Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest

by Frazier, Robert

  Boston

  I am consumed by

  the sentience of the

  Mutant Rain Forest,

  I am transformed to

  a roiling hive mind

  of mutated beetles,

  voracious as piranhas,

  swarming like army ants,

  leveling flora and fauna

  in their ravenous path.

  I am something of a man

  and something of a beast,

  a creature once-cat,

  with a distended skull

  and enlarged forebrain

  who now walks upright,

  engaged in a mortal

  struggle with a panther,

  trying to obliterate

  the lingering image

  of my animal ancestry.

  I am consumed by the

  sentience of the forest,

  its uncommon beauty

  and inescapable horror,

  more than a solo sentience

  but a host of warring ones

  which foster an awareness

  that nurtures the riotous

  and unchecked rampage

  of its burgeoning borders .

  I am a singular copse

  of acid-violet poinciana,

  transient, slowly dying,

  starving for sunlight

  and cloaked in shadow

  by the swifter growth

  that surrounds me.

  I am an iridescent

  great horned eagle

  in stratospheric flight

  with the continent

  spread before me,

  the mottled coverlet

  of viridescent plague

  reaching from Amazonia,

  its tentacles winding

  north to Guatemala City

  and south to Patagonia.

  I am a thick whirlwind

  of smoke that streams

  from active volcanoes

  in the unknown depths

  of the Mutant Rain Forest,

  carrying spores that

  catch the jet stream,

  to traverse oceans

  and snow-clad summits,

  to infest the Earth

  with diverse mutations.

  DESCENT INTO EDEN

  Robert Frazier

  On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when he was haunted by dreams of an empty childhood, Marais awoke to a wind that howled offshore of the Mutant Rain Forest of Belize. It snapped his tent flap and startled him as it keened through the mangroves hemming his campsite in the interior of tiny Last Chance Cay. His stomach spasmed with dysentery. For a moment Marais was afraid that he’d soil himself and reactivate a stench like the one that had lingered over his father on his death bed.

  The spasm passed. He released his breath in a loud sigh. All he wanted to do was stay healthy. All he’d ever desired was to find a place where he felt at home and accepted and well in the heart. Perhaps the moment augured good luck: a day of important discovery in his hive studies, or one unmarred by further bouts with the disease. He pulled on his jeans and crawled out into a stinging salt spray. It took him three tries to gain his feet, and once he managed, he swayed, dizzy, the edges of his thoughts sizzling and flaking away.

  “Damn it,” he said, and sat down by the tide line.

  Damn rotten mess he was in, that’s what. How did he think he could continue? Trying to shore up a fading career on a weak stomach and weak legs. Only love can wreck a human being, his father once told him, but he was turning inside out without that complication. Without anything to hold on to but his work. Always his work. He dashed water into his eye sockets and gouged them dry as if that might draw the poisons from him. Drying his face and beard on his shirt, Marais felt a bitter impatience with himself and with the world.

  The sky lightened, and six rippling camp tents buoyed up from the island’s shadows. Overhead, dun-colored clouds advanced in a front from the Mexican border to the north, shrouding the other cays that listed like sunken galleons behind the barrier reef. Angling through a crack, an amber ray of sunlight pierced the gloom to strike at Marais’ feet. He stared at an illuminated patch of shells, the debility in his gut spreading through his body and leaving him giddy. This shaft appeared to him as such a clean sign, such a magical sign in its suddenness and accuracy, that his eyes wet, and for an instant he was living in a triumphant future wherein he’d achieved vindication, his treatises on the group mind hailed as genius, his work with the termite colonies of the Mutant Rain Forest deemed essential by his peers. He passed his palms through the beam and marveled at how it caused the golden hairs along his wrists to glow. He buried his head in these hands and imagined their radiance purifying his flesh with heat. Years of loneliness seemed to lift from his shoulders.

  “You okay, mon?”

  Marais jerked his head up. He squinted into the backlit face of Ilusorio Gaspar, his Carib cook. Ilusorio scratched at the insect bites under his khaki pants and along the black marble of his belly. He appraised Marais with a stare.

