Blinding Light Page 5

  “You guys must be teachers,” Nestor said.

  “No teachers here,” a man said in a weary voice.

  “How many kilometers to Papallacta?” a new voice piped up in the darkness. Because the man was agitated, his German accent was more distinct than if he’d been calm, and he chewed it and turned it into a gargling speech impediment.

  Nestor laughed and muttered something to Hernán, and at that moment a cell phone sounded two notes in the back of the van. A woman fumbled with it and tried to answer, the call failed, and the woman muttered, “Oh, knickers.”

  But for some time Steadman had known who these other passengers were.

  Manfred was panting with impatience and now and then sighing with deliberate harshness as he fussed with the tangled wires of a pair of headphones. The others talked without letup, because of the darkness, because of their apprehension, because they were naturally assertive. Steadman did not blame them for being wealthy or for collecting destinations like trophies, but he minded their talking so much and so intrusively this early in the morning—dawn still distant, their voices contending in the van—and not conversing with each other so much as boasting to be heard by the eavesdroppers they hoped to impress. They were saying what all of them already knew, and everything they said had a gloating sound.

  Wealth had made trespassing simple. With money it was now possible to go anywhere in the world. No courage was necessary, nor any planning. Steadman was fascinated by the choices: gorillas in Africa, temples in Bhutan, back roads in Yucatán. In Antarctica—so Wood was recalling right now in the van—they had wandered the rookeries of the emperor penguin. Though Steadman had imagined just himself and Ava on this trip, it was not surprising that they were with these others on the van ride to the jungle. Steadman hated the thought that he was like them, for his wealth had made this possible for him, too. But this was only the beginning. The real test would come later, down the river, in the jungle, at the village.

  Still in this darkness the man who had been introduced as Hack said, “I still can’t see a fucking thing,” his face against the van window.

  “Sabra and I heard about one of these quote-unquote raves outside London,” Wood said. “I gave a taxi driver a hundred bucks and said, ‘Just get us there.’ It was some kind of industrial facility on the outskirts, a couple of thousand whacked-out kids jumping up and down. They all had taken this drug Ecstasy.”

  Sabra said, “One kid told me that he took a huge hit. Wandering around. Kids were just stepping on his face.”

  “The Secoya are much more civilized than that,” Nestor said.

  “One hit of Ecstasy and he’s blind for six hours.”

  “A drug that blinded you might bliss you out.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “Yah, but some few plants give you fissions.”

  Dawn broke slowly, the buoyant light leaking into the air around them and seeming to hoist the sky as the darkness dissolved, leaving shadows like a residue by the roadside, on dense bushes and leaning trees. The soft brief light turned harsh and overbright within minutes and showed the littered road. Up ahead, near some frantic chickens and a tethered goat, was a low plank-built house at a bend in the road, its chimney smoking.

  “Pit stop,” Hack said as Hernán slowed the van.

  “Anyone hungry?” Nestor said. “Also there is a restroom.”

  Beyond the house was a valley brimming with morning cloud, more spider web, some of it tangled, some of it close-knit and welcoming. Steadman walked over to the edge of the road and yawned and stretched. He turned, thinking that Ava had followed him, and saw Wood beside him in a blue jacket with full sleeves and a pair of warmup pants.

  “This cloth is actually a kind of ceramic,” Wood said, stroking his sleeve. “While these Trespassing sweats are made from recycled plastic bottles. That’s why they’re so expensive.”

  “Ten percent of the pretax profits go to environmental causes,” Steadman said, looking away.

  “Tell me that’s not deductible.”

  Steadman smiled and listened to a birdcall that was a tumbling whistle, like a showoff sound of beautiful wooing.

  Hack crept to Steadman’s other side and he too looked into the valley.

  “Hold your nose if you’re using the crapper here, it’s like the one in Cambodia,” Hack said. He was still sizing up the valley. He said, “Good friend of mine from Wharton got jacked here on the local juice.”

  “Hack, check it out. Whole bunch of water over there.”

