Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest

by Frazier, Robert

  the color of an open wound suppurating with pus and

  blood.

  From this base—nutrient rich—fine rhizomes sprouted

  and tendrilled,

  sooty black as the branching air passages in a rock miner’s

  lungs.

  They matted to a mycelium knotted with buttons of tiny

  orange fruit.

  They mounded on him, formed a topography of the

  mutant landscape

  crawling with faceless stick figures, seething spore-

  bearers.

  These things embraced then fought; mated and—it

  appeared—died.

  Finally, they fused into a winged beast, a panther with the

  skin of a boa

  and the wings of a great bird, and this image birthed a

  bronze-colored cub

  as the man moaned in something resembling a wind-

  borne chant.

  Thus, Wutai’s monologue was made corporeal before my

  eyes.

  4.

  Its inscrutable eyes spin mandalas that drift and blue

  shift in toward Armageddon.

  Within minutes the native had healed, a process in which

  the growths shrank,

  withdrew from his back, and the man stood on both feet

  in good vigor and

  shook Wutai’s hand. He then staggered on to some other

  rendezvous, enslaved,

  perhaps, by a need to convert the world through his

  obeisant displays.

  I sat with Wutai in silence and watched the monkeys

  dance on the shoreline,

  acting out a primal play of lust conquering, of lust

  spurning.

  What riddle had the rainforest placed before me in the

  body of that man?

  And Wutai, was he a facilitator in this riddle? Or a

  separate challenge?

  My skin crawled with emotion, perhaps a foreshadowing.

  I realized that my bargain with Wutai was not what it had

  first appeared,

  that his offer of a guide was an offer of himself, of his

  instruction,

  and for him, my pilgrimage here was to Wutai, not to the

  bishop or to the wilds.

  Bulolo’s trail guide was no more than a figment of Wutai’s

  dementia.

  No man explored these jungles for long; no man returned

  unmodified.

  Certainly, no man would come to lead me physically to

  my own healing.

  I had not sought salvation so much as I’d sought escape.

  I had not sought truth so much as I’d sought an elaborate

  lie.

  Wutai sensed this and offered a woman and some down-

  home wisdom.

  I walked down to the river’s edge, skipped stones into its

  cauldron pools.

  The mist gathered, wet my eyes, and for a moment my

  resolve broke.

  I knew then I must find the center of the rainforest for

  myself,

  accept its changes on me as I had accepted the wounds of

  a shattered love,

  of a woman I’d left far behind in the cubicled cities of

  America,

  of a woman who had known my heart but feared the

  power of her own,

  who feared the thin illusion that my life was staid and

  stable,

  feared rejection and its loneliness where none was

  possible from me,

  feared the intensity I had leavened into friendship.

  I must accept that we could’ve loved, could have reached

  unscalable heights,

  yet we’d feared—we both feared—the raw, exposing

  power of that act.

  These were inescapable insights. Yet it seemed I could

  escape them.

  And in the mutable heart of darkness, I would act out

  their stigmata,

  a broken man laboring at every moment to live with my

  truth,

  my flesh opening for each new spore to implant

  the solace of its corrupting visions.

  Coda

  In the Mutant Rain Forest where everything dreams, yet nothing sleeps,

  in its replenished interior that is the shade of the soul,

  where ancient fires still rage and sputter dead,

  I sometimes see my own death shapeshift before me,

  a flashing vision

  of scales patterned in a lambent bronze,

  in a stream of rays that runs liquid as the days.

  It is a Sphinx that lifts the world upon its back and growls.

  Its veins are roadmaps that lead nowhere,

  its breath a cipher,

  its inscrutable eyes spin mandalas that drift and blue

  shift in toward Armageddon.

  And everywhere I look upon the Sphinx’s skin,

  memories spin; they form from the formless . . .

