She described the great lines under the earth, how they gave nutrients to the trees and wisdom to the people and revealed themselves to her abuelita when she partook of the Velada ceremony. Her grandmother spoke about how in parts of Mexico and other colonized places across the Americas, people had connected to the lines and to one another, passing along secrets and food-stores and magic that could not be stolen by the colonizers because they had no idea what was going on beneath them.

On his twelfth birthday, V’s parents gave him a new Bible and told him that they had to move on. The anticlerical movement was growing. They would have to move back toward the north, where Catholics still had power. Before he left, Manuela’s abuelita gave him a small bag of mushrooms and told him to take them in a quiet place.

He waited until his parents were out on a visit and then went out to the hillside. He swallowed a pinch of the pungent flakes. First, the sky brightened, and a softness burrowed into his stomach. He sat down in the earth. He could feel the direct line from the plants to his own body, which was no longer clenched in repression. His sensed that his bloodstream was viscous, open.

When he closed his eyes, he saw a landscape of roots, all attached underground. He fell into a light reverie and awoke, exhausted, but convinced that the world could be joined together. The second time he took the mushrooms, he tried to replicate the same conditions. He went out to the hillside. He lay down in the grass. First came a softness in his stomach, and then it turned, and when he looked up to the heavens, he saw a great violent mass of hornets trying to sting one another, buzzing in a maddening cacophony. He tried to close his eyes and cover his ears, but they were inside him as well. Eyes closed, he stumbled away from the house, lest his parents think he was more possessed than they already feared. In the midst of the nightmare, he fell asleep. When he awoke, the hornets were gone, and he knew that the world would reach the edge of war. He threw the rest of the stems into the dirt.

He did not think of them again until the Opera House in 1945, when the assistants to the heads of state were all whispering about forming their own collective. He wondered what had become of the small town, and if the vision had been some sort of message about a new way of being. The Arched Umbrellas was formed that night, with a goal of creating a network of gays spread throughout all their home countries and beyond. The AUs reached out to other “deviants” and began pooling resources to pay for members’ medical care, the assassination of spouses, travel to libidinous cities, respite from factory work. There were fierce battles, fierce romances, and fierce betrayals.