Alter

by Jeremy Robinson

  I intend to give them both, but my confidence wavers when Tikuna’s face transforms into something hideous.

  His animal has arrived.

  The big man dives at me, half-sword aimed at my throat.

  With no time to move, I lift the machete, and place my left hand against the dull side. The blade strikes the rapier’s elaborate hilt, preventing the broken sword from piercing my neck, but the big man is putting his weight and ferocity behind the attack. Antique iron inches toward my neck. In seconds it will push against my skin, break through, and slip through my windpipe.

  Ashan kicks and fights, trying to free herself from the Arawanti men holding her back. She knows I’m screwed. Everyone watching knows that death is imminent.

  What they don’t know is that it won’t be mine.

  At the edge of the jungle, peering through the low hanging leaves of a mango tree, is a pair of rage-filled yellow eyes.

  Had Tikuna been a smarter man, or not so lost to rage, he might have realized a simple twist would have freed his sword and sent it plunging into my neck. Instead, he just growls and pushes, lost to his animal so completely that my spreading smile doesn’t register with him.

  The others see it, though.

  So does Ashan. She’s stopped fighting, and is now watching with eager eyes. I’m not sure if she knows why I’m smiling, but she knows what it means.

  I’m not dying.

  “Not today,” I say to Tikuna, and then I shout, “Oro!”

  The Arawanti chief is undeterred by my outburst, by the cries of fear around us, or by the roar of an approaching feline. But he can’t resist the force of a two-hundred-pound jaguar.

  The only person surprised when Tikuna is sprawled to the side is Tikuna himself. All of his rage disappears when the first four red lines open up on his side. When he turns himself over to see what has attacked him and comes face to face with Oro, he screams.

  The warrior becomes a child, gripped by fear, pushing himself away from the cat, who’s low to the ground and stalking her prey.

  My prey.

  I roll onto my hands and feet and join Oro. She growls and hisses at me and I give it right back.

  The Arawanti have backed away, giving us a wide berth. While they could still shoot us both, no one has raised a weapon. Oro’s involvement, while technically unfair, is probably seen as even more of an omen than the breaking of Tikuna’s sword.

  The big man’s blubbering is pitiful.

  Embarrassing.

  “Her name,” I growl.

  “W-what?”

  “I want you to say it. Your sister’s name.”

  Drool dangles from his quivering lower lip, and when he speaks, everyone watching knows he fears me more than Mapinguari. “U-Urpi.”

  If Tikuna believed telling me her name would save his life, he was wrong. “Oro…” I share a glance with the cat, offering a toothy smile that she matches with a snarl. Then we both roar and pounce.

  Oro follows her instincts, going for Tikuna’s head. Her massive jaws wrap around his lower face. The force of her bite breaks his jaw, but his high-pitched scream is muffled. She’s going to suffocate him.

  But Tikuna will be dead long before a lack of air does him in.

  Much of what happens next is a blur, viewed from outside of myself.

  I see a man with shoulder-length, mud-clumped hair, his tan skin slathered in gray, his tendrilled beard tangling. He feels a warm spray. Hears a slurping whack. His arms burn. Guttural shouting turns his throat raw. He feels little more than a hunger that has nothing to do with food. Something in him is empty, the void filled for the moment, with savage violence.

  He bathes in it. Revels. The life of another spills over him, granting him power, numbing him. For a moment, he is remade. Reborn. And then, as his energy waivers, he slips away as though into a fog.

  When full awareness returns, I’m standing on two feet, machete in hand. Dark red blood covers me from head to toe, growing tacky as it dries. My voice is hoarse, each deep breath sounding like the grunt of a bear. At my feet is what remains of Tikuna. From the chest down, he’s unrecognizable as a human. Pieces of him lie in the dirt up to fifteen feet away.

  Oro keeps one protective paw on the former chief’s chest, while licking out the inside of his cracked-open cranium. This is mine, she tells me with a hiss.

  When I look up, the Arawanti people have fled.

