Blinding Light

1

WISHING TO GO where you don’t belong is the condition of most people in the world” was the opening sentence of Trespassing. The man with that sentence in his head had turned and lifted his sleep mask to glance back at the passengers who were masked and sleeping in their seats on the glary one-class night flight. The blindfolded people were strapped down, slumped sideways on their safety straps, with tilted faces and gaping mouths, enclosed by the howl of monologuing jet engines. The man excited his imagination by seeing them as helpless captives or hostages, yet he knew better. Like him, they were tired travelers going south — maybe some of them on the same drug tour, but he hoped not. This man slipping back into his seat and readjusting his mask was Slade Steadman, the author of Trespassing.

“Travel book” was the usual inadequate way of describing this work, his only published book, but one that had made him famous, and later, for unexpected reasons, very wealthy. He was so famous he would hide himself, so wealthy he would never have to write another word for money. This account of one of the riskiest and most imaginative journeys of the modern era was an obvious stunt remembered as an epic.

The idea could not have been simpler, but his seeing it through to a successful conclusion was another matter; that he had survived to tell the whole story was his achievement. Steadman had traveled through Europe, Asia, and Africa, twenty-eight countries and fifty-odd border crossings, defying authority, for all of it — arrests, escapes, illegal entries, dangerous flights, near disasters, river fordings, sneaking over frontiers — had been accomplished without a passport. No papers, no visas, no credit cards, no ID at all. Covert Insertions— the military term for his mission — had been a working title, but squirming at its ambiguity, the publisher had discouraged Steadman from using it.

Not only had he been undocumented during his entire yearlong trip, alone, an alien, struggling against officialdom to keep alive and moving; he had not carried a bag. “If it doesn’t fit into my pocket I don’t need it,” he had written, and it was now as well known a line as the one about wishing to go where you don’t belong. Around the World Without a Passport was the subtitle of the book: the plight of a fugitive. It was the way he felt right now, twenty years later, restless in his aisle seat on the flight to Quito with the blindfolded passengers who were trying to sleep. For all of those twenty years he had tried to write a second book.

He had not been surprised to see the young woman snoring in the seat behind him with a recent edition of his book on her lap. Readers of Trespassing—and over the years there had been millions — often took trips like this, involving distance and a hint of risk. The book had inspired imitations — the journey as a stunt — though no other writer had matched him in his travel. Even Steadman himself, who now saw Trespassing as something of a fluke, had failed to follow it up with an equally good book — or any book — in the decades since publication. And that was another reason he was on this plane.

They were two hours into the flight, after a long unscheduled layover in Miami, but the delay had been eased for Steadman by his spotting the woman at his gate reading a copy of Trespassing. It was the edition with the TV series tie-in cover showing the handsome actor who played the twenty-nine-year-old illegal border-crosser. And of course the actor wore a leather jacket. At the time of publication much was made of the fact that Steadman had traveled without luggage, wearing only a leather jacket. He had not realized how this simple expedient of not carrying a bag had made him more of a hero. The bruised and scuffed jacket with its many pockets was part of his identity, but when it became a standard prop in the television show, Steadman stopped wearing a leather jacket.

Watching the woman read his book with rapt attention — she did not see him or even glance up — and liking her trance-like way of turning the pages, helped pass the time for Steadman. He felt self-conscious at the sight of this old success, but gratified that so many people still read the book, even the ones who were following the reruns of the TV series. He had wondered if the woman reading it would be among the passengers on this Ecuador flight, looking helpless and passive. And of course she was.

In the seat next to Steadman, his girlfriend, Ava Katsina, stirred in her sleep. Seeing her, too, blindfolded like a hostage, he felt a throb of lust. The blood whipping through his gut and his fingers and his eyes made him jittery with desire.

That was welcome. The sexual desire he had once described in starved paragraphs of solitude in Trespassing as akin to cannibal hunger was something he had not tasted for a long time. Ava, a medical doctor, had said, “Are you past it? Do you want me to write you a prescription?”

At fifty Steadman was sure he was not past it, but his years of struggling to attempt another book had afflicted him and visited impotence on him too many times for him to believe it was a coincidence. Virility, he thought, was not just an important trait in an imaginative person but was a powerful determiner of creativity. Women writers were no different: the best of them could be lavish lovers, as ramping and reckless as men — at least the ones he had known when he had been the same. But those days were gone.

This slackness was another reason he and Ava had decided to split up, and the decision had been made months ago. The trip they had planned as a couple could not be canceled, and so, rather than lose their deposit and forgo the tour, they were traveling together. What looked like commitment, the quiet couple sharing the elbow rest, sitting side by side on this long flight, was their following through on the promise, a favor more than a duty, with no expectation of pleasure. When the trip was over, their relationship was over. The trip itself was a gesture of finality — this flight was part of their farewell, something civilized to share before they parted. And here he was, wanting to eat her.

For years Steadman had felt well enough established as a writer to shun rather than seek publicity. Now, he did not in the least resemble the author of Trespassing. That reckless soul was falsely fixed in people’s minds as only a one-book author can be, a brooding one-dimensional pinup in a leather jacket. This man was his book, the narrator of that amazing journey. The book was all that was known. The mentions of him in the press — fewer as time passed, dwindling to a handful in recent years — described someone he no longer recognized.

Trespassing was still selling, its title a byword for adventure. He had paid his debts with his first profits and then began living well on the paperback rights. The big house up-island on Martha’s Vineyard he had bought with the movie money. The TV series that came later made him wealthy beyond any of his earlier dreams of success. But the author who went under his name was a public fiction, elaborated and improved upon by the movie and the TV shows. The TV host and traveler was now pictured on the book jacket, and that well-known actor was fixed in the public mind and more recognizable than Steadman himself, but possessing the traits Steadman had established in the book. He was elusive, a risk taker, unapproachable, inventive, uncompromising, a free spirit, highly educated, physically strong, something of a Boy Scout, demanding, enigmatic, sexual, full of surprises.

The handsome actor who was identified with the TV dramatization of Steadman’s book often made statements about travel, risk, and heroism — even about writing, with enormous confidence, even when Steadman could do almost no writing himself. As a stand-in for the reclusive Steadman, the actor was now and then employed as a motivational speaker, using the challenges of his television experiences making the show — most of it was filmed in Mexico — as his text. He did so portentously, in the tone of a seasoned traveler, as though he were responsible for the book. And Trespassing had spawned so many imitators it created a genre, inspiring a sort of travel of which this Ecuador trip was typical: a leap in the dark. Before Trespassing there had been travel of this kind but few persuasive books about it. Steadman had made it an accessible narrative, popularized it, given it drama. He had succeeded in making the world seem dangerous and difficult again, full of unpredictable people and narrow escapes, a debauch of experience, as in an earlier age of travel.

The merchandising that came later astonished him. Just the notion of it seemed weird, especially since he had not published any other book. A man he despised at the agency that had promoted it and sold it had said to him: “Don’t write anything else, or if you do, make it another Trespassing. Don’t you see what you’ve done? By not writing another book you’ve made yourself into a brand.”

After Steadman licensed the name, it was more than a name; it was a logo, a lifestyle, a clothing line that was expressly technical, a range of travel gear, of sunglasses and accessories — knives, pens, lighters. The leather jacket had been the first piece of merchandise, and as a signature item it was still selling. The luggage came later. The clothing changed from year to year. The newest line was watches (“timepieces—‘watches’ does not describe them”), some of them very expensive: chronometers for divers, certified for two hundred meters; a model with a built-in altimeter for pilots; many for hikers; one in gold and titanium. The licensed brand was Trespassing Overland Gear. The motto, a line from the book, was “Cross borders — don’t ask permission.”

How popular was all this? He knew a great deal from the revenue, which seemed to him vast and unspendable, but he often wondered what sort of people bought the stuff, because he so seldom went out and he avoided using any of it himself. Now he saw that the clothes on that woman behind him with his book on her lap were from the catalogue; and the man next to her, the others around her, all of them wore travel outfits bearing the TOG logo of a small striding figure in a signature leather jacket.

Merchandising and relicensing the name produced such a large and regular income that Steadman had long since stopped writing for money. He wanted only to produce another book worthy of his first one, but fiction — as brave an interior journey as Trespassing had been a global one. He had started writing the book, and spoke of it as work in progress, but for years he had regarded it privately as work in stoppage. What he published now, the occasional magazine articles and opinion pieces, were merely to remind the world that he was still alive, and this reminder was a way of promising another book.

Steadman liked to think he was in the middle of his career. But he knew that for an American writer there is no middle. You were a hot new author and then you were either an old hand or else forgotten. He was somewhere deep in the second half and wishing he were younger. Everything he had gladly done in the early part of his career he now avoided: the readings, the signings, the appearances, the visits to colleges and bookstores, the posed photographs and interviews, the favors to editors, the sideshows at book festivals — he refused them all and wanted the opposite, silence, obscurity, and remoteness. His refusals created the impression of snooty contempt; his brusque deflecting ironies were taken to be bad temper. Simply saying no, he was seen as grumpy, uncooperative, a snob. He did not want to convey to these strangers how desperate he was. Having all that merchandising money somehow made it worse.

Rather than agreeing to interviews and public appearances to correct the false impression that readers had of him, he withdrew even further; and in seclusion, without the envious mockery of journalists and profile writers, he began to suspect that he might have written better — that he could do better. He was hardly thirty when he wrote Trespassing. The book was full of hasty judgments, but why tidy it now? He was known as a travel writer, but he felt sure that fiction writing was his gift. Because so much of Trespassing had been fiction — embroidered incidents, improved-upon dialogue, outright invention — he knew he had a great novel in him. There was still time to finish the book that would prove this.

He had started writing it. Ava had praised it; they were lovers then, sharing their lives. In the course of their breakup she told him frankly that she hadn’t liked what he had read to her after all. The novel in progress was a reflection of him: selfish, suffocating, manipulative, pretentious, incomplete, and sexless.

“Writing is your dolly. You just sit around playing with it.”

This same woman, listening naked in their bed to him reading part of a chapter, had once said, “It’s genius, Slade.”

“You’re probably one of the few writers in America who can afford to treat writing as your dolly.”

He protested, ranting like a man in a cage. Instead of consoling him, Ava said, “You are such a fucking diva.” He was demoralized for the moment. He told himself he would be better when she was completely out of his life. He took work for magazines — his factual story-chasing journalism had always been resourceful and vivid, even shocking. He said, “I write it with my left hand.” The novel was what mattered to him. Yet what editor ever said, “Write us some fiction”? His struggle to continue his novel wrecked his relationship with Ava.

“You’re just selfish,” they both said.

When their love was gone, replaced by indifference and boredom, a new Ava was revealed — or, not a new Ava, but perhaps the essential woman: ambitious, sarcastic, resilient, demanding, predatory, sensual, much funnier and more resourceful than she had been as his lover. Her intelligence made these traits into weapons.

The delay in Miami proved her toughness. In the lounge, seated in the crossfire of intrusive questions and small talk, most of it from nearby passengers, expressing their impatience by gabbling, Steadman kept himself customarily stone-faced and silent, wearing the implacable mask he had fashioned for himself over the years of his withdrawal.

“On a tour?” one of the men said.

He was a big man, as bulky as his own Trespassing duffel bag, in his late thirties. His badly slouching posture made him seem slovenly and arrogant, and his anger gave him an overbearing and elbowing confidence. Steadman had noticed that he demanded more space than anyone else, an extra seat here in the lounge for his briefcase, his arms on both armrests, his bulgy duffel filling the overhead rack. Walking confidently on kicking feet toward the plane, he filled the jetway, pulling his valise on wheels that trapped people behind him, even his wife, who remained talking on a cell phone until the plane took off, and was on it again, urgently, saying, “I’ll send you all the bumf with a packet of swatches.”

Steadman took his time, and at last he said, “Are you?”

“For want of a better word,” the man said, and looked up, hearing his wife say, “Hack?”

A dark scruffy man, bug-eyed and with spiky hair, was arguing with a clerk at the check-in desk, saying in an insistent German accent, “But that is falsch. I am on the list — Manfred Steiger. I am American.”

Steadman thought: You went away to be alone — or, in his and Ava’s case, on a deliberate self-assigned mission — and you discovered your traveling companions to be the very people you were hoping to flee, the ones you most disliked. In this case, young overequipped couples — rich, handsome, heedless, privileged, undeserving, and profoundly lazy in a special selfish way — from this generation of small-minded entrepreneurial emperors. And most of them were dressed in his clothes.

“God, how I loathe these people,” Ava whispered to Steadman.

For one thing, they boasted of hating books and hardly read newspapers. Trespassing didn’t count, because it wasn’t new and was better known from movies and TV — Steadman was aware that some of the most obnoxious people seemed to love it for its lawlessness, its self-indulgent rule-breaking, and its tone of boisterous intrusion. I've only read one real book in my life — yours, such people wrote him. That alone was enough, but it was also an indication that you couldn’t tell them anything. They didn’t listen, they didn’t have to — they ran the whole world now. You turned me into a world traveler.

The thing was to shut them down as quickly as possible.

Steadman had learned that, in an interview, if you fell silent and watched and waited instead of answering, people volunteered more detail. In this instance another man, a bystander, offered the detail.

“It’s quote-unquote adventure travel,” that man said.

“Eco-porn,” Ava said. “Eco-chic. Voyeurism must be such a wet dream for you.”

That man winced, but the man named Hack said, “We’re traveling together. Didn’t you see our T-shirts?”

He unbuttoned his khaki safari shirt, revealing the lettering on his T-shirt: The Gang of Four.

“Until they finish the renovation on our house,” the second man was saying. “We’re reconfiguring the interior of a lovely old Victorian. We’ve got twelve thousand square feet. It’s on an acre in a lovely part of San Francisco. Sea Cliff? Robin Williams lives nearby, and so do Hack and Janey.”

“Marshall Hackler — call me Hack,” said the big slouching man, inviting a handshake with his carelessly thrust out arm.

And Janey was apparently the woman on the cell phone. She just flapped her fingers and turned away, but another woman who had been listening — she was pretty, bright-eyed, the one holding the paperback of Trespassing, in a bush vest and green trousers, dressed for a safari — smiled and said, “Ecuador. A year ago it was Rwanda. We were the last people in there before the Africans massacred the people on that tour. We had the same guide. He was almost killed. No one can go now. We were incredibly lucky.”

The woman speaking on the cell phone broke off and said, “We’re whole-hoggers. We want it all.”

“Janey’s doing the interior. But we’re reconfiguring the outside, too. Swales. Berms. I’ve got the footprint and the plans with me — still working out siting of the lap pool. Downstream we’ll be putting in a guesthouse and sort of meld it with the landscaping.”

Hack put his arm around the man and said, “This guy actually wrote a book.”

Dismissing this with a boastful smile, the man said, “For my sins,” then took a breath and added, “Anyway, I sold my company and got into hedge funds. This was — oh, gosh — before the NASDAQ tanked in — what? Last April?”

Steadman leaned toward him, saying nothing, smiling his obscure smile at the self-conscious “oh, gosh.”

“And I got in the high eight figures.”

Hack said, “So he said to me, ‘Let’s get jiggy wid it.’ ’Cause he’s an A-player. He’s a well-known author, too.”

At the mention of “high eight figures”—what was that, tens of millions, right? — Ava barked loudly, as though at an outrage, and the woman in the Trespassing vest glanced over her cell phone and said, “Do keep it down. I’m talking.”

“Wood worked for two solid years for that payday,” the other woman said, looking up from Steadman’s book.

His name was Wood?

Janey, Hack’s wife, was saying in a wiffling English accent into her cell phone, “It seems frightful. But in point of fact, single people spend a disproportionate amount of time in the loo. The laboratory, as you might say.”

Both couples were dressed alike, mostly in Trespassing clothes from the catalogue: trousers with zip-off legs that turned them into shorts, shirts with zip-off sleeves, reversible jackets, thick socks, hiking shoes, floppy hats, mesh-lined vests, and fanny packs at their waists.

Seeing them, Steadman wanted to say: I give away ten percent of my pretax profits from catalogue sales to environmental causes. How much do you contribute?

“This has something like seventeen pockets,” the woman with the book said, patting her vest, seeing that Ava was staring at it — but Ava was staring at the TOG logo. She slapped it some more. “These gussets are really useful. And check out this placket.”

And when Ava’s gaze drifted to the woman’s expensive watch — it was the Trespassing Mermaid — she said, “It’s a chronometer. Titanium. Certified for like a billion meters. That’s your vacuum-release valve,” and twisted it. “We dive — Janey doesn’t but she snorkels.” The woman on the phone turned away at the mention of her name and kept chewing on the phone. “We’re hoping to do some in the Galápagos.”

Steadman was so delighted to hear that they were going in the opposite direction he did not tell them that snorkeling there was strictly regulated, but encouraged her instead. The man he took to be her husband was going through the sectioned-off pockets of his own padded vest. He brought out a folded map and his boarding pass and a wallet that looked like a small parcel, with slots for air tickets, dollar bills, and pesos. The wallet, too, was a Trespassing accessory.

“What I love about American money is its tensile strength. It’s the high rag content. Leave a couple of bucks in a bathing suit and never mind. All you have to do is dry it out. It actually stands up to a washer-dryer.”

“You mean you can launder it?” Ava said.

Janey, the young woman with the English accent, said “Ta very mooch for now” and “By-yee” and snapped her phone off, and collapsing it, she turned it into a small dark cookie. The other woman reached into another expensive catalogue item, the Trespassing Gourmet Lunch Tote, a padded food satchel with a cooler compartment. She handed her husband a wrapped sandwich.

“We always bring our own,” Hack said, chewing between bites. “It’s smoked turkey with provolone and tomato and an herbed vinaigrette dressing.”

Noting that the man said “herbed,” Ava frowned and turned away, and the woman looked up from her book and offered Ava half a sandwich, saying that she had plenty. Ava’s tight smile meant “no thanks.” Tapping the cover of Trespassing, Hack put his arm around the woman and said, “That must be one hell of a read.”

The woman said, “It’s awesome.”

“Like how?”

“Like in its, um, modalities. In its, um, tropes.”

“You’ve been reading it for weeks and ignoring me.”

“I read real slow when I’m liking something.”

“So who wrote it?”

Steadman, who had been listening closely, braced himself, putting on his most implacable face.

The woman said, “This, like, you know, legendary has-been. The outdoor-gear freak. He’s more a lifestyle than a writer.” Then, “You guys married?”

Hearing “legendary has-been,” Ava shut her eyes and smiled in anger. As for the question, everything about it, too, was wrong. The “you,” the “guys,” the very word “married.”

“I’m Sabra Wilmutt,” the woman said.

“I’m Jonquil J. Christ.”

Sabra’s face looked suddenly slapped and lopsided. She said, “I don’t get it.”

“The J is for Jesus.”

As Ava spoke, the reboarding announcement was made.

What does it matter? Ava’s expression said to Steadman, who had heard it all. But Steadman had been attentive to the woman named Sabra, immersed in Trespassing. It was just this awful flight to get through, and after that they would never see any of them again.

2

AIRBORNE ONCE MORE, isolated and blindfolded, with the slipstream crackling at the airplane’s windows and fizzing along the fuselage, the passengers were at last silenced. Steadman reflected on what they had said. They were boasting, of course, but because most boasting was bluff and lies, really they had given very little away. He took them to be lawyers, even the one who had sold his company, because of their affectations. Lawyers never volunteered the truth, because the truth was debatable, and this was why they could hold two opposing views in their head, and seemed capable of believing both, as they tossed out challenges and suppositions, speaking in irrelevancies calculated to throw you off. The merchandising of Trespassing was a wilderness of lawyers waving contracts. Challenge them with a tough question and they handed you a sandwich.

But he said to Ava, “What was that all about?” for the way she had called attention to herself among those strangers. Steadman had described in Trespassing how it was always a fatal mistake in travel to be conspicuous. The greatest travelers made themselves invisible. An invisible man was a man of power.

Ava just shrugged, pretending he was worked up over nothing. Yet she knew she was motivated by their breakup. Underlying her sarcasm was the suspicion that if the people found out that she was with Steadman the famous writer, he would have to take the blame for her behavior: her insolence was his insolence. Breaking up had liberated Ava and made her reckless and indifferent to his worry, helped her see what a baby he was—“and writing is your dolly.” She couldn’t play with it, couldn’t even touch it. He fussed with it in his room. And as time had passed the dolly had become more special, first a toy, then a fetish object, then a totem, and finally an idol that represented something approaching a deity. “Fucking writers,” Ava had begun saying.

Steadman had carefully not asked the other people any questions for fear they would ask him the same things. He was on this trip for a reason, his own assignment, and he wanted it to be secret. He had covertly been taking notes, and he was still taking them. The meal trays had been cleared and he had just written the word máscara.

The lovely, dark-eyed, plump-lipped woman, looking like a prison guard in her black uniform, was the flight attendant. Brisk and busy, she murmured, “Mascara, mascara moving down the aisle, handing out blindfolds. Each passenger accepted one awkwardly {as though they had been handed a condom, he noted, which in a sense they had) and with varying reactions: bewilderment, suspicion, surprise, amusement, embarrassment. None had looked grateful, yet each had put the blindfold on.

Turning to size up the masked passengers, Steadman had taken a good look at the Trespassing Treads — the hiking shoes — and the Trespassing cargo pants and multipocket vests and the Trespassing daypack at Hack’s feet. The woman named Sabra was reading Trespassing— or, rather, not reading it, since the thick thing lay spread open, turned over on her lap.

Just behind them was Manfred, the man who had announced in a heavy German accent that he was an American. He pulled the mask over his eyes and ratcheted his seat back and slept. He was wearing black Mephisto hiking shoes and a black hat and black leather vest. In their blindfolding they seemed to Steadman like participants in a solemn ceremony, some of them novices, some old hands. That did not make the blindfolds any less bizarre, yet it was somehow appropriate to this night flight to Ecuador, all of them gringos, more or less unprepared — willing and innocent and irrationally confident, flying blind.

Passing the blindfold to Ava, Steadman had noticed her trying to suppress a smile. She had not smiled for weeks, especially not that sort, a coquettish curl of the lips, with so much understood in it. When she put the blindfold on she was still smiling, looking helpless and eager, her mouth kissing air, like an amorous wink with her lips that suggested she knew she was being watched. Steadman touched her hand, and she snagged his fingers and squeezed. At that point Steadman put his own mask over his eyes.

He thought about the stopover, the delay, how the people who talk the most, using those cliches, pretending to be inarticulate, were often the reverse, and trying to hide something.

How much they had told him: the SUV, the house, the sale of the business, the shoes, the biking, the knife, the travel, the gear that he knew only too well — all of it could be summed up in one word, money. They meant it when they called themselves A-players, and were serious only in their jokes.

His desire as a writer, as a man, was to know them, to see into them, behind their masks. To translate what they said. To know them on the most fundamental level. But he knew enough now to dismiss them and go the other way, to use what he had found.

“You’re a pornographer,” Ava had said to him recently, to irritate him, another truthful piece of abuse from their breakup.

Yes, he thought, the truest expression of our being is our passionate engagement in the act of sex. To know that was to know almost everything, that we are most ourselves in sex, our most monkey-like, our most human, so why shouldn’t he be fascinated? He realized this now because it was over with them, until last night no sex for months, only her hideous efficiency and angry humor and her long days and nights at the hospital.

Shifting in her seat, seeming to wake, Ava sighed. Steadman hated it when she talked to strangers. Once it had been he doing it, and he had thrived. But that ended, and now he listened to her. Her talk bored him, made him anxious; she never knew when to stop. Neither of them hid their annoyance. But what did it matter? This was their last trip. They had planned it for months, and the very planning of it, as the most ambitious holiday they had ever had, put such a strain on them, all the negotiation that collapsed into nagging and quarreling, that they realized how unsuited they were to each other.

They were certain now that they would split up, and this realization calmed them and released them from their struggle. Recognizing that they had reached a conclusion more final than a truce, they had the dull serenity and silent patience of a couple who know they have no future. It was better to see each other as a stranger than as an enemy, and in this slipping away they lost much of their history — the false, insincere part that had been their meaningless romance. They were tougher, not sentimental, hard to convince. No favors: with none of the frivolous generosity of lovers, they were, oddly, now equals. But more circumspect, less knowable, than when they had first met.

