Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Banning feathers, however, was not enough, authorities stated. It would be necessary to go to the source. It would be necessary to attack the rickettsia in the lice in the bird feathers. Batista was frantic. The authorities were adamant: no birds could be spared if the disease were to be completely eradicated. Batista himself had tried out DDT on a small selection of his own birds. Every bird had died. “It’s not an insecticide,” he ranted. “It’s a birdicide!”

  The authorities admitted that some birds might not survive the application of DDT, but that a particularly strong solution of it was necessary to kill the tenacious lice. Batista himself could even vouch for the ineffectiveness of the DDT solution; long after the death of his birds, he was sure he could see the lice crawling around under the barbs. Batista was furious. What was the purpose of this mandate if the birds died but the lice survived? Some officials, who did not want to be quoted, claimed that if the birds were dead, the lice would not have the advantage of that parasitic relationship.

  Michelle Mabelle, the French bird professor, telephoned Batista almost every day now to voice her alarm. Batista could hear the cries of Michelle’s triplets in the background. “Ah, is it Liberté?” Batista could hear Michelle asking. “Poor baby.” From where he stood, Batista could observe a new clutch of Djapan champions, the parent birds regurgitating the curdled pigeon milk in their crops for the hungry squabs. And from the other end of the line, Batista could hear Liberté’s sobbing shudder and its contentment as it nudged into one of Michelle’s copious breasts. Michelle made herself comfortable with the nursing baby and continued her conversation with Batista. “You’re the only one who understands the situation around here, Batista,” she began. “Only someone like you, someone who could take such extreme care to make the best bird feed in the country, could understand. Where, I ask you, are the other bird-lovers in Brazil? I’ve spoken to everyone, given interviews to all the papers, sent letters and telegrams to politicians and conservationist groups all over the world. No one seems to have the time to listen! Some ask me if I didn’t know there was a drug war going on. Others say that human beings and the unborn fetus are more important than birds. Others ask me if triplets are not enough for me to worry about,” Michelle fumed.

  “What about your husband? He must have some influence,” suggested Batista.

  “Ah, Batista, we argue about it continuously. He is so involved in the pressures of the market these days, I can’t seem to get through to him. Of course he is concerned. This will be the end of feathers. The end!” Michelle tried to contain her sobs. “He is still trying to recoup the losses from those horrid plastic feathers. There have been lawsuits, you know.”

  “Dona Michelle,” Batista pleaded respectfully, “Mr. Tweep has to understand about the loss of all the birds. You must talk to him.”

  “You don’t understand. I have tried. He’s still convinced that artificial plastic feathers are the answer. It’s a problem of removing the magnetism, he said. With proper marketing, he believes it could work again.”

  “Work again?” asked Batista.

  “Yes. It’s a problem of technology, my husband says. Plastic feathers would not harbor lice.”

  “But the real birds!” cried Batista. “What about the real birds!”

  Michelle Mabelle’s voice trembled, “I have asked him the same thing over and over. Ever since Chicolándia, I think he is convinced that everything can be more easily reproduced in Matacão plastic. What can I say? It is like talking to the Matacão itself! I try to tell him that half—HALF—” Michelle screamed, “of the world’s species of birds live in the Amazon forest. There are many I have never even seen,” she sobbed, remembering her bird lists. “I ask him about my pioneering work on the neotropic family Thraupidae. Imagine the green and gold tanager, the Tanagara schrankii. I finally saw it the other day. The beautiful black eyes, the soft yellow and green hues tapering into the sky blue of its wings and tail feathers. Everything shimmering softly in the sunlight. I could hardly breathe for the joy I felt. It was such a momentary happiness—” Her voice broke off in long hopeless sobs.

  “Dona Michelle,” Batista tried to console the woman. “Please don’t cry. I will try to do everything possible to save the birds.”

  Batista stalked all the halls of government trying to save his pigeons from the inevitable. The old dispatcher, once fluent in the language of paperwork and former sophisticate of the easy bribe to cure any bureaucrat’s thirst, saw all the doors close before him. No amount of money or hustle could supplant this now indelible code. Batista wondered at the purpose of a bureaucracy which could not be subverted. Things had certainly changed since his days in the business. “We know your situation, but the public must be attended to. Too many people have died, and thousands more will die if we do not stop the spread of the disease now. It would be impossible in such an operation to single out particular locales of noninfectious habitation. We are infinitely sorry for the loss you will have to suffer, but think of it, Batista, this is for the good of mankind.”