  Aside from Ashan, who’s speckled with blood spatter and looking a little numb, and the very old man with the cane, the village is empty.

  The old man looks sad, but he’s unafraid. He leans on his cane, his help having fled with the rest. “He was wrong to insult you, Shawindo.”

  Shawindo… Cat-talker. My legend grows, but I am not yet Mapinguari. It’s possible that my reputation might surpass that of the ancient beast, but the transformation Ashan began in me was not into something new, it was into something old. A legend more timeless than the broken sword. That is what I am to become.

  The old man hobbles toward me, picking his steps carefully. One wrong foot placement and what used to be a man will squeeze up between his bare toes.

  When he gets too close to the corpse, Oro hisses at him. The old man stumbles and falls, toppling toward the open mass of ruined flesh.

  Without thought, I reach out, catch his arm, and pull him upright. While holding onto him, I crouch and retrieve the cane. I flick the blood from the wood and hand it back.

  Tears in his eyes, voice quivering, the man says, “There is still a path back for you. Even the darkest heart can be remade.”

  “Even Mapinguari?” I ask.

  He frowns and holds up his hand. “What do you see?”

  “Your hand.”

  He puts his hand directly in front of my eyes. His closeness should put me on edge. Aside from Ashan, the only people to get this close to me since I arrived in the Amazon have lost their lives.

  “Now what do you see?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “That is where Mapinguari exists. She lives in a world that appears free of pain because everything is pain. She cannot see it because she is too close to it. Her darkness drowns out the world. Drowns out the past. It does not soothe, it erases.”

  Something in his voice, or perhaps his words, draws tears to my eyes. The pain he’s talking about lurks just beneath the surface. I have pushed it down, I’ve obscured it with drugs, sex, and violence—the same remedy humanity has employed for millennia.

  But it’s not enough.

  I need something more.

  “That sounds perfect,” I tell him, ignoring the tears.

  An intense mercy fills the man’s eyes. He tugs his arm from my hand and supports his weight on the cane. “Queshupa lies to the west. You will have no trouble finding it.”

  With that, he turns and starts trudging away. “Please take your jaguar with you.”

  “Oro will come when she is ready,” I reply. “She is a friend. Not a slave.”

  The man just shakes his head and continues on his way, slipping into the jungle and abandoning his village.

  Ashan approaches, wisely steering clear of Oro, and eyeing me with suspicious eyes.

  “Where did you go?” she asks.

  “When?”

  She motions to the bloody heap beside us. “I did not see you…” She places her hand beside my eye. “In here.”

  I nod. “I don’t remember doing it. Not really.”

  A voice from my past offers a diagnosis: dissociative break. I stopped being me. I viewed myself as a spectator, freed from the most visceral and disturbing event of my life. I have seen men die. I have taken lives. But I have never undone a man, body and soul, rending him to little more than a puddle. What does a man who can do such things feel like? I will never know.

  I wasn’t there.

  I didn’t feel it.

  I felt…nothing.

  “It’s perfect,” I whisper, more resolute than ever to complete the alteration.
>
  My hand on Ashan’s cheek helps put her at ease. “I am here. Now.” I offer her a smile. “Have you been to Queshupa?”

  She gives her head a quick shake. “It is forbidden.”

  “But you know where it is?”

  A nod.

  “The laws of the jungle are ours to write. Forbidden or not. Right and wrong. Light and dark. These things are like clay to people like us.” I look down at Oro, who’s enjoying Tikuna’s shoulder. “We are animals, traveling where we please, eating what we want, and enjoying the bliss that comes with freeing ourselves from this world, one way or another.”

  Her smile is unsure for a moment, but it returns when a raindrop strikes my forehead and runs down the side of my face. I turn to the sky where the stars are being blotted out by an invisible darkness. A deluge follows, chasing Oro away from her meal and cleansing the blood and mud from my body.

  I stand in the rain, arms outstretched, feeling new.

  Ashan does the same, until we’re clean once more. Then she takes my hand and leads me to the dry interior of a nearby hut, where we partake in mind-altering substances and each other’s bodies.

