At Play in the Fields of the Lord (13 page)

The extract of
B.
caapi
is a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen containing phenol alkaloids related to those found in lysergic acid, and whether or not it finds a respectable place in the pharmaceutica of man, it has held for unknown centuries an important place in the culture of Indian tribes of the Amazon basin
.
At the time of my experiment I was lying in a narrow room with a corpse in the next bed, with God, a vulture and a dog as witnesses, wishing that Marguerite were here.
Marguerite.
I wish to tell Marguerite that the reason I did not make love to her that time in Hong Kong was not because I did not want her but because I had reason to believe that in the late, low hours of the week before, I had contracted a low infestation.
I did not know Marguerite well enough to give her crabs—you understand?
Marguerite had alabaster skin, triumphant hair, and an unmuddied soul, and a swinging little ass into the bargain.

You listen to me, Meriwether Lewis: what the hell you sass that Sheriff for?
He mighta kilt you.
You stay clear of whiskey, then; long as you can’t stay out of trouble, you ain’t welcome back.
And don’t you show your Mam that bad face, neither; I whupped you plenty times before, and I’ll whup you again, hero or no hero
.
Alvin Moon “Joe Redcloud” said,
You’re all your people here got left to count on.
You go get that education, hear me now?
And then you come on home and learn it back to us as best you can.
Because the way things are goin they ain’t no hope for none of us, lessen we don’t get somethin learned here to us pretty quick
.

I have opened my eyes again, to shut off all that blue.
Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that—an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem.
But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks, the bureau budges; they back and fill, about to charge.
From above the bulb socket descends like a falling spider, leaving the bulb behind.

B.
caapi,
which is named for the
caapi
of certain Brazilian Indians, is also the
camorampi
of the Campa, the
natema
of the Jivaro, the
ayahuasca
or
haya-huasca
of the Quechua-speaking peoples, the
yage
of Ecuador, the
soga de muerte
of most Spanish South Americans, names variously translated as “Vine of the Devil,” “Vine of the Soul,” “Vine of Death”: the Spanish term means literally “vine rope of death,” the
soga
referring to the jungle lianas used commonly as canoe lines, lashings, ropes, etc.
In addition to certain medical properties, the vine can induce visions, telepathic states, metaphysical contemplation and transmigration; these conditions are used by the Indians for the reception of warnings, prophecies and good counsel.
Among many tribes one purpose of the dream state is identification of an unknown enemy, and the use of it is thus related to the Jivaro practice of taking
tsantsas,
or shrunken heads
 …

I am cut off, I feel both silly and depressed; it is the solitude, not solitude but isolation … Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?

I am trying to reach out to you, but I do not know who you
are, I cannot see you.
I only feel your presence in this room.
Perhaps … I wonder … are you inside me?
And if so … Now listen carefully: There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago.
Are you in touch with it: can you tell me—did you see?—the man with the blue arrow—

Or … or are you the figure in the center of the street?
So you came here, after all!
Can you hear me?
I said,
CAN YOU HEAR ME?
CAN—YOU—HEAR—ME!

I cannot reach him through the sound and silence, distant sound and deepest silence, like a thick glass barrier between the world of the living and myself, as if I were wandering on an earth which had suddenly died, or in a Purgatory, myself already dead.

There is something that you have to understand.

Now look what’s happening—can you see?
It’s Him, the Dead Man.
Resurrection.
Rising out of bed.
Not suspecting that I am already dead, he will attempt to kill me.

He speaks:
StopshoutinforChristsake!

Here he comes, intent on the kill.
He has broken the glass wall.
He drags me across the room.
He has a costume, he is all dressed up like a soldier of fortune, he is very hip; but see the rosy cheeks behind that beard?
An enormous child!

“You are an Enormous Child!”

Nevermindmejustlookinthemirra!
Whatareyousomekindofaaddictorwhat?
Gowanlookatyaself!

See that pale face in the glass!
The face is rigid, and the eyes are dark and huge.
Over the left eye drifts a dark shadow, like a hand.
There you are, I see you now, and the bearded man, your warder.

He knew his lucidity could not last, and because he had taken too much, he dreaded going under again, and he started to ask Wolfie for help.
“Hey,” he said.
But he could not ask, he had never asked in all his life, and even if he asked, what could poor Wolfie do?
There were no sedatives in Madre de Dios; sedation was superfluous in a graveyard.
He pushed away and tottered toward the window, where he fell across the sill.
The dog and the vulture were gone.
The light was tightening in the way it always
did before the sudden jungle night, and down the center of the street a solitary figure walked away.

The bottle stood upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.

H
E
felt like crying, but did not.
He had not cried in twenty years—no, more.
Had he ever cried?
And yet he did not really feel like crying; he felt like laughing, but did not.
Stalking Joe Redcloud’s shack as twilight came, he waited to be called back, beaten, and forgiven, but with the clear prairie darkness came the knowledge that the call would never come, that the days of tears and comfort had come and gone before he had realized they would ever end.
Dry-eyed, enraged, he crouched in the sagebrush for a little while, and then moved off like a lean yearling grizzly driven snarling from the cave, feeling very bad and very good at the same time, and spoiling for a fight.

