The Encounter
Page 9
when I turn back, it’s not the frog he’s cutting. He has sliced
open his own forearm. What’s he doing?
The
ACTOR
takes the glass shard and draws it down their
arm. Blood gushes out.
He’s opening it, and he’s pouring the frog secretion, straight
into the bloodstream. They’re going to see the animals now.
I turn around and see Cambio, his forehead has pearled up
with sweat. He says ‘plants grow inside me’ with such
conviction that I expect tangles of creepers to push out
through his skin. He keels over, sprawls on the ground.
Hey, are you alright, buddy?
Now they’re seeing the animals. The clearing is full of
cawing, barking, growling men. And although I haven’t
taken any of the drug I feel like I’m turning into an animal…
The
ACTOR
’s voice is modified so low that they begin to
sound like an animal. They bark, growl, roar. The
modification suddenly sweeps very high, turning them into a
bird, shrill, cawing.
In front of me, a man imitates a macaw so convincingly that
his cat tattoos seem in total contradiction to his voice. He
invites me to look into his eyes. The tunnels in his pupils are
a dark passage into something I’ll never visit. So I turn away.
I close my eyes. I try to visualise my own version of the
beginning.
But I meet no fabulous beasts. I see man.
Labouring across a fogged-up landscape, and I realise that
this landscape is not territory, it’s time.
I see time. Our time.
SFX montage: fragments of voices overlapping, the sound of
drilling and chainsaws.
MILTON FRIEDMAN.
Is there some society you know that
doesn’t run on greed?
JESS WORTH.
They’re trying to drill in the Russian Arctic,
they’re here in the UK, they’re drilling in the North Sea…
LOREN. Across the fog, a silhouette appears. Barnacle. I open
my eyes. His shadow seems to reach toward me over the
plaza. He beams to me that these things are truly happening,
that time is falling off.
What am I supposed to do about it?
Why am I here?
Am I supposed to be your authenticator?
BARNACLE (LOREN
voice-over
).
You will prove that it is
real.
LOREN. No! I am not a cell! I am not a molecule! I’m not an
ant, blindly obeying nature! I’M A MODERN MAN!
The
ACTOR
picks up a water bottle and throws it at the
back wall, shaking the whole space.
Do you really think Time comes in objects like milk in
mothers? You think shuffling around a hundred square miles
of bush is supposed to waltz us back across Time? Fuck’s
sake! Someone has to denounce this, this craziness. I need
to start a one-man insurrection. If I’m to survive, I must
pump out of my psyche a massively self-generated sense of
who I am.
So. Come on. Science. Mathematics. Multiplication tables.
One times one is one. One times two is two. One times three
is four. No, no, start again. Shut up.
To recapture myself another way, I turn and face the forest. I
stare at the green jumble of branches, creepers. Sumaumus.
Lupuna.
A new sensation emerges in me, but it is not one of sadness
or fresh disaster. I become aware that while I could flee
now… I have no interest in doing so. I try to picture myself
escaping through the forest, back down the river, getting
back to my world… Come on! But escape from what? Into
what? What lies ahead is made of the same river, the same
plants, but now it’s empty of modern humankind. No one
like me is out there.
But, listen, the civilised world hasn’t disappeared, no, it has
simply not appeared yet.
We are the first humans in a territory of unnamed, uncounted
life forms. A people taken to the beginning by Barnacle. And
I have gone with them.
17. Breakfast at the Dawn of Man
LOREN. Time passes until eventually Cambio stands up and
rubs his hands over his face. He lumbers over exhaustedly
and sits by me. I close my eyes and open them. Barnacle is
standing over us. I look up at him, his stare opaque and
sphinx-like. I ask:
Quando vamos morrer?
‘When are we going to die?’ Cambio translates and Barnacle
leans over to tap my arm with his open hand, which feels
hard, sure, certain.
‘Não morrer,’ says Cambio. Not to die. Not to die.
The cold wing of death has lifted, but it’s still so close that I
feel my hair prickling up on the back of my neck,
anticipating its return. My body seems to lose its solid state.
