Blinding Light

1

THERE WAS SO LITTLE he could tell of the journey. Dark — so dark it was not travel at all. He saw nothing, he heard hardly anything, he was numb with despair. It was a stunned and fatal fall through a tube of air-softened space, like an endless burial, a vertical night drop into a narrow and bottomless hole. He had surrendered himself to Manfred and the trip, as though to be sacrificed. He was prodded by Manfred’s ignorant fingers, and Manfred’s meddling voice misled him. He was soaked in darkness, he was hardly human, just a hostage, dying in stages.

The passing scene was indecipherable, the dark places meant nothing but delays — the wait in Boston, the change of planes in Miami, the long flight to Quito. They offered nothing to remember. The blindfold mask he had once worn was now his own face.

Before he left the Vineyard, Ava had said, “Are you okay?”

Doing her duty, Ava was more efficient, because she was out of love. But her nurse-like kindness and unselfish attention mattered more to him than her exhausting passion. Her awkwardness was like the clumsy shame of atonement. As an invalid, he understood.

Terrible for her, he thought: the healer who can’t help, sensing that she had failed him. He knew very little now, but one thing was certain — standing there trying to console him, she was not alone. Her new lover was with her and she was happy.

She had repeated her question.

“No,” he said. “Not okay at all.”

A whisper leaked through his mind, saying Find the heart of the flower.

And with that he left with Manfred, a man he despised, to return to Ecuador to try to undo everything that had been done: to rid himself of the first journey, and the drug, and his story, seeking to be healed. The long slow trip unfolded in darkness. He forgot each thing as soon as it passed. Manfred never stopped saying “Money.” He was a noisy eater and he ate constantly, chewing, swallowing, smacking his jaws.

After they arrived in Quito, Steadman could not say if the trip had taken a day or a week, or whether it was true they had arrived. Manfreds gabbling was no proof of it. Steadman was still falling, but through thinner air, and he thought, All cities are dreadful in the dark. The hotel room was a tomb in which he lay mummified, waiting for Manfred’s knock.

Another plane, a narrower seat, a bumpy landing. Manfred said “Lago,” and helped him down the stairs.

He was clasped by a big man, and then Nestor’s voice: “Sorry.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“That’s good. You’re humble. That will help.” Then he spoke to Manfred. “Hola, Alemán.”

Another night in a hotel room, this one stifling, Manfred next door watching soccer on television.

The boat trip nauseated him, the fumes from the chugging engine, the tipping seat, the empty reassurances of “Not far.”

“They believe the river is a snake,” Manfred said.

Nestor said, “You don’t believe it?”

The moment he said that, Steadman felt the boat muscled from beneath by the coils of a snake.

Not long after that, on one reach of the river, they were spun in the outer eddy of a whirlpool. When they stopped circling and the gurgle of the eddy ceased in a softer bubbling, the engine stopped, too. Steadman heard the chatter of villagers, the quacking tribal welcome, the sterner voice of Nestor negotiating, speaking Secoya. The incomprehensible language in the darkness completed Steadman’s sense of being nowhere.

That night he lay on the platform, Manfred not far off, first eating in his loud snaffling way and then snoring. When he woke Manfred was talking to Nestor, making demands. He was uneasy here, just another visitor, an ineffectual consultant among specialists.

How many days passed? Steadman asked himself, but couldn’t say for sure. He woke, he napped, he had nothing to do. He did not need to know anything except that he was where he wanted to be. Here his sickness had a name. Hope here was a smell of vegetation and decay, the nagging of birds, the ripsawing of insects, the giggling of children, and most of all the muddy surge of the river snaking past, sucking at the hollows of the soft embankment; hope in the dusty stink of pollen, hope in the foul wood smoke, hope in the human odors of the village, hope in Manfred, the man he hated.

Cross-legged on the platform, he smelled what he could not see: the smoke, the river, the rotting forest. He was calm; as long as the shaman was not here, he had not failed. He knew why he was here. He belonged here.

Manfred was impatient. Something in the way he ate, in the very way the man breathed beside him, conveyed to Steadman that he was feeling helpless and upset. He asked, “Where is the curandero?”

“The messenger has been sent. But Don Pablo is afraid, of course,” Nestor said. “He might not come.”

So it was Don Pablo who was to perform the healing.

“To make you well he must become ill. He was very sick once. That was how he became a pajé. A man can only have that power after he has been cured of a bad illness. It is the only way. The sick man becomes a healer. Maybe our friend here will be a healer.”

Steadman heard in Manfred’s mutter an objection to this, not specific words but a sound that meant “It will never happen.”

Nestor said, “And you will have to drink poison.”

Don Pablo arrived that night. It was as though he had descended through the boughs of the forest canopy, settling slowly into the village like a spider on its thread. He had not announced himself, yet he created an atmosphere, a silence, like dense space around him. Steadman was aware of his presence, and he smelled him, an odor of vines, a sweetness of tobacco smoke. Don Pablo asked no questions. He mumbled in Secoya and took Steadman’s hands in his own and pressed them.

The Secoya words meant nothing, but at his touch, Steadman began to cry.

In a tone of approval, Don Pablo said, “Listo"

Manfred woke Steadman early the next day. He had become like a keeper, inattentive and meddling, yet suspicious of others.

“Don’t take food,” Manfred said. “Nothing to drink.”

Without saying so, Steadman knew it was the day.

“He says you are dead.”

