Eric McCormack - Cloud

He graduated as a physician and put in his years of surgical residency, but he couldn’t find a cure for himself. The wound caused by his wife’s treachery was now compounded by a deep sense of self-loathing at having allowed himself to live comfortably on its benefits. He’d left Montreal because of the one, and could no longer endure Camberloo because of the other. In the desperate hope of somehow cleansing himself, he volunteered to work as a medical generalist in whatever remote corners of the world could use his services.

DUPONT TOOK a big gulp of his whisky.

“So, here I am, headed for Africa again,” he said. “Not that I expect any longer that my service in such places will resolve my personal problems. I’m afraid it’s true that you always take yourself with you, no matter where you go.

“But things are much better for me now with the passing of time. For years, I tormented myself over what happened. Did she really love that other man? Was it the jewels she loved? Or did she really love me? Or maybe she thought it would be nicer for us to live in comfort while I finished my medical studies, and that what I didn’t know wouldn’t harm me? After all, the last words she said to me were ‘I’m only doing this because I love you more than anything in the world.’ I couldn’t get them out of my head.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“In the end, I came to believe she did love me and that everything she did — even giving herself occasionally to her boss — really was for me.” He looked at me sympathetically.

“Of course, after what you’ve been through, it’s hard for you to understand. When I was young, I felt the same. But now, what she did no longer seems so awful to me.”

I honestly couldn’t see any similarity between our situations. His wife’s infidelities, if she’d done them out of love, weren’t really all that treacherous. To forgive her didn’t require great generosity. But Miriam’s rejection of me was quite another matter. She’d let me fall in love with her, didn’t love me in return, and had all along intended to marry another man. It was my misfortune that I still loved her. In the matter of forgiveness, I was too mixed up to know where to begin.

Dupont, as I was contemplating these things, was fingering the two little green beads on the tips of his beard.

“I didn’t sell all her jewels,” he said. “These are sapphires from one of her rings. I’ve been told they’re the stones for remembrance. Whenever I touch them, I think of her.”

At night in the crew’s quarters, some of the men would lie on their bunks smoking what they called “kief.” They’d stuff little ornate pipes with a brownish substance, inhale it for a few seconds, then slowly exhale. The entire area would be filled with a sweet smell, for this kief was a mixture of rose petals and marijuana — naturally, I’d never heard of it in the Tollgate, where beer and whisky reigned supreme. Some of the crew, when they were smoking, became a little friendlier towards me. One of them even offered me his pipe.

But the whole scene brought to mind that horrible old man lying on his couch in Duncairn.

“No thanks,” I said.

My shipmate was in too good a mood to be offended.

I ASKED DUPONT about kief one night in his cabin over a glass of scotch.

“I occasionally smoke it myself,” said Dupont. “I’m one of those travellers who believe that participating in such local customs can be an important aspect of understanding other parts of the world.”

He saw I was interested in hearing about that.

“I’ll give you a useful illustration,” he said.

ONCE, HE WAS posted to a group of islands in the Pacific. He’d been sent there by a philanthropic agency to set up a clinic to treat the islanders’ ailments. But when the clinic was ready, they stayed away from it. Dupont discovered the reason in a roundabout way.

At some distant point in their history, it seems, the islanders had realized that the skin of little fish from certain mountain streams stored a type of narcotic. This fish soon became an integral part of various rituals. The men of the tribe would assemble at some holy place where the women would serve them the fish. The men would lick the skins of the fish and go into a state of religious ecstasy. The women could only watch as it was taboo for them to lick the fish.

Dupont, when he heard about the fish-licking, wanted to try it out. For him, it was his professional obligation as an anthropologist as well as a medical doctor. Fish-licking seemed to be intimately related to island culture. For a researcher not to try it out would be as foolish as a confirmed teetotaller attempting to grasp the essence of many Western forms of celebration.

One of the islanders he’d come to know told Dupont he’d introduce him to the drug itself. But since he was a stranger, the islander certainly couldn’t allow him into the secret religious rituals associated with the fish-licking — the drumming, the chanting, the costumes, the ceremonial trappings, and so on. So, for the demonstration, he brought Dupont to his own home and took him out onto the balcony after sunset.

The scene was quite domestic. The man’s wife had caught a fresh fish — a very small one, since Dupont wasn’t experienced with the drug — and she now brought it out on a saucer, along with a glass of water for cleansing the palate after the licking.

The fish was about six inches long, light green in colour, and plump for its size.

Following the islander’s example, Dupont slowly ran his tongue from the head to the tail of the fish, twice. Then they sat back in their chairs and let the drug do its work.

Dupont was almost instantly transformed into a swimming creature. He felt the chill of the highland stream as he patrolled its pebbled beds in search of food. His heart thudded at the sight of monstrous rats, eels, frogs, and even slit-eyed crocodiles prowling the water around him. Once, a huge bird swooped down from above and tried to grasp him in its claws. Not long afterwards, Dupont became a thing that crawled on its belly on the mossy shore, burrowing and eating, turning the earth into compost, tasting its world. Language by now had slipped away and his mind was filled with images so harrowing he feared he’d go mad.

Fortunately the effects of the drug were already beginning to ebb. Dupont was relieved but at the same time regretful as his perceptions shrank once more to those of a human being.

When his eyes were able to focus again, he saw that the islander had long returned from what, for him, had been a mild experience. Dupont wanted to talk about what he’d seen — what he’d been — but could barely find the words. The islander assured him that even if he were a master of language, it would be no more possible to reconstruct the fish-licking experience in words than to turn the bungalow in which they sat back into the vesi trees from which it was built.

After that introductory experience, Dupont spent two years on the island and participated in the fish-licking a number of times. He noticed that each time he came out of his ecstasy, he was equally speechless. But he also now began to feel a keen fellowship with the islanders and intuitively grasped something of their world view.

The reason they wouldn’t come to his clinic, for example, was that they believed in a form of reincarnation that completely negated Western ideas of medicine. Fish-licking had taught them that human life was only one of the innumerable life forms each spirit would inhabit and that nothing must be allowed to interfere with that continuity. Likewise, all afflictions of the physical sort must be endured. Indeed, if any attempt were made to moderate them, they’d have to be undergone again in subsequent lives in even more virulent forms.