Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  Finally, I couldn’t take it. “Baby, baby.” I took her in my arms. “Get yer clothes off! I gotta be with you, inside you, right now, right now!”

  “You gotta make it fast, Cigano! Hurry up, go, an don’ take so long, go!”

  She pulled her shorts off and lay back on the fluffy goose-down quilt, spreading her long white angel legs for me. After a month away, her warm, wet hole was a magical portal to home; and then I was right back where I’d started, back where I’d sworn to never go again, right back where I belonged, hugging her insides, eating her alive, lost and drunk, drowning in her smell; the dark, toxic magic of her presence.

  Rocking back and forth on the storm currents of her sacred, overpowering, magical madness, climaxing fast and hard, I went limp all over, sinking deep down inside her, kissing her long and soft, our languid breaths mixing into a forbidden, stupefying, musky poison.

  Then, we passed out.

  The rest of the night was a tangled, soporific underwater orgy, a tender war of arms and legs and bellies and backs, unconscious caresses, hugs, snores, groans, farts and grunts. Holding each other close for warmth, we shifted around like restless sands on a desert of dreams.

  I fucked her again while she slept; drinking in her hot, sedated, snoring breath, moving soft and slow as I worked it in and out, a stealthy safecracker in the house of Eros. Narcisa never stirred as I tunneled into her feverish, wet core and came again and again forever.

  92. DIGGING

  “IF SOMEONE TELLS YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM.”

  —Maya Angelou

  The next day, we awakened in silence.

  We dressed and made our way down a dirt path to the bike. Without a word, we took off along the winding mountain road.

  The spectacular vistas looked new and different in the light of morning; uplifting and magnificent. A few minutes later, we stopped at a humble little roadside eatery, overlooking the vast jungles and valleys stretching below forever.

  As we sat by the window, eating warm bread and jam and soft white goat cheese, smoking cigarettes and drinking sweet black coffee, Narcisa began telling me stories of her childhood; all sorts of funny little tales of growing up in the country; all the petty rivalries and fights she’d been in with other children, her dreams and hopes; the random injuries and battles of a feral child bouncing over these same rutted dirt paths in search of wings to fly off to faraway lands.

  The burning morning sunlight seemed to glow behind her eyes as her brain exploded softly into the World Unknown. “First time I listen to de voices, Cigano, I was just a little girl.”

  “What voices, baby?”

  “Just voices. I donno, mano, but always I use to feel it, like a presence of somebody, something invisible, e’standing close by, but I never know what was it, you know?” She shrugged. “Sometime I even can sorta see it, like de kinda shadow thing, moving, but I never know who is there. When I get more older, I e’start notice that any time I get upset an’ go close by de electrodomestico, de radio or television, whatever, was all de time de big interference . . . An’ whenever I think about something real hard, or maybe I wan’ for some kinda thing to happen, it always just happen, you know?”

  I was impressed. “Woah. That’s some wild shit, Narcisa.”

  She studied her coffee. “No so much, bro. For me, always seem like normal thing. It never bother me . . . But some really e’strange kinda thing e’start happen . . .”

  “What kinda things?”

  “Like one time when I get real angry, I go an’ e’stand by de TV an’ bum, she just blow out, an’ de e’smoke come out de top. No more picture! Finish! Fock!”

  Narcisa went on to explain how she’d always had trouble because of her weird telepathic and telekinetic gifts, starting from early childhood. It got worse as she moved into adolescence. Being seen as “different,” she was labeled as a freak in her backward, religious small-town community. Finding herself bullied by other kids, being avoided and hated on as a liar or a witch, or simply crazy, Narcisa began her retreat into her own little fantasy bubble.

  Her eyes lit up. “Before I take de drugs, first time I get de buzz, I was just a little geer-ool, Cigano, maybe only three year old . . .”

  “Caralho!” I looked at her, stunned. “Three years old? How?”

  “ . . . Yeh, mano. I use to take off de back from these radio my mother got, an’ then I go an’ stick my finger inside!”

  I laughed. “What th’ fuck did ya do that for, ya little maniac?”

  She grinned. “For feel it de e’shock, Cigano! Was my very first time buzz. Hah!”

  “You liked that shit?”

