He turned away from me then and spoke to the smaller man, who then went to the nearest hut, returning a moment later with a leather satchel. Marlowe took the bag and sat it between his feet.
“You know, it really is quite a fascinating narcotic,” he said, as he withdrew a hypodermic syringe and a glass phial. “At first I thought it to be a variation on the more common voudoun drug used in rituals all across the island. But it is, in fact, an altogether different beast. You see, the others employ a laughably rudimentary concoction of mescaline and ergo-tised grass seed, while these clever buggers have found themselves a nasty little tree frog whose skin exudes, would you believe it, a wholly unique form of tetrodotoxin.”
Marlowe smiled and held the phial out before him; the grin on his face was that of a small boy who has just found a shiny stone.
“All quite exciting, really,” he said. “Who knows, if we play our cards right, we may even be able to set up a little gourmet concern on the side. Could be big with the Japanese. We could import a gaggle of fugu chefs to the Excelsior and offer up a double course of pufferfish and Maladif grenouilles. Of course, we would have to take great care with the recipe.”
Marlowe seemed to be finding all of this quite funny, and when he laughed, the Force Sûreté men laughed with him, though I doubt they understood a single word he said.
“Now these heathens,” Marlowe went on, motioning toward the surrounding huts, “use the drug in its powder form. They blow it into the intended’s face, so that it is inhaled and absorbed through the mucous membrane. Or else they mix it with crushed nettles and spread it over the ground. The small lesions produced are sufficient to allow the drug into the bloodstream. Both remarkably inefficient delivery systems, if you ask me. Injection is far more expeditious.”
He pushed the needle through the rubber stopper in the phial and began to extract the plunger.
“Shall I tell what makes this wee potion so remarkable, James?” He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he looked mildly perturbed. “You do have the right to know.”
Again he waited. I said nothing.
“Don’t be petulant, James,” Marlowe sneered. “It doesn’t become you.” He held the loaded syringe at arm’s length and depressed the plunger so that a stream of the solution shot into the air.
“Fine,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s so remarkable.”
“Gladly, James. Gladly.” His smirk returned. “Unlike the primitive concoction they employ down below, or indeed the chiri favoured by Nipponese gourmands,” Marlowe said, “this lovely little wonder does not affect heart rate nor, I’m pleased to say, does it depress respiration. This is no bogeyman potion, James. No Baron Samedi trick to steal the soul. In fact, for all its artlessness, it is quite sophisticated. Very specific. It seems to work exclusively on the voluntary musculature, inducing complete paralysis. There’s many an inmate in Cap Gloire’s central prison that could attest to that. Well, at least they could have,” he said, casting a sly glance toward the two Force Sûreté men, “had my friends here not paid them a visit in the infirmary.”
“And me?” I asked. “Why me?”
“Please, James,” he said, shaking his head. “I should have thought it obvious by now. You are the perfect choice. Not only do you have a thorough professional knowledge of the disease, but you are also its victim. What more could a scientist ask for than a subject that can report on the effects from both the inside and out?”
I took a deep breath and thought that maybe it would have been better if I had put up a fight. Then I wondered about Mathieu. I wondered if he had fought. Or did he let them take his life as easily as they did his machete?
“This is madness,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“On the contrary, James. I see it as pure science.”
“And what about afterward? After you’ve catalogued your findings. What then?”
Marlowe pursed his lips and looked down at the ground.
“You went into the Maladif jungle with a local guide in search of a community well known for being hostile to outsiders. Neither you nor your guide was ever seen again. It was only by the grace of God and a nasty little viral infection that I didn’t suffer the same fate.”
“And that’s it?” I said.
“Yes, James,” Marlowe replied. “That’s it.”
He motioned to one of the men, who retrieved a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a ball of cotton batting from the satchel. Marlowe held the syringe between his teeth as he swabbed the crook of my left arm.
