by Wade Davis
In 1980, eighteen years later, a man walked into the l’Estère marketplace and approached Angelina Narcisse. He introduced himself by a boyhood nickname of the deceased brother, a name that only intimate family members knew and that had not been used since the siblings were children. The man claimed to be Clairvius and stated that he had been made a zombi by his brother because of a land dispute. In Haiti, the official Napoleonic code states that land must be divided among male offspring. According to Narcisse, he had refused to sell off his part of the inheritance, and his brother had, in a fit of anger, contracted out his zombification. Immediately following his resurrection from the grave he was beaten and bound, then led away by a team of men to the north of the country where, for two years, he worked as a slave with other zombis. Eventually the zombi master was killed and the zombis, free from whatever force kept them bound to him, dispersed. Narcisse spent the next sixteen years wandering about the country, fearful of the vengeful brother. It was only after hearing of his brother’s death that he dared return to his village.
The Narcisse case generated considerable publicity within Haiti and drew the attention of the BBC, which arrived in 1981 to film a short documentary based on his story. Douyon, meanwhile, had considered various ways to test the truth of Narcisse’s claim. To exhume the grave would have proved little. If the man was an impostor, he or his conspirators could well have removed the bones. On the other hand, had Narcisse actually been taken from the grave as a zombi, those responsible might have substituted another body, by then impossible to identify. Instead, working directly with family members, Douyon designed a series of detailed questions concerning Narcisse’s childhood-questions that not even a close boyhood friend could have answered. These the man claiming to be Narcisse answered correctly. And over two hundred residents of l’Estère were certain that Narcisse had returned to the living. By the time the BBC arrived Douyon himself was convinced. To close the circle, the BBC took a copy of the death certificate to Scotland Yard, and there specialists verified that the fingerprint belonged to the sister, Marie Claire.
It was several moments before I could accept the seriousness of their conclusion. I stood up and moved, escaping the white whorls of cigarette smoke, anxious to shake loose a dozen thoughts and questions.
“How do you know this isn’t an elaborate fraud?”
“Perpetrated by whom and for what end?” Kline replied. “In Haiti a zombi is a complete outcast. Would a leper stand upon Hyde Park Corner and boast of his disease?”
“So you are saying that this Narcisse was buried alive.”
“Yes, unless you believe in magic.”
“What about oxygen in the coffin?”
“His survival would have depended on his level of metabolic activity. There is a medically documented case of an Indian fakir consciously reducing his oxygen consumption and surviving ten hours in an airtight box hardly larger than a coffin.”
“It is worth pointing out,” interjected Lehman, “that damage due to oxygen deprivation would be progressive.”
“In what sense?”
“If certain brain cells are without oxygen for even a few seconds they die and can never recover their function, for as I probably don’t have to tell you, there is no regeneration of brain tissue. The more primitive parts of the brain, those that control vital functions, can endure greater abuse. Under certain circumstances the individual may lose personality, or that part of the brain that deals with thought and voluntary movement, and yet survive as a vegetable because the vital centers are intact.”
“Precisely the Haitian definition of a zombi,” noted Kline. “A body without character, without will.”
Still incredulous, I turned to Kline.
“Are you suggesting that brain damage creates a zombi?”
“Not at all, at least not directly. After all, Narcisse was pronounced dead. There must be a material explanation, and we think it is a drug.”
Finally I knew what they wanted from me.
“I first came across rumors of a zombi poison some thirty years ago,” said Kline. “During my first years in Haiti I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a sample. I did meet an old voodoo priest who assured me that the poison was sprinkled across the threshold of the intended victim’s doorway and absorbed through the skin of the feet. He claimed that at the resurrection ceremony the victim was administered a second drug as an antidote. Now both the BBC and Douyon have sent us very similar reports.”
