Page 38 of Atticus

On good days I painted in the jungle, faking it mostly, far too much hard-won technique and far too little imagination. Otherwise I hung out at the hotels, half-baked on hashish or the hard drugs I could score off college kids on their getaway flings, as goofy as that, cruising the playa in jams and sunglasses and a teal satin shirt, like the playboy of the Caribbean, hunting babes who were already high and inviting them home for an up-all-night, and then coming to in that Oh, Jesus chaos of emptied bottles and passed-out strangers and somebody softly sobbing upstairs. Anything to stay buzzed, to forget my obsession: self-prescribing Dexedrine, Percodan, Ritalin, and Valium at the farmacia and trying out fancy chemistry projects until I felt the attack of the thousand spiders. I was halfway through an imitation of Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca: fit and tanned in the afternoon, grinning for the camera in white shorts and huaraches, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in one hand and a full bottle of gin in the other; and far far gone by nighttime—feckless, sulking, furious, unshaved, in a fuddle of shame and neediness, failure becoming his full-time job.

But as skin-your-nose low as I was, there were a hundred others just like me down there, the formerly talented, the formerly with-it, hulking over shot glasses in the frown of drunkenness, not talking because we couldn’t form words, having no company but fear, and pitifully tilting down for a taste because our hands weren’t working quite right. You could find us haunting the centro at five A.M., walking car wrecks and homicides, waiting for the cantinas to open again and looking away from each other because we hated seeing that face in the mirror. You heard all kinds of reasons for being in the tropics: for their arthritis, their pensions, the fishing, the tranquil and easygoing ways, but the fact was a lot of us stayed because Mexico treated us like children, indulging our laziness, shrugging at our foolishness, and generally offering the silence and tolerance of a good butler helping the blotto Lord What-a-waste to his room. In high school my brother knowingly told me, as a kind of dire warning,

“There are people who do on a regular basis things you have never even imagined!” I was now one of those people. Eventually it had become fairly ordinary for me to lose the handle and black out so far from home it might as well have been Cleveland, sitting there in a foul doorway in the barrio, fairly sure I’d had sex but not knowing with whom, blood on my shirt front, puke on my shoes, kids stealing the change from my pockets, and so little idea where my Volkswagen was that I used up an afternoon in a taxi just prowling the streets until I found it. And then, of course, there was a celebration and I fell into a wander again.

I have trouble putting a date to that particular spree, but it was late January, four months since I’d got off lithium, and for days I’d been floorboarding it into what Renata used to call “a heightened state of mental fragility.” Whether it was insanity or the aftereffects of pharmacy, I felt brilliant, ebullient, invulnerable, full of gaiety and false good health and a giddy, Wow, isn’t this freaky? excitement. Well-being for me, though, is often like the aura that precedes the seizures of epilepsy, and I was headed for doom even while I was heartily being in my prime, Captain Electric, happy-go-lucky Scott. Stuart tried abiding me at Printers Inc and found himself not up to the task, and when I showed up at his villa (“Hi, honey; I’m home!”) Renata gave me that Oh, you poor puppy look. We finally went out to inflict ourselves upon Mexico and found our way onto a bus tour of Resurrección, one of those You are here jaunts put on by the grand resort hotels to lure their elderly out of their rooms. And by then I was falling into a funk of aloneness and loss and desolation, hunkered down inside those old, old feelings of lunacy and finding familiar faces in all the Americans on that air-conditioned tour bus (“We know each other!”), as if I were part of some cosmic class reunion, déjà vu to the max—that old guy daubing sunblock fifteen on his nose and the hunchbacked woman holding her purse with both hands were as friendly to me as regulars at the truck stop cafe in Antelope, and wasn’t that Aunt Claire? Were I still full of optimism and hail-fellow-well-met I would have been tempted to shout hellos and harass the old people with my frantic happiness, but my fluky head chemistry was forcing me into a bleak house of paranoia, restlessness, even terror, and I was trying to hold back, quiet the hectic tattoo of my heartbeat, put the watchdog out on his chain in case things got too weird.

Which they did. We’d motored through the centro, found photo opportunities with the fishing boats and the fruit sellers, heard the chamber of commerce pitch about a sky’s-the-limit real estate future, and halted in front of the Church of the Resurrection. We were going on a walking tour, the girl in charge said. She said we would “find inside the parroquia many furnishing from Espain that the padres are bringing to Mexico in the eighteen century.”

