy of the Fifth Sunset isn’t that the Tzitzimimeh are marauding strangers from a far off land. They and their Moon Goddess captain are all sisters of Huitzilopochtli. You often fear the unknown when those closest to you, when left unchecked, will fester and rot until their rage and jealousy and pettiness seep to the surface, looking to infect whatever it can lurch onto.

The damage your parents did to you seeped into your brain, and now all you know, all you see is conspiracy. Jaded destiny. Where are your allies? You know where they are, but you cannot see them, or they seem foreign to you because the people who were supposed to love you unconditionally either did not or they showed it in such an odd way that no sane person would receive it as love. But you know your allies are there. By the bones in Mictlan, you saw it during War Games! You just don’t believe yourself.

How could you though? The mind is the most powerful processor known to man, and if it is corrupted…

-

Finally, he got sick of watching the match footage. He wasn’t finished torturing himself by a longshot, but he had to work different muscle groups to keep the self-flagellation from getting ineffective. He flicked through his phone and clicked on his text conversation with his and his father’s lawyer, Mario Bevilacqua. The video of his father’s last will and testament. He clicked play, squeezing his eyes shut and squinting.

“Dad, you really fuckin’ did a number on me, didn’t you?”

He paused the video. His father looked like he was trying to be remorseful, but the expression on his face was similar to what he remembered Marshall Applewhite’s looked like way back in the late ‘90s when he watched the Heaven’s Gate manifesto video. It was less a man profession a lifetime of regret and more manifestation of psychosis, a cult leader justifying his nonsense actions.

The three most painful words shoved themselves into Tom’s brain.

“Mom… was… right?”

No, she couldn’t have been, he quickly counter-thought. A wise person once said “Assholes can be right, but just because you’re right doesn’t make you any less of an asshole.”

But was Mom right? A right asshole, but correct regardless?

The points she made about family were inarguably wrong. He FaceTimed Zo after his favorite player, Luka Doncic, couldn’t fend off the Celtics with his questionable teammates. Granted, his eldritch hatred of the Boston Celtics and three quarts of vinho verde made it a colorful conversation to have with a teenager, but the point stood. When he could, he played video games with Vinny with shitty hotel wifi.

And Tam was on her way to Portugal.

Oh shit. Tam was on her way to Portugal.

It was the diatribe Mom went off on about how he spent so much time on the road that she was left empty and unfulfilled. The life of a pro wrestler’s wife did not suit her when the husbands of the neighborhood always sat at dinner tables whether they had dirt or blood under their fingernails. Lorenzo would be gone for days, weeks at a time. Too passive to initiate an affair with the mailman and too unimaginative to take up a hobby like knitting, Joelle sat stewing on her plastic-covered couch with each passing moment her husband was on the road, cooking up a scorching vat of hot soup that she couldn’t wait to throw on her husband, until she realized it would be cruel to take it out on a man whose career left him a physical shell of the specimen who shored up midcards from Hampton Roads all the way up to the Maritimes.

So she hit the pressure release and burnt the one son who followed even the loosest path that his father tread.

Tam wasn’t passive at all. If you crossed her, she would cut your ankles from under you and piss on your writhing body on the ground. The earful she gave Tom after The Mexico Incident beat his eardrum harder than a John Bonham solo he would not soon forget, but at least he wasn’t a miscreant like Marcus Westcott, a rapist like Thunderhead Karagiannis, or a shiftless layabout coworker like Edwards.

Under the influence of Mom’s poison tongue, every possible action felt like a threat. And there was none bigger than a wife prone to grand gestures to show her feelings, positive or, in this case in his head, negative.

She was coming to Portugal to shatter their bond.

His text alert buzzed.

She was already here.

Mom was right. Mom is an asshole, but she was right.

-

Luchador, you’re tired because you think the world is against you, and maybe in aggregate, it is. Maybe it’s not, but I can see how you feel that the gods have forsaken you. Your life is difficult right now. I’m not stating this in mocking tones. Your parents, your brothers, whoever it is impersonated you, friends, acquaintances, they are closing in on you. They have been closing in on you for the entire year. I saw the assault in Brooklyn. It sent shivers down my spine. A gender-swapped preview of the Fifth Sunset with a goliath of a Russian man who may be more massive than the moon itself.

But you do not fight because the world agrees with you. A man who only picks up a sword with widespread support, he is no warrior. He is a butcher. A bigot. A colonizer. Cristobal Colon, there was a man who nodded back to his patrons on the Spanish throne every time he ordered a sword swung at the natives on the islands. Hernando gave us blankets and cut us down when they made us sick. Cortes, Cortes… what a killer.

