III
Snow’s narrative continues for another 156 pages, many treating of the tedious day-to-day life in the camp, an almost equivalent number constituting a disquisition on the nature of love, also tedious and overly analytic (as the preceding paragraph foreshadows), and some few detailing and explaining (‘justifying’ might be more precise a word, for he appears to have borne a heavy burden of guilt) the circumstances under which, four months after initiating a relationship with Yara, he sneaked away from the clearing, intending never to return. He cites as the root cause of his abandonment the ominous atmosphere that accumulated about the place and goes on to describe the event that precipitated his escape.
‘One morning,’ Snow writes, ‘Yara went to stand in the mouth of the skull, at the point of the jaw, and there she stayed for several hours, saying nothing, motionless as in a fugue. Over a span of fifteen minutes the adherents gathered beneath her. They were perplexed at first, calling out to her and conferring among themselves, but then they grew as silent and still as their queen . . . as their god. They remained standing in a loose assembly for nearly four hours, rapt as though compelled by unheard voices. The air grew warmer – substantially warmer, it seemed to me – as if this act of devotion, of pathological immersion, were somehow increasing the spin of their constituent atoms and generating heat . . . though it’s probable my anxiety led me to misapprehend a slight elevation of air temperature. Throughout the episode I was close to panic. The gloomy space under the canopy, the rundown camp, the zombie-like connection between the adherents and their queen: it was an eerie spectacle that evoked images of Jonestown. That I had been excluded from the group, cast in the role of onlooker or tourist, someone unworthy of participating in the experience, amplified my sense of alienation. I didn’t belong here, I told myself. I was a leaf blown by chance to their door and not party to this insanity. If I were I would be as mindless and mute as they, as the creatures of the jungle (they, too, had gone silent), receiving instruction from a woman who channeled the wishes and whims of a gigantic reptilian skull.
‘When Yara turned away from the assembly, the jungle erupted into a clamor of croaks and screams, and the adherents shambled off, resuming their normal activities. Yara claimed to have no memory of what had transpired, yet she was not in the least disconcerted to learn of it, and this as much as anything convinced me that the disaster I feared was days if not hours away. I begged her to put some distance between herself and the skull, but when I told her the scene in the clearing had reminded me of Jonestown, she flew off the handle and accused me of subverting her work and otherwise distracting her.
‘That night I lay in bed wondering what to do, feeling wrecked, staring at yet not focused upon Yara’s naked back, pinpricks of actinic brilliance popping and fading before my eyes like miniature flashbulbs. And then I observed that the skin bordering her implant was inflamed, a distinct redness suffusing the colors of the surrounding tattoo. The implant itself appeared less regular in shape, its convexity more extreme, and I thought perhaps her body was rejecting it. I gently pressed my forefinger against the skin at the edge of the implant and her hips began to roll and jerk, a slow, grinding torsion, as if she were having sex with an invisible lover. I snatched my hand away, startled by her reaction, and the movements subsided. Lately she had encouraged me to touch the implant while we made love, but I had been too intent on my own pleasure to notice whether there had been a marked increase in hers . . . though it seemed then, in the unreliable archives of memory, that she displayed a measure of reaction. “Yara!” I said, and repeated her name, but she was out like a light. I pushed down on the implant with the heel of my hand – her hips thrashed as if she were on the verge of an orgasm. Once again I tried to wake her, shouting at and even shaking her, all to no avail. Horrified by her comatose state, by her erotic reflex, I was too rattled to think, yet a portion of my brain must have been functioning, a batch of neurons excited by dread must have sparked and transmitted a warning, for as the sky grayed I concluded that I needed to save myself.’