I experience a wonderful easing of pressure.
SFX: Barnacle’s voice.
Barnacle pulls me to my feet, and then gestures for me to
follow him. I do.
He rolls his shoulderblades like an old man fighting stiffness.
Two old men. We walk through the forest, to the edge of the
river. We both know when to stop. He whispers one word,
and I think it means ‘look’, because he points upstream.
I do look, and an invisible change of lenses seems to occur
and my eyes tumble forwards. Five hundred yards extend,
while the sound of the water changes. I sense the distant
mountains rising beyond the trees.
The beginning is there. The source of the river.
Then from that source comes a message. It is wordless but so
gigantic that it breaks all boundaries. It fills all the space
outside me, inside me and fuses the source and the beginning
into one notion.
Together Barnacle and I beam to each other:
The beginning.
We face each other.
He explains, still without words, that he cannot let me leave.
Not after I have been part of this.
So – you heard me. You know
, I whisper without words.
We know
, he says. I understand that just as Barnacle undid
my spell by running counterclockwise, I could undo their
return. I could be the crack between here and there, through
which another time, our time, might flood.
He suddenly looks very naked and very tired. Aged, in fact,
and vulnerable.
He walks away, back towards the other naked, tired people
of the forest.
Until just hours ago, I was a modern man, activated by
the pressures of my civilisation, crowded inside its limits.
Barnacle and his tribe were pressured by the advance of
my civilisation even more, because their only alternative
was flight. Their only alternative
is
flight. Yet now the
certainty that blooms in every leaf and blade of grass is that
we are alone.
Tayah
, he calls me by my new name. I nod reassuringly and
go to him. Pad back to captivity. The song of the forest rises,
gains in richness and melody. My prison, my w
onderful
prison, is singing.
Forest sounds rise.
18. The Storm
A storm lashes down.
ACTOR. That night a storm shook the trees and rain lashed the
canopy so violently that liquid columns of downpour pierced
through. Flashes bathed the treetops in an apocalyptic blue
light. The water was rising incredibly fast, whipping with
unexpected strength at the trees. Swamping their roots.
Overflowing the forest floor. It rose with a surge that forced
into action all the animals that couldn’t count on the trees for
protection. They headed for higher ground.
The storm cuts suddenly and the quiet sound of a typewriter
replaces it.
LOREN. Caicaque Barnacle. Tribu Matses. Cachoeira
Esperanza. Ultra – Oriental Cordillera.
Dear Barnacle,
I don’t expect this letter to reach you, and even if it did you
couldn’t read it without the help of someone like Cambio (Olá
Cambio). Still, writing it makes me feel that you are alive.
The storm abruptly cuts over the letter.
ACTOR. McIntyre was almost knocked down by the panicked
traffic of tribespeople. He ran into the surrounding trees and
found himself in water up to his knees. He was nearly swept
off his feet. He was hit in one knee by a floating object, two
logs lashed together with palm fibre. He fell across the raft
without even thinking of clinging to it, and the current
dragged them both through a screen of low branches and
beyond. He paddled desperately, trying to steer himself back
towards his new family.
But seconds later, the raft had been pulled into the main river
and the repeated lightning revealed a frothing, boiling purple
mass of water. Return was now impossible. Still, of the
thoughts tumbling through his mind, his most anxious was
about the headman. Barnacle.
Silence. Then the quiet tapping of typewriter keys.
LOREN. Dear Barnacle,
You are a scientist in your way, as I am in mine. But your
attitude is that everything around us is alive and therefore
reachable. Nothing is forbidden. That’s why you can travel
in time.
I want to know about time. I want to know about it. I want to
know about the Earth, know about the source of this big river
and the natural world it sustains. But for you, it is less
important that you know about all these things. What’s
important is what you do with them. You are doing something
with time, rather than agonising about understanding it.
That’s why I know you are present here and will somehow be
able to learn the content of this letter.
SFX: rushing, flowing water.
