And it had. He was the soul observing the men tinkering with the shell of his being. Drunk with the drug and groaning in pain, the men led by Don Pablo were drooling over him.
Steadman sank deeper into a darkness suffused with green. He was underwater, enclosed by a snake, wrapped in its coils, being swept downstream. The pulsing of the snake’s slippery entrails was like the suck and rush of a river.
With a stinging sense of being bitten, Steadman’s whole body contorted, his muscles wrung like rags, his brain convulsed, until he was twisted small. With a mild sinking acceptance, he thought, I am dying. And his eyes were wet, not weeping but bleeding, wounded by the stones that had weighed on them. I am dying, meester.
He was turned inside out — another old feeling. This time the song was within him, the lowest notes in his belly, the chorus like colors in his eyes, not simple colors but the familiar mass of pixels. He was so small that when he fell he sped like a dropped pebble and kept falling fast, past the snakes and the moon men, until he came to rest in a tangle of filaments like a collapsed web.
There he stayed, vibrant, atomized, yet tranquil. Nothing else mattered. In a ritual of presentation, the shaman approached him with a brimming cup. He was shown his reflection in the liquid, and he took this to be the meaning of life. He did not recognize his face. He had an insect’s head, bulbous eyes and mandibles like a pair of sickles. He did not know whether he had woken from a dream or had gone under again, reentering a dream.
The cup of mirroring liquid was offered amid swirling smoke. Words came; he was not sure whether he or someone else was speaking, or they might have been thoughts floated from his mind.
“What is it?”
“Cura.”
“The cure?”
“It is poison,” the old man said in his dusty voice.
Steadman did not hesitate. A commanding instinct within him told him it was a cup brimming with death. And that he must drink it all, that he must die. He raised the cup to his lips to empty it.
His drinking of the bitter poison was a renunciation, a long kiss of farewell, and in this close embrace, the cup against his lips, he saw the passing of his life, the reminder of all his hopes, all the promises he had made, the miles he had traveled, the betrayals, the consolation of friends, the years of work and waiting — anger, fear, nights of desire, laughter, all his escapes and stratagems, meaningless memories of invention, all in that long swallow that ceased to be bitter, that grew sweeter and sadder as he gulped the last of it.
Then the cup was empty of poison. Night had fallen, burying him. He was so used to seeing nothing he merely stared with blank eyes when the torch became visible. He was staring into the hollow, at his fingers on the rim of the cup, holding the cracked thing nearer his face. With its ragged lurid flames and its unreliable promise of light, the torch was like the morning sun. He had surrendered. He was no one. His journey was over.
In the smoky pavilion he raised himself and looked into the bottom of the cup he had emptied. He saw active light among the droplets, something alive — a spider, glittering, lifting itself on its crooked legs, working its jaws. Steadman smiled as at the face of an old friend on waking from a bad dream.