Rage Is Back

by Adam Mansbach

  Now our teachers will be yours. Billy nodded, exhaled a long, shuddery breath, and closed his eyes. As scared and dieta-diminished as he was, I sensed relief. He’d had his fill of these guys, these middlemen.

  And then the bazaguanco took over and we were falling through blackness—and I mean fast, none of this tra-la-la trippy float-falling you see in movies, I’m talking a straight plummet like somebody threw us off a rooftop. Flailing, windmilling, bracing to hit bottom any second and pancake, and all the while it was getting colder and colder until breathing hurt, the lungs too tender for the harsh air. From the depths came a fast-rushing sound and then bats were everywhere, thousands of them shooting past us, their stink and screams filling the emptiness, the bright yellow malevolent streaks of their eyes all that was visible.

  We fell through them and then everything slowed down. The air grew warmer, thicker, turned gelatinous. Instead of falling we slid through it, slower and slower and then not at all, and it oozed into every orifice, filled our noses and ears and assholes, our mouths and eyes, the most invasive and unpleasant sensation you can imagine. I could hear my teeth grinding, or rather Billy’s—this snot-air conducted sound the way water does, amplified and nuanced it. You know what I mean if you’ve ever cracked your knuckles while lying in a bathtub, ears submerged, and skeeved yourself out at how calcified and loud and brittle the bone-on-bone grind sounds.

  A rhythmic pounding shook the world, and for an instant I imagined us from the outside, if there was an outside: we were slivers of orange rind suspended in a giant Jell-O mold, and somebody, Bill Cosby probably, was banging his fist against the table. Boom. Boom. Boom. Each reverberation loosened the mucus for a moment and we slid, stopped, slid again. Suddenly we were through it, free of the awful suck and squelch. I’d imagine being born felt something like this, except instead of blinding hospital lights and sweat-drenched maternal ecstasy there was only greater panic because we were underwater and whereas before, mollycoddled by snot, we had somehow been able to breathe, now we most certainly could not.

  The water was clear, tasted like river—subtle hints of stone, lichen and mud, a sweet finish that lingers on the palate, pairs well with poached salmon and death by drowning—and it was writhing with snakes, yellow-and-black striped, above and below us, a goddamn commuter highway. The name naka naka popped into my mind, poisonous hot on its heels. And still the boom, boom tremoring the water, riling the snakes. We swam toward it. My/Billy’s lungs burned. Any second they were sure to forfeit, fill with water and doom us to a mossy riverbed demise.

  And then a great thick tree trunk came into view, shape vague through snakes and silt, the distance to it impossible to gauge, and the boom, boom became buh-boom, buh-boom, as if to say I see you too or maybe imitate our heartbeats. With each stroke the tree loomed larger, until it was massive and we threw ourselves upon it, arms and legs spread wide, fingers scrabbling against the rough bark. Billy’s body surged with a relief I didn’t understand, since as near as I could tell we were still drowning.

  Buh-buh-boom. Buh-buh-boom. Light began to penetrate the water, pushing deeper with each moment. The surface of the river seemed to fall toward us, welcome and yet terrifying. It felt as if the weight might crush us, like a French press coming down on coffee grinds.

  Billy breached the water. Or rather the water breached him, and settled at the level of his heaving chest, still flush against the trunk. Fifty feet above his head, the tree flared into a crown of limbs and leaves. They overhung the body in wild arcs, like the trails of spent firecrackers falling back toward earth. The trunk itself seemed to erupt from the river, like a launching rocket. No other life was visible: there was only water in all directions, and this regal giant speared straight through it like a toothpick dropped by God.

  Gracias, anciano sabio, my father whispered. Creo que te conozco. ¿Se llaman El Purga, verdad?

  The response was spoken not out loud, but inside Billy’s head. Do not embarrass yourself with Spanish. It is no more my language than any other. Yes, some know me as El Purga. You can call me the Undisputed King of the Broadway Line, son.

  Billy gaped up at him.

  Just kidding, motherfucker. Now fall back. This river is my friend. She will support you.