  “No really.” She giggled. “First time I do it, I e’say, ‘Ai aiii, porra! I never gonna do that again.’ But next day come, e’same thing, I go an’ look de radio an’ I e’say myself, ‘No no no, don’ do it, Narcisa, don’ do it . . .’ But I just gotta try again, one time more, you know, so I go an’ put my finger again an’ bzzzzz! ‘Ai ai aiii! Fock, never gonna do it again!’ Then next day come, I look de e’same e’stupid radio an’ I thinking again, ‘No no no, don’ do it’ don’ do it . . .’ an’ then I e’say, ‘Fock it, gotta try again’ an’ then, bzzzzzz! Zow! ‘Ai ai aiiiii!’ An’ you know, I keep doing these e’same e’sheet for years, e’same focking thing! Hah!”

  Narcisa fell silent. Then, finally, with a faraway look, she shrugged. “I only e’stop play with these e’stupid radio after I go take de real drugs, got it?”

  I got it. She’d found a way to quiet the voices, to live in peace with her unwanted paranormal sensitivity. Narcisa was instinctively self-medicating.

  After leaving home, she said, she’d visited spiritist centers and terreiros, consulting with different psychic mediums. She detailed how she’d finally blown her mind open like a mineshaft to hell, after taking her first drink of psychedelic tea, made from the sacred indigenous ayahuasca plant mixture, at the tender age of twelve. In the ensuing years, she’d met with all sorts of other mystics and UFO students, up in the mountains, before declaring it all a waste of time.

  She told me how she’d stumbled through every occult sect and cult, one by one, burning bridges behind her as she went, leaving a trail of cynical disillusion in her wake.

  Narcisa had always been studying the dynamic laws of the universe, it seemed, if only to better defy them. Even as a child, she’d already been staggering through the mystical psychic minefield she wandered in, lost, today.

  For a curious little warrior spirit like Narcisa, always thirsty for new sensations and awareness, whatever desperate dirt path she stumbled onto would always turn out to be a high-tension tightrope walk into the light of knowledge.

  As she talked on, I gazed at her with a new admiration.

  Narcisa’s whole life, as weird and contradictory as it appeared to me at times, was a long, painful, frenzied, hyperactive quest for Truth.

  93. BATTLE SCARS

  “O FOOLISH ANXIETY OF WRETCHED MAN, HOW INCONCLUSIVE ARE THE ARGUMENTS WHICH MAKE THEE BEAT THY WINGS BELOW!”

  —Dante

  I leaned forward, listening to Narcisa, taking careful mental notes, like an archeologist dusting a patch of rock for some tiny clue to mysteries transcendent and sublime.

  As we sat there overlooking the lands of her birth, she began relating the many sins of her forefathers. Desperate to escape the harsh realities of her violent, unhappy home, from an early age Narcisa had made books her only friends. But the drugs had eventually robbed her of the focus to continue her studies, cutting her off from that magical world of mysticism, philosophy and letters.

  With a sad little shrug, she confessed she’d read her last complete book at the age of thirteen, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, but she’d never read another one since.

  “Hah! I take so many different kinda drug, Cigano, now I got only de two little brain cell left inside my head.” She tapped at her forehead with a spoon. “Anybody home, hein? Hah! Only these little two all de time make de big war with de o
ther one, got it?”

  I got it. Like myself, it was a miracle Narcisa could even put two words together.

  Shaking my head, I smiled sadly. “Jesus, baby! Didn’t it ever occur to you ya mighta had a problem? Why didn’t you ever try to quit?”

  She shrugged. “Well, I try an’ stop forever these one time, Cigano, but, I donno . . . I guess it was kinda e’stupid . . .”

  With a sheepish grin, she told me of her one heroic attempt to reclaim her soul and get clean. When she was fifteen, she said, she’d fled back to Penedo, after many hard months in Rio. One drizzly gray morning, depressed and hungover, too proud to ask anyone for help, Narcisa trudged off into the jungle, all alone, shedding her shoes and clothing along the way.

  As we sat smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, she gestured at the imposing mountain range and vast tropical rain forests below, detailing three full moons she spent out there, all by herself, living like an animal, wandering the bush by day and sleeping at night, ingesting only berries, roots and herbs for sustenance.