You are not a colonizer, even if you share the same blood as Colon, the same language as Cortes even if your second. Why do you think the gods took you in their favor in the first place? You don’t fight with a cudgel. Yours is a broadsword of legend. A whip aimed for the head of a dark lord.

A spear, noble, slender, true.

Your spear flew at the hearts of thieves of our underworld and in protection of a child. You knew that would make you enemies. Desperation and greed spawn the worst motivations and the most selfish desires. The true heart threatens. The true heart must be obliterated.

You wanted to change the world and bring wrestling, lucha, teyaochiua to the most noble roots. Did you think this would be done in a day, a week, even a month? This gambit was your downfall, Luchador, the impatience. The Mexica did not build their empire from the marshes encircled by Lake Texcoco in a day.

Changing a culture requires time and effort. Much of that time and effort will be dedicated to thwarting people who want to drag you back into the swampy old ways. Whoever it was who got you your match with Ghost, he was inevitable. Your past will catch up with you in horrible ways, but the measure of your success is never how many hands grab your legs as you inch closer and closer to your personal Sun.

It will be how you rip them from their elbows as you forge ahead.

Those pulling at you seem numerous. Your destiny will still feel weighty. Is fate truly inevitable? What if I told you not everyone coming into your view wants you dead and defeated?

-

She didn’t want him to pick her and the boys up at the airport. That text only pressurized the air in the room exponentially, making each breath feel like a COVID gasp. His personal life was about to explode, scenarios too varied for him to dwell on one. So his mind went to his professional life.

The bald man with the sadistic streak who wanted to end him.

The systematic destruction of his life, one that started with a will and testament and his surviving family treating him as a pariah, would end on the Iberian Peninsula. And not even in the bigger, more historically notable country. He would go out like a chump, losing the rest of his family, his career, possibly his life, in fucking Portugal. The country that got hosed like marks on the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Tom didn’t even need video to replay the image of the man dressed like him assaulting Jason Snow against that fucking crumb in Barcelona. That dragon suplex into stairs burnt into his brain like the silhouette of the sun in his eyes when he would stare straight into it in the summer sky on dares with his equally dipshitted friends in school. He imagined it long enough that he gaslit himself for a moment that yes, he mastered the science behind bilocation and was in two places at once.

Each time he replayed it in his mind, the bald skin on Snow’s head grew redder and redder, as if he stole Brandon Youngblood’s Anger Golem powers for himself for the sheer purpose of taking out every frustration he had with losing to Jiles on the Luchador. He challenged Ghost not to commit suicide but to test himself against the most legendary wrestler ever to set foot in PRIME. “I didn’t think this through,” Tom thought to himself, as if the Original Villain label was just for show.

The door latch clicked, and the heavy oak swung slowly open.

“DAD!” both boys shouted immediately as they dropped their bags and bum-rushed Tom, giving him the biggest group hug seen in Portugal since the national team won Euros in 2016.

“Vinny, Zo, I missed you.”

“We missed you too, Dad,” Vinny said, still clutching to his father.

“Did Mom tell you Chick took us to the moon?” slipped Zo.

“WHAT? No he…”

“Your dad’s right, kids. Chick did not take you to the moon. Now go grab your bags and head into your room. I gotta talk to your father.”

“Which one’s ours?”

“The one that actually has two beds in it,” Tom answered.

The kids grabbed their bags and scurried off into their room. Tam looked at her husband with a blank expression on her face. The sweat beaded on his forehead at an alarming rate. She noticed and furrowed her brow slightly.

“Look, babe, I…”

“Tom, shut up.”

He was dumbstruck. Before he could formulate any thought in his head, she quickly advanced on him, grabbed his head down to meet hers, and kissed him like she hadn’t seen him in years, not weeks.

-

You mortals, you have a gift. It’s called death. Your mother pushes you out of the womb, and you live anywhere between a few seconds to over a hundred years. You see how much of a farce the process of life is, how these things that people speak of that are important clearly aren’t. The hypocrisy and silliness of it all. You get a taste of it. Some of you learn if you get enough time. But whether you wise up or remain in the dark about select truths, you only get minor exposure. Then you get to rest forever after.

The gods, we have no stop to the neverending charade. Some among the pantheon ignore what plainly plays out in front of their eyes, but if you pay attention, you learn not to get worried about things you can’t control. Because there’s one truth I know completely and thoroughly.

Destiny is fake. Prophecies are lies. Fate is unwritten.