  Nestor called out, saying that breakfast was ready. Behind Steadman on the path, Hack said, “But Cambodia was great. On that same trip we went surfing in the Andaman Islands.”

  “Thailand’s ruined,” Wood said. “Bali’s a toilet.”

  The women were seated at a table with Manfred, who was wearing headphones and had started eating before anyone else. He had a huge plateful of food—hunks of bread, deep-fried buns, gritty eggs, and wet boiled greens. Instead of sitting elbow to elbow with the others, Steadman stood, holding his plate with one hand and eating with the other. He marveled again at how Manfred seemed to have more than two arms, for the man was reaching and eating at the same time.

  “Keebler. Like the biscuits,” Janey was saying into her phone. A selfconscious singsong whine entered her voice, especially when she was attempting a joke. It came again. “No. Pfister. The P is silent. Like the pee in bath.”

  Janey began tapping her phone—she had lost the signal, she said. “You’re eating that frightful tuck?” When Steadman did not reply she said, “It looks like something the cat sicked up.”

  He listened to Hack telling Ava, “We work hard, we play hard,” and he wondered whether he should interrupt, to rescue her.

  More coffee was brought and poured, and it was only now that Steadman noticed the people who were serving: small hurrying Indians, looking anxious as they moved among the visitors, smiling fearfully, in toothy terror-struck appreciation, whenever they made eye contact. Nestor gave one of the Indian men some money for the meal and said, “Now, let’s boogie.”

  They reboarded the van with the brittle politeness of people who dislike one another, the sort of brusque formality that verges on rudeness. “Excuse me.” “You are excused.” And, “May I trouble you for a tissue?” “You may indeed trouble me for a tissue.” And, “Thank you very much.” “You’re welcome very much.”

  “I am going to be terribly rude and put my cheesy feet up on the back of your seat,” Janey said to Manfred.

  Misunderstanding her, Manfred tapped his headphones and widened his eyes and shouted, “Weber! Die Freischutz!"

  Janey peered out the van window as they drew away from the building of rough planks where they had just eaten. She said, “Everything here is so retro.”

  Planning the Ecuador trip with Ava, Steadman had imagined just the two of them with Nestor, negotiating the descent to the jungle from the plateau, Nestor confiding the secrets of the Oriente. Back then, this van and its occupants had been unthinkable. He had not counted on any intrusion, especially from tourists. And he had looked forward to being with Ava. He had wanted the journey to be singular, even risky. But it was over with Ava, they were not alone, and he felt disgusted and nauseated, resenting the other passengers, hating Hernan’s driving, and with the sickly premonition that this was all a waste of time. He had wanted his Ecuadorian adventure to be the first stage in reclaiming his reputation as a writer, which he believed would be the making of him as a man. The drug tour that he had hoped would be unique, his own, was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

  For a while, for too long, he dishonestly complained about his celebrity and his book sales—secretly, he had been delighted. But after that his complaints were sincere. He wanted to move on; he took any work that came his way. He was h
ired by magazines because he had established his name first with Trespassing, and the assignments he chose always involved travel. Ava loved to travel. For several years there was hardly any difference between his work and their vacations.

  As the author of Trespassing, Steadman, a traveler, a writer, became known irrationally as a travel writer. He had been prevailed upon to take magazine assignments to write about cities and hotels and restaurants. In the beginning he could not believe his luck. “To travel writing,” he would toast, clinking glasses with Ava over a sumptuous meal—and the meal might be lobster agnolotti followed by osso buco on polenta with baby carciofi, in the restaurant at the Hotel Cipriani—the crenelated, ecclesiastical skyline of Venice across the Giudecca Canal, San Giorgio Maggiore just out the window.

  His assignments had been so pleasurable that he did not need to be told by editors that the underlying assumption in all such magazine writing was that the pieces would be friendly and positive. Most of the time there were no expense forms to fill out. Magazines sent him on press trips. The hotel or tourist bureau provided the airfare and treated him to meals and drinks. He was given helicopter rides and expensive presents and sent home with a press kit from which he was expected to write his story.