  Batista went home, exhausted and dejected by his inability to save not only his own prize Djapan pigeons, but any and all birds. In a last frantic effort, he ran about opening all his pigeon cages and shoving the frightened birds from their roosts. “Go!” he commanded. “Fly away before it is too late,” he screamed. But while many flew up, sweeping the skies with their circular routes, most returned within a few hours to the home they had been trained to return to.

  Batista sat in the dark and wept. He could hear the small biplanes and the camouflaged bombers flown by the air force, flooding the air with their drumming propellers. Hundreds of these planes flew back and forth all day and all night long, dropping their poison bombs and spraying a dense fog over everything—the town, the Matacão, the farms and plantations, and the beautiful and still-mysterious forest. For weeks the odor and the fumes lingered over everything. Not only birds died, but every sort of small animal, livestock, insects, and even small children who had run out to greet the planes unknowingly. The odd mice with suction-cupped feet and the rusty butterflies of the forest parking lot died, too. Strangely, as Batista himself had predicted in his own and last pigeon message, the birds had risen from the dense forest in a panic to escape the horrid fumes. Millions of birds of every color and species, many the very last of their kind—ebony toucans with their bright orange beaks, red-headed blackbirds, paradise tanagers in clear primary colors, scarlet ibises, spike-billed jacamars clothed in metallic green, miniature darting hummingbirds—filled the skies, pressing the upward altitudes for the pure air, but the lethal cloud spread odiously with sinister invisibility. The Matacão was soon covered, knee-deep with the lifeless bodies of poisoned birds. Indeed, for countless days and nights, it rained feathers.

  CHAPTER 30:

  Bacteria

  By the time GGG researchers and scientists discovered the true nature of the Matacão and developed a reasonable hypothesis for its existence, Kazumasa had disappeared. The Matacão, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part within the last century, paralleling the development of the more common forms of plastic, polyurethane, and styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid deposits of the molten mass had been squeezed through underground veins to virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty.

  Kazumasa did not care how the Matacão or the plastic had gotten on Earth. None of these explanations seemed to have any connection to him or to me. The fact that the Matacão was made of nonbiodegradable garbage seemed to have very little bearing on me or my ability to detect large masses of the plastic stuff. Kazumasa felt he had had enough of Matacão plastic, intrigue, and danger. He stared cross-eyed at me with a certain sinister irritation but eventually relented. It was not my fault. One did not simply separate one
self from a lifetime of close proximity. Kazumasa felt ashamed of his desire to be released from me; I was actually looking rather haggard and even, Kazumasa detected, sad these past few days. We had certainly been through some trying times.

  Ironically, Kazumasa and I were rescued from all those agents and counter agents by J.B. Tweep himself. From his helicopter, J.B. had spotted Kazumasa and me running from the tragic scene of Chico Paco’s murder. J.B. hid us in the confines of his penthouse apartment with the clip collection and all the 9.99 artifacts.

  Michelle’s exotic collection of birds and their cages and the bird caretaker were all conspicuously absent, as was Michelle and the Tweep triplets. Michelle Mabelle had remained through the typhus epidemic despite the danger to her newborns. She had remained like foreigners often remain in war zones and military dictatorships, writing home to their friends and families to tell how the situation isn’t as bad as the press makes it out to be, strangely immune to the turbulence surrounding them. But allowing the birds to die had been the end, the unforgivable end, she told her husband. She did not wait to see the slaughter of the tropical birds, their thick, stinking blanket of corpses covering the Matacao. She swept up her three chubby babes and all the birds and their cages and had everything transported via private jet back to her birthplace in southern France.

  J.B. had run to the airport, gesticulating with all three hands in a helpless penitent manner as the airplane lifted off and carried them away from the Matacão forever. Long after the plane had gone, J.B. wept on the tarmac, wringing two hands and wiping his tears and blowing his nose with the third. He emptied all his pockets, scattering clips everywhere. “Liberté!” he cried. “Égalité! Fraternité!”

