Tropic of Night (13 page)

Gasps. Screams. Vast applause.

His eyes crinkle entrancingly behind the glittering lenses. So, let us deconstruct what you have just seen. I am French, therefore I deconstruct. First, all of us bring to this phenomenon a cultural load. We do not observe it objectively; there is no such thing. And this load tells us that there is no magic. What you are observing is merely legerdemain. You cannot tell me how I did it, perhaps, you cannot explain what you saw, but you have utter confidence that the egg did not actually vanish, that the pigeon did not actually appear out of the egg. But let us take a poll, this being America: who here thinks I have actual magical powers?

Half a dozen hands shot up, waving wildly, us girls, naturellement, and a few of the crystal-and-patchouli crowd. Laughter, in which he joined.

I will be available for worship after the lecture, he remarked, to more chuckling. But most of you do not, and properly so, for you are all materialist empiricists. That is your culture. Of course there are people who simply believe in magic in the same way that some of you believe in a religion, but this is not what I am talking about. Again, this is a technology. It works whether you believe in it or not, just as a pistol will shoot you dead whether or not you believe that there are such things as pistols. What I just did with the egg and the pigeon was to demonstrate one element of this technology, which is the control of the consciousness of one person, or a group of persons, by another. I created an illusion, yes? One easily penetrated by the powers of science. But I am not interested in the mechanics; I am only interested in the psychic reality, the distraction itself. Among traditional peoples where the shamanic technologies are well developed, the manipulation of consciousness has advanced to a much higher degree. We have ample evidence that, for example, shamans and sorcerers can enter the dreams of sleeping people and stage-manage the dream state. Sorcerers can elicit in their subjects psychic states that are somewhere between dreaming and sleeping, so that the subject entertains elaborate illusions that seem undeniably real, a kind of induced psychosis. Sorcerers can play with some skill on the interactions between mind and body, an area in which scientific medicine is almost entirely incompetent. We speak, for example, of the placebo effect in a drug trial as junk data. We toss it out, yes? We are only interested in the drug effect, so we design the double-blind trial, no one knows what is the pharmaceutical and what is the sugar pill. The patients who get rid of the cancer or whatever with the sugar pill, we don’t worry about them. They are of no interest. And when someone is sick, or in pain, and we cannot find an organic, a material cause, we dismiss it. It is only psychosomatic, we say. And the mental diseases …

Yes, those mental diseases. A scratching rustle on the roof, claws, and a grunting sound. It’s happening again. I stop swinging in the hammock, my chest tightens, and my ki leaps up into my throat. I get out of the hammock and my knees barely support me. Deep breaths now, controlled breathing. When everything is reeling out of control, still you can control your own breathing, push the ki gently down where it belongs. So my sensei advised, and so I do now, and it works. The first time I was attacked by a witch, it was just like this.

More scratching and snarling and a heavy thump on the landing at the top of our steps. The child stirs in her sleep. I walk trembling to the door, wondering if I have enough komo in my hidden box and whether I can remember the spell. If this really is a jinja …

But upon stepping out onto the landing what I see is the fat ass of a momma raccoon waddling down my stairs, accompanied by her two kits.

I collapse on the top step, making a peculiar noise somewhere between hysterical laughter and tears. How bland and restful nature! How like Dolores not to know that there was a raccoon nesting in the neighborhood. Jane would have known.

The raccoon family vanishes into the thick foliage at the edge of the yard. There’s a faint breeze, but it’s blowing away from Polly Ribera’s house, and so the dog Jake does not smell the raccoons and set up a holler. I don’t go back to my hammock. This is unusual; Dolores does not like the night, a bed-by-ten girl ordinarily. The step I am sitting on is rough, however, and is pressing uncomfortably into my meager bottom, and so I stand and stretch and descend into the garden. I am wearing nothing but the size-large T-shirt I sleep in, a thrift-shop purchase, ragged on the bottom and washed thin as paper, bearing the logo of the Miami Marlins.

Rough grass against my feet, between my toes. I used to go barefoot in Danolo; Uluné recommended it, for drawing power from the earth. And worms too. A good deal of the sorcerer’s pharmacopoeia is devoted to vermifuges. I stand in the garden and open myself to the night just a crack, arms hanging, legs apart, face up for a moonbath, so good for the complexion, as the Olo believe. Sounds, the hum of the air conditioners, distant traffic, the odd airliner. Filter those out. The tiny sigh of the breeze, creeping through the half mile of city from the bay, just strong enough to make animalish flappings in the leathery crotons, enough to stir my moronic hairdo against my ears and forehead, stir my pubic hair against the tender neglected flesh of my groin.