So this trip was practical. Though the planning had been full of conflict and taken so long, they went ahead with it. They had to take the trip or they would lose their deposit and forfeit the plane tickets. Ava said, “You actually care about the money?” The money was a pretext for the mission: he hoped the trip would lead him to his book.

Holding the blindfold, he said, “This thing cost two grand.”

She said, “It’s probably worth it.”

To travel in separate rows, to pretend not to know each other, would have been ridiculous — they had discussed these strategies. They still needed each other, needed most of all to be let down gently, to part without drama. They still liked being together, even if they were no longer in love. The finality — the peculiarity of nothingness, no hope, no future — affected their sex life, gave it a vicious push. The night before they left they made love as though they were strangers, meeting by chance, emboldened by their anonymity to be selfish, even brutal, seeming to use each other. But the rough grappling in the dark room surprised and delighted them, afterward leaving them gasping, sprawling naked on the carpet, looking beaten and broken, as though they had fallen to the floor from a great height.

“I liked that,” Ava had said. She knew that Steadman had too. It had reminded her of the first time, the blind recklessness of it, when they had just met and knew only each other’s first name. “That was nice.”

Ava had not been put off by the coldness of it, Steadman’s apparent indifference to her, his concentrating on his pleasure. He probably had not noticed that she was using him, that only her pleasure mattered to her. And it proved that they were finished, it was over, she could say anything to him now, even tell him she didn’t like what he was writing. They were strangers again in the dark room. She slipped her hand between his thighs and touched him and told him she wanted him again. She shocked him, she aroused him with her demand, her saying, “And if you can’t get it up, what good are you?”

Afterward she had said in a teasing, greedy way, “Maybe we’ll meet other people on the trip.”

Blindfolded, he remembered everything.

Two hours into the second leg of the flight, and even taking into account the delay in Miami, the only people they had met were the talkative travelers who called themselves the Gang of Four, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts: big, loud Marshall Hackler — Hack — his English wife, Janey, the overly tidy reader, Sabra, and her husband, the competitor named Wood. The dark, bug-eyed German, Manfred Steiger, had hovered, wanting to enter the conversation, squinting, grinning, showing his teeth in a what’s-going-on? face.

Here was the odd thing. Steadman felt he had met another person, too, and what fascinated him was that it was Ava, someone he thought he knew well, the woman he had once believed he would marry. She was someone else, someone new, a woman he both feared and desired. It was not just her lovemaking, her selfish sensualism that turned him into a voyeur, like a man watching a woman masturbate — that was how it seemed, and he had liked it. There was her frankness, too, her telling him his work was pretentious, her air of independence, and a toughness that made her seem strong. Most of all, her dealing with the other travelers, snapping “eco-porn” and “Jonquil J. Christ” and any other insulting thing that came into her head. He wondered if the fact that she was a doctor, used to giving reassurance and help, made it all the more thrilling for her to abuse these people.

Under his blindfold Steadman fell asleep, and the vibration of the plane, the engine howl, his damp palms on the armrests, and the smell of the dinner trays and dusty carpet and reheated food — it all entered his dream. He toppled and, still toppling, realized that he had lost his balance in an anatomical landscape. The valleys were the creases in a woman’s body, and that discovery woke him. The plane was bright and stank of warm plastic and it was dawn, the just-risen sun blazing on the left side of the plane. Coffee was being served.

“Ever been to Ecuador?” he heard. It was the man named Wood, blowing on his coffee, speaking across the aisle.

Ava said, “Hey, that sounds like an invitation.”

That was another aspect of the new Ava — her teasing, her mockery, the way she deflected questions like a child, like a coquette, being impossible and domineering, as though these people were trying to woo her.

“It’s where this aircraft is going,” the man said, maintaining his composure.

“Right. We’re getting off at the next stop.”

“How long are you guys going to be there?”

That “guys” again, and it seemed to Steadman that the man was preparing to ask what they were planning to do there, and Steadman hoped that Ava would resist answering the question.

She pleased him by saying, “That’s kind of up in the air. How about you guys?”

“Three weeks. We’ve got a full program.” He was boasting again. He said, “I bet everyone on this plane has to be back at work next Monday.”

That was worth a note — that all these young well-off Americans were heading to Ecuador as though it were a holiday in Maine. They were probably on a tour of some kind, one of those expensive ones where someone else did all the arranging. Except for the Ecuadorians and a few missionaries and some obvious businessmen in wilted suits, most of the passengers looked like weary and apprehensive tourists. Steadman was glad that he was headed for Lago Agrio and Rio Aguarico and the darkest, most distant downriver village in the Oriente. As Ava had said, they would never run into these people again.

“Wood Wilmutt,” the man said, introducing himself. “You here on business?”

Ava said, “No.”

“Pleasure then?”

“Probably not.”

“What else is there?”

“A wet dream,” Ava said.

The man’s eyes went sharp and serious as his mouth became small. “A leap in the dark,” she went on, and Steadman wanted to hug her for quoting him. It was something he had thought, but he had studiously said nothing. He did not want to disclose that he was a writer on assignment. That kind of revelation always provoked questions and cast a shadow over a conversation, made some people inquisitive and bumptious, and others wary. At the very least it turned most people, including the writer on assignment, into bores.

“So you’re on vacation,” Ava said.

“If you will,” Wood said, and Steadman made a note.

“And you’re retired.”

“For want of a better word,” Wood said, and Steadman made another note.

“Meaning?”

“I said I sold my company, I didn’t say I’d retired,” Wood said. “I’ve been pretty lucky. Anyway, Sabra’s still got her dental practice.”

Steadman wondered whether Ava would divulge the fact that she was a doctor, and he thought she might, less for information than as a doctor upstaging a dentist; but she said nothing.

“ Was tun Sie, Fritz?" Sabra said.

“Ich bin Schriftsteller Manfred said. His eyes were dancing in anger. “Aber mein Name istManfred, nicht Fritz, danke. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Kind of. I mean, I speak Yiddish.”

“You are wrong if you think Yiddish is German. Yiddish is meaning Jewish,” Manfred said. Then he spoke to the others. “Schriftsteller— writer.”

“My husband wrote a book,” Sabra said.

But Manfred was still talking. “My family is dealing in medical supplies, but I said no to the business. You are knowing Steiger Medical Fabrik?”

“Drugs?” Wood asked.

“Some. But rare varieties. Also uniforms. Glassware. Sterilizing appliances. Disinfecting agents. Rubber goods. Tubing. Syringes.” He leaned forward. “Government contracts. We make good business.”

“U.S. government?”

“German government.”

That killed the conversation — and sigh-ringes had the others exchanging glances — until Manfred remembered something. He knelt down and pulled a thick book from his carry-on bag. He showed it to the passengers in nearby seats. It was A Guide to the Medicinal Plants of Upper Amazonia.

“I am writing some things,” he said, and the others smiled at sum sings. His face tightened, as though he knew he was being silently mocked. He said, “Yah, I do journalism, but I am looking into psychotropic substances, too.” He put his face near Sabra’s and said, “Ich bin Forscher und Wissenschaftler. Verstehen Sie?”

Ava had been playing with her blindfold. She put it back on and smiled, as if reentering a familiar and hospitable room.

Steadman watched her for a while, enjoying the animation on her face, the shape of her lips, her shallow breathing. But he was thinking that he had not told anyone his name or where he was from or that he was a writer. And he was happy in his own anonymity. What people knew of you diminished you, robbed you of your strength. You were never stronger than when they were in the dark. Because of his reticence, Ava had taken charge. As a writer, nothing pleased Steadman more than holding a conversation in which the other person told him everything and he responded giving nothing away.

The seat belt light came on. The plane skimmed across the tufts of a pillowy layer of clouds. The pilot announced that they would be landing in Quito soon and gave a weather report and the temperature.

Still wearing her blindfold, Ava leaned over and whispered, “I’m glad I’m not your girlfriend anymore.”

3

ON THE WAY into the cloud-dampened and sloping city, with its chilly, hard-to-breathe air, sitting next to Ava in the taxi, under overcast skies and the slope of the rubbly volcano Pichincha which was strewn with precariously sited huts, Steadman was thinking how this would be the last trip he’d ever take with her. The particular thought was not a sentence or phrase in his mind, not words at all, but rather a specific image, the sight of her nearest knee, pale from always being covered by her surgical smock, looking pinched and plaintive, as dimpled as a new potato, and representing a mute farewell.

That ambiguous little knee made Ava seem again like a stranger, enigmatic and yet unpromising. She had withdrawn from him, she was less helpful, a bit too brisk, and at times she seemed bored — not hostile but indifferent — casting her gaze beyond him when she looked in his direction. She was like the people on the plane, who had brushed past him at the baggage claim area and were now dispersing — Hack and Janey, Wood and Sabra, the hurrying Manfred, who scuttled, bent over, spider-like, as though on extra legs, reaching as he moved. And all the others whom he imagined to be bird watchers, trekkers, and ecotourists in their Trespassing gear, colorful fuzzy jackets and hats and thick socks, wearing the most expensive sunglasses and wristwatches in the catalogue. Manfred had carried his thick Medicinal Plants book and studied it, making notes in the margins. He wore a black jacket and at his waist a soiled misshapen fanny pack. Sabra wore a small and neatly zipped TOG pouch. He’d had a glimpse of their luggage — slightly bruised Trespassing duffels and chubby leather satchels chafed at the edges and the best bags from the Trespassing line. Ava was now like one of these people, and Steadman was just a man who happened to be sleeping in her room.

This distant failing country and the strangers and the thin gritty air made their separation more emphatic. They looked lost here, they were alien to each other, and the foreign place represented their estrangement. He had heard of couples taking a long joyless trip, sometimes as a formality, in order to end a love affair or signify and seal an ending. Steadman understood that effort now. Some brutal landscapes, some lovely jungles, threw relationships into stark relief. You might go away with someone in order to make an announcement, and it might be a farewell. The far-off place was neutral ground. Steadman and Ava managed to be civil to each other, but they were through, it was over, and the other people probably sensed it. Then the others were gone, as though dissolved in the Ecuadorian air. “Good riddance,” she said, and he knew she was talking about the others.

From the taxi window, filmed with dust and finger smears, Quito was both more orderly and more ramshackle than Steadman had expected. It depended where you looked. Off the fairly new main drag were side streets lined with hovels. Yet in the distance the hovels seemed substantial, and in the foreground the newer buildings were rundown and the gutters littered.

Steadman inclined his head and thought, In the Third World you smile at the strangeness, then you look closely and see ruin and misery, or that something is badly broken, or that woman is ill, that child is an old man. From the lovely veranda you saw mangy dogs and a man pissing against a wall — a wall on which someone had scribbled an angry slogan in Spanish, bracketed by exclamation marks, ¡FUERA GRINGOS INVASORES! From the loveliest window you saw filthy-faced children huddled in doorways. The bottom of the heap was not far from the top, and all of it was home, turned upside down and stinking.

“Mi casa, por acá. My ’ouse down there,” the taxi driver said, smiling as a street flashed past, and in that brief glimpse Steadman could see it was shallow and ruinous.

“Where is Nestor?” Steadman asked, since the driver had voluntarily spoken in English.

“Veesy. He see you later.” His breath was moist with chocolate and tobacco. The man’s pungent breath had a greater reality than his words.

“He didn’t leave a message?”

“Yes. That is the message.”

Though he was simple, even crude, the driver’s succinct directness in basic English made him seem intelligent.

Steadman turned to Ava. He had felt slightly nauseated and lightheaded since the customs delay at the airport. A headache made of raw nerves tightened beneath his skull. He said, “The air’s so thin.”

“What did you expect at ten thousand feet?”

He expected something else. The high-altitude air was chilly, dusty with grit, and a dampness caught in his throat and scratched his eyes, like the furry air in a house of cats.

Searching the side streets for the grimmer sights, for it seemed that truth lay at the very margins of this ride, he saw a procession, girls and women in white smocks and black veils, boys and men carrying a tottering holy figure on a litter, shoulder-high.

“Is a fiesta,” the driver said, sucking candy, his tongue gummy. He was small, in a tight sweater of pilled dusty wool. Though the sky was overcast he wore sunglasses. “Is coming Todos los Santos. And Día de Difuntos. How you say fiesta in English?”

“Fiesta.” Steadman was staring at some masked children ahead.

“Halloween,” Ava said. “They celebrate it here.”

At the stoplight, the children approached wearing Halloween masks — cat masks, witches’ hats. Their clothes were clean, they had good teeth. Steadman had expected urchins. He rolled down the taxi window and offered a dollar to one of the masked children.

“Por su máscara’’ Steadman said, lifting the mask with one hand and handing over the dollar with the other. The black satin cat mask was trimmed with black lace and seemed like an obscure intimate garment, like a cache-sexe.

Hearing the driver’s empty squawk of mirth, Steadman reflected that in places like this, demoralized and humiliated countries, someone’s laughter seldom meant that something was funny. The driver had been disturbed, perhaps insulted, by Steadman’s boldness — the dollar, the swap, the snatch. He winced and squawked again when Steadman put on the cat mask.

“That sort of scares me,” Ava said, sounding stern. He knew that severe tone: she meant what she said. He took the mask off.

The hotel was the Colon. Ava said she had imagined it to be smaller and simpler, but checking in, Steadman reminded her that it was supposed to be only one night.

“Still no message from Nestor.”

“Why do they all have names like that?” Ava said.

“He was recommended. Supposed to be an ethnobotanist.”

“A nice name for ‘drug man.’”

“You found him.”

Their corner room faced a large park out one window, and out the other was the long steep side of the volcano. A cloud was flattened and raveling on the volcano’s peak, and its slopes were dotted with houses. Steadman felt that up close they were hovels, but at this distance, in dim early morning, their lights still twinkling, they represented to his ignorant eyes the magic of a new place.

Ava had pulled off her T-shirt and was searching her bag for something. Her skin was luminous and blue in the gray daylight. Across the room, Steadman saw her as a strange woman who had materialized here, silent, careless, half naked, paying no attention to him. He was fascinated by her indifference, her naked breasts, the impersonal room, the sight of the huts out the window. It was as if he did not know her, that he just happened to find himself in this room with an attractive preoccupied woman. He watched her take off the rest of her clothes: her slacks first, which she folded; her panties, which she slid down with two thumbs and stepped out of, tossing them with one toe. She was headed for the bathroom, preparing for a shower.

Moving quickly toward her, Steadman touched her waist, just grazing her skin with his fingertips, as though stroking and steadying a cat, and then slipped the cat mask over her face, all the while staying behind her. She hardly reacted, except to straighten the fastening cord. He liked that; he could tell she was cooperating. And the mask and her willingness and this strange room in Ecuador aroused him more than love had ever done. Love had made him gentle, and love’s querulous concern killed his desire.

This way she seemed his equal, a match for him, a black mask on her white body. He held her. He could not kiss her lips while she was masked, and that tantalized him the more — she seemed to like his frustration. Her mask dared him. She went to the bed and knelt, holding her hand between her legs while he watched, and then she opened her legs and, splaying her fingers, parted the dewy gills of her pinkness, and all the while her mask was impassive.

Watching her, Steadman roughly pushed off his clothes and was on her, slipping inside her, frantic. She murmured softly from beneath her mask, but when he leaned over and attempted to kiss the satin lips of the mask she moved her head away and arched her back, lifting her chin to expose her throat and the tightened cords of her neck. She seemed to exist in some blind private rapture of her own reckless anonymity.

Even when he was finished and on his back, blind himself and gasping, she did not take the mask off. She lay there beside him, so distant she could have been in another country, drawing the droplets through the hair between her legs, making this slickness seem like another mask, her parted legs showing at her vulva the image of a tarantula. And when she turned toward him, still masked and enigmatic, he thought that not she but he was the whore.

Over breakfast afterward — and it was Ava who remarked that it was still unbelievably only nine-thirty that same morning — they said nothing about what had just happened. The sudden wordless episode, the snatched sex in the room, seemed as remote as the long disruptive flight, the annoying passengers, the unhelpful taxi driver, the fiesta and its masks and costumes.

All that Ava said was “It’s a real city. I was expecting something desperate. These places that people are always leaving to become maids and janitors in the States, I imagine them to be awful. But no, the places look fine. It’s the people’s lives that are awful.”

All that Steadman said was “That bastard Nestor told us he’d leave a message.”

But he said it casually and without rancor, for the sex had calmed him, had eased his mind and pleasantly wearied him and made him accepting.

They went for a walk to Old Town, down the main street that led from the hotel. On the way, seeing a hat shop, Steadman impulsively went in and tried some on.

“All from Montecristi. The best ones. Is the Optimo estyle,” the saleswoman said, offering others. “We call these thee Natural. Look, thee weebing. So many months it takes to weeb one. You like?”

Steadman bought himself a Panama with a wide brim, and left the shop wearing it, walking self-consciously because of the hat. They saw more Todos los Santos processions, looking like Halloween kids, one small girl wearing the same mask — black satin trimmed with black lace — that Ava had worn when naked, making love. Steadman could not help attaching sexuality to the masked people, even the skinny-legged girls, whom he saw as teasing, even provocative.

As they approached the narrower roads of Old Town, the sky lowered and contracted with dark clouds. A rumble of thunder brought a torrent of rain. They ducked under a flat-roofed shelter at a bus stop and watched as hailstones, bright white and as round as mothballs, clattered onto the soaked cobbles of the road.

Then the rain eased. They resumed walking and were obstructed on the sidewalk by a small pretty Indian child, red-cheeked in the cold. No more than three or four years old, she sat in the middle of the wet sidewalk holding a plastic cup — and could not possibly have known what she was doing, though this was likely to be her life’s work. An old woman across the road, probably Granny, eyed the little girl while begging herself, with two other children. There were ragged children all over Old Town, selling candy and bunches of flowers and combs and matches, assisting at stalls selling fruit, sweeping with clumsy-looking bunches of twigs that served as brooms. Medieval in its crude simplicity and desperation, this scene was repeated on other narrow streets, and some children carrying heavy loads in their tiny hands seemed like dwarf laborers in a cruel folktale.

At the edge of a large plaza, Steadman saw an elderly priest walking just ahead of an Indian man. The Indian, in a blue smock and bowl haircut, with a round face and bandy legs, looked like a big simple-minded child, except that he was doggedly carrying a bag on his shoulder, and the lovely leather bag could only have belonged to the priest. The Indian belonged to the priest, too. He had been domesticated and made to submit. Steadman looked at the clean hem of the priest’s white cassock and his shiny shoes, at the Indian’s stained smock and cracked sandals. The upright priest, the bent-over Indian: in their progress across the old paving stones of the plaza they seemed to represent the history of South America, if not the history of the world.

To Steadman all religious people looked like savages. Some of them were timid and innocent, most of them were arrogant, menacing in being so credulous and assured — the apes of an imaginary god, tyrannical simpletons who had invented that god and used the god’s denunciations as weapons in their tyranny.

Among all these churches, Steadman reflected that he had no religious belief. The sight of believers aroused his pity but could also make him angry or sad, depending on the circumstances. Often he felt resentment that his skepticism could still shock people. His undogmatic sense of the spiritual was limited to preserving forests, nesting places for birds, shade for animals, roots keeping water pure. The symbol of his belief was a tree, and he had spoken in Trespassing of how many times he had been hidden and saved by the forests at frontiers and border crossings.

He could not bear the glibness of religious people. God spoke to them; they talked back. “God’s testing me.” God arranged everything. It was so easy for them to love life or have hope; they were taking directions from God. Yet how did a person like himself, with no faith, learn to love life? Perhaps by fearing its loss. Going away, as he was doing now — it was another message of Trespassing — was one way of seizing control of your life.

In a meaningless world he had devised ways to give his life meaning. Sensuality was meaningful; desire and the act of creation gave him purpose. The trip he had embarked on now in Ecuador was an expression of hope and, though he hated the word, his quest.

At the church entrances were Indian women, some with bags, others carrying babies — impossible to say whether they were selling something or just begging, but they were rooted there, looking immovable in their importuning. A blind woman whined at him, “No sea malito/” and superstitiously he pressed some money into her hand, making her smile. Black men hollered in Spanish, selling lottery tickets and newspapers. Stylish warmly dressed women slipped out of chauffeur-driven cars and hurried into shops. None of these people looked as though they were affected by the altitude. Steadman and Ava, exchanging an exhausted glance, were breathless and suffocated.

Pausing to rest, for even their plodding pace wore them out, they saw two people from the plane, Wood and Sabra. Wood nodded brusquely and seemed to mutter something to his wife, as if finding this chance meeting just as awkward as they did, for hadn’t Ava promised “We’ll never see them again”? Husband and wife were wearing new Panama hats.

“Janey’s been robbed — her bag ripped right off her arm,” Wood said. That was his greeting, as though he planned to deflect any pleasantries by introducing a note of drama — the theft. “All her credit cards. Her passport. Quite a lot of money. And she’s been in the country — what? Three hours?”

“Maybe that’s some kind of record,” Ava said.

“It was a beggar, a blind woman!”

“Robbed by a ciega. That’s a neat trick.”

“Where was her husband?” Steadman could not remember the husband’s name, and he did not want to say the wrong one because he recalled that the name was ridiculous.

“Hack was actually looking for her,” Sabra said.

As though reproaching Ava for her callousness, Wood said, “Anyway, all her medicine was in the bag, as well as her valuables.”

“I’ll write her una nueva prescripción,” Ava said.

Sabra said, “You speak Spanish.”

“Obstetrical Spanish. Abra sus piernas, por favor,” and she smiled at the woman’s confusion.

She knew she was being offensive — she intended it. She did not like bumping into these people. She had not come all this way to chitchat with tourists. She seemed to enjoy the fact that the big bossy interior decorator with the English accent and the cell phone had been mugged. Not harmed, just taught a useful lesson. Meeting these other travelers from the flight was a shock, though. They had never thought they would see them again, and here they were, two of them on their first excursion from their hotel room.

“You got a hat, too,” Wood said, tugging the brim of his own. “This is at least a grand back in the States. Maybe two grand.”

They parted as clumsily as they had met and, heading for a church shown on the small map in their guidebook, Steadman and Ava took a wrong turn and entered a plaza, which was set up as a market area. Three more passengers from the plane, nameless gringos in newly bought Ecuadorian garb, Indian-made sweaters, one wearing a crisp-brimmed Panama hat like the one he had just bought, were haggling over trinkets at a stall. The sight of these people drove them from the market, and yet they saw others from the plane in the museum and in the Indian market and in the narrow streets of Old Town.

What was the point in coming this distance if all you achieved was that disgusting flight and the company of these timid adventurers? Steadman felt he had so far accomplished nothing. They were stepping over beggars, entering the church of La Merced, their original destination — lots of Todos los Santos activity here, in the shape of reverential women carrying lighted candles or slender flaming tapers.

The large soot-darkened paintings in La Merced depicted soldiers in armor and settlers in flowerpot hats, the history of the country from the Spanish point of view, unintentionally showing plunder and bamboozling priests and grateful baffled Indians. In one painting a blind priest was being led by a young boy acolyte, Jesus smiling down from the heavens. The text under it read:

A los ciegos tit siempre iluminaste,

Testigo el sacerdote que curaste.

“‘You always illuminate the blind — witness the priest who’s cured,’” Ava said, translating. “But it rhymes in the original.”

The tall gold altar was as high as the church ceiling, with tiers of twisted columns, all thick pasty gilt and dazzling gems. A gigantic fatuity, this jewel box, looming among ragged people, some of them prostrate, others on their knees.

“But I had a strange encounter this morning at the hotel,” Ava said. She kept walking, did not look back, slipped into a pew at the side of the church.

Steadman followed her. He sat and listened to her describe how she had taken her clothes off and a man had come from behind and slipped a mask over her face; how he had made love to her; how it had happened in silence — she told Steadman in an even voice, as though confiding to a stranger.

“You liked it,” he said.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said.

He wanted her again, and seeing a masked woman pass up the aisle and drop to her knees, a supplicant at a side chapel, only aroused him more.

The masked woman was praying, her words remorseful and audible: “Perdona nuestras ofensas como también perdonamos a los que nos ofenden — no nos dejes caer en la tentación…”

“Tell me,” he said, his tongue thick with desire.

“All this way.” She spoke in a whispering mystified voice that trailed off. They were near enough to the chapel to feel the heat from the rack of small candles, a hundred flames lighting the jewel-crusted crucifix on the gilded altarpiece. “And all that expense,” she said. “We’re in these mountains, among all this gold and these cross-eyed Indians, and at best we are blindfolded.”

