Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest

by Frazier, Robert

  “Dat’s so. But den we may haff to stay de nite.”

  As if to emphasize Ilusorio’s statement, the wind blew the door shut against the jam with a solid crack. Marais sat upright.

  “Relax, mon. De aftaanoon grow long.”

  Marais appreciated his concern, and he felt a momentary bond of brotherhood with this stranger. It felt good. The Mexican’s warning about Ilusorio, though well-intended, seemed also to be ill-founded. The Carib passed into the next room, leaving him to rest.

  The rain continued to pelt the forest, drumming the roof above and an exposed floor somewhere in the guts of the building. The rhythms lulled Marais. He nodded off, dreamed of his life as a boy. In this life, though, he and his father lived in a huge red tree house, high in the tallest maple of a park along the Seine. Scholars and scientists gathered below to listen to his father’s speeches. They were invited up while Marais served wine or tea. They patted him on the shoulder and brought their daughters for him to meet. They were his family, and the whole world his address. And they never forgot a birthday.

  ***

  Marais swam up through sodden levels of drowsiness. He followed the sound of a moan. Raising his head from his knees, he shook out the cobwebs of sleep, and then ate dried fruit and crackers from his pack. The sound became a murmuring voice; this time it wasn’t a dream. He thought he heard his name whistle through the eves as the storm continued outside and the sun dimmed to a faint presence, thickening into violet washes that alarmed him. He couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped. He knew that they should run for the boat and recover emergency supplies, if not make an attempt at returning to the tents on Last Chance. He needed his serum and his men.

  “Ilusorio! Ilusorio where are you?”

  The murmur grew louder.

  “Ilusorio. Is that you?”

  Marais pushed himself to his feet though sharp pains lanced his ankles. He tore down his socks where the rain had washed away the repellent and loosened the taped seals, and he used his gloves to crush a crowd of fat termites that bit into the soft flesh about his heels.

  “Jesus!”

  His head pinwheeled.

  “Ilusorio?”

  Marais stepped from the hall into a bare room that amplified the mysterious voice. At the far end of the room he found a metal stairway that spiraled up through a column of pale light, where the roof had collapsed and the rain flashed in drips from the growths that choked the roof hole, slicking the mossy stairs. He held the handrail as he climbed. His ascent seemed to corkscrew into the column, carrying him to a heaven of weak illuminations and unkempt gardens, and only after several turns in the stairs did he realize that the illusion was enhanced by a large snake—a golden boa mutated to the thickness of a tree trunk—that slid down the central shaft as he went up. Marais felt dizzy, and he hurried to the landing above.

  He rubbed the spots from his eyes, and he stepped into a large unfinished space. On a desk stood the shell of an antique computer, one of the early Macintosh models whose intact screen glowed with shifting light. As Marais approached it, fascinated by the impossibility of light without electric power, the voice that had awakened him rattled from the computer box and startled him. He noted the signs of termites where they’d tunneled into the disk drive slot. The light and sound appeared to be the revelations of the insects that moved within the machine, the essences of their tiny lives channeled through the senses of the circuitry, and as he swiveled the chair, intending to sit before the computer, he came face to face with a swarthy man. Or at least the semblance of one. The chiclero’s nose and ears were rotted away, and his head slumped against the backrest. Whether recently dead or in a deep coma, he was gone from the world, his skin drained of color, yet he twitched on occasion. A feat, Marais realized, that could only be accounted for by the termites lodged at the nerve centers on his neck and under his tattered clothes. The head jerked sideways and the eyes fluttered open. They fixed on the screen as if decoding a message from the shifting patterns within. Marais followed its hollow stare and found that the bioluminous termites formed a face in the screen, the face of his father. It tried to speak to him.

  Marais backed away, terrified yet fascinated. The corpse’s head jerked again, and its eyes were glowing, ringed with larval termites. Marais bolted. He tore through the growth on the stairs and slipped his way down to the first floor until he ran headlong into the wall at the bottom. His helmet cushioned some of the blow. His skull the rest.

