Alter

by Jeremy Robinson

  “You understand me, don’t you?” the man asks.

  Mapinguari growls, tensing to strike, to finish what this man interrupted. Then he will die, too.

  “My name is David Wellcome. I’m from the United—”

  “Gwwaaarrrgh!” The machete rises and falls.

  “Greg Zekser!”

  The machete’s blade stops again, this time a millimeter inside the now-weeping man’s neck.

  Waves of nausea roil through Mapinguari. What did he say? What curse did the man use? Dark magic, he thinks, snarling.

  A convulsion starts in his feet, working its way toward his head.

  Mapinguari grips the machete tighter, grinding his teeth, as he pushes the blade down.

  But the weapon doesn’t move.

  Something is resisting him.

  He looks for the person clutching his arms, but there is no one.

  When he growls in frustration, the man beneath him wails once more, but still, Mapinguari cannot silence the man or end his life. The darkness has fully retreated.

  He twitches at the sound of weapons being readied. The beaten and bloodied men he subdued have risen anew, guns in hand, all trained on him.

  Why haven’t they fired?

  Do they know he can’t move?

  “Greg Zekser,” the white man named Wellcome says again, this time pleading.

  “Greg Zekser is dead!” Mapinguari screams. “I devoured him, and I will—”

  “He’s not breathing,” someone calls out.

  The Guagin gathered around the poisoned man part. They’ve plucked the arrow from his still chest, but there is nothing they can do for him.

  “Please,” Wellcome says. “You are a doctor, yes? Doctor Gregory Zekser.”

  My hand snaps up, releasing the machete. I’m repulsed by the weapon and the blood, both new and old, staining its blade.

  The man beneath me cries out in relief, slapping his hands over the bleeding wound on the back of his neck.

  A wave of disorientation sweeps through my body when I attempt to stand. I stumble and fall onto my back, staring up at the blue sky surrounded by jungle trees. Monkeys dance about, agitated by my defeat.

  Memories and self return in painful waves, comingling with vivid recollections of my time as Mapinguari. An anguished scream tears from my throat as I remember…everything. Ashan’s death and my failure to not just save her, but to mourn her passing, and that of our child, arches my back in pain as I gasp in a raspy breath. The memory of Oro’s limp body reduces my screaming to sobs. And then, the moments of darkness concealing my worst deeds clear. I see, for the first time, how Juma, Mapinguari, and Tikuna died at my hands. How I desecrated their bodies and bathed in their remains.

  Despair becomes horror.

  I truly was—am—Mapinguari. A monster. A man-made beast.

  And then the rest of my life arrives in a sudden, mind-numbing explosion.

  Gwen and Juni’s faces return to my memory in high-res clarity. I can hear them, see them, smell them. Even worse, I can remember how much I love them and they love me, and I fully realize just how much I have betrayed them both. I remember Juni’s birth, my wedding day, the deaths of my parents, my childhood. All of it comes back, and with it, more pain.

  I writhe in the mud as though struck by madness. I don’t want to be seen. Don’t want to exist. Drowning in shame, hands clutched over my eyes, I weep for the life I lost, the loved-ones cleaved from me by fate and violence—and the lives I ended.

  How many people did I kill?

  How many did I enjoy killing?

  “Doctor Zekser?” Wellcome asks, his blue eyes staring down at me, hands on his knees, surrounded by a bevy of guns aimed at my forehead. “Is there an antidote for the poison you used?”

  I try to focus on his words, but my body continues to convulse, clutched by the horrors of my own creation.

  “Doctor Zekser,” Wellcome says, worry raising the pitch of his voice, “if this man dies at your hands, I will not be able to get you home.”

  Home.

  “Home?”

  “Yes!” the man shouts, now with tears in his eyes. “Home! To your family! Your wife. Your daughter.”

  When I sit up, the men with guns rush in.

  “No, no, no!” Wellcome shouts. “Let him be. His mind has come back.”

