“Higher up, further out,” the old man urged from below. “The fresh ones, the little ones.” I stretched up and plucked them, spear blades of green light against the blue equatorial sky. It was August 17th, 1995. Dave Sternstein and don Joaquín and I were gathering the ingredients. The drinker had chopped pieces of a thick, old yagé vine, then sent me up an apple tree after leaves from a yagé ocó vine he’d planted at the base. He left to do some work back at his hut. Five meters up, on swaying branches, I filled a bag with leaves, while below, Dave cut a yard-long, flexible piece of wood and tied a length of fishing line to it to make a musical bow to play later on during the ceremony. As Joaquín had told me, Dave was Jewish, but he knew little about Judaism, his parents having rejected much of their heritage. Dave and his sister had been raised in Ecuador and Northern California. He’d met Joaquín a year after I had, and the two had hit it off. Dave and I brewed the yagé over a fire in a small clearing near Cabaña Supernatura. Two Y-shaped vertical sticks supported a third horizontal stick from which hung a huge aluminum pot filled with chopped and pounded yagé vines, yagé ocó leaves, and water. Beside the boiling pot of yagé, I told him Bible stories. About Abraham, who smashed his dad’s idols. About Issac, to whom little happened after Abe nearly cut his throat with a stone knife. About Jacob, who fell in love with Rachel, worked for her dad for seven years, and got tricked into marrying her big sister Leah. Then Jacob had to work seven more years to marry Rachel. Dave interjected, “Dude, the Bible’s like a friggin’ crazy soap opera!” “Yup. So Jacob had twelve sons by those two sisters, and the sons became the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. ‘Israel’ was a nickname that Jacob got. One time he camped on top of a mountain. An angel or an emanation of God came to him in the form of a human. The two of them wrestled all night. Neither one could win. At sunrise, the stranger just touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it, and then said, ‘Let me go. The sun’s up. I gotta be on my way.’ Jake was like, ‘Not until you bless me.’ And that angel or emanation or whatever gave him the name Israel, which means ‘Wrestles With God.’ That’s what the people of Israel are: Godwrestlers.” Dave replied with myths of hunters and forest spirits while the pot bubbled and steamed. For much of the past five years he’d lived with Quichuas and Waoranis, helping get legal titles for their territories and studying their plants. He’d drunk ayahuasca as a student of a Quichua shaman named Ignacio Chimbo. He’d even spent a lot of time with Nenke, the Waorani shaman Jeremy Carver had told me about and whom I’d seen on the river in 1993. Broad-shouldered and wiry, Dave had dark eyes in a narrow face under a crown of black curls. When he walked, he leaned back. He was only twenty-four, but his hands were rough and skillful from manual labor. He was at home in the forest. A born leader, I thought. He could’ve been the biblical David himself, leading his cat-and-mouse guerrilla war against King Saul from his wilderness fastness. Dave’s enthusiasm was contagious. “I’m here to take a stand to help save the planet,” he told me as he put another log on the fire. “There’s nothing more important.” Nearby, a stick cracked. Then another. We looked up. Rufino’s three black-and-white cows were at the edge of the clearing, having slipped out of their enclosed pasture near Joaquín’s old house. They were here to raid the sugarcane and other crops. We grabbed sticks and yelled at them and chased them away. Joaquín’s skinny hunting dogs Cuaucuillo and Potente helped us, barking and snapping, but they were actually a bigger problem than the cows. Joaquín had told us dogs contaminate the space where yagé is brewed: their energy being harmful to the yagé’s energy, they needed to be kept away. The dogs allowed themselves to be driven off. The cows, though, were imperturbable. They came three more times and we chased them away three more times. They’d run away only until they were out of our range. Then they’d stop, turn their heads, and stare at us calmly, chewing their cuds. We could yell and keep on chasing them, but as soon as we stopped running, so would they, and when we turned our backs, they’d follow us, perhaps immediately, perhaps not, but in any case, just as soon as they felt like it. Dave and I mooted esoteric interpretations of these invasions. The cows were evil spirits. Or good spirits testing us, like Zen masters. Maybe all evil spirits were good ones in disguise. “Thank you, Jehovah,” Dave prayed, leaping to his feet again and grabbing a stick, “for these frickin’ cows!” Sticks were the only things we had to throw at the beasts, as there were no stones in the area. But it’s nearly impossible to cause a reasonable amount of pain to a cow by throwing a stick at it. So we kept having to chase dogs and cows away. The two tame peccaries also invaded our airspace, which wasn’t a problem from a ritual point of view, but they were incredibly rank-smelling. Their presence further disrupted the meditative calm which Dave’s teacher Ignacio Chimbo said was the ideal state in which to prepare yagé. Around four in the afternoon, Joaquín called, “¡Davíd!” “¿Qué pasa?” Davc called back. “A snake biting a neighbor from across the river. You helping with that machine you having.” “I’ll be right there,” Dave called back, standing. To me, he said, “I’ll go help out. I got this snakebite zapper with electricity. Supposed to break the chains of the molecules of the toxin. I know this Waorani snakebite remedy I can brew too. Joaquín has the plant. You keep the yagé going, OK?” “I got it covered.” An hour later Joaquín came to tell me the three of us wouldn’t be able to drink that evening, what with the chaos of dogs and cows and the emergency. I let the yagé boil a while longer, then took it off the fire, which was dying down. With a pair of sticks I fished out most of the plant matter and discarded it. Leaving the pot, I headed back to Cabaña Supernatura. At least I could have something to eat and drink. The season to pick coffee beans had begun that morning. Radio Sucumbios had been reminding harvesters for several days to watch out for snakes. The patient was Aguilar, the mestizo shopkeeper who lived just upriver on the other bank. He’d been picking coffee beans behind his house. A little green snake had been resting, coiled, on a leaf, matching its color. So Aguilar lay in a chambira hammock in the family hut next to Cabaña Supernatura, his throbbing, blackened, swollen arm cradled in a sling. From time to time he zapped the arm with Dave’s device—which looked like a yellow electric razor—and sipped from a gourd of the bitter infusion Dave had brewed. Aguilar’s father, visiting from the coast, was bedding down on a mat on the floor nearby. The younger Aguilar was wiry, mustached, hawk-nosed, with a blue-green tattoo of a cross on his skinny chest. I knew him from his store. He’d migrated to the jungle fourteen years earlier with fifteen other families from the southern province of Loja. Now, together with his wife and three kids, he ran a general store on the second floor of his house. His front yard was a volleyball court frequented by other settlers. Joaquín called him “brother” when he shopped there. The Secoyas frequently voiced their opposition to colonists—poor people from Ecuador’s coastal cities who invaded unsettled land with the government’s tacit or explicit permission. Although, on principle, the Secoyas resented the presence of those people, in part because they were killing off the wild game, they were often fond of the colonists as individuals. The next morning, the patient went back home across the river, but he returned in the early afternoon because the pain was so bad. His family stayed at his place, warily harvesting coffee beans, so he was alone and had little to do. I gave him the Spanish-language New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs that Greg the missionary had given me up in San Luis Potosí. Dave and I went back out to boil down the yagé from three gallons to one. Once the fire was going with the pot of yagé suspended above it, we sat crosslegged on broad banana leaves and relaxed. Some branches of a tree reminded me of Hebrew letters. I said, “There’s this idea in Jewish mysticism that everything that exists is God’s language. The mystics looked at that one passage in Genesis where it’s like, ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’ And the mystics were like, ‘Aha! Everything that exists