Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  A taxi waits for them outside. The driver wears white gloves and an oversized black suit with a short, stumpy black tie. Outside Hiragana Katakana Kanji. Along the way, Oggie won’t reveal to Boy who they’re going to meet, so it’s with great surprise he sees David-Mayo, the most successful artist Oggie has ever fostered, sitting on a tatami mat next to a Japanese woman in a basement restaurant.

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ Oggie says as they shake hands. He wince-smiles and turns his attention to the Japanese woman, who introduces herself as in English as Yuki.

  Boy gets the sense that David-Mayo and Yuki are on-again off-again lovers, but he can’t be too sure. Something about the way she smiles at him when he speaks reminds Boy of his ex-girlfriend, Salome. He shudders the thought away, escapes his own sharks yet again.

  David-Mayo’s a bearded man with a tangle of yellow hair piled on top of his head like a swami. He is in a pair of dark rimmed glasses and a maroon vest over an open collar shirt that needs ironing. As he greets Boy, he tells him he’s a fan of his Human Comedy collection. Boy tries to compliment him as well, but stumbles over his own words.

  Oggie calls the waiter over and orders something in Japanese. ‘Can you break your vegetarian vows for one night?’ he asks David-Mayo.

  ‘I already did a few months back.’

  ‘Eating meat again?’

  ‘Just fish and chicken,’ David-Mayo says.

  ‘What about reptile?’

  He smiles at Oggie. ‘Why not?’

  Oggie places an order and Yuki laughs. ‘Don’t tell them,’ he says to her. She shakes her head, promising she won’t.

  ‘Are you in town for long?’ Boy asks David-Mayo.

  ‘Just tonight, that is, unless the typhoon hits Taiwan.’

  He explains that an old piece of his was bought by a Taiwanese museum. Having never been to Taiwan, he decided to fly there to see the piece and meet some friends who were visiting from South America.

  The waiter comes. On his tray are four shot glasses containing a red, bubbly liquid that looks like tomato juice mixed with Pepto-Bismol.

  ‘What is it?’ Boy asks.

  ‘If I tell you, will you still drink it?’ Oggie asks.

  ‘No, probably not,’ David-Mayo says, laughing.

  ‘It’s so bad tasting!’ Yuki curls her nose.

  ‘Shhhhh… it’s not so bad.’ Oggie raises his shot glass. ‘Kannpai!’

  The four glasses clink together.

  ‘Whew…’ Boy says frowns as the liquid sludges down his throat. With his tongue out, he reaches for his glass of tea to wash it down.

  ‘So bad…’ Yuki says coughing alongside David-Mayo.

  The taste – a coppery Tabasco sauce flavor that’s chunky and warm – lingers on the roof of Boy’s mouth, no matter how much he cleanses his palate with tea. He feels his stomach cramp. ‘What the hell is this stuff?’

  ‘Turtle blood,’ Yuki says.

  ‘Seriously?’ David-Mayo asks.

  Oggie waves his concern away. ‘Health benefits.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘It’s a known aphrodisiac. Also, it has high traces of zinc.’

  ‘Ugh… it’s worse than drinking ayahuasca,’ David-Mayo says.

  Boy springs at the statement. ‘What’s that like anyway?’ He swallows a lump of saliva, hoping to get the taste of turtle blood off his teeth. ‘Sorry, that’s a stupid question.’

  David-Mayo laughs. ‘It’s a hard question to answer, unless you’ve taken it yourself.’

  Boy thinks of Friend. He’d spoken to him once or twice about trying to get ayahuasca, the famed South American hallucinogen made by mixing caapi vines and a certain type of leaf. Friend had even gone as far as brewing some up, but he hadn’t gotten the right DMT-containing leaf, and ended up with diarrhea for a week.

  ‘Who was that guy you met in Peru, the Canadian guy you were telling me about?’ Oggie asks, steering the question towards the story he wants to hear.

  ‘You mean, Whistle?’

  ‘His name was Whistle?’ Yuki asks. ‘I thought this was a whistle.’ She squeezes her lips together and makes a tweeting sound.

  ‘Yeah, he told me that the name had come to him during his first ayahuasca experience. It stuck apparently.’

  ‘What is eye-yah-who-ah-ska?’ Yuki asks.

