Indecision (20 page)

“Tell him I want as much as possible! Como quisiera,” I said, “quisiera macho! Or I mean mucho!”

Omnicompetent Edwin took out of his rucksack a hand drill and this small plastic tap. I watched as the reservoir beneath the plastic tap started filling up with opaque yellow liquid.

Before long I’d stripped to my boxers and was basting myself all over with the coolish soothing stuff. Bridge offered to apply the unguent junk in the hairy center of my back, where I could never reach to. The touch of her warm intelligent hands made me squirm with romanticism even in the heat. And Edwin too was apparently having fun—laughing, calling me
loco.
The word was like a license, and I reached inside my boxers and began loco-ish-ly patting the goo all over my hairy but possibly not-even-all-that-uncallipygian buttocks.

“Edwin has never seen anyone so hairy as you!”

“Maybe no one ever will again,” I said, sparing my pubes, scalp, and itchy face but otherwise covering myself completely. “Voilà!” I said at last, glistening. “Or mira!” I threw open my arms. But looking at smiling Brigid I feared I would spring an erection—until then I’d forgotten all about Abulinix’s satyriasis side effect—and immediately I looked away.

Fortunately my dick remained well behaved as Edwin egged me on further. He encouraged me to fill my two water bottles with this incredible elixir of hairlessness, and then to machete off the other four roots of this incredible, in fact incredibly beautiful tree that I was—hmn, come to think of it—that probably I was in the process of killing.

“But Dwight really do you hate so much to be hairy?”

“Well it’s just a question of what I’d more prefer. Others might prefer it too, huh?” I winked at her and resumed laboring in the dank heat, hacking away like some utter berserker as the Nalgene bottles filled with sap. Yet with knowledgeable, moral Brigid looking on I couldn’t help thinking how unpleasant it would be to do this work for subsistence pay, as some casualized agricultural laborer, for eight or more hours every day.

“Edwin thinks you are interesting. He is saying that most of the English treat the Oriente like a museum. Maybe true,” she allowed with a certain reluctant admiration that I was in such a good mood as to feel I might deserve, hacking away until I was finished, and sweaty, and tired. Then I stood up and began putting on my clothes, receiving a smattering of applause from my jungle companions. And using the tamshi vines which Edwin had handed me for twine, I bundled up the thick roots and then carried them off lashed to my pack as we proceeded through the rest of this remarkable day.

Around sunset we reached a scenic oversight perched on some cliff’s edge. There it was—the same river we’d first paddled down, unraveling uphill like the past. And also on view was the Oriente spreading all around, and off in the distance the famous Andes, just like the mints, but with a sideways drift of smoke trailing from one volcano. Edwin went off to make dinner, and I very nearly sashed one arm around Brigid’s neat, tight waist.

“No question about the bobohuariza,” I said instead. “It definitely works.” Fallen-out hair already lined the insides of my pants and shirt like some shedding short-haired dog shared them with me. And the change worked by this special sap had also functioned as a symbol of more interior change, because the main event of the past few hours was that I could feel the mild sure sensation of the Abulinix colonizing my system and lightly mastering it. The choice, made in a flash, to be rid of all the hair south of my neck, was seeming to have been the drug’s first annunciatory effect—and that was also how it had seemed at the time! I reveled in the sensation of feeling the same way about something both later on and while it occurred. . . .

Brigid seemed like the sort of person who needs larger questions resolved before submitting to be kissed, therefore I proceeded to lay out the big idea that had popped into my brain: “Okay so I’m unemployed and you’re having issues about your studies.”

“I have no more studies!”

“Still, what I propose is we keep some of the bobohuariza, we take it to a lab in the States, we have it analyzed, then we patent a synthetic version. We have some giant cosmetics firm market it as the incredible depilatory it truly is, and we make our fortune.”

She shook her head at my ingeniousness.

“Then,” I said, “if you find new work that’s meaningful, great—and if not, don’t work. Didn’t you say you admire the Haponi capacity to be lazy? And meanwhile I can enjoy access to the stuff just by going to the drugstore.”

“I wasn’t warned you are so vain.”

“But all my other motives are so, so good. We’ll split the money two ways. Maybe with your share you could create some Belgian foundation to, you know, counteract and undermine the sort of—what?—neoliberalism?—anyway the sort of capitalism that you don’t like so much.”

“And you like it so much?”

“I don’t know, my knowledge is in the process of arising. And as long as I don’t have to have a job I can just learn things all day long. But so what do you think? I mean, bikini lines—gone.”

“You become more strange by the hour.”

“But this is so not about me. You may have noticed there’s a war against hairiness going on among the hirsute peoples of the more western or northern world—who also happen to be the big spenders. And we’ve found the silver bullet! I mean it’s obvious to me that in the future all the women are bald and the men have flowing hair—but only on the head! Brigid, I feel very lucky about this.”

“But really this is your idea? To market the n’importe quoi, the bobohuariza? I have to confess what I think—”

“Think what you want. Really. You may have noticed that I’m something of a cipher who could probably be halfway molded to your wishes.”

“But what has affected you this way? You are behaving so bizarrely.”

“I know I’m acting a little differently. True. But we can never really schedule the important things that happen to us, do you think? Let me admit something to you, Bridge. Lately I have been suffering from this
chronic indecision
or—”

“Ah, you too.”

“—or abulia. But today, for whatever reason”—Abulinix made me decide not to mention Abulinix—“today has felt like a total breakthrough day. Today it has occurred to me that if all of a sudden I chose to be rid of my body hair; and if the certainty has also emerged in me that tech support is the wrong way to go, and a right way is going to be found, very possibly through selling the bobohuariza; and if now I know that even to have mistakenly gone after Natasha was absolutely necessary, since how would I arrive where I needed to be except through a detour? and if furthermore I’ve detected that many of my thoughts and feelings have become swift and super-sure and that’s a big part of what happiness is . . .” I felt like the Abulinix was making my consciousness so acute that life would just describe itself to me as it took place, and merely to open my mouth would render me the tribune of articulate events.

