Blinding Light (6 page)

Instead of being reassured by Nestor's excellent English, Steadman was suspicious of his presumption. The man was clearly experienced, but he was impulsive in his movements, even in the way he walked—lunging—and so confident as to be carelessly clumsy.

Five other shadow-shrouded people sat in the back of the van, faceless in the darkness, hunched over in the chill of the early morning. A cassette of Andean flute and panpipe music was whistling in the van's tape player. They said nothing when Steadman and Ava got into the forward seat. They remained silent—Steadman guessed that they resented having to pick up him and Ava last, giving them more time to sleep. Waiting for them in the porte-cochere of the luxury hotel perhaps annoyed them, too.

“Six hours to Papallacta,” Nestor said. “And then Lago Agrio. We stay in Lago tonight. We will be on the river in the morning. Tomorrow afternoon in the jungle. Anyone mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

“We mind,” came a voice from a back seat, a woman's voice, like bolt cutters snapping through iron.

Nestor shrugged and unwrapped some chewing gum. He sat next to the driver, whom he announced as Hernán. Hernán was a capable driver, but Steadman disliked being driven except by Ava, who was efficient at the wheel, using her bossy doctor's manner in traffic, but she drove with caution, never speeded. The other passengers in the van were seated in silence, their heads down. Steadman had assumed, based on the high price they had paid up front, that he and Ava would be alone. But this was like a group trip for budget travelers.

Steadman reminded himself that he would not have been able to accomplish this drug tour single-handedly. They needed Nestor, and Hernán too, probably, for though he had been in Ecuador before, this was different. Even if Steadman had managed to find the village in the jungle, he would not have been able to negotiate the drug ceremony with the Secoya. He needed Nestor as a guide and go-between, but he also resented needing him.

Outside the city, the road widened into what seemed a highway, and after a short distance—though it was impossible to be precise in this darkness—it dropped down to a narrower, winding road. The van swayed on the curves; Hernán drove with his forearms on the wheel. In the deeper valleys it seemed that dawn was receding and night falling all over again. All that was visible was a short stretch of road ahead, rising and falling in the lights of the van, and at the margin of the road deep green sides of a forested valley.

“Like that road in Uganda,” came the bolt-cutter voice from the back, faintly English. “On the way to that gorilla place.”

“Bhutan,” a man said with more certainty. “Bhutan's got roads like this. To the monastery. That burned down after we saw it.”

“This could be Yucatán,” a woman said.

“You been to Uganda?” Nestor called out. “Supposed to be awesome.”

There were murmurs from the back, though Steadman was thinking that “awesome” was just the sort of word such an Ecuadorian hustler would know. A woman, not the harsh-voiced one, said, “Africa's finished. We're never going back. Some people feel sorry for the Africans and their AIDS epidemic, but I despise them for it. I hate them for being so irresponsible.”

Beside him, Ava took a deep breath and released it as a sigh, a slow, barely audible whinny of exasperation.

“Billions of stars,” a man said.

And ghostly moon-glow patches on the dark earth where there were thick, squat huts, with stones weighting the corrugated squares of their rusted roofs. To the south, the eerie brightness of a snowcapped peak, like a bed sheet crumpled on a black rock, just a glimpse that came and went. Strands of clouds, like torn spider webs, fluttered up from the snowfield and then were crushed by the darkness that poured from the depth of the valley.

“Dark matter,” the softer-voiced woman said.

“I don't get that,” the other woman said.

“Particles,” a man said. “It's dark energy. What do you think is holding the universe together? Not the stars, that's for sure. They are, like, this tiny proportion of what's out there.”

“What else is out there?”

“Dark energy. Quintessence. Gravity mass. It's a kind of invisible cosmic broth that keeps galaxies in place,” the woman said. She was eating trail mix, stirring it in a bag with her fingers and chewing loudly as she spoke. “Or maybe not particles but overfolded space-time, like a new dimension. A whole different plane of being.”

“You guys must be teachers,” Nestor said.

“No teachers here,” a man said in a weary voice.