is made of God’s language.’” Dave said, “Wicked! Check this out.” He flipped through a dog-eared copy of Terence McKenna’s Archaic Revival and read aloud, “I don’t believe the world is made up of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of those things. I believe the world is made of language.” “Belief is powerful,” I said. “I believe I’m going to try a cup of this brew.” I dipped a cup into the steaming brown liquid, let it cool, said Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who has created the vine, amen, and drank the divine language, rich and bitter like the fruit of the tree of knowledge itself. I stood up with a grimace. I observed the linguistic surroundings, the langscape. Beneath a tree made of language, I found a twig bearing dried leaves that in their drying had curled up like withered brown hands. I sat down with the twig for further study. I noticed that the leaves were teeming with a miniscule language of black ants. From a little nook, a cave-like fold of leaf, a hunting spider peered at me like a tiny gray monkey with too many legs and eyes. We stared at each other until we lost our fear. When I turned my head to say “Dave, look at this,” the spider jumped onto the hair on my chest, explored for a moment, jumped on the ground and was gone. I picked up Dave’s paperback Field Guide to Tropical Rainforest Mammals and opened it at random to a page on which were drawn the heads of many species of bats. I wondered about the bats’ role in the local shamanism, and whether, as spirits, they were friendly or unfriendly, good or evil. Some looked wise and kind—others, less so. The vampire bat looked malicious, diabolical. Why? And what are animal spirits, anyway, if they exist? What relation do they have to the physical animals, and to evolution? Rain started falling. From trees, Dave and I hung two overlapping sheets of plastic and sat beneath them, trading myths, breathing smoke, keeping the fire alive. He said, “Do you know the Secoyas’ origin myth?” “No.” “Check it out. At first, humans lived underground, and they had tails. They ate nothing but various kinds of clay. One day God lured them up to the surface with some palm fruit, and as they emerged one by one, he ripped their tails off and tossed them away, and the tails turned into monkeys. Each tribe’s tails turned into a different species of monkey. Secoyas’ tails turned into woolly monkeys. Waoranis’ tails turned into spider monkeys. White people’s tails turned into chimpanzees and black people’s turned into gorillas. This was in Peru near the Santa María River. There’s a particular place where it supposedly happened. Rufino showed me on a map.” “That’s cool,” I said. “Do you know the origin of the Norse runes?” “Uh-uh. What is it?” “This tribe was really messed up—they were going hungry, they needed some power, some magic. So this guy Odin goes out to Yggdrasil, this giant ash tree, the biggest tree around, and he hangs himself upside down in it and cuts himself with his spear. He stays there, fasting, for nine days and nights until he suddenly sees the runes surging up out of the earth to him. He’s like, ‘Aha!’ He cuts himself down. That’s how runes came to people, through Odin’s vision quest. People used them for spells and for writing. It was basically a shamanic initiation to get them. A controlled near-death experience that led to a vision. I read in a different book that Inuit shamans initiate students by holding them underwater until they nearly drown, then bringing them back up.” “Yagé can be a kind of near-death experience too.” “Right on. So that tree Yggdrasil plays another role in the Norse myths as the axis of the world. Its roots reach down into the underworld and its branches touch the sky. This dragon called Nauthig gnaws on the roots. When he kills the tree, the universe will die.” “Long may the tree live.” Out of his bag, Dave took a pouch of American Spirit tobacco, and using a half-dry banana leaf, he rolled himself a cigar. Humming, he pulled a stick out of the fire and lit the cigar off its embers. Puff, puff ... his thoughts were elsewhere ... the smoke glided away and was lost in the rain. For two hours, the rain drummed on the plastic sheets over our heads. Then the clouds cleared. At sunset we strolled back to the cabin, bringing the warm jug of yagé, and we gathered what we’d need for the ceremony. We made mamecocós by cutting the plants and bundling their stems with twine, leaving the tongue-like leaves free to rustle. In the cabin I hung up hammocks for Dave and Joaquín and me. As I was making mine fast to a roof beam, a bat flew by, brushing my hand. I thought, That’s funny. I’ll have to ask Joaquín what that means. I felt a mild sting: the animal had touched me with a claw. As if on cue, the black dog, Cuaucuillo, jumped up onto the floor of the hut where he knew he wasn’t supposed to go and trotted around, wagging his tail, daring me to try something. I chased him off twice, then smudged the area with a bundle of sage I’d brought from the States. Wafting the smoke around, blowing it, marking a sacred space. Keeping demons away. A game of Let’s Pretend for grown-ups. Cuaucui kept his distance. Dave came back from the family hut with the news that Joaquín would join us around midnight. Dave and I painted red designs on our faces with achiote. He added Waorani zigzag designs representing lightning to his arms. I added Norse runes to the backs of my hands, Algiz for protection and Ansuz for vision. We were ready to go. As night fell, we lit a candle and poured our first cups of yagé. I intoned, “Great Spirit, please bless this ceremony. Show us good, strong visions. Grant us the power to heal ourselves and others.” I choked down the lukewarm brew. Dave proclaimed, “Eyes of the divine immortals, gaze upon my heart and reflect my devotion to the truth. With this drink I seek to connect myself with the highest, bravest, and most virtuous powers in the universe. I dedicate this drink and this ceremony to their greatness!” He blew on the surface of his yagé and then, without pausing, drank the liquid to the dregs. Whether a short time or long time a passed, no-one knew, but then Dave was murmuring a melody and my visionary capacity clicks on like a TV set. Thin white lines fan out in the darkness—eldritch gossamer, psychic spider-silk, faerie axons linking the world into a macro-mind. I’m listening to Dave and watching the lines, when Bam! the face of a giant bat appears right in front of mine, very detailed, extremely real—bared fangs in its open maw, a leaf-shaped nose, huge ears, glossy eyes staring into my soul. Dave told me Ignacio Chimbo told him, “If something scary appears, sing and it’ll disappear.” So I sing, Hee-ye-hey, hey, ya-ha-ha, hey, hee-ye-hey, hey, ya-ha-ha. The vision doesn’t disappear. The face doesn’t move a muscle. But the terrifying snarl is now a broad grin. I grin back. I begin to have a bat trip. The bat spirit transmits bat thoughts to me, bat ideas, bat language. “There’s no need to be afraid of the dark,” he advises. “Fear of the dark is a weakness you humans have.” “All right.” “It’s OK to be upside-down. We bats sussed it out long ago. It’s no big deal.” “Cool.” “We get a kick out of scaring humans for the fun of it. We just have to fly around, and you scream. You-all are easy to scare. Especially women.” “Good to know.” “And, finally, we experience many different kinds of love.” With that, the face vanishes. For a moment, I’m flying in the body of a bat in a cave filled with many others. Then I’m back in the hammock. Earlier, I wondered whether bats were good or evil omens. Now it’s obvious it depends on the species, the community, the individual. Bats have their own myths, traditions, politics. At least, those are the human words that come closest to what they have. I sing, Bat love is so wild, Cloud love is so mild. Cloud love is so wild, Bat love is so mild. I tell Dave about the visions and wonder whether what I saw was “a bat spirit,” or “the bat spirit,” or the spirit of that particular species. Dave’s not sure either. Outside the hut, the patch of night sky fills with black, shiny eyes, a visitation of bodiless beings from outer space come to take a look at us, curious about a pair of humans beginning to learn to see with their minds. Looking around with my mind at what humans call the spirit world, I see an infinite ecosystem populated by infinite species of beings. The place is so huge you might never see members of the same species twice. Unencumbered by matter, they shapeshift and move fast. Simultaneously, amid that chaos, particular spirits and groups of spirits associate