  I nod my thanks to the man and crawl toward the Guagin…a logger just doing his job. A swipe of my arm sends the nearby men scattering, and I descend on the fallen man with all the ferocity of Mapinguari, but with the intention of saving a life, not taking it.

  The man’s ribs crack as I perform CPR, pumping blood through his veins, filling his lungs with oxygen, keeping his mind alive until the paralysis wears off. It’s impossible to know if he’s dead beyond rescue, or simply too frozen to show signs of life, so I continue for ten minutes, weeping and begging, “Please, please, please,” to anyone that’s listening.

  The man’s return to life is subtle. He doesn’t gasp. Doesn’t open his eyes. I simply feel the resistance of his lungs rising on their own when I try to compress them. I lift my hands up and away, watching his chest rise and fall. Relief rushes through me, overwhelming my already frayed nerves.

  This time, when darkness overtakes me, it’s the merciful nothing of unconsciousness. I hear Wellcome shouting my name, again and again, and I feel his smooth hand patting my face.

  And then, nothing.

  49

  I wake to the sound of distant chainsaws. The loggers have already returned to work, deforesting a swath of jungle that has belonged to the four tribes for thousands of years. Revulsion for this desecration wages war with the fresh memories of my own despicable acts. Who am I to judge the actions of anyone?

  “You’re awake?” Wellcome asks.

  I open my eyes and glance at the man. He’s seated, elbows on knees, beside my cot. We’re in a trailer, something old, something that’s spent too many years fending off the jungle. It smells of mildew, and feels a lot like a cave, the ceiling’s closeness oppressive.

  “You changed your clothes?” I ask, noting the dry, unsoiled Hawaiian print shirt. In the jungle, he’d stand out like a beacon for all kinds of trouble.

  He looks down at the shirt. “You think I’d be able to handle the humidity by now. I’ve been here enough.”

  “You work with them?” I motion toward the sound of the saws.

  He chuckles. “Hell, no. I’m a private investigator. Honestly, looking for you, out here, it’s a bit out of my wheelhouse. But I speak the language and I need the money. So here I am. That I found you, now, is something of a miracle.”

  He waits for me to ask why, but I just stare. It’s been so long since I’ve held a conversation in English, it feels strange. The cadence of the language sounds off. I’m having trouble distinguishing honesty from sarcasm. Is the man disappointed he’s found me? Is he relieved? Indifferent?

  “I’ve been down here a dozen times, networking with local governments, unsavory types, farmers, and logging companies. I even made friends with some Indians. The civilized variety. Not the guys you’ve been hanging around with.”

  “They are civilized,” I say, and I must be glaring more than intended because Wellcome leans back and looks ready to bolt.

  “They wanted to strap you down,” he says. “Was I wrong to stop them?”

  I relax in the cot. “Yesterday, you would have been smart to kill me.”

  “And today?”

  “I’m me,” I say, and when he doesn’t look convinced, I add, “You’re safe.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Plane crashed,” I say.

  He nods. “That’s the one thing I know.”

  “After that…” Memories flash past. My descent into madness, and love, and mercy, and primal violence is a story that’s not easy to tell, and somewhat unbelievable. There are also people to protect. The four tribes, including Ashan’s family, need to be protected. Their traditions, sacred locations and
myths must remain a secret. At the same time, my capture has exposed them. No one will believe that I survived the Amazon rainforest on my own, developed my own tribal paints, self-taught the use of poisoned arrows and cut my hair like…

  I rub my hand over my head. It’s been shaved down to stubble. I glance down at my body. I’ve been dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. My cargo shorts and T-shirt.

  “Your wife had me bring them, along with…” he digs into his pocket and pulls out a Snickers chocolate bar. They’re my longtime favorite, what Gwen calls my ‘one and only vice.’ I take the candy, unwrap half, and bite down. The sweetness is overpowering. I fight to not spit it out. I wrap the rest, pretending to have enjoyed what now feels like fake food.

