They stopped the tractor and began hiking. They walked for several miles through a barren area of grassland, mostly flat, slightly uphill. Aunt Peggy pointed out a rare five-petalled white flower that was still in bloom. The woods began just beyond the grassland and were mostly stumpy oaks mixed in with yellow pine. The ground was covered in leaf litter, and the cloudless blue sky shone between the branches of the oak, setting off the yellowing leaves in sharp relief. They stopped where trees had been cut and stacked in logs and Don took out two cordless drills from the pocket of his oversized army coat. He, Julia and Lianne were going to be drilling holes in the logs for mushroom spore. Aunt Peggy and Ricky continued on through the trees. They could hear the sound of the cordless drills and then just the crunching of their steps through the dead leaves.
This was all cut over and farmed at some point. And then the people moved on, said Aunt Peggy. The soil was too thin for any kind of extractive farming. They were mostly tobacco farmers from back east who weren't used to living on the land. They wouldn't work in the iron mines around here because it was mostly slaves who did that work. After the Civil War the former slaves fled, the iron mines closed, and then there was nobody for a long time until Ned and his friends moved in.
Isn't that what you're doing?
What? Fleeing?
Yeah.
Hmm. I can see how it would seem that way, Ricky. We're trying not to. Ned always talks 'bout the two boats we’re riding in, Mahayana and Hinayana. You've got to be riding in both. He says Hinayana is your little life. The trick we're trying to learn is keeping that balanced. It's hard. Much harder than it seems when you're young. What about you?
What?
How do you find your balance?
I don't know.
Ricky thought of how he'd had the feeling the previous night of needing the tablet by his side all the time, of how desperate he felt when he thought of searching for his father, and sometimes how he wished he could forget about the whole thing and just concentrate on working things out, having fun.
And then Mahayana is how you're effecting change in the broader picture. What kind of ripples are you sending out? That sort of thing. The little boat goes in the big boat. How do you fit it in?
Look, I don't have a clue. I said that already.
Well, think about it. Use your time wisely, young man. Here we are. Look at this.
They'd reached a clearing in the woods. There was a stand of several hundred cannabis plants stretching about head high. Aunt Peggy examined the thick buds with a magnifying glass.
Yes, this is it. Come have a look.
Ricky wandered over to where she was.
See the hairs? They're beginning to turn from clear to milky, even amber in color.
Ricky looked through the glass. It reminded him of science class in seventh grade when they'd visited the arboretum in Panama City. It was clearly of great importance to Peggy.
This is a female plant. She's trying to attract the male pollen. Right now is the time to harvest. We have a window of about a week, I would say.
What happens if you wait too long?
Then you get the THC starting to break down and too many byproducts in the resin.
Ricky wasn't a smoker. He'd tried a couple of times on the beach with Lianne, Kendra Jackson, and her cousin Connor. But it wasn't something he cared about, just something that had colored those afternoons last summer with a slurred memory of strangeness.
So the male plants fertilize the females, is that what happens?
There are no males. We don't want the energy going into seed production, so we cull the males as soon as we can, usually sometime in the late summer.
That seems cruel.
These ladies are full of goodness and earth wisdom, Ricky. Can you hear the story they are telling us? Let's stand in the middle here and listen.
She led the way to the middle of the stand and stopped. She put her arm around Ricky's shoulder and spun him so he was facing the same direction she was.
It's all about ripeness, Ricky. What you want and what the world wants can be aligned. You have to listen for it. Do you understand what I'm saying?
I have no idea.
Then she leaned over and kissed him on the lips, opening her mouth and probing with her tongue for his. Ricky closed his eyes and listened. All he could hear was the pounding in his ears of the blood rushing in his veins. They fell to the ground and she stripped her clothes off first and then helped him undress. Her breasts were surprisingly full. Their bodies tangled, came together and then separated like ocean tides. They lay together while their hearts slowed and their senses returned, looking up at the blue sky through the straight, bending stalks and the thick buds of the ripe cannabis.
That was your first, am I right?
I guess.
She laughed. What have we done? Have I just corrupted you, young man?