Oh, and there’s night, there’s night, when wind full of cosmic void feeds on our faces,as Rilke says, O and I wish this wind would eat my face, chew me down to the old Jane, Jane before Africa, I miss her so.

But not before Marcel, no, and that day I saw him first, golden and full of magic powers. He went on, then, to describe his theory of deep interpretation; we must be like divers he said, like Captain Cousteau, immersed in the culture, so that we comprehend its subjective reality, in our own hearts and souls. It is like literature, he said. If you ask me to tell you about Proust and I say (and here he mimicked a dry academic voice) Proust is eighteen centimeters by twelve and four centimeters thick, colored green, and consisting of five hundred and seventy-two printed pages on which the following words appear: “the”: six thousand seven hundred fifty-two times; “of”: six thousand twenty-two … bah! You would think me a cretin, yes? This is anthropology. They want to be objective, like physicists, so they don’t ever truly read the book. You must read the book and let it work on your heart, and then, if you can, interpret it to your own people. And this is dangerous, as it is for scuba divers. You may swim like a fish, and the fish may think you’re a fish, but don’t throw away your tank and try to breathe water.

Then he told about his seven years with the Chenka in Siberia, his training as a shaman, his adventures in the spirit world. There were slides with this part. Marcel in native dress, Marcel with various shamans, Marcel on a shaggy pony, indistinguishable from a dozen other Chenkas on shaggy ponies. Middle-distance shots, these, no faces showing. He had lived with these guys for seven years on the Siberian steppe, during which he had virtually no contact with the outer world.

I whispered to O’Neill, “This is like Castaneda, with yurts.”

“Not like Castaneda,” she said. “You read his book?”

I had not. “Read it,” she said. “It’s got forty pages of footnotes. He’s got reams of data, tapes, the works. It’s real science; he kept his hose connected while he was doing all that. Castaneda is fiction.”

We got shushed. Marcel went into his peroration, a rant about the imbecility of objective, reductionist explanations of human consciousness. It was, he said, like a New Guinea tribesman being plonked down in New York. What would he understand? Next to nothing. He would not even be able to see anything but vague and alarming shapes. When Captain Cook arrived in Australia, the aborigines failed to see his frigate, although it was sitting just offshore. They had no mental compartment to put it in, so they ignored it. The city of consciousness is just as baffling to the Western mind as Manhattan to the tribesman. Do we understand pain? No. Do we understand dreams? No, nor addiction, nor mental illness, nor desperate love, nor the anger that creates war and crime. Consciousness, the one common experience of mankind, is also the last unexplored country, a challenge to the scientist, but the very métier of the sorcerer. Thank you. Thunderous applause.

My head was, as they say, in a whirl. O’Neill noticed and asked me if anything was wrong. Nothing was wrong. I had found my Life’s Vocation. I didn’t say that, though; I made my face all phony-dreamy and said, “I’m in love!” True also, but I didn’t know it then. O’Neill released her famous dirty snicker.

We all giggled out of Low, like a bunch of teenies from a boy-band concert, and down Low steps. And then we all went back to the books, except me. I snuck off up the hill to the bookstore, where I bought Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, and the text for Anthro 101; to the corner place, where I bought an Italian hero and a quart of Coke; and back to my room, where I shit-canned Sartre in French and read Vierchau and Lévi-Strauss in English, all the night through, and in the morning I bought a couple of whites from the dorm pusher and went into my French exam flying.

I should have failed but, magically ( magically!), one selection for translation was from Colette’s Mes Apprentissages, which I love, and knew well, and the other was from (wait for it!) L’Apprenti du Sorcier, and screw all of you who memorized vast uncharted realms of Foucault and Derrida.

Then I went to my adviser and got my major changed to anthropology, and later to the registrar and talked my way into a couple of already-closed summer session introductory courses, and signed up for sixteen credits in anthro and related subjects for my senior year. They wouldn’t let me into the seminar that Vierchau was teaching in the fall, distinguished visiting professor, very selective, no way, that was by invitation only, but I could audit with the instructor’s written permission. Which was an excuse to go see him.