  Marais felt embarrassed and disoriented, as if he’d been dangling on a thread of sanity for years; yet he found no contempt in Ilusorio’s face, not like with the Mexican workers who called him a blanco. The Carib remained as emotionless as on other mornings, when he asked questions about the worksite in the jungle and the big insects. Marais leaned back on his elbows.

  “I’m fine. Just a bit tired, I guess.”

  “I t’ink you got sick from de feefa. Eat up by all de bugs. Or maybe de rot, you see.”

  “The rot,” Marais repeated after Ilusorio with a shudder.

  He staggered to his feet and dug into his pocket for a slim bottle of orange liquid. The serum burned the back of his throat like a tongue of lava, but it was worth it, worth the fortune he’d shelled out. It fortified him against the cartilage-eating spirochete that natives called “the rot.” The leishmaniasis bacterium had mutated along with the rainforest, and now only a desperate few, like himself, or the chicleros who gathered latex into ingots from the heart of the jungle, dared venture along this slip of coast linking Belize to Mexico. The disease seemed to strip its victims of humanity, and the ‘rot’ wounds carried the familiar smell of slow decay. Marais believed it was the most insidious fate that could befall a man.

  Pierre David Marais, that’s what the birth certificate said. Marais to everyone after that, because no one cared enough to call him differently. Mother hadn’t. That was certain. She abandoned them when he was five, when free love soured along the Left Bank, and though he recalled her blond hair, the face felt as incomplete as the visage of a chiclero with wounds where the ears once were. Father, however, stood in vivid relief in his memory: ruddy complexion, blond gone to gray, sunken chest. He’d propped himself against the wall of their cold water flat as he cursed his wife, detailing the gruesome afflictions that should ravage her. This had jolted a younger Marais, for he couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than the squalor in which they lived. Or more accursed than the hollow feeling in his gut on those nights when Father drank until he cried over his decline, and then fall from an Academy chair to the depths of a bottle of anisette. Well, he’d adopted a thick skin, hadn’t he? None of those bastards would get to him again. He’d show them. He’d never considered Paris worthy of more than contempt, and he felt a closer bond to the termites of his father’s studies than to his neighbors there.

  After Father died of cirrhosis, Marais developed a passion for the man’s theories that bordered on pathological. He held numerous entomology degrees. He gathered newer findings. Yet when his own career fell on hard times, he also found himself turning to drink. The offer of a study in the Caribbean seemed ideal: far from the radiation leaks that depopulated Europe; close to this source of mutational resurgence, and to the unnamed species of termites that ruled the jungles with a blend of aggression and colonization.

  Rain sprinkled his skin. A steady patter began to stipple the surface of the ocean with ove
rlapping circles. Marais stood and gathered driftwood with Ilusorio, and they piled it by a scorched pit scooped out of the thin soil and slag coral underneath.

  “Will this weather last?” he asked as Ilusorio kneeled and blew on a pile of coals from the previous night’s fire. A flame tindered among the embers and a cloud of ashes swirled about them and over the tents. Ilusorio coughed.

  “It goin’ all de day, I say. And den some.”

  Marais clenched his fist. “Just my luck.”

  While Ilusorio worked against the rain, Marais woke his four diggers from the Yucatan province and questioned them through the flaps of their tents. They argued against laboring under stormy conditions, especially after two solid weeks of excavation into a hardened termite mound. Marais shook with rage, a reaction aggravated by the dysentery, and he called them out of their tents. They stood in a ragged line, dog-faced as condemned prisoners prepared to accept their fate, but when he saw how tired they were, how in need of rest, he held back any ultimatums and agreed to give them the day off. They yelled a brief cheer and shook each other’s hands. They promised to work hard the next day, then staggered back into their beds.

  After gathering his equipment in the boat, he told Ilusorio that he intended to motor into the study site alone. The Carib shrugged as he preserved a flame under his coffee pot by shielding the windward side of the fire with two skillets.

  “No, mon. You need company.”