  “I thought it a bit strange,” he says. “Honestly, I usually just eat them myself. They melt down here, you know. I was about to eat that one when I got this.” He digs out a smart phone, and after a few flicks he turns the screen around for me to see.

  The man captured in the photo is a stranger…if he’s a man at all. His skin is covered in scales and mud. A large eye glares from his forehead. A mouth gapes from his midsection, matching the snarling maw on his face, which is surrounded by a gnarly mane of hair. He stands low to the ground, on all fours, like an ape, the motion blur blending it all so that he looks like a true beast of legend. He’s horrifying.

  “You don’t recognize him?” Wellcome zooms in on the photo, shifting it around with his thumb until the man’s face fills the screen.

  My face.

  “That’s…”

  “You. Pretty nasty, right?”

  “I was in a dissociative state,” I say. It feels like a lame excuse, but it’s also the truth. I was both me, and not me. The jungle made me more, and less, revealing my true self and the monster all men are capable of becoming.

  He tries the word on for size, speaking slowly. “Dissocia… What is that?”

  “When you become disconnected from your own memories, thoughts, feelings, and actions. For me, there were layers. At first, I was disconnected from everything that came before, but I was still living my life. When things got…unbearable, I was separated from myself entirely. It’s like…watching yourself on TV. Living in third person. Some of it I didn’t remember until yesterday, and now I wish I could forget it again.”

  “Sounds like a foolproof diagnosis.” His tone a mix of distrust and compassion. “I can see it. The man in this picture is you…but it’s also not. The man I’m talking to now is not the…”

  “Monster I was before.”

  He gives a slow nod. “That’s fair. The point is, you’re definitely not the same guy now. Honestly, when the logging company e-mailed this—” He gives the phone with my image on it a shake. “—to me, I didn’t think it was you, but Gwen...”

  I clutch my stomach and lean forward.

  “Please don’t puke,” Wellcome says. “This isn’t my trailer, and I don’t want to clean you up again.”

  “She saw this?” I grip the phone, crushing my shame into it.

  “I had to be sure it was you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In a plane by now,” he says. “From Manaus.”

  “What was she doing in Manaus?” It’s the largest inland city in Brazil, and the base of operations for many cultural and relief organizations dealing with tribal people, but why would she be there if she didn’t know I’d been found?

  “She’s been living there for two years now.”

  Two years…

  “She sold the house in Massachusetts and came here. She’s really something. Never gave up hope. The Brazilian government stopped searching for you after a month. She never did.”

  This news brings tears to my eyes. She never gave up on me. Never moved on. But I… A heavy sigh leaves my body shrunken.

  “I get it,” he says. “You did things out there. To survive. I don’t need to know. No one needs to know, especially your wife and kid. The only real problem we need to clear up is the man you nearly killed. He’s hurt pretty bad, though it’s more from your effort to save him than to kill him. I’m not sure they’re going to let us leave, no matter how sad your sob story is.”

  “Is Gwen coming here?”

  Wellcome shakes his head. “Iquitos, in Peru. That’s where we’ll be headed if they let us go. It’s a few hundred miles closer than Manaus.” He squints at me. “Do you even know where we are?”

  I shake my head.

  “Vale do Javari. State of Amazonas. And if that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s the wordy way of saying, ‘the middle of nowhere.’ You’re damn lucky you didn’t spend the rest of your life in this green hell.”

  My instinct is to argue with his assessment of the jungle. There is plenty about life in the Amazon that is hellish. I became my worst self here. But I also learned things about myself, and my life’s priorities, that I couldn’t have learned in the sterilized world outside. Life in the modern world might be more cosmetic, but there are enough desperate junkies, hungry thieves, and ruthless murderers to know Mapinguari’s darkness roams all corners of the Earth.

  “How long have I been here?” I whisper.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Lost track of time.”

  He flicks his phone on, taps the screen a few times, and then looks up. “You want exact number of days, or—”

  “Just tell me!”

  “Four years, two months. Roughly.”