“Yes?”

But here it was hard to go on. “Well, then,” I said, thinking that it was a wonder drug after all, and presuming that if prolonged use didn’t cause nervous disorders, or a dangerously accelerated heart rate, or some other health consequence, then my life might be saved (while it lasted).

“Yes? If, if, if—then what?”

Fervently I clasped Brigid’s hand. My touch may have been ambiguous—“Quoi?” she said—with all the ambiguity of the future, but there was also the sureness in it of believing the future can be met head-on and converted into past time without too many leftover regrets. I figured, and tried to transmit this figuring to her through my palm, that whatever we turned out mutually wanting would be just the right thing, to which this touch would end up having made a good prelude. Meanwhile decide things, I told myself, but only the ones you can, and using honest developing feeling as your sole single principle, decisively divide the objects of decision from the objects of a sure and careful patience. So just go from moment to moment like someone picking his way from rock to rock across a stream.

“Ah, Bridge.” I was filled with gratitude toward the revolutionary pharmaceutical giants of our age. And even Pfizer, for firing me! Because in any other period of human history what could have been done with me, with my condition? I squeezed Brigid’s hand.

“I care for you as well,” she said, weakly squeezing back. “Mais tu es complètement fou. Un fou. Do you know what I am saying? You are fully crazy, really.”

“I
was
crazy,” I acknowledged.

SEVENTEEN

Edwin looked at us, chuckled, and said that he was going to give another shot to constructing a palm-leaf structure. I hoped this announcement might indicate so much sexual tension bristling between Brigid and me that Edwin (with the special psychobiological acuity of a premodern man) sensed the intensity of our need to be left to our own devices.

However when we retired to our hut Brigid seemed in no mood.

“I’m sorry,” I said as she established herself on her hammock in a definitely noli me tangere sort of way. “I forgot about Edwin. We’ll split the money three ways. I should have thought of that before. Think of the wedding the guy could have.”

“You happen to chance upon the bobohuariza and now you want to take it away and then maybe take out a patent? I am sorry, but no, you cannot do this.” She’d taken off her boots and slipped beneath her net. “It would be the history of South America repeated all over again.” She shook her head and her headlamp made the gesture especially dramatic. “It would be just as with the rubber tree—”

“What? What’s the problem?” And did rubber really grow on trees?

She’d shut her headlamp off—now it was utter, utter jungle dark—and was asking me whether I knew the rubber tree also came from the Amazon.

“Everything comes from somewhere,” I said, slinging my ass onto my own hammock and beginning to pull off my Wellington boots while Brigid explained that in 1870 some English dude had smuggled a few rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil, with the result that before you knew it rubber plantations had sprung up in
British
Malaya. “So that by the middle of the twentieth century Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, home to the rubber tree, now they are mostly purchasing all their rubbers from abroad.”

Stupidly I laughed.

“Yes, so ironic and cruel that it
is
quite funny—to take away the wealth of the place and then sell it back at a high cost. But it will be the same black comedy if you take the bobohuariza and sell it as hair remover to the rich blanco ladies of Quito and Lima and New York.”

For a moment I just sat there on my hammock listening to the jungle.

“Well how about if we share the profits then?” I suggested. “With the Ecuadorians?” No response—and it seemed like the jungle got louder the longer you listened, like some huge insect riot where their demands went increasingly unmet. The sound had begun to fringe the edges of my good mood and freak me out a little. I had to say something: “So what’s up with the Ecuadorians anyway? I mean, where’s the initiative of these people if they have to wait around for someone like me to show up before anyone even
thinks
of becoming the local bobohuariza tycoon?”

“An interesting mystery. But also it is very interesting about you, that you come from New England.”

“How do you say non sequitur in French? It’s not interesting at all.”

“Don’t you think so? Because New England is very rich and that’s where America first began, yes?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“And there in New England with your wealth you also have freedom, relatively speaking, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And yet in
South
America as you notice the people are quite poor and lack genuine freedom with their economies, and have not a lot of cosmetics companies?”

“Sure.” But she was making me feel like one of those dumb-assed yes-men in Plato’s dialogues who just keep on going
Yes, Socrates, right Socrates
until they’ve been led unwarily by their own dull answers into serious extremities of contradiction.

“And why do you think the cosmetics companies are there and not here?”

“You know Brigid you can seem pretty didactic sometimes.”

“Only sometimes? For me an advance.”

I lay slung in the hammock listening to the surround-sound eruption of humid white noise. “Oh, go ahead,” I said. At least she had a nice voice.

And now she was saying that it was kind of strange on the face of it that New England and then all the US would get to be so rich while South America remained so basically poor, something that seemed very natural to me—or at least it did until Brigid pointed out that South America had always been loaded with natural resources, whereas New England was pretty singularly impoverished in those terms.

“All right.” But the darkness of the hut, tucked inside the massive spinning night, was making me feel a little disoriented and uncertain.

“Maybe this arrangement of wealth doesn’t seem very strange to us, but—” And here she reached back into history and referenced the incredible mineral wealth of South America circa its conquest, the super-fertile coastal soils, and then the fact (which I’d never believed before or believed the opposite of—had simply just never considered) that South America had also had this comparatively large, concentrated, and therefore readily-enslaved Indian population. “In New England by contrast you had nothing for Europe to want—no silver, no gold. And your climate was very like England’s, while here and of course in the Caribbean one could cultivate sugar, cotton, coffee, tobacco, indigo. And what is the result of this, I think?”