At Fear's Altar (16 page)

T
he bus palsied as it rumbled along the muddy road. Steady rains had reduced the ridges into a sucking clay that seemed hungry for the bus’s tires. Through her filmy window Mary Cowan saw a lightless void that was occasionally ruptured by bursts of sheet lightning. The storm had been raging for hours, and it was only by sheer luck that the Boeing Mary happened to have been travelling on touched down at Cancun Airport between downpours. Her flight from Toronto had been smooth, but only physically. Internally, Mary’s trip had been a turbulent examination of her emotional stamina.

Raindrops splattered against the sides of the bus, came dripping through the faulty window frames.

The dramatic weather made it difficult for her to grasp that only a few days ago she’d been at Whitley’s bedside.

“You’ll find him?” her husband had rasped.

Mary had meant to say “I’ll try,” but the reply that escaped her lips was far more binding: “I’ll find him, Whitley. I promise.” There had been tubes running from Whitley’s spindly arms like glassy tentacles. They bound him to dripping opiates, the lone substance that slowed the agony of the cancer that was slowly consuming him. A tabletop Christmas tree had stood on the small shelf by the bed, its tiny red bulbs flashing. It was only a few days until Christmas, but Mary doubted that her husband would live to see it.

When he’d heard his wife’s promise to find their estranged son, Whitley’s face twisted into something Mary could only assume was intended as a smile .   .   .

She purged the memory with a shudder. For a while she stared blankly at the sand that had collected in the ruts of the rubber matting in the bus’s aisle. The man in the seat next to her emitted body odour as redolently as a censer during mass. A pudgy woman across the aisle was snoring.

Unfastening the pocket of her walking shorts, Mary carefully freed the photograph.

It was more of an impression than a picture, a suggestive but frustratingly vague image. Softened edges of the bulk in the foreground seemed to bleed seamlessly into the background’s green haze. Mary wondered if the photo had been snapped by someone who had been mindlessly driving past this site and noticed it at the very last moment, just in time to capture a glimpse on film. Perhaps the photographer had been running away, had fumblingly pointed the lens over their shoulder and clicked, hoping to create evidence of what they’d seen in the jungle. Had the camera been dropped in the flora, rescued only by some freak chance of a passerby who salvaged whatever film he could?

Broad slabs of light panned over the passengers, burning away Mary’s reverie. She re-pocketed the picture and resumed staring mindlessly out the window.

Streetlamps glowed around the perimeter of a parking lot. The lighted hotel windows glowed like furnace embers, and the sight of them made her feel a little more secure.

The hotel’s lobby was more functional than fashionable. Its couches were not inviting enough to loiter upon and its counter was an austere stone instead of the customary cozy wood or auspicious marble. A single computer rested there; a model Mary had not seen since before Damon was born.

Mary allowed all the other passengers to register before her. When she finally made it up to her room, she fulfilled her promise to her sister and phoned home.

“Jo? It’s Mary. I made it here in one piece, barely. How is he?”

“Good Lord, I can hardly hear you, Mary. You’ll be relieved to know that Whitley’s looking stronger than I’ve seen him in weeks. He was actually sitting up earlier tonight. He even ate half a chicken salad sandwich for dinner. He says he misses you.”

Mary swallowed the lump that had begun blocking her throat.

“He also said that he can’t wait to see Damon again.”

“Neither can I,” Mary managed.

Crackling static was the only thing that passed between the two sisters for a few seconds until Jo finally asked what the next step in Mary’s plan was.

“I’m going to see what I can find out about this little island. I’ll just have to play it by ear.”

“But what if that man in Albuquerque was lying to you, Mary? What if something goes wrong, either with you or with Whitley?” Mary heard the bitterness begin to infect her sister’s voice. “I’m sorry, Mary,” Jo continued. “I just wish you weren’t so damn far away right now. I want you here. I know Whitley wants that too.”

“Whitley wants to see our son, Jo,” Mary snapped. “And I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen. Can you
please
try and understand that?”

Nothing. Then, “Phone me tomorrow and let me know what you’ve found out.”

They said their goodbyes and that was that.

Mary unpacked only what was essential for such a late hour: her nightgown and her toiletries. She tried reading the novel she’d packed, but the words were just senseless stains on the page. Not knowing what else to do, Mary reached to the nightstand and retrieved the photograph she’d set there.

By now the storm had ebbed, but the lingering rain that hit the window glass seemed to be counting off each tedious second like a metronome. Mary lay on the lumpy mattress, studying the fuzzy Polaroid.

She thought back to the strange man that had given it to her .   .   .