If anyone knew when or how the first four Sunsets would happen, they were lying. If you think gods are perfect, you’ve been fed too much Christian bullshit. Gods aren’t perfect. They just have more power and never die, which is what makes them fools mostly. Their hubris gives them a veneer of infallibility when in fact, it’s their folly that presaged every major disaster known to the world before mankind learned sentience. Then you, oh yes, you all showed how much in our image and likeness you were created in the first place.

I mean not that all gods or humans are rotten. For every Hernan Cortes there are ten Luchadores. Flawed, maybe a little selfish at times, but the enemies they make pale in comparison to the lives they touch positively. Do I think every good warrior, every decent man, attracts an army of Tzitzimimeh wanting to break down their doors and rend asunder all they’ve worked for? Maybe not all, but the best ones attract more detractors.

But they never have to fight alone unless they choose to.

You’ve been through this wringer enough, Luchador, to know you’re not alone. And each time, you close the door. Why? It’s not for me to ask. I know mortals and their brains are complicated. But you only learn by repetition because you were never meant to live this long, let alone fight. Your species prolonged lifespans without studying what would happen if you stopped dying at age 30.

But that understanding only goes so far before you end up, as you gringos call it, spinning your wheels. Then, and only then, will the sun set on you, Luchador.

I don’t think you’re ready for that. Or else you wouldn’t have survived the grain silo. The cliffs. The climb to the stars. All of which led you not to taking the easy path, but to fight the most fearsome Ghost known to this roster or any company. Do you think the gas guzzlers in Chicago have someone the likes of Snow? No.

But your company does.

And you chose to fight him.

That doesn’t sound like a man ready to let the stars crash on him for good now, does it?

-

For two long minutes, their lips locked. Tom felt literal demons leaving his body, a wave of relief mixed with shock washing over him. Finally, they released, and the room depressurized. He breathed in deep before asking his first question.

“Miss me much?”

She smirked and slapped him on his chest.

“Jerk,” she said with a laugh. “I thought you needed that. I needed it, but man…”

She trailed off and shook her head.

“So your mom, huh? You wanna tell me exactly what that bitch said to you?”

“That bitch?” he mouthed before shaking his head and forming an earnest reply. “It’s a…”

“You know what, I don’t need you to tell me. I know it’s hard to hear, but I never liked her.”

“Under any other circumstance, I might be mad, but, you know what. I’ll give it to you.”

She went over to the sofa in front of the room’s fireplace and sat plopped.

“She doesn’t understand. Just because her husband was bad to her doesn’t mean the cycle always has to continue.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know you, Tommy Battaglia. I chose to spend the last 22 years of my life with you because of who you are.”

“A good father and husband?”

“I mean, of course, but do you think I saw you and said, ‘man, damn, he’s gonna put a kid in me and be a responsible father?’”

Tom quizzically smirked and leaned his head to the side.

“You idiot. No. I wanted you because you were a wrestler, a damn good one. And that’s who you are now.”

“How do you know? I keep getting…”

“Fuck that. Whoever it was who got you this match did you a favor. You’re going to go in there and twist that bald bitch into a pretzel. And then he’s going to apologize to you for doubting that you were ever on his level. Then you get to go and find out who did you the favor and beat them until they cry ‘no mas.’”

The relief and shock intensified into euphoria.

“So you dig me because I’m a wrestler?”

“Of course. I still love you after all this time because of who you are, not because of what you do or what you fail to do. Even Mexico, like…”

“You gave me an earful.”

“That’s because you almost cost us a million dollars, you nerd! But even if Modelo didn’t bail us out, it didn’t matter. I knew why you did it.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you have pride. You take immense pride in your craft, and how could I not want to be with someone like that? You’re a wrestler, Tom. If you weren’t, if you were here to do hoodrat shit like the Whoresmen or whatever, you wouldn’t have called out Snow.”

She got up from the sofa and went over to her husband again.

“Tom, you’re not just a wrestler. You’re the wrestler. The purest, most complete one on this roster, fuck whatever people say otherwise. And I needed to be here. I needed your sons to be here.”

Tom smiled.

“And why’s that?”

“Because your family has to be here to see you win the biggest match in your career.”

This time, it was the husband who leaned in for the kiss.

-

The Fifth Sunset. Aztec myth says it will happen when the stars fall from the heavens to attack the Sun, to attack the god using his might to shine on the world.

Huitzilopochtli.

Me.

Luchador, you don’t have to become a god. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. They… no we… no, I never forsook you.

You are my spear.

You are the legacy of the spirit of our combat.

Now go, slay the Ghost. Become he who you were always promised to be. Fuck destiny.

Make your own fate.