with certain groups of humans over time. Like the gods, like Thor who visited the first time I drank. And the spirits of the aná, the Coras’ magic wands—rattlesnake-hawk-doctors with medicine of earth and air. My vision drills into the ground beside the hut. Warped, fanged, spiky humanoids are walking around down there. One, pale and muscular, is sucking energy out of Aguilar with a gray magnetic beam that comes out of its hands, face, and chest, and rises up through the ground to connect with the man sleeping in the other hut. It used the snake as a mouth to strike our neighbor and begin to feed off him. I watch this predator. It can’t see me. I analyze it, assess its strength. I want to attack it, drive it away. But it’s underground: I can’t reach it. Of course those things have to eat just as we do. To counteract them would be to disrupt the cosmic balance. But we work on behalf of the humans. And there’s no cosmic balance or imbalance, only flux, only change, only whirling energies. That’s how it looks from here, as I stare into the swirling air. What the shamans believe is true: disease is attack by invisible predators. The breast cancer that strikes women in my family, for instance. What we call disease is the perceptible dimension of the strike. Behind cancer is a hungry demon, gnawing, feeding. Like a lamprey that bears the sun in its gut, so that, in dying, we’re sucked into fire and light. A terrible gateway to infinity. A “demon” is whatever preys on us. Dave interrupts my thoughts. “Did I tell you about Wepe? No, right?” “No, please do.” “He’s a Waorani elder. He lives in the village of Quehueri’ono, where I was three years ago. His name, Wepe, means blood. He told me about this thing that went down twenty-five years earlier. A missionary from the United States persuaded some Waoranis in another village to convert to Christianity. One of the converts, a guy named Humberto, showed up in Quehueri’ono with short hair, really fine city clothes, and a fat gold watch on his wrist, and started trying to convert people. Wepe got in his face and yelled, ‘You’re not a Waorani! Where’s your long hair! Where are your ears?’—all Waorani guys back then used to pierce their ears and stretch the lobes way out and put balsa-wood disks in them. ‘Where are your ears?’ “Humberto told Wepe not all Waoranis pierced their ears or wore their hair long anymore. Something new was going on! There was a new way of living in the world, and God had come to earth and died so all people everywhere could be saved from Hell. “Wepe looks at him and goes, ‘You’re talking shit! You’re not one of us! You’re a demon!’ “Humberto’s like, ‘No, I’m a Waorani like you. And I’m here to tell you God loves you.’ “Wepe goes, ‘Well, if you’re a Waorani, you’ll know how to make a good spear.’ “Humberto’s like, ‘I know how to make a good spear.’ “So they took machetes and an axe and went into the forest. They came to a chonta palm tree. That’s what the Waorani use for their spears. It’s a food plant—it has fruits—and it’s also the hardest wood in the forest. So Humberto cut the tree down with Wepe watching him. Humberto started making a spear, but Wepe didn’t like how he did it. Wepe’s like, ‘You fuckin’ demon! That’s not how a Waorani makes a spear!’ He picked up the axe and split open Humberto’s back and killed him. Shit, man, Wepe was laughing his ass off when he told me this! Then he cut off the guy’s hand with the gold watch on it and carried it back into the village, yelling ‘I killed the demon! I killed the demon!’ He paraded that hand all around and around the village, then threw it in the river, fat gold watch and all! It sank like a stone! And that was the end of missionaries around there. Crazy shit.” Dave pauses. “Wepe said to me one time, ‘Truth is the tip of my spear.’”

As the phrase sinks in, I’m already transforming it. “Truth is the tip of my tongue,” I quip. “The tongue is mightier than the spear.” “Except when it’s not,” Dave reminds me. “Truth is on the tip of my tongue,” I continue. “I wish I could tell it! I can taste it. It’s bittersweet.” “To tell the bittersweet truth,” Dave concludes, “I’ve got to take a crap.” Carefully, Dave stands up and climbs down off the floor. Humming and singing, staggering exaggeratedly, flashlight beam pointed ahead of him, he zigzags across the lawn. I wonder, “Why is he pretending not to be able to walk straight?” I’m very calm, myself. I pray for Aguilar, who’s asleep in the other cabin. I try telepathically to suck some of the power of the venom out of his arm. It works: I feel it in my stomach: an image, a feeling. I’ll need to vomit at some point. With the ache of poison in my belly, I listen to the insect night bird orchestra. Swirling, the still birds echo, calling the water. Everything’s consciousness, very pure. And Joaquín’s the Buddha—he’s the local incarnation of that energy. There’s a quiet rustling of leaves, a bright spot of moving light. I hear Dave’s footsteps in the grass, his voice humming, murmuring. He zigzags back to the hut like the red lightning designs on his arms. I sing a wordless song to welcome him. He sits with his back against a pillar, wearing his dark green tunic with a pink long-sleeved cotton shirt underneath it, and, on his head, a half-finished yagé drinker’s crown—a hoop of wood with a woven brim—that Joaquín fashioned for him in Lagarto Cocha. Dave flashes a grin, twinkles his eyes, and croons: Every rainbow has a skull for a head. That’s what I saw when I woke up dead. That’s where my conclusions inescapably led: Every rainbow has a skull for a head. And every skull has a rainbow for a tail. That’s what I saw when I walked up the trail. Try and disprove it, you’ll inevitably fail, ’Cause every skull has a rainbow for a tail. As Dave sings, I close my eyes and see skull-headed rainbows gliding serpentine around the trunk and limbs of an enormous tree whose roots vanish into darkness. One root represents the past in which humans emerged from a cave in Peru. Another root represents the past in which we evolved in Africa. A third represents the past with the Garden of Eden, the snake, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The roots join at the trunk, where we are now. The song and the vision end. I open my eyes. I say, “You know, maybe time is shaped like a tree, with all the roots joining at the trunk. And this origin myth is correct, and that origin myth is correct, and neither one rules out the other. All kinds of evolution and creation are true, and none of them is the whole story.” “Right on,” says Dave. “You got it! And here’s a song to go with it.” Maybe time is shaped like a tree. That’s what I saw when you said it to me. If it’s true or not doesn’t matter to me! But maybe time is shaped like a tree. I laugh. By the light of the candle, I notice that two eyes have sprouted on the band of Dave’s crown. I tell him. He laughs. Next, those eyes disappear, and new ones appear on his face, on the level with his own eyes, forming a band of linked eyes across the front of his head. An angel-man, he squints at me out of six bright eyes, he grins and laughs. It’s a bit much. I feel as if I’ve been out in the sun too long. Meanwhile, there’re dark things transpiring in my guts. Nausea churns. “I’ve gotta go fight some demons,” I mutter. I rise from my hammock and get down off the floor onto the ground. The night is vast and dark, the grass soft and damp. I mobilize. War breaks out between me and my demons—half-sensed presences, tactile metaphors, dream predators, parasites who drink the blood of my soul. My strength surges against theirs. I raise my hands in the air and do an ancient war dance. I’m acting—but also incarnating the spirit of an ancestor. He and I grunt, gutteral, Huh huh huh huh hu hu hu hu hu hu. A Paleolithic tribal code surges through us: first we show the strangers our peace, then our strength, and if they attack anyway, we devastate them. I’m from half a million years ago, a warrior, a man of God. As David, son of Jesse, said about the Philistines, Do they have any idea who they’re fucking with? Nausea hits me again, a solid punch to the stomach. I bellow with pain. Losing the war against myself, I stride to a fallen tree, prop a foot up on its trunk, and vomit with a roar on the other side. Now that I’ve lost, the victory’s mine, complete and resounding. I’ve driven out the invaders, as all invaders must be driven out, and I bellow toward the river and any demons who can hear, WE PROTECT OUR OWN!!! The struggle’s transpersonal, all of us in this community of neighbors on this river defending ourselves against attackers. The battleground isn’t me