Blinding Light (16 page)

Welcoming them to this different pavilion was the small smoothfaced shaman, Don Esteban, who had assisted Don Pablo in administering the ayahuasca. He had been the cook; he had stoked the fire, chopped and peeled the vine stems, stirred the pot; he had brewed the mixture.

Ava said, “He looks like he has a stocking over his face.”

Hearing her speak, Don Pablo clapped Don Esteban on the shoulder and said, “
Vegetalista. Toéro.”

And there were others: three Secoya men watching blank-eyed, or perhaps not expressionless but with faces so expressive, so peculiar, they could not be read—riddle-faced Indians squatting on their haunches and being obscurely busy, like scullions in a primitive kitchen. A frown might be a smile; their sniffing was like inquisitiveness; when they pressed their lips together it might have meant anything—pique, frustration, impatience.

Nor was language any good. In German-accented Spanish, Manfred said, “We start. I am first.”

They ignored him and went on stirring the pot, stewing the peelings of the dry slender stems, crushing them into it and reducing the liquid until it was darker and thicker. Steadman saw that it was the simplest boiling and simmering. He thought, I could do that. They were making tea, but strong stewed tea. Don Esteban, the shaman they called the
toéro,
was working over another fire, ladling liquid into another pot and reducing it, mixing it with more plant fragments, stirring it until it grew soupy.

Manfred announced himself again with a question, but the Secoya were so preoccupied in their cookery they did not notice his standing over them, nor did they acknowledge him until, in frustration, he squatted, rocking on his haunches, and then called out to Steadman.

“This one is
Datura Candida','
he said. “It contains alkaloids, such as tropane and scopolamine. Not like
maikua,
but strong still.”

Using nannying gestures, the Secoya men directed him to sit. When he was seated, leaning forward, the shaman brought him a cup—a cracked porcelain cup—of the dark liquid. In drabness and consistency the liquid was no different from ayahuasca, a cup of muddy tea with a leaf of wrinkled scum on its surface. Manfred sipped, drank a little, then tilted the cup, emptied it, and blinked hard.

“Nossing,” he said, and beckoned with his fingers.
“Más. Más!'

The
toéro,
Don Esteban, considered this, let some moments pass, and refilled the cup. Manfred drank the second cup more slowly while the Secoya watched him.

Don Pablo, the calmest of the squatting Secoya, simply gazed and growled tunelessly, chanting through his sinuses, as if he knew what was coming next. Seeing Don Esteban, Steadman was reminded of that moment when a dentist administers a jab of Novocain and then turns his back and squints again at the x-rays hanging from clips over his tools, knowing that in a moment or so the jaw will be numb enough for the tooth to be drilled or yanked. Don Esteban had that dentist's confidence, which is also a look of indifference, part of the routine.

“Why it is not working?” Manfred said, his teeth against his lips.
“Esta medizina no fale nada”

But he was looking away from them, interrogating the carved wooden protrusion on the worm-eaten finial of a corner post of the pavilion.

“Más, más”
he said.

Don Esteban did not react. He was hunkered down, looking directly at Manfred, who was still preoccupied with the carvings on the corner post, grunting at them, perhaps finding a meaning.

Ava said, “He's toasted.”

Manfred got up and stumbled a little, looked away, and then walked straight into the side of the pavilion, cracking his head on a beam. He staggered and sank to his knees, holding his ears, then slowly fell onto his side, his hands clutching his head, his elbows up. He was out cold.

Don Esteban shrugged and said,
“El resultado no depende de mí”

Before Steadman had been able to help him, as he struggled to his feet and reached, the shaman waved him away in a negligent gesture that seemed to mean, Leave him—he will be all right.

“I think they've seen this sort of thing before,” Ava said. She gave Manfred's head wound a swift appraisal, as she would any drunken stranger lying comatose in the gutter. The Secoya were fascinated by the way she lifted his eyelid and looked at his dilated pupil. They seemed to gather from this procedure that she was peering through this opening, through his body, into his soul.