“How many kilometers to Papallacta?” a new voice piped up in the darkness. Because the man was agitated, his German accent was more distinct than if he'd been calm, and he chewed it and turned it into a gargling speech impediment.

Nestor laughed and muttered something to Hernán, and at that moment a cell phone sounded two notes in the back of the van. A woman fumbled with it and tried to answer, the call failed, and the woman muttered, “Oh, knickers.”

But for some time Steadman had known who these other passengers were.

Manfred was panting with impatience and now and then sighing with deliberate harshness as he fussed with the tangled wires of a pair of headphones. The others talked without letup, because of the darkness, because of their apprehension, because they were naturally assertive. Steadman did not blame them for being wealthy or for collecting destinations like trophies, but he minded their talking so much and so intrusively this early in the morning—dawn still distant, their voices contending in the van—and not conversing with each other so much as boasting to be heard by the eavesdroppers they hoped to impress. They were saying what all of them already knew, and everything they said had a gloating sound.

Wealth had made trespassing simple. With money it was now possible to go anywhere in the world. No courage was necessary, nor any planning. Steadman was fascinated by the choices: gorillas in Africa, temples in Bhutan, back roads in Yucatán. In Antarctica—so Wood was recalling right now in the van—they had wandered the rookeries of the emperor penguin. Though Steadman had imagined just himself and Ava on this trip, it was not surprising that they were with these others on the van ride to the jungle. Steadman hated the thought that he was like them, for his wealth had made this possible for him, too. But this was only the beginning. The real test would come later, down the river, in the jungle, at the village.

Still in this darkness the man who had been introduced as Hack said, “I still can't see a fucking thing,” his face against the van window.

“Sabra and I heard about one of these quote-unquote raves outside London,” Wood said. “I gave a taxi driver a hundred bucks and said, ‘Just get us there.' It was some kind of industrial facility on the outskirts, a couple of thousand whacked-out kids jumping up and down. They all had taken this drug Ecstasy.”

Sabra said, “One kid told me that he took a huge hit. Wandering around. Kids were just stepping on his face.”

“The Secoya are much more civilized than that,” Nestor said.

“One hit of Ecstasy and he's blind for six hours.”

“A drug that blinded you might bliss you out.”

“In your dreams.”

“Yah, but some few plants give you fissions.”

Dawn broke slowly, the buoyant light leaking into the air around them and seeming to hoist the sky as the darkness dissolved, leaving shadows like a residue by the roadside, on dense bushes and leaning trees. The soft brief light turned harsh and overbright within minutes and showed the littered road. Up ahead, near some frantic chickens and a tethered goat, was a low plank-built house at a bend in the road, its chimney smoking.

“Pit stop,” Hack said as Hernán slowed the van.

“Anyone hungry?” Nestor said. “Also there is a restroom.”

Beyond the house was a valley brimming with morning cloud, more spider web, some of it tangled, some of it close-knit and welcoming. Steadman walked over to the edge of the road and yawned and stretched. He turned, thinking that Ava had followed him, and saw Wood beside him in a blue jacket with full sleeves and a pair of warmup pants.

“This cloth is actually a kind of ceramic,” Wood said, stroking his sleeve. “While these Trespassing sweats are made from recycled plastic bottles. That's why they're so expensive.”

“Ten percent of the pretax profits go to environmental causes,” Steadman said, looking away.

“Tell me that's not deductible.”

Steadman smiled and listened to a birdcall that was a tumbling whistle, like a showoff sound of beautiful wooing.

Hack crept to Steadman's other side and he too looked into the valley.

“Hold your nose if you're using the crapper here, it's like the one in Cambodia,” Hack said. He was still sizing up the valley. He said, “Good friend of mine from Wharton got jacked here on the local juice.”

“Hack, check it out. Whole bunch of water over there.”

Nestor called out, saying that breakfast was ready. Behind Steadman on the path, Hack said, “But Cambodia was great. On that same trip we went surfing in the Andaman Islands.”

“Thailand's ruined,” Wood said. “Bali's a toilet.”