  But Michelle was gone, and there was nothing J.B. could do about it. They had had a last irreparable argument about nature VS. technology. He had said unforgivable things about French breasts and culture and she about uncouth American arms. J.B. could not convince Michelle that birds reproduced on a production line were ultimately more valuable to mankind. “Just think of the jobs we would create!” he had exclaimed. J.B. remembered the horror in Michelle’s face. She would not even let him touch his own three babies. She threatened to get plastic surgery and donate her third breast to an organ bank. “You are a monster!” she had screamed. “I am not a monster. No. No!” she cried, hurling a rash of French expletives at J.B.

  “At least she could have left Butch,” J.B. confessed to Kazumasa and me, even though we did not understand any of J.B.’s personal traumas. We were simply relieved to be hidden at the quiet center of the mad tornado surrounding us. We cowered in this center helplessly, frightened by the horrible death of Chico Paco in Kazumasa’s stead and despondent about the attempt to get Kazumasa’s ball by snatching it from his dead body. “If I could remove you myself,” Kazumasa grabbed me in demonstration, “there would be at least some chance of hiding you somewhere.”

  After several days of wandering around J.B. Tweep’s apartment, among those 9.99 artifacts, Kazumasa and I were removed to a new hiding place attached to Hiro’s Karaoke. Kazumasa resisted mightily his desire to rush into Hiro’s and burst into song. His resistance to this urge was greatly reduced by the arrival of Lourdes. In a moment saturated with all the romance that any soap opera could possibly muster, Lourdes and Kazumasa fell passionately into one another’s arms, actually forgetting that I even existed.

  When Lourdes emerged from that embrace, she remembered the horror of the past few days, the terrible moment when Kazumasa and I exchanged ourselves for the lives of her children and the death of Chico Paco and of Gilberto. She shuddered at the thought of her own dreams, the vision of the murderers dragging Kazumasa’s dead body around with the ball which would never detach itself. She would be the same, she thought, like the ball. She would attach herself forever to Kazumasa; those murderers would have to drag her dead body around, too.

  But it was Lourdes who first noticed something physically different about me. Kazumasa had felt a slight light-headedness, and certainly, my attraction to the Matacão was more than noticeably weak. That Kazumasa had not been thrown by my attraction onto the hard surface of the Matacão that fateful Saturday night was a definite indication of my diminished abilities. Kazumasa imagined that I was suffering from the stress of our travels or the psychological trauma of our isolation and the obvious danger involved. There was, too, the fact that so many things were now made of Matacão plastic; anything built or devised within the last several years might no doubt have been created out of Matacão plastic. My energies were conceivably dispersed. But perhaps my powers of magnetism to the Matacão were actually waning, thought Kazumasa with relief. J.B. could arrange some sort of press conference, a public statement to impress upon everyone, those agents and counter-agents, those greedy and power-hungry murderers, that I was now only a worthless object of curiosity. But this was not necessary.

  “Look, Kazumasa,” Lourdes pointed at me one morning. “It looks lopsided today.” Kazumasa could not quite see the difference, but he did notice I was spinning with a sort of awkward limp, if balls could be described as having limps. I no longer spun with my old snappy precision but with a sort of dizzy unpredictable turning, like a planet losing its star. On closer inspection, Lourdes and Kazumasa discovered that I was no longer quite spherical and that I seemed fraught with tiny holes. At night, Kazumasa was tormented by what he thought must be his dreaming impressions of the sound of something chewing.

  “Lourdes!” he screamed. “It’s eating my ball!”

  It was true. Something was eating me, carving out delicate pinhole passages, which wound intricately throughout my sphere. Of this, I confess, I felt nothing but my own disappearance, bit by bit, particle by particle, my world falling away. Kazumasa alone felt pain, and it was sad to see this. Every day, Kazumasa watched more and more of me disappear, my spin grow slower and more erratic. He was helpless to stop the strange decay of his beloved ball. Kazumasa was disconsolate. Lourdes would find Kazumasa alone, speaking sadly but comfortingly in Japanese to his poor dying ball, as if I would feel more comfortable with the language of our childhood. Kazumasa continued his monologue for many days, sitting with an incurably sick and dying patient, apologizing, reminiscing, and always thanking me. One day, he touched me tenderly and was shocked to find his finger pierce the now very thin veneer of my surface. Within, I had been completely hollowed out by something, by some invisible, voracious and now-gorged thing.

  The next day, Kazumasa awoke and wept uncontrollably at the unobstructed view of the room before him.