“You're next, darling.”

Now Steadman was glad she was there with him. He needed her experience, her skepticism, her strength. Only since their breakup had he realized how tough she was. Perhaps that was why their sex was better, even if so much else they did together was worse.

“Please, stay right here until I come down,” Steadman said.

He sat with his back flat against a corner post and accepted the cup from the
toéro,
then drank, sipping, and waited, and swallowed, then sipped again. He heard a mutter:
“Está bebiéndolo”

He knew that he had drunk the entire cupful of dark liquid when he lowered the cup and looked in and saw a large spider, flexing its legs against spots of rust-stained enamel on the bottom. The thing was not just alive but visibly growing larger, hairier, its eye bulbs swelling with sympathy as Steadman's own eyesight dimmed. From the spider's posture and gaze Steadman saw a friend, in an attitude of patient welcome.

Turning the cup toward Ava so that she too could see the spider, he smiled, and she smiled back. But he did not see her. He was looking through her, and from far off came the small dull clatter of a metal cup striking the ground.

Too much was happening within him for Steadman to speak. He was plunged into an episode in progress, twilit, people busy in the foreground. The dusty liquid in his throat was like warm stale tea, but the taste had nothing to do with the effect, for it had the smack of ayahuasca, the mud-puddle tang of dust, rain, smashed stalks, pounded roots, dead leaves—any weed would taste like this. It was a swallow of the earth. So with this muddy ordinary taste of a dull drink he was unprepared for what followed.

What he took to be twilight, a summer dusk, the looming shadow of night falling, was in fact dawn, a slant of light rising like the first sword blade of sunrise and lifting upward, slashing open the darkness so the whole sky was pierced with day. The difference was that the moon was still sharply visible, and so were the stars, as he remembered them on some of the clearest mornings of his life. This morning was full of bright stars in a pale sky, with the same important patterns of constellations—readable to him now, the complex skein of stars making perfect sense.

He had no eyes, yet his whole bedazzled body was an organ of vision, receptive to all images. He seemed to understand and receive these sights with the surface of his vibrant skin. He felt a transparency of being, a prickling awareness—not observing in a simple goggling way, but knowing, being connected, a part of everything that was visible.

No visions played in front of him. Instead, they glowed inside him—his body was the engine of the vision, the light was within him. He was hyperalert as though feverish, and the crystal world was composed not of surfaces but of inner states, what lay beneath the look of things, sometimes hilariously, for he had a glimpse beneath a mass of expensive adventure gear of a big pale body he recognized as Hack's—so odd to see this irrelevant American here and Sabra beneath him, making a cradle of her open legs. Not so hilarious was his understanding of his immediate surroundings, for there were snakes in the trees and spiders in the thatch and a clutch of nibbling rat-sized rodents in the undergrowth. Listening closely, he remembered and could understand everything that Manfred had said in his sleep.

No one knew him, no one saw his condition: the Secoya were indifferent to the state he was in. They were on the point of leaving the gringo to writhe, and he knew he was the gringo.

Turned inside out, he could think very clearly. He saw the blossom—he was inside the angel's trumpet.
This is what the ayahuasca told me.
He was blind in a powerful way, in the thrall of a luminosity he had never known before, so that blindness was not the shadowy obstacle of something dark but rather a hot light of revelation, like a lava flow within him, a river of fire, and he was euphoric.

He could fly in a dazzling arc over the people who were near him. There were many of them, some from the distant past, women and girls he had known. But he was the only one who could see. They could not see him, or even themselves, in their flattened shadowy state.

“Slade.”

Ava was calling to him, whispering, imploring. He knew she was worried—more than worried, she was terrified. And he understood: This is her own terror of herself and the world; it has nothing to do with me. She is lamenting something within her, crying out to herself.

Speaking with his whole body, Steadman said, “I am not that man.” He was outside time, outside his eyes, outside his body, in the opposite of a dream state. He was a hovering witness, seeing everything, all the guts and gizzards, the nakedness of familiar people, the sadness of their deceits. Of his own deceits, too, for he was like them—his keenest illumination was just that, a glimpse of his resemblance to these people.