  Oggie explains the hallucinogen to her and their shared tongue and her eyes widen. ‘Okay, so Whistle,’ he says.

  ‘Whistle was this former Canadian hairdresser who, after his sister died, decided to move to the jungles of Peru and become a shaman. I met him at a little coffee shop in Iquitos. I’d just arrived there, and was staying at this guesthouse with this British guy, Sean, that I’d met in Lima. Sean had lived in Peru for a couple of years, and we’d actually ridden his motorcycle from Lima to Iquitos, which was already a crazy journey in itself.’

  ‘Why?’ Yuki asks.

  ‘Well, on our way out of Lima, the city was struck by an earthquake, not so big on the Richter scale, but it was pretty freaky. I mean, we were behind this truck transporting giant bags of food supplies, and the earthquake literally bounced the truck in the air, tossing all these bags of flour and potatoes. We were almost killed by the potatoes.’

  The waiter comes by and whispers something to Oggie. Oggie nods and the waiter retreats back to the kitchen.

  ‘But anyway, in Iquitos, I was planning on taking ayahuasca, I just didn’t know who I was going to take it with. It was one of the reasons I’d gone to Peru. I really wanted to try it and see what it did with my art.’

  ‘Was your British friend planning on eating this plant too?’ Yuki asks.

  ‘Sean had done it a couple of times before, so not this time. Actually, he wanted to go to Iquitos to meet this ex-girlfriend of his, I just tagged along because the city is on the edge of the rainforest and I figured I’d have a better chance of meeting a good shaman there.

  ‘Anyway, so I’m in this coffee shop – ironically enough, it’s called the Karma Café – and I’ve been sitting there for a few hours reading. At around noon, this guy came in with this kind of cobra-like face. Maybe cobra-like isn’t the best word, he didn’t look devilish or anything, he just had this face that kind of dipped into a sharp point. This was the guy you asked me about, Whistle. He sat directly across from me and pulled out an old book called Magic and Mystery in Tibet.

  ‘My immediate thought was, this guy is one of those Tibet crusader hippy-types, but then I was wondering what Tibet had to do with the jungles of Peru. He was clearly out there – his head was shaved aside from a long strand of braided hair behind his ear and he was wearing so many prayer beads that they rumbled like maracas every time he shifted his weight.’

  The waiter sets a square plate in the middle of the table. On the plate are what look to be four lumps of apricot jelly on the back of a bed of sharp black needles.

  ‘Uni…’ Yuki says with a smirk. Another waiter comes and sets down four mugs filled with a green brew.

  ‘Green beer?’ Boy asks.

  ‘Wasabi beer,’ Oggie says.

  ‘Sounds… umm…’ David-Mayo laughs. ‘What are you trying to do here anyway?’

  ‘I just thought we could dine on something out of the ordinary. Don’t worry, I have regular Japanese food coming too,’ Oggie says.

  ‘What is this stuff?’ Boy points at the apricot jelly food on the plate in front of them.

  ‘Uni,’ Oggie says. ‘It’s the raw eggs of a female sea urchin. They tear the sea urchin in half and rip out the eggs inside.’

  ‘That’s…’

  ‘You eat oysters, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Boy says.

  ‘Same difference.’

  ‘Only different,’ David-Mayo scoops the uni onto his plate.

  ‘Just try it,’ Yuki says as she reaches for hers.

  The uni slithers down Boy’s throat like a lump of Jell-O dipped in oil. He reaches for his wasabi beer, but turns to finish his green tea instead.

 
; ‘So you were saying,’ Oggie says to David-Mayo.

  ‘Yes, so this guy – Whistle – was sitting across from me at the Karma Café, and I just knew I was supposed to introduce myself. It was strange. I basically saw myself standing before I even made the conscious effort to go over there. It was like Whistle lured me over to him or something, or not him exactly, but some greater force. Long story short, we talked for the next hour about our lives and how we both came to be in Iquitos.’

  ‘Did he tell you he was a shaman?’ Boy asks.