It took only seconds for the drug to start taking effect. I recognized in myself the initial signs of tetrodotoxin poisoning, almost as if I were witnessing them in a lab specimen. My motor coordination began to fail and the entire surface of my skin was soon numb. I began to salivate; a long string of spittle slipped from the corner of my mouth and hung, unbroken, from my chin. I could feel my muscles weaken and my head started to droop. The sensation was quite frightening at first. It felt as if tiny strings throughout my body were unravelling, as if I were coming undone. There was a flash of heat behind my eyes. From there it radiated out and I was bathed in warmth, from the top of my skull to the tips of my toes. This was followed by a pleasant sense of hollowness, as if I’d been emptied out, leaving just the shell of me, nothing else.
I could hear Marlowe’s voice, coming at me as if over a great distance. It wavered, then was loud again, as if it were being tossed about by the wind.
“James,” I heard him call. “Are you still with us, James?” He lifted my head and peered into my eyes. “Of course you are,” he said. “You’re still in there.”
He was grinning like a cat.
“Don’t you forget, James,” he said, almost shouting now. “Don’t you forget what it feels like. Notes; a good scientist always takes notes. Now,” he said, gently turning my head to the side, “have a look at this.”
He was showing me my hand, my left hand. It lay motionless on my thigh. As still as it had been in many months, not a tremor to be seen. As if my body were at last my own again.
Then Marlowe turned my face back toward his own, and I noticed in it a look akin to compassion.
“I think that’s good enough for our first go-round, don’t you?” He nodded my head for me. “I’m going to give you another shot now, James,” he said, as if he was explaining a simple medical procedure to a worried child. “It’s a mild Datura stramonium derivative. Has some rather intriguing hallucinogenic properties, but nothing too potent.”
At this point, Marlowe motioned to one of the others to hold my head while he prepared a second syringe. He administered it very near the puncture mark left by the first. Then he stepped back and waited, looking more than satisfied with himself. But when nothing happened, his demeanour changed. He became agitated.
He waited a moment longer, then knelt down on the ground in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders.
“James,” he said in a ridiculously stern voice. “Are you listening to me, James? I’ll have no games here. This is serious business.”
The Force Sûreté man holding me from behind spoke. I did not understand what he said, but his tone was distinctly unfriendly. Marlowe hissed at him in indecipherable Creole, then reached for his satchel and withdrew another syringe.
“One more, James,” he said, offering me a hopeful look. “But that’s it. I don’t want you bouncing around this place like a madman.”
Thirty minutes later, I still showed no signs of re-emerging from the stupor. Frustrated, Marlowe grabbed me by my hair and pulled my head back over my shoulders. He put his face very close to mine and shouted my name repeatedly. Small foamy pockets of saliva collected in the corners of his mouth. And as he yelled, the veins in his neck bulged. He could not tell that I was laughing at him.
He ordered the men to cut me loose from the chair. They carried me back to the hut and laid me down again on the straw mat.
As near as I could tell, the two men from the
Force Sûreté left before evening fell. Until then, they had remained standing just inside the doorway to the hut, eyeing Marlowe as he worked to revive me. As the hours passed, he grew more frantic.
My third injection of the Datura stramonium, though it showed no outward effect, served to produce some rather interesting visions. At one point, I thought I saw Mathieu leaning over me, grinning, and telling me in a voice that sounded much like my own that he had gone back and found the mules, and that he’d returned them safely to the old man’s livery. Then Mathieu’s face began to swirl about, like water over a drain, until it was gone altogether, replaced by a large black fly buzzing in the air above me.
After the Force Sûreté men had left, Marlowe calmed considerably, though he appeared no less concerned about my condition. In their absence, he began to look to more arcane remedies to resuscitate me. He directed the villagers to produce balms and mud packs, and he spread a paste made from tree bark on the inside of my lips and under my tongue. The whole of the while he nattered away, scolding me one moment, the next caressing my brow and whispering softly into my ear. Most of what he had to say did not register, so addled was I by the hallucinogenic cocktail he’d fed into my veins.