  Marais forced a laugh. “Are you tired of cleaning pans?”

  “It’s fine.” Ilusorio kept a blank expression. “De taamites cannot cotch us on de cay like in de faarest. Nor de bad ones of de chicleros.”

  “But they can in there.” He pointed toward the mouth of the Rio Sultriana inside a broad lagoon. “Right?”

  “You see, den. It not safe to go alone.”

  “Okay. You’re in. Saves me from having to answer all your questions at the end of the day.”

  Ilusorio’s face lit up for a moment, and Marais wondered what it meant, if anything. The Carib wiped away the rain that caught in his black curls and ran down the dust of ashes on his forehead and over his cheeks.

  “De faarest always excitin’, mon.”

  “Yet you’ve avoided it these days.”

  “Not dis day. Not dis one.”

  As he drank steaming coffee and chewed a tough jerky of smoked turtle meat, Marais studied Ilusorio’s face. He found no further clues to the man’s mood. Certainly little toward a warming trend in their relationship.

  Later, as Ilusorio pulled on a shirt and shoes for the trip, one of the Mexican workers, named Carlos, bent by the fire for some coffee.

  “The others think you should know, señor. Things come up missing in our tents. Watch this Carib. And watch out for chicleros.”

  ***

  The rain abated during the boat ride to shore and into the mouth of the Rio Sultriana. Except for a brief stop to inspect termites harvesting pollen from a gargantua palm, where a stray one bit Ilusorio on the thumb, the trip upriver passed without event. However, when Marais steered their fiberglass boat into the creeks that networked the adjacent swamp, he grew agitated, his bearings in doubt, his sense of familiarity with the surroundings lost. They traveled this way for over an hour.

  A shattered gargantua saved them. Ilusorio recalled the workers’ stories about the stump of jagged heartwood. Several animals had climbed over the lip rather than risk a circumvention—as Marais theorized to a silent Ilusorio—of its vast buttressing roots and whorls of body-length thorns, and the impaled carcasses froze in various testaments of decay. On one weathered skeleton, a bird with translucent flesh pecked for marrow. Marais imagined that its staccato music was a warning from the forest. Each leaf pattern, each eddy at the riverside seemed to open new possibilities for expression. He stopped his idle conversation. He grew jittery. He jumped at every sound and at each movement in his peripheral vision, for he’d ignored such omens before in the world of politics and science. They coasted in silence to a bank adjoining the fields of an abandoned cattle ranch.

  Marais jumped to the muddy bank with their gear, while Ilusorio tied the boat to a fig tree. He shrugged into his protective suit, then zipped on a netted helmet. He checked the tape that sealed his gloves to his sleeves and sealed pant legs down into tight boots. After helping Ilusorio with his seals, he turned him like a mannequin and doused him with a quinine-based repellent that kept the five centimeter termites from invading their clothes.

  “Looks like dis not be needed,” Ilusorio stated as he sprayed Marais in turn. He pointed at the glove that covered his thumb. “De pain be not’in’. Don’t effen got a welt in dere.”

  “But care must be taken. Especially where you step. Too many bites will cause a fever.”

  “Ah. Dat be de way of it, but I wanna faaget. I see dis mon once, he act crazy from de bites. T’ink de faarest speakin’ to ‘im.”

  “Yes. It’s a drug the insects manufacture. Similar in structure to the ones that a voodoo priest uses to trance zombies. There are howler monkeys about the main city of mounds whose necks are ringed with such bites. When observed by binoculars, they appear docile, willing to let the termites crawl on them and latch on. Yet when our work group approaches the clearing each day, they wail and cry and pound the trees in alarm. Which unfortunately brings the termites boiling from their mounds. So far we’ve been confined to exploring a dead hive.”

  “I be lost on dat talk, mon. Keep it simple.”

  Marais heard what Ilusorio said, but the explanations consumed his mind. While he’d preferred the silence of minutes ago, his own voice now seemed to allay his jitters. He led them into the forest as he talked, through a low tunnel of shadow.

