The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Narby’s book tells about his experiences in the Peruvian Amazon region of Quirishari, in the Pichis Valley, among the Ashaninca people. While doing field work for his dissertation on the distribution of plant species—an attempt to stave off corporate developers and their desire to clear cut and “manage” the treasures of the jungle—he met local shamans, ayahuasqueros as they are called, who had an incredible grasp of the biochemistry of the local plant life and how it could be used in creating effective medicines. Narby was astonished at the knowledge these adepts had garnered about the abundant and diverse species of plants indigenous to the region.

  When Narby asked one how the Ashaninca had learned so much from the jungle, the shaman answered that the knowledge was revealed from the plants themselves. In other words, Nature itself had told them. He dismissed this at first, thinking it was mere mythology, but the ayahuasqueros insisted that they were not speaking metaphorically. They offered to show him, but he would have to ingest ayahuasca.

  In taking the drug, his hallucinations showed him images of entwined snakes and other odd creatures and designs that he later realized were very reminiscent of the figures found in biochemistry. One image that often repeated was the double helix of DNA—the substance responsible for all life on Earth. It came to him later that perhaps the drug was able to unlock the information stored in DNA.

  Usually I am fascinated with ideas like this because they make interesting fodder for my fictions, but I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday and have developed a healthy skepticism about outlandish claims. Narby’s argument for the Ashaninca shamans learning cures directly from the forest spirit convinced me, though, when he detailed the biochemical properties of ayahuasca itself. The drug is formed from two different plants, one a vine, the other a bush. Only one carries a hallucinogenic substance, a chemical that is also secreted under certain circumstances by the brain. It has no effect when ingested because existing chemicals in the stomach neutralize it. The other plant contains no hallucinogen but merely an enzyme that blocks the chemical in the stomach from rendering the hallucinogen ineffective. The odds that someone would be able to stumble upon this particular chemical reaction, out of 80,000 possible species of plants, is nearly impossible, not to mention all the hundreds of other intricate chemical combinations and cures the shamans were privy to. In short, ayahuasca put you in touch with, essentially, the mind of life.

  “Crazy shit,” said Barney when I spoke to him on the phone the next day. He’d read The Cosmic Serpent as well.

  “Are we going to tap that DNA?” I asked.

  “I’m going for it,” he said. “After I finished reading the book the other day, I was heading out to the studio to sit there like a wooden Indian for an hour or so, and what did I see over by the outhouse but a snake. This long, multicolored job, winding through the leaves. What’s the chances of seeing a snake in November?”

  “It’s your Lady of Fatima,” I told him.

  He’d already set up a date with Stick to take the ayahuasca. “Stick said eat a lot of bananas to keep your serotonin level up and no heavy stuff like meat or sweets for a couple days before. No sex for the same amount of time.”

  “Sounds doable,” I said.

  “You’re a damn shaman,” said Barney.

  A week later, we were in Stick’s truck, sitting three across in the cab. We headed out toward Money Island, a spit of land that juts into the Delaware at the farthest southern point on the west side of Jersey. Sometimes it’s a peninsula and sometimes an island, but there’s a little bridge that keeps it connected to the mainland. All the houses there are on stilts.

  “No Ugly American stuff,” said Stick. “This guy’s a real ayahuasquero.”

  “We’re PC,” said Barney.

  “But what’s he doing in Jersey?” I asked.

  “He’s on the run,” said Stick.

  “From?”

  “He did some rabble-rousing against a couple of the companies raping the jungle down there.”

  We pulled up in front of a weathered gray shack on legs just as the sun was going down. The place had a boarded window and was listing forward slightly. It was at the end of a dirt road, all by itself. Behind it was a wall of reeds, and behind that the river. The temperature had dropped and it was really cold, but not enough to subdue the smell of low tide.

  Stick led the way up the rickety steps and knocked on the door. As we waited for the shaman to answer, I started to have misgivings about this enterprise. I thought of my wife, Lynn, and my kids and got the urge to bolt back to the car. Barney, who was behind me on the steps, leaned in and whispered, “Did you really eat the bananas?” Just then the door opened.