Don't worry about it.
Well, then. Thank you so much for that.
She leaned down and kissed him again. This time he listened and heard more clearly the word she had said: ripeness. He should have been in school; he should have been saving his father from the Santos Muertos. Instead he was lying on the bottom of the woods in Tennessee with some woman he barely knew. Now that he had experienced what it was that took place between men and women, a secret out of which sprung a lot of the good and bad in life, all tied together in a spiraling sequence, a dance, interconnected, he thought his path might seem a little clearer. Instead the world seemed a muddle of botched possibilities. If this was God's idea, he surely had a twisted sense of what ripeness entailed. The woods, on the other hand, had a clarity and a peace about them that filled his lungs with the sharp tang of pine scent. They had never been home for long to anyone, and yet there was a sense of hominess as if they were also yearning for completion. Maybe that was the point, he thought, staring up at the blue hole of the sky.
Fourteen—Lightness and Unreality
If the Universe is spinning, then nothing has an essential purpose that has yet to be revealed. When the song ends, the play will be called. Until then we are running around the chairs trying not to be the ones standing when the music ceases. On the other hand, if the Universe is stable and we're the ones spinning, then this is a story with a beginning and end and the purpose of hell is to purify us for an eventual liberation. It would also explain all sorts of stuff such as the nausea, the feeling I get when I contemplate my imprisonment here.
Also, morning sickness, when the tumbling child wanting to be liberated calls out from the vacuum of the womb. Mary suffered tremendously with Ricky, or Richard, as she called him. I can picture her huddled beneath me in the bathroom, my arms around her stomach, holding her up like a sack of potatoes, sometimes for hours it seemed, the sun coming up in the window with the orange tree outside it. It never gave any oranges aside from one year when we got some pitifully small fruit. But Ricky was as healthy as an onion. The little guy came out like a ball of fire, blathering, spewing his bodily fluids freely with the hospital cap on his elongated head, stretched from the difficult passage into this world through Mary's hole. She was our world tree, the axis around which our lives revolved. With her death we were cast headlong into the spinning vortex where we tried with all our might to hold on to what we had, our memories of the love, the faith that it would continue to grow and wrap itself around our hearts and develop into something resembling the image we had in our minds of her. I'd almost be capable of assembling my memories into a coherent picture except that it would serve no purpose. There's nobody coming for me in this place. I don't believe it anymore. There's nothing calling to me beyond the noises of the infernal machinery in this underground, viperous catacomb.
And yet she was above all else endowed with a sweetness of spirit, a rock meant to alleviate the spinning of whatever time and space we are sailing in. She never failed to pick me up when she smiled, and she smiled all the time—in the morning, looking up from the bed with half closed eyes
as I dressed for work, in the night when I stumbled around in the dark and switched on the light, unable to sleep from too much bourbon with the Myers staff at the annual Christmas party.
She and Ricky sometimes whispered conversations at the table and I couldn't quite make out what they were saying; and she would smile at me and repeat what she'd said, sometimes not quite truthfully, just to rub it in, kind of harden me in her own way. She wasn't some kind of perfect wife, agreeing with me on every subject, God knows. But I could count on her honest opinions.
Odds and ends from the hundreds and hundreds of mental images that come out: Mary and Ricky reading the Lorax in Ricky's bed. A card Ricky made for Thanksgiving—the orange-crayoned pumpkin and ridiculous stencil of a turkey. She had it up on the refrigerator for months. His class pictures on the refrigerator also. They stayed for years. The photograph on her bureau of the two of us on the deck of the Freedom standing in front of the big tuba of a ventilation shaft. The earring box covered in dust. The mole on her back, about an inch windward of the vertebra. Her long feet splayed naturally, the way she stood over Ricky when she was trying to get his cowlick just right for school. The day she cried when I came home and announced I'd lost the job at Myers, angry at them for not having given me time to even clear out my desk.