  ***

  When Marais awoke this time it was pitch black in the hacienda, and many hours had passed. His temples throbbed, but the ache was dull and distant, healed by many hours of dreamless oblivion. He pulled on his helmet, shoved through the main door into the overgrown yard. Marais could see his way toward the termites’ clearing in the faint airglow outside. By now the bites he’d incurred and the blow to his head had left him feverish, unsure of his own thoughts or the things that he saw, yet he considered the boat a reasonable escape and a necessary one. Then he heard Ilusorio’s voice calling from ahead. He jogged down the old driveway.

  “Marais. Help me.”

  Marais jogged faster, hands before him, pushing through a torrent of leaves stirred up from the ground by a strong gust. His helmet tumbled off his head and rolled away on its edge. The voice called again, and he followed it down a side trail that led away from the house and the excavations. The voice said to hurry. He ran harder, blocking out the pain that shot up through his calves. Marais pushed through unfamiliar territory until he entered a rent in the forest, a shadowy counterpart to the one populated with hive mounds. In this one, a single gargantua pointed a crooked finger into the faint washes of dawn, and a massive hive mound wound around it, using its girth to support the largest colony he’d ever seen. Ilusorio stood at the base of this tower—without protective clothing—and coughed as he held his belly.

  “Are you alright?” Marais asked as he approached, out of breath.

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” Ilusorio’s voice sounded like he was drifting on narcotics. “And now de old one wanna see you. He been waitin’.”

  “Waiting? What’s going on?”

  “Dis an impaatant nite. You impaatant. You must climb de birt’in’ mound and meet your fate.”

  Two stocky chicleros—Mestizos in better shape than the one in the ranch house—stepped from the shadows and tied Marais’ arms behind him. They removed his gloves. He struggled, but his muscles lacked strength.

  Ilusorio said, “I’m sorry,” and motioned him to follow, and Marais was pushed onto a narrow ledge that wound up the hardened wall of the mound and about the trunk of the gargantua. A fresh squall dashed him with cold slugs of rain. He shivered and stared at Ilusorio’s back as the wind seemed to urge him up the crude steps.

  A bolt of lightning crackled across the sky. This illuminated the Carib and highlighted a bulge that ringed his belly under his shirt. In the darkness that followed, Marais noticed a faint glow there, and when the wind ruffled the edge of Ilusorio’s shirt tail, it revealed the foxfire-white bodies of termites hanging from his belly skin. Remembering the bites he’d seen there that morning, Marais swore, but his anger over Ilusorio’s betrayal soon waned. It wore away with the tedious climb. This turn of events only cemented his belief that the jungle had held the key to his fate all along.

  As they mounted a flattened lip at the top of the mound, which looked out over the jungle treetops and into the top of the gargantuan, which had been completely eaten away, Marais stumbled forward. Ilusorio shoved him into the hole, following close behind. A bolt of lightning arced in blue across the sky, forking like a skeletal hand. They stood on wet sawdust and hardened cellulose to face a hooded figure twenty yards away on the opposite side of the lip. The figure spoke to them over the thunder.

  “You’ve brought him, Ilusorio.”

  “Just as you say. Just as de sick one upstairs at de ranch say.”

  “You will be rewarded. Go. Take the others to our retreat in the inter
ior. The blanco and I will follow.”

  Ilusorio gave Marais a quick glance, hung his head, and melted into the darkness. The figure turned to Marais.

  “So, you know of us, señor. You’ve studied us.”

  Marais tried to cover his ears, but the voice penetrated his barrier and bore its way inside his thoughts.

  “Come closer.”

  The pain in his ankles flared, spread through his body. He felt himself respond to the command. The old one held a power over him. He seemed to float with the feeling, and found himself against the far lip of the bowl with his head even with the knees of the old one.

  “Are you ready to join us? To join us wholly?”

