“Fair enough,” said McMurphy. “What else would you know?”
I said, “You saw them. Didn’t you?”
“Yes. They were stooped, long-limbed people who tended the fruits around their camp, and they had wrinkled skin, flattened noses, clawed fingers, and glittering eyes. I watched one man shave the dark body hair of another on the porch of the closest hut.”
“They were cats?”
The color drained, no, shifted in McMurphy’s face.
“That is possible. One of them stealthily got the drop on me in the harness. And knew what to do.”
“Will you go back?”
“No.”
“No matter my offer?”
“No matter.”
An awkward silence engulfed us.
A large woman with a pale fungal growth engulfing one ear announced that the bus was finally repaired, and we boarded immediately. McMurphy and I settled in our original seats, distant by several rows, for the long ride into the molten core of another day in the hot season. By twilight, I was sleeping like a baby. The bus felt like a furnace.
Actually, it was a furnace.
I was jolted alert as the bus slipped off the shoulder of the road on the top of a burning ridge top, and it crashed on its side. Then the bus caught fire as the passengers and I poured like ants through the upturned windows into the surrounding darkness.
People were weeping and shouting. There was a bloody veil over the face of the driver, and most everyone looked disoriented. My senses hummed with adrenaline.
All at once the entire countryside seemed to be in flames. Smoke swirled about me on all sides. I pointed my nose into the wind and tried to sniff my way to freedom, probing for pockets of fresher air on the ridge. I growled directions to the others as they groped about in fear, but only McMurphy settled in beside me as I charged ahead toward a break in the smoke.
I veered around a clump of heavy brush that crackled with fire; the light formed a halo against the darkening sky. Passing the charred body of a deer, we hopped across an outcropping of rock so hot that it penetrated the soles of our shoes, then shot down a sharp incline. Broomsage smoldered, singeing my legs. Between columns of smoke that seemed to twist toward the moon, reaching to engulf it, I spotted lights in the valley directly below.
It was there I sensed the bind we were in.
We could not turn back against the inferno, placing our survival on chance or luck. Yet if we swept toward the bottom of the ridge, toward the lights, we would no doubt reach a cliff, and that was chancy. We might not see the edge in time. The choice felt impossible to make, though that mattered less with each fifty yards we crossed. The fire and smoke turned us downhill, and I could not fight the pull of gravity.
We plunged through brambles that seemed untouched by the fire, and ran parallel to the valley lights, but a wall of flame leapt at us and forced us even lower on the hillside. We moved north again, only to meet a slip where the earth had been softened by constant rains. The slip created an impassable gap, its bottom thick with mud, and about twenty yards farther down, the slip had collapsed into a full slide that left a ragged edge where it had dropped to the plain below. At the very top of the slip, flames licked through the weeds.
I hesitated; McMurphy seemed to wait for my decision. High on the bluff, the gouts of smoke still looked too thick to trust. And skirting below the slip meant chancing the very edge of the drop-off.
I edged down into the slip. McMurphy followed.
He held his footing in the soupy mix, motioning me to cross the gap as quickly as possible, yet I lingered inside, making sure that no passengers had followed us and become mired. That became a mistake in judgment. The land under the mud was clay, and my footing gave way and I landed on my ass heading downhill. I dug in my heels and kept my legs stiff, but they began to lose strength, so I thrashed with all fours, flipping belly-down to stop my momentum with my stomach. Another mistake. Now I could not regain my feet. Gravity sucked me to the very edge of the precipice, where I seemed to hang in suspension for a slice of eternity, clawing for a foothold. I pitched forward and saw dark treetops rise rapidly toward me.
The stars spun in streaks above me.
The night air rushed across my mud-soaked clothes.
Twisting to right myself, I slammed into water, front first. I kicked and stroked myself to the edge of a shallow pool, choking on weeds and snorting liquid from my nostrils. The shore felt heavenly under me. I collapsed upon it, lost consciousness . . .
And awoke moments later in a few inches of water, my head cradled in McMurphy’s lap. All the adrenaline had drained from my body and my muscles hurt terribly.
“This is pavonine,” McMurphy said as he fed me a sweet fruit that rapidly invigorated me. “It will reorient you.”
When I shifted my gaze from his expressionless face, I was unprepared for what I saw.
The pool I had landed in was about an acre and perfectly round, a rare occurrence outside of the glacial terrain up north. The shoreline had recently receded several feet, leaving a perfect carpet ring of blood-colored grasses and transparent ferns, brightened by the tiny flowers of blue toadflax. There was a thin inner ring of very shallow dark water—where I lay—showing a few sprigs of knotty weeds. Save for the intrusive tip of a mudslide, the rest of the pond’s surface appeared matted with the pads of a table-sized water lily—an olive-green plane dotted by pure white flower heads that opened to a moon that, surprisingly, blasted through the smoke-threaded sky like a searchlight down a well. A couple lemon-feathered birds buzzed inches above this in a chaotic holding pattern. Winking electric blue darning needles flitted from foothold to foothold. Close in my field of vision, a tiny frog stretched its tongue to impossible lengths for gnats, while further out, water beetles the size of cobblestones gave the pond’s surface the look of boiling coffee as they rose between the lilies to capture an envelope of air with their back legs.