ACTOR. The morning came fast, the rain seeming to bring a
grim grey mass of light down onto the frothing waters. He
saw a mudflat, paddled towards it, crawled out and sat for a
few moments in the morning light.
And then McIntyre knew, with a certainty that allowed no
room for hope or doubt, as if the headman himself was
making sure that he had the news, that Barnacle was gone.
He was dead, drowned. Barnacle was gone and yet at the
same time he was ineradicably present in everything that
surrounded him.
So close did he feel to him, that he felt Barnacle’s features
were somehow superimposed on his own. As if they were
one person.
Dying, the headman had exited the daily physical sequence of
time, entering instead that space/time/mind continuum
McIntyre had experienced. They were travelling in it together.
Then the fantastic sensation, like others so recently
experienced, faded.
He staggered out into the water, fell onto his balsa raft and
drifted downstream.
Petru recording, played on the
ACTOR
’s phone.
PETRU.
Loren McIntyre died in 2003, and I did not see him
before he died. We hadn’t lapsed, it simply happened like
that, as happens in life with some people that are important,
you already know. But then it becomes even more important
to remember them, and I was extremely, extremely – I said,
why was I so foolish, not to jump on a plane and go see him?
But I think I was, er, secretly, frightened to see him weak…
SFX: typewriter tapping.
LOREN. Dear Barnacle,
I’m here, in Arlington, Virginia, writing to you. I sailed
down with the flood, to return to my territory. But I shall
return one day to your beginning. Maybe it will only be in
my memory, but that will do. Because even there I will learn
certain things about you, and you shall learn things about
me. And there will be a consequence to our association.
Maybe more people will benefit from it. Or maybe just you and
I, sitting near a fire, sharing food, until our thoughts find a
way to connect.
ACTOR. Some of us are friends.
This is a conversation between the
ACTOR
, live, and Noma
McBurney, recorded aged five.
NOMA.
Dada, I can’t sleep.
ACTOR. Oh sweetie. You’ve just been up all night. It’s only
because Mama’s not here. You know that.
NOMA.
Will you tell me a story to help me sleep?
ACTOR. I’ve told you one already.
NOMA.
One from the book you’re reading.
ACTOR. It’s a grown-up book, sweetie. It’s not for children.
NOMA.
Dada, please read me a story.
ACTOR. Okay. I’ll find something in here…
NOMA.
One from the book you’re reading.
ACTOR. Yes, okay. This is a story about the beginning of a
people. The Mayoruna people. You’re at the beginning,
aren’t you, sweetie?
NOMA.
Yes.
ACTOR. This is the story of how they began. It’s a story from
Petru’s book. You remember Petru, don’t you, sweetie?
NOMA.
Yes.
ACTOR. Well, it was told to Petru by a man called McIntyre,
and it was told to him by Cambio. And Cambio heard it from
his father. And his father heard it from his father…
Once upon a time, the big river flowed in the sky. Its whole
valley was carried on clouds, fastened to the clouds with
bulky liana ropes. Many people lived in the valley in the sky
in perfect harmony. But one day a curious bunch of children
untied one of the ropes. That was enough to undo the whole:
rope after rope snapped under the pressure, and the valley
crashed onto the earth. Thus the big river split into
thousands of smaller rivers, and the sky, sad over the loss,
cried its first rain.
Some of us are friends.
(
Looped
.)
The sound of Noma breathing, asleep.
The End.
A Nick Hern Book
The Encounter
first published in Great Britain in 2016 as a paperback original
by Nick Hern Books Limited, The Glasshouse, 49a Goldhawk Road, London
W12 8QP, in as
sociation with Complicite
This ebook first published in 2016
Adapted from the novel Amazon Beamingby Petru Popescu, republished by
Pushkin Press in 2016
The Encounter
copyright © 2016 Complicite
Front cover image: Simon McBurney © Gianmarco Bresadola
Designed and typeset by Nick Hern Books, London
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84842 554 5 (print edition)
ISBN 978 1 78001 716 7 (ebook edition)
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