I laughed.
‘It’s not funny!’ She swung her legs off the bed, as if preparing to bolt. ‘I mean it!’
‘I’ve heard women say that before, but they were referring to another part of their bodies.’
She picked up a flimsy robe from the floor and put it on. I asked what she was doing and she said she was going to eat.
‘It’ll be cold,’ I said.
‘It’s good cold.’
She sat at the table and dug in, forking up a bite, chewing, swallowing, forking up another bite, making of the meal an act of mechanical ferocity.
After a minute I stood and stepped into my boxers. Yara continued chowing down, not sparing me a glance. Despite the breeze I felt hot, my thoughts stale and repetitious. The unbroken eggshell-smooth surfaces of the chamber oppressed me.
‘This place could stand a window or two,’ I said.
I sleep too deeply and wake too abruptly to remember my dreams, but during the week that followed, though I retained nothing of their substance, I woke with a sense that my dreams had been disturbing, and not in the customary sense, not due to anxiety or stress. I had the feeling that something had been picking at the shell of my consciousness, trying to insinuate itself into a crack, to find a way in. When this feeling persisted I mentioned it to Yara. She said it was a common reaction.
‘Reaction to what?’ I asked.
‘To being here,’ she said, and headed off to the tiny chamber set forward of the brain box, where she commonly passed an hour or two each morning.
I spent a portion of the following day exploring the skull, negotiating channels that often led to other channels, but occasionally to small chambers, all so scrupulously clean that I suspected someone must have snuck in and done the sweeping. Nothing was out of the ordinary about the majority of the chambers (aside from the extraordinary fact of their existence), but the chamber to which Yara went each morning had a soporific effect on me, making me drowsy whenever I entered it. I would have asked Yara about this had she given me reason to anticipate a straight answer – as things stood, after determining that the drowsiness was not the product of my imagination, I marked it down as an anomaly, a minor mystery in the midst of a greater one.
My initial impression of the adherents had been that they were timid, sullen, and ignorant, dimwitted in some instances, and that they represented the disenfranchised, their lives ruled by poverty and informed by delusion. Yet though they lived rough, and though I continued to believe that the foundations of their community were based upon a significant delusion, I came to acknowledge that I had mistaken distraction for temerity, self-absorption for sullenness, and that a majority of the approximately five hundred people dwelling beneath the canopy were upper middle class: educators, doctors, artists, researchers, and professionals of various types. Of course there were also a good many laborers and shop clerks, and a number of ex-derelicts, reformed drunks and addicts, but these were counterbalanced somewhat by the presence of people like Major General Amadis de Lugo, who inhabited a shack close by the skull. A smallish man in his seventies, with a time-ravaged yet still handsome face, ragged white hair, and an untrimmed beard, customarily dressed in fatigue pants and a white T-shirt, he was nonetheless an imposing figure, at least to me. When I first arrived in Temalagua he had been the titular head of Department 46, the country’s notorious internal security unit, and thus had been responsible for the deaths of several of Ex’s colleagues at the university, not to mention thousands more deemed politically untrustworthy by the government. I was shocked to see him (I recognized him from newspaper photos), astonished that he could survive in the community. Someone in the camp must have lost a friend or relative to de Lugo’s death squads – I presumed that they would seek to exact vengeance, but the cult made a point of ignoring all sins committed before joining, even those of a villain like de Lugo, and the policy had not thus far been contravened.
Four days after I moved in with Yara, she spent the morning sequestered in her little bone chamber and in mid-afternoon she went about the encampment, conversing with the adherents. They were less conversations than counseling sessions – she did the lion’s share of the talking and the adherents were limited to nods and affirmations. I tagged along behind her and from what I could hear she appeared to be offering advice designed to shore up their commitment to some nebulous goal, generic hogwash of the kind that enraptures the fans of asswipes like Tony Robbins and Dr Phil. She had a ways to go before she perfected her spiel, but she had Tony and Phil beat all to hell in the looks department and I thought with proper management and a team of make-up people and hair stylists, she could be coached up into a serious money maker. She had a terrific back story: the abused street urchin who had learned life’s secrets from the rain forest swamis and was engaged in hauling herself up from society’s rat-infested basement to become every loser’s dream of success, a Rolex-wearing, couturier-clad, self-help diva striving to reach a platform that would enable her to sell the world some perfumed brand of bullshit. I imagined myself her advisor and complicitor. I’d warm up the audiences, an Armani-wearing stooge delivering a well-rehearsed message of non-denominational love, toothless liberalism, and capitalist greed, yielding the stage to Yara in order to seal the deal with a double shot of the same rendered in her charmingly accented English, all the more charming for having been polished so as to achieve a desired effect.
It was a humid day, the air heavy with the smell of rain. Smoke from the campfires lay close to the ground, thickening the usual haze to a roiling smog, so that people who were not close at hand acquired a ghostly aspect, their indefinite figures fading in from the murk and then dematerializing. Tired of listening to Yara mold her constituency, I staked myself out on a makeshift bench near the ashes of a fire and began sketching in my notebook, adding brief written descriptions of each subject. I’d been at it for perhaps twenty minutes when someone cleared his throat in an attention-getting way and I glanced up to find General de Lugo standing beside me, leaning on a cane, partially blocking my view of the skull. Seeing this emblem of death’s human expression superimposed against that vast iconic figure unsettled me, but de Lugo smiled – not the most assuring of sights – and indicated that he wished to sit down. I made room and he lowered himself onto the bench, groaning as he completed this arduous process.
I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. His hair was exceptionally silky and his clothes reeked of mildew. The flesh beneath his eyes looked bruised – from lack of sleep, I assumed. ‘Go on,’ he said, pointing at the notebook. ‘I will watch.’
He beamed at me again, a beacon of his approval, but when I continued to sketch he tsk-tsked and grunted as in apparent pain, as if displeased by my work. I sketched a pink umbrella tree at the edge of the clearing, a shriek of color like an exposed vein, a more vital territory laid bare behind the smoky green vegetation, and he snorted impatiently. I asked if I was doing something wrong.
‘You draw trees, shadows, people.’ De Lugo gestured at the skull – it towered above us some sixty or seventy feet away. ‘But not the dragon. Why? It is the only thing worth drawing.’
‘You want me to draw the skull? You got it.’
After a couple of false starts, using a pen with a fine point, I managed to get going on a miniature of the skull protruding from its cover, focusing to such a degree that once I finished I was startled to discover that three other people had joined us and were sitting on the ground about the dead fire. A young couple, student types, the guy’s hair longer than his girlfriend’s, and a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing shorts and a worn, dirty dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. De Lugo took the notebook from me, studied it a moment before passing it to the girl. She shared it with the two men and they murmured their appreciation.