“So what?”

“Did we have to come to Ecuador to find that out?”

“Obviously,” he said.

“That’s not why we came.”

“I forget why we came.”

They left the church and walked some more in the noisy clammy city. They came to a market and hoped to find handicrafts but saw only old-fashioned women’s underwear, piles of men’s shoes, stacks of brown trousers, folded blankets, and Chinese-made cooking pots. All this ordinariness in front of an ancient scribbled-on wall: ¡FUERA GRINGOS! Near the sign was a café, where they were greeted by a cheery woman who welcomed them, Ava saying “Huevos” Steadman felt sick before he had eaten much of his omelet. Ava said the beer she had drunk to quench her thirst made her feel dizzy. Was it the thin air? Steadman asked the waiter to take the beer away.

Throughout the morning walk in Quito he had felt they were getting on well, like an old married couple, but here — at rest, at the café table, dazed by the altitude and the indigestion it seemed to cause — Steadman realized that perhaps this apparent congeniality and easy company was the result of their decision to separate. Once they had said it was over, they had nothing to argue about — they had no future. They could be friends again.

Still, they sat at the café not speaking, not touching. The conversation in the church hung over them, the nagging echoey weight of unanswered phrases.

Rain came again, first like blown grit, then like pebbles tapping and softening in the gusting wind until the sound was more like a lash. Darkened by the weather, they were isolated and lost any desire to see more of the city. Steadman paid the bill and they caught a taxi that was parked near the bus terminal.

When they got in, the taxi driver was effusive, wearing a colorful scarf and a dangly earring. He spoke a sentence that Steadman could not comprehend.

“He says the rain is good luck,” Ava said. “He’s so pleased we are here. He has a friend in New York. Male friend, of course.”

Steadman thought how rainstorms made strange cities familiar, exaggerated and simplified their contours. Yet here the rain did not drain away but puddled and flooded and held up traffic. This sudden downpour enclosed them, blurred the city, gave it a look of homely exoticism, made them need each other again. Now it was just the two of them. The sun might have separated them, but the bad weather brought them close.

Steadman said, “I’m starting to worry about this trip. If I don’t hook up with this guy Nestor I’m screwed. I’m depending on him to get me into the jungle. He’s supposed to be an ethnobotanist. If he doesn’t show, there’s no story.”

Ava sat back in the taxi, drawing away from him, and said, “Oh, so you’re a writer.”

At first Steadman almost laughed and said, What are you saying? Of course I am! But he hesitated, because she was blank-faced, waiting for an answer while the taxi splashed through the flooded gutters, sending up gouts of water. That was the other thing about rain in such a country. It came down mud-colored.

Steadman said, “Yes, I am. And what do you do?”

“I’m a doctor.” She smiled as only a stranger smiles at another stranger, holding the expression in check and yet hopeful.

The taxi driver took an interest. He said, “Quisiera mostrarles cosas fantásticas.”

“He wants to show us some amazing things.”

Steadman whispered, “He’s a sodomite.”

Ava smiled again. She said, “Like me.”

“What’s your name?”

She said, “I’ll tell you upstairs.”

The taxi’s seats were covered in torn leather. Hanks of straw showed through, and the pungency of the straw and the leather stirred him as much as her teasing words.

In the hotel lobby, Ava said, “I’m in three-one-oh-two. Give me a few minutes.” She did not touch him. She turned and was gone.

Steadman liked this change of mood and the way she had given him this information, telling him what he already knew — so brisk and businesslike, as though she were an accomplished sneak, having rehearsed it many times. But he thought, That’s what fantasies are — fantasies are rehearsals.

Liking the taste of the delay, he gave her more time than she had asked for and then went upstairs. She answered the door wearing a hotel robe, but slipped it off when he entered. She was naked. Steadman locked and bolted the door, and when he turned to Ava again she was blindfolded — the sleep mask from the plane — and held another blindfold in her hand.

“Wait.” Steadman was kicking his shoes off, stripping off his shirt. She knew what he was doing. She said, “I don’t care what you wear, as long as you wear this,” and handed him the other blindfold.

In the stumbling game that followed, Ava slipped away from him and then called to him from across the room. Fearful of hurting himself, Steadman got down on all fours and crept toward the sound of her voice, though she went on teasing him. Over here, she said. No, over here. Until he cornered her and took hold of her and kissed her and pressed his face against her softness, sensing her vividly as an odor and a warmth in the darkness of his blindfold. As they kissed, this darkness lifted and became smoldering light. But the act itself came much later, for they struggled, choking in a hallucination of desire, teasing, delaying, relenting, beginning again, two strangers becoming acquaintances, uttering the desperate half-laugh of lust.

The act was not about possessing her but about letting go, each of them doing so in the most private way, as though practicing this release. And they took turns, each one both a suggestion and a dare, as if in using only their lips and their tongues they were saying with mute eloquence, This is what I want.

Later, Steadman was the first to wake, but taking off his blindfold made little difference, for night had fallen. He saw a slash of meager brightness, the dim lights of the city through the curtain. Ava lay asleep, still blindfolded, sprawled between two chairs, embracing herself for warmth. She looked tossed there, her lips parted, her tongue showing, like a cat that has been hit by a car.

He too was lying naked on the floor. There was also a crack of corridor light showing in the threshold, enough light so that Steadman saw that a folded paper, probably a note, had been thrust under the door.

4

BEING WOKEN before dawn was like an intimation of sickness, a set of symptoms: the tremulous fragility of early morning in the high distant city, sniffing the thin, sharpened air in the dim fluorescence of the uncertain light, the rank dust, the muffled voices and humming stillness, his clamped head and crusted eyes. He was reminded that he had said something like this in Trespassing about this very place.

Steadman hated early starts, and downstairs he was jarred by Nestor’s heartiness.

“Ready to rumble?”

When people like this knew American catch phrases, Steadman suspected them of trying to hustle him. Why else would a stranger take such trouble to ingratiate himself? Besides, their knowing such inanities proved that they had habitually associated with shallow boisterous Americans and knew no better.

Ava, used to a doctor’s emergencies, was already up and dressed and lucid.

Nestor was a big confident man, no more than forty, with a beaky face and a mustache and deep-set dark eyes. He wore a heavy leather jacket, which Steadman remarked on. Nestor instantly seemed to know what Steadman was intimating and said, “You won’t need it where we are going.”

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.

The pieces were not received well. One editor said, “You don’t seem to have had a very good time. All you talk about is the bad driving and the dangerous roads.”

Steadman was not discouraged. He quoted his line in Trespassing — Travel at its most enlightening is not about having a good time— and continued to go on press trips. But when they received his pieces the editors said, “This needs a little work,” or “This wasn’t exactly what we wanted,” and would explain in vague, insulting terms how he ought to rewrite the piece—“Tweak it,” they said — to make it publishable.

Steadman endured a terrible time on a press trip to Trinidad. The place was crime-ridden and dirty. It was noisy. Steadman hated the music. The Trinidadians he met were rapacious. He used the words “risible” and “jungly” and “sweaty” and “cacophonous,” and all of them were crossed out by a subeditor. So was the word “stink.” He had looked into the island’s racial politics. The piece was rejected. “It was supposed to be for our ‘Island in the Sun’ slot. You didn’t even mention the raw bar at the Intercontinental.”

Steadman sent the editor a signed copy of Trespassing.

Sour or carping pieces were instantly rejected, irony was discouraged for its ambiguity, humor was unwelcome for its belittling, satire for its subversion, and any mention of ugliness or ruin was forbidden. In all such writing a note of fawning gratitude was mingled with submissive bonhomie. The theme of each excursion was pleasure: How lucky I am to be in this lovely place, eating this delicious meal, and you will love it too!

“It isn’t travel. It isn’t even writing,” Steadman said. “This is advertising copy. I am expected to be an adjunct to the public relations industry.” The magazines demanded pretty pictures and gusto and undiluted praise, in order to encourage advertisers and build income. It was how they prospered.

Real travel was risky, uncertain, difficult, and not very comfortable. What these magazines called travel were in fact beach holidays. For the upscale magazines it was the fake sophistication of gourmandising or the indolence of a luxury cruise — self-indulgent, undemanding, pleasurable, lots of sunshine, swimming, moonlight. Steadman had been hired because he was a real writer with a reputation, the author of a travel classic; but he realized that as an open-minded and wealthy traveler he was feared by the hosts, whose pretensions he would ridicule, and disliked by the magazines, which felt he would drive away advertisers. It took almost two years for Steadman to understand that he had no future in this business. He returned to struggling with his novel: work in stoppage.

And later, with the reading of Burroughs’s Yage Letters, he yearned to take a trip to Ecuador — to visit a shaman; to experiment with yaje, which was also known as ayahuasca, “vine of the soul”; to revisit the drug that Burroughs had praised in his obscure book; to rediscover a true story and perhaps find the inspiration to go on with his novel. He needed fuel. He read the other recommended books — the ethnobotanical work of Richard Schultes and the more mystical Reichel-Dolmatoff. The drug literature was respectful, more about spirit and ritual and cultural roots than about thrills. But all the botanists mentioned the risks.

He had not guessed that this, too, had become part of the tourist industry, but now he knew that the people in the van, on this trip — Sabra, Wood, Hack, Janey, and Manfred — were like the people who were looking for the perfect mai tai on Maui, or the best snorkeling spot on the Great Barrier Reef, or the greatest nude beach on St. Barts. He knew now that they had trekked to see gorillas and gone bird watching in Botswana, been to Cambodia and Bhutan and Thailand, across the Patagonian pampas, down the Zambezi, up the Sepik. “I’ve got a Bontoc head ax. There’s drops of blood on it.” Scuba diving off Palau, they had been surrounded by sharks. Easter Island. The Andamans. Gauchos. Mudmen. Ifugao. Pygmies. Sea Dayaks. “Headhunters.”

“India sucked except for the Ayurvedic massage in Kerala.”

Trophies, all of them. And this — the trip to Oriente, the visit to a shaman in a jungle village, the search for a true ayahuasquero and the trance-drink itself — was another trophy for these romantic voyeurists.

“What are you planning to do here?” Ava had asked the others at breakfast.

“Same thing as you guys.”

What Steadman believed he had elaborately devised as an original trip, using obscure anthropological texts and the works of ethnobotanists — a trip he hoped would help make his reputation as a traveler in search of enlightenment — had become nothing more than the highest-priced package vacation, a drug tour. Without her having said a word, he knew that Ava was also dismayed by the presence of the others on the tour. What he had hoped would be an adventure seemed no more than a school outing.

Yet he was determined to see it through. The trip had just begun; the others might panic and bail out. It happened — luxury cruise ship passengers got seasick, a woman on a press trip in Mexico was raped in her hotel room, and on the Trinidad junket a male travel writer from New York handed a woman travel writer from Seattle an envelope full of clumsy Polaroids he had shot of himself, nude, in a full-length mirror. And then the man had threatened her when she said she would turn them over to the police. Drama was still possible on this trip, but Steadman doubted that it would serve him. At times, being with Ava in this state of detachment was like being alone, for she had insisted on being a stranger, and that was an unexpected help to him, even a thrill, for her pretense and her manner of seduction.

He hoped the trip might result in a book, and perhaps he could make it one, part of the novel he had planned, an in-search-of book, exaggerating the dangers, profiling the people, attributing the sexual experiences he had already unexpectedly enjoyed, masked and blindfolded in the Quito hotel, to someone else, who perhaps he could say had bared his soul to him — or, coming completely clean, using his relationship with Ava. This travel-book-as-fiction would include food, drugs, sex, exotic landscapes, remoteness — snowcapped peaks rising above the green heat; the jungle in the shadow of Cotopaxi; romantic failure, disillusionment, disappointment; a breakup book, more about trespassing than Trespassing had been.

All this he reflected on during the long silent trip to Papallacta. The only words that had been spoken since breakfast were Manfred’s “Weber! Die Freischutz!” Everyone but Steadman and Manfred had fallen asleep.

Just before Papallacta the van wobbled and swerved: a flat tire. They had no jack and had to flag down a car for help. The hour it took to fix it, and then get the spare repatched, put them behind. Lunch was late — just peeled fruit and warm beer in a parking lot near the hot springs at Papallacta.

“Aguas calientesNestor said.

Steadman watched Hernán approach a tall bush in bloom at the edge of the parking lot, just outside a low wall. He smiled and stroked the large white flowers.

“You know this tree?” Nestor asked.

Ava said, “It’s pretty.”

“Maybe you call it angel’s trumpet?” Nestor said.

“I don’t call it anything.”

“We call it toé. There are many kinds. Brugmansia. Some we have down the river,” he said, and tapped his head. “They are nice.”

“And you know that because you’re an ethnobotanist?”

“I am a vegetalista,” Nestor said. “I am not a toéro, but I know this toé”

Steadman said, “It opens your eyes, is that it?”

“Luz,” Nestor said with slushy sibilance, and goggled at him with a comic stare, then winced in exaggeration. “Is a light. Open eyes, close them, give you eyes like a yana puma — a tigre’,' he added, and spoke rapidly to Hernán, who laughed.

Ava hated it when people like this shared a secret in another language while laughing in her face. She believed they intended her to feel insecure and out of her depth, and she was insulted.

Insistently, she said, “What did you just say to him?”

“I speak in Quechua. You don’t speak Quechua? I say, ‘Toé—nino amaru’ It is the fire boa.”

Manfred fingered the leaves of the bush and said, “This is Datura Brugmansia. Is a separate genus now. A strong hallucinogen. Maybe containing the entheogen maikua. You call this borrachero?”

“Some people do.”

“Is a solanaceous genus,” Manfred said, hobbling his plant book, clawing at the tissuey pages with his sticky fingers.

Steadman was listening closely, fascinated by Manfred’s dirty fingernails and his erudition; but Ava had turned away. “Why did we stop here?” she asked.

“Lunch. Then baños. Use the hot springs, then we go,” Nestor said.

The hot springs’ enclosure lay on a hillside, where there were terraces and stone steps, a shed that served as a changing room, and a shelter where an old leathery-faced woman in braids dispensed clean towels. The succession of pools set into the slope were linked by troughs and sluices down which steaming water ran. The pools at the top, near the source of the hot springs, were very hot — bubbling, perhaps boiling — and all of them were empty. Steadman put his hand into one and scalded his fingers. The larger, lukewarm pools were just below, surrounded by reeds, the water tumbling into them over a moss-covered spillway.

By the time Steadman and Ava had changed, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts were already sitting in the largest pool, up to their chins in the water, their heads wreathed in vapor.

“Plenty of room for you guys,” Wood said.

“Ain’t half hot!” Janey called out.

Steadman and Ava stepped into the steaming water and slipped down, seating themselves on the stone shelf, until only their heads were visible in the vapor. Four other heads watched them from the far side of the pool. A sulfurous odor hung in the mist over the bubbly gray water.

“Where’s our German friend and his big book?” Hack said.

Janey cursed her phone and tapped the keypad irritably.

“I was promised roaming here.”

Steadman noticed that a copy of Trespassing— it had to have been Sabra’s, she carried it everywhere — lay on the wall next to the pool.

“How sweet it is,” Wood said, thrashing like a child.

“The man of leisure,” Hack said.

“I wish,” Wood said. “I want to do another book.”

“You’re really a writer?” Ava said. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was so surprised by “I want to do another book,” it slipped out. She became self-conscious. “You mentioned your company?”

“One of my companies.”

“He buys companies,” Hack said.

“Writer, book packager, pretty much the same thing.”

Steadman just stared at the man who was stirring the tip of his stubbly chin in the steaming water.

“The Heights of Fame— that’s mine,” Wood said. “One of mine.” “Full disclosure, the only one,” Hack said.

“One of those is all you need,” Wood said.

Ava smiled in surprise, for she had actually heard of the book — was it a book? Ava remembered it as a chart. She wondered if perhaps someone had given them a copy as a present — for a long time it was a gift item. It was regarded as a publishing phenomenon, widely publicized, reprinted many times, and unexpectedly and hugely profitable.

Wood said, “It was a great idea, but the worst part for me was its simplicity. So everyone copied it.”

The idea had occurred to him, he said, while he had been reading a biography of Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s height was given as just five feet.

“I had thought of Conrad as a giant — bearded, broad-shouldered, a big Polack sea captain. He was tiny!”

Wood read more biographies, he said, looking for the one fact. Diminutive writers seemed to be the rule. Alexander Pope had been four six; Lawrence Durrell gave his height as five four, but in fact he was just a little over five feet tall. Wood searched further. Keats had been five feet tall, Balzac five one, T. E. Lawrence five five — the same height as Marilyn Monroe. Dylan Thomas was five six, Thoreau five seven, and Robert Louis Stevenson five ten.

Wood said, “Melville was a munchkin! Henry James was a dwarf! Faulkner was a peewee! Melville was just over five feet. You think of him as a powerful whaler, wielding a harpoon, but no, he was a borderline midget, like most other writers.”

Ava said, “Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a midget.”

“He’s on the chart. He was six four.”

Now she remembered: a foldout chart was included in the book. It was in the form of an enhanced tape measure, giving the name and height of each writer mentioned. This was to be tacked to a wall, and there was room on the elongated chart for you to write your own names on it. So your mother might be as tall as Conrad, your child the size of Alexander Pope, your basketball-playing nephew the physical equal of Thomas Wolfe.

“Graham Greene and George Orwell were both way over six feet,” Wood said.

“Listen, want to hear something totally awesome?” Hack said to the others. Then he spoke to Wood in the tone of a quizmaster: “Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Five eight,” Wood said.

“Marquis de Sade?”

“Five three.”

Ava said, “William Burroughs.”

“Five foot eleven and a half.”

“Just your size,” Ava said to Steadman, and Steadman smiled, for she knew that it was Burroughs’s book that had started him thinking about this journey.

“Ever read The Yage Letters?” Ava asked Wood.

“Never heard of it. Who wrote it?”

“A man who came here once,” Ava said.

As she spoke, Nestor appeared. He said, “He didn’t come here. He was in Colombia, on the Putumayo. But it was still Amazonia and the quest was the same. Not a tour, though. Now we go.”

Emerging from the steaming pool, they were chilled by the late-afternoon air and felt tired and stewed from sitting in the hot water. Drying themselves, they saw Manfred at the top of the slope. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as though dropping from an invisible line, like a pendulous insect. He was entirely naked and unembarrassed, thrashing himself with a loose towel, pink-fleshed from the scalding water, the hair on his head spiky and damp, his penis slack and swinging as he descended from stone to stone. He was wearing earphones and carrying a Walkman in one hand and had a small spray of flowers pinched in the fingers of his free hand, and he was smiling.

“Is a bromeliad!”—shouting because of the earphones.

Nestor said, “Next stop, Lago Agrio.”

“How many kilometers until Lago Agrio?”

“I will tell you later,” Nestor said.

“How many kilometers until ‘later’?” Hack demanded.

5

THE FIRST INDICATION that they were nearing the town of Lago Agrio was a succession of signs, most of them lettered Prohibido el Paso, some of them showing a grinning stenciled skull, like a Halloween mask, and the single forbidding word Peligro.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Wood asked in the darkness of the van.

“Calavera,” Hernán said. “Eskell.”

It was after midnight when they entered the empty streets, lurid in the glare of small orangy light bulbs, traveling first on a bumpy road and then the uneven pavement of the main street, flanked by the same ocherous shadows. All the shops were shuttered and dark. Only a handful of shadow-faced people lurked by pillars in the arcades, where some open fires were glowing, cut off oil drums serving as braziers. Ava and Steadman were first off the bus, and even in the semidarkness, smelling dampness, ant-chewed wood, moistened dirt, dog shit, rusty pipes, and the smutty smoke from the braziers, they sensed the town was ugly — not old but hastily built, a kind of blight in the jungle, a sudden wasteland of dead trees, a slum smelling of blackened pots and stale bread and frying and decay. Another stink in the air was subtly toxic, the sour-creamy tang of fuel oil.

“It’s sensationally scruffy,” Janey said in a tone of gloating satisfaction. Then she yawned. “Promise you will tuck me in, darling? I am so knackered.”

Off the main road, down an alley, within a narrow courtyard that looked fortified by its high walls, the Hotel Colombiana lay in darkness. Hernán backed the van into the courtyard, stopping and starting.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to park the van on the street?” Sabra said.

“Then the van would not be here tomorrow,” Nestor said. “We are less than twenty miles from the Colombia border. You know the FARC? Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia? They will take the van. They will take you.”

As he spoke, he worked, catching the bags that Hernán passed to him and stacking them beside the van.

“You mean kidnap?” Sabra said.

“They are too busy for that. They outsource the kidnapping,” Nestor said, and looked smug using the word “outsource” as he labored with the bags.

“So who does it?”

“Children kidnap you and then sell you to the FARC or anyone who will continue the ransom procedure.”

“Charming,” Janey said.

“What kind of kids would do that?” Hack asked.

“Hungry kids, with guns,” Nestor said, and headed for the hotel office. “I will give you room keys.”

The others complained about the hotel and were so aggrieved by Nestor’s warnings that Steadman and Ava made a point of praising the place. They drank gin-and-lime in their hotel room, hearing distant voices, screeching women, roaring men.

While Ava sat facing the window and the wall of the hotel garden, which was fragrant with night-blooming jasmine, Steadman walked behind her and put a blindfold over her eyes.

They went on drinking, Steadman carefully filling Ava’s glass, but she said, “It’s not working.”

Steadman said nothing. Perhaps she was tired. Was the whole blindfold business a self-deceiving gimmick, or was it a step too far? He resisted giving it a name. Surely such intensity could not be blunted after one day. Steadman put tonight’s failure down to the fact that they had spent all that time together in the van. Being so close for so long, elbow to elbow, had tired him and killed his desire. Hers too, it seemed.

They felt awkward climbing into the same bed, clinging briefly though not kissing. And then they were asleep.

They were woken at seven — the jangling phone, Nestor summoning them to the café at the front of the hotel, where coffee, fruit, and bread were being set out on a table by Hernán. The others yawned and muttered, sounding irritated and weary. The morning was already hot enough to melt the butter in its sticky dish, and the humidity glowed on the faces of the travelers. The low hideous town was loud with traffic and scurrying people and hawkers, with new and sharper stinks and monotonous music.

“Anyone get kidnapped last night?” Hack said, peeling a banana.

“Hack, you are awful,” Janey said, smiling in encouragement.

Nestor said, “Something stranger than that, my friends. Near here is the San Miguel Bridge to Colombia, at La Punta, the frontier. They call it Farafan. Early this morning, some people going across the bridge in their cars were stopped by the FARC soldiers at gunpoint. The soldiers gave them a choice. ‘Set your car on fire or we will shoot you.’ Twenty-two cars were burned on the bridge. Just here.”

“That was this morning?” Sabra said, sounding terrified.

“It’s okay, Beetle,” Wood said, and hugged his wife. With angry emphasis, he said to Nestor, “What is the point of that?”

Nestor said, “Maybe they don’t want people using the bridge, or maybe it’s a protest against the hit squads here. Or maybe you should ask Tiro Fijo.”

“Who’s that?”

Hernán said, “‘Sure Shot,’ the big man of the FARC.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Sabra said. She was squeezing her copy of Trespassing in anxious fingers.

“I think he’s just winding us up,” Janey said. “All I see in this grotty little town are nig-nogs in market stalls trying to sell us wickerwork.”

Wood said, “Are we going to be leaving here in a timely fashion?” “After we go shopping. We need food for the jungle,” Nestor said. “There’s not much gringo food down the river. Ah, here is the estranjero.”

Manfred appeared, walking into the café from the direction of the Hotel Colombiana passageway.

The others, expecting someone new, looked up with disappointment. Manfred was in jungle gear, which made him seem darker and more predatory, his shirt tucked in and sweat-stained, his thick thighs tight in his trousers. He looked hot and uncomfortable, bug-eyed and blinking, his mouth open, breathing hard as he smiled and muttered at the rest of the people. He then seemed to take possession of the table, snatching at fruit, twisting bread in his fingers.

“You hear about the kidnappings?” Wood asked.

Manfred said, “Of course. Everybody knows. They enjoy kidnapping the oil people. This was all rain forest until the oil companies came. Texaco and Occidental cleared it. Now it’s drugs, putas, gun sellers, and oil pipelines. High toxicity. Criminals. You blame the people here for hating gringos?”