  ‘No, he was pretty secretive. He just kind of let me talk. I showed him some pictures on my phone from my art shows and told him why I was there. He told me about how long he’d been there, and asked where I’d been in Peru – that kind of stuff. Well, so it turns out, I have this birthmark on my upper arm, kind of star-shaped. And as I was turning to leave, he saw the birthmark. Out of the blue, he rolled up his sleeve – he was wearing this baggy brown dashiki – and sure enough, he had a matching birthmark. He told me to sit back down.’

  The waiter brings a pile of what appears to be fried chicken. Hungry for something that isn’t slimy, Boy reaches for a piece of the chicken. He takes a bite, cringes as the flavor breaks into his mouth.

  He reaches for his beer, forgetting that it is wasabi beer, and downs a good portion of it. David-Mayo laughs, ‘That couldn’t have tasted good.’

  ‘Order me some orange juice,’ Boy says to Oggie, swallowing the crunchy fried mixture and the wasabi beer. ‘What the hell is this shit?’

  ‘It’s fried chicken,’ Yuki says, crunching a piece.

  ‘No it isn’t; at least it doesn’t taste like fried chicken.’

  ‘Nankotsu. Fried chicken cartilage,’ Oggie clarifies, flagging the waiter down.

  ‘I’m definitely not eating that,’ David-Mayo says, ‘but I will try this wasabi beer.’ He takes a sip of it and frowns. ‘Not… not bad. Okay, so back to my story. To answer your question from earlier,’ he says to Boy, ‘It was at this time that Whistle told me he was a practicing ayahuasca shaman who had drunk almost two hundred times. Two hundred times. That wasn’t counting the amount of ceremonies he’d participated in as a guide or an observer. Anyway, we arranged a meeting, and as I was standing to leave, he slid me his book on Tibet. He told me to read the pages that he’d dog-eared.’

  ₪₪₪

  ‘What did the book say?’ Yuki reaches for another piece of chicken cartilage with her chopsticks.

  ‘It said quite a lot. Of course, the ayahuasca ceremony – well to clarify, the five ceremonies I took part in – all had their own revelations and whatnot, but it was this book that really had an impact on me.’

  ‘What’s the book called again?’ Oggie asks.

  ‘Magic and Mystery in Tibet. It was written by this French woman, Alexandra David-Neel. She was a French researcher who visited Tibet in the twenties, and lived there long enough to become fluent in the language. The book is mostly about the monastic set-up and travel difficulties in Tibet, but the pages Whistle had dog-eared dealt with something else entirely.

  ‘In one of the final chapters, this French woman hears about some form of reality creation in which someone sits in a cave and breathes a picture into life.’

  ‘Breathe a picture into life?’ Boy asks.

  ‘It was the final lesson, after an apprentice had learned everything there was to know about enlightenment – although they wouldn’t have put it like this. In this final lesson, the teacher gave the student a drawing of some deity. The student was then instructed to go and sit in a mountainside cave, meditating on the picture until it became real.’

  ‘Became real?’ Yuki asks.

  ‘Yeah, until the picture was moving and alive. Then, at least according to lore, the student went down from the mountain cave to find their teacher and tell him that he did it, that he’d brought the picture into life. The teacher would then ask something along the lines of, “Where is it?” and the student would realize that their creation has stayed in the cave. The teacher would tell them to go back to the cave, and meditate on the image until he was able to get the creation to leave the cave with him. Some would give up at this point; others would go back for a few more months and meditate on the picture.

  ‘After a few months, the student would then come back down the mountain with the creation following behind him. Do you guys understand what I’m saying here?’ David-Mayo stretches his hands in front of him like he’s playing with invisible putty. ‘The creation – what used to be a picture on a piece of paper – would now be alive. Tangibly alive. Seeing this creation, the teacher would congratulate the student and say, “You’ve learned all there is I have to teach you. Reality is something you create.”’

  ₪₪₪

  ‘And you believe this?’ Oggie ask, apparently not having heard this part of the story before. ‘You believe that reality is… easily creatable?’

  David-Mayo shrugs. ‘Well, it’s the other part of the book that shifted my viewpoint on the subject. This French author was a skeptic all the way. Convinced that this reality creation thing was a glorified myth, eventually, the author retreated to a cave in the mountains with a picture of a little monk. She spent some time there. I can’t remember how long – maybe six weeks – and was called away from the cave due to some business she had in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city.