The women were seated at a table with Manfred, who was wearing headphones and had started eating before anyone else. He had a huge plateful of food—hunks of bread, deep-fried buns, gritty eggs, and wet boiled greens. Instead of sitting elbow to elbow with the others, Steadman stood, holding his plate with one hand and eating with the other. He marveled again at how Manfred seemed to have more than two arms, for the man was reaching and eating at the same time.

“Keebler. Like the biscuits,” Janey was saying into her phone. A selfconscious singsong whine entered her voice, especially when she was attempting a joke. It came again. “No. Pfister. The P is silent. Like the pee in bath.”

Janey began tapping her phone—she had lost the signal, she said. “You're eating that frightful tuck?” When Steadman did not reply she said, “It looks like something the cat sicked up.”

He listened to Hack telling Ava, “We work hard, we play hard,” and he wondered whether he should interrupt, to rescue her.

More coffee was brought and poured, and it was only now that Steadman noticed the people who were serving: small hurrying Indians, looking anxious as they moved among the visitors, smiling fearfully, in toothy terror-struck appreciation, whenever they made eye contact. Nestor gave one of the Indian men some money for the meal and said, “Now, let's boogie.”

They reboarded the van with the brittle politeness of people who dislike one another, the sort of brusque formality that verges on rudeness. “Excuse me.” “You are excused.” And, “May I trouble you for a tissue?” “You may indeed trouble me for a tissue.” And, “Thank you very much.” “You're welcome very much.”

“I am going to be terribly rude and put my cheesy feet up on the back of your seat,” Janey said to Manfred.

Misunderstanding her, Manfred tapped his headphones and widened his eyes and shouted, “Weber!
Die Freischutz!
"

Janey peered out the van window as they drew away from the building of rough planks where they had just eaten. She said, “Everything here is so retro.”

Planning the Ecuador trip with Ava, Steadman had imagined just the two of them with Nestor, negotiating the descent to the jungle from the plateau, Nestor confiding the secrets of the Oriente. Back then, this van and its occupants had been unthinkable. He had not counted on any intrusion, especially from tourists. And he had looked forward to being with Ava. He had wanted the journey to be singular, even risky. But it was over with Ava, they were not alone, and he felt disgusted and nauseated, resenting the other passengers, hating Hernan's driving, and with the sickly premonition that this was all a waste of time. He had wanted his Ecuadorian adventure to be the first stage in reclaiming his reputation as a writer, which he believed would be the making of him as a man. The drug tour that he had hoped would be unique, his own, was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

 

For a while, for too long, he dishonestly complained about his celebrity and his book sales—secretly, he had been delighted. But after that his complaints were sincere. He wanted to move on; he took any work that came his way. He was hired by magazines because he had established his name first with
Trespassing,
and the assignments he chose always involved travel. Ava loved to travel. For several years there was hardly any difference between his work and their vacations.

As the author of
Trespassing,
Steadman, a traveler, a writer, became known irrationally as a travel writer. He had been prevailed upon to take magazine assignments to write about cities and hotels and restaurants. In the beginning he could not believe his luck. “To travel writing,” he would toast, clinking glasses with Ava over a sumptuous meal—and the meal might be lobster agnolotti followed by osso buco on polenta with baby carciofi, in the restaurant at the Hotel Cipriani—the crenelated, ecclesiastical skyline of Venice across the Giudecca Canal, San Giorgio Maggiore just out the window.

His assignments had been so pleasurable that he did not need to be told by editors that the underlying assumption in all such magazine writing was that the pieces would be friendly and positive. Most of the time there were no expense forms to fill out. Magazines sent him on press trips. The hotel or tourist bureau provided the airfare and treated him to meals and drinks. He was given helicopter rides and expensive presents and sent home with a press kit from which he was expected to write his story.

At first he did well. He had enjoyed himself; he expressed his gratitude in lush description, repaid the hospitality with praise. But the novelty was dulled by repetition, the travel became more laborious—more like work, even the luxury seemed humdrum and superfluous—and instead of the places seeming interchangeable, they became distinct, joyless, hardly human, and often odious to him. There was something peculiarly rigid and unspontaneous in the glamour. All this he described in travel pieces that he believed were fluent and truthful and sometimes humorous.