“So what are you doing here then?”

Manfred became serious and said, “I am on a quest, like you.”

“We’re not on a fucking quest,” Hack said.

“No need for effing and blinding,” Janey said.

As a way of indicating that she was not interested in this abrasive back-and-forth, and loud enough for everyone to hear, in the manner of an announcement, Ava said to Steadman, “Let’s look around town, shall we?” She glanced at Janey and added, “I want to see those nig-nogs and the wickerwork.”

“Meet back here at noon,” Nestor said. “Hernán will go with you. If you get lost, ask for the Colombiana.”

“I’m staying right here,” Sabra said. She opened Trespassing and lifted it to her face, as though to keep the world away.

Hernán led Ava and Steadman down a side street, explaining the stalls, some selling tapes and CDs — the music blaring — and others selling sneakers and sports jerseys and cheap clothes. Beyond the stalls were small shops, bars, and garages. The curio shops were stocked with blowguns of various lengths and darts, bows and iron-tipped arrows, crude knives, beaded belts, and woven baskets. Lining the walls were medicinal herbs in fat dusty burlap sacks.

“You want something special?” Hernán asked Steadman, and winked at a man in a curio shop.

The man took a long soot-blackened blowgun and inserted a dart into its tube and with bulging cheeks ostentatiously blew the dart into the ceiling of the shop. Then he led them past the sacks and more blowguns, behind a partition, saying “ Tigre, tigre” and showed them a jaguar pelt and a jaguar skull with sharp gleaming teeth. The man spoke eagerly to Hernán.

“He will give you a good price.”

Tigre!

Steadman looked at the empty eye sockets of the jaguar skull. The thing had long fangs among its sharp teeth, but the hollows where its eyes had been made it the pathetic parched shell of a small blind monster. On the table were dishes of animal teeth, feathers, quills, and patches of fur. He picked up an even smaller skull, the size of a baseball.

“Look, a little baby,” Steadman said.

“Baby monkey,” Ava said.

Seeing Steadman’s interest, the man pressed the small skull into Steadman’s hand and said, “Mono. Ees mankee. En peligro de extinción!” He flashed his fingers at him, saying “Cinco”

“Who kills these animals?” Steadman asked.

“Hungry people,” Hernán said. “Them too. En peligro de extinción también

In a glossy box, propped on hatpins, was a large, hairy-legged, popeyed spider.

“Tarántula!” the man said. He handed the box to Steadman.

Holding it up, Steadman looked hard at it. The creature that had seemed a horror in its box was, up close, a figure of sorrow. He marveled at its symmetry, its long jointed legs, its shiny bristles. But for all its complexity it was just another empty shell, like the animal skulls, a black thing crucified on the pins.

“Take. Cómprala/”

“I want a live one,” Steadman said.

“A live one will kill you,” Hernán said.

Now the shop owner was holding a dead bat, and he shook it in Steadman’s face, calling out prices as Steadman backed away toward the door.

Outside, at the sidewalk table of a café, a teenage girl in a tight skirt and frilly blouse sipped a drink. When Steadman glanced at her, she stared at him and smiled, following him with her eyes. Steadman smiled back and greeted her.

“I think you’ve just made a friend,” Ava said. “Chingada”

“So funny to hear a woman say this word,” Hernán said.

“What word do you say?”

“We say chingada. We say puta. We say”—he giggled— “tiradora. Culeadora. We say araña. We say many things.”

“Lots of words for them.”

“Because lots of them in Lago Agrio,” Hernán said. “Personas aprovechadas”

“I heard some clicking up and down the street last night,” Ava said.

“Day and night,” Hernán said. “The ones on the street are old and — how you say— muy fea? Agli. Most are at the burdeles"

“What time do the burdeles open?” Steadman asked.

“Los prostíbulos están siempre abiertos"

Steadman glanced at his watch. “It’s nine in the morning. The whorehouses are open now?”

Hernán shrugged, and casually reaching toward the busy street and making a gesture with his fingers, he stepped back as a taxi drew to the curb. He said nothing more to them. Taking charge, he opened the rear door, and after Ava and Steadman got inside, he slid into the front seat. He muttered a word to the driver, “Pantera,” and they were off.

Within minutes they were going slowly on a bumpy back road, the tires thumping large loose rocks. It was more like a dry creekbed than a road, and as it narrowed it steepened. They climbed a low hill, where at its brow they were struck by the hard glare of the morning sun, and passed a neighborhood of shacks and dogs and snotty-faced children. Descending the hill, their taxi had to stop to let a large foul-smelling truck go by.

“Cargo of meat,” Hernán said, and looking back they saw carcasses and sides of beef swinging from hooks in the ceiling of the blood-splashed interior, and clouds of flies following.

More shacks, more children, and a short distance beyond this little slum the car stopped before a yellow-walled building. It was solid, made of cement, one story, with a big black cat crudely drawn on the wall and a painted sign: La Pantera.

Hernán led them through the door, toward the music, which was loud and Latin with a pulsing beat of drums. The sound of syncopation filled the large room but competed with other sounds, low animal wails of complaint, an agonizing mooing. The strange, seemingly empty room was the size and shape of a dance hall, with a high ceiling, which was the tin roof of the building. The wide floor was like that in a dance hall, but no one was dancing. Only the music and that horrible mooing filled it. The middle, which could have been the dance floor, was littered with tipped-over chairs and some empty tables and made of cement — a boy was slapping at it with a dirty mop and dragging a bucket.

At first glance the place made no sense — a big hollow noisy space, the music, the animal howl, the clutter, the boy with the mop. Looking harder, Steadman saw activity at the margins, groups of men seated in chairs drinking beer from bottles, scraps of bright color that were the costumes of women, some standing, some seated, at the doorways — a door every six feet or so, around the entire perimeter of the dance floor. Of the fifty or so doors, there were women at most of the thresholds. The women wore bathing suits, most of them were smoking cigarettes, and they seemed demure, patient, passive, and vaguely attentive, as though waiting for a bus that was overdue.

Most of the women sat alone, but near two or three of them were clusters of men. The men sat talking together, their elbows on the tables. Steadman saw that the men were old and tough-looking, and in each case the woman nearby was hardly a woman but rather a girl, sixteen at most, looking watchful.

“Hola” Ava said to one of the young girls, walking past the men. The men pretended not to be interested in or shocked by the tall lighthaired woman and the man in the Panama hat behind her approaching the slender prostitute, who stood up like a schoolgirl, showing politeness.

“Cuál es su nombre?”

“Soy Carmen. Mi apodo es Mosca’’

She seemed shy and was so soft-voiced Ava could not understand her.

“ Vive usted aquí?”

“No. Vivo en Lago Agrio”

“De dónde es usted?” Ava asked.

“Guayaquil,” the girl whispered, and entered the cubicle.

Ava followed her inside, and Steadman joined them, and there was so little room in the cubicle that the girl sat on the edge of the bed, which was just a mattress covered with a stained sheet, the two visitors towering over her, their elbows against the walls.

“Cuánto vale esto?” Steadman said.

The girl clasped her hands. She looked so awkward in her bathing suit and thick-soled shoes. She said softly, “Dos personas juntas?”

“You’re scaring her,” Ava said, and as she spoke she heard the men outside hoarsely conjecturing.

“I’m just wondering,” he said.

The girl said, “Por mí, normal — solamente normal aquí. Cinco dólares. Pero, número trece, número catorce” —and she gestured to the wall, meaning the cubicles that way— “por allí” —and she became vague, and hesitated. She shrugged. “Otras cosas”

But Ava had been right: Steadman saw a look of fear on the girl’s face, something in the way her mouth was drawn sideways, a brightness in her eyes that was terror. He wanted to leave and he wanted to calm her. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill and motioned to Ava to leave.

The men gaped as Ava and Steadman left, and one of them — the oldest, the drunkest, grizzled and wearing a baseball hat — swaggered to the door, and before the young girl could step out he squeezed her face in his dirty hand and pushed her inside. She sat down on the bed and wrung her hands as the man kicked the door shut.

Hernán had hung back as Ava and Steadman went forward, passing the other groups of men, the single seated women, and toward the far end of the row of cubicles, all of which were numbered — a cot and a mirror and a small cluttered table were visible through each door. The women here were older, potbellied, with slack breasts, pathetic, even ridiculous in bathing suits. They did not look depraved, they looked sullen and badly fed. The music rang against the tin roof and this end of the brothel had a bad smell.

The old black woman in the last cubicle wore a tutu and high-heeled shoes and a pink turban and sunglasses. As they approached, her phlegmatic expression became alert and attentive. She frowned when Steadman met her gaze, but realizing that her head did not follow him, he motioned silently, an onward gesture with his hand. Just then, the racket of harsh wailing beyond the window became shrill, like an animal fighting confinement.

“Number fourteen,” Ava said. “Other things.”

The staring woman in the pink turban heard her and said, “Soy Araña!’

They kept walking past her, past the partition to the window, where that agonized wailing was louder. Steadman looked down and saw a gutter running crimson, bubbling where it was slowed, frothing over the sides, into the dust — a stream of blood outside thickening the soil, losing its redness, making the mud blacker.

Through one of the grimy and blood-smeared windows of the large building just behind the brothel, Steadman saw a blindfolded cow being electrocuted, howling and collapsing on twisted legs as the electrodes of a black clamp were fixed to its head, the cow shitting in fear, expelling great dark muffins of dung. Another window showed a scene of butchery, two men hacking at a bloody animal carcass on a stone slab, and other windows gave onto sides of meat on hooks, men skinning cows, tearing carpets of hairy hide from fatty flesh, knives and cleavers flashing.

“Is the abattoir,” Hernán said, laughing at the absurdity of a slaughterhouse next to the whorehouse, the smells and noises mingled. “You want to see Las Flores. Is another burdel, but not so nice.”

Some people began to dance on the floor that was still wet from the boy’s mopping. But Ava and Steadman could not hear the music anymore, only the sounds of cows being slaughtered and the hacking of cleavers on slabs, the chucking sound of steel blades against thick bone and raw meat. Ava and Steadman backed away.

In the distance they saw Manfred in a stained T-shirt and sweat-plastered hair, watching them. He was carrying his beat-up bag, the weight of the big book showing in it. He turned and walked quickly past one of the girls, into her cubicle. She placed her cigarette in an ashtray beside her chair and followed him.

The black woman who called herself Araña was still sitting outside her cubicle. She cocked her head; her sullen look left her. She stood up and mocked them and, doing a little dance, spun slowly, wagging her bum at them, plucking at her buttocks.

“Buenos días. Que desean?” she said. And then, spittle forming on her lips, she said, “Sodomita” making the word like the name of a delicacy. She leaned toward them, but they had taken a few steps, so her head was canted wrong: her sunglasses faced in the direction of the slaughterhouse, where they had lingered and talked.

Ava said softly, “She’s blind.”

Araña beckoned. She opened her toothless mouth and stuck out her tongue and wagged the long pink thing at them. Then she laughed hard, louder than the dying animals. And she clutched herself and repeated the word: “Sodomita”

“Lo siento” Steadman said to her, and Ava murmured to Hernán, “No comprendo lo que dice.”

Araña laughed and Hernán translated her shout: “‘But why? Because you’re not interested in this culeadora?'”

She went on shouting, and when Steadman nodded, Hernán continued to translate, but slowly, softly, with reluctance, as Steadman stared at the woman. She removed her dark glasses. Her eyes were pitted and scarred, with welts like burn tissue, a pair of wounds.

“What is reflejo?” Ava asked.

But Hernán was trying to catch up with the woman’s shouts. “‘You are not looking at me, you’re looking at yourself,”’ he said. “‘Don’t be so proud. I am you! Your reflection!”’ She plucked at her flesh, her breasts, did a little dance, and she laughed again, sticking out her pink tongue. “‘Take a good look. I am your mirror. You are me — the same. You are Araña.’”

Sensing that Steadman and Ava had turned, that Hernán was following them, still talking as they walked away, the woman pursed her lips and spat at them.

“Fak yo!”

“I got that,” Ava said.

On the way out they heard metal chairs clatter to the cement floor and saw some men fighting, two big men hauling the arms of the grizzled man who had swaggered into the young girl’s cubicle earlier. The old man shouted and kicked at the bouncers as they dragged him outside. When that noise died down they heard another shouting match: Manfred arguing with a man and one of the prostitutes, as though haggling over the price.

Hernán went over to Manfred and spoke to him. The German shrugged and, seeing Ava and Steadman, spoke to them.

“They try to cheat me. I want to leave. I want to go into the chungle.”

Hernán tapped his watch. “ Vámonos.”

Over lunch at the café, Nestor said, “We eat, then we go.”

“Any pork in this?” Sabra asked, using her fork to indicate the sausage in her soup bowl, but not touching the meat with the tines.

Wood said, “Porco?”

“Puerco. Cerdo. Sí, all pork,” Nestor said. With a wink he added, “And a little bit perro”

Sabra peeled a hard-boiled egg, prying pieces of the shell with her long nails.

The rest of them ate impatiently, hardly speaking, but self-conscious in the silence, Janey said, “Oh, super. Elevenses.”

Manfred reached for the dish of hard-boiled eggs and slipped three into his jacket pocket.

“I wonder if we get afters,” Janey said. “Any pud? What about biscuits?”

Reaching again, Manfred began to tug at a covered dish, and when he got it nearer he lifted the lid with one dirty finger and exposed a bright crust.

“Crikey. There is pudding!”

“Llapingachos’’ Nestor said. “Pancakes.”

“And a cuppa char would go down an absolute treat.”

“Special Ecuador coffee,” Nestor said.

“Look, Hack,” Janey said as the coffee was served. “Just a manky little packet of instant.”

Then they were all in the van again, with the boxes of food and stacks of luggage blocking the view out the back window. They were driven very fast down a narrow road fringed by tall grass and yellowish trees. At a settlement of shacks and shops—“Chiritza,” Nestor said — they were shepherded to a riverbank and down a wooden walkway to a waiting canoe. Steadman sketched it quickly in his notebook, for it was less a canoe than an enormous tree trunk that had been hollowed out, its ends blunted, an outboard motor clamped to the stern. The travelers sat on the benches that had been lashed to it, and they watched as mud-splashed boys labored back and forth on the walkway with the luggage and food boxes.

While the lines were being unclipped from the mooring posts and coiled, Nestor knelt and reached into a bag. He took out some hanks of cloth and said, “Where we are going must remain secret. Please put these over your eyes.”

6

THESE NEW BLINDFOLDS on the river made them fearful and garrulous, seeking reassurance, their yakking a frantic signal, like bat-squeal. In places, the river made odd swallowing sounds. Birds jeered at them from high branches, insects strummed and chattered, the heat and moist air left a film of damp scum on their skin and thickened their hair. Ill at ease, trying to imagine the scenes they were passing on the jungle stream, they went on talking, interrupting the birds and insects, interrupting one another. After a while they ceased to sound like bats, but instead squawked like anxious children, praising what they could not see, as though infantilized by the blindfolds, attempting to propitiate the river’s menace.

“This is awesome,” Wood said.

“Sweet,” Hack said.

In a timid voice tinged with nausea Sabra said, “Like I’m traveling into some enchanted cave.”

“As the bishop said to the actress,” Janey said.

“Hernán is so shredding this river,” Hack said.

Keeping his head down, Steadman lifted his mask with one thumb and was briefly blinded. He saw a rusted sign on the muddy riverbank, Prohibido el Paso, and let the mask drop over his eyes once more.

Hack said uncertainly, “This isn’t that bad. Remember that smelly cave system in Mexico where we went diving? Santo something?”

“And the most awesome thing about it is the, like, smell of the darkness. Like you’re in a tunnel.”

“That is a veever bird,” Manfred said.

As though Manfred’s utterance were a cue, Janey said, “Jolly super.”

The air on this part of the upper river was clammy, intimidating, and felt full of looming shapes. Some of these shapes seemed soaked in the fetid stink of fear, the musty forest-hum of an old corpse softening to the sludge of vegetable mulch. The bad smell silenced them like an overwhelming noise. And then Sabra spoke in an earnest voice.

“I think you’re wrong — we are on a quest,” she said. When no one replied, she added, “I want a healing.”

Her seriousness seemed to silence the others. There was only the gurgly drone of the outboard motor, farting when it idled, and the mingled sounds of birds and insects, seeming to compete, their calls skimming across the river’s surface.

“For me, yah, is a kvest.”

“The longest distance on earth is from the heart to the head,” Sabra said, as if she were remembering and quoting. She started to say more when there was a snort of derision from the bow of the boat, which in a bizarre echo was repeated by a birdcall, just as derisive.

“How long we must to wear this thing?” Manfred pleaded, in a different mood.

“What do you care?”

“I want to see things. Long ago, in 1817, came here von Spix and von Martius. They found the unique species on the River Caqueta, on one place, name of Cerro de la Pedrera. I will go there for my book. And Nachtigall as well. For the Schamatiismus. You know the Schamanismus?”

The motor chugged and coughed, sounding unreliable, and the water slapped the bow of the boat.

“Also, in 1905 up to 1922, Koch-Grünberg was here.”

“That’s funny. My mother’s name was Greenberg.”

“And Otto Zerries,” Manfred said, remembering. “Also Schultes, of course.”

“Oh, do put a sock in it,” Janey said.

But no one else was listening. As the river widened and warmed in the sunshine, the air was less dense and the afternoon gave softer colors to the forest they imagined — greener trees and clearer water, a blue sky showing through the canopy of high boughs, and the louder birds they assumed were larger than others, with great beaks and spiky crests, toucans and hornbills with colorful drooping tails.

The light quieted them. They listened to the slurp of their wake against the bank.

“Confluencia,” Nestor said as the boat tipped and seemed to slip sideways along a swifter current. “Río Arana. You say ‘confluence’?”

After a while the brightness reminded them that they were exposed, and they became talkative again. One swirl of river sloshing in an eddy beside the bow Steadman took to be a fleeing snake, uncoiling in the stream. The air was humid against his face. In the shadows of trees at the level of the knobby roots were jaguars and ocelots. Sunlight glinted on the water like slivers of scrap metal, Hernán at the stern, Nestor at the bow, impassive, saying nothing except for their murmured directions: “To the bank” and “Stump ahead” and “Shallow here” and the repeated “Siga, no más

Janey Hackler seemed on the verge of speaking, asking a sudden question beginning “Europe!” But it was not a word. She was retching strenuously, her whole bulgy gut audibly convulsed, and a moment later she vomited over the side. She sobbed disgustedly, and when she got her breath she said in a pleading voice, “I’ve got bits of sick all over my fingers.”

“I guess this is what you’d call dark matter,” Hack said.

“Marshall, do be serious. I’m all sticky,” Janey said, her gorge rising again. “Yoo-roop! Oh, crikey!”

“Wait,” someone said. “Listen.”

A canoe was passing. It had to have been a canoe: there was no engine, only the slurp and suck and drip of working paddle blades. People in the canoe called out a greeting, not Spanish but a chain of seesawing monosyllables, and Nestor replied in the same language, but flatter, seeming to repeat something he had once heard.

“What’s that you’re saying?” Hack demanded, but unsurely, in a nagging way.

“Secoya language.”

They hate to be blindfolded, thought Steadman, who not only liked it, but unexpectedly took pleasure in being in the presence of blindfolded people, for all their revelations in the darkness.

“Lots of bird life,” Wood said.

“This sucks,” Hack said.

“But at least you’re not covered with vomit, are you,” Janey said, sobbing. “What are you grumbling about?”

“I can’t see shit!” Hack screamed.

“I left my Leicas in Quito,” Wood said. “They said travel light.”

“The little Leicas, they weigh nothing.”

And everyone sighed, because Za little Leicas, zey veigh nossing was so much more irritating spoken in the darkness. Yet the darkness was a soup of colors, and the colors were smells, not images, a swirl of odors, marbled like endpapers in an old book, the heat of the day making the color green almost black, and the crimson black, and the tree bark black. The green had the sharpness of cut leaf, the air was like sour dust, and the bark had the moldering odor of tobacco moistened by rain. The odors came in irregular layers, like the layers of a whole plant — leaves and roots and shimmering blotches of flowers they could actually taste.

Sabra said, “Rivers are borders. If you haven’t crossed a border without permission, you haven’t traveled.”

Steadman held his breath, waiting for someone to comment on this oversimplified quotation from Trespassing. He heard the glugging of the outboard, some seconds passed, and then Manfred spoke.

“How much farza?”

Nestor did not answer.

“I thought this was supposed to be a doddle,” Janey said.

They were now deep into the afternoon, and the day was thick with a heat and humidity that clutched them, and the highly colored smells all around them became stronger and mingled with the sound of the river.

“And it’s a fag,” Janey said. “And I have to spend a penny.”

The colors reversed, blue river, green sky, shimmering trees, the decay in the air giving off patches of luminescence that showed through the hanging vines and stringy tails of lianas, and when they cut the engine and lifted it to paddle in the shallows between sandbanks, the shriek of insects was deafening — bright beetles and big-winged dragonflies and birds like paper kites and clouds of midges glowing in the slanting sunshine, a dream of deep Ecuadorian jungle.

“Okay, take your masks off.”

They did so and were silent. Now they saw how wrong they were. Nothing was green here. The daylight was almost gone. The river was muddy and narrow and there was a whirlpool just beyond the landing place; the trees were so dark as to be almost black, the air heavy and hot, almost no sky. The riverbank was covered with smashed and bruised tree roots. Yes, there was decay, and where the soil was not crumbly it was mushy.

“Where are we?” Hack asked.

“Remolinos,” Nestor said, “wheelpools,” and pointed at the whirlpools. In the failing light the coursing water was scattered with floating blobs and divots, like hacked-ofif scalps and bubbly blisters and clotted soap scum.

But after they had taken their masks off they smelled nothing. Even the loudest nagging birds were invisible, but some insects looked as big as sparrows.

Someone called out up ahead, a small coughing sound, and then an echo in the person’s sinuses, like a startled animal cooing in recognition, not a person but the incomplete ghost of a person, suggesting faulty magic. Some people stood on the bank, ragged and hopeful, like castaways amid the scabby bark of the tree trunks. Small people, some half naked, some in knee-length red smocks, whom they took to be Secoya, with damp hair in their eyes — the smaller they were, the nakeder they were — crouched in greeting, gaping at them with a passive curiosity that suggested imbecility. They were brown, elfin, laughing.

With a yelp, one boy in torn shorts seized the bow line and secured the boat. Still laughing, others hurried down the riverbank and, placing their feet apart, straddling the gunwale and the dock, began hoisting the bags and passing them to the boys on the bank. Standing at the side of a plank, a man helped the passengers ashore.

“Those bowl-shaped haircuts make them look like retards,” Hack said.

Janey said, “Their hair looks frightfully nagged at.”

Their mouths hung open, their teeth were small and worn flat, they were listening as much as watching. A naked child-mother clutched a naked baby to her breasts, and the baby, with dangling legs, looked limp and lifeless.

“Como está? How are you doing?” Sabra asked, and when she got no reply, she said, “Why are they looking at us like we’re monkeys?”

Seeing that the boat was tipping in the wash of the river’s eddy, one of the Secoya men, wearing tattered shorts with a Polo Sport label, scuttled down the mud bank and seized the noose of the stern line.

I have never seen a human being move like that, Steadman thought. The man had a skipping bandy-legged stoop-shouldered roll that made him almost invisible for the seconds that he was in motion. He snatched the rope and in the same gesture looped it round a protruding tree root.

“This man is Don Pablo,” Nestor said.

Hearing his name, the man hesitated and looked at the passengers in the boat. He gabbled a little over his shoulder to the others crouching and staring on the bank. Some Secoya men murmured softly, their hands out. Hernán handed one of them a blue plastic cooler with a padlocked lid. The women and children said nothing.

“They sort of hate us, I can tell by their squiffy eyes,” Janey said, fingering her cell phone. “And why do they look so stroppy?”

“Which one?” Wood asked.

“All of them. Him — he looks like a wet weekend.” Janey called out to the man, “Oh, do cheer up. It may never happen!”

“But we’re giving them business, right, Nestor?” Hack called, and turned to help Sabra out of the boat while Wood zipped his duffel.

On shore, the Secoya women gathered around Sabra, touching the stamp-sized butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, but Sabra hardly noticed.

