Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“Does this remind you of fucking Jonestown?” Hack said. He said to Nestor, “I’m not drinking anything until they wake up.”

“Is your choice.”

“I’m like the designated driver,” he said in Steadman’s direction, and Steadman could see in the man’s nervous bravado that he was frightened. “These people are my friends.”

Steadman said to Ava, “You want to try it?”

“I think there could be something toxic in it. All this retching. I’ll watch. I might have to stick my finger down your throat if you have an adverse reaction.”

So Steadman stepped forward and took his place on the mat and was served a bowl of the liquid. His tongue was dulled with a taste that was muddy and flat and twiggy, and he found it hard to imagine the cloudy concoction having any effect at all: it tasted sourly of the earth and the soupy bug-flecked air of the gray forest.

“Tastes like medicine.”

As he reminded himself that he must drink it all, he looked at what was left, sloshing, and could not see the bottom of the bowl, it was so thick and dark. He tried to think of words for the taste. This is like drinking poison, he thought, trying to make a whole sentence. But before he could finish it he felt a separation take place in his body. Euphoria lightened his brain even as his body became nauseated and weak.

The bowl was taken from him. He propped himself on one elbow and shifted his whole body to the mat. Though his head and neck were at an awkward angle he did not have the strength or the willpower to change into a more comfortable position. But it hardly mattered, because a moment later he left his body and now hovered over it, looking down at the nauseated sack of flesh that was wearing his clothes. He was in the air. He was all bloodshot eyes in a hot realm of light.

The growling chant helped him steady himself in an aura of bright colors and scratchy sounds and an irregular echo of voices and birdsong. He heard the swish of a paper fan that he realized were a dragonfly’s wings. Below him was nausea and the dense meat of his body, and where he hovered was light and air, streaked with primary colors, a prism of heat, and his mother, Mildred Mayhew Steadman, just passing by, airborne and soaring toward a distant planet.

Not ecstasy, not rapture, he was buried in a deep dream of tranquillity and solemn contemplation that saturated his body and warmed his nerves. There passed before his eyes a complex and highly colored panorama. A sequence, too, like zones of light breaking over him. Heavy rain came first, or it could have been a waterfall. Then, with muscle spasms, the pricking of bright stars, each a different color. Then darkness, then a translucence. Then snakes twined on trees, or they could have been vines, but vines with eyes and mouths. And families of spiders clustered like primates, the biggest spider like a silverback, moving its mandibles and speaking — not words but sounds that Steadman could understand as reasonable, even wise. The spider raised itself and came so near it resolved itself into a shrewd black light.

The vagrant light formed itself into a face, and the brightest parts of it were eyes; the mouth was whiskered like a cat and partly hidden. Not a nose but a snout, and furry ears. It was the head of a lioness in an Egyptian head scarf with blank staring sightless eyes and narrow feline cheeks and a woman’s breasts, a real lioness, real breasts, with nipples like rosy spindles sucked smooth, on pale skin. The beautiful beast had wings — that was the first sound he had heard, the papery wings. The mouth could speak, it spoke to him, it did not move, yet it was insistent, calling him forward in a language he could translate.

He slipped forward, just his eyes, his mind, leaving his body below him in a piled-up shadow. The voice of the lioness beckoned him toward a light. The striped headdress of the lioness was friendly, the voice was soft, the nostrils were damp, the heavy breasts were a comfort, the distant light was a friend.

Even with a severe headache, Steadman was joyous with power and importance, translating the welcome in the vision of light, instantly knowing this language coming out of the cat face, its clucks and labials.

The growly voice said: Find the heart of the flower.

The solemn message was specific to him, spoken in a tone that implied that it knew everything about him — his few successes, all his failures, his anxieties, his weaknesses, his whole secret history. He was exposed. He was naked before this intelligence; and naked, humbled, known, he felt very small, less than childlike. He was a wisp of spirit — all his substance, the meat of his being, the coat of flesh that had always slowed him, had long since slipped away. He knew he was in two places.

In a green shadow, big pale bells tolled soundlessly, swinging softly on the limit of a low branch. One huge horn grew larger and began to emit white fuzzy notes of sloshing water, which Steadman recognized as the sound of the sea, breaking waves and surf growing louder, and the round bell-like mouth beckoning, a dark welcome that drew him on, for the bell resolved itself into a dainty flower, one he knew but could not name. The flower lifted to toll again, and he saw that the dark was pierced by a pinprick of light.

The risk in entering was that he would be swallowed and suffocated. Yet he never stopped staring at the tiny eyelet of brightness, like a single star of hope in the middle of all the murk, staring back at him from across a swamp of live rippling slime.

Find the heart. He knew he needed to enter the throat of the flower. He gave himself to the risk, remembering an odd phrase from somewhere in Borges, the unanimous night, and put his head forward and instantly knew he had penetrated a passage through the blossom of the angel’s trumpet.

He was first blinded and then bathed and reborn in light, rejoicing in a vision of glory that was all the more powerful for being enacted over a dark pit, surrounded by a head-high fence, of wet snorting pigs and knotted snakes. The pit was striped in a slickness of oil that oozed through smooth punctures, and when he looked back it was impossible for Steadman to tell the snakes from the oil trails.

But by thrusting his tormented head into a familiar flower blossom he had saved himself.

The triumphant revelation of the light and the color and the warning and the wings was that they could be trusted; they were all true. And now he could discern great smoking oil pits where the swamp had been, and he could smell scorched flesh, charred bone, burned hair — the smoldering stink of burned human hair was unmistakable. But this was the whole smoking world, where he was known and small and ruled over by a blind heavy-breasted lioness. This truth entered his consciousness and, remembering the specific injunction to go forward, that time was short, he felt pity for that pile of frail flesh beneath him that looked like a corpse, and he began to cry, sorrowing for himself, for the little time left to him.

His sobbing was indistinguishable from his nausea. He gagged and wept and woke with drool on his cheek, hearing Ava say, “You’re all right. Slade, can you hear me?”

Yes, he could hear, but he could not say so. He imagined speaking, he dreamed an articulate reply in which he described what he had seen. But obviously Ava could not understand, because she was still asking him whether he could hear her. All this happened in his vision, but when he managed to open his eyes to the dim light of the jungle day under all the discolored trees, and when he saw Ava’s face, her fear, he knew he had touched down and reentered his body again. After that, his body felt leaden and half alive, a corpse rising from the dead, more zombie than human.

“The others are over there,” Ava was saying. “That woman Janey freaked out, Wood is detoxing, Hack didn’t take any but he’s acting weird. Manfred wants to do it again.”