Back here in the now, the moon pops out from behind her low cloud, casting into silhouette the tall coco palms in the next street, and the breeze picks up a trifle and veers north. The palm fronds set up a gentle clatter and at that moment a mockingbird starts to sing. Entrancing. I am entranced, which I have not allowed myself to be for some time. I used to be quite good at it, so said Uluné. A technical term in sorcery, of course, ilegbo in Olo, but among us materialistas most often only figuratively used. Tears are rolling down my cheeks now, as the creature sings its tiny heart out against the castanets of the coco palms and the low hissing of the other foliage. The American nightingale, so called, a good substitute and no hungry generations tread it down either. Oh, I don’t need this, and I need it badly. For the first time since Africa it occurs to me that this life-in-death is not forever. I look up at the moon and in my trance it seems to stop moving against the clouds, the wind stops, and the clatter stops, and even the nightingale stops singing, and everything is for one long instant made of shining stone.

“Okay, thank you, I get it, I get it!” I say out loud. And the world cranks up again, moon, wind, palm, and mockingbird, all having their being, and me too. A little apotheosis in the night, hasn’t happened in a long time to me, and was always rare, they don’t like you to look behind the machinery of nature, uh-uh, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The bird stops singing and flies off, the moon slides behind a thicker cloud bank, the garden grows dark, the wind seems to drop a few knots, or maybe that’s my imagination. In any case, show’s over. As I climb the stairway, I notice my body feels different, and I pause and puzzle for a moment about it. Ah, yes. The Dolores slouch is missing. I am walking like Jane. This won’t do, but oh, my, it’s going to pinch and tickle climbing into that heavy, scratchy costume again. I was trained to stand up straight and be proud of my height and my big-boned body. Winsoum she wase, and like a jolly colte, tall as a maste and straight as a bolte: my husband, quoting Chaucer, of me, lovingly. Faire Alisoun, in “The Miller’s Tale.”

Where does love go when it’s gone?

I am aware that my disguise is something of a libel on the actual Dolores Tuoey, S.M., who did not slouch, and whose poor taste in clothing and coiffure (if any) was masked by the modified habit she wore and her neatly cropped head. I didn’t know her well, but she was a figure on the streets of Bamako and the outlying district. I model thus a product of my sick imagination: what Dolores would be like had she betrayed everything she believed in, her sisters and her church. This phantasm would, I think, be as repugnant to Dolores as it is to me.

I lie back in my hammock, and unconsciously I hook my toes into the strands of the edges on either side, opening my genitals to the tropic breezes. My hammock is a Yucatan string model, colored red, green, yellow, purple, of the larger sort called matrimonio, although, of course, I sleep in it alone. How to fuck in a hammock without falling out was one of the very many things taught to me by Marcel Vierchau, and I find that, what with the night, the night, and the poetry, and thinking about Marcel and my nonflaming, but nevertheless hotter than now, youth, I feel unaccustomed warmth and humidity among the nether petals. Father forgive me, it has been three years and 220 days since my last decent fuck. No, none of that, now. I am in enough trouble and I am not ready to …

I unhook my toes and press my legs together and roll up with sheet and pillow into the fetal crouch in which I generally sleep, and after a bit I think, not ready for what? Run, do nothing, fight. I ran already. I am more disinclined than formerly to do it again. I am presently doing nothing, but with increasing discomfort. Almost four years is a long time, a jail sentence for a fairly serious felony, although the worst of what I did is probably in the codes of neither Florida nor the state of New York. Maybe the kid makes me eligible for parole.

Which leaves fighting. The way of sorcery is often about healing, and fate, and other spiritual activities, but day in and day out it is about war, mainly skirmishes, brief firefights, I sock your guy so you blow up my guy. This goes on in Miami and New York and L.A. all the time, anyplace where brujos, hougans, curanderos, and santeros are found among the believing immigrant communities. Marcel used to point out that it was a great error to imagine that traditional technologies of power were controlled by people any less rotten in the main than those who controlled industrial technologies of power. Spiritual don’t mean nice. Inuit and !Kung villages have, and always have had, murder rates in excess of those current in Miami, and most of these killings are due directly or indirectly to sorcery. There are saints and the wise among shamans, of course, but they are about as common as saints and the wise among generals, corporation presidents, and politicians.