“Douyon brought us a sample of a reputed zombi poison some months ago,” said Lehman. “We tested it on rats but it proved to be completely inert. However, a brown powder given to us recently by one of the correspondents of the BBC may be of greater interest. We prepared an emulsion and applied it to the abdomen of rhesus monkeys; it caused a pronounced reduction in activity. We have absolutely no idea what the powder was made from.”
Lehman’s grave dark face had changed; it was luminous, trembling. I found his excitement contagious. Yes, it was completely conceivable that a drug might exist which, if administered in proper dosage, would lower the metabolic state of the victim to such a level that he would be considered dead. In fact, however, the victim would remain alive, and an antidote properly administered could then restore him at the appropriate time. The medical potential of such a drug could be enormous … as Kline obviously appreciated.
“Take surgery,” he said. “Someone is about to have an operation. What do they want to be sure of?” Before I could reply, he said, “Their surgeon? They want to know that the surgeon is qualified, but the truth is that most surgery is absolutely routine. The real liability, the hidden danger that kills hundreds of patients every year, no one even thinks about.”
Lehman was restless, anxious to finish Kline’s thought, but Kline went on. “Anesthesia. Every time someone goes under, it is an experiment in applied pharmacology. The anesthesiologist has his formulae and his preferred chemicals, but he combines them on the spot, depending on the type of operation and the condition of the patient. Each case is unique and experimental.”
“And hazardous,” Lehman added. Kline held his empty brandy glass to the light.
“We cloak all uncomfortable truths in euphemism,” Kline said, moving back to the table toward me. “General anesthesia is essential, often unavoidable, always dangerous. That makes everyone, especially the physicians, uncomfortable. Hence we joke about getting knocked out, as if it were a straightforward procedure. Well, I suppose it is. Bringing someone back undamaged, however, is not.”
Kline paused. “If we could find a new drug which made the patient utterly insensible to pain, and paralyzed, and another which harmlessly returned him to normal consciousness, it could revolutionize modern surgery.”
It was my turn to interrupt. “And make somebody a lot of money.”
“For the sake of medical science,” Lehman insisted. “That’s why it behooves us to investigate all reports of potential anesthetic agents. We must have a close look at this reputed zombi poison, if it exists.”
Kline moved across the room like a man at odds with something more than himself. “Anesthesis is only the beginning. NASA once asked me to consider the possible application of psychoactive drugs in the space program. They would never admit it, but basically they were concerned with how they were going to keep the restless astronauts occupied during extended interplanetary missions. This zombi poison could provide a fascinating model for experiments in artificial hibernation.”
Lehman looked at Kline impatiently. “What we want from you, Mr. Davis, is the formula of the poison.” The bluntness of his statement, however expected, pushed me back from the table, and I turned my back on them both, stepping toward a sliding glass door, until I felt myself caught like a fly in the cross mesh of their gaze.
I turned back to them. “What about contacts?”
“We will be touch with Douyon. And perhaps you should call the BBC and speak with their correspondent.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all we know.”
“And my expenses?”
“We have a small fund put aside. Just send us the bills.”
There was nothing more to ask. They were like two major currents, Kline torrid and surging, Lehman passive and subdued; they had come together, determined to act. My assignment as outlined succinctly by Kline was to travel to Haiti, find the voodoo sorcerers responsible, and obtain samples of the poison and antidote, observing their preparation and if possible documenting their use.
As I went out the apartment door, Kline handed me a sealed manila envelope, and it was then I realized that they had assumed all along that I would take the assignment. I didn’t look back, even as I heard their voices continuing behind me.
Kline’s daughter Marna caught up with me in the lobby. It was late, and I walked her back to her Sixty-ninth Street studio. Outside on the streets a thin drizzle had turned the pavement to pools of yellow light. The storm had passed and the city once again carried its own sounds. Marna hadn’t said anything during the meeting, and she didn’t speak now. I asked her about a photograph I had noticed in the apartment, of a frail white-haired man sitting at a desk, reaching a hand across a pair of ivory-handled revolvers.