  THE TALE WITHIN

  Robert Frazier

  In the hot season of a hot year, on a pilgrimage through the superverdant interior of the Mutant Rain Forest that spans from old Belize to the swamps flooding Panama City, I retraced the route of my father’s expedition in a series of rattletrap buses. Drivers plowed their vehicles through black bottomless mud holes, and on the roads linking the high passes, harpy grandmothers would lock my arm in a death grip as we snaked down hairpin turns whose shoulders fell away hundreds of meters to the cloud forest below. It seemed plausible that my father had been swallowed by this nightmare. Lost, yes, but not killed. He epitomized the adage that says every sailor must be prepared to take the wheel of the ship. I had considered it on this trip several times.

  Worn by lack of sleep and constant delays, I left such a bus one afternoon while it was stopped at a border crossing from Honduragua into Costa Rica, and I followed a vine-choked alley toward a bar overlooking the Rio San Juan. Another passenger walked with me: shorter than I, rotund, dressed in khakis, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pronounced facial tic. When we reached the patio that overlooked the ochre waters of the river, he insisted on ordering us an iced pot of maté.

  Just what my spirits needed. A Brazil-sized jolt of caffeine.

  “Going far?” the man asked with an Irish accent as buoyant as my mother’s.

  “I’m not sure where I’m going,” I said.

  We both looked away to a thick log that floated by us in the water, and the back of a glassy iguana that rode upon it. Its transparent flesh resembled a map of red and blue roads. In a seamless motion, the log rolled, swallowed the glassy iguana whole, then flipped its branch-like tail and dove into the current, no doubt to surface upriver and begin another search for a tasty passenger.

  “Ah,” he said. The man seemed restless, stirred in his depths by an invisible hand. “You’re here for the jungle. A photographer, right?”

  He gestured at the camera bags I had carried with my suitcase from the bus.

  I said, “I do some of that.”

  “Thought so,” he smiled. “I’m a guide working out of Managua. McMurphy’s my name.”

  No emotion showed in his milky jade eyes. He relied on facial muscles.

  “Oh, I’m not soliciting. I specialize in canopy work, and I’m dead set against taking out another tourista.”

  I made a weak effort to uphold my end of the conversation. I kept hearing my mother, seeing my mother in his mannerisms. The breathy sonorities, the twitch, the deep need to tell everyone her circumstances. This man might someday fall silent as she had, succumb to a powerful grief or to some secret that already ate at him from within.

  I said, “Kind of narrows your options.”

  His cheek spasmed. He shook his head as he spoke. “After what happened a year ago, I’m sticking with biologists.”

  “Last year?”
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br />   “Nothing you’d believe for long, I dare say.”

  “Please continue,” I assured him. “I’ve been distracted.”

  I reached out and gave his hand a vigorous shake. His sweaty grip felt tenuous, as if his arm might come off at the shoulder.

  “I’m Rob,” I said. “Rob Breslin.”

  “Ian,” he said. He looked wistful for a moment, like a schoolboy gathering his thoughts before a speech.

  “Okay. It began just about this way, you know. A sleepy town. A long stopover. A story to be told. Only it wasn’t my story, really.

  “This kid was looking for his roots. He told me he’d been abandoned on the doorstep of an American mission in Mexico City, and now wanted to find his family. He backed this with a roll of money that smelled faintly of drugs and fast cars and city life. He claimed he’d been the offspring of a native woman and a white traveler who’d retreated into the wild.

  “Now, his skin didn’t have the right look, if you know what I mean. Instead of a rusty bronze, he was pale, with black hair matting his chest and arms, everywhere actually. His nose had been broken, flattened to his face, and his eyes showed yellow as wheat straw. He had a spiky mustache, too.” The man rubbed the hair above his own lip. “Mestizos don’t grow much face hair, you see.”

  I said, “I’ll remember that.”

  “Anyway, we set out to cross the steep eastern slopes of the Miravalles volcano. He felt certain that his family lived in the wilds above the waterfalls there, at a commune in tree houses. They worshipped the jungles as a paradiso. He’d hired me for checking the treetops, and we did just that. He was bloody loony, I soon realized, but it was too late to turn back. All that first day he mumbled stuff about jaguar men and the need to stay hidden.”