  Invisible leeches suck away my strength, leaving me numb. Four years. Why didn’t Gwen move on? Why didn’t she give up? Her stalwart dedication is inspiring.

  “This needs to stop,” I say, turning toward the sound of a tree falling. “There are several uncontacted tribes in this region. If they keep logging, it won’t just be one man sent to stop them. It will be an army. They’ll all be killed.”

  “And then the tribes will be wiped out,” he says, sadness and understanding in his voice. “But that’s not going to happen while we’re stuck in this camp. A battle for the trees might be fought in the jungle, but the war won’t be won here. You need to get back to civilization for that. You…wait, the tribal people sent you to stop the logging? Just you?”

  I nod.

  “What were you supposed to do against that many men?” He’s genuinely bewildered, and for some reason I decide to trust him with the truth.

  “Kill them all.”

  He swallows and glances at the door. “But that was dissociated Greg Zekser, yeah?”

  “Mapinguari,” I say. “That was my name. I was a monster. A legend.”

  We sit in silence for several long seconds before he clears his throat. “Well, the Brazilian government is protective of indigenous people. With your story, I’m sure it won’t be hard to get their attention.”

  My story… I don’t like the idea of telling anyone what really happened in the jungle, but if a watered-down tale of peaceful tribes will save them, that’s what I’ll give the world. “What will it take? To get out of here?”

  “Money,” Wellcome says. “Of which your wife has little.”

  “That’s why this was your last trip?”

  He shrugs. “I have bills to pay, too.”

  “My satchel, did you open it?”

  He shakes his head and searches behind him. He leans back and plucks the old leather bag from beneath a soiled towel. “Didn’t look inside.”

  Wellcome puts the worn strap in my hand when I reach for it. I open the satchel and pause. At the top is a leaf-wrapped meal, a surprise gift from Grandmother. I can smell the fruit and meat within. I hand the bound food to Wellcome and dig a little deeper. A small portion of the marijuana brick comes next.

  “Is that?” He takes the bundle of pot and smells it. “That will help, I’m sure, but it’s not enough to—”

  I remove the $5000 stack of cash. His eyes widen. “How much?”

  “Five thousand.”

  He nods. “That should do it. Though we’ll offer less to start. We s
till need to secure travel, food, and lodging. Getting to Iquitos won’t be easy.”

  I look down into the satchel and hold my breath.

  The notebook. Nearly all the pages are missing, pillaged for joints or starting fires. But the pages that remain… I lift it from the satchel and place it on my lap. Wellcome watches in silence as I open the cover with shaky hands to reveal a page with four words written on it in charcoal.

  Gwen.

  Juni.

  Home.

  Purpose.

  I choke back a laugh-sob, but fail to stop fresh tears.

  I have been given all four, and the last of them drives my hand back into the satchel. The bag falls to the floor, empty as I lift the zip-locked phone from inside. I tear the bag open and reassemble the phone, my whole body shaking. I press the power button, but nothing happens. “C’mon, damnit. C’mon.”

  Wellcome places a gentle hand on mine. “Hey.”

  When I look up, he’s holding out his phone, swiping to a saved contact that reads: Gwen Zekser. “Your number is different, anyway.”

  I snatch the phone from him, hit the call button and nearly have a panic attack as several clicks are followed by ringing.

  On the sixth ring, the phone is answered. “Hi, Mr. Wellcome. Mommy forgot her phone, but you can—”

  When I sob at the sound of my daughter’s voice, she stops speaking. It takes all of my strength to reign myself in and say just one word. “J-June-bug?”

  There’s a pause. Several loud breaths. And then...

  “Daddy?”

  EPILOGUE

  One Year Later

  “Careful,” I say, reaching for Gwen’s hand. “It’s steep here.”

  “You’re sure this is the way?” she asks for the tenth time today. It’s a question I’ve grown accustomed to over the past few weeks. With no path to follow and no maps or compass to guide us, it’s not hard to understand her fear of getting lost.