  Billy dropped his arms and legs, let the water take him. He drifted a few yards from El Purga and bobbed there in a standing position, nipple deep, two-thirds less buoyant than Jesus.

  Let’s have a look at you, El Purga said, and from the tree’s highest boughs shot seven beams of light. One hit Billy between the eyes. Another bored into the center of his chest. A third touched down atop his head. Others were directed at points submerged; I could see them cutting through the water, pure white, like a series of thin ropes connecting Billy to the tree.

  You ever go to the barber and get buzzed with the clippers in that one small spot behind the left ear that feels mad good, almost sexually so, and your eyes float back in your skull and you wonder if that’s where your endocrine gland is located and also if dude knows what he’s doing right now and whether there’s some kind of unspoken homo undercurrent to the whole haircutting ritual and that’s why everybody in black barbershops stays talking about broads and politics and boxing all the time? It was like that: warm, jangly and electric. But much longer, and all up and down the center of the body, and far more intense.

  I felt it, but for the first time since I’d seen him, I was locked outside of Billy’s mind, reduced to watching. Every few seconds my father would twitch, or moan, eyes closed and eyeballs roving beneath the lids as if he were having a nightmare. I started to notice dark specks of matter floating up the beams of light, toward El Purga. They seemed to be coming out of Billy, and soon the shafts were full of them and the expression on my father’s face had become one of intense pain.

  Halfway between my father and the tree the seven slim rays fused into a single thick one. The specks clustered together, like metal shavings drawn to a magnet, with more still coming out of Billy. Soon there was a huge black column of them, slow-turning like a rotisserie. Then the beams cut off and Billy’s eyes popped open and he thrashed as if drowning.

  El Purga’s voice sounded inside his head: Rage! Billy’s head jerked up and he screamed, because the black column was a black column no more but a subway train, a lifesized New York City F to be precise, and it was chugging toward him at full speed, barreling down invisible tracks but making real life noise, hellacious quantities of it. Slapped across both sides were burners and they read KILROY DONDI VANCE and IT’S A BOY and WREN 209 and HOT MAMA and IMMORTAL FIVE ALIVE.

  You might, at this point, ask: Oh, it’s like that, El Purga, you sick bastard?

  Yeah, it’s like that. And that’s the way it is.

  The train plowed into Billy and he disappeared into the river, plastered to its grille. Then I was underwater with him, father and son standing inside the lead car as the train shot straight down, tunneling through blackness. And in the middle of the car, oblivious to us, a younger Billy and a very young Wren 209 fucked on the floor, wrapped up in a rough green blanket with her on top, cowgirl style, titties bouncing, head thrown back, palms pressed to his chest, and out of everything I’d seen thus far, this was the shit I really, truly wish I hadn’t. Billy stood and watched, dumbstruck and sad, but not for long because behind us came a voice, Yo, nigga, and he whipped around.

  Dengue?

  It was the Ambassador, all right, circa 1987, young and sighted, in an Adidas jumpsuit and matching yellow-and-green-when-it’s-time-to-get-ill shelltoes.

  Yes and no. Well, no. You’ve got some serious chakra blockage, you know that? There is much healing to do.

  El Purga?

  Tell me what you hope to learn.

  I want to heal myself, and others.

  A shock of pain, a flash of white, and then I/Billy was on the ground, staring up at Anastacio Bracken.r />
  Don’t tell me what you think I wanna hear, shitstain. Up came the nightstick. Blammo, right across the ribcage. You wanna learn to kill me, don’t you?

  Billy heaved for breath, squinted down the length of his body.

  I don’t know.

  Bark began to grow over Bracken’s boots, and then his legs. I knew I’d never use the expression “treed up” again.

  I could teach you that. It was El Purga’s voice now. At least, it was the voice he had first used, the one Billy’d heard inside his skull.

  But by the time I do, if I do, you will no longer feel the need. Rise.

  Billy obeyed, and as he stood, the train split open and a jet of water, a geyser, propelled him to the surface of the river. He floated on his back and listened to his heart, his breath. El Purga loomed above him, motionless and silent. Greasy black globules, the consistency of chicken fat, bobbed to the surface, one after the next, and spread across the water.

