Going Native (33 page)

Drake, without any initiative on his part, had become hazardously involved in a disparate tussle with the potent
tuak,
a drinking contest with a young man of bottomless capacities, another of the chief's fine sons (how large exactly was the royal brood?), the contest quickly attaining the delicate point where honor and pride, etc., etc., dictated that Drake not lose, American manhood before the bar of an entire Dayak village, even as his inner gyros went swinging level with the slippery surface of the wine he was lifting cautiously as a ticking bomb to his benumbed lips. His opponent's gloating face near and far was bulging and swaying like a painted balloon, as were, he noted with a detached scientific precision, the lines and angles of the room. How could he ever have gotten so wasted so quickly? Now a young girl appeared before him, a girl with golden skin, as beautiful a girl as any that ever was, a kind girl who helped him out of his sticky shirt, his pants, too, an excellent measure considering the mounting stuffiness of these close quarters, soft caramel limbs coaxing him out onto the floor, where, stripped to a tattered pair of black boxer shorts, drums thudding eloquently in liturgical cadence, he embarked on a hunt for the great prey. A trail opened before him, the jungle of signs as clear as a book. In the blue predawn haze he crept upon the unwary enemy. He waited, gauging the transcendent moment to strike. Then, all at once, he was in motion, charging, shrieking, wielding the blade of his sweet
mandau
with a lover's zeal. He danced as he had never danced before. Heads tumbled around him like cabbages. He deposited his trophies at the feet of the girl. He went to his knees, he bowed. The Pekit, who initially believed he was imitating a mating rooster, clapped and cheered, impressed by the uncanny accuracy of his moves. Then, as the drums continued to sound, the girl helped him up and the song of the Pekit embraced the night as her silken hands sought his face, his head, his hair, stroking at his chest, his legs, his drenched skin blazing beneath her touch, all he had to do was think it and her hands completed it -- was this real? was he dreaming? -- but when he opened his eyes he found himself in a strange bed with a strange leg thrown across his thigh. He eased himself out from under his snoring companion and looked about the room. He recognized nothing. His shirt, his pants, his underwear, were gone. On the floor he found a loincloth one of the men had worn last night as a dance costume; he wrapped it around himself as best he could and staggered through the open door.

Outside, the milky light was as bright, as loud, as the milky wine. The veranda was littered with slumbering bodies sprawled about in every conceivable attitude like discarded mannequins. Carefully, he went tiptoeing his way among this minefield of contorted limbs. At the end of the veranda he stood gazing outward, one clammy hand clutching the rail, the other gripping his sodden penis, weaving somewhat unsteadily while attempting to christen the yelping dogs below with the ropy arc of his urine. He found Amanda among the fallen, her head hanging halfway off the edge of the veranda, where she had crawled sometime during the boisterous interminable night, the planks of the floor actually inclining uphill all the way, head changing size with each breath, body bathed in a foul sweat, and quite relieved when the real vomiting finally began, then alarmed when it wouldn't stop, emptiness emptying itself, muscles quaking, tears running freely from her burning eyes, she could hear the pigs under the longhouse rooting excitedly among the unexpected treasures of her stomach, and then nothing until the chimerical voice of her husband, his familiar hand on her shoulder, raising her into his arms, and back to the room with their stuff in it, and when next the lids of her eyes became unglued, Drake was standing over her stark naked but for a filthy scrap of Pekit cloth.

"Good God," she managed to croak, the parts of her mouth dry and thick. She looked up again. "Good fucking God."

"How you feeling?"

She squinted up at him. "You're too chunky to wear that," she mumbled. "Too pale, too."

Drake looked down at himself. "I like it. I'm keeping it on. For the duration of our stay."

She forced herself up onto her elbows. Drake's sallow, somewhat flabby flesh offered an aspect of nakedness lamentably more naked than that of their equally bared hosts. For, despite nautilus machines and morning jogs, Drake's body did not adapt well to the unaccommodated state, the cast of his skin was dull, the motion of his muscles graceless: thoughts you did not share with the one you loved.