  The next thing I knew, we were inside and Stick was introducing us in Spanish to this little brown fellow, Rosario. He had a lot of wild black hair and a big smile—perfectly white teeth. I put out my hand and he shook it, and although he had a small frame I could feel real power in his grip. He was dressed in a blue-and-red-striped dress shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of green polyester bell-bottoms, with sandals on his feet.

  Barney shook hands with Rosario, and he and I stood there smiling and nodding, bowing as if we were meeting the emperor of Japan. We moved away from the front door to a living room with doctor’s waiting-room furniture, a lot of mod vinyl. Barney and I took the couch, Stick sat in a chair, and Rosario fell, playfully, into a big, pink beanbag thing on the floor. He cocked his head to the side, a look of seriousness set in, and he started talking, making gestures with his hands.

  Stick wasn’t exactly Ricardo Montalban, but he translated as best he could. Still, he was able to relay that Rosario was welcoming us, that he was pleased to meet two artists, a painter and a writer, from the U.S. We did some more nodding and smiling and thanked him. The detente and pleasantries continued for a while, and then he told us that the maninkari, the spirits, had told him we would be coming. He said he had been instructed to administer the ayahuasca to us.

  I asked him why, and when Stick translated, Rosario laughed and responded, “We’ll see,” in perfect English. When I looked over at him, he was lighting what looked like a big fat joint. It and the lighter seemed to have materialized out of thin air. He took a hit and launched into a monologue in Spanish.

  Stick said, “This is real tobacco, not the poison of American cigarettes. Jungle tobacco. It will draw the spirits close to us, so that when we take the ayahuasca, they’ll be present. Spirits feast on tobacco. Once they’ve gathered, the drug will focus your senses so that you might see and talk with them.”

  The jungle cigarette made the rounds, and it was strong. Barney, who didn’t smoke cigarettes coughed like an old man. I wasn’t unhappy when it was finally stubbed out in an ashtray on the table next to Stick’s chair. The shaman then rose, and asking our friend to accompany him, left the room.

  “If a cigarette smoked cigarettes, that’s the cigarette it would smoke,” said Barney.

  “I’m on the verge of puking,” I whispered.

  “Are the spirits around us now?” he said, glancing briefly over his shoulder.

  “You didn’t eat the bananas.”

  “Fuck the bananas,” he said. “I ate McDonald’s only about two hours ago.”

  “I’m ready to bag this whole thing,” I said.

  I heard the floorboards creak then and knew Rosario and Stick were returning. The shaman was carrying a two-liter Pepsi bottle half-filled with a reddish brown liquid, and in his other hand what looked like a dried out sweet potato with holes in it. Stick carried three gas station giveaway glasses with scenes from Star Wars on them. He had promised that he wouldn’t take the drug so he could keep an eye on us. Barney was specifically afraid of getting up on the roof and jumping off, trying to fly. He had mentioned it about a dozen times in the truck on the way over.

  Rosario carefully poured juice into each of the glasses. He lifted his off the table and brought it up near his mouth. “May the force be with you,” he said.


  I held my breath and chugged the ayahuasca. It was horrible. Before I could even reach over and put the glass on the table, I could hear my stomach saying, Wrong.

  Barney gagged once and then managed to get the rest down. Rosario drank his like it was chocolate milk. We didn’t have time to say anything stupid, because Rosario started singing. His song sounded like gibberish, but his lone voice and the honesty with which he sang was immediately fascinating to me. I sat back, closed my eyes, and followed the permutations of the tune.

  After a short time I became aware of a rush of images presenting themselves behind my eyes, like a slide show on fast forward: my vision of the character, Perno Shell, from Deluge, standing on the roof of the floating apartment building, staring through a spyglass at the horizon; my older son, shooting baskets; the computer in my empty office; a small, dilapidated ranch house, the color pink of Rosario’s beanbag chair, nestled like a cottage out of Hansel and Gretel at the edge of a forest; Soutine’s side of beef; my father teaching me to drive; my dog, Shadow, laying in a sunspot on the living room floor; my wife, fixing the kitchen sink.