“There’s flies all over that kid,” Sabra said.

“He’s got a discharge, some eye thing, maybe conjunctivitis,” Ava said. “I’ve got some cream for that.” She took a tube from her waist pouch and said, “Medicina. Crema para los ojos de su niño"

“Let’s go!” Hack said.

But the word medicina had excited the watching people and they clamored around Ava, plucking at her clothes, until Nestor shouted. At his shouts they stepped back and made room for the visitors.

Without a word, Don Pablo turned and moved in his peculiar skittering way down the path. The others followed — Manfred up front, kicking leaves and striding to be first, but keeping one finger to hold his place in his big plant guide. Then Wood and Sabra, Hack and laney, Steadman and Ava, and behind them on the forest path the Secoya boys carrying their bags.

Hack said to Ava, “I saw that medicine stuff back there. Are you in the virtue business? I hate people in the virtue business. Know what I think?”

“Who gives a flying fuck what you think?” Ava said with a smile.

From behind it seemed that Hack’s ears were reddening. Janey turned, her thumb pressed into her cell phone, searching for a signal, and said, “You can’t save everybody!”

“Know what, sister? You got vomit on your lips,” Ava said.

Steadman enjoyed seeing Ava sticking up for herself. She was above all else a doctor, and in a place like this he knew her reasoning, the doctor’s conceit: In the end you will need me. I have the medicine. Following them in single file, he wondered whether it was impatience or courage that was driving the others onward. In spite of the chattering in the boat when they had been blindfolded, they did not seem seriously daunted here. Or was it just the confidence, the indifference, of people who knew they were protected: tourists with a guide.

He was annoyed by the way the others made him self-conscious, by their irritating mannerisms, their very presence. Alone, he could reach his own conclusions, but with them everything had to be shared and either overdramatized or ignored. He had counted on this being an important trip but knew he would find it hard to write about, because seeing it with their eyes, it was diminished for him. Just as bad, as much as he resented the others, he was grudgingly impressed. They were determined to have their experience, and so far, even with their complaints they had not mentioned turning back. They were stronger and more single-minded than he had expected them to be.

“This thing’s useless,” Janey said, shaking her phone. “It’s a pup.”

“We had a doctor along in Bhutan,” Hack said, tossing the words over his shoulder. He was speaking to Ava. “He got sick as a dog. He was asking me for advice!”

There were no animals or birds near the path. Steadman was on the lookout for snakes. He heard the sounds of prowling and looked back and saw children following. Some were naked, all were barefoot. But the people on the tour wore boots and leggings and long-sleeved shirts, and the two women wide-brimmed hats with mosquito veils.

Up ahead was the village, just a cluster of huts with thatched roofs in a clearing filled with long rags of white smoke from cooking fires.

Janey said, “Isn’t that fun, the way they gather and finish those good strong reeds in the roofs? I could use that in my arbors and garden thatch. What would you call it? Something like ‘distressed vernacular’?”

Nestor said, “We would call it poor people who don’t have money for metal roof.”

A small boy approached, running through the smoke, his hands out, gesturing, seeming to beg. Nestor muttered and waved him away while an old man came forward, also through the smoke.

“This is Don Pablo’s brother. His name is Himaro.”

The man nodded and glanced at the newcomers, their faces, their clothes. He wore shorts and a torn shirt, and on his head was a tiara of woven straw and upright feathers, and at his waist a belt of braided vines on which various totems dangled: a broken tooth, a yellow animal claw, a bunch of fluff, a hank of fur, a clutch of sharpened bones, which clicked as he stepped forward to greet the visitors. When he got closer, Steadman saw that the old man’s eyes were weepy from infection as well as clouded and vague, searching helplessly.

“Himaro means tigre, the one we call yana puma” Nestor said. “That is a powerful animal here.”

There was some palaver with Nestor in the Secoya language. The visitors stayed together, squinting at the incomprehensible quack of the words.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Wood said, interrupting the flow. “Can you tell him that?”

Nestor said, “Yes, I could tell him that. But he would not understand.”

What they could see of the village were straw roofs and glowing interiors and a smoky hut that might have been a communal kitchen. The brightest structure was a large platform beside an enormous tree, opensided with a thatched roof, chickens pecking beneath it in the cracks of light from lanterns. Clotheslines were strung from tree to tree, and like dark cutouts, backlit by the bright lanterns, were Secoya, just flat shadows staring at the newcomers.

Janey singled out a low lashed-together hut and said, “That one’s fun. It’s a sort of Wendy house. Isn’t it a pity that banana fronds always look so tattered?”

Hack looked around the clearing and said, “Fucking Discovery Channel bullshit,” and motioned as though with an invisible remote switch and said, “Hey, guys, I can’t shut this program off!”

When Steadman turned to speak to Ava, he saw that she had walked a little distance to where the women and children had gathered. He joined her there, noticing how the women were touching her, appealing to her for — what? Medicine, perhaps, some sort of handout. The old man wandered over, scraping his feet in the dust, feeling his way from shoulder to shoulder.

“They all have drizzling colds,” she said, and touched the nearest ones. “This one has a low-grade infection. Look at this kid’s shin. The sore is so deep it has eaten into the muscle. This old man could lose his eyes — he needs an antibiotic. He’s rubbing them, for Christ’s sake. No toca, no toca.”

“The paje,” Nestor said. “Himaro. The brother.”

“He’s also a shaman,” Steadman said.

Don Pablo now appeared again. He wore a smock and a crown woven of slender vines and a row of stiff feathers. His eyes were wounded too, one weepier than the other, which was bloodshot and turned inward. The ailment made him seem more of a brother. Yet the shaman had a clumsy agility, and while he was anything but deft, his gestures were the more effective for being approximate, commanding attention and asserting control through his show of clumsiness. The Secoya near him were watchful in a shy, respectful way, giving him room as the old man worked his fingers like antennae, positioning them as though he had eyes on his fingertips.

Nestor signaled for them to follow when the old man turned and shuffle-kicked toward the stamped and smooth center of the village, where there were pots and baskets. Before the smoky fire were logs arranged like benches.

“Sit down. Have a cold drink.”

Hearing this, Hernán dragged the blue plastic cooler toward the log, opened it, and passed out cans of soda. The white visitors drank, looking exhausted in their crumpled clothes, while the Secoya stared, naked, saying nothing, the children’s noses dripping. Some men lying in hammocks humped and rolled over and, still horizontal, stared sideways at the strangers.

The pile of pots, the baskets of cut vine stems, the enamel bowls, on a shelved frame of lashed bamboo, suggested cooking, but nothing was on the boil. Near this paraphernalia some women knelt, grating manioc.

“This would make a super credenza,” Janey said, gripping the bamboo frame. Then with a pitying smile she said, “But I peeked inside one of those huts. You know, they don’t accessorize at all.”

Irritably, Sabra said to Nestor, “Are we supposed to sleep here?”

“We’re putting up hammocks, or you can find a space on that platform back there under the ceiba tree.”

“What about washing? What about eating?” Wood said.

“I was going to give you some of the background,” Nestor said. “This is a spiritual thing, like religion and medical combined. There is so many aspects. Maybe you like to know?”

“Yes, all,” Manfred said.

“Skip the background,” Hack said, lifting his elbows, creating space around him. “I’m going for a swim.”

“We have manta rays in the river,” Nestor said. “Hernán got stung by a ray and he was in his hammock for three months.”

Janey said, “What about din-dins? I’m peckish.”

Nestor leaned over and worked his mustache at her, smiling in toothy incomprehension.

“Hungry,” she said.

Nestor spoke in Secoya, and one of the woman grating manioc replied to him without looking up. Still pushing the stick of manioc against the grater, she called out. A child’s voice sounded from the direction of the big tree and the smoky hut, and within a minute two young boys hurried into the clearing with a pole through the handle of a large blackened stewpot. A girl followed, carrying tin bowls and spoons.

“What is it?” Janey asked.

“Caldo of yuca and pavo.”

“Any pork in it? Porco?” Sabra said.

“No puerco Nestor said.

Manfred said, “Pavo means a wild turkey. A kind of stew.”

As the soup was ladled, Janey lifted her bowl and said, “I’ll have a wee scrap more. There’s masses going spare.”

Hack said, “When do we get to drink the ayahuasca?”

“Don Pablo wants to speak to you,” Nestor said.

The old man adjusted his coronet of plaited vines and feathers, and he stood behind Nestor, shuffling his feet, muttering. He put on a pair of cracked and twisted glasses.

“Look, he’s got super gig-lamps,” Janey said.

But the man removed his glasses and began rubbing his seeping eye with the knuckles of one hand.

“He says tonight is not good. You have just arrived. Some of you are angry. You must dissolve anger from your life. The women”—Nestor paused for Don Pablo to speak, and then he resumed—“he believes that one gringo woman here is having her moon.”

“And that gringo woman would be me,” Sabra said, and sat primly, her eyes glistening with annoyance that she had been singled out. She stared at a small dirty boy crouching in the dust near her and addressed him. “I’m unclean. I’m tainted. I’ve got the curse. They’re worse than Hasidim!”

“Beetle, please,” Wood said, cautioning her.

“In Secoya culture, sharing in a ceremony while having your moon is taboo. It is too much purification. Too much light, Don Pablo says. It can make the shaman very ill. He will see the huts dripping blood. So”—Nestor spoke directly to Sabra—“please keep away from the kitchen area. The food. Other people’s dishes.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll read my book instead. It’s more exciting than this garbage.”

Wood put his tin bowl of stew on the ground and crept beside her and awkwardly put his arm around her. She began softly to cry. “It’s okay, Beetle. Let it out.”

Manfred said, “They have rules. They must be obeyed.”

“You Germans know all about obeying rules,” Sabra said.

His face gleaming with sweat, his big teeth working, Manfred said, “That’s right, I am a wicked German who started the World War and made all the camps, and you are a good person who does nossing bad.”

“Woody, tell him to stop,” Sabra said through her tears.

But Manfred was on his knees hissing at her, “I have been to Ramallah! You have seen Ramallah?”

“Oh, do belt up,” Janey said.

Then Nestor rose and gestured with his hands to quiet the squabblers. He said, “Don Pablo wants to welcome you.”

The old man was muttering behind him, shaking his head, and when he nodded some wisps swayed in his feathered coronet.

“Don Pablo has been a shaman for many years. In Secoya, the word paje is shaman. It means ‘the man who embodies all experience.’ He says that some of the people he was treating were witches. A shaman always has enemies, because he is accused of being responsible for people’s deaths.”

“Where’s he from?” Hack asked.

Nestor translated the question, listened to Don Pablo, then said to the group, “He didn’t understand, but his answer is interesting anyway. He believes the Secoya were descended from a certain group of monkeys in Santa Maria — downriver from here, where two rivers meet.” The fire had died down, and as the crackling had diminished the jungle sounds had increased. Though they could only have been insects, they sounded to Steadman like a chorus of crazed birds — the honks and squawks issuing from the darkness around them.

“His father was also a shaman. He taught Don Pablo and Himaro how to use ayahuasca. Don Pablo became a paje because he was very sick. He healed himself and became a healer. The best way to become a paje— maybe the only way — is to be very ill and follow that path.” Nestor listened to Don Pablo and spoke again. “Ayahuasca is like death. When you drink it you die. The soul leaves the body. But this soul is an eye to show you the future. You will see your grandchildren. When the trance is over the soul is returned.” Don Pablo was still talking. Nestor said, as though summarizing, “He talks about ‘the eye of understanding.’”

Manfred said, “Please ask Don Pablo to explain the meaning of this.”

The question was relayed to Don Pablo, who turned away and answered the question while facing the trees and the darkness and the insect chatter.

“This eye can see things that can’t be seen physically. Some people have this third eye already developed. And for others the eye of understanding can be acquired through ayahuasca or some other certain jungle plants.”

Steadman sat feeling hopeful, and as he was listening another old man appeared, wearing a yellow smock, a feather coronet, and a necklace of red beads and animal teeth. He spoke to Nestor.

Nestor said, “This is Don Esteban. He is a Kofan. He wants to tell you that he learned to speak Secoya in one night from a parrot after drinking a huge amount of yajé”

“Is yajé the same tipple as ayahuasca?” Janey asked Hack, who said, “I guess.”

“Don Pablo can turn into a tiger. He can visit other planets. He has been to many planets — he makes beautiful pictures of them. He can see into a diseased body.”

“Who would have known — he’s a fucking astronaut,” Hack said under his breath.

In a seemingly cautionary way, Don Pablo spoke, and Nestor translated: “A flower may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that sees everything. That is the soul of the plant, which makes it alive.”

Don Esteban added a thought, then shrugged.

Nestor smiled. “And, yes, a flower may talk.”

Without another word, Don Pablo and Don Esteban signaled to Himaro and slipped away into the darkness. Nestor lit a torch from the embers of the fire and led the visitors down the path.

“Since I’m unclean, I’m going to my room,” Sabra said.

Wood hugged her. “You don’t have a room, Beetle.”

Hurrying ahead, Nestor had planted his torch at the entrance to the high sleeping platform, the light whirling with small white moths. Fuzzy knuckle-sized insects buzzed and bumped the lighted posts. Watching the others approach it slowly, Steadman could see their reluctance in the way their dusty shorts were pinched between their bobbing buttocks.

7

FROM HIS ROPE HAMMOCK strung between two trees, Steadman lay as if trussed in the rope mesh, seeing the others thrashing on the sleeping platform, the Wilmutts and the Hacklers, backlit by the lanterns and surrounded by clouds of fluttering moths; all night their muttered complaints.

Steadman said in a drawling voice, “Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait till you sit there five days on a sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat, and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor.” He paused and listened to the insect howl. “Burroughs was right. Tomorrow the river will be higher.”

Manfred had slipped away. Perhaps he knew how persistently he talked in his sleep, asking questions, making declarations, usually in German, sometimes in English. Steadman had heard the gabble, and though he could not understand any of it, there seemed a coherence in its slurring narrative, like a story that Manfred had mumbled in his sleep many times before. But Steadman also guessed that Manfred had found a more comfortable hut or a better sleeping mat, or perhaps a companion.

Just as likely he had found a candle stump somewhere so that he could study his book of medicinal plants. The man was irritating, but in his reading and his note taking and his pedantry, the tenacity of his tactless honesty with the others, he was a reproach to Steadman, who swung in his hammock, regretting that his own notebook was so neglected. He told himself that he had refrained from writing so as not to appear conspicuous to the others, who might recognize him as the author and pester him with questions.

In her own hammock next to Steadman, Ava said, “That annoying woman is still reading your book.”

Dawn came early but dimly, the tentative sun not penetrating the trees but lighting portions of sky, which were visible as tiny blue patches through the canopy of leaves. Beneath those boughs the air was pale green, gassy-looking, and filled with flitting insects and lazy filaments that swayed like the torn veils of spider webs, yet they were high up, draping the green air, where Steadman had never imagined spiders to live.

The birds had begun shrieking long before dawn, and one had a monotonous voice of objection that nagged through the jungle. Nimble, darting, unswattable flies kept returning to settle on and sting Steadman’s face. Ants were everywhere, large and small, trails of them, clusters of them, black glossy ones, tiny flitting ones, some no bigger than sand grains. They gathered on Steadman’s sandals, delved into his bag. The heat woke them; the heat seemed to make all the insects active: biting flies, white moths, big furry beetles, foraging wasps, and glossy cockroaches with tortoiseshell wings.

Walking toward the covered platform with Ava, Steadman picked up a fist-sized snail that was leaving a track of slime across the beaten-down earth.

“Desayuno he said to a small Secoya girl who was watching him, and seeing her look of wonderment, he realized she did not speak Spanish.

The others were seated cross-legged on the platform, looking fatigued and miserable in rumpled clothes.

“My hair’s a rat’s nest,” Janey said. She appealed to Ava. “We didn’t get a wink of sleep. This whole bally place is a tip. We’re so fed up we’re about ready to leave.”

Ava said, “I slept like a log.”

Nestor was mounting the ramp to the platform. In great contrast to the visitors, he looked rested and bright-eyed, his thick hair combed straight back, and wore a clean T-shirt and jeans.

“I want to give you some instructions from Don Pablo,” Nestor said.

Hack said, “Enough with the lectures.”

Nestor stared at him, saying nothing, but with ironic jeering lips. Though he was a big man, his face was narrow, his black eyes set deep in his face, and he was the more intimidating for being calm and saying nothing until Hack looked away.

“I want to suggest to you,” Nestor said, “that you are not home now. You are in Succumbios province.” With his tongue between his teeth, he added, “Oriente.”

Now Manfred appeared on the ramp, looking like a commando in his jungle gear. He swung himself onto the platform. He too looked rested, another reproach to the others who had suffered in the night. He was carrying a tin cup. He sat and sipped from it and swallowed with a hearty sigh.

“Ecuador café. Very delicious!”

Steadman smiled to see how Manfred aroused the hatred of the others, and how Manfred enjoyed it.

“Herr Mephistos,” Hack said, gesturing at Manfred’s shoes.

“I take from a pee-sant,” he said, sipping the coffee.

Nestor said, “Please eat some fruit for breakfast, then nothing more. No food all day. But stay busy. If you drink — just water. The ceremony will begin after sunset in the pavilion over there. Later I will tell you what things to bring. The main thing to bring is a clear mind and a pure heart. And an empty stomach.”

It was seven in the morning, sunset almost twelve hours away, and already the heat and the biting flies and the stink that rose from the sodden earth seemed unbearable.

“Why can’t we have the ceremony right now?” Wood asked.

“Night is for ceremonies. We need darkness,” Nestor said. “So you can relax.”

“I didn’t come all this way and pay serious money to relax!”

“You can maybe weed Joaquinas garden, then. She needs help.”

“Hard cheese on Joaquina,” Janey said. “She can weed her own garden. What a cheek. Imagine, faffing around on some scrubber’s allotment.”

“Or the Secoya women will show you weaving if you like. Or you can make pictures. Or Don Pablo will teach you the names of the plants.”

Wood turned aside to Hack with an incredulous glance, mouthing the sentence “Do you fucking believe this?”

“We’ll just hang out,” Hack said, as though to calm his friend.

“I’m unclean anyway,” Sabra said and, still sitting cross-legged, picked up her copy of Trespassing. “Look what this climate did to it!” The pages were thickened by the humidity, the binding curled, the whole book fattened and misshapen.

“At least you have something to read, to take the curse off this grottsville,” Janey said.

“Are you hot?”

“Not half,” Janey said.

“I wouldn’t put that drug in my body anyway,” Sabra said. “It’s like a pact with the devil, drinking the magic potion so you can get visions. I’m glad I brought this.” She tapped the book. “None of that tricky stuff in here. I mean, the whole point of this book is that you can test your limits without putting crap like that in your system.”

Steadman stared, his lips pressed together, and felt Ava’s eyes on him.

Nestor said, “Anyone who wants to go on a jungle walk, Hernán will take you.”

“That’s us,” Ava said.

They left after breakfast, just Ava and Steadman. Seeing them approaching the path with Nestor and Hernán, Manfred smiled at Steadman and said, “I would like to come with you.” He sounded sincere, but more than that he sounded familiar, using a tone with Steadman that he never used with the others.

Ava said, “I’m sure you have something more interesting to do here.”

“Yah. I want to see the cooking, for my notes. How the ayahuasca is prepared. How it is stewed. You say ‘to stew’? The yajé”

Nestor said, “We say hervir. We also say reducir. They mix in some other plants.”

“Of course, I know. I have read. They add other species of special plants. This I would like to see. You would like to see this?”

He was speaking to Steadman, but Steadman was so puzzled by the man’s unexpected friendliness he just shrugged.

“They call the mixture changru-panga.”

“You don’t need me,” Nestor said to Manfred. “You are a perito. Hexpert!”

Hernán nodded that he was ready to go, and he turned abruptly and set off, leading with a raised machete. A barefoot Secoya boy wearing a small canvas knapsack followed with a stick. They cut through Joaquina’s maize patch and jumped a wide ditch. They were almost immediately slipping on a narrow muddy path under the tall trees, Hernán slashing at hanging head-high fronds and low thorny branches, the boy poking his stick at the dripping ferns at the track’s side.

The land was level and the path fairly straight, but deeper in the forest the air was inert, hot, sodden, dense with humidity, whirring with insects. Some sunshine, in cones of light, penetrated from torn patches of the tree canopy, yet deep green shadow predominated. The shadow was wet, and the moss on the trees was like green foam.

After half an hour — they had not gone very far on the path — Steadman’s shirt was soaked from sweat and his brushing the big, low-growing, dripping leaves. His shoes were heavy with mud. The bare skin of his forearms was scratched and dirty. Ava smiled at him but she was soaked, too.

“Where are we going?” Steadman called ahead to Hernán.

“Paseo,” he said. “Walking only.”

Perhaps feeling that he should be more informative, he pinched some leaves from a bush and showed them to Ava.

“The Secoya use this one for tea, if you have pain problem in you estomach.”

“ Tortuga the Secoya boy called out sharply, and darted past Steadman and knelt in the mud. Steadman saw nothing, but within seconds the boy was holding up a small muddy turtle, its legs twitching and dripping.

“How did he see that?” Ava said.

“He is hungry, so he see everything,” Hernán said.

Farther on, Steadman paused and said, “I always wondered where those flowers came from.”

“We have many like this,” Hernán said.

“I think that’s Heliconia,” Ava said.

The bunches of buds, red and yellow, hung on a long stalk like small brilliant bananas, little nips of color that were vivid among the gray ferns and shadowed leaves.

“You have this one?” Hernán said, and he indicated a tall bush with a profusion of white bell-like blossoms, thick and drooping from every slender branch.

Recognizing it as the mouthy blossom that Nestor had pointed out at Papallacta, Steadman said, “I saw one of those at the hot springs.”

“Is good for this,” Hernán said. He tapped his head and smiled at the Secoya boy, who was nodding eagerly, grinning and showing a broken front tooth. “See? Even he knows. He helps to gather this one.”

“Angel’s trumpet,” Ava said, remembering what Nestor had told them. “What do you call it?”

“It is toé. La venda de yana puma. The tiger’s blindfold.” He smiled and widened his eyes as he said it. “We scrape. We boil the pieces. We drink.”

They walked on for another hour, but slowly, because of the mud and the heat. Toward noon they came to an area where some trees had fallen and littered the earth around them with heaps of dead leaves and the withered trash of dead branches. Some of the trunks looked rotted and infested but one firm trunk remained, the right height for a seat. Ava approached it to sit down.

“Mira. Espera un momentito,” Hernán said, and slashed the trunk with his knife, and it came alive with large frantic ants and clumps of tumbling ant eggs like furious grains of rice.

“I think I’ll stand,” Ava said.

Hernán took the knapsack off the Secoya boy and distributed bottles of water.

“Paseo is better,” Hernán said, wiping his mouth. “If you sit in the village, you see food and you want to eat. Then, when you take the yaje tonight, you feel sick.”

But Steadman had forgotten the ceremony. He was looking around at the great vaporous hollow of the fly-specked and thick tainted air, everything greenish, soaked and slick under the rain forest roof.

Flourishing in this remote seclusion, unaided by any human hand, was an obscure and eternal thickness of garden beneath the patchy heights of the forest ceiling. In the lowest shadows of the muddy floor were soft dirt-humps marked by the grubbings of tree rats and turtles. Flowering plants grew at every level, banking to the highest tree trunks.

More angel’s trumpet, sallow and succulent, like white downcast funnels, and torch ginger with crimson flower pods, and the Heliconia that Ava had identified, its smooth curved fruit red and yellow and striped black; the labial petals of a rosy blossoming vulva on a bluish stalk; the orange beaks of Strelitzia; and the scalloped and splayed fragility of purplish orchids. Fingers of boiled pinkness pointed from a pendant vine, and on another tiny yellow bells on wing-like leaves. All of it glowed in the feeble light, and from the heights of the boughs immensely long, narrow roots, some of them hairy, trailed past gnats and flies.

He saw struggling butterflies and dangling worms, the crooked symmetry of the blue veins on big leaves, the frail luminous tissue like wadded silk of droopier flowers, the stiffer stems of wet black plants, the pale noodles of wandering tendrils, and the fuzzier knobs, like monster paws of nameless growths — all of this in a place where there was the narrowest path and no other footprints and only the dimmest daylight reached to the bottom of the forest. Here it was possible to believe that, though humans had passed nearby, none had interfered with the place, nor had ever bent a stem, nor plucked a flower. The whole world was blind to its beauty.