  ‘This is where the book got interesting. Assuming she had failed at creating the little monk into reality, the French woman gave up on this reality creation practice, concluding that it wasn’t possible. But a few days later, she saw him – a small monk was walking behind her entourage, the same monk she had created in the cave.’

  ‘What? Really?’ Yuki asks.

  ‘The French woman, by instinct I suppose, ignored the monk, and went about her business as if he wasn’t following them. Well, as the days passed, the monk began to shrivel with age. He was being forgotten, and she continued to ignore him.’

  ‘So the less attention she paid to him, the older he got?’ Boy asks. Could this be what happened with Lucy?

  ‘Exactly. One day she was out with her attendant getting yak butter from a nearby herder, and back at her camp, someone in her entourage saw the little monk inside her yurt. Completely freaked out, he reported his sighting to the French woman, who finally told her entourage about her reality creation experiment. She’d created the little monk into reality and the creation had actually followed her from the cave. Because of this, they had to do some sort of Tibetan rituals to get her creation to leave.’

  ‘What did they do?’ Boy asks. Maybe I can get my demons to leave. Maybe…

  ‘Well, the book didn’t say anything about it.’

  ‘Of course,’ Oggie says. ‘Sounds like your typical Western fantasizing of Asian culture. The author probably just heard a story about this happening, and decided to write her own version to sell some books.’

  ‘Maybe,’ David-Mayo says. ‘Personally, I’d think the same thing if it weren’t for the seriousness of the rest of the book. Why would you name a book Magic and Mystery in Tibet and spend most of the novel talking about monastic set-up and travel difficulties?’

  ‘To sell it,’ Oggie says. ‘Would you rather a book called, The Monastic Structure of Tibet and a Few Magical Stories?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t be as popular. The tone though, the tone was dead serious. I just can’t see it being faked for book sales. The woman spent a lot of time there. I guess the bigger picture I got from this novel was this idea of reality creation.

  ‘Maybe, it’s the artist in me speaking, and maybe I’ve said too much, but this was one of the more important things I took away from my experiences in Peru. I became truly aware of what we create, and how the things we create can invariably destroy us, and how the things we avoid creating can haunt us forever. It simplifies it to say we’ve trapped ourselves, but there really is no other way to put it.’

  ‘What about the things we’ve somehow created – maybe acci
dently – but no matter how hard we try, we can’t destroy them?’ Boy asks. Glass Wings.

  A wooden tray with something that looks like a boiled monkey’s brain arrives at the table. The dish is enamel white and covered in a thin membrane. ‘I’m not eating that,’ Boy says instinctively. The waiter slides a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in front of him.

  ‘You both have to at least try it,’ Oggie says. ‘You already ate the female version…’

  ‘Female version?’ David-Mayo asks.

  ‘Uni—urchin eggs, remember?’ Oggie says. ‘This is shirako, male fish sperm.’

  ₪₪₪

  Tokyo breezes by in a blur of lights outside his hotel room. Boy’s stomach is sour, filled with the strangest foods he’s ever eaten. He wants a tamale. He wants another glass of orange juice and a piece of chocolate.

  What David-Mayo said about reality creation had bothered him on the entire ride back to the hotel. Boy is fueling his hallucinations, he knows it, and now he needs to destroy them. An unholy shellacking is in order. But he needs to do more than take a bat to them; he needs to eradicate them from his life completely. And unfortunately, he doesn’t have some magical Tibetan spell at his disposal. He also has an uneasy feeling about Penelope’s role in all this.

  His hotel room is colder than he left it; he’s shivering by the time he hears a knock on the door. Megumi.

  He opens the door to find her standing with her arm at a forty-five degree angle as if she is holding a child’s hand.

  ‘Penelope?’ Boy asks, trying to calm the thorny sensation on the back of his neck. Something’s not right. He can sense it; he can feel it in the air as Megumi smiles at him.

  ‘Hi,’ Penelope says. His senses tingle as they normally do when she announces herself.

  ‘Can we come in?’ Megumi asks.

  ‘Y-yeah, come in.’ Boy can’t see Penelope walk by, but if he could, she’d be grinning up at him. He just knows it.

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘I’m always here,’ Penelope says. ‘You can’t find me.’