  High in El Purga’s branches, a faint light shone. The tree’s voice was a whisper now.

  I will give you a Karos, Billy Rage. A song. Memorize it. Use it to summon me. Later, you will learn other karos, for other teachers. Or you will not. I cannot tell with you, and usually I can.

  The melody El Purga sang was spare and beautiful, ten notes that sounded torn from nature: a bird’s song, a waterfall’s descent. They sang it together, Billy and the tree, a blissful smile on my old man’s face. Once through, twice, and by the third time the world around me was sunspotting and fading, and I felt a tingling sensation and thought maybe the resin had run its course. I tried to fade too, closed my eyes and hoped that a few seconds later they’d open in Fever’s living room.

  Instead, I dropped into what felt like one of those accidental-but-incredibly-deep five-minute naps that leave you twice as tired as before, and woke up in a darkness rank with jousting smells: unwashed humanity and fermenting vegetables, charred animal meat and sweet, cloying smoke. It was a combo that didn’t necessarily rule out Chez Dengue, if he’d ordered goat roti and sparked some cheap incense while I was gone, but as the Ambassador did not live in a candelit mud-and-straw hut swarming with mosquitos and subject to hundred-degree swelter, I quickly ruled the possibility out.

  The Billy Rage who sat before me, crosslegged and hunched over a wooden table, was a different man from the one I’d left harmonizing with the spirit of a tree in the middle of a river, a bazaguanco trance, and La Dieta.

  He’d been grubbing his ass off, for one thing. Gone were the sunken eyes and jelly-limbed frailty, usurped by a gut that overhung the plastic waistband of the ratty athletic shorts comprising his attire. It pained me to think that he would lose that weight and more by the time we met. The muscles of his arms were lean and ropey, and his skin bore no trace of rosacea red. He seemed like a man who had overcome something, emerged on the other side. And though I was a mere observer now, it seemed clear what that was.

  Around the hut’s perimeter stood jars and bottles, three and four rows deep, casting long flickering shadows on the walls. Clumps of drying plants hung from the ceiling. I watched Billy rise and walk to a corner. He bent at the knees, unscrewed the top of a container and withdrew a fragrant palmful, then returned to the table and sprinkled it over a bowl. He repeated the process twice more, moving with the confidence of a photographer in his darkroom. On the third trip Billy hesitated, furrowed his brow, sang a string of notes into the heavy air. He finished and stood waiting, then nodded as if to a reply and selected his next ingredient.

  I saw the man standing at the hut’s mouth before my father did. It was the younger of the two shamans. He’d out-aged Billy in the intervening years, and there was a bunch more crap sticking out of his face—a triangular rod through his septum, three more straight ones through his earlobes. Maybe it was based on status or ritual or something, I don’t know, but the extent of his adornment seemed poseurish. He reminded me of those gutter-punks you see sitting in front of the big monument on Astor Place, with their studded leather dog collars and face tats, everything orchestrated to look reckless and boss—and it would, except that if you watch for more than two seconds you’ll catch them flicking their eyes at every passerby, desperate to be scorned, feared, judged, whatever. Or my “spiritual” custies, who aren’t satisfied unless you notice that they’re wearing cruelty-free jeans and brewing fair trade coffee.

  “Billy!” He said it a little louder than necessary, like a gym teacher.

  “Esteban.”

  “It is time. Are you not ready?”

  Billy poured a brown juice into his bowl, gave the potion a sniff and a stir, then emptied it carefully into a jar and nodded. The shaman watched with an impatience bordering on fury. It was unclear whether Billy moved so deliberately to irk him or because that was the way he did things now.

  “You should never have been entrusted with this responsibility.”

  Billy screwed a lid onto the jar, tucked it beneath his arm, brushed past.

  I’d expected a village outside. Instead, there was only a vegetable patch, and a fire pit enclosed by stones. The swarm and teem of the jungle was shouting distance away, huge and dense and sudden. Perhaps Billy wanted to live near his teachers. The dim, massive shape of a tree that might have been El Purga dominated what little I could make out. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized trees that might have been El Purga stood everywhere. I wondered how many Billy knew.