For a day and a half he disappeared. I can only assume he went back to Cap Gloire for supplies, because when he returned he brought with him several new intravenous variants of the original Datura stramonium derivative, each of increased potency. None produced any greater effect than magnifying my apparitions, and further deflating his own spirit. These failures took their toll. When he looked down at me, the disappointment registered in his features. Of the two of us, I’d no doubt that it was I who now appeared the younger. A thought that pleased me greatly.
Then, a few days after Marlowe’s return from Cap Gloire, a colonel of the Force Sûreté came to the village. He and Marlowe stood outside of the hut arguing, their voices cracking in anger. When they came inside, the officer took out a handkerchief and held it over his nose and mouth. By then, the smell in the hut was ungodly. The sad fact was, with the paralysis of my voluntary musculature, I no longer had the ability to control my bodily functions. And the thin gruel that Marlowe forced down my throat through a feeding tube fashioned out of a length of rubber surgical tubing went through me like Pablum through a newborn. As he refused any assistance from the villagers, the job of my cleaning fell to Marlowe; it was not a duty he performed regularly.
The officer was clearly disgusted by the sight that greeted him. He stared at me for a long moment before he finally bent over and held his hand close to my mouth to see if I was still breathing. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
Possibly we had met in the lounge of the Excelsior. Satisfied that I was still alive, he retreated. He said something to Marlowe, then turned and kicked me repeatedly in the upper thigh. When I did not respond, he withdrew his revolver and placed the muzzle against my temple. I heard the click of the hammer being cocked. Marlowe moved forward then and grabbed him by the shoulder, at which the officer spun round on his heels and pressed the barrel against Marlowe’s forehead. Then he laughed and re-holstered his weapon. He draped his arm across Marlowe’s shoulder and led him outside. I did not see Marlowe again after that.
Yesterday I heard the sound of fighting. Mortar rounds and small-arms fire. It came from far off, somewhere down below the village. Espérance, I should expect. I could only suppose that officers from some other district on the island had decided it was their time to assume control of this terrible place. Or maybe it was the Marais junta, arisen from the ashes.
Fighting raged throughout the day and there was much commotion in the village. I could hear children crying, women too. The voices of the men were harsh and insistent. The corrugated-steel roofs were being removed from the surrounding huts and dragged across the hard-packed earth. They were placed against the outside walls of my hut, sheet after sheet, and I found the rusty, chiming sound of the panels of metal falling together comforting, as if I were being sealed up in an encrusted cocoon.
As night fell, and the noise of the battle grew closer, the villagers began to flee Ascension, seeking refuge in the jungle higher up in the mountains. But before they left, a small group came into the hut and stripped me of my clothes, as has happened every night since Marlowe disappeared. In his absence they assumed my keeping. It is a responsibility shared among them, and in their hands I have felt a degree of security I could not have previously thought possible. Their kindness, though, is not a gesture of acceptance, for I do not belong here. And yet it is kindness nonetheless. It is no doubt born of pity, and that pity in turn born of compassion. I have seen it in their faces as they lean over me, their wet cloths sliding over my skin, cleansing my body. But there was something else in their eyes on this night, something they tried to keep hidden from me: sadness, regret.
As their faces passed back and forth across my field of vision, I saw among them the features of the thin man I had followed along the darkened path that led me to this place. He knelt on the floor beside me and put his mouth close to my ear. He whispered something in his singsong dialect that I did not understand and softly kissed the spot where the club had struck me. Then he took the wide-brimmed straw hat from his head and placed it gently over my face. The last sound I heard was that of his bare feet gently slapping against the earthen floor as he left my hut.
PAYNE’S FLIGHT
THE MAN WHO OCCUPIED THE WINDOW SEAT insisted on climbing over him to gain the aisle, rather than allowing Payne to get up and let him pass. Twice already he’d made the assault, and he was preparing to do so again. When Payne noticed this he moved quickly, undoing his seat belt and grabbing hold of the headrest in front of him. A polite tap on his elbow stopped him from lifting himself any farther. There ensued a smiling pantomime, the silly dumb show of those who do not speak one another’s language. The mummeries of his fellow traveller won out, and Payne settled back uncomfortably. He watched as the man went through his strange pre-clambering routine. In the impossibly narrow gap afforded by their coach-class berth, made only slightly more spacious by the vacancy of the middle seat in their row, the man executed several knee thrusts, like a sprinter warming in the blocks. Then, without a pause, he climbed, gracefully Payne had to admit, onto the empty seat. And after two more knee thrusts, possibly to synchronize his rhythm, he passed over Payne and into the aisle.