anymore, but Aguilar. A puma spirit from the highlands enters my body. We stalk, silent, sniffing, peering into the darkness, learning the place. The puma walks out of me and a condor flies in. We extend my arms / his wings, glide above the land. A jaguar’s next. Then a wolf. He lopes away, gray form melting into shadow. I turn back toward the cabin. A cluster of stars near the middle of the sky sends a river of multicolored energy swarming into my chest. An unbelievably powerful ecstasy surges through me and I dance and sing One love is high! One love is high! One love is high! Stepping barefoot up the wooden stairs of the hut, I observe that strong religious feeling has two related forms. In the first, we feel that everything is beauty, truth, goodness. God is love and the universe breathes in concert. Predator and prey evolve together; dreadful enmities mask joyful conspiracies of compassion. In the second form of strong religious feeling, we identify with this great harmony, and if someone else acts against us, they’re acting against it, and we’re capable of responding with extreme fury. Back in my hammock, I mutter to Dave, “That wasn’t me dancing, it was the universe dancing through me.” I remember a Sanskrit word, lila, divine playfulness. The cosmos is a carnival and a game of matter-and-energy tag; we’re all enjoying itselves amazingly. Within lila is lawfulness: we strive toward good, away from evil; our souls yearn for good like green plants yearn for the sun. Dave says, “When you were roaring out there, you reminded me of this wicked stone carving I saw in the Museum of Natural History in New York. It’s called ‘Krishna killing the horse demon,’ and it’s got Krishna just whaling on this evil monster, kicking it in the belly whilst jamming his elbow in its mouth.” “I’d like to see that. We’re all Krishna, right?” “Yeah. Speaking of evil monsters, check this out. This happened a few months ago. Five Argentine businessmen bought this friggin’ oil company called Maxus that’s taking over and polluting Waorani lands. The businessmen were flying to Ecuador to take control of the company when their light plane mysteriously fell out of the sky and they all died!” “Wow, crazy.” At that moment, we hear movement from the direction of the family hut. A patch of light glides, bouncing, across the ground. Joaquín climbs the steps, greets us, sits in a hammock, clicks off his flashlight. He jokes with us, prays over a cup of yagé, drinks it, wraps himself in a blanket and goes to sleep. Dave and I each have another cup too and explore the esoteric dimensions of the Maxus executives’ crash. We suspect that somewhere a Waorani shaman might be laughing up his nonexistent sleeve. Or maybe it was just a mechanical failure. As humans, we’re not smart enough to figure it out, so we sing. Dave picks up the musical bow he made the day before. He puts one end up against the corner of his open mouth, a resonating chamber, and he twangs the string. Then he shows me how to do it. Changing the volume of space inside the mouth changes the overtones. What are you going to know? When are you going to know it? We sing and play the bow, ho, ho, ho, ho. Dave says, “Joaquín said something really intense when we were in Lagarto Cocha. He said the last time he was there, he drank yagé by himself, and the ghost of his grandfather came to him and said he should go and live there, where he can lead a proper, traditional life, hunting and fishing, without any interference from the outside world. So he wants to move there, and maybe start a village there. “He was talking about it, and Carlitos was like, ‘What’ll you do if the Peruvians invade?’ And Joaquin was like, ‘I’ll go up a stream and brew yagé and summon demons, and the demons’ll finish off the Peruvians. No problem!’” “I hope his plan to move there works out. It’d be great to drink deeper in the forest. The deeper the better, you know?” “For real. And, bro, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to come along to Lagarto Cocha. So check this out. A few years ago I took a journey with some Quichua friends of mine deep into their territory to a tiny settlement of six huts high up off the ground on stilts. It was twilight when we got there, and the guys there were just about to drink ayahuasca! They invited us to join the ceremony. We said, ‘Sure!’ We hadn’t had much to eat that day anyway. “A couple hours into the ceremony, I was doing great, but one of my Quichua friends, this guy I’ve known since we were both eleven, started to go crazy with pain, insisting that the shaman had driven an iron spike into the top of his head! He was yelling at the shaman to pull the spike out. The shaman totally ignored him and went on singing! The guy climbed down off the hut, and these other Quichuas tried to calm him down, but he kept on sobbing and falling down and screaming. He climbed back up on the hut and pleaded with the shaman to pull out the spike. The shaman was like, ‘Be quiet, you’re just making it worse,’ and went on singing. He never admitted or even denied spiking my friend’s head. People suffer hard sometimes when they drink yagé!” Crickets and cicadas wrap us in their intricate music. A bird flutes, a frog peeps. I flash back to my ceremony with Joaquín and Lázaro, and the pain that brought me so close to death. I flash forward to my upcoming trip back to the States. I imagine telling someone there the story of the shaman who may or may not have spiked a guy’s head. I think about this journey of mine, my latest adventure in the southern lands, and about my goal of becoming a shaman and writing about it. I can put all this in my book. Every story’s made up of other stories, each full of idiosyncratic details, exquisitely complex. Stories within stories within stories and songs. I sing, What are you trying to do? Where have you been? Who did you meet while you were there? What did they talk about? Hey, hey, hey. Dave says, “Hey, hey, hey, what do you say we pray for Aguilar?” “Sure, let’s do it.” Singing hard, shaking our leaf fans like trees in a storm, we raise a healing prayer for Aguilar. I ask Jesus to help. Waves of force flow to the patient, supporting him in fighting the poison. Later we fall silent. A stick cracks. Another. “¡Vaca!” hisses Dave. Rufino’s three cows are back. Evil or good, they’re hell on Joaquín and Maribel’s crops. Silently, we spring to our feet, cross the floor, ease ourselves to the ground. We whisper to the two dogs, black Cuaucuillo and his pale, skinny brother Potente, to come with us. We arm ourselves with heavy sticks and creep toward the invaders. When we get close, they see us and we shout “¡Vaca!” and throw the sticks at them. The bovids turn around with a thumping of hooves and begin to exit the scene. The dogs zoom in, barking and snapping, driving them back along the trail they came on. We primates lope back to the hut with our upright stances, our opposable thumbs, our big brains lit up by yagé. Dave says, “I’m gonna write an article on how cows are destroying Amazonian shamanism.” He sings in Spanish, “I’m going back to the Waoranis … Waoranis don’t have cows.” “Do Waoranis drink yagé?” “Not usually. Nenke just gets possessed by the jaguar spirit. When I was recording their songs, I recorded some of his trances. When Nenke wants to know something that’s happening far away, or is gonna happen in the future, he goes into a trance. First thing is, he gets cranky in the morning. He doesn’t eat all day. In the nighttime he lies down and starts friggin’ singing and roaring! He’s got a special connection with the jaguar, ‘cause when he was ten or eleven, he got separated from his family and lived with jaguars for a year and a half. They accepted him ‘cause he could already hunt and everything.” I remember what Rufino told me about the jaguars roaring at me from across the river, saying they wanted to be with me. I wonder again if I can join them someday. I consider telling the story, but I don’t want to one-up Dave. Anyway, I like his Waorani talk. “One time when I was there,” Dave goes on, “Nenke channeled a song the wild Waoranis have. There are one or two groups of wild Waoranis that have no contact with anyone else. Through the jaguar spirit, Nenke picked up on one of their songs. The words go like this: “‘When we are happy, we sing like birds. When we are angry, we kill like jaguars. Whoever thinks about coming to look for us feels weak and sad, because he knows if he meets us, he’ll never see his family again. Tiriririririririri, tererererererererererere.’ “Whoa.” “Check this out. Two years ago some guy hired by the oil company killed a young Waorani who was organizing resistance to oil exploitation. The Waorani was riding on top of a ranchera bus and the thug went up there and shot him. The police said he’d fallen off and hit his head when the ranchera hit a hole in the road, but they wouldn’t let anybody do an autopsy. “A while after that, I was working with another Waorani to translate a tape of one of Nenke’s jaguar trances. It was from six months before the killing. As this guy was helping me translate it, he suddenly bursts out crying, super hard. I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’ He goes, ‘It’s what Nenke says on the tape! Nenke says “Young Waoranis shouldn’t travel alone. I see a white man on top of a ranchera. He’s got a gun. It’s not a long gun, it’s a short gun. Watch out!”’” “That’s fuckin’ intense.” “It is, right?” Dave rolls an American Spirit cigar for himself in a half-dry banana leaf and lights it. “Nenke. He told me once, if I ever have trouble with the Devil, I should think of him, and he’ll be there. A while after that, I had this dream I was in a house with some kids, and they were showing me some technology they had. Then we found out the Devil was coming. I went out to face him, but as soon as I walked out the door, I realized he was already in the house behind me! I turned around and saw the Devil! And I was like, ‘Nenke!!!’ And Nenke appeared! And the Devil blew apart into all these fragments!” “Cool!” “One time I was hanging out in Nenke’s hut. He wasn’t around. Some Waorani guys wanted to dress me as a traditional Waorani, naked with a chambira string tying up my foreskin. But I don’t have a foreskin, ‘cause I’m circumcised. So I was just lying there naked, being real cool, hanging out with these guys in a hammock, when this sizzling hot Waorani girl walks in and looks at me, and I got a hard-on! These guys cracked up so bad, one of ‘em fell out of the hammock!” Dave rocks with laughter, then goes on. “Waorani guys have this crazy game they play before they go to sleep at night. They all try to grab each other’s dicks. They’re not gay or anything. It’s just the funniest thing to them.” “I noticed that. I had my dick grabbed twice. Freaked me out.” “That game makes them practice dodging—and that’s a skill that can save their lives! Think about it. If you can’t dodge some guy trying to grab your dick, what’ll happen when somebody throws a spear at you?” “Far out.” I nod. The dick-grabbing makes more sense now. I wonder how long I’d last in a spear fight. Probably a second and a half. Unless I was possessed by the jaguar spirit. “Waoranis are totally self-reliant,” Dave goes on. “One time we were walking through the forest, and this one Waorani guy started screaming and rolling on the ground. The other guys laughed at him like crazy and kept on walking. I said, ‘What happened to that dude? Aren’t you going to stop and help him?’ And they said, ‘Naw, he just got bit by a snake.’ The guy survived. I saw him a couple days later. Waoranis will basically take your idea of what you think people are capable of, and completely fuck with it, with good reason.” “I can see that. It’s like I was thinking—humans can have any kind of customs. Just like, we can believe anything at all. And everyone’s belief system is equally accurate for the particular world they live in, right? And there are infinitely many types of human society possible. We haven’t seen even a fraction of them yet!” “And everything we do and say now, Nate, is going to subtly influence everything that comes later—the entire future of the human race, the world, the universe!” “So we’d better do it well, right?” “We’d better do it impeccably!” Dave proclaims. “Like our sublime ancestors did! Their thoughts are still with us, their voices, and their auspicious, brave deeds.” He breaks into wordless song, rich and ancient. I close my eyes and I’m sprinting through a vast, semitransparent labyrinth in the form of a maple tree, smashing through its walls. More stories and more songs. In what McKenna calls “the cool night of the mind,” the world tells itself to itself through us. I quote my phrases from last year: There’s only one story. How well do you know the story? We weave wavy webs of weird words and whirled worlds; drunk on dreams, we warp and woof the interminable story. And the dawn breaks. In the middle of one of Dave’s Waorani tales, I recall someone’s affliction with nightmarish images of sex and violence. Too high to fully identify with that person, I feel compassion for him. I’m a little concerned I might become him again, but either way, I’m not too worried. Right now, I just want to dance. So when Dave finishes the story, I go out and whirl like a dervish. Above me, bats are breakfasting on crunchy bugs. I look up at them. One zooms close to me. I take it as a sign and stare straight up in the middle of the sky. Dizziness clobbers me with the dizzy club—it doesn’t hurt, but it scrambles me. I stagger-dance off on an erratic, bat-flight-like course before plowing into the soft ground with my knees and hands. Embarrassed to fall in front of Dave, I jump up and do it all again, but trying not to fall. Same spin, same look at the same sky, maybe same bat, same look straight up, but more careful now; same dizziness—being careful didn’t work—; same vespertilian stagger-dash, same plow into the ground, same embarrassment. I struggle to my feet and mentally flip the script, intending to do the whole thing deliberately this time—spin-sky-bat-stare-dizzy-fall. But accidentally falling on purpose proves impossible, and I jerk to a standstill, knees bent, bare feet far apart in the damp grass, the green in my tunic visible in the dawn light, the world swirling around me with echoing birdcalls, the hum of insects, the chittering of bats. I straighten up. Dave remarks, “Bro, it looked like those bats were pulling you down!” I parse the sentence. I think there’s some disconnect between his thought and mine. “No, they were just up there eating bugs. They were cool.” “I mean those bats that were flying in front of your face.” Under his black curls, his dark eyes are earnest. “Flying in front of my face?” That doesn’t sound right. “Yeah. One flew down about a foot in front of your nose each time you fell, and both times it looked like it was pulling you down.” “I had no idea.” I frown-smile at the bats that zip through the blue air, knowing they can read my expression, wondering what else they could tell me. As Dave and I stroll back toward the cabin, I remark, “Speaking of bats, right after I saw that bat spirit vision I told you about, I saw the sky outside all filled with shiny black eyes like bat eyes.” “Yeah?” Dave says. “Man, I saw those eyes too. It looked like they were checkin’ us out.” We pile into our hammocks to rest. We sway back and forth, drifting, listening, watching the layered palm-frond ceiling swing back and forth. People in the other hut are stirring. Toucans yelp in the forest. A male oropendola down by the river squawk-chimes like weeping liquid bells. Every time you turn your ears to listen, there’s a new set of sounds. The nighttime frogs have fallen silent, it being dawn.

Once more we drove the cows away. Otherwise it was a quiet morning. Smiling, Joaquín’s wife Maribel brought us six small, sweet bananas—the only food we’d eat that day. Luis and Xiomara and Mecías came around and hung out for most of the afternoon. Luis carved a miniature canoe paddle for me out of balsa wood. I used a magic marker to write an alphabet for him and his sibs on the wood chips, and spelled some words in Spanish. David told them about the divine immortals from the books he reads on Taoism—they’re like wiñawai, he says—and about the Jade Emperor, who’s like Ñañë, God the creator. Aguilar sauntered up, his arm still black and swollen in its sling. “Good morning.” “Morning,” I said. “How’re you feeling?” “A little better. My hand still hurts a lot. But I read some of that Bible you gave me. Are you guys Christians?” “We’re Jews,” Dave answered. “Ah, Jews.” Aguilar nodded. “What part of the Bible were you reading?” I asked him. “Some Psalms and some Proverbs.” “‘Why need I fear when evil times come? Only my own sins can ensnare me,’” I quoted, translating the passage into Spanish with difficulty. “What’s that from?” “Psalm 49. The psalms were supposedly written by King David, the guy his name comes from.” “King David, sure. The one who killed the giant. It’s been too long since I read the Bible. It used to give me so much strength. Lately I’ve been lazy about reading it and sharing it with my kids. I’ve realized this bite is a punishment and a reminder.” “A reminder?” Dave