There is light and an electrical outlet and a bed. I have tried to position the bed so as to miss most of the drips. The cell I am in now has puddled water from the condensation dripping from the ceiling; but the pencil, the paper, all of these are meager, yet important improvements. The guard, Lucas, who brought them in on Chagnon's orders, is from Cucuta in the Andes, about twenty. He was studying business at the University of Bucaramanga before he joined the Santos, first as a courier and then a soldier. He wears all black, and the first time he took off his ski mask to reveal his face, I was startled by his youth, by his large, brown eyes that focus uncertainly, and by the spiderlike, curlicue tattoos covering his neck and cheeks. If it weren't for the tattoos, he would have an insipid, non-threatening appearance. He is fluent in English and interested in poetry. He says Chagnon is always looking to gain adherents. He likes to talk about the Santos and is obviously very proud of his membership in such a gang of outlandish thugs. There are even Americans in the organization, he told me. That's what he called it, an organization, like something larger than life, which I suppose it is, being dedicated to the pursuit of death in all things. The one thing they all have in common is they are all former drug addicts and have chosen to fight their demons by joining the struggle that Chagnon has painted as millenarian and involving the overthrow of all current, corrupted Western political systems in favor of a true rule of the people, without any centralized structure, just a sort of priesthood of adepts in the cult of the Santa Muerte. By choosing death, they are in fact glorifying a higher sort of life, in Lucas's view. He explains to me that the sooner I can learn the system of the Santa, the sooner I can join up and walk out of the cell into a new life. He is a true believer, Lucas is.
It's been about a week since the last session with the water, the brushing with death that is like an initiation into what makes their sadistic organization tick. I feel my mind beginning to fill out, to breathe a little deeper, putting out feelers of hope like some unstoppeable force now that there is a light and some pain-free days behind me. I can still feel the train, rumbling overhead on some kind of random schedule. It shakes the bedrock and sometimes even shifts the bed while I am lying on it. I wonder what it is. I asked Lucas what went on above us, and he refused to say.
I am guessing we are somewhere either in Western Europe or North America, where Chagnon is able to use a work force of marginalized gang members—the type of people who would tattoo their faces to claim membership in an "organization"—cut off from any of the surrounding society and, therefore, dependent on him for any and all validation of their worth. That is the entire trick of course, to break down all of individuality and then build a person back up again in the image of the strong man, the smart man, the fearless man with the magic touch, the leader, with his agenda fully internalized. You start with people who have already self-destructed and allowed the demons of self-hate to rule them, who have incinerated the seed of goodness, the original blessing that gets planted at birth when a baby is placed at its mother's breast.
Chagnon came in one night when I had just finished writing. I had been unable to write down anything of any value, no memories of any note or immediate significance had come to me, just random images like a surrealist film, somebody's knee and a background of a fire hydrant open and the flow full force and children racing through it, and voices, dismembered voices, like ghosts from long ago. I had written down the images with the idea that later I would go back and claim them, give them names and places, a context that could take me out of here. But, as I said, it was nothing much, a meager output, and I really doubted that there was any value to the exercise. In other words, I was vulnerable, full of self-doubt. And then he walked in. He circled the bed and observed me putting the journal down beside me. I swung my legs so that my feet were on the ground again. I had a brief and debilitating moment of metacognition, wondering how I looked, how I seemed to him, my slumping, decrepit old body. Then he smiled. And I realized that his smiles, his attempts at sympathy were all a ploy. He did nothing, not even breathe, without an ulterior motive. It was one of the admirable things about him, that he was so transparently full of himself, not like most people who feel the tug of mediocrity, the need to love their neighbors so that they too will be loved, that herd-like swoon that we wrap in names to disguise the self-interested weakness that also is our birthright. But some, like Chagnon, are born with a social blindness that can be perceived as strength, and thus are vaulted into greatness on the welcoming backs of the mob.
How are you liking the new habitation?
It's great. Much better, thanks.
You see we are not all bad.
You can let me go anytime.
No. We can't let you free. You see, once your son is located we will bargain for the tablet.
That Mayan thing? Tell me it has anything good on it, Chagnon.
The Mayans knew the secret of the Safira, the levels of structure that make up the quantum universe. It was recorded in its purest mathematical form on the Chocomal by the priests of Caracol during the golden age of Mayan science and learning.
