Put off by the dissonance between her tone now and that she had employed during our first encounter, I said, ‘You wondered that, did you?’
‘Don’t you want to know how I knew we’d meet again?’
‘Sure. Whatever.’
‘I always know that sort of thing.’
I waited for a deeper analysis and when none was forthcoming I said, ‘Well, this is nice, but I’ve got to be stepping.’
‘Don’t go.’ She linked arms with me and did this little snuggle-bunny move against my shoulder. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’
‘Whoa!’ I disengaged from her. ‘Last week you treated me like I was a fucking STD and now . . .’
‘I’m sorry! I was in a terrible mood.’
‘And now you’re coming on to me in this retarded way. What’s that all about?’
She took a backward step and said soberly, ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have a relationship. You’re an attractive man, but I think it’ll just be sex with us.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Enough crazy talk. I’ll catch you later.’
She gave me a pouty look. ‘Don’t you want to see where I live?’
‘Why should I? What do you have in mind?’
‘Americans are so paranoid,’ she said. ‘I guess you’ve a right to be. There’s a lot of anti-American feeling down here. A girl might invite you to dinner just so she can chop off your head.’
‘Damn straight.’
‘You could take preventive measures,’ she said. ‘Notify a policeman. Give him your name and destination. That way if you go missing they’d come after me. I’d be forced to control my murderous impulses.’
‘Now I really want to go with you,’ I said. ‘Because you saying that, wow, it makes clear what a paranoid asshole I am for thinking your invitation is suspicious.’
Four boys wearing designer jeans and polo shirts, expensive watches on their wrists, rich kids just into their teens, came pounding into the entranceway of the electronics store from the street, laughing and breathless, as if they had just played a prank on someone and made a narrow escape. One of them noticed Yara and said something about whores. For some reason, this infuriated me. I told him to fuck off. The boys’ faces grew stony, all the same face, the same soulless, zombie stare, and I had a shocking sense of the seven-billion-headed monster of which they constituted a four-headed expression. I spat on the sidewalk at their feet and took a step toward them. They cursed us and scooted off into the crowd, re-absorbed into the body of the beast.
Amused, Yara said, ‘You were really angry with those kids. You hated them.’
I became aware of the street sounds once more – radio music, car horns, the gabble of shouts and laughter – as if the curtain had been raised on a noisier production.
‘What’s not to hate?’ I said. ‘They’ll grow up to be fascist dicks just like their daddies.’
She seemed to be measuring me. ‘I think you’re a nihilist.’
I laughed. ‘That’s way too formal a term for what I am.’
She didn’t reply and I said, ‘You have a thing for nihilists, do you?’
‘You should come with me. Seriously.’
‘Give me a reason.’
‘You’ll like what I’ve got to show you. If that’s not enough of a reason . . .’ She shrugged. ‘You’ll miss out on the fun.’
‘What kind of fun are we talking about?’
‘The usual. Maybe more.’
Yara leaned against me, her breast nudging my elbow, and, though I remained paranoid, my resistance weakened.
‘Come with me, man,’ she said. ‘If you die, I promise you’ll die happy.’
We took a taxi to the rain forest. If we walked, Yara explained, if we went down through Barrio Zanja, we would have to traverse almost two miles of jungle terrain – this way we would only have to walk for fifteen or twenty minutes. The taxi whipped us around Plaza Obelisco, past the unsightly concrete monument to Temalaguan independence, some despot’s idea of a joke, and past the Flame of Liberty, which had been installed to memorialize the overthrow of the very same despot, and before long we were bouncing along over a dirt road that grew ever more narrow and dead-ended in the isolated village of Chajul on the verge of the jungle, set beneath towering aguacate trees. Yara gave the driver the bills she’d received from the electronics store clerk. I asked if the money had been a pay-off and she said, ‘They’re contributions. Funding.’
‘Funding for what?’
‘I’m not certain,’ she said.
Away from the city I could see the stars and the glow of a moon on the rise behind hills to the east, but once we entered the jungle it was pitch-dark. Yara shined a flashlight ahead and held my hand, warning me against obstructions. Insects chirred; frogs bleeped and tweedled. Rustlings issued from every quarter. Smells of sweet rot and rank decay. Mosquitoes whined in my hair. It felt hotter than it had in the city and I broke a sweat. Shuffling along in the dark, passing among unseen things, twigs and leaves poking, brushing my skin – I imagined vines forming into nooses over my head, spiders scurrying up my trouser legs, vipers uncoiling from branches above, pointing their shovel-shaped heads and darting their tongues. Yara may have sensed my apprehension because she told me we’d be there soon, but I didn’t buy it, I knew she was leading me into a trap. I gave thought to taking her hostage in order to forestall an attack by whoever was lying in wait, but I glimpsed a ruddy glow through the leaves and caught a strong fecal odor and shortly thereafter we emerged into a clearing the approximate length of a soccer pitch, though narrower, overspread by a dense canopy and bounded by walls of vegetation – you could have fit the upside-down hull of a mighty ark into the space described by those walls and that canopy. Among tree stumps and patchy underbrush lay a jungle squat that spread out across the clearing, a settlement combining the harsh realities of Stone Age life with those of brutal urban poverty. Lean-tos, tents, thatched huts, and a handful of shacks with rusting tin roofs. Campfires generated a smoky haze and as we passed through the settlement I saw shadowy people stirring, all moving about with what struck me as an excess of caution. Some acknowledged Yara with a wave, but no one called out her name. I estimated that several hundred souls lived in the squat and would have expected to hear a conversational murmur, the odd laugh or shout, music and such, yet the place was as hushed as a church and there was a corresponding air of pious oppression, one comprehensible when you considered the enormous reptilian skull, yellowed with age, illuminated by torches, that occupied the entire far end of the clearing, looming high into the canopy.
I had left the States five years previously, discouraged by the quality of my life, bored by the drabness of the American tragedy, with the consumerist mentality and the market forces that bred it, with celebrity scandals orchestrated to distract from more significant trouble, with every element of that carnival of lies – I had hoped a more vivid landscape would serve to pare away the rind that had accumulated over my brain, yet everywhere I went it seemed I brought drabness and boredom with me, and my life remained tedious and uninvolved. The skull was the first thing I had seen to put a crack in my worldview. Its size and uncanny aspect, the barbarous embellishments added by man and nature over the centuries, scribblings of moss and fungus, inlays of milky jade and black onyx, the fangs coated in verdigris, the snout covered by painted designs, much faded, that had been applied by some long-vanished tribe, all of it visible in the erratic light . . . at one second it seemed a clownish, grotesque fake, a gigantic papier mâché Mardi Gras mask, and the next I grew terrified that it would return to life and roar. Vegetation hid the greater part of the sloping brow and a thick matte of vines obscured one of its eye sockets, but apart from a few clusters of epiphytes the snout was unencumbered, reaching a height of forty feet above the jungle floor. Propped against the side of the jaw, its topmost section resting against a portion of bone adjacent to a fang, was a telescoping aluminum ladder. When I realized we were heading toward the ladder my anxiety peaked – I was insecure with the idea of climbing into the mouth, but Yara displayed no sign of trepidation and I kept my worries to myself. A disquieting atmosphere of the sort that gathers about ancient ruins enveloped the skull, an absence of vibration that causes you to listen closely, to attune yourself to the possibility of vibration, so that you may feel something where, perhaps, there is nothing to feel . . . except this particular vacancy had an inimical quality, as if it retained a residue of its former contents, like a glass that once held poison.