echoed. “Yeah. I made a deal with Jesus. I dedicated my life to him, and he washed away my sins. I need to remember that.” “Your interpretation,” I said, “of why you got bitten is interesting to me—last night it seemed I saw a demon feeding on you through the snakebite.” “No. I think God Himself sent the snake to bite me.” “Ever tried yagé?” Dave asks. “Yeah, one time, a bunch of years ago. I’d been in a stupid and destructive period in my life. I was drinking too much, chasing women, staying out all night at parties. After the healer gave me yagé, I felt I went to Hell. I saw devils flying around torturing the souls of the damned.” “What did the devils look like?” I wanted to know. “Like devils!” Aguilar said. “Red, with bat wings?” “Of course. And I realized I was gonna end up there if I didn’t change my life. Completely! Immediately! At that moment I prayed to Jesus and asked him to wash away my sins. Later that night I went up to Heaven. I saw Jesus. The next day I restarted my life. I met my companion a little while after, and married her, and we’ve been together ever since.” The buzz of a motorcanoe on the river intensified, then stopped. Aguilar’s father strolled up the path, light on his feet, white-haired, slender, dark-skinned. His son feeling good enough to go home, the two men left. Dave took off his crown, lay down on a foam mat, closed his eyes. Soon he was breathing deeply and regularly. I lay in my hammock, eyeing my broad, squarish feet—the pale, smooth skin; the sparse brown hair; the short toes Deirdre insisted looked like squid tentacles. I remembered Deirdre telling me she sometimes felt her own toenails were watching her, like eyes. I pondered the snakebite mystery. Maybe the bite just happened because the snake perceived Aguilar as invading its personal space. Snakes usually respect human space because we’re strong in it, and it doesn’t benefit them to invade. Plus, they don’t want to waste their venom. Joaquín came over at dusk and sang a lilting song over a cup of yagé for each of the three of us, beginning with himself. Paihuhu ke yuuri. Matemo pai ke yuuri. Hey, Ey-ey, Ey-ey…. Then he wrapped himself in a blanket against the chill, curled up in a hammock, and fell asleep. I lay down on a mat on the floor, wrapped a blanket around myself, laid my head on my folded sweater—a black one Deirdre had given me for Christmas—and slipped into a tidal wave of unconsciousness. I’m smashed by a tremendous force. I’m in the severest agony. Time has stopped, and the moment explodes into a punishment of infinite pain that lasts forever and ever and ever. At the far side of forever I wake in the dark in a new world of pain. The only difference is, time’s running. And I remember where I am. But I’m on fire inside. Whole body burning. Can’t move. Can’t think. Can barely moan. In a word, dying. In his hammock, Dave clears his throat and sings: Every rainbow has a skull for a head. That’s what I saw when I woke up dead.... Like anything else that might’ve happened at that moment, his singing makes the pain worse. I want Dave or Joaquín to save me from this hell, not sing. Every cell in my body’s screaming. At last I manage to struggle to my feet. I throw back my head and bellow in Spanish: “¡¡¡GOD!!! ¿YOU WANT TO KILL ME? ¡¡THEN KILL ME NOW!! ¡I’M READY! ¡LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND KILL ME!” Seething with energy, silent, I’m within death, a dark antechamber of wind. I peer around. I contemplate it. I pull out of it, alive. So death’s a change of scene. Another kind of puberty, an initiation, a maturation. And when we die, we leave our old ways behind and go exist in a more advanced way. And I’d gladly die to save the life of any of Rufino’s kids in the hut next door. And the old die to free up energy on Earth for the young. And Dave’s relatives who died in concentration camps watch him from the sky to which they rose as smoke. They look just like stars. The stars of David. Dave sits up in his hammock in a cloud of stars. I tell him about the infinite pain I felt. He nods. I mention I poked my head into the Realm of Death. He nods and begins to speak the things on his mind. I can’t yet focus on what he’s saying. My inner noise is too loud. And the stars are too bright. But slowly, ever so slowly, in my infinite wisdom, it enters my thick rainbow-tailed skull that Dave was also experiencing difficulty at the same time I was. I realize this after he tells me so several times. For him it was two anacondas made of fire squirming and lashing out inside him, burning his brain and guts to ash. Now, though, we both feel fine. So we climb down off the hut and stand on the grass and stretch and talk. Me: “...And this old Kabbalistic theory I was reading about last year said there’s reincarnation among Jews—it doesn’t say anything about other people—this was just talking about Jews—and it said all the Jews who are alive today were present at Mount Sinai when Moses brought down the tablets of the law; it’s all the same people, but it’s not direct reincarnation—like one person then equals one person now—but like there’s bits of each of them in each of us, like a bit of Samson in my elbow and a bit of Adam in my chin—but then—it also seems like there’s more like—I get this flash of you being King David and me being the prophet Nathan, who was this prophet David hired to tell him what was up with God—and it feels like we had this exact same conversation in the desert, three thousand years ago….” Dave: “…And wondered if we’d have it again in the future, and the answer was, yeah, of course, absolutely, and also we’ll have it again in some far-flung future in some far-out galaxy whilst smoking a spliff on a newly-discovered rainforest planet, and like now, we’ll recognize that we’re ancient people reincarnated in modern times to manifest the true and proper religion of world peace and brotherhood and respect that all people know intuitively but can’t usually make happen in their daily lives because they are infected with the diseases of modern society, like ignorance and greed and gluttony; so in this life we need to open our eyes and be absolutely righteous, keeping ourselves clean from the temptations of materialism and consumerism, following the examples of the highest, purest divine immortals; and the challenge for us is to remember that, to hold tight to that truth, to learn the ancient traditions, and never let them fade away!” His voice echoes in my ears, away, way, way, way! Pausing, we echo ourselves, in the ringing silence of the shadow of language, eternal like mountains and clouds, and like them, drifting. When the nausea finally comes, it’s gentle. In the spirit of the gleaming machines of the Café Trieste, I intone, We make cappuccino for the grass, we make espresso for the earth. The yagé is even sweet as it gurgles up, and frothy like steamed milk. After spitting out the last of his, Dave remarks, “Don Ignacio told me Quichua shamans sometimes re-drink the ayahuasca they vomit up. They puke into gourds, then drink it back down.” “Right on. It’s pure,” I say. “When you fast, you get clean inside. And there didn’t seem to be any stomach acid in that dose I just threw up.” Dave nods. “The stomach doesn’t digest it, just passes it on to the intestines.” The clouds have parted to reveal a huge, yellowy-golden crescent moon, parallel to the ground, a hand’s width above the trees, its horns pointed up, the very image of a Sumerian cow goddess. I send her my love. “I feel like sending a fax,” Dave says. “A fax?” I echo. “A fax to Fujimori.” “Explain?” “Alberto Fujimori, the Japanese Peruvian dictator-president of Peru. He ordered the invasion of Ecuador’s jungle territory south of here eight months ago.” “I know who he is. The press says he’s like a modern samurai. How you gonna send him a fax at this time of night in the middle of the jungle?” “By taking a crap. That’s what people say here in the Oriente, the Ecuadorian Amazon. Fax paper’s like toilet paper, right? Both come in rolls. So when you crap, you send a fax to Fujimori.” “Ah! Tell him I say ‘Peace.’” “Will do, Old Shoe.” King Dave zigzags off across the grass. I climb into the network of my hammock and pray for peace. A blue nine-pointed star appears before my eyes etched in crisp neon lines in the air. It vanishes. I want a tattoo of it on my shoulder. And maybe I’ll shave my head and have six eyes from different animal species tattooed on my scalp, in honor of the hunting spider from yesterday afternoon. That’d be nice for ceremonies. But expensive and impractical. My hair would grow over it. Only really useful if one day I get put in a prison