Carlos Gaza had been his name. He, along with a half-dozen devotees, lived in a bashed double-wide trailer just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mary had gotten Gaza’s name and location only after she’d pleaded with one of her son’s ex-girlfriends. At first the girl stubbornly refused to offer Mary any information about Damon’s whereabouts. (She’d apparently sworn an oath to her vanished lover.) It was then that Mary lost her composure, burst into tears, and shrieked, “My husband is dying! I need to find my son! I don’t give a damn about any promise you made to Damon! Please don’t let my husband
die
without seeing his only child!”

The girl had sheepishly confessed that she hadn’t seen Damon in over a year, but that toward the end of their relationship Damon had begun talking endlessly about one Carlos Gaza. The two of them had apparently been corresponding, about what the girl couldn’t say, but Mary had no doubt that it was something cosmic, something seemingly profound.

That had been Damon’s bent since childhood. He’d been such a serious child, almost monkish in his demeanour. In the early years Damon’s proclivities were far less noticeable. Once he underwent puberty, however, things began to crumble for the Cowans. Damon flung himself into an indefinable quest. Attending school became a rare occurrence. Around the house he was practically mute, preferring to spend his time poring over strange books, or meditating, or visiting every church, temple, and synagein in the city.

Damon had dropped out of school at seventeen, moved out of the house two months after that. Mary and Whitley, trying to follow the familial rule of ‘tough love’ that their friends had encouraged them to adopt, let Damon go. If he fell flat out there in the cold world, he’d surely come to his senses, turn his wayward life around.

But Damon never came home. Occasionally Mary and Whitley would receive third- or fourth-hand snippets about how their son had been spotted working in a grubby occult bookshop, or that some ridiculously obscure ’zine had published one of Damon’s essays where he rambled on about Yogic techniques or the inherent unity of all things. But once he confessed to his then-girlfriend that Carlos Gaza had something he’d “been seeking all his life,” Damon dropped off the face of the Earth.

How exactly her son had come to know about Carlos Gaza, Mary could not establish. She suspected it was from the usual shady network that such guru-types often surround themselves. The girlfriend had given Mary one of the envelopes from a letter Gaza had written to Damon. Without hesitation, Mary booked a flight to Albuquerque, armed with only a post office box as her destination.

On the plane to New Mexico, Mary had actually felt that she might be able to make good on her promise to Whitley. She may just manage to reunite their fractured family after all.

She’d gone to Albuquerque under the assumption that Gaza was some charismatic huckster who’d lured Damon in under a Svengali control. But when the taxi delivered her to the edge of the single worst trailer park she’d ever had the misfortune of seeing, Mary began to wonder how accurate her assessment of her son truly was if he was willing to call such a deplorable place home.

When the frightening occupants of the park directed her to the half-rusted camper at the back of the lot, Mary had shuddered at the thought of Damon squatting in such quarters.

The person who’d responded to Mary’s feeble knock was a boy barely out of puberty. He’d been dressed only in a pair of swimming trunks. He’d studied Mary through the door’s shredded screen.

“Do you speak English?” she’d asked the boy, slowly and too loudly. The boy did not respond. “I need to speak with Carlos Gaza.”

The boy had leaned his head back into the curtained hull of the camper and rattled off something in Spanish. A voice grumbled back from the gloom. It didn’t sound pleasant. The boy shrugged at Mary, then closed the door in her face.

She’d knocked again, before hammering with both fists. She’d roamed the perimeter of the camper, trying to peer in its windows. Finally Mary had screamed that she needed to see Damon Cowan.

When her pleas went unanswered, Mary had been reduced to a sobbing heap on the ground, her trembling form framed by drained beer bottles and bits of broken furniture. She’d become the main attraction to the trailer park residents, but she didn’t care. At last she’d pulled herself up from the dusty ground and had begun to stagger off aimlessly.

“What do you want of Damon?”

There had been definite traces of a Spanish accent in the voice, which had come from a portly, bearded man who had barely reached Mary’s shoulder. Hair had sprouted from his large nostrils, from the canals of his ears. She’d moved to him and said, “He’s my son.”

The man’s hard expression had cracked with fault-lines of sympathy.

“Come inside,” he’d said, “please.”

Mary’s thirst for answers had overpowered her disgust at the conditions of the camper she’d entered. The stout man had flung himself into the cushioned chair that was slumped in one corner. He’d grunted as though stepping outside to call to Mary had been some great exertion.

“Your son is not here, ma’am,” the man had told her. “He was staying on these grounds, but I have not seen him for some months now.”

“You’re Gaza?”

“
Si
, I am.”