I have no idea if it was intuition or if some psychic floodwaters were opened and feeding me insights into the past, but I felt superior to whatever that girl’s presentation would be. I felt like a former inhabitant, like I knew that place when the paint was still fresh, as if the hallways, the hidden doors, the shellacked pictures on the walls were as familiar to me as my father’s house, and I’d forsaken the right or possibility of going inside again. Call it superstition or just a bad trip, but it felt as heavy as shot-in-the-night reality, like I was a kid on the first porch step of a haunted house, and my first remedy of choice was to hide my head underneath the sheets. I have a hard time making these events obey anything but the horrible logic of nightmare. I just know that as the old people herded off the bus I was shaded by the wings of madness and just sat there in my place, heartsick, holes for eyes, frail as an invalid, and shaking like it was forty below.

I heard Renata ask, “Are you spooked?” And I realized that she and I were the only passengers still on the bus, and that the frustrated driver was fixing a hard squint on us in his rearview mirror.

I just said, “I’m not ready for this.”

“You don’t have to go in,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll see if you can stay.” Renata gallantly went forward to help out the crazy person.

I heard Spanish and hours seemed to pass as I hunched forward, my face hidden in my hands, and inhaled, exhaled, as if that would be my only job from then on. Then I heard Renata say it was not possible, it was break time and the bus was being shut down, I’d fry inside with the air off. She took hold of my wrist and led me like a child to the door and ever so tenderly onto the sidewalk.

You’d have thought I was a head-on collision the way the Americans lurked on the sidewalk, talking about me, retreating, Don’t get anything on me in their looks as I was hurried across the street, my feeble shoes shuffling a sandpaper rasp from the cobbled paving, and was settled like an ill-wrapped package on a park bench in the jardín. She said, “You know, I’m not that healthy myself. We can’t take care of each other.” If I looked at Renata then it was fleetingly, but I followed her with a toys-in-the-attic stare as she waded back into that hushed crowd, and I fended off self-doubt by thinking that this helplessness and despair was her scene, not mine, I was fine until she took my hand. I have to go now, I thought. I have to wash. I’ll eat my food with a fork.

A full day later in my house and I was fine again, honest, no fooling. Waking up and holding my hands out in front of my face in that how-many-fingers final exam of full consciousness and perspective. But one frightening leer from Mr. Hyde in the bathroom mirror told me that I ought to get out of town for a while. And so I hurried into a bleached shirt and chinos and hiking boots, filled a box with food, block-lettered a note for María, and headed out to Eduardo’s to hie the lunatic into the hills.

We shared a past, Eduardo and I, that made his friends consider my visits to his shanty in the jungle a kind of jubilee of wild invention, so within the next few days all the families in the area found their way to his place to hear the holy fool. My first night there fourteen men and boys settled on their haunches around a fire, inhaling huge handmade cigars until they were wholly intoxicated, and fascinatedly watched the zoo animal in his own private Weltschmerz. Eduardo finally squatted next to me and whispered in Spanish, “We wait for a speech.”

I gave it some thought and recited in English a high school lesson of the first paragraph from Moby Dick: “‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.’”

I have no idea what my English sounded like to them, but when I finished, a few softly applauded me in their flat-palmed way and one at a time they got up and finally left, fully entertained.

Hectic that life was not. We fetched water from the hole and used posts to tamp kernels of corn in a field that was still hot with soot and ash, but otherwise the hours passed at half-speed in a whine of insects, Eduardo instructing his heedless wives in their work while the heat soaked the black-and-blues away. Each night Eduardo’s oldest wife, Koh, offered me a hideous brew of balche and chewed roots and seed pods that I took in perfect obedience. And I’d sleep hard, hammered, until high noon, hearing nothing but pigs and chickens and the chinking noise of machetes hacking down great trees in the jungle, feeling nothing but the infrequent, faint, floating touch of children’s hands on my face and hair.

And then Saturday afternoon Eduardo and three of his friends invited me fishing, and we hiked through the forest to a harbor where a high-sided skiff was lolling on the swells as a teenaged boy in a racing suit fiddled with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor terribly hitched to its transom. I looked north and found far off the shell gray of the pollution that tarnished Resurrección, but the shoreline was otherwise foreign to me.