  Through it all, his mind wanders through the jungle, seeking Mapinguari and the final bliss she offers. He will find her. He will kill her. And then he will finally become more, and less, everything and nothing.

  34

  For the first time since setting foot in the Amazon Basin, I’m relaxed without the aid of drugs—mine or Ashan’s. That the hunters have summoned Mapinguari to kill us means they are no longer actively hunting us. As for the woman-turned-beast, she waits for us at Queshupa. I suspect her brother’s challenge was not part of the plan. But he couldn’t resist the temptation to inflate his own legend. Vanity has an uglier face in the jungle, but it is alive and well.

  Oro’s presence, once a source of nightmares, now provides security. As in tune with the jungle as Ashan and I might be, the cat’s heightened senses will detect danger long before we can. She’s out of sight most of the time, but she checks in on occasion, when she wants some more of the meat we took from the Arawanti village, or when I call her.

  On the fourth night of our journey west, I woke to find her sleeping a few feet away. When she sensed my attention, she opened her eyes, yawned, and went back to sleep. She’d normally be more active at night, but she’s traveling with us throughout the day, and hasn’t needed to hunt. When I woke in the morning, she was gone, but she returned when the night grew dark. She fell asleep beside me as I scratched her head.

  She’s still wary of Ashan to a degree, but no longer bristles at her proximity.

  It’s now the tenth night of our journey. Oro leans her chin on my leg while I rub behind her ears. Her hair is soft and feels good between my fingers. With each squeeze, we both become more relaxed.

  Ashan is squatted beside a fire, roasting a large catfish she caught. She and Oro had argued over the fish, the cat wanting to eat it on the spot. Ashan had won the argument after bludgeoning the fish and dragging it back to the fire—something Oro still avoids. But the jaguar hasn’t left us since. Her tail snaps back and forth, impatient.

  “Should I be jealous?” Ashan asks, when Oro begins purring. “I think she is smitten.”

  “You’ll just have to share me,” I say.

  She smiles. “You’ve taken a jaguar as a lover, then?”

  “Think of her as our daughter.” I lean down to Oro and point to Ashan. “She’s your mother now. Be nice.”

  Ashan’s good humor fades. “And if I am her mother, and you her father, what does that make us?”

  A mental stumbling block trips me up. I’m unable to answer for a moment. Something about this feels wrong. But why? Ashan is my life. What else is there? What is there to feel guilty about?

  Nothing, I decide, and when Ashan flinches back, I worry that I’ve spoken the word aloud and out of context.

  “You have to think about it?” she asks.

  “I’m just not sure how it works here.”

  “How what works?”

  “Marriage.”

  A trace of a smile returns. “A marriage must be recognized by a tribal elder. There is usually a ceremony.”

  “But it is not required?”

  “It is also not possible. The Dalandala has no elder. Has no people.”

  “As long as you live, your people still exist. And if you’re the last, I think that makes you the elder.” I point at the fish, which is beginning to scorch. Oro’s ears perk up when Ashan rotates our meal, but she doesn’t move. “And maybe, someday, the tribe will grow again.”

  “Mapinguari does not have children,” she says.

  “Mapinguari does whatever he wants.”

  “I’ve noticed,” she says, tearing off a piece of flakey catfish. She bounces the meat between her hands, cooling it down and capturing Oro’s full attention.

  Oro and I are both surprised when Ashan approaches us, meat in hand. Before now, she’s insisted that the cat receive our scraps. While I don’t think Oro cares about which cuts she’s given, she is always tense about eating last.

  Ashan crouches down, meat in hand. Oro sits up, licking her nose. “But first, our daughter must accept me, as she does you.” She reaches her hand out to touch Oro’s head. The cat bares her teeth.

  “Easy…” I say, to both of them.

  Ashan inches the meat closer and the snarl shifts back to eager licking. Both hands moving in unison, Ashan allows Oro to eat from her hand, while Oro allows Ashan to pet her for the first time.

