Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  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 naus
ea 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.