Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“This one is Datura Candida’,’ he said. “It contains alkaloids, such as tropane and scopolamine. Not like maikua, but strong still.”

Using nannying gestures, the Secoya men directed him to sit. When he was seated, leaning forward, the shaman brought him a cup — a cracked porcelain cup — of the dark liquid. In drabness and consistency the liquid was no different from ayahuasca, a cup of muddy tea with a leaf of wrinkled scum on its surface. Manfred sipped, drank a little, then tilted the cup, emptied it, and blinked hard.

“Nossing,” he said, and beckoned with his fingers. “Más. Más!’

The toéro, Don Esteban, considered this, let some moments pass, and refilled the cup. Manfred drank the second cup more slowly while the Secoya watched him.

Don Pablo, the calmest of the squatting Secoya, simply gazed and growled tunelessly, chanting through his sinuses, as if he knew what was coming next. Seeing Don Esteban, Steadman was reminded of that moment when a dentist administers a jab of Novocain and then turns his back and squints again at the x-rays hanging from clips over his tools, knowing that in a moment or so the jaw will be numb enough for the tooth to be drilled or yanked. Don Esteban had that dentist’s confidence, which is also a look of indifference, part of the routine.

“Why it is not working?” Manfred said, his teeth against his lips. “Esta medizina no fale nada”

But he was looking away from them, interrogating the carved wooden protrusion on the worm-eaten finial of a corner post of the pavilion.

“Más, más” he said.

Don Esteban did not react. He was hunkered down, looking directly at Manfred, who was still preoccupied with the carvings on the corner post, grunting at them, perhaps finding a meaning.

Ava said, “He’s toasted.”

Manfred got up and stumbled a little, looked away, and then walked straight into the side of the pavilion, cracking his head on a beam. He staggered and sank to his knees, holding his ears, then slowly fell onto his side, his hands clutching his head, his elbows up. He was out cold.

Don Esteban shrugged and said, “El resultado no depende de mí”

Before Steadman had been able to help him, as he struggled to his feet and reached, the shaman waved him away in a negligent gesture that seemed to mean, Leave him — he will be all right.

“I think they’ve seen this sort of thing before,” Ava said. She gave Manfred’s head wound a swift appraisal, as she would any drunken stranger lying comatose in the gutter. The Secoya were fascinated by the way she lifted his eyelid and looked at his dilated pupil. They seemed to gather from this procedure that she was peering through this opening, through his body, into his soul.

“You’re next, darling.”

Now Steadman was glad she was there with him. He needed her experience, her skepticism, her strength. Only since their breakup had he realized how tough she was. Perhaps that was why their sex was better, even if so much else they did together was worse.

“Please, stay right here until I come down,” Steadman said.

He sat with his back flat against a corner post and accepted the cup from the toéro, then drank, sipping, and waited, and swallowed, then sipped again. He heard a mutter: “Está bebiéndolo”

He knew that he had drunk the entire cupful of dark liquid when he lowered the cup and looked in and saw a large spider, flexing its legs against spots of rust-stained enamel on the bottom. The thing was not just alive but visibly growing larger, hairier, its eye bulbs swelling with sympathy as Steadman’s own eyesight dimmed. From the spider’s posture and gaze Steadman saw a friend, in an attitude of patient welcome.

Turning the cup toward Ava so that she too could see the spider, he smiled, and she smiled back. But he did not see her. He was looking through her, and from far off came the small dull clatter of a metal cup striking the ground.

Too much was happening within him for Steadman to speak. He was plunged into an episode in progress, twilit, people busy in the foreground. The dusty liquid in his throat was like warm stale tea, but the taste had nothing to do with the effect, for it had the smack of ayahuasca, the mud-puddle tang of dust, rain, smashed stalks, pounded roots, dead leaves — any weed would taste like this. It was a swallow of the earth. So with this muddy ordinary taste of a dull drink he was unprepared for what followed.

What he took to be twilight, a summer dusk, the looming shadow of night falling, was in fact dawn, a slant of light rising like the first sword blade of sunrise and lifting upward, slashing open the darkness so the whole sky was pierced with day. The difference was that the moon was still sharply visible, and so were the stars, as he remembered them on some of the clearest mornings of his life. This morning was full of bright stars in a pale sky, with the same important patterns of constellations — readable to him now, the complex skein of stars making perfect sense.

He had no eyes, yet his whole bedazzled body was an organ of vision, receptive to all images. He seemed to understand and receive these sights with the surface of his vibrant skin. He felt a transparency of being, a prickling awareness — not observing in a simple goggling way, but knowing, being connected, a part of everything that was visible.

No visions played in front of him. Instead, they glowed inside him — his body was the engine of the vision, the light was within him. He was hyperalert as though feverish, and the crystal world was composed not of surfaces but of inner states, what lay beneath the look of things, sometimes hilariously, for he had a glimpse beneath a mass of expensive adventure gear of a big pale body he recognized as Hack’s — so odd to see this irrelevant American here and Sabra beneath him, making a cradle of her open legs. Not so hilarious was his understanding of his immediate surroundings, for there were snakes in the trees and spiders in the thatch and a clutch of nibbling rat-sized rodents in the undergrowth. Listening closely, he remembered and could understand everything that Manfred had said in his sleep.

No one knew him, no one saw his condition: the Secoya were indifferent to the state he was in. They were on the point of leaving the gringo to writhe, and he knew he was the gringo.

Turned inside out, he could think very clearly. He saw the blossom — he was inside the angel’s trumpet. This is what the ayahuasca told me. He was blind in a powerful way, in the thrall of a luminosity he had never known before, so that blindness was not the shadowy obstacle of something dark but rather a hot light of revelation, like a lava flow within him, a river of fire, and he was euphoric.

He could fly in a dazzling arc over the people who were near him. There were many of them, some from the distant past, women and girls he had known. But he was the only one who could see. They could not see him, or even themselves, in their flattened shadowy state.

“Slade.”

Ava was calling to him, whispering, imploring. He knew she was worried — more than worried, she was terrified. And he understood: This is her own terror of herself and the world; it has nothing to do with me. She is lamenting something within her, crying out to herself.

Speaking with his whole body, Steadman said, “I am not that man.” He was outside time, outside his eyes, outside his body, in the opposite of a dream state. He was a hovering witness, seeing everything, all the guts and gizzards, the nakedness of familiar people, the sadness of their deceits. Of his own deceits, too, for he was like them — his keenest illumination was just that, a glimpse of his resemblance to these people.