“I don’t give a ruddy fuck anymore,” Janey said.
But they complained in better spirits, dismissively, knowing they were leaving. The van was waiting at Chiritza, where Nestor gathered the blindfolds. They arrived before noon at Lago Agrio and had lunch. After the simplicity of the Secoya village, the town looked especially vicious to Steadman now, for he saw — somehow knew — that the town of drug dealers and gunrunners and whorehouses had once, before the oil boom, been a sleepy village on a riverbank. They boarded the van and took the long road to Baeza, ate there in twilight, passed by Papallacta, and made the long climb to Quito in darkness. The village was not very far after all, yet it now seemed inaccessible.
Steadman wondered if he and the German had become allies in their sharing the datura.
“What did you see?” Steadman whispered as the van labored on the turns up the steep road.
Manfred shrugged and grunted and remained inert, frowning, saying nothing. Steadman smiled in a friendly way but was puzzled by the German’s lack of enthusiasm, and disappointed, too, because he wanted to talk about the drug, verify details and doubts.
The others, united in their failure and humiliation, had taken a disliking to Manfred—“Herr Mephistos,” because Manfred called attention to his sturdy shoes. Now Steadman knew the German did not share the bond of blindness — seeing with tiger’s eyes. On the journey back, Steadman replayed the experience, and his episode of blindness unspooled, returning him to the dazzle that overwhelmed the ayahuasca nausea. The drug was the route to a cave, but a lighted cave with many echoey chambers, and not darkness at all but a vision, another self, another life, another world. He had been alone there. It was like love — a consuming happiness and a careless wishing for more.
Steadman gathered that Manfred had seen nothing or very little, though Manfred was animated by the experience. Finding the drug and persuading Steadman to try it had given him status, set him apart, made him talkative. And Ava occupied a special place for Steadman, having cooperated and watched over him.
Already the Hacklers and the Wilmutts, timid and exposed, were detached from this trip and mentally on the next leg of their journey, the Galápagos. They had come for the ayahuasca and they had a story to take home, even if it was not the story they had planned. The Galápagos would be another story.
As they were climbing out of Tumbaco, ascending the pass that led them to a clouded ridgeline and the thin air of Quito, there was an incident.
Nestor had said, “Baños. Anyone need?”
“Pit stop!” Wood called out.
Hernán slowed the van and parked it by the side of the road, near a café, but before he opened the door a commotion began at the back of the vehicle.
“Do me a favor!” Hack shouted, for Manfred had reached up to the luggage rack, bumping the Hacklers’ backs. Janey said, “Do you mind!”
Manfred paid no attention to the protests. He dragged down his bulging duffel bag and unzipped it, taking out a large basket, not smooth like most of the ones at the curio stalls, but a bulky one of slender woven twigs still encased in their bark. From the wide opening of the basket he produced a human skull.
“My frent.”
The skull was dark and smooth, with the grain and shine of polished wood. The eye holes gaped at Ava, who stared back.
“Your friend has sustained serious trauma to the superciliary arch and the zygomatic bone. I think someone hit him in the eye with a blunt object,” Ava said. “I hope it wasn’t you.”
“I buy him in the village.”
Hack said, “And I got this,” and unsheathed a crudely made knife with a woven raffia handle. He pointed the blade at Manfred and set his jaw and said, “A shank. To replace the one they stole.”
Manfred said a German word and stuffed the skull back into the basket. Ava glanced at Steadman.
When they went outside to the café and the toilets, Steadman took Manfred aside and said, “That’s amazing.”
“Is old, the head. They call it tsantsa.”
“But what I want to know,” Steadman insisted, “is where you got the money for it.”
“Was my last money,” Manfred said, losing his fluency in his evasiveness. “Was why I require some loan from you.”
Manfred swallowed and something stuck in his gullet and made his eyes go out of focus, as they had glazed over when he had seen Hack’s knife blade pointing at him.
Ava said, “A loan is something you pay back.”
Manfred had a bristly face and spiky hair. He had been sleeping in the van, his mouth gaping, his hands gripping his knees. Steadman admired him for the way he slept so easily, despised him for the way he took advantage, hogging a whole seat to sleep on. Steadman, who thought of himself as thin-skinned, easily offended by slights and criticism or even hearty encouragement—“When are you going to write another book?”—was fascinated by someone who did not care how much he was disliked. More than that, Manfred seemed to be energized at being singled out by other people’s contempt.
Ava said, “He wants his money now.”
Manfred did not turn to her, but he laughed, liking the aggression. “Ha! I don’t have!”
This took place at a lookout point on the road, next to the café. A dog lay by the roadside in the dirt, probably sleeping but so skinny it was flat enough to be dead. The others who had used the baño —“It’s just a hole in the ground, like Bhutan”—were now adjusting their clothes and squinting and sidling back to the van. They looked defeated. This return trip was a form of retreat, and their rumpled expedition gear made them seem greater failures, because the clothing was a symbol of their ambition and their conceit.
“You got Mister Bones,” Steadman said.
“Is just a memory. A curio, so to say.”
Steadman looked up to see Nestor smiling at their quarrel. He seemed impressed by Ava’s presence, her tenacity, for she was smaller than Manfred but more aggressive than Steadman. With her as a bystander, the encounter seemed a more serious dispute.
Nestor said, “Who is winning, America or Germany?”
“I am American,” Manfred said, so sharply the dog in the road jackknifed and raised its head to listen.
Nestor glared at him and said, “ Usted es una persona aprovechada.”
Steadman said to Nestor, “What would an Ecuadorian customs inspector say if he saw a human skull in someone’s luggage?”
“They like it,” Nestor said. “They see them sometimes. They are very happy.”
Manfred looked puzzled, and Steadman smiled, wondering what was to come.
“Because then they ask you for a dádiva, a fat soborno, a bribe.” Nestor was big and confident and took his time, using his cigarette for drama and delay. “And you say yes. And you are happy, too, because they are so dishonest.”
“You sink so.”
“Yes. Because if they are honest, they do not ask for a bribe. They arrest you for breaking the law. If you ever see an Ecuador jail you know how lucky you are that they ask you for a bribe.”
After that, they rode in silence up the escarpment to Quito. Steadman looked out the side window, seeing nothing, not even his reflected face, but only remembering his episode of blindness, the taste of the datura, and wishing he could remember more. He had his story, he had found peace, he was bringing something back. He knew he was selfish in wanting more, for his lingering feeling of the experience was like desire: the infatuation that had once made him obsessive with Ava, needing her constantly, his saying “I believe in pheromones — you have them,” and her replying “You’re cunt-struck. I like it.”