  He and Esteban walked in silence. After a few minutes, the jungle opened onto a clearing the size of a basketball court. A wide circle of torches blazed, and by each one stood a man, bare to the waist, painted in red designs. In the center, surrounded by four more torches, lay a pyre of wood, and on the pyre was a man, a dead man. The old shaman.

  Esteban held out his hand, and Billy gave him the jar. He took a gulp, and passed the brew around the circle. Billy drank last, and when he finished Esteban strode into the middle, bowed before the corpse. The men grew still.

  “Tonight we rejoice as your spirit flies free. We ask that you continue to protect and advise us, dear teacher, as we honor you by returning your shell to the dust.”

  He uprooted each of the four torches, and used it to light a corner of the pyre. The flames shot forward, met. The men watched silently, and soon the drink kicked in. Some wandered a few steps before falling to the ground. Others crumpled where they stood. Soon, Billy and Esteban were the only men left on their feet. Neither looked as if he would remain that way for long.

  With what appeared to be great effort, Esteban rolled his eyes toward Billy. His head followed after a slight delay.

  “You will leave, now that he is gone.”

  Billy stared into the flames. “He wasn’t what kept me here.”

  Esteban’s smile was cruel. “Ah, but he was.”

  Now Billy looked at him. “Others protect me. I’m well past being afraid.”

  “Such arrogance! You’re only a guest here.”

  “The teachers decide who they will teach.”

  Esteban took a step toward my father, moving as if knee-deep in mud. “I know your mind, gringo. You will take this knowledge away, to misuse where no one can see you. You are not a healer. You seek power. A fucking brujo in training!”

  “And what are you, Esteban, with your jealousy and threats?” The words dripped from Billy’s mouth in slow motion, as if he were drooling honey. “Who have you healed? Not even yourself.” And with that, my father plopped straight down onto his ass. His hands fell into his lap. His head attempted to join them, and got as far as his chest.

  Esteban lowered himself to the ground inch by inch, then crawled toward Billy until he was close enough to speak right in his ear. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with,” he said in English, and collapsed onto his back.

  The night collapsed with him. Imagine the world is a big sheet of pa
per and you’re a little doodle-person right in the center, and the artist, let’s call him Shitbag Larry, decides to start over, so he crumples up the sheet and the last thing you ever see is the edges of the universe beginning to furl in, like you’re a black hole and the nature of light and matter is to pinwheel toward your stomach in a pure-white maelstrom. Those two images might not quite mesh, the crushed doodle and the black hole, but you know what? I don’t fucking care, I’m sick of trying to describe all this oogabooga-ass drug shit in lucid terms. That was what it felt like to me, and if you want to quibble with my descriptions when I’m trying to recount some essentially unfathomable shit then once again, Tuesdays with Morrie might be more your speed. Over twelve million copies sold. Published in fifty countries. Called “as sweet and fresh as summer corn” by USA Today. No? All right then.

  I think the resin knew what I could handle and what I couldn’t, because my final experience under its guidance was just a flash. The blinding white of the imploding cosmos narrowed and focused, resolved into a shaft of noontime sunlight shooting through the broken slat of a cheap wooden curtain and terminating in a blotch of yellow that sat defiantly on a hotel room’s scabrous concrete wall.

  Cockroaches, broken glass, and congealing vegetative sludge covered the floor. The bed was a jumble of shit-spattered sheets, the narrow mattress teetering halfway off its metal frame. A ceiling fan’s blades meandered through air like rancid butter. Beneath them sat a chair, and on the chair a coil of rope, and only after seeing all of this did I spot Billy, shivering in a corner with a blanket around his shoulders, hair matted and snarled.

  He looked up, quick and scared, as if he’d seen a ghost. We locked eyes and boom, I was inside his mind again. Only now it was a place of devastation, a bombed-out city swarming with ghouls and pulsing with the terror of the final, demented survivor—as though someone had severed each and every fiber tying Billy into the web of life, connecting him to other living things. My father was alone, truly and hideously alone, as only a man trapped in a universe of his own devising can be. And yet the trap was so malicious and meticulous that only another person could have wrought it.