“Mira — cuidado,” the Secoya boy said sharply, and stepped in front of Steadman. Then the boy pointed with his stick, and Steadman saw the threads of a spider web glistening with dew. The whole thing was the size of a wagon wheel but suspended high, the center of it level with his eyes and trembling with the damp breath of the hot forest. If the boy had not spoken, he would have walked into it and wrapped the web across his face and all over his head. Just thinking of that made Steadman take a step back.

“Where’s the spider?”

“Araña,” the boy said, indicating the creature at the edge of the circle of milky filaments.

Steadman saw the spider, and even though he took another step back in fear, he could see it clearly: a big purple fruit with the dusty shine of a plum, highlights of pinky yellow, looking ripe and heavy. It was hunkered on skinny legs, each one ending with a tiny toothy foot. It stayed at the edge of the web, its jaws apart like a pair of pincers. What unnerved Steadman was not its large size or its lurid fruit-like color; he was alarmed by its gaze, its glowing eyes like drops of poison turned on him and fixed upon his own eyes.

“Escucha” Hernán said, tilting his head to listen and look up.

Only then did Steadman awaken from the trance state induced by the spider’s gaze. All that Steadman heard was the racket of insects. The boy and Hernán were straining to hear.

Then Ava said, “What’s that?”

There came a far-off chugging, like a motorboat plowing invisibly through the sky, and when it drew closer it became a more distinct yak-yak-yak.

“Mira! Helicóptero the boy said, his hair in his eyes, the complex word issuing from his smile and the space of his broken tooth.

Hernán said, “Is a chopper.”

A shadow like a big brown cloud passed overhead, a mammoth belching airship, the largest helicopter Steadman had ever seen.

He started down the path after it, but Hernán shouldered past him and then the boy skipped ahead, his skinny brown legs working as he leaped like a fawn. The sound of the helicopter was still loud, not far off, perhaps circling or going lower.

The enclosed interior of the forest with its dome of branches and leaves prevented them from seeing the progress of the helicopter, yet they still heard it and were able to follow its percussive sound, the drumbeat of its engine burps in the distance.

They were off the path now and chest-high in ferns and big leaves as they saw ahead a brightness, an opening in the forest, perhaps a clearing, and then the descending darkness of the helicopter settling to earth.

Hernán and the boy were hunched in stalking postures, signaling for Steadman and Ava to stay behind and keep low. The brightness led them on and dazzled them, too, for the whole morning they had been walking in the dappled shadow of the rain forest, and now sunshine poured through the trees.

They were stopped by a head-high chainlink fence that ran through the forest, razor wire coiled along the top edge and skull-and-bones signs lettered in red, Prohibido el Paso, every twenty feet or so. Sunlight scorched the clearing within the fence — sunlight and steel towers and boxy prefab structures and oil drums and the huge sputtering helicopter, its twin rotors slowing as men in yellow hard hats rushed back and forth from its open cargo bay, unloading and carrying cardboard cartons.

The encampment was entirely encircled by the fence and the forest. No road penetrated here. And there was no break in the fence — no opening, not even a gate. Thus, the helicopter. When the sound of it died down, they could hear the softer but regular pulsing of an engine and could see a steel cylinder moving up and down in the center of the clearing, pounding the earth, pumping with gasping and swallowing noises and the lurch of unmistakable grunts that sounded like squirts of satisfaction.

“Mira. Gringo,” Hernán said, seeing a tall man in a checked shirt and boots waving the workmen along.

But to Steadman that American was not the oddest aspect of the clearing, for near the entrance to one of the new bright boxy buildings was an Ecuadorian all in white — white shirt, white apron, tall white chef’s hat — and he was conferring with another swarthy man in a short black jacket and striped trousers and bow tie. This second man, obviously a waiter or a wine steward, held a tray on his fingertips, and on the tray were a pair of thin-stemmed wineglasses and a wine bottle in an ice bucket.

Another man was climbing out of the cockpit of the helicopter. Steadman could tell from the casual way he walked, almost sloppy as he staggered on the gravel, and from the flapping of his big hand, his easy wave of greeting to the other man, that he too was an American. He had the carelessness of confident ownership.

“Es él quien tiene la culpa,” the boy said.

Hernán translated: “That one’s fault.”

The two men shook hands and conferred, and the waiter approached with a flunky’s obedient walk, upright and smiling and presenting his tray, and was rebuffed. The Americans walked toward a shelter — an awning propped up like a marquee — and the waiter followed them, the chef behind in his spotless whites.

“Petroleros Hernán said.

The boy appealed to Steadman, saying, “Nos gustan los Estados Unidos” Then he made a face and gestured to the oilmen: “Pero!”

“I wish I weren’t seeing this,” Steadman said to Ava. He regretted being there and for a moment forgot why he had come to Ecuador.

Then Hernán said, “We go now. We get ready.”

Only then did Steadman remember the ceremony. As he walked the narrow path back to the village and the riverbank, the rain forest seemed much more fragile and less wild, not as shadowy, but part of a captive and violated world that he had always known.

8

THEY WERE GATHERED at the thatched pavilion in the failing light of day, looking pale and uncertain. Each person carried a hammock and a change of clothes and the items they had been instructed to bring: a sleeping pad, a poncho, socks and a jacket, and a bottle of drinking water. The shelter had looked simple enough from the outside, but now that they were inside and choosing places to sit, they could see how carefully the shelter had been made, the peeled logs lashed together, the slanted split-bamboo roof covered with tight bundles of thatch, the upright poles like columns that had been rubbed smooth. The whole structure now seemed less like a pavilion than a chapel in the forest, lit by sooty lanterns and flickering candle stubs.

Don Pablo and Don Esteban sat on stools at the far end, at what would have been the altar, had it been a chapel. They were monkish in their solemnity and their simple red smocks, with necklaces of orange beads and crowns of plaited feathers on their heads. Each man held on his knee a gallon-sized plastic jug sealed with a carved wooden stopper, dark liquid sloshing inside.

Other Secoya men, in T-shirts and shorts but just as serious as the two ornamented and costumed old men, were stamping on the earthen floor. There was no music, no sound at all except for the bird squawks and the piercing insect wail of the forest.

Some more Secoya men walked out of the darkness from the direction of the village, holding torches. Their entering the shelter, and lighting its interior, seemed to animate Don Pablo and Don Esteban, who began chanting, first in a murmur and then in a low growl that sounded to Steadman like the groaning syncopation of Tibetan monks at prayer.

Steadman and Ava had unrolled their sleeping mats to one side, near a lantern. They set out their clothes, their pillows, their water bottles. Steadman kept his notebook and pen by his side.

Manfred was at the front, nearest to Don Pablo, and the other four were gathered behind him, Janey leaning on Hack’s shoulder, the Wilmutts squatting, coaxing their air mattress.

“They’re supposed to be self-inflating,” Wood said.

“Who’s first?” Hack asked, and Steadman heard a note of apprehension, a quaver in the man’s voice.

Sabra said, “It’s like, ‘Take a number.’”

Hearing her, Don Pablo stopped chanting and waved her away, and when she hesitated, he rose and stepped forward and poked her shoulder with his staff. Sabra backed away, glaring at the shaman.

Manfred was kneeling, leaning forward, holding an empty cup, so that when the moment came he would be ready, he would be first. He was watching Nestor for a sign. .

But Nestor ignored him. He had been glaring with disapproval at Sabra all this time, hoping to catch her eye. He had told her before that because she was having her period she was not permitted near the shelter. Don Pablo had poked her so hard with his stick she was rubbing her shoulder, as though in pain. She backed out of the shelter, looking wronged, and became a shadow, slowly retreating.

Nestor said, “Okay, we can start, but it is not a good idea to be in a big hurry. Calma. There’s lots of different energy here.”

Manfred hesitated, the others murmured, Janey stepped back as if she had been asked a question to which she did not have the answer, and now Steadman was glad that he had not come alone. He could see that Ava was relieved that Manfred was going first.

“Don Pablo wants to show you the vines that went into the mixture,” Nestor said, following the old man.

Manfred said, “Tell me the names of the others you mix with it. I mean, to the caapi maybe they add rusbyana.”

“I don’t know the names.” He spoke to the shaman, then said, “Tobacco. And sometimes toe. What you call the datura.”

“I want to know more about this.”

“Do me a favor!” Hack said. “Like you want to do lunch at the Four Seasons and they show you the fucking kitchen. Hello! Can we start now?

“What about cosas cristalinos?” Manfred said, ignoring Hack and speaking to the old man, who looked more and more like a goblin as he got nearer the fire. When the old man tilted his head, a vagueness that seemed to indicate “sometimes,” Manfred began talking excitedly to Steadman. “Fischer Cardenas was the first to isolate the alkaloid crystals from yaje. He called it telepathine. The crystals are very beautiful, like jewels. They are harmala alkaloids.”

Don Pablo brought them to the edge of the open-sided pavilion. A pot was simmering near the fire, a brown liquid inside, twigs and broken leaves floating on the surface. Using a long fork, he fished up some cut segments of a thick vine. The liquid itself was muddy and clotted in the firelight.

“That’s the Kool-Aid,” Hack said.

“Psychotropic substance,” Manfred said.

“Ayahuasca,” the old man said.

The others became animated on hearing it, as though congratulating themselves, for it was the first word he had spoken that anyone could recognize.

Without another word or any ceremony, ladling some of the liquid into a large enamel bowl, he showed it, an opaque brew like overboiled tea that had stewed too long without being strained. He shook it a little, as if verifying its viscosity, then poured it back into the pot and returned to his seat at the back of the pavilion, where Don Esteban sat, still chanting, his lips rounded like a chorister’s.

Steadman and Ava were sitting cross-legged. Manfred was kneeling, intending to be first. Wood sat with the Hacklers, behind Manfred. The Secoya men watched from the sides of the pavilion with eager, firelit faces.

“You go,” Janey said to Wood. “You’re the one who was so cock-a-hoop about doing it.”

“Probably a big mistake,” Wood said with an anxious giggle. He took the bowl, tilted it, and sipped at the rim.

“Drink it all,” Nestor said. “Then lie down.”

Wood did so — the others watching in alarm — and coughed and retched. Then he lay down, waiting for the drug to settle within him.

“Nothing yet. But it’s real bitter,” he said, and on the last word he retched again, tried to contain himself, doubled up, and instead of vomiting he heaved and clutched his face, clawing his throat and his eyes. Janey stared for a moment, then turned to Hack, who looked blank and helpless and who smiled in empty terror. Janey got to her feet and walked lamely, stumbling in fear and uncertainty, toward Wood, who was gagging.

Using his stick, Don Pablo stepped between them, not looking at either of them — and anyway, the shaman’s eyes made Steadman think of burned-out bulbs. The shaman grasped a smoking bucket and from it he took an ember, and this he held over Wood’s head, wreathing it in smoke and repeating a litany of quacks.

“Has the old man had any ayahuasca?” Ava whispered to Nestor.

“Maybe a little. He drinks to understand.”

Wood was now lying on his side, batting at the smoke, still heaving and gasping, kicking his feet as though struggling for breath. Everyone stared, seeming shocked by this sudden casualty, who had been overcome and was sniveling with suffocation.

“Did he get it down him too fast?” Janey said. “He looks ghastly. Are you ghastly, Woody?”

“He’s baked,” Hack said. “He’s fucking jacked.”

“Choking,” Ava said. She looked down at him as if in triage, examining a patient on a stretcher, staring hard, scrutinizing his vital signs, trying to size him up. “Some kind of convulsion.”

Spasms shook Wood, then he retched some more, heaved without spewing, and kicked again, the veins standing out on his forehead and neck.

Steadman noticed that Wood was wearing new hiking boots, a style from the catalogue that Trespassing intended as an improvement on Timberlands. He found something sad in their newness, the bright toe caps, the unscuffed soles, the yellow laces. Wood’s knees were filthy, his hands were dirty too, and they streaked his face as he dragged his fingers against his cheeks.

“Looks like he’s swimming,” Hack said, seeming detached now, almost relieved to be standing at a distance from the flailing man.

“Drowning,” Ava said.

Wood began seriously to gag, inhaling and unable to exhale, filling with wind, and when he gasped, in an effort to breathe, he began to cry — to whimper, anyway, tears smearing his cheeks, dirtied by his hands. The effort quieted him, as if he were dying from lack of air. Then he slumped, drugged, a trickle of thin yellow vomit running from the side of his mouth and sticking his face to the mat, his eyes still open, seeing nothing.

All this while, Nestor had stood apart, his arms folded, frowning in satisfaction. “He will sleep a little. Maybe a lot.” He turned to the others. “Who is next?”

“Not me,” Janey said. She was looking down at Wood as she spoke. Wood lay awkwardly on the mat like a sick child, his fingers crooked, the mat rucked up from his having convulsed and twisted it.

Biting her lower lip, Janey looked horrified. Her wrinkled clothes made her seem childlike and pitiable, a fat girl out of her element, unconsoled by Hack, who was smiling in confusion.

“I’m not touching it,” Janey said with an empty laugh.

Manfred struggled forward impatiently on his knees and said, “Yah, I go now.”

Don Pablo raised his plastic jug and poured some of the ayahuasca mixture into a small bowl. This he held before the German, and when he lowered the bowl and nodded, Manfred got the point and rocked backward, sitting cross-legged again, unsteady in his attempt to look decorous. He accepted the bowl with two hands — they were very dirty — and he raised it and drank it slowly, glugging it like a stein of beer. Afterward, he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and shook his head, seeming annoyed and impatient again.

“No anything. Just my fingers only.” He flexed them and held them to his face. The splashed liquid had left blotches on his dirty hands, and he stared in dumb puzzlement at these dark stains on his skin.

The others stepped away, as though expecting him to explode. But he grunted, demanded more to drink. Don Esteban seemed to refuse, and he conferred with Don Pablo. Manfred was made to wait, and then he was given another full bowl. He drank it the same way, pouring it slowly down his throat.

Still he waited, and he looked at his hands, but in a different way, for his hands lay limp on his knees. He lowered his head to look at them, as if they belonged to someone else. He asked for more, a third cup, but before he could drink it he tottered. And with a dog-like motion of his head, he had just begun to complain when he toppled forward onto his face and vomited, his hands at his sides, and he lay there, his lips dribbling. He shuddered once and then was still, lying beside Wood, who was also motionless, his mouth open, the pair of them like poison victims sprawled on a puke-splashed mat.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Hack said with reluctance, accepting the bowl, and bobbling it, splashing the potion a little. “I mean, this is why we came, right? I’m chugging it.”

“Don’t, lovey,” Janey said, seeing the uncertainty in her husband’s hands, the unwillingness in his fingers, his anxiety converted into clumsiness. “Marshall. Please don’t do it.”

Janey seized Hack’s moment of hesitation and took the bowl from him. He let go easily, looking relieved, and then watched helplessly as she drank.

Janey caught his eye and gave him an insolent smile and licked at the brown liquid, teasing him until Hack glanced away, as though shamed by the woman. She said, “This is going down a treat,” and did not gulp but rather sipped it slowly, creating more silence in her slowness, then set it down, sloshing the dregs and the residue. She hugged herself and concentrated, and when she lay down she began to moan softly and moved onto her side, away from Hack, and made swallowing sounds. She looked serene, breathing lightly, like a woman dreaming.

“Does this remind you of fucking Jonestown?” Hack said. He said to Nestor, “I’m not drinking anything until they wake up.”

“Is your choice.”

“I’m like the designated driver,” he said in Steadman’s direction, and Steadman could see in the man’s nervous bravado that he was frightened. “These people are my friends.”

Steadman said to Ava, “You want to try it?”

“I think there could be something toxic in it. All this retching. I’ll watch. I might have to stick my finger down your throat if you have an adverse reaction.”

So Steadman stepped forward and took his place on the mat and was served a bowl of the liquid. His tongue was dulled with a taste that was muddy and flat and twiggy, and he found it hard to imagine the cloudy concoction having any effect at all: it tasted sourly of the earth and the soupy bug-flecked air of the gray forest.

“Tastes like medicine.”

As he reminded himself that he must drink it all, he looked at what was left, sloshing, and could not see the bottom of the bowl, it was so thick and dark. He tried to think of words for the taste. This is like drinking poison, he thought, trying to make a whole sentence. But before he could finish it he felt a separation take place in his body. Euphoria lightened his brain even as his body became nauseated and weak.

The bowl was taken from him. He propped himself on one elbow and shifted his whole body to the mat. Though his head and neck were at an awkward angle he did not have the strength or the willpower to change into a more comfortable position. But it hardly mattered, because a moment later he left his body and now hovered over it, looking down at the nauseated sack of flesh that was wearing his clothes. He was in the air. He was all bloodshot eyes in a hot realm of light.

The growling chant helped him steady himself in an aura of bright colors and scratchy sounds and an irregular echo of voices and birdsong. He heard the swish of a paper fan that he realized were a dragonfly’s wings. Below him was nausea and the dense meat of his body, and where he hovered was light and air, streaked with primary colors, a prism of heat, and his mother, Mildred Mayhew Steadman, just passing by, airborne and soaring toward a distant planet.

Not ecstasy, not rapture, he was buried in a deep dream of tranquillity and solemn contemplation that saturated his body and warmed his nerves. There passed before his eyes a complex and highly colored panorama. A sequence, too, like zones of light breaking over him. Heavy rain came first, or it could have been a waterfall. Then, with muscle spasms, the pricking of bright stars, each a different color. Then darkness, then a translucence. Then snakes twined on trees, or they could have been vines, but vines with eyes and mouths. And families of spiders clustered like primates, the biggest spider like a silverback, moving its mandibles and speaking — not words but sounds that Steadman could understand as reasonable, even wise. The spider raised itself and came so near it resolved itself into a shrewd black light.

The vagrant light formed itself into a face, and the brightest parts of it were eyes; the mouth was whiskered like a cat and partly hidden. Not a nose but a snout, and furry ears. It was the head of a lioness in an Egyptian head scarf with blank staring sightless eyes and narrow feline cheeks and a woman’s breasts, a real lioness, real breasts, with nipples like rosy spindles sucked smooth, on pale skin. The beautiful beast had wings — that was the first sound he had heard, the papery wings. The mouth could speak, it spoke to him, it did not move, yet it was insistent, calling him forward in a language he could translate.

He slipped forward, just his eyes, his mind, leaving his body below him in a piled-up shadow. The voice of the lioness beckoned him toward a light. The striped headdress of the lioness was friendly, the voice was soft, the nostrils were damp, the heavy breasts were a comfort, the distant light was a friend.

Even with a severe headache, Steadman was joyous with power and importance, translating the welcome in the vision of light, instantly knowing this language coming out of the cat face, its clucks and labials.

The growly voice said: Find the heart of the flower.

The solemn message was specific to him, spoken in a tone that implied that it knew everything about him — his few successes, all his failures, his anxieties, his weaknesses, his whole secret history. He was exposed. He was naked before this intelligence; and naked, humbled, known, he felt very small, less than childlike. He was a wisp of spirit — all his substance, the meat of his being, the coat of flesh that had always slowed him, had long since slipped away. He knew he was in two places.

In a green shadow, big pale bells tolled soundlessly, swinging softly on the limit of a low branch. One huge horn grew larger and began to emit white fuzzy notes of sloshing water, which Steadman recognized as the sound of the sea, breaking waves and surf growing louder, and the round bell-like mouth beckoning, a dark welcome that drew him on, for the bell resolved itself into a dainty flower, one he knew but could not name. The flower lifted to toll again, and he saw that the dark was pierced by a pinprick of light.

The risk in entering was that he would be swallowed and suffocated. Yet he never stopped staring at the tiny eyelet of brightness, like a single star of hope in the middle of all the murk, staring back at him from across a swamp of live rippling slime.

Find the heart. He knew he needed to enter the throat of the flower. He gave himself to the risk, remembering an odd phrase from somewhere in Borges, the unanimous night, and put his head forward and instantly knew he had penetrated a passage through the blossom of the angel’s trumpet.

He was first blinded and then bathed and reborn in light, rejoicing in a vision of glory that was all the more powerful for being enacted over a dark pit, surrounded by a head-high fence, of wet snorting pigs and knotted snakes. The pit was striped in a slickness of oil that oozed through smooth punctures, and when he looked back it was impossible for Steadman to tell the snakes from the oil trails.

But by thrusting his tormented head into a familiar flower blossom he had saved himself.

The triumphant revelation of the light and the color and the warning and the wings was that they could be trusted; they were all true. And now he could discern great smoking oil pits where the swamp had been, and he could smell scorched flesh, charred bone, burned hair — the smoldering stink of burned human hair was unmistakable. But this was the whole smoking world, where he was known and small and ruled over by a blind heavy-breasted lioness. This truth entered his consciousness and, remembering the specific injunction to go forward, that time was short, he felt pity for that pile of frail flesh beneath him that looked like a corpse, and he began to cry, sorrowing for himself, for the little time left to him.

His sobbing was indistinguishable from his nausea. He gagged and wept and woke with drool on his cheek, hearing Ava say, “You’re all right. Slade, can you hear me?”

Yes, he could hear, but he could not say so. He imagined speaking, he dreamed an articulate reply in which he described what he had seen. But obviously Ava could not understand, because she was still asking him whether he could hear her. All this happened in his vision, but when he managed to open his eyes to the dim light of the jungle day under all the discolored trees, and when he saw Ava’s face, her fear, he knew he had touched down and reentered his body again. After that, his body felt leaden and half alive, a corpse rising from the dead, more zombie than human.

“The others are over there,” Ava was saying. “That woman Janey freaked out, Wood is detoxing, Hack didn’t take any but he’s acting weird. Manfred wants to do it again.”

Steadman could not say anything. The vision was still within him, slowly slipping away, the light leaking.

“I decided not to take any,” Ava said. “I thought I might come in handy if anyone seriously choked. This is pretty heavy stuff.”

The old man and Nestor crept over to Steadman. And Steadman saw from the mottled sky behind the pavilion that it was now early morning.

“Good?” Nestor said. “You okay? You see some things?”

Steadman smiled and said, “A lion, a big cat. Beautiful, powerful, with”—and he made a plumping gesture with his hands to indicate a pair of breasts.

Nestor spoke to the old man, who all this time was staring into the middle distance with his damaged eyes.

“So, let’s boogie,” Hack said.

“Maybe better we stay here another day,” Nestor said. “The people who took the yajé are tired. This is a good village — good people, and safe. We go back tomorrow to Lago Agrio.”

“That’s going to muck up our schedule,” Janey said. But she spoke wearily, for the effects of the drug and the nausea were still evident in the slurring way she spoke.

“Shed-jewel,” Nestor said, imitating the woman’s way of saying the word.

“We’re supposed to be flying to the Galápagos the day after tomorrow,” Wood said.

“Oh, Jesus, it’s Kenya all over again,” Hack said. “Look, let them rest now and we can leave later — tonight.”

Hernán said, “Even the Secoya, they no go about in the night.”

Nestor said, “In the night here in Oriente, snakes sometimes drop down from the branches of the trees into the boat, and they don’t say ‘Excuse me.’”

There was no dispute after that, though there was more complaining, especially from Hack, who had not taken any ayahuasca and seemed stronger, and also from Sabra, who had been excluded and was angry. Wood and Janey looked weak; they were pale, they were quieter, as if convalescing.

Hernán said, “The Secoya say it is better not to take a bath today. If you do, you wash away the nice things you see and the pinta”

On the way back to the center of the village Nestor fell in with Steadman. He said, “The old man, Don Pablo, I told him what you said. He wants me to tell you that you did not see a lion. It was a puma, a tiger. Your dream was true. He knows — he had the same dream.”

9

THEY WERE NOT used to failure. They took it badly, as though it suggested the weakness and defeat of character flaws, so they denied it. They were not ashamed but angry and blaming. “It’s all Nestor’s fault,” Hack said. “What a loser.” And Janey chimed in, “It’s a bloody shambles”—she the one Steadman remembered looking at the village huts and saying, “Isn’t that fun, the way they gather and finish those good strong reeds in the roofs? I could use that in my arbors and garden thatch.” She was now saying, “We should never have come. The whole rotten thing’s a dog’s breakfast.”