  Many of them, she said, were familiar psychedelic plants.

  Narcisa’s voice fell to a whisper. Her eyes flashed like colliding stars as she described her months in the wilderness. After nightfall, the crackling, twittering darkness would burst to life with ghostly sounds and weird, shadowy shapes of unseen creatures and alien spirits. Trees called out in dark, menacing tones, rustling their spindly limbs with eerie, malevolent intent.

  Breathless, she spoke of the mysteries of the forest, lit only by piercing knife shafts of light, swirling with glittery, colorful insect mists. Boisterous toucans with gaudy, oversized beaks, and screeching monkeys skittering around overhead were her only company on that long, lonesome pilgrimage through the thick green tapestry.

  I looked out at the distant waterfalls threading shimmering paths down a granite mountain, like crystalline tear-trails. “Fuck, baby! Nobody knew where you were all that time?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Ninguém!”

  Everyone had assumed she’d simply gone off into the bush to die, she snickered. The natives were shocked, then, when she appeared, months later, swaggering back into town, clothed only in foliage. Dirty, disheveled, savage-looking and scrawny as a lean, hungry young wolf, Narcisa was carrying only a thatched reed bag she’d constructed like an Indian, filled with magic mushrooms and other medicinal plants.

  “Hah! De focking peoples all look me like I am de focking e’spaceman!”

  After that, Narcisa became something of a local legend.

  She stopped talking. As she sat staring out over the scenery, her long, contemplative hush was like an invisible gun taking steady aim at my heart.

  Finally, she cocked her head and went on. Soon after her long, lionhearted jungle walkabout, Narcisa put her thumb out on the highway again, and headed back to the dirty old killing grounds of Copacabana. There she would surrender, once and for all, to her addiction, and all that came with it; prostitution. Crime. Homelessness. Begging. Hustling. Stealing. Long, livid days and threadbare nights of filthy, tattered, shattered destitution in the chaotic, heartless urban jungles of Rio.

  Anything would’ve been better for poor Narcisa, it seemed, than the frightful prospect of living a life without drugs. That had all been just before I’d met her. But even then, she already knew she was beat. And still she refused to quit.

  I got it. Drugs were Narcisa’s only hope for any small peace of mind, stolen in brief moments of stoned-out, incoherent relief.

  Over the years, the seeds of madness grew and raged like a lightning-fueled forest fire. Narcisa grew increasingly violent and irritable, breaking things, starting streetfights with strangers and cutting on her own hated body, just to remind herself she was alive.

  “I use to really like make de cuts on myself, Cigano!” She grinned, running the table knife longingly across her forearm. “But I never go too deep. I wan’ only de pain for feel de control of it. Is really crazy de sensation, bro! Hah! But one day I go cut too deep, oops, an’ I fock up a tendon or veins or whatever . . . Lookit, you see it here?” She pointed with pride to the jagged Frankenstein scar running down her left forearm like a fleshy malediction.

  I winced. “That’s some nasty cicatríz, baby. Looks like ya fucked yerself up good there.”

  Narcisa’s eyes glowed like a world of mad fireflies. “Hah! I was e’staying with my husband, in de big hotel in Copacabana, an’ after I cut it, I just wanna get more higher, cuz de pain in my hand get so bad, you know? But I gotta make de big e’scandal for these focking gringo buy me more drug, cuz he keep e’say, ‘No more drug now for you,’ so then I go an’ cut my wrist again, more deeper de next time, an’ then I put de knife on my throat an’ I e’say him I gonna finish myself if he don’ buy me de focking drugs right now, got it?”

  I got it. Blackmail. Emotional extortion. I shuddered as I recalled her suicide threat in the country with me. As I stared out over her childhood home, I replayed the stories she and Doc and others had told me of her people’s brutal legacy. Knives, stabbings, cutting, blood, rape, betrayal. I thought of how it all played out in her life, again and again, in a noxious, repeating cycle of unfocused primal rage.

  Narcisa’s stories trailed off into the afternoon like a long, ghostly archeological expedition, unearthing more surreal clues to her being. She told me of her following years, scrambling around like a frantic, bug-eyed ferret in a burning maze, falling into all sorts of scenes and taking every possible combination of drugs. She did whatever she had to do to get them, of course—unwittingly following right in the footsteps of her hated whore mother.

