He had not guessed that this, too, had become part of the tourist industry, but now he knew that the people in the van, on this trip — Sabra, Wood, Hack, Janey, and Manfred — were like the people who were looking for the perfect mai tai on Maui, or the best snorkeling spot on the Great Barrier Reef, or the greatest nude beach on St. Barts. He knew now that they had trekked to see gorillas and gone bird watching in Botswana, been to Cambodia and Bhutan and Thailand, across the Patagonian pampas, down the Zambezi, up the Sepik. “I’ve got a Bontoc head ax. There’s drops of blood on it.” Scuba diving off Palau, they had been surrounded by sharks. Easter Island. The Andamans. Gauchos. Mudmen. Ifugao. Pygmies. Sea Dayaks. “Headhunters.”
“India sucked except for the Ayurvedic massage in Kerala.”
Trophies, all of them. And this — the trip to Oriente, the visit to a shaman in a jungle village, the search for a true ayahuasquero and the trance-drink itself — was another trophy for these romantic voyeurists.
“What are you planning to do here?” Ava had asked the others at breakfast.
“Same thing as you guys.”
What Steadman believed he had elaborately devised as an original trip, using obscure anthropological texts and the works of ethnobotanists — a trip he hoped would help make his reputation as a traveler in search of enlightenment — had become nothing more than the highest-priced package vacation, a drug tour. Without her having said a word, he knew that Ava was also dismayed by the presence of the others on the tour. What he had hoped would be an adventure seemed no more than a school outing.
Yet he was determined to see it through. The trip had just begun; the others might panic and bail out. It happened — luxury cruise ship passengers got seasick, a woman on a press trip in Mexico was raped in her hotel room, and on the Trinidad junket a male travel writer from New York handed a woman travel writer from Seattle an envelope full of clumsy Polaroids he had shot of himself, nude, in a full-length mirror. And then the man had threatened her when she said she would turn them over to the police. Drama was still possible on this trip, but Steadman doubted that it would serve him. At times, being with Ava in this state of detachment was like being alone, for she had insisted on being a stranger, and that was an unexpected help to him, even a thrill, for her pretense and her manner of seduction.
He hoped the trip might result in a book, and perhaps he could make it one, part of the novel he had planned, an in-search-of book, exaggerating the dangers, profiling the people, attributing the sexual experiences he had already unexpectedly enjoyed, masked and blindfolded in the Quito hotel, to someone else, who perhaps he could say had bared his soul to him — or, coming completely clean, using his relationship with Ava. This travel-book-as-fiction would include food, drugs, sex, exotic landscapes, remoteness — snowcapped peaks rising above the green heat; the jungle in the shadow of Cotopaxi; romantic failure, disillusionment, disappointment; a breakup book, more about trespassing than Trespassing had been.
All this he reflected on during the long silent trip to Papallacta. The only words that had been spoken since breakfast were Manfred’s “Weber! Die Freischutz!” Everyone but Steadman and Manfred had fallen asleep.
Just before Papallacta the van wobbled and swerved: a flat tire. They had no jack and had to flag down a car for help. The hour it took to fix it, and then get the spare repatched, put them behind. Lunch was late — just peeled fruit and warm beer in a parking lot near the hot springs at Papallacta.
“Aguas calientesNestor said.
Steadman watched Hernán approach a tall bush in bloom at the edge of the parking lot, just outside a low wall. He smiled and stroked the large white flowers.
“You know this tree?” Nestor asked.
Ava said, “It’s pretty.”
“Maybe you call it angel’s trumpet?” Nestor said.
“I don’t call it anything.”
“We call it toé. There are many kinds. Brugmansia. Some we have down the river,” he said, and tapped his head. “They are nice.”
“And you know that because you’re an ethnobotanist?”
“I am a vegetalista,” Nestor said. “I am not a toéro, but I know this toé”
Steadman said, “It opens your eyes, is that it?”
“Luz,” Nestor said with slushy sibilance, and goggled at him with a comic stare, then winced in exaggeration. “Is a light. Open eyes, close them, give you eyes like a yana puma — a tigre’,' he added, and spoke rapidly to Hernán, who laughed.
Ava hated it when people like this shared a secret in another language while laughing in her face. She believed they intended her to feel insecure and out of her depth, and she was insulted.
Insistently, she said, “What did you just say to him?”
“I speak in Quechua. You don’t speak Quechua? I say, ‘Toé—nino amaru’ It is the fire boa.”
Manfred fingered the leaves of the bush and said, “This is Datura Brugmansia. Is a separate genus now. A strong hallucinogen. Maybe containing the entheogen maikua. You call this borrachero?”
“Some people do.”
“Is a solanaceous genus,” Manfred said, hobbling his plant book, clawing at the tissuey pages with his sticky fingers.
Steadman was listening closely, fascinated by Manfred’s dirty fingernails and his erudition; but Ava had turned away. “Why did we stop here?” she asked.
“Lunch. Then baños. Use the hot springs, then we go,” Nestor said.
The hot springs’ enclosure lay on a hillside, where there were terraces and stone steps, a shed that served as a changing room, and a shelter where an old leathery-faced woman in braids dispensed clean towels. The succession of pools set into the slope were linked by troughs and sluices down which steaming water ran. The pools at the top, near the source of the hot springs, were very hot — bubbling, perhaps boiling — and all of them were empty. Steadman put his hand into one and scalded his fingers. The larger, lukewarm pools were just below, surrounded by reeds, the water tumbling into them over a moss-covered spillway.
By the time Steadman and Ava had changed, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts were already sitting in the largest pool, up to their chins in the water, their heads wreathed in vapor.
“Plenty of room for you guys,” Wood said.
“Ain’t half hot!” Janey called out.
Steadman and Ava stepped into the steaming water and slipped down, seating themselves on the stone shelf, until only their heads were visible in the vapor. Four other heads watched them from the far side of the pool. A sulfurous odor hung in the mist over the bubbly gray water.
“Where’s our German friend and his big book?” Hack said.
Janey cursed her phone and tapped the keypad irritably.
“I was promised roaming here.”
Steadman noticed that a copy of Trespassing— it had to have been Sabra’s, she carried it everywhere — lay on the wall next to the pool.
“How sweet it is,” Wood said, thrashing like a child.