Naked before this man, unable to object, Steadman understood this to be part of the process. He grew weaker in the heat as the hours passed, yet it was still light when he was led to the pavilion, Manfred on one side, Nestor on the other. From the way Manfred helped carry him, his grip on Steadman’s arm, Steadman could tell that Manfred was proprietorial, the pressure of ownership in his grip.

Steadman’s sightless eyes prickled with the sharpness of wood smoke. That his useless eyes could still smart with the sting of smoke he took as a hopeful sign.

“Daytime is better for a healing,” Nestor said.

“Because there are demons in the dark,” Manfred said.

“More demons in the dark,” Nestor said. “There are demons all the time.”

Led like a prisoner to be slaughtered, shuffling flat-footed without his shoes, Steadman lost his fear of death. Don Pablo was right: he was already dead. This was the meaning of his illness, gone with everything else. Infection had emptied him of vitality.

Nestor said to Manfred, “You can go. I will stay with him.”

“I must stay,” Manfred said. “This is my story now.”

Steadman was lowered to a mat, and he lay listening to the preparation — rustlings, pourings, squeezings, the chuckle of liquid in clay jugs, the mutters of the Secoya, the children’s whispers, their breathing. The afternoon sun heated his face. He heard murmuring, which could have been dismay or a prayer, and then the first of the chants.

“Don Pablo is drinking,” Nestor said. “He has found his stool.”

Steadman could hear Don Pablo scraping the stool nearer.

A cup was placed in Steadman’s hands. He drank, he retched, he drank again. Altogether he took four cups. Then he lay on his back, lumps of earth or broken-off brush stumps poking against his spine. He was soaked with sweat, his cheeks flecked with vomit.

Groaning over him, Don Pablo hovered, puffing a cigar. He blew smoke in Steadman’s eyes. He brushed them with a bundle of wilted leaves. All the while he continued groaning, a rhythmic chant low in his throat.

Feeling slight pressure on his eyes, Steadman lifted his arms and touched two smooth stones that Don Pablo had placed on his lids. His arms became very heavy as the drug took hold — the first stage he recognized from so many other times: the sound of rain drenching his mind; the trembling would be next, then the stars, the snakes, a milkiness in his vision, and finally his slipping free of his body and ascending to stare down at himself in trance-like concentration.

Don Pablo was anxious. He choked a little, he gagged and spat, and finally grew quiet. He placed his fist on one of Steadmans eyes, pressing the stone. Using his clenched fist as a pipe, he put his lips on it and began to suck air through it. Someone else, one of the acolytes or helpers, was singing like a novice monk in long organ notes of harmonious groans.

Sucking, spitting, Don Pablo began to work on Steadman’s other eye. The drug had given Steadman a sense of being wadded in cotton. He was watching his mummification from the wooden rooftree of the pavilion, his stretched-out body like a smoked corpse, as though his soul had left it.

And it had. He was the soul observing the men tinkering with the shell of his being. Drunk with the drug and groaning in pain, the men led by Don Pablo were drooling over him.

Steadman sank deeper into a darkness suffused with green. He was underwater, enclosed by a snake, wrapped in its coils, being swept downstream. The pulsing of the snake’s slippery entrails was like the suck and rush of a river.

With a stinging sense of being bitten, Steadman’s whole body contorted, his muscles wrung like rags, his brain convulsed, until he was twisted small. With a mild sinking acceptance, he thought, I am dying. And his eyes were wet, not weeping but bleeding, wounded by the stones that had weighed on them. I am dying, meester.

He was turned inside out — another old feeling. This time the song was within him, the lowest notes in his belly, the chorus like colors in his eyes, not simple colors but the familiar mass of pixels. He was so small that when he fell he sped like a dropped pebble and kept falling fast, past the snakes and the moon men, until he came to rest in a tangle of filaments like a collapsed web.

There he stayed, vibrant, atomized, yet tranquil. Nothing else mattered. In a ritual of presentation, the shaman approached him with a brimming cup. He was shown his reflection in the liquid, and he took this to be the meaning of life. He did not recognize his face. He had an insect’s head, bulbous eyes and mandibles like a pair of sickles. He did not know whether he had woken from a dream or had gone under again, reentering a dream.

The cup of mirroring liquid was offered amid swirling smoke. Words came; he was not sure whether he or someone else was speaking, or they might have been thoughts floated from his mind.

“What is it?”

“Cura.”

“The cure?”

“It is poison,” the old man said in his dusty voice.

Steadman did not hesitate. A commanding instinct within him told him it was a cup brimming with death. And that he must drink it all, that he must die. He raised the cup to his lips to empty it.

His drinking of the bitter poison was a renunciation, a long kiss of farewell, and in this close embrace, the cup against his lips, he saw the passing of his life, the reminder of all his hopes, all the promises he had made, the miles he had traveled, the betrayals, the consolation of friends, the years of work and waiting — anger, fear, nights of desire, laughter, all his escapes and stratagems, meaningless memories of invention, all in that long swallow that ceased to be bitter, that grew sweeter and sadder as he gulped the last of it.

Then the cup was empty of poison. Night had fallen, burying him. He was so used to seeing nothing he merely stared with blank eyes when the torch became visible. He was staring into the hollow, at his fingers on the rim of the cup, holding the cracked thing nearer his face. With its ragged lurid flames and its unreliable promise of light, the torch was like the morning sun. He had surrendered. He was no one. His journey was over.

In the smoky pavilion he raised himself and looked into the bottom of the cup he had emptied. He saw active light among the droplets, something alive — a spider, glittering, lifting itself on its crooked legs, working its jaws. Steadman smiled as at the face of an old friend on waking from a bad dream.