camp where they shave everyone’s head. There, though, I could potentially freak out the authorities with it. And maybe even process information the eyes took in. What are the chances I’m going to end up in a prison camp, anyway? Am I going to die under torture in a prison camp? Is this a premonition? Every time we think about death, it’s a premonition. We perceive it moving toward us. It emits waves, it has prepercussions. We experience these as pain and fear. But that’s OK. I know death now. I’m not afraid. And again, the thought of death again: but no longer so heavy: light, like a black feather one carries tied in one’s hair to move in the breeze. The breeze ruffles the surface of a pool of frosty light in my mind. I shiver. From the chill in the center, cold thoughts congeal into silver marigolds that amuse the panther sky curled up under the roof trying not to smile. The panther is a cloud of oak leaves from which drip oscillating feathers that sob in rippling laughter. Dave’s back. “Nate,” he murmurs, grinning, strolling up to the edge of the hut. “I was shitting in fluent Japanese! I warned Fujimori not to invade Ecuador again, and I prayed for peace.” “That must have been very enjoyable for you.” I slowly stand up from the hammock and stretch, then climb down to the ground and lean against the edge of the floor. “It was. You know, Fujimori’s got a daughter. Did I tell you this already? Last time I was in Lima, she was trying to get me to marry her! I met her at this party. It was really hard to shake her off.” “Too bad for you,” I say. “Japanese women are hot.” “Don Joaquín says the women of the sky people are so beautiful that, when you meet them, you lose your desire for human women.” “I can imagine that would be true, if they look like Japanese women.” “Cielojaponesas,” Dave muses. “Japanese women of the sky. I can almost see them now.” “I had a Japanese girlfriend in my boarding school,” I tell him. “Up there, nobody had any condoms, so it was all about oral sex, in secret, on the sly. We used to break into cabins in the woods and sixty-nine on the beds.” “Uh-huh.” “I read an article on the plane as I was coming here that said that in the embryo, this one organ develops into either a penis or a clitoris. So with cunnilingus, you can end up having a homosexual relationship with a woman—‘cause we’re all basically the same sex anyway!” There’s an awkward pause. Dave breaks the silence, murmuring, “I have to be by myself now.” He strides away in a curving path, leaving me leaning against the edge of the floor, thinking, Damn, why did I say that? He must think I’m a total pervert. He’s always going to remember me as that dude who has gay sex with Japanese girls. I’ve got to remember I’m not in a boarding school for the arts anymore, not in a violin major’s dorm room with a David Bowie poster on the wall. The problem with me is, my mind’s full of thoughts. And they jump out of my mouth like fish. It’s the storyteller’s fate. Live by the word, die by the word. Nothing I can do but let the moment flow down the river of time. Let it be carried away with all the other stupid things I’ve ever said and done. That reminds me of a time I sat down to eat lunch in a Chinese restaurant with a Mexican friend, and I had something to say to him, and then it was gone. It was as if the thought had been a fish and an osprey had swooped down and snatched it right out of my head to eat. Thoughts, memories, moments of time, events—all fish hunted by the ospreys of oblivion. Some of these fish swim away, some come back. We can consciously re-call them. Sometimes they don’t come, because they don’t want to, or they’re dead, or too far down the river. The river. I should haul some water to wash the floor of the hut in the morning.

At the trees, I pick up a four-gallon aluminum pot by its C-shaped handle and work my way slowly down the slippery bank, barefoot, in darkness. Animism. Everything’s a being, even thoughts, memories, moments of time, and the smooth, soft mud letting me walk upon it without making me fall. Dear mud, I bless you with my feet. Words, too, are beings, evolving over time and space. They want to be used, spoken, expressed, instantiated, given birth to, reproduced. I reach the water’s edge and squat down in the sand and listen to the river pronouncing its long, long word. My mind somersaults into a darkness of liquid sound. Doesn’t everyone struggle with their sexuality, whatever it is? We’re like Jacob wrestling with the angel! This is our holy war! Ahhhh…. These thoughts I’m having now, they’re so fine. I won’t remember them later on, but that’s all right. Catch and release. As with fish. If I had a pen and paper now, I’d write all this down. But a light would spoil the trance. Better to let the mind move like water, rippling invisibly. I release my thoughts, aiming them into a kind of orbit so they might come back someday when I have a pen at hand. Their splayed silver tail fins vanish in the inky sky. I’ll recognize them if they come back to me, though they may have changed. And if they don’t return to me, they’ll go to someone else. Such thoughts have had themselves had by many. I dip the pot deep in the water and haul it up and out, pour off the excess, walk it back up toward the hut, socializing with the mud with my feet, letting the weight of the pot steady me. At Cabaña Supernatura, I realize I’ve forgotten everything I’ve thought about since I headed up from the river. The thoughts were coming too fast for me to fix them. I know this has happened many times before. What good is a thought if you can’t remember it? Does it leave a trace? Joaquín’s awake, sitting up in his hammock, talking with Dave. Dave hands him back the empty cup. Dave rinses his mouth, spits into a crack between the floorboards. I tread slowly up the steps and set the pot down. I dip a plastic bowl into it and wash the mud off my feet, then sit in my hammock. “¿Contento?” Joaquín asks me. “Sí.” “¿Quiere tomar otro?” “Sí.” He pours and sings. Under his voice, micro-demons flow like particles of dust off the cup until the yagé is pure. Then he hands it to me, lies back in his hammock, wraps himself in his blanket. Over the cup, I sing One love is high, one love is high, one love is high. Hundreds of small, perfect orange flames appear over the liquid’s surface, spiraling clockwise toward the center. I watch them as I sing; each one’s curved and recurved, wavy like the blade of a kris. But as beautiful as they are, they’re flames, and they might set me on fire inside again. The moment I think that, they become petals, and an orange flower floats atop the brew, spiraling, the color of the evening sun on the horizon. I drink the power, set the cup on the floor, rinse my mouth, spit the water in a crack between floorboards. A light snore: our teacher has crossed into dreams. “Nate, let’s pray for Joaquín,” Dave says. We chant rhythmic syllables. A cumulus of healing energy condenses above us. I invite spirit doctors from Heaven to treat any nascent illnesses Joaquín might have. Two doll-sized men in brown robes float down though the cloud—Saints Peter and Paul making a house call. They vanish inside the drinker’s body. After a time, the work feels done. We grow silent, attentive. The saints float back to the sky. The cloud dissolves. I observe Joaquín’s sleeping form, wonder what he’s dreaming. Since our first ceremony, I’ve felt he and I are one man in two bodies. He’s the older Secoya me and I’m the younger gringo him. Now I’m the he who’s awake and he’s the I who’s dreaming. Do I watch the dark world with eyes he sees through? Is the black-green of our eyes flinty enough to slice the skin of this night? Swirling, the still birds echo, calling the dawn. A rooster crows once, twice. The air trembles with insect song. Dave laughs, and sings, Hey, hey, hey, hey…. I lie face-down in my hammock as if in a net. My soul’s a dolphin that sometimes surfaces to breathe. Those quick surfacings are my lives on the material plane. I’m a weredolphin aswim in the myth of the world. Just need a stingray for a hat to hide my blowhole. While, wavelike, reticulated like a python, the universe slithers into undreamed-of futures. Those who haven’t seen as we have seen have seen nothing. And yet, everyone has seen everything. We’re just the ones who remember. An old classroom with squeaky wooden floors and scarred wooden desks materializes in my memory. The professor’s discussing one of the earliest Hindu philosophers. “So what he’s saying is, is that there’s only one being in the universe, and it incarnates across time and space in every single organism that has ever existed and will ever exist.” The little nine-pointed blue star appears again, a sign, a messenger, a blessing. I observe it, admire it. It’s for me. I sit up, refreshed. Joaquín’s still sleeping. Dave remarks, “Nate, did you know that the Waoranis and the Secoyas used to be enemies?” “No.” “The Secoyas were scared of the Waoranis because the Waoranis were crazy warriors. And the Waoranis were scared of the Secoyas because the Secoyas were powerful magicians!” “That makes sense.” I nod. “The two tribes also have a totally different attitude about sex. Secoyas don’t even kiss each other. But Waoranis are all into sex. A lot of Waorani guys want to marry Quichua women because Waorani women consider it their right to fuck any guy they want when their husband isn’t around!” “I kind of got that impression.” I remember Ayamo, and that look she gave me, inviting me, challenging me to make love to her. “Here’s something else,” Dave goes on. “If you want to count to ten in Waorani, you say aruki mea mea go aruki mea go mea emempuki emempuki go aruki emempuki go mea emempuki go mea go aruki emempuki go mea go mea tum pepuki. Get it? It’s like saying ‘one, two, two plus one, two plus two, five, five plus one, five plus two, five plus two plus two, ten.’ But these days, Waoranis usually use Spanish for numbers instead.” “Right on. The Spanish system’s more convenient. OK, more Waorani trivia.” “Another thing I learned was this. When a Waorani farts, he says, ‘Durani koma.’ That means ‘Ancestor fart,” which is short for ‘As my ancestors farted, I fart.’ They crack up when they say it. But it’s deep. Think about it.” “Cool. What my ancestors did, I do. I’m them, alive again. It’s true.” “Speaking of ancient smells,” Dave says, sniffing, “do you smell that?” “No, what?” “That tree over there.” “No. What’s with it?” “It’s a cannonball tree. Can you smell it?” “Now that you mention it, there’s a kind of musk, now that the breeze is coming from over there.” It smelled like the ball-sweat of a ghost. “Right,” Dave says. “The tree’s name in Quichua is aya uma. Soul skull. It has these armored, cannonball-sized fruit that sometimes fall from twenty-five feet up! If you’re standing underneath, they can kill you! Most trees in the forest have shallow, broad root systems. But the aya uma’s got a taproot like a long, strong spike deep in the ground, so it’s nearly impossible for it to blow over in a storm! That’s why Rufino didn’t cut it down when he built this hut. Don Ignacio told me the Quichuas say that if you want to be strong like the tree, you can run up to it and punch it in the trunk as hard as you can, then run away as fast as you can. You’ll get really strong, unless you trip and fall while you’re running away. If you do that, you’ll die soon.” “Cool. Dude, you know what’d be crazy?” I ask, changing the subject. “What?” “If we could continue this exact same conversation another year, in another yagé ceremony.” “Right on, bro!” “I’m planning to come back here next year.” “Me too,” Dave says. “Don Joaquín said I could take some of this yagé up to the States with me. I’m thinking I’ll host some ceremonies in California and raise some money for a community project here.” “Far out! Go for it! I’m just gonna go home and work. But I think I can get back.” The thought of travel moves me. I go out and stroll on the grass. I don’t punch the cannonball tree, just sing One love is high. I dance, and information floats down to me from the sky. The Germans, I murmur. The Germans and the Jews. The Nazis were possessed by a spirit of destruction. They consumed their victims: they took money and property from them, took their lives, shared their flesh out between the earth and sky. Maybe God wanted the victims near him. The victims were low in vitality but high in holiness. The world has always dealt harshly with those who lack whatever it is that enables us to survive—the penalty being, of course, death. So the Jews got to go to Heaven and the Nazis got their stuff. That’s cosmic justice, that’s the karmic equation that’s invisible to materialists. Everybody lost and everybody won. The Nazis were defeated when the forces of preservation of life allied against them. The gods of death raged for a while, then the gods of life took their turn. Now Wiesenthalic angels hunt Nazi ghosts in the Argentinas of the beyond, and the Jewish victims live a step closer to God in celestial stedtls from whose wells they can watch over their relatives in this world. Back at the hut, Joaquín’s awake. Dave and I ask him for healings. Dave lies face-down on the floor beside Joaquín’s hammock. The old man lights a Full Speed. He blows its smoke over the mamecocó, then sings, and whisks Dave’s energy field clean. Each sound is beautiful. But the procedure takes a long, long time. I get impatient and jealous: Joaquín likes him better than me! I encourage myself to relax and/or shut up. “Hn-hn,” Joaquín finally says, stopping. “Ya.” “Que lindo,” Dave murmurs, How beautiful. There’s a pause. “I saw a hummingbird,” he continues. “It said....” There’s a long, long pause filled with the crystalline ringing of crickets. A rooster crows. Morning’s coming. I hear Joaquín breathing softly. “‘Mi’pë,’” Dave finishes. “What does that mean?” “Hn-hn,” responds Joaquín after a moment, distractedly. “The hummingbird said it,” Dave reminds him. “Mi’pë.” Another long crickety pause. I put my hand on the floor, nearly stopping the movement of my hammock, then give the floor a shove and fold my arms across my chest. “‘People,’” murmurs Joaquín finally. “It’s one of their words. It means ‘people.’” “Deóhi,” Dave thanks him, and stands up slowly, and walks back to his hammock, whistling under his breath. “Toanké?” Joaquín says. I unfold myself and sit up and rise and approach and get down and stretch out on the floor, face down. The song begins, along with the soothing, energetic flight of the mamecocó over my back. My father used to say a Jewish blessing with his hands on my head when I was a child. A bracha. It was odd. Embarrassing. But I let him do it because it mattered to him. Now I see the brachas have kept me safe by installing patterns of caution inside me and waves of safety around me. In my memory, I’m seeing the bracha from my dad’s perspective, not mine—looking down his arms at his hands resting atop my head. Blessed art Thou, Oh Lord, our God, King of the Universe…. One day last year, the father of my old friend Murray came into the Café Trieste and told me about a recent, excellent mushroom trip he’d taken with his friends. “The famous realization from that day was when one of my friends runs up to me, and grabs my arms, and goes, ‘Now I get it! I am my father!’” Another inlakesh. It made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now, as I represent my lineage in accepting a blessing from a different father and his lineage. We’re all distant cousins anyway. According to the Hindu philosopher, we’re even all the same person. Joaquín’s blessing is clearing away smog above me, opening a space for an invisible light that shines down from above. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, creator of invisible light. Builder of the trees from which Jesus and Odin hung, and the trees for which Humbaba died. These thoughts hang in the air like my father’s sculptures, allowing themselves to be observed from many directions. I think I see a flaw in one of them. If blessing leads to survival, were children who die young not blessed enough? No, it’s not that. Their souls must be needed in the next world. They hit death puberty earlier than average. They keep evolving on the other side. By the time we die, their palaces will be built. I recall what I’ve seen in these nights, guard it from the ospreys of oblivion. The bats, the flames on the cup, the nine-pointed blue stars. The Japanese women of the sky. The eyes in the sky, the eyes on Dave’s crown. I’ve been talking with that guy for two days and two nights! “Hn-hn,” murmurs Joaquín with a final flick of the mamecocó. “Go lie down now.” “Deóhi,” I say, and stand up slowly and keep my head down to avoid the dizziness that could knock me back to the floor. There’s a deep blue glow under the leafy fringe of the palm frond roof: dawn’s coming. I wrap myself in my blanket and lie down, rocking from side to side. Wriggle to crack my back, observe the sensation of breathing, and relax. Not sleepy. Alert and curious for what will happen next. Dawn comes. Rufino’s three cows do too. Our patience tested again, Dave and I chase them away. Fog makes a silky void of the river, swallowing the trees on the other side. All is cool, calm, and gray.