  At first he did well. He had enjoyed himself; he expressed his gratitude in lush description, repaid the hospitality with praise. But the novelty was dulled by repetition, the travel became more laborious—more like work, even the luxury seemed humdrum and superfluous—and instead of the places seeming interchangeable, they became distinct, joyless, hardly human, and often odious to him. There was something peculiarly rigid and unspontaneous in the glamour. All this he described in travel pieces that he believed were fluent and truthful and sometimes humorous.

  The pieces were not received well. One editor said, “You don’t seem to have had a very good time. All you talk about is the bad driving and the dangerous roads.”

  Steadman was not discouraged. He quoted his line in Trespassing—Travel at its most enlightening is not about having a good time— and continued to go on press trips. But when they received his pieces the editors said, “This needs a little work,” or “This wasn’t exactly what we wanted,” and would explain in vague, insulting terms how he ought to rewrite the piece—“Tweak it,” they said—to make it publishable.

  Steadman endured a terrible time on a press trip to Trinidad. The place was crime-ridden and dirty. It was noisy. Steadman hated the music. The Trinidadians he met were rapacious. He used the words “risible” and “jungly” and “sweaty” and “cacophonous,” and all of them were crossed out by a subeditor. So was the word “stink.” He had looked into the island’s racial politics. The piece was rejected. “It was supposed to be for our ‘Island in the Sun’ slot. You didn’t even mention the raw bar at the Intercontinental.”

  Steadman sent the editor a signed copy of Trespassing.

  Sour or carping pieces were instantly rejected, irony was discouraged for its ambiguity, humor was unwelcome for its belittling, satire for its subversion, and any mention of ugliness or ruin was forbidden. In all such writing a note of fawning gratitude was mingled with submissive bonhomie. The theme of each excursion was pleasure: How lucky I am to be in this lovely place, eating this delicious meal, and you will love it too!

  “It isn’t travel. It isn’t even writing,” Steadman said. “This is advertising copy. I am expected to be an adjunct to the public relations industry.” The magazines demanded pretty pictures and gusto and undiluted praise, in order to encourage advertisers and build income. It was how they prospered.

  Real travel was risky, uncertain, difficult, and not very comfortable. What these magazines called travel were in fact beach holidays. For the upscale magazines it was the fake sophistication of gourmandising or the indolence of a luxury cruise—self-indulgent, undemanding, pleasurable, lots of sunshine, swimming, moonlight. Steadman had been hired because he was a real writer with a reputation, the author of a travel classic; but he realized that as an open-minded and wealthy traveler he was feared by the hosts, whose pretensions he would ridicule, and disliked by the magazines, which felt he would drive away advertisers. It took almost two years for Steadman to understand that he had no future in this business. He returned to struggling with his novel: work in stoppage.

  And later, with the reading of Burroughs’s Yage Letters, he yearned to take a trip to Ecuador—to visit a shaman; to experiment with yaje, which was also known as ayahuasca, “vine of the soul”; to revisit the drug that Burroughs had praised in his obscure book; to rediscover a true story and perhaps find the inspiration to go on with his novel. He needed fuel. He read the other recommended books—the ethnobotanical work of Richard Schultes and the more mystical Reichel-Dolmatoff. The drug literature was respectful, more about spirit and ritual and cultural roots than about thrills. But all the botanists mentioned the risks.

  He had not guessed that this, too, had become part of the tourist industry, but now he knew that the people in the van, on this trip—Sabra, Wood, Hack, Janey, and Manfred—were like the people who were looking for the perfect mai tai on Maui, or the best snorkeling spot on the Great Barrier Reef, or the greatest nude beach on St. Barts. He knew now that they had trekked to see gorillas and gone bird watching in Botswana, been to Cambodia and Bhutan and Thailand, across the Patagonian pampas, down the Zambezi, up the Sepik. “I’ve got a Bontoc head ax. There’s drops of blood on it.” Scuba diving off Palau, they had been surrounded by sharks. Easter Island. The Andamans. Gauchos. Mudmen. Ifugao. Pygmies. Sea Dayaks. “Headhunters.”