The disaster anticipated by Snow did not occur, at least not within the time frame he expected, and when nothing had happened after a month he was tempted to revisit the clearing, but shame and fear combined to negate this impulse. For a time he moved back in with Ex, yet it quickly became evident that the relationship had gone sour, as had his relationship with Temalagua, and he returned home to Concrete, Idaho, where he lived for free in an apartment owned by his father and landed a job in a local bookstore. He had intended to regroup there, to earn a little money and go off again, perhaps to Thailand, but was seduced by the lazy, listless patterns of existence in Concrete and stayed for the next ten years, maintaining a desultory lifestyle dominated by affairs with unattainable women, either married or disinterested in him as other than a pastime. The one noteworthy achievement of those years was the publication of his partial memoir, which remains unfinished to this day. (This may not be ascribed to a lack of effort, to youthful lassitude, but to the fact that it is an immature work to which he had only a passing attachment.) His infatuation with Yara developed into a full-blown obsession and, though when called upon to do so he would describe love in terms that accorded with his previous statements on the subject, he grew to think of Yara in terms more consistent with a romantic ideal. He searched the Internet for news of her and, finding none, he scribbled in his notebooks, dredging up memories, striving to piece together a coherent narrative of his four months in the jungle. He had done nude studies of Yara, but in them her face was either turned away or partly hidden by her hair – he could not recall why he had posed her this way, if it had been her idea or his, but the sketches seemed emblematic of their inadequate commitment to the relationship. He tried drawing her face from memory and was able to create accurate renderings of her features, but they were devoid of vitality and character, like better-than-average police sketches. He perceived this to be emblematic of what they had lost – an opportunity for emotional brilliance, for the transcendence of the ordinary. The conflation of time and an erratic memory presented him with the certainty of what he had heretofore merely imagined – that he had been in love with Yara and she with him, but they had not taken the final, necessary step to confirm those feelings.
One evening while netsurfing he chanced upon an article dated two years earlier about unexplained Central American mysteries that devoted a few sentences to a Temalaguan religious cult whose membership, some eight hundred strong, had recently vanished along with their object of veneration, a skull belonging to an immense specimen of the genus Megalania (this last assertion was without scholarly basis). The leader of the cult had been, the story said, ‘a charismatic young woman.’ And that was all. There was no mention whatsoever of the incident in the Temalaguan press at the time of the disappearance, a fact Snow found disturbing, and he could find no other online stories that referenced the event. Based on this sliver of information, however untrustworthy, he chucked his job, bought an airline ticket, and a week later arrived in Temalagua.
The city was more polluted and poverty-stricken than Snow remembered, though he wondered whether he had been too self-absorbed to notice how bad things were ten years before. Perhaps it had always been a smoky, slum-ridden slice of Mordor, Detroit with less industry, brighter colors, and hills crawling with the poor, the anonymous-as-roaches poor, some carrying their shelters on their backs. Beggars rushed at him in platoon-strength, displaying deformities, amputations, and open sores. Child prostitutes, some as young as eight or nine, called to him from alley mouths and doorways, and in piping, playground voices offered to perform the most deviant of perversions. Widows in black dresses and shawls sat on the curbs along Avenida Seis, their heads down, mere inches away from the stream of traffic, as if they had given up hope and were waiting for a car to swerve and put an end to their misery. Many of Snow’s old connections were dead or otherwise defunct. Ex had lost her taste for revolution and married the proprietor of a department store who called her his little Commie and delighted in pinching her now substantial ass – she was pregnant with their fourth child and was reluctant to speak with Snow. The offices of Aurora House had been taken over by a travel agency, Pepe Salido had been murdered in a gambling dispute, and Snow’s colleagues in the charity had drifted away to parts unknown. Club Sexy hadn’t changed that much. They had put in track lighting above the bar and added a karaoke machine. Miraculously, the old man still played his rickety Beatle tunes against the same chintzy backdrop of silver glitter, moonglow, and palms. Expensively attired women thronged the tables – Snow failed to recognize any of them, yet they were of a type similar to those he did recall, and the fabulous Guillermo was still pouring drinks. Aside from the start of a double chin and a questionable goatee, he looked none the worse for wear. On seeing Snow he rushed out from behind the bar to embrace him.