Really?
Yes, really.
He stepped towards me. His eyes were black pinpricks of hate, hard and unflinching. It was not hard to imagine that he could lead any group of crippled and unsound men. He was capable of great cruelty that he used to instill fear and respect.
I hear you are building a big weapon. But you already have us by the cojones with all the drugs you sell on our streets.
The drugs are the anaesthetic. We need to finish you. You don't believe we can do it?
No.
He nodded and backed away, pacing around and around the bed.
Once we have the Chocomal, the guts of our enemies will stink in the streets, from Amsterdam and Istanbul to Washington and Bogota. It will be the new age of Mictecacihuatl, the goddess, as I prophesied.
You? A prophet as well. My, oh my, Chagnon.
I will bring you the book where it is recorded. The visions came to me in Rio Negro after we finished off the Septicos.
Who were the Septicos?
A cartel of low-class Medellin ruffians. They were ruling us. Kidnapping our women and raping them and leaving them in the parks of Bucaramanga. I killed Rajon Tulio, his wife, and two-year-old daughter with my bare hands. You see this?
He showed me a scar on his hand, raised pink flesh on the thin, fish-like slab.
This is where the little girl bit me after she watched me assassinate her father. I stabbed him in the neck and took his head off. And then, after she had the nerve to bite the hand that had killed her father, I held her on him and drowned her in his blood. It was good. The hand was infected, though. The little bitc
h was with the syphilis. I almost died, and the visions came to me then.
I'm sure that was very exciting.
You know what it is to create, Mr. Lyons. You are a writer. All the best are creative ones. Stalin was a priest. Hitler was an artist. One must be giving birth to one's ideas to be a true man. Perhaps yours are too timid. The visionary man is in touch with the deepest forces. It is the truest, fullest path to exist.
He had his hands behind his back and was facing the wall. I could hear the guards behind the metal door, shifting their weight. They too, listened, although they did not understand. I could have jumped him, killed him. I should have. Then he turned and stared hard at me. I almost thought he was reading my thoughts. I swallowed hard, expecting him to call the guards in.
I do not understand what you people fear so much about death. Verdad. Is like we are different especies. Take for instance the symbol of the zombie you find in so much of your television. What is that but fear of la Santa. This is why your health care costs are so high. I would become a great reformer, but instead I am how you say it, a root and branch man. That is what the English call it. We need to clean out the hojarasca and start with a fresh, clean plantación.
Chagnon, you couldn't get elected dogcatcher in my world. Your best bet, seriously, is to plead insanity when you get the chance.
I will show you what am talking about. Una demostración. I feel you are a man of science, of reason.
Reason is just another cult, Chagnon. I don't make it my god.
No, of course not. You are right. The true man worships only what he can validate por experiencia propia. I will feed your heart before we eat you. This is why you shall fly tonight. Lucas, Guajiro.
He called for the guards and instructed them to cover my head with a hood. I was bound and led by my tied hands out of the cell. Then I was marched for what seemed an interminable length down long corridors. I sensed the other prisoners behind thick walls, seething and tortured souls. Then I was on a lift and we were climbing to the upper floors and marching down more halls, footsteps echoing and the voices of the guards, and Chagnon lecturing, patronizing them with bits of his fool's wisdom and stories from his legendary past as the founder of the Santos Muertos. Then we were out in what felt like a large empty space and more hubbub of voices and another lift, this time going down. Automatic doors with rubber edging closed behind me. It was quiet except for the barely audible, high-pitched humming of the engines. This must have been the train I felt every night in my dreams. The hood was removed. I was seated on a metal ledge and in front of me was the pilots' console. The two pilots were in black uniforms. Their faces were covered in the Santos Muertos tattoos. Samael Chagnon had his hand on my shoulder. In his other hand he cradled a snub-nosed automatic rifle equipped with a large sight. He spoke swiftly in Spanish to the pilots. I couldn't understand. They nodded and turned to the instrumentation, and we taxied for a short distance and then lifted straight up into the air and took off with so much force I could feel the blood gathering in my feet and lower legs.
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