  Rosario’s song turned into musical notes, and I opened my eyes to see how he was accomplishing this. He was blowing into one end of that crusty sweet potato and fingering the holes as if it was a recorder. Tracks of bright colors shot across my field of vision, and then a golden rain fell out of the ceiling. The song he was playing somehow turned into the flute solo from Eric Burden’s “Spill the Wine.”

  “I know that one,” I said, and laughed. Then I asked, “Where’s the bathroom?” I knew I was going to puke. It’s not that I felt particularly bad. In fact, I was buzzing throughout my body, but I just knew I had to puke.

  Rosario said, “Follow the butterfly,” and opened his hand to release a phosphorescent specimen as big as a small bird. The creature languidly flapped its wings, heading down the hallway to our left. I followed it. As I passed Stick, I saw that his face had taken on the characteristics of one of his paintings, super detailed with a complexion of violet and yellow.

  I found the bathroom and puked; no big deal—the easiest puke I ever did. When I stood up, though, I got a rush, and the distant notes of Rosario’s music started to sound like birdcalls. I stepped out of the bathroom into what had been the hallway only to discover that I was now in the jungle. I found this amusing instead of frightening. It was dark green (even the light) and extremely warm, trees everywhere and resplendent undergrowth of ferns and vines. Above, in the canopy, birds called out and monkeys screeched.

  I started walking, heading in the direction I thought the living room was in. Before going too far, I came upon a tattered object hanging by a string from the branch of a small tree. Oddly enough, the tree was a dogwood, like the one I have in my backyard. The object was a kind of talisman I remembered having read about: a god’s-eye. It is made of woven yarn and sticks, often having concentric color patterns in the form of rural hex signs, meant to ward off evil. I thought of taking this one down and carrying it off, but something told me not to touch it.

  I realized I was on a path, and that path came to a turn that led into a small clearing where the jungle floor had been swept clean. There was a desk and chair and a lab table with test tubes, beakers, and a microscope on it. In the blink of an eye, there suddenly appeared, standing next to the desk, a luminous being with the head of a crow and whose arms were writhing snakes. It had a woman’s body that wore a simple black dress, white sneakers, and a lab coat.

  “You are the spirit of the forest,” I said. I could feel myself start to sweat, her sudden appearance worrying me, as if she could see through to my empty center and might kill me for it.

  The beak of the glistening crow head opened and a smooth, quiet voice said, “Do you know why you are here?”

  “I took the ayahuasca,” I said.

  “But why are you here?” it said.

  “For a story,” I said.

  “Well,” said the creature, “I have a cure for you.” She walked over and removed a beaker from the lab table. I could see that the glass cylinder held a jumble of words. Not words on paper, but just the words, as if type in black ink had been lifted off the paper of a book.

  “Why don’t you come and take the medicine?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. She let loose a deafening bird screech, and with that sound her features melted and reformed and she was a young woman with long brown hair and beautiful brown eyes. “Come now,” she said.

  I approached her and she handed me the beaker. I put it to my lips and poured the words into my mouth, chewing them and swallowing until the beaker was empty. They were brittle but sharp and tasted bitter.

  When I was finished, I said, “And this will help me to write?”

  “No,” she said, and laughed. “These are your instructions.”

  “Instructions for what?” I asked as I handed her the beaker.

  “To help you see in the dark,” she said.

  “Why did I think this experience would help me write?” I asked.

  “Because your eyes are closed,” she said, and her eyes grew wide. She dropped the beaker on the ground where it shattered. “He’s coming,” she said. With this, she evaporated into mist, her clothes dropping to the ground.