Then a great filmy bubble of swamp gas lifted from the center of the pond. At its center was a knot of fire, and its surface was figured with swirling iridescent hues, a Rorschach of color like the static of an early morning holovision, a shifting pattern in which you could see things, see images that moved and gestured and beckoned to you in ways that made your soul ache with longing.
My breath caught in my throat, perhaps from a reaction of awe at where I’d found myself, but just as much from a sense of reluctance, a feeling that I should make as small a disturbance as possible in this tableau of raw, undiluted beauty.
The bubble drifted our way. The sounds of the night intensified. And the effect of the pavonine fruit wormed deep into my brain stem. I saw McMurphy in a chimerical light. Or else the light of truth, for I had seen something like this happen to an ordinary garden tool in some village along the bus route, a spade whose handle dissolved into threads of maggots.
A violent facial spasm sent a ripple up one side of his head.
With a sense of urgency in my voice, I said, “I have no brother.”
McMurphy said, “And I have guided no one but yourself. This . . . this is all yours.”
His flesh sloughed down his cheekbones. One eye rolled from its socket and uncurled. It scurried down his neck, a ganglion-like mass on dendritic feet. The eye socket collapsed, his skull caved, and his entire body slumped. Pieces broke into smaller pieces, no longer differentiated, and then McMurphy dissolved into small motes, into a rising cloud of tiny winged insects that began to circle a larger and larger path around me.
When the gas bubble from the center of the pool burst, showering a thousand fiery beads over the lilies, these insects lost their flight pattern and settled everywhere, melting into the grasses and bushes and water lilies and the fabric of my clothes.
McMurphy was gone, if you could say he was ever there.
He had been a vestige of the forest, a single cell in its vast green brain trust, and, as if I were that iguana on the log in the Rio San Juan, I had been carried in the drift, steered by M
cMurphy’s influences, and finally swallowed up by the forest wilderness. It was up to me to emerge Jonah-like from the belly. Up to me to find my way alive to Paolo and my father.
What happened, how I survived, that is another story. It does not belong here. But there was an incident at the edge of the lily pool, just as I started out on my own, which will always stick with me as a defining moment for that passage.
I was gaining my feet, wavering a bit unsteadily, to say the least, when my hand and arm crossed my line of sight with the moon. The light seemed to pierce me. I remember how insubstantial, how like the iguana’s meat my arm appeared. I thought I saw the muscles swarming and reforming under the red caul of my palm. Following a purpose of their own. Agitated like bees on fire.
A chill swept through me.
Thankfully it passed, my vision cleared, and the night—such as it was in a place like this—felt normal again. I was weary of it all. I let out a sob of relief and hobbled off toward civilization out there ahead of me; while in their beds, unmindful of things of horrible dimension or the irrevocable import that might underpin the very fabric of their lives, the rest of the continent snored or coupled furiously or themselves drifted in a weary state, trapped in sleeplessness as if it were an amber sap that welled up from their souls.
SUMMER IN THE WORLD OF TWO SEASONS
Frazier
Those of the Stamen
In the jungle of mutable tulips,
massive stems thrust
above the storied cloud banks
and hold their crimson blooms
like acre-wide dish antennae
listening to the heavens.
Signals from the absolute
gather against their petals.
Dark secrets whistle
across their columned stamen
with the updrafts of storm fronts.
At dusk their pollen falls like gold
cotton upon the foothills below,
where the People of the Stamen
gather it for their shaman to digest
and divine the coming harvests
in a babble of red visions.
WINTER IN THE WORLD OF TWO SEASONS
Frazier
Those of the Fruit
With each snow fall on the mutant oaks,
buoyed by dreams of light,
the Yggdrasil acorn lifts high
like a mothership above the fjords.
Its cap hinges open to a nest
lined with eggs the color of icy water.
The People of the Fruit believe
that each speckle on those shells
encodes all knowledge:
a Rorschach of color
like the mysterious static
on their ancient television screens;
a shifting pattern in which they
see things, see images
that move and gesture and
beckon to them in ways
that make their souls ache.
RETURN TO THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston/Frazier
Years later we come back to find the fauna and flora
more alien than ever, the landscape unrecognizable,
the course of rivers altered, small opalescent lakes
springing up where before there was only underbrush,
as if the land itself has somehow changed to keep pace
with the metaprotean life forms which now inhabit it.
Here magnetism proves as variable as other phenomena.
Our compass needle shifts constantly and at random,
and we must fix direction by the stars and sun alone.