He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold.
He felt very cold.
On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing.
It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, and the spots were growing.
And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud, and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently.
The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark.

NowlistenI’mgonnatellGuzmánweflytomorrowawright?
AwrightLewis?
IsaidAWRIGHTLEWIS?

He looked at the man and the man’s head, fringed with hair; the head shrank before his eyes and became a
tsantsa
.
He could not look, and turned away.
A figure crossed his line of vision, moving toward the door.
The door opened and light came in.
The voice said
ThisisnowheremanI’vehadenough
.

Don’t go … I need … Don’t go.
I need … But he could not hear his own voice, and he could not have said just what he needed.
From over the man’s head the large white eyes of the
moth observed him; they pinned him, like incoming beams.
The music crashed, the wave … The door was dark again.
He pushed himself to his feet and stared out of the window.
The dark was rolling from the forest all around, and the sky was so wild as the sun set that it hurt his eyes.
He reeled and fell, then thrashed to his feet and fell again, across the bed, and was sucked down into the darkness as the music burst the walls and overwhelmed him.

His body diffused and drifted through cathedral vaults of color, whirling and shimmering and bursting forth, drifting high among the arches, down the clerestories, shadowed by explosions of stained glass.
In the dark chapels of the church was a stair to windy dungeons, to colors rich and somber now, and shapes emerging; the shapes flowered, rose in threat and fell away again.
Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain.
A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face.
Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone.
Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness.

S
NOW
, dawn, black aspens.
The creature rose at the boy’s coming and somersaulted backward, whining and snarling, the trap clatter muffled in white silences; whiteness; the blood pools colored black, the tight-sewn cold.

A great head, and yellow eyes too big for Coyote—the last wolf in the mountains, the first and only wolf the boy had ever seen.
He had no rifle.
The old wolf leaped, to drive him back, and fell forward on its muzzle, which rose white-tipped from the snow; its tongue fell out.
The icy steel worked tighter on its foreleg, and the pain confused it, for it looked aside and wagged its tail a little, shivering.
Then, just once, it howled a real wolf howl, pure as the black air of the mountain forest.
Then it lay down.
It had been gnawing on its foreleg, just above where the trap had snapped, and now it began again, whining and snarling at
its own agony, at the stubbornness of its own bone which held it earthbound.
The mad yellow eyes watched him, the taut muzzle, the purplish curled gum, red teeth, the jaw; the scrape of teeth on living bone made him cry out.
The ears flicked forward, but the gnawing did not stop.

When he came close, it sprang sideways; another such spring might free it.
He drew back, frightened of the mad wild yellow eyes.

The sun rose to low banks of winter clouds; the day grew cold.
He cut a sapling and carved a spear point, long and white; confronting the wolf, he drove the raw white wood into its chest as it came up at him and fought to pin it to the ground and grind the pain out of it.
But still it fought to live, dull heavy thumps in the white flying powder; a blood fleck seared his lip—the wolf was snapping at the place where the stake pierced it.
Shaken free, he had fallen within reach of it, but the stunned creature only raised its bleeding teeth from its own wounds and stared at him and past him, blinked once at the dying winter world, in daze, and lay its head upon its forepaws, panting.

He opened his eyes, gasping for breath; he drifted downward.
Once the abyss opened out into air and sunlight, but there were papier-mâché angels, and again he broke off chords of music from the air like bits of cake: the Paradise was false and he went on.
A spider appeared, reared high over his head, then seized, shredded and consumed him.
Voided, he lay inert in a great trough, with molten metal rising all about him in a blinding light.
SO THIS WAS BRIMSTONE
.
The missionary’s pasty face peered down at him over the rim:
This is a proud day for the mission, Lewis, and a proud day for your people.
We all count on you
.

Eyes.
Eyes.
He struggled to free himself, but the stake held in his heart, the hole in his heart; even breathing hurt him, even breathing.
He clawed at his own chest to ease it.
If only he could get that pain out, then his heart would bleed his life away, but gently.

A
ROAR
of trapped insects, flies and bees, and he among them: mad drone and bugging and brush of hairy, viscous legs scraping toward remote slits of air and light, of acrid insect smell, of flat inconscient insect eyes, unblinking, bright as jewels, too mindless to know fear, oh Christ, how mindless.
Humans … A human mob, pounding its way into the bar, in search of—what?
It did not know.
It had no idea what it was hunting, but was hunting out of instinct, with myriad flat insect eyes, trampling everything underfoot; he shook with fear.
Like a rat he was, a famine rat of broken cities, a quaking gut-shrunk rat, scurrying through the wainscoting of falling houses.
His skeleton flew apart, reassembled in rat’s skeleton; his spine arched, the tiny forefeet and long furtive hand, the loose-skinned gassy belly; he poised, alert, hunched on his knees upon the bed, hands dangling at his navel, long nose twitching.
In the mirror across the room he saw the hair sprout on his face and the face protrude.