Sole had been half-attending to the news, the rest of his mind still on that other amazing news contained in the letter, and the irritating suspicion that Pierre had pipped him at the post again—first his wife, now his work…
“Apparently folks are ‘speculating’,” he sneered.
Zwingler laughed.
“Phooey. That’s no sweat, Chris. A little bit of speculating? I tell you, the thing’s going okay.”
EIGHT
The day after he snorted the fungus powder and finally met maka-i, Pierre left the Xemahoa village, filled with a consciousness of what he must do that was as urgent as it was ill-defined.
Kayapi went along with him—he flourished no knives this time, made no threats. All the Indian said was:
“Pee-áir, we got to be back before maka-i is born, okay?”
Pierre nodded absently. He was still caught up in the experience. It was like the first sex experience, but a first sex experience of the whole consciousness. Overwhelmingly so—to the point of ecstasy and terror. He could concentrate on little else.
He had to rely on Kayapi to locate the dugout they’d arrived in. To empty out the rain slops. Clean the outboard. Pile Pierre’s things under some plastic sheeting.
Kayapi assisted without any complaints. He seemed to appreciate this irrational purpose that was urging Pierre to make the journey north to the dam.
He navigated the dugout, while Pierre stared out through the rain into the flooded maze of trees.
The bunches of epiphytic and parasitic plants crowding the terraces of the branches triggered a memory of a city far away—and highrise flats that he vaguely remembered being crowded with people all facing north during some disaster—a planecrash or a fire. Where had it been? Paris? London? Or was it just an image from a movie, that had suddenly woken to life? Saüba ants, driven off the forest floor, made tracks along low branches with leaf segments held over their bodies like columns of refugees protecting themselves with parasols. Macaws fired tracer messages of feather-numbers through the high leaves—numbers that he couldn’t count.
When the pium flies descended on them in bloodsucking, stinging clouds, Kayapi rummaged through Pierre’s things till he found a tube of insect repellent to smear on the Frenchman’s skin, so that his flesh wouldn’t swell up with the dropsy these flies left as their calling card.
At midday, it was Kayapi who pressed dried fish into Pierre’s hand and urged him to eat.
Pierre stared for hours into the dull green chaos of the forest that periodically came aflame with birds and butterflies and blooms.
There was chaos there, to a foreigner’s eyes—but there was no chaos in his mind.
There was a dawn of understanding.
Or rather, it was a memory of the dawn of understanding—which he struggled to hold on to.
His nostrils itched with the memory of maka-i, as though they’d been bitten raw by pium flies.
The day seemed endlessly, timelessly, long, like a long track rising over bleak, lonely mountains from the valley of the previous night, which a mist drifted up from now, to veil—yet without there being any clear line of demarcation between the two zones. He must have emerged from the experience at some particular time, he reasoned. Yet the boundary wasn’t definable. The greater could not be bounded by the lesser. The perception of last night could not be imprisoned in terms of today’s perception, when it was a vaster, more devastating mode of perception. Thus its bounds could not be set. How could a two-dimensional being who had been able to experience three dimensions set up a frontier post anywhere in his flat territory—and say beyond this point lies the Other? For the Other would be everywhere—and nowhere, to him. And as for clock-time, Pierre had let his watch run down and wore it only as a bracelet now. Time seemed like a useless ornament—a distraction. The sense of time he’d possessed the night before hadn’t been time by the calendar or time by the clock. It hadn’t been historic time, but a sense of the spatio-temporal unity out of which space and time are normally separated into an illusory contrast with one another.
In this three-dimensional flatland of ours, words flow forward and only hang fire of their meaning so pitiably short a time, while memories flow hindwards with such a pitiably feeble capacity to hold themselves in full present awareness. Our illusion of the present is like a single dot on a graph we can never get to see the whole of. It is a pingpong ball dancing on a jet of water, unaware of the jet. The jagged inkdrip of a thought recorded by the electroencephalograph pen.
Last night he had understood Roussel’s poem easily, effortlessly, and entirely. He held its embeddings in the forefront of his head. Held and held and continued to hold, while subprogramme after subprogramme started in, deferred to the next subprogramme, and sub-deferred again—and everything fitted together. Visual images of the embedded poem flowed within one another, all held together in a wheeling zodiac that spun round the deepest self-embedded axis in his mind.
Yet there had been terrible danger. He still sweated at the thought of it.
He had tamed the poem—and therefore the experience—only because he knew it so well already in its separate parts. Just as the Xemahoa already knew the separate elements of their coded myths, from childhood.
Throughout the Xemahoa chant-song, that many-part fugue of the Xemahoa B language, he felt his mind was splitting, flying apart, fluttering to pieces. He had feared the birds were all flying out of his head and near to losing their way in endless jungle.
It was Kayapi who netted his birds and herded them together. Kayapi saw what was happening to him and dragged him by the hand to the tape recorder, switched the poem on.
Kayapi knew the track of his lost flock of words.
Now—with the same competence—he piloted Pierre through the drowning jungle where ants fled like refugees, and wild pigs splashed and grunted, where butterflies made clouds of colour, and pium flies descended in searing fogs, while the snouts of caymans nuzzled the waves of their wake.
All these creatures were the tools of Xemahoa thinking. Today, the jungle seemed to be one vast beating brain.
Destroy these tools, and you would destroy the Xemahoa. For then they could not think anymore. They would become Caraiba, foreigners, to themselves.
Through the afternoon the fugue of thoughts faded in Pierre’s head, as he stared at the wet trees. By nightfall, the rainclouds had moved away from moon and stars. The dugout continued on its way through broader and broader channels by moonlight. It passed over flooded acres, through lagoons bristling with drowning vegetation. Pierre knew he would have got the outboard propeller tangled before many miles were up. But Kayapi piloted them through effortlessly and untiringly, sensing the right channels with a dexterity that shamed the Frenchman. Yet, for Kayapi, wasn’t it his own drowning mind that he was navigating?
Finally, hours after nightfall, the Indian did get tired. Abruptly he beached the dugout on an isle of rotten logs, stretched himself out and slept.
Pierre also fell asleep eventually; yet slept more fitfully, haunted by dying images of the embedding dance. In his dream birdfeathers formed into a giant roulette wheel. He rolled round this, his body bunched up into a ball, until the circle of numbered feathers flew apart, took wing in all directions, and lost themselves in the greater wheel of the zodiac of stars—shocked out of interstellar darkness into sunlight only by the dawn booming of a band of howler monkeys migrating through trees across the lagoon.
Kayapi immediately sat up, grinned, and set the boat on course again before producing some more dry piraracu and some pulp cakes.