Above our heads the canopy writhes in undiscovered life:
tiny albino lemurs flit silently from branch to branch,
tenuous as arboreal ghosts in the leaf purple shadow.
Here time seems as meaningless as our abstracted data.
The days stretch before us in soft bands of verdigris,
in hours marked by slanting white shafts of illumination.
At our feet we watch warily for the tripvines of arrowroot,
while beetles and multipedes of every possible perversion
boil about us, reclaiming their dead with voracious zeal.
By the light of irradiated biota the night proliferates:
a roving carpet of scavenger fungi seeks out each kill
to drape and consume the carcass in an iridescent shroud.
A carnivorous mushroom spore roots on my forearm
and Tomaz must dig deeply beneath the flesh to excise
the wrinkled neon growth that has sprouted in minutes.
We have returned to the Mutant Rain Forest to trace
rumors spread by the natives who fish the white water,
to embark on a reconnaissance into adaptation and myth.
Where are the toucans, Genna wonders, once we explain
the cries which fill the darkness as those of panthers,
mating in heat, nearly articulate in their complexity.
Tomaz chews stale tortillas, pounds roots for breakfast,
and relates a tale of the Parakana who ruled this land.
One morning the Chief’s wife, aglow, bronzed and naked
in the eddies of a rocky pool, succumbed to an attack
both brutal and sublime, which left her body inscribed
with scars confirming the bestial origins of her lover.
At term, the massive woman was said to have borne a child
covered with the finest gossamer caul of ebon blue hair.
The fiery vertical slits of its eyes enraged the Chief.
After he murdered the boy, a great cat screamed for weeks
and stalked about their tribal home, driving them north.
His story over, Tomaz leads our way into the damp jungle.
From base camp south we hack one trail after another
until we encounter impenetrable walls of a sinewy fiber,
lianas as thick and indestructible as titanium cables,
twining back on themselves in a solid Gordian sheath,
feeding on their own past growth; while further south,
slender silver trees rise like pylons into the clouds.
From our campo each day we hack useless trail after trail,
until we come upon the pathways that others have forged
and maintained, sinuous and waist high, winding inward
to still further corrupt recesses of genetic abandon:
here we discover a transfigured ceiba, its rugged bark
incised with the fresh runes of a primitive ideography.
Genna calls a halt in our passage to load her minicam.
She circles about the tree, shrugging off our protests.
As we feared, her careless movement triggers a tripvine,
but instead of a hail of deadly spines we are bombarded
by balled leaves exploding into dust—marking us with
luminous ejecta and a third eye on Genna’s forehead.
Souza dies that night, limbs locked in rigid fibrogenesis.
A panther cries; Tomaz wants us to regroup at our campo.
Genna decides she has been chosen, scarified for passage.
She notches her own trail to some paradise born of dream
hallucination, but stumbles back, wounded and half mad,
the minicam lost, a disk gripped in whitened knuckles.
From base camp north we flail at the miraculous regrowth
which walls off our retreat to the airstrip by the river.
The ghost lemurs now spin about our heads, they mock us
with a chorus as feverish and compulsive as our thoughts.
We move relentlessly forward, as one, the final scenes
of Genna’s disk flickering over and over in our brains.
In the depths of the Mutant Rain Forest where the water
falls each afternoon in a light filtered to vermilion,
a feline stone idol sta
nds against the opaque foliage.
On the screen of the monitor it rises up from nowhere,
upon its hind legs, both taller and thicker than a man.
See how the cellular accretion has distended its skull,
how the naturally sleek architecture of the countenance
has evolved into a distorted and angular grotesquerie,
how the taloned forepaws now possess opposable digits.
In the humid caves and tunnels carved from living vines,
where leprous anacondas coil, a virulent faith calls us.
A sudden species fashions godhood in its own apotheosis.
A MISSIONARY OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
In nomine Patris et Filii et Felidae Sancti
Cassock torn, rorshached by blood and sweat,
a detailed gold crucifix with broken chain
clutched so fiercely in one skeletal fist
that an intaglio of the thrice-nailed Jesus
imprints like a scar in the hollow of his palm,
he trods through patches of light and shadow
cast by vast vegetal eruptions he cannot name
except to christen them infernal or sublime.
Having penetrated farther into the wilderness
than any of his far less stalwart brethren,
all of whom have fled to the coast or died,
his aquiline features are increasingly set
in a rigorous mask of beatific masochism,
he is sustained by the fervor of a faith
more maniacal than the landscape he tracks.
The creatures of the forest do not harm him,
in awe of the madness inherent in his quest.
Swarming clouds of carnivorous red-jackets
shun the taste of his pale fevered flesh.
Or it may be his sermons that protect him,
leaden tracts rehearsed till letter perfect
in the sanctum of some distant spartan cell,
now raged and chanted through the awful glens,
against the scattered shards of unthatched sky,
Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Page 12