“I need you to tell me where Damon is now. It’s urgent.”

Gaza had pushed the rivulets of perspiration around on his cheeks. “It’s not that simple.”

“Look, I’m not interested in whatever operation you run here, I need to find my son because of a family emergency. His girlfriend told me where to find you, and I came all the way from Canada to get him.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to travel further still, ma’am.”

“What do you mean?”

Gaza had snapped his sausage fingers to summon his young companion. He gave some orders in Spanish, and the boy then disappeared behind the ugly curtain that hid the back half of the camper, quickly returning with the blurry photograph.

“This is where Damon said he was going,” Gaza had explained. “It’s a small island set off the Equazoli village on the Riviera Maya. That is where he said he wanted to be.”

“Why?”

“Your son is a very talented young man. But I’m afraid he is also easily led astray.’

‘Yes, by people like you,’
Mary had thought.

For a few silent seconds, Gaza’s eyes had flickered from Mary to the ugly curtain and then back again. Finally he’d said. “Come with me.”

He’d led Mary behind the curtain and into an alcove that resembled a makeshift ritual chamber. Two orange crates were stacked on end to form a shoddy altar; charms and bronze statuary were balanced precariously upon the wobbly stand. The threadbare carpeting had been heaped with incense ashes.

A pair of large banners had hung on either side of the altar; on the right a great winged serpent who held the Earth in its coiled tail, on the left a sleepy-eyed chimera whose body looked as though it had been assembled by a manic child’s cut-and-paste—one foot was human, the other a crooked tree root, feathers sprouted up here and there, as did doll-like people and colourful flags and skulls and countless garlands.

Gaza had pointed to the glorified worm. “This is Quetzalcoatl. He is the serpent-ruler of the First City.”

His finger then panned to the image of the mismatched deity. “This is Tezcatlipoca, the deceiver, the trickster. He is known as the lord of the near and the nigh because he fools the sons of Earth with illusions, he pulls them into the nonsense of the nigh. I’m afraid Damon was one of the sons who got lured away.”

(Mary had never been a believer in prescience of any sort. Why, then, was Gaza’s tapestry of Tezcatlipoca seemingly familiar? Why had she experienced pangs of nostalgia at the sight of the patchwork grotesque? Because Damon had often summoned Tezcatlipoca, years ago, that’s why. He’d raised the trickster with crepe paper and crayon wax and clay. Hoping to foster their son’s broad and deep creative streak, Mary and Whitley had bought him an easel and a desk, crayons and modelling tools and paints. Damon was enrolled in a children’s art programme through a local gallery. He had trouble distinguishing between what the students were asked to draw and what he thought they should look like. Damon’s paintings of sunflowers incorporated furniture, human faces, starscapes, words, animals.

Imagination was all well and good, but Damon’s instructor had expressed concern that these hodgepodge creations might be snapshots of the way Damon perceived the world .   .   .)

“What are you telling me?” Mary had finally muttered to Gaza.

“That your son has gone far from this place, which was once his home. He came from Canada to learn with me, to know the mysteries of the Serpent-Creator, but what I had to teach and what Damon wanted to learn ended up being two very different things. He didn’t want the truth about transformation and change that Quetzalcoatl represents, he only wanted the mask. Tezcatlipoca’s glamour was just too tempting for Damon. He was led astray, tricked.

“He fell in with a group of Trickster devotees, followers of Tezcatlipoca. These people, they take all things at face value. They feel that the mask is more important than the soul behind it, that there is nothing more sacred than lies and illusions.”

“You mean they believe that illusions are real?”

“Not exactly. They promote something worse than that. They believe that in the end, distinctions do not matter, that everything is a lie and true all at once.”

Mary had studied Gaza’s photo again before pocketing it and exiting the trailer with a terse “Thank you.”

She was almost at the sidewalk where she’d hoped to flag a taxi when she’d heard Gaza calling out to her.

Turning, Mary’s eyes had been met with the near-comic relief image of Gaza jogging across the littered terrain of the trailer park, his arms flailing in mad pleading gestures.

“Wait!” he’d huffed. When he’d stumbled near enough, Gaza hunched over and gulped at the air. “Don’t go,” he’d finally managed. “I know how worried you must be, and it tears me up to say this, but you must know that your son is probably dead. These followers of the Trickster, they are not like my circle of students. They peddle drugs to earn their keep, but that’s the least of their indiscretions. They commit terrible deeds, ma’am. Things I won’t even discuss. I beg you, don’t go there. Go home. Even if Damon is alive, he’ll no longer be the son that left you.

“I will pray for you,” he’d said just before the taxi carried Mary away.