  Jaguar men! Those words pierced my chest like a poison barb. My father had come to these parts to trace such a rumor, based on specious accounts that a missionary on the Isla de Ometepe had harbored a small group of mutated cats who walked erect. His theory held that they were shaved, disguised in holy cloth, and sent south with two monks across Lake Nicaragua, to where the Mutant Rain Forest was impenetrable.

  I didn’t mention this to McMurphy. Nobody gave my father’s expedition credence back then; I didn’t judge McMurphy to be any different.

  I said, “What about these Jaguar men?”

  “I know this won’t make sense, but bear with me.”

  He freshened our cups with more maté and ice.

  “We’d been traveling for two and a half days, and the kid had survived a touch of dysentery, the hallucinogenic stings of lime ants, and an encounter with a very nasty bat. Barely twenty, but he had guts. On the morning of the third day, after a hard rain pelted our hammocks, we heard a cry. A haunting cry. I assured him it was only a Kong sloth, you know, but he insisted that we descend in our harnesses and start off toward where we’d heard the call. Within three hours we were pumping our ascenders into the low sucker branches of a peculiar gargantua tree.”

  “You can’t summit a gargantua manually,” I noted, setting my feet up on a battered chair. “Even the saplings rival the Empire State Building.”

  “So you know something of this forest.” McMurphy’s eyes widened and he plucked at his goatee. His expression always seemed in flux. “That is good. Very good.

  “Anyway, when he stated that morning that he was serious about attaining the crown, an impossibility as you say, I suggested we rig a few emergency motors to our gear. We wired up these rigs with battery packs, and soon climbed in relative peace, tugging at the ropes with our arms and elevating through a mist illumined to violet by the rays of sunset. A swarm of eagle-sized butterflies passed below us. I glimpsed the Miravalles volcano smoking peacefully above us. You couldn’t fault him for choosing a beautiful climb.

  “I didn’t sense that something was amiss—truly amiss—until the second afternoon in that tree, when we’d threaded up through the first big branches. I had to recoil the ropes and fire launchers for yet another leg of the climb. Here the bark appeared devoid of bromeliads and anaconda vines, say nothing of epiphytes. I’d never seen a tree so clean. I noted this, but the boy showed no alarm. By the time we’d reached the underbellies of the huge main branches of the lower half—thick as box cars they were!—and had stopped to fire the ropes yet another time, I also noted how uncluttered the main limbs were. As if some creature of the forest had deliberately pruned its millions of small branches and twigs just to strengthen the larger ones. It certainly made things safer for us, you see, but . . . ”

  “I know,” I said, growing eager to hear the end of his story. “The gargantua grows so rapidly that its small limbs are too weak to hold a man.”

  “Correct,” he said.

  I brushed a bee from my sleeve into my palm. Its thorax looked as if a human skull was painted on it.

  “So you also know that everything grows parasites here. And worthless branchlets below the leafy crest. Yet, as I said, this gargantua had been gleaned. In such a state, the crown might indeed have been reachable with enough food and our battery packs, as yet unused.

  “The boy saw this and grew more agitated, and he started up before I’d hooked my harness and gear into the new run of lines. Switching on his motor, he built a lead, and he increased it with reckless tugs of the ropes that jerked him ahead faster. I watched as his figure diminished above me.

  “I later found him on a high limb where the ropes ended. He sat cross-legged, paralyzed by what he’d discovered.”

  McMurphy paused to refill his cup.

  “Go on. I’m in suspense.”

  McMurphy smiled. “Ah, that is what makes this well-told!”

  I frowned. “He found what he was looking for?”

  “Yes. Or so I imagine now.

  “Before us stretched a small village of leafy huts built upon platforms of branches, and between them ran rope bridges made from the interweaving of vines. On a man-made canopy about them, large yellow bromeliads flourished in ordered rows, each with pineapple-like fruit at their center.