  With a mischievous grin, she recounted her exploits as a teenage prostitute. Schooled in the offbeat ho-stroll scams of the streetwise squatter chicks at the Casa Verde, she always demanded cash up front from the gringos she went with in Copacabana. Even as a seasoned “sex worker,” Narcisa had never cared for either prospect: work, or sex. And she did whatever she could to dodge the dreaded moment with her unfortunate clients.

  She described how, once inside a trick’s hotel room, after getting paid, she would slowly, seductively begin to undress. Then, at the last minute, she’d reach into her panties, extracting a tampon soaked in red wine stashed in a plastic bag.

  Before the gringo’s mortified eyes, she’d fling the “bloody” cotton wad against the wall with a resounding fwap.

  Laughing, I pictured a disgraceful red menstrual trail snaking down a spotless white hotel room wall, and a grossed-out, red-faced gringo scurrying to the door in horror, holding it open for Narcisa to depart. Untouched.

  “Hah! Perfect, Max! Thank you come again! Next? These e’sheet always work, Cigano! An’ they never even one time ask for de money back! Hah!”

  As she chattered on, I was reminded of Narcisa’s playful, innocent lust for fun and excitement; how her whole world had once been a big, wide road of daring adventures—until she’d stumbled into the nightmare realm of the Crack Monster, where the Curse had seized her soul like a red-eyed, screaming chimpanzee, sending her into a deadly tailspin and stopping her dead in her tracks.

  After that, the best poor Narcisa could do as she ran around in futile little circles of ruin was to write down her thoughts, seeking mental refuge in crooked philosophical speculations and poetic pretzel logic, as she went progressively mad.

  “De best philosophy for me is de Nietzsche, Cigano, got it?”

  I got it. I remembered having read through her notebooks filled with confusing, contradictory quotes from the enigmatic German visionary scribbled into the margins. After she’d disappeared to New York, I’d sat up many a night, racking my brains to decipher her long, surreal poems. It seemed I’d always been seeking an answer to the riddle of Narcisa’s mind. As the years crept by, my digging had trailed off in a sad little dead-end labyrinth; page upon page of tattered, ash-blackened, trembling, illegible nuthouse scrawls . . . What a waste!

  Finally, she gave me another wry little grin. “So that’s i
t, Cigano. That’s me. Thank you come again! Next?” She winked with a shrug.

  Then she fell quiet. Narcisa was finished talking.

  I sighed and stood up, beaming at her with a deep admiration . . . My brave little warrior . . . Choking back a tear, I shuffled over and started the bike.

  Narcisa got on and we rode off down the long, bumpy mountain road.

  94. CHECKMATE

  “MORALITY IS CONTRABAND IN WAR.”

  —Gandhi

  By the time we arrived back at her shack, it was dark. Thankfully, none of her macabre associates were hanging around this time. But, as the night deepened, it got colder and damper in her crude little hideaway. The uncomfortable, dirt-floored hut seemed all the more sordid and desolate after spending the previous night in a clean, warm, well-appointed chalet.

  Soon enough, Narcisa grew fidgety and grumpy. I watched as she puttered around in the dark, scrounging for weed scraps to roll a joint. I tried to make conversation, but her replies were curt, monosyllabic grunts. Narcisa was tongue-tied, frozen; as if she’d expended her lifetime supply of words up on the mountain.

  I suggested we get on the bike and ride back to Rio. What did she have to lose? I couldn’t see any reason for her to stay.

  She hemmed and hawed and balked and stalled. It was weird. I knew Narcisa. Something was wrong. She was scared of something! But why?

  Has that asshole Doc threatened her? What the fuck? Why doesn’t she wanna leave?

  I was puzzled; but, as usual, I said nothing. Standing by the only window, looking out, I watched a dark-skinned boy in a straw hat struggling with a donkey. The mule had stopped in the middle of the dark dirt path; no matter how hard the kid tugged at the lead, it refused to budge. I looked on as he cursed and kicked at the stubborn creature, trying to bend it to his will. No dice. The donkey wouldn’t move. Finally, he threw his hands up and walked away. Then, slowly, at first, the donkey began to follow.