A queer little fellow, Payne thought as he turned in his seat and watched the man make his way toward the toilets in the rear of the airplane. He was impeccably dressed in varying shades of charcoal, from his smart pullover down to the felt slippers covering his expensive socks. Japanese, Payne decided as he reached into the seat pocket in front of him and withdrew his spiral notebook. He unclipped his pen from the coils and flipped to the page he had been working on earlier. Before continuing, he reread what was already written:
Esteemed colleagues—for that is what I consider you, both professors and pupils alike. We are all, regardless of achievements, confederates, compatriots—compeers, if you will. Bound together in our quest, our thirst, by a love that is far deeper than simple admiration. It is a passion that embraces our souls, that settles in our bones, that stirs our loins.
Loins? Payne thought. Stirring? How asinine. To be sure, there had been occasions on which his loins had been stirred, but never by literature; at least not by proper literature. He glanced down to the bottom of the page, to where he had written her name—to where he’d written it, crossed it out, drawn a circle around it and then filled in the circle so all was hidden.
For good measure he put another thick line through the blot of ink, then tore the sheet from his notebook. But instead of crumpling it into a ball, as had been his intention, he folded it neatly and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he stared at the blank page before him. The symposium was set to begin at one o’clock the following afternoon, with his address scheduled to close the first day, at a dinner being held in his honour. And all
Payne had was the folded piece of paper in his pocket.
Three months earlier when the invitation had arrived, it was completely unexpected. It wasn’t so much that Payne hadn’t heard of Hoogeveen Polytechnic, which he hadn’t, it was that someone at Hoogeveen Polytechnic had heard of Severn College—and Professor Harvard T. Payne of Severn College in particular. His first reaction was fear, sure as he was that it was just another cruel faculty joke. Only after a rather arduous overseas phone call were his anxieties quelled. “Ja, Dokter Payne,” Professor Willem Hefflin, the invitation’s signatory, assured him, “we are very excited to have you speak. Your work on Gaynor is well regarded.” At that, Payne considered again the possibility of an elaborate jape.
His research on the slim canon of Noel Gaynor, whom Payne believed to be a significant figure in the birth of Canadian letters—at least as important, if not more so, than those uptight émigré sisters, Moodie and Traill—was considered by his fellow professors at Severn to be something of an embarrassment. After Payne’s seminal work on the subject, a slim article entitled “Noel Gaynor: Lost in the Bush,” had been turned down by all the respectable academic journals, he’d finally had to subsidize its publication in an obscure periodical put out by a West Coast university even more insignificant than Severn. Many within his own English department held the view that his tenure was the result of an administrative oversight. A clerical error, Payne had overheard one colleague say. Thus, the invite to the symposium was indeed a coup. One that Payne was more than prepared to flaunt. With it also came the promise of adventure. The thought of a stopover in Amsterdam with Kathryn made him tingle.
Payne called her after verifying the invitation’s authenticity. He’d settled himself down behind his cluttered desk in his cramped little office, which was tucked away in the farthest reaches of the Victorian manor that housed the English department. He couldn’t be sure, hadn’t found any hard evidence, but was fairly certain that the room had once been part of the servants’ quarters, situated, as it was, on the top floor of the old house. Wedged under the gable of the roof, its ceiling was crossed with beams that drooped so low at the edges he could stretch to his full height—just slightly under five foot eight—only in the middle of the room. Still, there was the consolation of the view afforded by the dormer window behind his desk, which looked out over the gravel-packed faculty parking lot to the thick copse of sugar maples beyond. The bush, he liked to call it, in deference to his woodsman scribe.
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