The others agreed: Nestor, hired to provide the ayahuasca experience, had let them down. The trip had been uncomfortable, the blindfolds had been unnecessary and disorienting, the village hideous, the people objectionable and unfriendly, the shaman an impostor in a ragged feather crown and elf’s smock, never mind all his trinkets. Wood had almost been poisoned. Janey was still nauseated: “I’m feeling ever so precious.” Sabra was frightened by everything she heard, and Hack, who had been appalled at the memory of his having been terrified, kept saying how shocked he was. “You could have suffered liver damage! Kidney failure!” he shouted to Wood. “And this food is crap.”

“What’s in this stew?” Sabra asked.

“Probably the same as before. Turkey. Yuca.”

“Why not fish? There must be lots of fish in the river.”

“Mudfish. Eels. Manta rays. Snakes. You want snakes?”

Nestor was impassive, smoking with one hand, picking at his food with the other. He said, “Not pavo today. It is cuy. Guinea pig.”

The four Americans stopped eating. They dropped their spoons onto the food-splashed mat. They seemed beaten, their expensive jungle adventure clothes the more deranged and dirty-looking because they were so stylish, making the wearers like parodies of travel gone wrong. And the labels mocked them: Hack’s crumpled North Face cap bore the legend Never Stop Exploring, the back patches on Sabra’s jeans and Janey’s fanny pack and Wood’s windbreaker said, Trespassing Overland Gear.

“This isn’t what we were expecting,” Hack said. “My wife might be ill, and we’ve still got the Galapagos to do.”

“You expect us to sleep another night in this village?” Wood said.

“There is such an incredible pong here,” Janey said. “Even some of these flowers smell like stinky feet.”

“Maybe you could try holding your nose,” Nestor said. “You’ll be in a hotel room in Quito tomorrow.”

“I’m not talking tomorrow!” Wood howled. “I am talking now!” Instead of being alarmed by the shout, the villagers smiled and crept closer to look at the big red-faced man in short pants waving his arms and stamping, his knees dirty, his chin dripping, sweat patches darkening his shirt.

With the morning sunshine slanting through the trees the clearing was full of luminous silvery smoke from the cooking fires and seemed haunted rather than miserable, the people more spectral than destitute. Stepping off the canoe two days before, the visitors had seen the place as filthy yet picturesque. But that was when they had believed they were just passing through. Now they were mocked by their first impressions: picturesque meant grubby. The prospect of spending another night there made the village seem dangerous, without privacy, and as Janey Hackler pointed out, there was nowhere to sit.

“I just want to wash my face,” Sabra said. Then she walked a little way off, as though she might find a washbasin, towel, and soap dish, and after a few steps she screamed. “It’s a spider! Get it away!”

Wood hurried to help her—“Get back, Beetle!”—but when he raised his stick to beat the spider out of its hanging web, Steadman stepped behind him and deftly snatched the stick, whipping it out of his hand.

“Don’t kill it,” he said.

“What’s your fucking problem, man!”

“Just keep walking,” Steadman said, staring him down.

With a low chuckle of approval, Manfred said, “Yah. Is not necessary to kill.”

But the outburst soured the atmosphere further. The others were so humiliated they did not talk about their fear or their nausea from the ayahuasca. They blamed the village for being dirty and Nestor for not caring and said that they would be faxing the agency. That they wanted a refund. That they would ask for a meeting with the tourist board in Quito.

“I will make sure you get to Quito,” Nestor said, and they hated his insolence the more for its being enigmatic.

In all this Manfred Steiger, who might have been expected to complain, had only seemed more enthusiastic. Steadman admired the man’s animation and his pounce, the way he could fasten his attention on the minutest pedantic details of the plants and the ceremony. He was inexhaustibly nosy, as cheap people often are, and his parsimony made him impatient and a nagger; but when he did complain, his complaints were unconventional, and he never whined. He was boring, but in Manfred this was like a virtue, his dullness and his ponderous industry making him seem indestructible. He made notes, he consulted his plant book, he interrogated the Secoya boys — and was not deterred even when they smiled at him, not understanding a word he said.

He boasted that he never tipped anyone — didn’t believe in it, did not pay his way if he could avoid it. He always took second helpings of food, and sometimes thirds. Steadman had noticed that he had asked for a third helping of ayahuasca. Manfred often stuffed food in his pockets — an extra orange, the hard-boiled eggs, sugar cubes, bananas. After wolfing down noodles at Papallacta, he had snatched fritters and wrapped them and sneaked them into his pockets. When something was offered, Manfred’s empty hand was the first extended, and he always took more than his share, as though counting on the fact that everyone else would be too genteel to object. He was a successful predator, whose success depended on everyone else’s being unwary or hesitant or polite.

His eyes were always working; his fingers, too — always flexing. He had a scavenger’s restlessness. And now, while Steadman and Ava were listening to the objections of the others, who were shocked at the prospect of spending another night in the Secoya village, Manfred was making a circuit of the settlement, looking hungry and moving swiftly, his greedy eyes twitching busily in his jerking head.

On his return he nodded to Steadman. He gestured to him, indicating that he wanted to speak to him alone.

“You want to try something else?”

Ava said, “What did you find?”

But Manfred, who had shown no interest in Ava, did not turn to her. He kept his attention on Steadman, in the confiding and familiar way that unsettled him, as though Manfred assumed that Steadman was a friend, or if not an ally, then at least pliable. He walked a little distance, where a torn web dangled like a rag, and beckoned to Steadman.

“This is not yimsonweed,” he said when Steadman wandered over to him. Manfred was pinching a twig still bearing leaves and thin ragged flowers. He sniffed it and held it close to Steadman’s face. “Is a clone of Brugmansia. You see the leaves so shredded? The flowers — just strings? Its name is Methysticodendron. This is so rare, no one sees this but just a few lucky botanists. And maybe it did not exist before.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means datura — highly atrophied.”

“What happens with it?”

“I know a man, one German from Koblenz, who came through here. He was a chemist. He wanted to synthesize the alkaloids in this clone. They said, ‘Try it first.’ It was a scopolamine crystal. It blitzed him.”

“Ayahuasca blitzed me,” Steadman. “I’ve had all the visions I can handle.”

“No visions,” Manfred said. “I know a little about this one. They make tea from the leaves and stems. I read it in my book. Take the scrapings in an aqueous maceration.” Steadman suppressed the urge to smile at the way Manfred sucked at his saliva as he said this. “It is great. It change your head, it give you experiences. Only the question of money, but you have money.”

Steadman glanced at Nestor, who was implacable, picking his teeth. “So what’s the point?”

Manfred said to Nestor, “He wants to know,” but Nestor just shrugged — knowing yet noncommittal.

Steadman said, “Why are you telling me this, Manfred?”

“Don’t you see?” Ava said. She had walked over to listen with Nestor. “It’s something that costs money. He doesn’t want to pay.”

Even then, Manfred did not look at her. Instead, he shortened his neck and clenched his jaw, making it as compact as a clutch of mandibles. All his teeth bunched in his mouth, bulging against his lips.

Nestor smiled at Steadman, but his smile meant nothing except a challenge or a contradiction. He said, “In the Oriente you find out about these drinks after you drink them.”

“Experience,” Manfred said. “He knows.”

“Knowledge,” Nestor said. “Some people call that borrachero. Or toé. Ask Señor Perito. Mr. Hexpert.”

“What about the others?” Steadman asked.

He indicated the two couples, who, a little distance away, just out of earshot, were squatting on logs near the covered platform, looking disconsolate, wanting to leave, hating the smoke and the smells, dreading the night they would have to endure in the village.

“Rich tourists,” Manfred said.

The same casual belittling thought was in Steadman’s mind, and it so annoyed him to hear this irritating man put it in words, he told himself that the description might be wrong. One of them appeared to be enjoying his book. And, after all, these people were doing the same thing he was. Like them, hoping for an adventure, he had hooked up with Nestor for the ayahuasca. The truth was that they were all on the same drug tour.

“You are not like them. You are an intelligent man — a wise man. Also brave.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I know this. If you want to try it, we must do it now.”

Steadman said, “Nestor, who else has done this?”

“Not many people. No one lately. It doesn’t work on everyone, and it costs more. Five hundred each.”

Without saying yes, Steadman said, “Five is doable.”

“The Secoya don’t take credit cards,” Nestor said.

“Maybe you can loan me some money,” Manfred said.

Ava jarred him with a laugh. She said, “‘Loan’ never means loan.”

“I researched the information,” Manfred said, nagging again. “What about the time factor? I negotiated with the Indian. I am facilitating.”

Nestor said, “I’ll just let you guys argue it out.”

“See? I told you,” Ava said. “He doesn’t want to pay.”

As though to put an end to the argument, she walked away with Nestor, back to where the others were standing, looking futile.

“I know who you are,” Manfred said, putting his face into Steadman’s. “Ever since Lago Agrio.”

“You saw a passport at the hotel.”

“Yes, but even if I never see it, I know,” Manfred said. “You are different from those people. In the van I think, There is something about this man. And I see you writing notes.”

“What do you want?”

“I want your story for my book.”

“I’m not who you think I am, and I don’t have a story,” Steadman said, defying him and at the same time impressed that all this time Manfred knew who he was. “But even if I was and I had a story, why should I give it to you?”

He was not amazed by Manfred’s presumption — writers he regarded as headhunters. This was typical, the arrogant conceit of the writer who took everything and used what he wanted; the same presumption was often in his own mind. And Steadman was annoyed again, because the German was giving voice to one of his own ideas, an ambition that was still unfulfilled, and his saying it aloud — like “rich tourists”—made it seem oversimple but valid. Steadman did not know what he wanted to write, but whatever it was, he wanted it to be his own, original, unexpected story, not something a stranger could guess at. And that was precisely what Manfred had guessed.

“I want your story” was the sort of thing a dwarf with an evil insect’s face might say, bargaining with the harassed hero of a folktale.

Manfred was still holding the unusual plant with the strange torn-looking leaves and the even stranger blossoms. He dangled it, his eyes blazing, and said, “I have made the arrangement. Without me you cannot do it.” He breathed harshly through his mouth. “And this is something incredible.”

Whenever it became obvious that someone was brazenly trying to fob something off on him, Steadman felt his attention slacken and he lost interest. The more forceful and creative the sales pitch, the more Steadman resisted, seeing the salesman as an obvious buffoon. A persuasive sales pitch was no pitch at all, but rather something like a tremor that caused a distinct throb of aversion. The odd thing was that, knowing all this, seeing Manfred’s motive as transparent, and even sensing resistance rising in himself as Manfred grew shriller, he still wanted to know more. And he was fascinated by his own reaction — that he was allowing this grubby wheedling man to tempt him with the misshapen blossom on the twisted twig.

Ava seemed to understand that Steadman was listening. She walked from where Nestor was crouching and said, “If you give this German any money, you're nuts.

Manfred said, “Yah, I am just a German,” but his accent so overwhelmed him, his protest was a Teutonic yawp, which almost gagged him on the word Chermin. “When you see me, you see a German. Do you see a Jew when you see the woman Sabra? Oh, we are bad people. We persecuted the Jews. So we made our fate. We are the Jews now. You can say anything about a German and no one will schrei at you.”

Nestor was squatting on his haunches a little distance away, smoking a cigarette, listening to the rant and watching the negotiation. Several Secoya men with him were similarly squatting, hugging their knees, puffing pipes.

As though anticipating a probing question, Nestor called out, “It is not part of the tour package.” They looked at him and Nestor seemed to see another question in their faces, which he addressed. “So I am not responsible.”

This hint of risk attracted Steadman and, raising his eyes past Nestor, he saw the others, the ones who called themselves the Gang of Four, looking disconsolate on their log, like monkeys in the rain.

Steadman was indifferent to the bargain that Manfred was trying to strike. Instead, he saw a chance to rescue something from this trip — something to write about, something new, which would be part of his own story. And the fact that Ava was against it was another reason for him to go ahead with it. They were at an end. This decision to try the rarer drug was something final that would demonstrate this. It was more than a gesture; it was like a new aspect of separation, an act of defiance.

“Don’t listen to this cheeseball,” Ava said. “He comes down here with his big fat plant book and puts himself in charge, and you’re buying it?”

“Yup,” Steadman said, and gave Manfred two hundred and fifty dollars, counting the bills into his hand. Manfred objected with a movement of his mouth. Steadman added, “You get the rest when it’s over. But you can’t have my story.”

Ava said, “He’s the devil!”

But Steadman smiled. He was amused by Manfred’s meanness and manipulation, the transparency of it, especially when compared to the self-satisfied spending of the Americans and all their high-end gear — the contrast of Manfred’s beat-up Mephistos and rotting socks with the Americans’ expensive Trespassing Treads. Manfred’s shorts and all-purpose black sweater had tears and pills; Wood’s Trespassing jacket had seventeen pockets — so he kept saying — and Manfred had a greasy sack into which he stuffed everything, including the hard-boiled eggs he routinely sneaked.

Manfred’s sunglasses were misshapen; the Americans wore titanium TOGs and peaked caps with neck flaps, like Foreign Legionnaires. When there was a brief flutter of rain the Americans took out their Trespassing rain jackets and Trespassing ponchos and crouched in the drizzle and waited it out. Manfred was the picture of discomfort, with muddy legs, bruised fingers, dirty nails, clawed sweaty hair, and a mud-streaked cheek from his having rolled off his sleeping mat in a convulsion during his ayahuasca trance. And at his muddiest he was capable of insisting, “I have good connections in Washington and New York. I am working on a book. Many people know my name.”

“This watch is good for two hundred meters,” Hack had said.

“See this watch? I found it,” Manfred said.

Steadman liked Manfred’s recklessness and saw him as a natural ally, the improvisational traveler that he had once been. That, too, made Ava insecure.

“Do you know anything about this business?” she asked Nestor.

“Only that it is done outside the village,” Nestor said. “It is a shaman’s drink. Not like ayahuasca. This plant is new. It is rare. It is an accident. I saw a couple of people take it. Only one of them got a buzz.”

“What was the buzz?”

“That is the funny part. The guy just got quiet. He could not see. It was like we say, una ceguera, a blinding. Ugly to think about. But he knew everything that was going on — more than we knew.”

“What is it?”

“The one he showed you.”

“Angel’s trumpet?”

“The toé. Borrachero,” he said. “La venda de tigre.”

Manfred tapped his plant book and said, “Datura. Methysticodendron.”

“The tiger’s blindfold,” Nestor said. “He called it a crazy name. ‘A necessary poison.’”

“It is not very far,” the Secoya man said, pressing through the low bushes. His Spanish was as basic and approximate as Ava’s— “No muy lejo.”

“ ‘Not far’ always means it’s far,” Ava said.

She followed Steadman, knowing she wouldn’t take the drug — and certainly not on Manfred’s terms — but she felt protective toward Steadman. Her sympathy and patience were an unexpected reaction to their breakup, as strange as the sudden irruption of sex. But the desire to make sure he would be out of danger had nothing to do with their future; there was no question of compensation or reward. She had at last realized that they were each of them alone, and after the infatuation, the romance, the attachment had ended, and they were indifferent to each other’s power, underlying it all were frailty and friendship — mutual understanding.

But there was an awkwardness, too, the realization that they did not know each other completely. They had withheld something, they still had secrets. Those secrets exerted a subtle force, and their being blindfolded had made them unselfconscious enough to exploit the secrets, made them strangers again in the eyeless darkness of sensuality, less inhibited. For Ava eroticism was anonymous hunger—“I am stuffing myself,” she had told him with a greedy smile; never mind his pleasure.

She was free, no one’s wife, no one’s fiancee, no one’s girlfriend; just his friend — she could do as she wished. Being with Steadman was her choice. She wished for the time when she would be certain that he would be safe. Then she would be finished with him.

The Indian had been accurate; it wasn’t far. Beyond the bushes and split-bamboo stockade fence of the compound, another lashed-together pavilion stood a bit back from the riverbank and out of sight of the village.

“I guess we’re on our own now,” Steadman said.

Nestor had wanted to join them, but the Hacklers and the Wilmutts had demanded that he stay close to them, with Hernán, in case there was a problem. Nestor had mumbled “Niños" and stalked toward them, as though wishing them ill. Then he stood and ignored them and smoked, because they hated smokers and had not allowed it in the van.

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.”

10

THE 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.

The chugging of the outboard, the gurgle of the bow wave, the low voices of Hernán and Nestor, seemed to relax the others and embolden them to complain.

“I think my sponge bag was pinched,” Janey said. “Couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“My daypack’s all jumbled up,” Wood said.

“Anyone see my knife?” Hack asked.

Sabra said, “Do your blindfolds smell as bad as mine?”

“I don’t give a ruddy fuck anymore,” Janey said.

But they complained in better spirits, dismissively, knowing they were leaving. The van was waiting at Chiritza, where Nestor gathered the blindfolds. They arrived before noon at Lago Agrio and had lunch. After the simplicity of the Secoya village, the town looked especially vicious to Steadman now, for he saw — somehow knew — that the town of drug dealers and gunrunners and whorehouses had once, before the oil boom, been a sleepy village on a riverbank. They boarded the van and took the long road to Baeza, ate there in twilight, passed by Papallacta, and made the long climb to Quito in darkness. The village was not very far after all, yet it now seemed inaccessible.

Steadman wondered if he and the German had become allies in their sharing the datura.

“What did you see?” Steadman whispered as the van labored on the turns up the steep road.

Manfred shrugged and grunted and remained inert, frowning, saying nothing. Steadman smiled in a friendly way but was puzzled by the German’s lack of enthusiasm, and disappointed, too, because he wanted to talk about the drug, verify details and doubts.

The others, united in their failure and humiliation, had taken a disliking to Manfred—“Herr Mephistos,” because Manfred called attention to his sturdy shoes. Now Steadman knew the German did not share the bond of blindness — seeing with tiger’s eyes. On the journey back, Steadman replayed the experience, and his episode of blindness unspooled, returning him to the dazzle that overwhelmed the ayahuasca nausea. The drug was the route to a cave, but a lighted cave with many echoey chambers, and not darkness at all but a vision, another self, another life, another world. He had been alone there. It was like love — a consuming happiness and a careless wishing for more.

Steadman gathered that Manfred had seen nothing or very little, though Manfred was animated by the experience. Finding the drug and persuading Steadman to try it had given him status, set him apart, made him talkative. And Ava occupied a special place for Steadman, having cooperated and watched over him.

Already the Hacklers and the Wilmutts, timid and exposed, were detached from this trip and mentally on the next leg of their journey, the Galápagos. They had come for the ayahuasca and they had a story to take home, even if it was not the story they had planned. The Galápagos would be another story.

As they were climbing out of Tumbaco, ascending the pass that led them to a clouded ridgeline and the thin air of Quito, there was an incident.

Nestor had said, “Baños. Anyone need?”

“Pit stop!” Wood called out.

Hernán slowed the van and parked it by the side of the road, near a café, but before he opened the door a commotion began at the back of the vehicle.

“Do me a favor!” Hack shouted, for Manfred had reached up to the luggage rack, bumping the Hacklers’ backs. Janey said, “Do you mind!”

Manfred paid no attention to the protests. He dragged down his bulging duffel bag and unzipped it, taking out a large basket, not smooth like most of the ones at the curio stalls, but a bulky one of slender woven twigs still encased in their bark. From the wide opening of the basket he produced a human skull.

“My frent.”

The skull was dark and smooth, with the grain and shine of polished wood. The eye holes gaped at Ava, who stared back.

“Your friend has sustained serious trauma to the superciliary arch and the zygomatic bone. I think someone hit him in the eye with a blunt object,” Ava said. “I hope it wasn’t you.”

“I buy him in the village.”

Hack said, “And I got this,” and unsheathed a crudely made knife with a woven raffia handle. He pointed the blade at Manfred and set his jaw and said, “A shank. To replace the one they stole.”

Manfred said a German word and stuffed the skull back into the basket. Ava glanced at Steadman.

When they went outside to the café and the toilets, Steadman took Manfred aside and said, “That’s amazing.”

“Is old, the head. They call it tsantsa.”

“But what I want to know,” Steadman insisted, “is where you got the money for it.”

“Was my last money,” Manfred said, losing his fluency in his evasiveness. “Was why I require some loan from you.”

Manfred swallowed and something stuck in his gullet and made his eyes go out of focus, as they had glazed over when he had seen Hack’s knife blade pointing at him.

Ava said, “A loan is something you pay back.”

Manfred had a bristly face and spiky hair. He had been sleeping in the van, his mouth gaping, his hands gripping his knees. Steadman admired him for the way he slept so easily, despised him for the way he took advantage, hogging a whole seat to sleep on. Steadman, who thought of himself as thin-skinned, easily offended by slights and criticism or even hearty encouragement—“When are you going to write another book?”—was fascinated by someone who did not care how much he was disliked. More than that, Manfred seemed to be energized at being singled out by other people’s contempt.

Ava said, “He wants his money now.”

Manfred did not turn to her, but he laughed, liking the aggression. “Ha! I don’t have!”

This took place at a lookout point on the road, next to the café. A dog lay by the roadside in the dirt, probably sleeping but so skinny it was flat enough to be dead. The others who had used the baño —“It’s just a hole in the ground, like Bhutan”—were now adjusting their clothes and squinting and sidling back to the van. They looked defeated. This return trip was a form of retreat, and their rumpled expedition gear made them seem greater failures, because the clothing was a symbol of their ambition and their conceit.

“You got Mister Bones,” Steadman said.

“Is just a memory. A curio, so to say.”

Steadman looked up to see Nestor smiling at their quarrel. He seemed impressed by Ava’s presence, her tenacity, for she was smaller than Manfred but more aggressive than Steadman. With her as a bystander, the encounter seemed a more serious dispute.

Nestor said, “Who is winning, America or Germany?”

“I am American,” Manfred said, so sharply the dog in the road jackknifed and raised its head to listen.

Nestor glared at him and said, “ Usted es una persona aprovechada.”

Steadman said to Nestor, “What would an Ecuadorian customs inspector say if he saw a human skull in someone’s luggage?”

“They like it,” Nestor said. “They see them sometimes. They are very happy.”

Manfred looked puzzled, and Steadman smiled, wondering what was to come.

“Because then they ask you for a dádiva, a fat soborno, a bribe.” Nestor was big and confident and took his time, using his cigarette for drama and delay. “And you say yes. And you are happy, too, because they are so dishonest.”

“You sink so.”

“Yes. Because if they are honest, they do not ask for a bribe. They arrest you for breaking the law. If you ever see an Ecuador jail you know how lucky you are that they ask you for a bribe.”

After that, they rode in silence up the escarpment to Quito. Steadman looked out the side window, seeing nothing, not even his reflected face, but only remembering his episode of blindness, the taste of the datura, and wishing he could remember more. He had his story, he had found peace, he was bringing something back. He knew he was selfish in wanting more, for his lingering feeling of the experience was like desire: the infatuation that had once made him obsessive with Ava, needing her constantly, his saying “I believe in pheromones — you have them,” and her replying “You’re cunt-struck. I like it.”

Manfred, he could tell, kept wanting to start a conversation, so he turned away and held Ava’s hand and imagined her blindfolded again.

In Quito, after the others had taken their bags and gone with Nestor into their hotel lobby, Manfred said, “I have no money.”

“So I’ll take something else.”

The German frowned and pulled on his nose. He said, “You think I don’t know you, but I read your book. When I read it I say to myself, ‘If I can write a book like that I will be so happy.’ That is why I want your story for my book. You are a great writer — better than me. You don’t need money.”

“This guy is just so incredibly smooth,” Ava said, and Manfred scowled at her.

“He heard what Nestor said. When he goes through customs he’s going to have a problem with his skull. I’ll make sure.”

Manfred smiled grimly, seeming to expect this as part of the negotiation. He wasn’t flustered, he was nodding — calculating. He said, “Okay.

I pay you. Tomorrow.”

“You heard him, honey.”

They were dropped at the Hotel Colon. They bathed, they drank beer from the minibar, and then, exhausted, they lay apart on the big bed.

Ava said, “What was it like?”

Steadman knew what she was asking, but he had no words for it. And he did not want to say that he was thinking how the trouble with the darkness here and everywhere was that it was not dark enough. The blindness he had known in the village just yesterday was so seamlessly black it was beyond eyesight, beyond vision, and really not the shadow he thought of as darkness, but a void of such profound blackness it was also its opposite, a brilliant light that endowed him with power.