  “Good girl,” I say.

  Oro purrs at me.

  When the cat finishes the meat and raises her head, she allows Ashan to rub their foreheads together. Ashan is so pleased by the contact that, with tears in her eyes, she continues to dole out the fish, giving the largest portion to Oro. I’m hungry, but I don’t complain. It will reinforce their budding relationship.

  Once I’ve eaten, I lean back against a tree trunk. Oro has abandoned me for Ashan. They’re kindred spirits, strong and deadly women. My fingers aimlessly twist the ring on my finger. It had significance once, but that feels like another life, like a story I watched. I feel no value in it, and have trouble recalling why I ever wore it.

  Feeling shamed by its presence, I pry it off my finger, working it slowly up and around my knuckle. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want Ashan to notice. Don’t want her to ask about it. I’m tempted to flick it away or push it into the soil, but I slip it into my satchel bag and let it fall to the bottom to lurk beneath the half brick of marijuana, the cash, the gun, and the bound paper. Of all the bag’s contents, the pot, the paper, and the lighter have been the most useful. The rest I keep…well, because they’re mine.

  The lingering sun settles down for the evening, plunging us into firelit darkness. With the fish cooked and sleep nearly upon us, the embers burn down to a dull, hellish glow.

  My thoughts turn to Tikuna, as they have every night since we left the village. I clearly remember our conversation, and the building tension, but I have no memory of our combat, of Oro’s intervention, of killing the big chief, or of mutilating his body beyond recognition. I remember remembering it, viewing the events from the outside, like an out-of-body experience. But those memories have faded in the same way the ring’s history and importance has drifted away. It’s like part of my life has been erased.

  My mind is making space, I decide, for Mapinguari. My mind can’t be remade and remain unchanged at the same time. Humanity is weak. Atrocities affect the soul and wound the mind. Part of becoming more means feeling less. Perhaps this is how it happens. A permanent dissociative break. All of the benefits with none of the negatives.

  Sounds like bliss to me.

  I hide my pain from Ashan, but while my thoughts of the past have dwindled, I still hurt on the inside. Emotions I would never admit to having reign chaotic in the quiet times between sleep and wakefulness. They’re indistinct, without an accompanying image. It’s like I’ve eaten som
ething foul, but can’t remember what.

  So I press on.

  I look forward.

  As night settles in, I picture the impending confrontation with Mapinguari. I see a great fight. I smell blood. Mine and Mapinguari’s. When it’s over, she lies at my feet, begging for mercy. Then I wonder if I’ll even remember the fight.

  Whatever the case, when it is done—when I am Mapinguari—the ache inside me will be squelched. And then, I will just be. With Ashan. With Oro.

  I want nothing more.

  Sleep robs my growing smile and transports me to another world.

  It’s unfamiliar. A dwelling, bright and colorful with solid walls. The lack of trees confuses me. I see them through the windows… Windows?

  I stumble as something bright and sharp stabs into my foot.

  Where am I?

  The world is a haze of unfamiliar smells that frighten me.

  I’m not afraid of anything.

  Thumping from above throws me to the ground, which is covered in a thin layer of light blue grass.

  A rug.

  A rug?

  A luminous ball of light sways back and forth as the thumps return, this time coupled with a monstrous roar.

  Where is the sky? The leaves? The surface above me is textured white.

  A ceiling.

  A scream directs me to a staircase. Where does it lead?

  Upstairs.

  What is upstairs?

  A second scream, high pitched, forms a single word that bristles my insides. “Dad-dy!”

  I don’t know why it feels important, but I respond the only way I know how; I charge forward, ready to fight.

  At the top of the stairs, I draw my weapon. It’s a thin metal rod that grows when I pull on the end. I know what this is, and that it’s not a weapon. A radio antenna. I push and pull the object, shrinking and growing it, fascinated by its ability to change.

  A fresh roar centers me. Draws me through a doorway. I know what’s on the other side of this door. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to remember it. But when I step through the threshold, nothing is right.