  “The kid let out a cry like I’d heard that morning, only this time the haunting note seemed twisted by a sad need, an emotion so pent up that it had mutated like the jungle into something, well, tragic. It was as if . . . ”

  I said, “All right, all right. What happened?”

  McMurphy shrugged. “Suddenly, I fell away from the sight.”

  “Your rope broke?”

  “No. My harness let loose, tripped by a creature that had worked its way up under me. I zipped down at an amazing rate, managing to jam the mechanism just before my rope ended. The rope stretched and broke, then I slammed hard into rough bark—the feel of it is the last thing I remember. Next I found myself in a hospital with two busted legs and a cracked ribcage. I’d be dead if not for the orchid gatherer who found me. He dug me from a dense pile of leaves at the base of the tree. Before the blood mites drained me.”

  Downriver, our bus blurted its horn.

  “End of story?” I said as I paid the waiter.

  “Very much so. I never heard if the kid made it out. And I’ve never gone back. Though I might someday, just to prove I saw, well, what I saw. I might if I had the right reason to go back.”

  As we hurried toward the bus, McMurphy fell silent and I sensed a reluctance in him to speak further. I myself felt numb, unable to digest his story or even make a comprehensible whole of its parts. We sat together, but I dozed while he stared ahead into the setting sun.

  When I awoke it must have been well past midnight. The bus had stopped in another town, and then wouldn’t start. I stumbled out into the humid night to find a room.

  Three girls from a hot pillow joint, their faces thick with garish make-up, helped the male travelers with their bags under a lone streetlight. I saw McMurphy shrug off their advances and head toward a hostel down the street. I followed at a distance and took a room in the back over the alley, only to wake before sunrise, overwhelmed by the smell of sewer wastes and a
longing that coursed over and over through my heart like the deep insistent songs of sap locusts.

  One clear dream memory of my mother’s mouth wavered in my mind’s eye. I heard her voice calling me.

  With a fuss and a small bribe to the proprietor of the hostel, I managed to raise McMurphy. It looked as if he had slept upright in a chair, for neither the bed nor his clothing were rumpled.

  “What’s this about?” he said.

  He squinted into my face as the sleepy cook brought us two mugs of weak coffee on a tray. McMurphy kneaded his hands, and we moved to a pair of ladder-back seats in the vestibule. Neon toucans flitted from bush to bush outside, their bioluminous bills making loopy streaks through the shadows. I wondered if these were messages. A ghostly foretelling, perhaps, of the success of my journey.

  “Speak, Breslin! You must have disturbed me for a reason.”

  “I have a theory,” I said.

  His frown turned to a smile. “Ah. By way of trying to hire me?”

  The steam from our drinks swirled in punctuation about our heads.

  “You need reasons for your work, you say?” I cleared my throat. “What if I told you that the boy you left in the forest was half jaguar.” I paused until his eyebrows raised in anticipation.

  “Ah,” he said. “You are still dreaming.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well,” he said as he stood abruptly. “I wish I were. You have wasted my time. I am not interested in this mockery of my tale.”

  “But . . . ”

  “I am sorry I began this.”

  He left the hostel abruptly, and I did not see him again until I made my way to the bus station two hours later. I confronted him where he stood by the ticket window.

  “Ah! What a surprise. It’s Breslin.”

  I nodded. “I believe your indignation is a ruse. You left out an important part of your tale.”

  “True,” said McMurphy. “But neither were you forthcoming.”

  “Fair enough. That boy you guided into the forest was probably my half brother. I am searching for him.”

  “The resemblance did not escape me,” McMurphy said. “But your face is not his. A different mother, perhaps? Yes. But you’re not here just to find your brother, are you?”

  “My father as well.”

  “He lived here? A Notre Americano?”

  “Yes. He returned once with Paolo, when I was a baby, so that my mother could raise us together. Paolo lied to you about the mission steps and the orphanage. He lied to my mother about his reasons for seeking out my father in the jungle. She died waiting for my brother and my father to come home.”