“François Duvalier. Eugene Smith took it when he and my father were in Haiti.”
“Your father knew Papa Doc?”
She nodded.
“How?”
“When they set up that institute where Douyon has the zombis. The one named after him.”
“After Duvalier?”
“No,” she said with a laugh, “my father. He’s been going to Haiti for twenty-five years.”
“I know. Ever go with him?”
“Yes, all the time, but …”
“Like it?”
“Sure, it’s wonderful. But listen, you ought to understand something. He really believes zombis exist.”
“You don’t.”
“That’s not the point.”
Outside her apartment house, an empty cab approached and I hailed it. We said goodnight. It was hours past the last air shuttle, so I directed the cabbie to Grand Central Station and waited for the night train to Boston. Once on board, I opened the envelope that Kline had given me. Besides money and an airplane ticket there was one Polaroid photograph, a dull image of a poor black peasant, whom a note identified as Clairvius Narcisse. I found myself cradling his face in my hand, astonished how a mere photograph could make the exotic seem intimate. I still held it as the train pulled out, and then finally I glanced at the airline ticket. I had one week to try to piece together a biological explanation that would fit the limited data.
3
The Calabar Hypothesis
I ENJOY TRAINS, and in South America whenever possible I rode them, sitting on the open ends, savoring the waves of tropical scents that the passage of the train whipped into an irresistible melange. By comparison to those creaking Latin caravans, so alive in human sweat and wet wool, smelling of a dozen species of crushed flowers, American trains are sadly sterile, with a heavy atmosphere that makes the air taste used. Still, the rhythm of the rails is always seductive, and the passing frames race by like so many childhood fantasies, alive in color and light.
But leaving New York, it was not to the train that I owed my strange sense of release. I questioned my reflection in the train window, puzzled by a range of inexpressible feelings and ideas. “The frontier of death”—it was that phrase of Lehman’s that haunted me most, pulling me back from the borders of sleep, leaving me alone in an empty train car measuring the passing night by the periodic shuffling of the conductor’s feet.
Kline and Lehman. I weighed their words, groping for hidden meanings or clues, but kept returning to the bare facts of the case. These did not tell me much, but they were enough to get started, and, moreover, they mercifully grounded my imagination.
A poison sprinkled across a threshold was presumably absorbed through the feet. If true, this implied that its principal chemical constituents had to be topically active. From descriptions of the wandering zombis, it appeared likely that the drug induced a prolonged psychotic state, while the initial dose had to be capable of causing a deathlike stupor. Since in all likelihood the poison was organically derived, its source had to be a plant or animal currently found in Haiti. Finally, whatever this substance might prove to be, it had to be extraordinarily potent.
Knowing very little about animal venoms, I reviewed the toxic and psychoactive plants I had become familiar with during my six-year association with the Botanical Museum. I thought of plants that could kill, and others that could lead one past the edge of consciousness. There was only one that even nominally met the criteria of the zombi poison. It was also the one plant that during all my investigations, and through all my travels, I had dared not imbibe—a hallucinogenic plant so dangerous that even Schultes, for all his stoic experimentation, had never sampled. It is a plant that has been called the drug of choice of poisoners, criminals, and black magicians throughout the world. Its name is datura, “the holy flower of the North Star.”
My tired thoughts broke into fragments that landed on a distant night, cold and clear as glass, in the high Andes of Peru. A brown dusty trail curved past agave swollen in bud and rose to an open veranda flanked on three sides by the adobe walls of the farmhouse. Against one wall sat the patient, alone and strangely solemn. He had been a prosperous fisherman a season ago, before the currents shifted and the warm tropical waters came south to strangle the sea life of the entire coast. As if conforming to some bitter law of physics, his personal life had mimicked the natural disorder: his child had taken ill, and then his wife fled with a lover. In the wake of these events the poor man disappeared from his village, only to reappear a month later, a simulacrum of death, naked and quite insane.