  Off in the distance, I heard something moving through the jungle. When it roared, I started running. I ran and ran for what seemed like an hour. The path disappeared and I scrabbled frantically through the undergrowth. When I was out of breath, sweating profusely, my heart pounding, I stopped and slumped down against a fallen log. I coughed, cleared my eyes, and tried to listen for the approach of my pursuer. That’s when I saw it, off to my right, the dogwood with the god’s-eye hanging from its bare, lowest branch. I had gone in a complete circle.

  Someone elbowed me in the ribs. I looked up and found I was in the cab of Stick’s truck. Rosario was at the window. He put his hand in through the open window, past Stick, and I shook it. Barney leaned over and also shook his hand. We thanked him and then Stick drove off. All traces of the nausea had passed and I still felt a little high. I had some coffee at Barney’s to wake up and then drove home. There was a full moon. I left the window open for a while to get some fresh air. Passing the fields and forests, I thought I heard them murmuring.

  After the night out on Money, Barney and I had decided not to talk about the ayahuasca experience for a while. We didn’t last a week, though. I called him a few days later on Friday afternoon.

  “It was a coffin on the river for me,” he said. “Two really little guys, imperious sons of bitches, with heads like blue jays sat perched at either end. I watched the clouds passing overhead as one of them told me, ‘The knowledge that is about to be revealed to you is reserved for the dead or dying.’ How do you think that made me feel?”

  “Did you get sick?” I asked.

  “The McDonald’s wasn’t a winning strategy.”

  “What was the knowledge?” I asked.

  “We wound up on some island and I sat on a stone bench, really uncomfortable. Across from me was a big fat snake on a concrete throne, partially coiled and sitting upright, wearing a crown. It lectured me for a half-hour and then said I could go. I woke up out in the back of the house by the reeds.”

  “What’d the snake tell you?”

  “I couldn’t understand what the hell it was saying. It was actually talking English, but it hissed every word. I made out one or two, but …”

  “Since then,” I said, “every time I go near the plants Lynn brought in from the yard for the winter, I hear a vague whispering sound, and I get this recurring image.”

  He started laughing.

  “No shit,” I said. “I swear.”

  “There’s a field,” he said. “About a hundred yards in is the edge of a forest.”

  “A house,” I said.

  “Ranch style, pink,” he said. “It’s right at the tree line and two huge oaks kind of arch above it.�
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  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Kind of disappointing after all that rigmarole with the ayahuasca.”

  “I haven’t written a damn word. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I ever thought tapping into my DNA was going to help that.”

  “Well, I’m going to paint that pink house. I figure, I see it enough, I might as well paint it. You should write a story called ‘The Pink House.’”

  “Who do you think lives there?”

  “Richard Burton and Liz Taylor.”

  I got as far as, The Taylors lived at the edge of the forest in a pink house, and then turned the computer off. I left my office with no desire to return. In the next two days, I walked both in the morning and at night, long wanderings with Shadow. As I went along, the pine trees put thoughts in my head that I heard as words. They told me to shave and lose weight. They ridiculed my attire. I paid the bills. I helped my younger son memorize the state capitals. I made a meatloaf. I sat with Lynn on the couch; we drank coffee and talked. When no one was home, I played the Ink Spots on the stereo, “The Trees Don’t Need To Know,” as I stood by the front window where the plants were gathered and daydreamed that place across the field. I had achieved a certain peace with my blankness.

  Thanksgiving came and went, and I was surprised I enjoyed it so much. The weather turned bitter cold and it snowed lightly one night at the end of the month. Life was but a dream, all domestic harmony, the promise of Christmas, soft music, and fires in the fireplace. The hours came and went and I thought nothing of them. Then, one night I was in the kitchen, cooking dinner, and the phone rang.

  “I found the pink house,” said Barney.

  “Bull,” I said.

  “I was sitting in the studio today, and I decided to get up and go out. So I hopped in the car and just started driving around, not really thinking about anything. I let myself get lost on a road out by the State Forest. The road was empty, the sun was shining, I was easing along. Then I saw the field out of the corner of my eye. I turned and there was the house, right at the edge of the tree line.”