"Our hosts," she observed, "are all on their way to Oz. You're on the way back."

"Yes, but I think I've found my movie."

She sighed. "What?" she asked.

"Me. Us. The story of what's happened here on our vacation through time."

"Do me a favor."

"Of course, my cannibal queen."

"Ask around, see if they've got some sort of magical root for a hangover, and bring it to me, quick."

He stood there pinching his waist and hips. "How can you say I'm fat? Where?"

"The root," she croaked. "Get it. Fast."

His ridiculous bare feet went thumping away down the veranda. From one of her nearby bags she pulled a half-empty quart of Evian water which she drained greedily. Once all the bottled water was gone, so was she. Fixing a limit on their village stay was a good first step on the road to sobriety. She lay still on her back, massaging her bruised eyeballs, against which beat the ragged surf of her polluted blood. A couple of months steeping herself in the poisons of this place and her whites would match the chief's. Drinking was a serious occupation among these people, a matter of confronting whatever was washed free. She had no memory of last night's festivities, other than a nagging suspicion that unwanted bowls of that vile
tuak
had been forcibly poured down her gullet once she was too fried to protest, precious shreds of her consciousness offered up raw to the leering rice goddess. The ugliest cat in the creation wandered in and began rubbing its ratty colorless fur against her hips. The beast had no tail, no ears, and no teeth and the sound of its meow was little more than a thin querulous creak. Its gemmed eyes rested upon her with the severe indifference of a stone effigy. It knows my mind, she thought. It is not a cat.

Drake returned in the company of Henry and a solemn old woman half-naked with cracked shrunken paps and a head of coarse hair tangled down to her waist. She carried herself with a remote professional air and the backs of her wrinkled hands were covered in a strange geometry of tattoos, fine parallel lines and spirals intertwining and congruent triangles and circles within circles. The
belian
of the village, Henry explained, the shaman.

She squatted beside Amanda, in swift succession palpating her forehead, her arms, her hands, her thighs, her feet. From a shabby beaded bag she extracted a single white egg which she proceeded to rub over Amanda's face and skull, crooning all the while in low guttural tones what sounded remarkably like a child's lullaby. The held egg traveled slowly down the left side of Amanda's body, then slowly up the right side. When she was finished, the
belian
raised the egg into the air above her head as if in blessing, the chanting increasing in volume and tempo, and then, in a sudden flourish, she brought the egg down sharply onto the edge of a porcelain plate at her feet. Out of the cracked shell slid the white, the yolk, a curled tuft of human hair, an orange pebble, a black feather, and a U.S. buffalo-head nickel. The
belian
scrutinized this riddling mess with scowling intensity. She remained silent for a long while. At last she sat back, hands on her knees, and she spoke, in a voice brown and ancient, its unruly syllables echoing back to spare uncluttered things, to beginnings.

How simple and few the chess pieces of the soul, thought Drake, much impressed by the potent gravity of the ritual, a tree, a snake, a bird, a mountain, a cave, a bear. The elements of everyone's story, the game time plays with human lives.

"
Belian
say," Henry translated, "problem of American lady is not with
tuak.
American lady sick from too much movie. Not good. Movies are visions sick people have before they die."

Amanda let out an ambiguous moan and covered her eyes with her arm.

"Okay," said Drake, "I can buy that. What about making them?"

"
Belian
say if American lady not healed in two days, then she sacrifice chicken and fly away into spirit world, find American lady's lost soul."

"Now, that's something I'd pay to see right now," said Drake. "How much for the chicken?"

"Please," said Amanda, without moving her arm, "thank her effusively for me. I'm feeling much better already." She had no memory of ever before experiencing such a sharpened focus of another's attention. The accompanying sadness like a wind sweeping through her. Suddenly she sat up and reached for her bag. She pressed into the
belian
's
creased palm a brand-new tube of Neosporin. "For the sores on her legs," she said to Henry. "Tell her."

