She reached for her purse, raising one eyebrow. “I wasn’t sure you drank . . . wine.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER SIX
THURSDAY MORNING
“Marian.”
“Yes?”
Matthew had come down to find Marian first into the store, as usual. Chantal, whose expertise with eggs was limited to “hard boiled,” preferred to let Matthew cook breakfast. Her insistence on a division of labor left her currently finishing the breakfast dishes.
“Chantal will do four days, but staggered hours, you’ll have to work it out with her.”
“Excellent.”
“About the new hire.”
“Yes?”
“Not some high-school kid; we need a grownup who knows books or at least can learn, who can eventually run things a few days a week.”
“I agree.”
“And I think the new manager should make the hire. That will establish the chain of command straight off, and the new manager will have to train them up, anyway.”
“That makes sense.”
“Are you willing to run the joint?”
“I’m . . .” She had to stop and clear her throat. He could see her forcing herself not to talk herself down. “Yes.”
“OK, that’s decided, then. There’s the matter of your pay.”
“I’m perfectly . . .” She stopped herself again.
“Assume for the sake of argument that you were to leave, so I’d have to hire a computer person to replace you for the online and business stuff, and a person to replace Bob as manager. At going rates for people who can actually tell a first edition from a first baseman, figure out what that would cost the outfit. Then tell me what your new, higher rate of pay is going to be, and be prepared to explain to me how much we’re really saving by paying you what you’re worth. OK?”
“Yes. I’ll do a spread sheet.”
“Which you’ll then explain to me.”
“Right.”
“Do you have anyone in mind for the new hire?”
“Les.”
“Les?”
“He knows books, he’s a published author, he’s on the panels at all the fantasy conventions, and he’s already a member of the Horrors. Plus his royalties are highly sporadic, it’s perfectly shameful, so he’s living like a pauper, which makes him affordable. And the cats like him.”
“Les is a night person.”
“Les has never bitten a customer, which is more than I can say for Mr. Cuddles. He can refill the hummingbird feeders without standing on a stool, and we’ve all seen him in daylight. He’s a little odd, but it’s part of what he has to do to write, the way Jeremy Brett had to become Sherlock Holmes. If he can’t start till noon we’ll work around it; there’s stuff that can be done just as well after closing; mornings are slow, anyway.”
“Marian, he won’t even come in the door unless he’s invited by someone who lives here, which right now he interprets to mean me and Chantal. What if we’re away?”
“I’ve been giving that some thought. The basement apartment is empty.”
“Would he move?”
“I have the go-ahead to talk to him?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
* * *
“Where to, now?” asked Chantal, looking all fresh and scrumptious. Matthew was tempted to say “Back to bed” but gave a slight sigh and decided to remain the responsible adult.
“The Botany annex.”
“Oh, goody: Drugs.”
“I hope you’ll be a little more circumspect if we’re within hearing of the undergraduates.”
“I thought all the undergraduates were away getting drunk and diving out of hotel windows in Florida.”
“It does fill you with optimism about the future of the race, doesn’t it?”
The gal they were looking for in the greenhouses turned out to be a pert little redhead named Darcie with green eyes and freckles and bangs. Matthew looked like he could eat her in one bite. Chantal knew she should have taken him back to bed for another half hour. Always trust your instincts on these things; run them till they drop. Naturally, while acknowledging this oversight to herself, Chantal was not going to become jealous; that would be immature. Even if the little slut wasn’t wearing a bra, and insisted on setting them swaying whenever he was looking, like a cow asking to be milked.
She had all kinds of things growing in an atmosphere that felt like a re-creation of some jungle plantation in Java.
“And what do you have that’s currently ready?” Matthew asked after a few introductory pleasantries about the Brugmansia, whatever they were.
“I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything from the cacti, we work from seed now and the Lophophora are so slow-growing. These little guys are two years old and as you can see they’re still no bigger than my fingernail. Well, maybe your fingernail. And in this tray over here are our babies, a couple of months old and you’d miss them if you didn’t know they were there, not much bigger than capers. You know capers?”
“Botanically or gastronomically?”
“Unless we can get some more cuttings to jump start things I’ll be an old hag before we can do much with this lot.”
Chantal wondered what she thought she was now, the cow, but decided not to say anything, since that could seem catty.
“Fertilizer?”
“Once they’re started we spray with some double-dilute phosphate to encourage blooms. In general it turns out they’ll tolerate a range of stuff as long as they’re well-drained, but generally they seem to want to grow in real crap. River sand, coconut husk, some limestone. They actually recommend pounding wallboard into dust. Yours survive, though.”
“In a sunny window, yes. Commercial palm and cactus mix, I’m afraid.”
“You’re fortunate, or else you’ve just been ignoring them. They need some moisture to get started, but after a certain point they seem to prefer being ignored. Water from the bottom to encourage those big taproots, and they need more sun than you’d think. More of our weak northern sun, anyway. In the Southwest they screen them with a white or beige cloth in the hot summer, they say to watch out for softness from excess sun, you know that, who do I think I’m talking to, but here we started our first batch with too little light, wanting to avoid burning them, and they grew thin and spindly, looking for the sun, till they finally damped off. It’s hard.”