We got naked and thrashed out to th

e skiff with our clothes held high overhead, and I heard only highly accented Mayan as they pulled themselves up over the gunwale and joshed about something having to do with the gringo. I played the fifth wheel, Oh don’t mind me, and faced them stonily from the forward sailing thwart as the kid in the racing suit got the motor going and we surged a half-mile farther out to a barrier reef where the water was as tepid and clear as Perrier but from a distance had the turquoise color of kitchens in the fifties.

The kid killed the motor and hurled overboard three concrete blocks that were tied to the painter line. An old face mask half eaten with salt and fairly good fins were handed to me, and then a four-foot spear just like they had. Winking, I gave them the old thumbs-up—what a good sport, what a trouper. The first to jump over the side was me, and then I heard hoots and the four crashing in, handling the seawater without face masks or fins and twisting like otters around the white elkhorn coral and infant sponges as they hunted brilliant wrasse and groupers and rainbow parrotfish. I went up for air a full minute before one of them did—they held their breath like turtles—but finally they all did flutter up for air with a boxfish that trailed shreds of blood, and I skimmed down past colonies of intricate lavender and red coral through a school of glorious blue tang that shuddered and broke apart at my presence and then rejoined into one mind again, and then I stroked farther past a terrace of black brain coral and sea anemone to a floor of sand. And there I found a stingray almost fully hidden in the sand, its fake-seeming yellow eyes flashing uninteresting news until irritation or fright finally registered and with a fluff of its gorgeous iron gray wings the sand floated away like smoke and the stingray was suddenly in a flight that was fluent as ointment. The first surge took it twenty feet from me, and then in its sovereignty it glided into a stall and oh so gently rippled its wings until the floor settled over it again.

Either I read it somewhere or Eduardo told me, but in their religious ceremonies ages ago, pre-Cortez, the Mayan high priests used to stab the barb of the stingray’s tail in their penises and the poison would kick them into head trips that seemed to offer hallucinatory interpretations of the future. You’ll have a sense of how far gone I was then that I found the hurt and danger of that kind of rush crazily alluring. I got high on threat and foreboding; I was like those heroin addicts who find they can get off just with the needle. I ought to have flashed up to the surface for air, but I felt a strong and irrational need to touch that stingray, and I kicked down until I was just above the fish, watching it blankly watch me.

I have given up trying to be persuasive about this. You get these looks: Oh sure, stingrays. But in fact a flock or herd or plague of stingrays majestically soared in from nowhere, five or six of them wrestling up against me in a thrall of motion, their soft wings sheathing me, their tails frantically whipping, falling away only to flare up against my flesh, showing their white undersides as their toothless mouths seemed to foolishly smile. I have no idea what attracted them. I have never felt anything so much like pure muscle, that filled me with such loathing. It was like one of those Renaissance paintings of Saint Anthony being persecuted by demons. The stingrays jolted hard into me and held me under and one blunt head knocked my face mask off. And I was near fainting for lack of air when I heard the Mayans there with me, churning their legs and fighting the wings until a spear jarred into one and a pink orchid of blood seemed to grow from its skin and their hands took hold of its head and ventral gills. And as I shot upward, they gingerly followed, hauling the fish to the skiff.

The kid was kneeling by a gunwale with a gaff. Enormously pleased, he helped me up into the boat and patted my head and heaped Spanish praise on me until he could heave the stingray onto the flooring. But then the others got in and huddled far from me by the engine as if they were afraid of getting anything of me on them. Even Eduardo found nothing more to do than frown at my bad karma.

We went farther up the coast to an inlet and the pretty white skirt of beach that was near Eduardo’s shanty. Women in five-dollar American dresses were there chanting songs as they husked corn around a fire, and Eduardo’s wife Koh shyly handed me a jar of the fermented corn whiskey called chicha.

I frankly brought nothing to that party; I was an anchorite, il penseroso, off by himself on a rock, hearing their talk but not understanding, hearing the high whine of insects at sundown. I felt apart from humanity, as full of friction and self-pity as a fractious misfit feeding on his miseries. Koh filled my jar again as the stingray was flayed, and as our food was cooked Eduardo sat by me in four or five minutes of silence before hesitantly saying in Spanish, “We are afraid of you.”

“Why?”

“Bad things happen,” he said. “We fear for our children.” Eduardo’s secret name in Mayan was Nicuachinel, he who sees into the middle of things.

Elegant Spanish escaped me. I offered him something like, “Well, that’s just stupid.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com