  Marais knew then that the termitary wanted him as a part, as an extension of itself. He was a man who understood it better than anyone from the outside world could. He understood hive imperatives, and could act as an ambassador for it. Or an agent. The pain eased within him at this thought, even the grumbling threads of dysentery quieted in his gut. All his life he’d wanted siblings and a real home. This was the first offer he’d ever had. The first gesture of acceptance. He felt a tug of longing in his heart.

  “You want an initiate,” he said.

  “You’re already initiated, Señor Marais. You’ve felt our sting.” The voice grated on him the way his father’s had during the last days, when he’d lapsed into rabid curses that called for Marais’ mother.

  “Do you join? Answer.” The voice wailed with the wind, seeming to unravel into exotic names for disease and death. “Step forth.”

  Marais knew what it meant to join. He’d been the only one to embrace his father’s theories on the potentials of the hive mind, and now he was asked to put his faith to the test. He’d been asked into the family.

  “Yes,” he responded, and with that he felt the termites swarming up about his feet. “No!”

  He looked up with tears in his eyes, hoping for a sign from the sky like the clean ray of light he’d found that morning. Thunder rumbled in the direction of the river. More brilliant flashes of lightning. A gust blew back the hood of the old one above him. It was not his father, if indeed it was now a man at all. Leishmaniasis had taken not only his nose and ears, but in some way stripped the flesh from his skull, then eaten back the softened bone and exposed the brain.

  Marais froze in awe. The figure before him appeared to be an interface between man and the termitary, an ancient human whose life was extended by his link to the hive. His features were grooved where the feet of termites made their daily route. The eyes looked pupil-less and milky white, with lids stitched by hanging fragments of moss. Rotted wounds were tended by termites that grew fungal salads at their edges, and his brain was transformed into a fungus-draped organ that squirmed under their ministrations like a queen laying eggs. The old Mestizo embodied the evolutionary step from a human form to a greater form of being. This went beyond the possibilities of group mind that Marais had fought in vain to prove to the world, beyond what he thought plausible.

  “Decide, blanco. You can not be allowed to leave with your knowledge of us.”

  The ancient one bent toward him. Overcome with the heat of revelation, Marais reached up to the old one and gripped his arms as he bent further. The man lost his balance, tumbled and bounced off his head into the glowing termites and larvae boiling about him. Marais felt his skull explode. His mind seemed charged with sudden clarity and pain. With his senses clear, Marais breathed the horrid odor of the man’s flesh; it smelled like death and fecal decay. It smelled like his distant past. Again the old one reached for Marais, but he kicked the man back in revulsion, and hoisted himself onto the lip of the mound. He beat the insects off him as more poured from the opening over the old one. The roof of the mound collapsed away from the lip under the combined weight, and he saw the man’s arms flail up for a moment, offering, perhaps, a physical manifestation of his disbelief at Marais’ decision. As the old one disappeared, there was a loud cry from the clearing below. Several chicleros shouted as they scrambled up toward him along the ledge that spiraled about the hive.

  In the eye of the storm, whose calm equaled the ravages of a normal storm, Marais slipped down the side of the mound in big jumps, surprising the chicleros and reaching the jungle trails at the perimeter of the clearing before them. From there on it was a wild race. He listened to the voice of the wind as it led him. He prayed that the drenching fury that bent the trees to submission would also provide cover for his escape. After each flash of lightning more distant than the last, he saw that he negotiated less of unfamiliar territory and entered upon more of the old ranch lands where his studies had centered. He also saw the faces of his pursuers growing near, with a tall, swift man in the lead. This first man caught him for a moment, grabbing around his chest, trying to pull him down. Marais was so slippery with rain that he managed to twist out of the man’s grip and shoulder him aside. The man up-ended, impaled on a long gargantua thorn.

  With a surge of adrenalin and several bold strokes of fortune, Marais emerged alone on the riverbank where the boat was tied, collapsing into the extra gear stored at the stern. The rainwater that collected there slopped against him. He felt renewed by the squalls that stung his face, and he lay for the briefest moment on his back as the drug-induced grip of the termitary ebbed from his body. But shouts reverberated through the forest shadows, causing him to jerk upright. Gunshots followed. Frantically, he strapped his big flashlight to the bow and started the boat on its way.