Light was power, and in this experience of power he knew what he had to do with his life, his writing; he saw his story. He realized why he had come to this village on the riverbank, and he knew precisely why it was necessary for him to be here with all those other people who sat before him. He knew them entirely. The process was glorious, yet what he saw—the human shadows turned into plotters of flesh and blood—appalled him.

Slowly he surfaced, as though rising from the depths of the ocean, recovering as the dim light of day returned, real dusk, real shadows, clammy air, in which the world was once again its own human smell—frantic birds, ragged leaves, shabby village, smoky fire. He was back on earth, and even as his knowledge was slipping from him, he suspected that outside that trance state he would never have had a clue that anything coherent was discernible beneath the stagnant surface of the visible world. He had an instant memory that he had seen to its heart, where all was light and everything obvious. But now that he was awake he could not understand much of what seemed only a murky liquefaction of time. And the light was gone.

“I don't think it worked.”

“You were out cold.”

“How long?”

Ava raised her wrist and showed him her watch, the stopped chronometer. “Almost four hours.”

“
Una ceguera
Manfred said, and Nestor shaped his mouth in a halfsmile, as if to indicate “Who knows?”

Manfred was staring, looking greedy again, and somehow Steadman knew the man was disappointed and envious. He had inspired and facilitated the whole thing, and all he had gotten, so he kept saying, were convulsions and cramps and bouts of projectile vomiting. He wanted to know what Steadman had seen. Steadman was so groggy, so confused by the experience, he realized that he would have to take the mixture again in order to remember.

“You were blind. I shined a light into your eyes and got nothing,” Ava said. “Why are you smiling?”

How could he explain? Blindness was the opposite of what he had experienced, but that was how he must have seemed to her.

“I was seeing in the dark,” he said. Late that night he woke in his hammock. He said, “You know that line in Lévi-Strauss? ‘The scent that can be smelled at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books'? That.”

T
HE OTHERS
did not sleep that night. They knew nothing about waiting, they hated to listen, they almost suffocated with impatience. All night they muttered, reassuring themselves, timidly plotting, too afraid to be truly angry. The village children—also awake, but frisky—played in the clearing by moonlight, while the Americans, hungry and uncomfortable, whispered like hostages, simply wishing to leave.

Before dawn, before the sounds of the assertive birds and the mutters of the Secoya women starting their cooking fires, when the Americans heard Nestor's call, which was just a murmured “Okay, we go,” they were fully awake, and then noisy and eager. Hack threatened to report Nestor in Quito; Janey was tearful, still hung over from the drug; Wood and Sabra were subdued, Wood also queasy from his dose of ayahuasca. Manfred, talking loudly in his sleep, even with his hat over his face, had to be shaken awake. Steadman and Ava woke from their fitful sleep. Steadman thought, Each of us is different now.

In the hot dark morning of dripping trees and big-eared plants and powerful smells of foliage as rank as old clothes, there was no farewell. Blank-faced Secoya adults watched the visitors hurry down the plank to the big canoe while the children turned their backs on them. The Secoya women were the most curious, staring at the American women as though studying a troop of pale excitable apes unsuited to living on this riverbank.

Nestor handed out the blindfolds again in the boat, and Hack said, “You're actually afraid that we're going to reveal the existence of this place?”

“Do I look afraid?” Nestor asked, and waited for an answer.

The visitors put on the blindfolds and became silent, sulking like scolded children.

Steadman sat close to Ava, perspiring in the rising heat of morning, breathing the stink of the jungle, listening to the ambiguous birdcalls that sometimes sounded like teasing human squawks. He was sorry to be leaving and still felt the intensity of the village, which was for him a physical sensation, something he could taste, a tightness in his throat, a weariness, the subdued joy of having suffered through an initiation. He had no words for it and yet he felt changed. His sadness was the intimation that he would probably never see the place again, that he would have to keep going, no turning back.