For two weeks the curandero had sought in vain to divine the source of such misfortune. With his inherent eye for the sacred he had laid out the power objects of his altar—stone crystals, jaguar teeth, murex shells, whale bones, and ancient huacas that rose methodically to touch an arc of colonial swords impaling the earth. In nocturnal ceremonies he and the patient had together inhaled a decoction of alcohol and tobacco from scallop shells carefully balanced beneath each nostril. Invoking the names of Atahualpa and all the ancient Peruvian kings, the spirits of the mountains and the holy herbs, they had imbibed achuma, the sacred cactus of the four winds. The curandero’s son had led the madman on mule on a slow passage high into the mountains to bathe in their spiritual source, the lakes of Las Huaringas. All to no avail. The visions had come, only weak and incomprehensible, and even the pilgrimage to the healing waters had done little to free the deranged man from his stubborn misery.
It was left for the curandero to work alone, to seek a solution in a stronger source, in some supernatural realm that might break a normal man. It was a solitary task, and leaving his patient sitting alone, he slipped away, walking with a stoop, sheltered by a worn poncho and an enormous hat that covered all of his face save his chin, which protruded like the toe of an old boot. He would engage a different set of visions—confusing, disorienting, unpleasant—and he would approach them not as a man of knowledge who might interpret and manipulate his spirit world, but rather as a supplicant who in just touching the realm of madness unleashed by the plant might attain revelation. It was a frightful prospect to relinquish all control, to lose all sense of time and space and memory. But he had no choice, and he approached his task with resignation, like the bearer of an incurable disease.
He retreated into a small stone hut, sealed by a broken door that turned his movements into vertical slices of light. I peered through these cracks at his shadowy figure moving in purposeful, increasingly smaller circles, the way a dog does before it beds down for the night. Once on the ground, he removed his hat, revealing a vaguely distorted face—distended blue-black lips and an elephantine nose that drooped precariously toward his mouth. The flesh had collapsed on his cheekbones, his eyes were lost in
shadow. He sat quietly, accepting but not acknowledging the ministrations of his assistant, who carefully arranged a bed, a large basin of water, and a small enamel bowl of dark liquid. The assistant came out and took his place discreetly to one side of the door. He beckoned me to join him, and I moved close. We remained still, peering into the dark room, our breathing silenced by the light wind falling on the tin roof.
The curandero clasped the enamel bowl as a rural priest might hold a chalice, with his whole hands, firmly and without grace. Nodding first to the four corners of the hut, he drank slowly, deliberately, wincing slightly only once before draining the vessel. Then he sat profoundly still, with the calm that invariably follows such irrevocable acts.
The potion took effect quickly. Within half an hour he had sunk into a heavy stupor, his eyes fixed vacantly on the ground, his mouth sealed shut, his face suddenly bloated and red. His nostrils flared, and several minutes later his eyes began to roll, foam issued from his mouth, and his entire body shook with horrible convulsions. He plunged deeper and deeper into delirium, breathing spasmodically, kneading the earth with his long bony fingers like a cat exploring for fissures that might release him from his madness. Agonizing screams sliced into the night. He attempted to stand, only to fall and lie flat on the ground, thrashing the air with his arms. Suddenly he lunged for the basin of water, like a man whose skin is aflame or whose throat is parched. Then with a final anguished spasm, he collapsed and lay still.
This was cimora, the tree of the evil eagle, the closest botanical relative of datura.
The pale lavender light of dawn shone through the opaque membrane of the train window, a mirage of life, and finally, the slow scuffle of feet in South Station led me out into the morning light and onto the streets of Boston.
The city was just coming awake, and I felt far too agitated to sleep. I got to the Botanical Museum by the time it opened and had to wade through a horde of schoolchildren being dragged by a schoolmaster to the exhibits before I could climb the iron staircase and finally reach the private library on the upper floor.