“Because your instincts are all wrong.”
“You want to baby them but they’re designed to grow in the desert under a mesquite bush or something. The land of rocks and scorpions where nothing soft survives.”
“But they have no thorns,” Chantal noted.
“No.”
“No natural defense?”
“They’re extremely bitter, of course. Although the tortoise reportedly go for them quite eagerly, which would tend to confirm what the Indians say about the tortoise being sentient, unless it just means they’ll really just eat anything that’s close enough to the ground, which is also widely reported. Did you know that during droughts they get their moisture from fresh cow patties? The cow only uses about 20 percent of the available nutrient and the droppings are more than 90 percent water; an interesting example of species symbiosis, the cattle probably replacing bison or antelope in the original ecosystem, since the cattle can travel further to and from a water hole.
“Anyway, currently no cactus in any useful quantities. If you’re in North Mexico or Southwest Texas and you can lay hands on some cuttings we’d be appreciative. We can bring them back from a pretty desiccated state. In fact, that’s much better than moist and rotting. Dry them. Dry dry dry. We do have some San Pedro that’s growing like crazy, those tree-like things trying to escape through the ventilation slats over there. But either we got the wrong variety or the psychoactive reputation is grossly exaggerated because we’ve taken to chopping them up and using them in salads and nobody reports the slightest buzz except fro
m the Tequila dressing. I do, however, have a nice crop of fungi.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. Much quicker turnaround.” She led them into a kind of wooden shed. “These are a Psilocybe from the Pacific Northwest, they started forming fruiting bodies last week. And you’ll love these, in fact I think you’re already familiar with them. In Oaxaca they call them derumbe, which means landslide. First thing out of the disturbed earth, probably. They’re actually Psilocybe caerulescens, which the Mazatec consider the big brother of the Psilocybe mexicana, here I am telling you this, like you didn’t write the book.”
“Wasson wrote the book. Wasson and Schultes.”
“I follow the journals, Matthew. You’ve written enough for another book if you’d just let someone pull them together. Meantime, you could take a bunch of these if you’ll promise to eventually get me a written report: duration, potency, usefulness. They don’t last, as you know, so otherwise I’d be stringing them up to dry, which starts to make the place look a booth in the mercado in Oaxaca. Experienced researchers are so much more useful. Anecdotes are fine. Jaguar sightings, whatever.”
She and Matthew traded some kind of communication involving eyebrows and head tilts, and the freckled little redhead produced a small blade and started slicing off the long, spindly fresh mushrooms and forming them into a pile on a large piece of waxed paper.
“All those?” asked Chantal.
“The cotacine prescribe 13 pair. Thirteen is the mystical number, of course, but 13 apiece evidently doesn’t open the doors far enough, so 13 pair. Mind you, casual users talk about six or eight per person. Not pair, just six or eight fruiting bodies, so it’s possible the curanderos build up a tolerance, although I know Matthew disagrees. Thirteen pair would be 52, twenty-six each if you’re both aiming to cross over all the way and speak with the light creatures. If it’s just for Matthew, 26, and then a beginner might want to go easy and take six or eight the first time, call it 33?”
“Fifty-two sounds right,” Matthew smiled.
“We don’t pay her?” Chantal asked Matthew once they were out of earshot, toting their paper bag of fresh produce.
“University bureaucracies work with purchase orders, invoices, billing codes. There are no cash drawers; cash would cause a panic. We invite her to dinner occasionally, and we give her a break when she’s looking for a hard-to-find book. The foundation also helped fund her doctoral field work in South America with the Ayahuasca. So it all balances out.
“You two know each other well.”
“I gave her some help on her field work.”
“You’ve tripped together.”
“Yes.”
“Naked? You’ve had your hands on those little honkers?”
“Chantal: You’re jealous.”
“I am not. OK, of course I am. You want me to lie?”
“I find it charming.”
“The light creatures?”
“You’ll see.”
“She didn’t mention Ayahuasca.”
“It works differently. Not what we’re looking for right now, although it might be appropriate another time. There are books from the early conquest years, both in Peru and in the Yucatan, that need finding. Les was on the right track with Blue Moon, Crystal Skull. Maybe I’m a little prejudiced; all that brewing up, very soupy.”
* * *
They were back upstairs at Matthew’s, Marian having been cheerfully informed he and Chantal were incommunicado for the rest of the day. Matthew had nice thick geometric patterned rugs in front of the hearth in the second floor living room, which Chantal appreciated almost as much as the cats.
A true child of the sixties, Matthew had put some kind of music on the stereo — Jefferson Airplane, she was pretty sure — a set-up which consisted of multiple elements all hooked together with actual wires. Now he lit a bundle of sage in a brass tray, and then the loose spliff of tobacco, which was not inhaled directly but wafted to the four points of the compass. The smoke was supposed to be a purifier.
“I love the tobacco and the sage. Could you do without them if you had to?”