  “India sucked except for the Ayurvedic massage in Kerala.”

  Trophies, all of them. And this—the trip to Oriente, the visit to a shaman in a jungle village, the search for a true ayahuasquero and the trance-drink itself—was another trophy for these romantic voyeurists.

  “What are you planning to do here?” Ava had asked the others at breakfast.

  “Same thing as you guys.”

  What Steadman believed he had elaborately devised as an original trip, using obscure anthropological texts and the works of ethnobotanists—a trip he hoped would help make his reputation as a traveler in search of enlightenment—had become nothing more than the highest-priced package vacation, a drug tour. Without her having said a word, he knew that Ava was also dismayed by the presence of the others on the tour. What he had hoped would be an adventure seemed no more than a school outing.

  Yet he was determined to see it through. The trip had just begun; the others might panic and bail out. It happened—luxury cruise ship passengers got seasick, a woman on a press trip in Mexico was raped in her hotel room, and on the Trinidad junket a male travel writer from New York handed a woman travel writer from Seattle an envelope full of clumsy Polaroids he had shot of himself, nude, in a full-length mirror. And then the man had threatened her when she said she would turn them over to the police. Drama was still possible on this trip, but Steadman doubted that it would serve him. At times, being with Ava in this state of detachment was like being alone, for she had insisted on being a stranger, and that was an unexpected help to him, even a thrill, for her pretense and her manner of seduction.

  He hoped the trip might result in a book, and perhaps he could make it one, part of the novel he had planned, an in-search-of book, exaggerating the dangers, profiling the people, attributing the sexual experiences he had already unexpectedly enjoyed, masked and blindfolded in the Quito hotel, to someone else, who perhaps he could say had bared his soul to him—or, coming completely clean, using his relationship with Ava. This travel-book-as-fiction would include food, drugs, sex, exotic landscapes, remoteness—snowcapped peaks rising above the green heat; the jungle in the shadow of Cotopaxi; romantic failure, disillusionment, disappointment; a breakup book, more about trespassing than Trespassing had been.

  All this he reflected on during the long silent trip to Papallacta. The only words that had been spoken since breakfast were Manfred’s “Weber! Die Freischu
tz!” Everyone but Steadman and Manfred had fallen asleep.

  Just before Papallacta the van wobbled and swerved: a flat tire. They had no jack and had to flag down a car for help. The hour it took to fix it, and then get the spare repatched, put them behind. Lunch was late—just peeled fruit and warm beer in a parking lot near the hot springs at Papallacta.

  “Aguas calientesNestor said.

  Steadman watched Hernán approach a tall bush in bloom at the edge of the parking lot, just outside a low wall. He smiled and stroked the large white flowers.

  “You know this tree?” Nestor asked.

  Ava said, “It’s pretty.”

  “Maybe you call it angel’s trumpet?” Nestor said.

  “I don’t call it anything.”

  “We call it toé. There are many kinds. Brugmansia. Some we have down the river,” he said, and tapped his head. “They are nice.”

  “And you know that because you’re an ethnobotanist?”

  “I am a vegetalista,” Nestor said. “I am not a toéro, but I know this toé”

  Steadman said, “It opens your eyes, is that it?”

  “Luz,” Nestor said with slushy sibilance, and goggled at him with a comic stare, then winced in exaggeration. “Is a light. Open eyes, close them, give you eyes like a yana puma —a tigre’,' he added, and spoke rapidly to Hernán, who laughed.

  Ava hated it when people like this shared a secret in another language while laughing in her face. She believed they intended her to feel insecure and out of her depth, and she was insulted.

  Insistently, she said, “What did you just say to him?”

  “I speak in Quechua. You don’t speak Quechua? I say, ‘Toé—nino amaru’ It is the fire boa.”