The
belian
accepted this gift with a dignified nod and, rising, with plate in hand, announced that she must go now down to the river to drown in its cleansing current the evil pictures she had extracted from the American lady's confused body. Her hard black eyes coldly afire with the sights she'd seen on ecstatic voyages to the country of madness and the dead, eyes which heralded the grim fact: honesty is fearful and the fearful is marrow and pith of the spirit. No wonder the woman lived alone in a detached room at the far uninhabited end of the longhouse. Hers were eyes that would never go out, in darkness or in death.

"So," began Drake, as soon as they were alone, seating himself cross-legged beside his ailing wife, "how do you feel, really?"

"Really, I feel much better."

"That's great. You know, I had a hunch this might work. She didn't want to come, of course, she's suspicious of folks like us."

"And what kind of folks are we?"

"The burn-the-trees, poison-the-well, fuck-the-kids, there-isn't-an-egg-big-enough-to-soak-up-all-the-evil kind, I suppose."

"I thought she was nice."

"An indifferent country doctor running her routine on a paying patient."

"How much did you pay?"

"Never you mind. What's important is, the treatment worked."

"Yes."

He was silent for so long she believed he'd left the room when his voice surprised her, saying, "I thought I'd go out today with the camera, you know, snap some candids of the archaic life. You think you'd be all right here alone for a while?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine, go on, go and get your pictures."

"Well, it is research, you know."

"I said I'd be fine."

"Sure?"

"Drake," she said, realizing later, even as he went, her pallid Tarzan with a Nikon around his neck, that, no, she was not better, remained in fact exactly as she had felt upon arising, that is, thoroughly drained, bruised, hollowed out, the miserable thumping in her skull relentless as a clock.

She lay motionless on the hard floor, a wet towel folded over her forehead. In the sounds of the village around her, the barking dogs, the hammering, the ceaseless weaving of human speech, human laughter, she could hear the noise of L.A., of her home.

After an hour, unable to sleep, she wiped her face and wandered out onto the veranda. A circle of Pekit women was busy husking rice, pounding the grain in wooden containers with large clubs. As they worked, they looked over at her, they talked among themselves, they looked back at her, they giggled merrily. With a wan smile she descended the trembling ladder log to the "village green." Some naked children were dragging a sick monkey around the funerary pole on a string. There were no adults to be seen. She followed a path through a pleasant stand of cool trees and out into the baking rice fields, where she discovered her husband posing various Pekit farmers in the knee-deep paddy. His skin was the color of a baboon's ass.

"Had enough?" she called from the shade of a sheltering tree.

Drake turned around and waved. He looked like a scalded baby who'd outgrown his diaper. Heat was rising off the field as if from a sheet of exposed metal. They worked the crop, these Pekit men and women, bowed at the waist as if in obeisance to the green shoots their gnarled hands so tenderly fondled. A killing labor with scant return, subsistence level year-round: what the children fled, growing up and one by one drifting down to the lights, the cash, of the coast. How could it be otherwise? The peopled night and the forest of the spirit in exchange for outboard engines and athletic shoes and television sets. How could it be otherwise?

Clutching the camera upside down like a turtle or some rare object he had found in the mud, Drake waded over to the grassy ground where Amanda stood waiting, brushing the hair out of her mouth.

He smiled. "I didn't expect you out so soon in the midday sun."

She shrugged. "I was bored."

"Sorcery," he said. "Proven reliable in nine out of ten university studies in combating the effects of hearty partying."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Yes, ma'am, I am through." He looked down in mock amusement at this awkward seminude body he happened to be momentarily occupying. "Believe I most definitely got more than a touch of a burn out here today."

"I mean it, Drake, I'm ready to signal for the flight out."

She might as easily have slapped him across the cheek for the look of genuine shock now hanging off his face. "But we just got here," he protested. He was beginning to wave his long arms around in the generally ineffectual way he always did whenever they began an argument he thought he might not win. "We just got here
yesterday,
for God's sake."

"Yes, and excuse me for having lost count of all the yesterdays prior to that. But at this point they've blended together into one excruciatingly long day of which tomorrow and any other tomorrows we spend in this rancid sink of a country will only be needless copies. I'm tired, Drake, my head hurts, my feet stink, I want to go home."