“A different ritual would be fine, but some ritual is advisable. You’re seeking the proper path, clearing your mind and opening yourself to allow free association in the hippocampus, probably, something close to the dream state, but a waking dream. You’re letting down the filters that trap us in a linear narrative. But those same filters are what keep us from wandering off into traffic. We have to remember how to re-erect them later. People talk about losing their inhibitions, but being able to recover some of our inhibitions is useful, if we don’t want to end up in some sheltered workshop stringing beads. Anyway, we need to be positive; think about Bob and Rashid and the book. Don’t expect to be in complete control, but we want to direct the vision, the journey, to some extent by focusing on our questions.”
“You learned the tobacco and the sage from your own road man?”
“I did.”
“In the jungles of the Yucatan?”
“Tikal has your better developed jungle, and Palenque. The northern Yucatan is more arid, miserable soil, except maybe Uxmal. But no, in Arizona, actually. The Apache.”
“Aren’t the Apache, like . . . violent?”
“No, no. A fun-loving people. Love to laugh. Though they often do go armed, like some others I won’t name. But motorcycle people get a bad rap, everywhere.”
“Your first spirit guides were an Apache motorcycle gang?”
“Chantal, of all people, do I have to tell you not to pre-judge based on appearances?”
“I think that’s why I fell in love with you, Matthew. You are what you appear to be.”
“I don’t see what’s so hard about that.”
“Of course you don’t. We’re really going to eat all these things?” The mushrooms made quite a heap on the coffee table.
“This would be a good time to speak up, if you’re having second thoughts.” Matthew looked so serious.
“Oh, relax. I’ve done some synthetics, you know.”
“Some are fine. Synthesizing DMT or MDA makes sense. But the natural compounds have a much wider range of alkaloids, they self-regulate your dosage. No one quite knows how they modify or enhance one another. This endless desire to purify into one compound, we call it the FDA effect. There are synthetics that seem like short-cuts but they can actually burn out some circuitry; read Dick.”
“Dick . . . Nixon?”
“Philip K. Dick. None of this should be done lightly.”
“Will I barf?”
“Probably not, if we’ve been fasting since yesterday. That’s so there’s less for your stomach to worry about purging, as well as to cut down on conflicting drugs.”
“I’m disappointingly straight, as you know.”
“You pay close attention to what you eat. You know how each thing affects you; that’s huge. Leaving your body in its natural state makes you more aware of your surroundings, already. You’re not dulled. But caffeine, the sugars, they can all have a tug-of-war effect. You’ll need to eat at least eight or 10 of these. If you want to slow down after that, it’s OK. But you asked if it’s important which ritual you use. Not as long as you understand what we’re doing, which is asking for help setting our feet on the proper path. It’s a narrow road to climb, narrow and steep, and we’ll be busy gazing at clouds and mountains and the light-people, not paying attention to where we put our feet. A long way to fall for those who use these plants for the wrong purpose.”
“So there’s danger.”
“These plants are powerful. Anywhere there’s power, there’s danger. Not for those who enter in a good spirit. If instead of fighting you’re surrendering to the power and seeking true guidance, then you’re OK, you know it will all come out OK in the end. Even if what you see is a little frightening, that’s to teach you that death is part of life, that you have to come to terms with all the aspects of life so they’ll no longer have the power of fear over you. You trust these plants an
d they give you warmth and comfort.
“There’s no fatal dose of these plants that we know of, no cardiac or respiratory danger in any quantity you can hold down. There is a slightly elevated risk of seizure if you’ve got a history of epilepsy or if it runs in your family, not a serious concern as long as you don’t go driving a car or starting up a chainsaw, which is contraindicated anyway.
“But those who look here for the secrets of a power to wield over other men, they’re the ones who tend to find only darkness and fear. To be a little cautious, to feel a little trepidation, to have to seek the courage to face true answers, that’s fine. That’s why we fast and meditate and prepare ourselves. But those who say the god of these plants is frightening, they’re only reporting what they see inside themselves. What terrifies them is nothing but a dark mirror.”
They’d started eating the Psilocybe, tender little things.
“These are a little earthy,” she said, “but they actually taste fine.”
“Yes, it’s the peyote that are bitter. Mushrooms are nice, especially when they’re so fresh. Moses said always to eat them the same morning they’re picked.”
“Moses as in . . . Moses?”
“Right.”
“I can eat the number I feel is right.”
“That’s exactly right.” The pile was already reduced by more than half.
“Can I drink water?”
“Absolutely; all you need.” Matthew stopped to smile at her. That was nice. Reassuring. “The weather seems to be holding,” he added. “Before too long we should go out. Outside would be better.”
“Is it safe to move?”
“Slowly.”
“I don’t think I should drive.”
“Absolutely not. The side yard. Take the Navajo blanket; I’ll bring water.”
“Down the stairs, then.”
“Slowly. Use the handrail. Don’t step directly on any cats.”
“Right.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
Several eager fur-persons did accompany them out the side door. The cats loved any activity that involved a visit to the side yard. They positioned themselves as centurions, in between investigating anything that moved. Serafina cautiously approached and began licking Chantal’s hand, which felt wonderful and . . . complex.
The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) Page 10