  “I’m hoping to gather sufficient evidence to show that the termites are in fact enlisting the howlers as sentries and allies. It seems likely that the insects are sedating them.”

  Marais peered through Ilusorio’s netting, probing for a sign that the Carib understood the repercussions this discovery would have in scientific circles throughout the world. Instead, fear and surprise twitched in the muscles of Ilusorio’s face. This seemed to Marais to carry the valence of a scathing judgment. He doubted himself for a moment.

  These theories, what were they in reality? A netting that obscured true observations? Maybe they kept him from the realization that he was doomed to fail, or had failed already? No doubt Ilusorio thought him mad. He hadn’t commented on the detailed talk, and had kept his customary distance at all times. Spurts of acid returned to Marais’ insides, and left his legs wobbly and his chest constricted. He pushed through the feeling, forcing confident tones into his monologue.

  “The most intriguing corollary to this insight is the concept of the termitary, my father’s theory in fact. He was expelled from the Academy of Sciences for its genius. In the termitary, the hive is seen as one creature. Not a million individuals. Since the Carboniferous Age they’ve developed into a composite animal. The termites are now the blood of the hive, foraging in capillary rivers for their leafy diet. The fungus gardens within are the stomach, digesting the leaves for the bloodstream. The warriors are the defensive claws. The queen doubles as the reproductive organs. If the queen dies, so does the lineage.”

  Ilusorio grunted, and when they ducked through a bush, they stepped out of the darkened groves into the rain and light at the edge of another large field, the light so diffuse that it felt to Marais as if they’d passed into a world drained of color. A caucus of monkeys screeched from their tail holds in the canopy above. Their shrill notes rose above the sound of the wind and shattered Marais’ concentration.

  “It’s the howlers,” he said, motioning with his hands. “We must get to the west end of the clearing. The termites will swarm.”

  He followed Ilusorio as the man stepped with ease over the first of the big insects. His moves were as fluid as if he’d spent years at it. In comparison, Marais moved with drunken rhythms. He remembered how long it had taken him to get the h
ang of it, and he reconsidered Ilusorio’s comments from earlier that morning.

  This man knew the jungle. No doubt about. He’d spent two weeks trying to master this trick, and Ilusorio could walk it in his sleep. Why had everything come hard to him? Always hard. It didn’t seem fair.

  The wind intensified, nosing deep into the tree canopy and rattling limbs heavy with leaves. Rain pelted the clearing. The ground was mired where the termites had stripped away its grassy cover.

  “Damn! I didn’t think it would rain like this.”

  “We not lookin’ to de sky. De signs be dere.”

  The rain fell in veils of silver that swirled about Marais and obscured his view. A solid sheet lashed at him. It threatened to topple him to the ground.

  “We’ve got to find cover!” Marais yelled.

  The two men pushed back the way they’d come, with Marais crushing a few stragglers in the termite’s own retreat. Instead of re-entering the tunnel through the forest, Ilusorio waved him toward another opening where the thickets had blown down to reveal a rotted fence row and a crumbling building in the distance. In the inky shadows of the thickets, Marais spotted termites by their glow. When Ilusorio stopped to stare at one, he had to tug the Carib along the fence, explaining the bioluminous phenomenon with garbled shouts into the gale. They fought the weather until they were exhausted.

  The hacienda that once ruled over the ranch lands had fallen into abject ruin, and its shape suggested the stump of a gargantua. The clearing that once surrounded it had given way to crimson-barked fig trees under-storied by graceful horsetails, while liana vines reclaimed the structure, threading into the broken windows like power lines punched through by the jungle. It looked to Marais as if they fed the structure a green light, yet when they pushed aside the broken door, and huddled in the entry, he realized the source was outside—muted sunlight passing through an overgrown hole in the roof. He slumped against a wall, setting his pack on a roll of peeled wallpaper for a backrest.

  “We lucky ‘bout dis place. No sign of snakes.”

  Marais nodded. “Especially lucky if the storm keeps up. It might cover us while we observe the lived-in hives.”