In the morning he looked for Manfred. He was determined that Manfred would not get away without paying him back. He saw Nestor in the lobby with Hernán, and even before Steadman spoke, Nestor pointed with a knowing smirk toward the coffee shop.

Manfred was in a corner reading the Miami Herald. Steadman sat down opposite him at the same small table.

“Five hundred bucks,” Steadman said.

“Is not even much money,” Manfred said.

“But it’s mine.”

Manfred said, “The datura. You liked it?”

Steadman did not want to be drawn into replying; the experience had been private. He was annoyed by Manfred’s bringing it up, especially since Manfred had not responded to the drug, and had only watched while Steadman came awake, his face glowing. He had not even wanted to talk about the experience.

“I give you some datura. You can use it, make it like tea. Better than money.”

Steadman tried to disguise his interest in the proposition, yet he saw Manfred smile, for Manfred knew he had succeeded in his pitch. More of the drug was exactly what Steadman wanted.

“You brought some back?”

Manfred tugged at the cloth bag at his feet. He opened it for Steadman, who saw the skull resting in the big basket, empty eye sockets, splintered nose bone, toothy jaw.

“All I see is a skull.”

“You don’t see the basket?”

The basket, so big and so obvious as to be scarcely visible, lay on its side, like a badly made and fat-bellied clothes hamper.

“The basket is datura — best kind. Five kilos of it. They make it from the flower stems. Just a small amount boiled into tea is what you took in the village. This basket is all Methysticodendron, pure drug, but not a drug that anyone knows — not described in any official book. Is what I tell you. Is a clone of Brugmansia.” He put his fingers to the lip of it and a small pinch of bark broke free. This crumbly fragment he showed Steadman. He said, “I know you want it. And maybe someday you will tell me what you see.”

“Sure I will. How much for the basket?”

Manfred lowered his head and said, “Two sousand.”

“Fifteen hundred. You already owe me five. I’ll give you a grand.” Steadman began counting the fifty-dollar bills.

They settled on seventeen hundred, and Steadman had to restrain himself. He would have paid much more. The agreement was that Nestor would hold the money. After Steadman had tested the datura tea and agreed, the money would be handed over. Nestor complained that he was being kept in the dark—“What’s all this money for?”—but Steadman suspected that he knew exactly the nature of the transaction.

Then, narrowing his conspiratorial eyes, and with a movement of solemn intrigue — Steadman smiled at how truthful Manfred was in his tactlessness — Manfred eased him away from the others.

“You will like the datura, and sometime”—Manfred raised his arms to take in everything—“we will come back to Quito, and back here, yah? Just the both of us. Down the river, to the village. We will drink again. We will have fissions.” Manfred fastened his gaze on Steadman’s eyes. “You will give me your story.”

Back to Quito? Down the river? To the village? Visions? He smiled at Manfred, and Manfred had never looked hairier or more spider-like.

“Sure,” Steadman said.

Upstairs, Ava looked at him with the same who-are-you? expression Steadman had seen on her face in the village. Noticing the big bag in his hand that contained the basket, she knew that the matter had been settled with Manfred. She could tell that Steadman was satisfied — more than satisfied: he was so happy he hardly acknowledged her.

She said, “Nestor wants to give a farewell party for everyone tonight. His way of thanking us.”

Steadman did not respond. He was examining the Indian basket, scraping at it with his fingernail. Loosely woven of thick, unpeeled, shaggy twigs, some of them splitting, it looked like a crude oversized version of many of the baskets he had seen in the curio markets in Quito.

Ava came back to her old question. “What is it? What did you see?”

If he told her that the drug had made him blind, she would have been misled, would never have understood, for “blind” was the wrong word. “I have seen among the flowers, tigers in the skins of men.”

“You’re just being evasive,” she said, which was true. “You’ve hardly said anything this whole trip.”

That was true, too. No one had noticed how silent Steadman had been. That was not unusual. Talkers never noticed; only listeners tended to be aware of the back-and-forth of discussion. Steadman had passively encouraged the others to talk by not appearing to listen.

Ava turned away, went to the window, muttered something. He knew she was not looking at anything, just gazing at empty space, the way she had six days before when he had blindfolded her and made love to her. Maybe she felt that had been a charade and was now feeling futile, probably thinking: What a waste, all this time and trouble, what have we learned?

Apart from Manfred, who in his clumsiness appeared to be the shrewdest one of all, Steadman knew the others were dispirited, impatient to go elsewhere, needing more travel. They were talking about the creatures they would see in the Galapagos. “Big goofy turtles.” They had not spoken about the ayahuasca. They were like children who had smoked their first cigar and gotten sick and said, “Never again.” They had learned nothing.

Ava was still facing the window. She was at her prettiest with the light behind her. Possessing the Indian basket filled Steadman with confidence. He only needed a way to tell her. He saw that he had a future, not earnest hope but the certain knowledge of inspired work.

11

NESTOR LEFT A NOTE for them at the Colón saying that he had organized the farewell party in a private room in a hotel restaurant, and el precio incluye todo — as though emphasizing that the party was included as part of the tour price would tempt them to attend. Ava laughed and crumpled the note and tossed it aside, but Steadman picked it up and smoothed it. He studied the map printed on the back, then folded it and put it into his pocket.

Ava said, “You seriously want to go to this thing?”

“No choice.”

The hotel was in the Mariscal Sucre district, within walking distance of the Colon, down the wide avenue called Amazonas, the narrow side streets leading off it full of strollers and youthful tourists on this chilly November night. No masks, no finery, no processions: the fiesta had ended. What costumed people they saw were Indians from the mountain villages, wearing shawls and beads and woolen leggings, selling woven mats and brightly colored rugs. Most of the shops on the avenue were shut, but Ava remarked that they catered to visitors who wanted jungle tours and Panama hats and leather jackets and raffia bags. The Ecuador experience.

“People like us,” Steadman said.

Seeing them approach, Nestor waved from the foyer of the restaurant. Steadman could tell from the hostility that hung over them like the stink from cold ashes that it would not be a friendly party but an absolute farewell, something verging on the funereal, but a ritual of empty gestures, as though they were burying a stranger. From the outset no one made eye contact. Manfred had already gone inside the restaurant and taken his place at the table and started drinking.

“This kind of goodbye party, we call it a despedida,” Nestor explained.

Janey's greeting to Steadman was “We didn’t reckon you’d pitch up.”

“The man of mystery,” Hack said.

Steadman had watched Hack drinking from an elegant silver pocket flask, and Steadman’s smile was his usual misleadingly mild one, his silence defiant and provocative.

“We have this feeling you think you’re too good for us,” Wood said.

“Is that the mystery?” Ava asked.

“The mystery is that he doesn’t say anything,” Hack said, and it really was like a chorus, this quartet of travelers. “The mystery is that we give a shit.”

Ava said to Nestor, “We were looking forward to your despedida.”

Steadman was still smiling. He knew that his smile was an irritant and that his silence and his gaze had worn them down.

“What is it about this guy?” Hack said, but it was less a question than an unfinished statement.

The hotel restaurant, Papagayo, had an Amazonian Indian theme — jungle foliage and macaws in cages and straw mats and even an assortment of oversized baskets that resembled the one that Manfred had sold Steadman. The floor show promised “folklore.” Nestor obviously chose the place because it was attached to the hotel where the Hacklers and Wilmutts were staying, as some sort of barter arrangement.

The couples had changed their style of clothes, the women now in white shirts and loose slacks and sandals: they were the catalogue models again, and Steadman saw with dismay that they were loyal to the Trespassing logo. The men wore new Panama hats and safari jackets and freshly pressed cargo pants. They had conquered the jungle. They seemed fashionable, calmer, relieved; they had put their humiliation and disappointment behind them. Their adventure was over. It would never be repeated. They had their stories, their photographs, and on entering the restaurant each of them wore a weary look of triumph.

When Steadman sat down at the long table, they lost their confidence and became furtive again, uneasy and resentful, for this man was still a stranger to them. He had mentioned nothing of his experience, not a single word to them in all the days they had spent together. They had never learned his name. He was like a man who had vanished in a forest and reappeared after a long time without telling anyone what he had seen.

“Thanks for sharing,” Wood had said in the van on the way back, in an attempt to provoke him.

Sarcasm was their way of showing frustration. Steadman’s silences maddened them, especially as their own talking revealed them as querulous and ashamed, like naked people in the presence of a man in a tuxedo. In their attempt to tease him they were mocking themselves and feeling foolish.

“Aguardiente,” Manfred said, sipping his glass of clear liquid.

“How about you?” Hack said to Ava. “Have a drink.”

Ava felt that she too was being tested, for every apparent expression of politeness from them was like a challenge.

At the head of the table, Nestor ordered the dishes, saying, “This a specialty of Esmeraldas,” and “The people in Riobamba make this chicken seco — like a stew but dry, seco de gallina,” and “My mother, from Guayaquil, prepares the fish like this.”

Even so, no one ate much. The altitude killed their appetite, they said. Only Manfred ate and drank with any gusto, and he had seconds. Steadman thought, He is silent only because his mouth is full of food.

While they picked at dessert (“I’d call this iced fancy a kind of macaroon,” Janey said), Nestor made a short speech, thanking them for visiting his homeland of Ecuador and for being such great travelers.

“And maybe better not say much about where we went and what things we did.” He leaned forward to confide in them. “Is secreto. Is escondido.”

And he put his finger to his lips. Conferring with the waiter, he quietly settled the bill, then scattered his business cards on the table. He backed away smiling, looking courtly, giving a little salute, leaving them to themselves and causing, by his departure, a conspicuous void that was like a reproach to the ones who remained there.

“He hates us,” Wood said. “Maybe because we didn’t tip him.”

“Because the expedition sucked,” Hack said. “Like, who would we tell?”

“Those natives in that scruffy village were cheeky monkeys,” Janey said.

Hack went on, “Nestor was all attitude. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Let’s get out of here.”

But he remained seated, drinking from a large glass, a green concoction, one of the local drinks the restaurant offered, canelazo.

“Rocket fuel,” Hack said. He was drunk, though he had always seemed that way to Steadman because of his anger and loudness, his air of reckless violence; even his posture was like a drunken threat.

Wood said to Ava and Steadman, “Want to come upstairs for a drink?”

He didn’t mean it — she knew that. His inverted politeness was not an invitation but a challenge. Out of a hostile reflex of false pleasantry, they were being asked to have a drink precisely because Wood and the others, who didn’t really want to have a drink with them, disliked them.

“Just one,” Ava said, accepting because she disliked them in turn. It was as though each were trying to expose the other. Had Ava and Steadman refused, their dislike would have been obvious.

Wood said to Manfred — more hostile ritual—“What about you?”

“Fámonos,” Manfred said, wiping his mouth.

In the elevator, Hack turned to a stranger, a man in a track suit, obviously an American hotel guest returning from jogging, and said, “You American? Us too. Bay Area. Marshall Hackler,” and stuck out his hand. “We just came from the Oriente. Lago Agrio? Aguarico River? We were staying in an Indian village. We took this psychedelic drug, no shit.”

“Ayahuasca,” Wood said. “I got ripped.”

“It was all ghastly,” Janey said.

“I’m not even supposed to be telling you this, but my friends will back me up. Anyway, the whole thing sucked.”

“No way.”

The man feigned interest, but seemed embarrassed to be at such close quarters with this loud man and this group of seemingly drunken people who filled the elevator. He pressed his lips together and said nothing more. He watched the lighted floor numbers change, and when the warning bell rang and the elevator stopped at his floor, he quickly squeezed past Hack, who was still talking.

“This isn’t a country, it’s a theme park. It should be turned over to a private company. Disney could run it.”

“You said that in Kenya,” Sabra said as the doors hissed shut again. Conversation for them, Steadman saw, was returning again and again to a subject and harping in monotonous repetition on trivialities. He had heard this same banter several times already, in the van, at Lago Agrio, at Papallacta, at the village.

“Kenya’s a fucking zoo,” Hack said. “India’s a total dump. China sucks big-time. Egypt’s all ragheads. Japan’s a parking lot. Want a sex tour? Go to Thailand. Want to get robbed by a Gypsy? Go to Italy. Want a truly shitty experience among dirtbags? Come here.”

“Do shut up, darling, you’re sounding bolshie and blimpish,” Janey said.

“Make them viable. Put some American CEOs in charge. Run these Third World countries like corporations,” Wood said.

“They got my hunting knife,” Hack said. His eyes went small and turned more mean than rueful. He was making a fist with one hand, as though clutching the memory of the knife. “It was a real shank, cut from a solid block of steel.”

“My posh Harrods binoculars were pinched,” Janey said.

“I lost some cash and traveler’s checks, but I’ll get the checks replaced,” Wood said. “This country is full of kleptos.”

The floor bell rang again, the elevator doors hissed apart, Hack led the way to the room — adjoining rooms, as it turned out, a pair of deluxe ones linked by a large, shared sitting room. This one had a sofa and armchairs and a wide-screen television, and on the coffee table were magazines and newspapers and Sabra’s copy of Trespassing. Manfred began asking aloud in a disapproving way what this arrangement had cost them and had they requested it beforehand? From the window they could see Pichincha, the twinkling lights from the mass of huts on its slope.

“You always travel together?” Ava asked, trying a harmless question because they seemed agitated.

Janey said, “Indeed, yes. We’re the Gang of Four. Surely you saw the printing on our singlets?”

“I thought those T-shirts had something to do with China,” Ava said.

“Have a drink,” Hack said to Steadman.

“He doesn’t drink anymore, really.”

“You sound like his mother.”

They had been cowed, uncomfortable, and defensive in the hot muddy village, but in the elevator and here in their tidy hotel room they were aggressive and rude, as though trying to erase the memory of that failure, or perhaps simply because they were leaving and had nothing to lose.

“I am ever so keen on our next trip,” Janey said. “Tibet. We found a way of going there without going into grotty old China. You just charter a plane in Nepal.”

Manfred said, “Maybe I come along. I was there. I wrote some things about the Schamanismus in Nepal. I know some important people, healers in Kathmandhu.”

Steadman just listened. The lights dazzled him, his ears rang from the talk, he felt anxious, he hated seeing his book in the room. He noticed Hack leering at Sabra, he heard Wood explaining how you would go about running a country like a business. Janey sat, knees together, watching Manfred drink from a bottle of aguardiente he had swiped from the restaurant table. Steadman sensed a great emptiness in the room — after all, it was just a hotel room in which they were taking their turn as guests. But the vibrations of an unspoken drama among the people present animated his imagination, and he saw more than he had words for, like a nameless odor or the echoes of strange rituals.

He watched and waited for a silence, and then filled it as conspicuously as he could, saying, “Take me home, Mother.”

“No one’s going anywhere,” Hack said. “You came here for a drink. You’ve got to drink something first.”

Steadman said, “You don’t want me here, really.”

Instead of denying this or protesting, they stared.

“Just stay,” Hack said. “And drink something.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Hack turned his back on Steadman and said, “This guy is calling me a liar.”

“You want the truth?”

Steadman was seated, facing them all, and the way he fixed his eyes on them, the tone he used in phrasing this question — his smile, his seriousness, his poise — silenced the room.

He asked for some water. Janey poured some from a hotel bottle of mineral water and handed him the glass. Steadman did not drink immediately. He took a small bottle of dark liquid from his pocket.

“Is the datura,” Manfred said, as Steadman poured some into his glass and mixed it with a swizzle stick, muddying the water until it was the color of tea, with bits of broken and shredded stems floating on its surface.

This whole process was so pedestrian, so like someone taking a routine dose of medicine, the interest in the room shifted away from him and a buzz of voices resumed. Satisfied that they had persuaded Steadman and Ava to stay, the others felt they had won, so they ignored them, and it seemed they had forgotten Steadman’s pointed question.

They expect you to be counterintuitive, Sabra was saying.

It’s a good thing Big Oil is taking over crappy little countries like this, Hack was saying.

The redemptive thing about debt, Wood was saying.

I don’t fancy being a whole-hogger anymore, Janey was saying. I am done. Done and dusted.

And only Ava and Manfred watched Steadman drink the tall glass of dark water — Ava with a puzzled smile, Manfred with recognition and a kind of envious joy that looked like hunger.

In the glow that was spreading through his body like warmth, Steadman became aware of an enlargement of his physical being — a bigness — of shadows slipping into him, separating his mind from his body, his nerves from his flesh. Something prismatic in his vision began this process of separation, too. It was what he had felt in the village: a sense of fragile surfaces. Everything he saw had an absurd transparency, but what lay beneath it was unexpected, like the spider he had seen in the village, rising from the bottom of his cup after he had emptied it of the liquid, and strangest of all, not a drowned spider, but a large one frisky with intelligence, on lively legs.

Steadman was so engrossed he had stopped pretending to smile at what he saw. The room was transformed; the people in it, too. The words they used were visible to him. They had weight and density and texture; understanding their substance, he knew their history. He could examine each one, and he was astonished at their deception, for he was able to study them and translate them, and each one seemed to contradict itself absolutely, as love meant hate, and black white, and joy sorrow. “I mean it” was its opposite, insincerity, the proof of a lie.

The room was much bigger now, and it held many things that had not been visible to him before. The ceiling was high, the sound from outside very loud, and even the smallest murmuring voice was audible to him.

He was able to reason that if a dream lacks logic and connectedness, is random and puzzling, it was the opposite of a dream, and was wonderful for its coherence. The version he saw of this room he took to be the truth. These people existed in their essence. It was no dream for him — they inhabited a dream from which he had woken.

Next to him, Manfred had been gabbling to Ava and had not noticed that Ava’s attention was fixed on Steadman.

“My father teach me how to paddle a boat,” Manfred was saying.

“Your father was a strange and violent man,” Steadman said. He had no idea why he said this or what he was going to say next, but the words kept coming. “He was a soldier. You hated him. But it’s a terrible story.”

“Blimey,” Janey said, for she had been on the periphery of this conversation and saw Manfred’s face redden as though from a choking fit.

Steadman said, “Your father was a Nazi.”

“That’s not news, ducky. The Huns were all Nazis,” Janey said, looking at Manfred eagerly — something horrible and gloating on her big plain face and the way her tongue was clamped between her teeth in her eagerness to know more. Sensing a secret about to be revealed, she wore an expression like lechery.

Manfred said, “My father was not healthy. He was wrong in the head.”

“He was in the SS.”

“Not the SS, but the SA, the Sturm Abteilung. But so what? Why blame me for my father?”

Protesting, saying vaht and fazzer and uttering the German words, attempting defiance, he sounded weak and emotional.

“He was captured,” Steadman said. “He was in a prison camp.”

“In Russia, working in a labor camp for the mines,” Manfred said, “until the mid-fifties. Ten years after the war was over, the Russians released him. You know nothing of this. It was hard for us!”

“That wasn’t the end,” Steadman said. “After he got sent home he couldn’t adjust.”

Manfred said, “You don’t know me! How can you know this?”

Now, with Manfred’s clamor, the whole room was watching.

“And he killed himself,” Steadman said.

“Why are you bringing this up? Can’t you see he’s upset?” Sabra said. “We were supposed to be having a drink for our despedida.”

“You asked for the truth,” Steadman said. “Manfred hates his father. He hates all fathers. He hates all authority.”

“And that doesn’t matter either.”

“His hatred has made him contemptuous. He hates you all. He is positively subversive.”

Manfred stared at Steadman with glistening eyes and sour insolence as the others waited for more.

“He’s a thief.”

“This is a lie,” Manfred said. “I am important in my country. I know the biggest scientists. I am a writer on drugs and ethnobotany. I am a journalist in the States. Americans know my name.”

Steadman ignored him and said calmly, “Those thefts you attributed to the Indians in the village and the people in the hotel. Your binoculars, your knife, your traveler’s checks — that was Manfred. He stole something from each of us.”

Janey said, “Is this true, Manfred?”

“Is a lie.”

But just that denial and the way he swallowed and sulked seemed the clearest proof of his guilt.

“I’m not missing anything,” Sabra said.

“He knows your Social Security number,” Steadman said.

He surprised himself with his own fluency, for he said these things without being aware of knowing them. And time was irrelevant, for nothing was hidden and he seemed to have access to the past in perfect recall. He knew everything that he had seen, and beneath each surface, as though in a state of controlled ecstasy — Sabra fussing in her wallet and Manfred staring hard at her clump of cards, the Social Security card on top, giving her full name and number.

“He memorized your numbers. He has one of your American Express card numbers too, but there’s a credit limit,” Steadman said. “He has all your details. He can do a lot with them. Ever hear of identity theft? He can open an account in your name. He can access more of your information on the Internet. He can get a lot of money out of you long before you realize it. That’s why he’s leaving tomorrow. By the time you get back to the States, your cards will be maxed out.”

The room was silent except for the coarse scraping sound of Manfred’s breathing through his nose.

“I’m going to ask the hotel to go through his room,” Hack said. “If they find my knife and Janey’s binoculars, I’m calling the police.”

“Go ahead, look,” Manfred said, with energy the others took to be bluff. But he stood up and seemed to be edging toward the door, as if to prevent anyone from leaving.

“You look worried, Herr Mephistos,” Wood said.

Hack said to Steadman in a slurry drunken way, matey, slightly cockeyed, “I don’t know how you knew this, but if you can prove any of it, there’s something in it for you.”

Steadman said, “Maybe it’s better not to look for the things that Manfred stole. I mean, what he said is true — he has quite a lot of influence.”

“He’s a thief. You said so.”

“You’re a thief, too,” Steadman said.

Ava said, “Darling, please,” as Hack bristled, stepping back, looking as though he were about to take a swing at Steadman, who was still seated impassively in an armchair. He stared straight ahead, looking through Hack’s face.

“You’ve been sleeping with Sabra,” Steadman said.

Sabra gasped and stood up and denied it. Wood went close to her and said, “Beetle?”

Janey started to cry, saying, “I knew it!”

Hack made a dive for Steadman, but was body-checked by Manfred, who simply stepped into his path and tipped the lunging man aside. With this new revelation, Manfred was attentive to Steadman, who seemed to know everything.

“It’s probably been going on for years,” Steadman said. “For all the time you people have been taking trips together. Maybe it’s the reason you’ve been taking the trips.”

“Get this guy out of here before I fucking kill him,” Hack said.

Wood said, “If there’s any truth in this, Hack, I’ll take you apart.”

“What a muggins I’ve been,” Janey said, sobbing.

Hack said, “Can’t you see he’s trying to start trouble?”

“But you’re a cheat too,” Steadman said to Wood. “You told me about your business, but your figures don’t add up. That can only mean that when you paid off all your partners you were cooking the books so you could sell the company for an inflated price. That’s just one instance. You are incapable of telling the truth. Every time you say a number, it’s false. That book you claimed you wrote was written by some students you hired and ripped off.”

“Bullshit,” Wood said.

“All you’ve ever done is screw people and play with a stacked deck,” Steadman said. “So it’s kind of appropriate that your wife is a liar too.” Sabra said, “No, Wood, it’s not true. Don’t believe him.”

But her protests were drowned out by Janey, who had slumped to a sitting position on the floor and was sobbing loudly like a big sorrowing child.

“This is the saddest one of all,” Steadman said, still facing forward, speaking in a confident monotone. “Poor little Londoner, lost in America. She’s having a nervous breakdown and doesn’t even know it. Her husband is fucking her best friend. Both of them are lying to her. She thinks she’s going crazy.”

Janey was murmuring “No, no, no.” Wood was glaring at Hack. Sabra’s eyes were blazing. Manfred was smiling at the confusion, looking vindicated, and he loomed over Steadman like a protector.

Hack said to Ava, “If you don’t get your boyfriend out of here I will fucking destroy him.”

After all these revelations, spoken with assurance, Steadman rose to go and staggered slightly. Now grasping absently for something to help steady him, he seemed uncertain. He groped forward, seeing a different room, and then hearing Ava—“This way,” she said — he stumbled and fell.

“What’s with him?”

“He’s blind,” Manfred said, almost in triumph, as though Steadman belonged to him. “He can see nossing.”

Sabra looked at Steadman with wonderment, searching his eyes. She moved her hand back and forth before his face. Steadman did not blink. “I was right,” she said in a hollow voice. “He doesn’t know anything.”

Ava went to him and helped him up. Steadman whispered with feeling, “I can’t live without you.”

He had never needed her more. He felt woeful, as though lost on a muddy star.