  Another motor started up behind him. A bullet pinged off his hull.

  With the same luck, heightened less now by the madness of the night and more by his fear that the engine might stall, Marais pushed the boat along the choppy river at full throttle. The beam of his flashlight rose and fell through the overhanging growths like a machete slashing its way to freedom. The dugout behind him kept pace but could not close the gap, and the few shots that were fired missed their mark in the rough conditions. He reached the mouth of the river as the sun leaked above the forest, a bloodshot eye peeking between the canopy top and the dispersing storm front. It seemed to rise from a shattered underworld below the horizon. The rain stopped at last.

  The dugout fell behind in the bigger chop of the sea. Marais pushed his engine to its limits. His men heard the boat as he motored close into the shallows near their campsite on the tiny island, and they poured from the tents to meet him. He screamed to them about the evil chicle gatherers and pointed at the approaching dugout. They fired a pistol at the chicleros, but had to duck for cover when one of them caught a rifle bullet in the leg in the return volley. Marais dug into his boat gear and pulled out a flare gun. Taking careful aim as his three pursuers plowed toward his mooring, he nailed the flare charge into the center of the dugout. It erupted in flame and exploded when the extra gas tanks caught fire. None of the three surfaced alive.

  “Ah, Señor,” Carlos said as he slapped Marais on the back. “You are a brave man. To fight them like that. And to have slept in the jungle at night.”

  The other Mexicans let out a loud cheer. They carried him to the main tent and poured coffee and rum between his chattering lips. They jostled him, wrapped him in colorful Indian blankets. They cajoled him into telling his story, looking awestruck at his revelations of the forest and at the account of his escape from the chicleros and the old one. Carlos nodded in agreement as Marais told them how bitter he felt about Ilusorio. He’d become someone different in the eyes of these men: a hero and a friend. He found in their excited faces a validation that had been missing from his life. In one day—an exact twenty four hours—he’d rejected a chance to prove his work, to live at the very core of the theory of communality that had driven his father and nearly himself to ruin in the civilized world. Now, he’d found a deeper, seemingly more resolute companionship with these men than he’d considered possible. For with all their faults, and no doubt because of them, they were human. They were familiar in all ways that warmed him deeply, warmed some catacomb
in his heart that he’d long given up as remote, cold, and lost to anything less than a miracle.

  “It was as I feared,” Carlos said when the others broke open another bottle of rum. He sighed, his eyes locked on Marais in a thoughtful, knowing look. “The Carib betrayed you.”

  “But you have not,” he told Carlos.

  If in the future he should consider himself at home in the world, triumphant or not, Marais knew that the feeling began there on Last Chance Cay. He relaxed at last, content to repeat his adventures to them over and over.

  THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST MEETS THE SEA

  Boston

  All-night cantinas are still.

  Shabby film-noir hotels

  are steeped in shadow

  deeper than their stains.

  The vines are everywhere,

  like the scouts of an army

  hard upon their heels,

  like mad organic lace,

  a grand ophidian opulence

  leafing the listing

  masts that dot the harbor,

  caging the empty plazas

  and abandoned streets

  in tendrils that strayed

  along pastel walls,

  across rust tile roofs,

  twining through windows

  with sinuous grace,

  toppling lamps aside,

  indifferent to remains,

  mute green strength,

  blind and vegetative,

  about to pull the city

  down into its waves.

  A COMPASS FOR THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST

  Boston/Frazier

  Norte

  Along the dense extremities of the forest north

  that advance across the Panamanian Isthmus,

  ancient bridge for mustang, panther, and bear,

  the trunks of towering andirobas intertwine

  interminably in unfettered mahogany abandon.

  Their barks are host to a protean foxfire that

  radiates iconographic images in a flowing