  CHAPTER 31:

  The Market

  What was apparent to Kazumasa was slowly becoming apparent to everyone else. The tiny munching sounds that became so familiar to Kazumasa while he kept a vigil for his dying ball were now a deafening unison. Chicolándia and its plastic jungle, once void of insects and real living creatures, had been invaded by devouring bacteria. The enormous Matacão plastic palms and the giant jatubá trees crashed and slumped, crushing the mechanical monkeys and unhinging the plastic sloths. Employees in hard hats picked through the continuing rubble, the powdered debris of Matacão plastic flower gardens and Cleopatra’s tomb, the mechanical innards and sole remains of stegosaurus and other prehistoric imitations. J.B. wandered about what once was a plastic paradise, now horribly disfigured, shot full of tiny ominous holes, the mechanical entrails of everything exposed beneath the once-healthy plastic flesh. He shook his head. It was just as well that neither Chico Paco nor Gilberto had lived to see the crumbling destruction of their fondest dreams.

  The Matacão, too, was slowly but definitely corroding, as was everything else made of Matacão plastic. Buildings were condemned. Entire roads and bridges were blocked off. Innocent people were caught unaware—killed or injured by falling chunks of the stuff. People who stepped out in the most elegant finery made of Matacão plastic were horrified to find themselves naked at cocktail parties, undressed at presidential receptions. Cars crumbled at stop light
s. Computer monitors sagged into their CPUs. The credit card industry went into a panic. Worst of all, people with facial rebuilds and those who had added additional breasts and the like were privy to grotesque scenes thought only to be possible in horror movies. And there was no telling what might happen to people who had, on a daily basis, eaten Matacão plastic hamburgers and French fries.

  As for the Matacão itself, so-called Matacão plastic conservationists ran all over it, tearfully trying to find a solution for the preservation of this contemporary geological and, many insisted, spiritual miracle. But every day, more and more of the Matacão disappeared. J.B. observed the Matacão from his apartment, watching its once-shiny surface defaced irreparably by the footprints of thousands of devotees, the famous altar of Saint George sinking into its deteriorating base.

  Everything at GGG was falling into shambles as well. The sale of feathers had come to a sudden halt with the news that typhus was being spread to its victims on the wing, so to speak. Now, GGG could no longer depend on Matacão plastic. The president of the company had made a public statement regarding the demise of their revolutionary material, and GGG was beset with civil suits for everything from bodily injuries to damaged reputations. The stock market plunged as the invisible bacteria gnawed away, leaving everything with a grotesquely denuded, decapitated, even leprous appearance.

  J.B. sat alone on the twenty-third floor of GGG. All the windows and any other portion of the building made of Matacão plastic were slowly crumbling to dust. The dense tropical humidity had begun to replace the artificially fresh air-conditioned atmosphere. When the air conditioning began to fail, most GGG employees photocopied their résumés and left. Floor by floor, they descended the elevators with their coffee cups and left forever. They left J.B. alone with his three arms, scattered paper clips, and a selection of old 9.99 objects which had escaped destruction, being made of traditional metals and plastics. One of the objects was a prosthetic arm, which his third arm caressed like a lost partner. J.B. mumbled quietly, with tired confusion, to the prosthetic arm, which he had named Butch, unwilling to admit his true longing for the flippant magpie and the third breast. His third arm was once again undergoing a slow atrophy, and J.B. was aware that he would have to leave the Matacão if he wanted to save his extra appendage. He thought absently that the old plastics and metals were still viable—not as realistic but viable. People were still interested in third arms, he nodded, his mind sluggish but still moving as if in perpetual motion across the old Matacão. The fashion and accessories department could be substantially revived by the introduction of third-arm fashions. He could propose the development of a new typewriter, not to mention pianos, keyboards, new games, new sports, new magazines to guide people through increased productivity and sexual activity, an entirely new way of life. That’s right, J.B. thought, conquering his loneliness with one sweeping gesture of his weak third hand—he would go into the arms business. Geoffrey and Georgia Gamble would have smiled; they themselves had predicted everything. At this he laughed hysterically, walked to the gaping edge of that twenty-three-floor plexiglass corporate structure and threw himself over. The spongy nature of the Matacão below did not save him. Some people later speculated that he might have used his golden parachute, but Jonathan B. Tweep, unlike poor Gilberto, had always known the truth. All the parachutes were made of Matacão plastic.