I might have dozed off. I couldn't be sure because I'd lost all sense of time. I didn't remember the storm fading, but I did remember opening my eyes and looking out the temple doorway and seeing a translucent predawn sky turning the color of skim milk. The jungle's early risers were already calling and flitting from tree to tree.
The mother jaguar stood in the other doorway, staring out at the clearing. I wondered how that was sitting with the pacas, but then noticed that their corner was empty. So was my shoulder. My spider friend was gone. Couldn't say I'd miss him. I checked out the walls around me. A few roaches and smaller spiders still clung to the stone, but most of their many-legged brethren had cleared out.
I winced as needle-like claws dug into my thigh. The cub on my lap was awake and stretching its foot pads as it yawned. Finally it hopped down to the floor. It padded over to where its two siblings lay wound into a ball and jumped on them. In seconds they were rolling around on the stone floor.
The big cat turned then and approached them. It picked up one by the neck and headed for the door near me. As it passed, its green glare said, Don't even think about making off with one of these.
Never even crossed my mind, I thought back at her.
The remaining pair of cubs scampered to the doorway and started mewing after her. She picked her way quickly and gracefully down the steps and took off across the sodden clearing without a look back.
I decided this was an excellent time to make my exit. I sensed the magic worked by the storm and flood last night wearing off. Might be prudent to put some distance between myself and Mama Jaguar.
My chilled, wet joints creaked and protested as I uncoiled from my cramped corner and staggered to my feet. I felt like the Tin Man with a terminal case of rust. I groaned and arched my back, then stumbled to the opposite door—away from the jaguar cubs. Machete in hand, I made my way down the steps.
Except for the blasted palm and the squishy ground, the clearing and the pyramid seemed little changed since yesterday. The sky was rapidly growing lighter as I moved toward the trees. I placed myself behind a thick mossy trunk and peeked back at the pyramid. I spotted the mother jaguar already heading down again with another cub. I watched till she returned the third time.
“So long,” I said when she exited with her last, and noted that my voice sounded unusually hoarse. The result of dehydration and a night sitting in bat guano? Or the tumor?
“Back to reality,” I muttered as I stepped into the clearing. I looked at the temple and the surrounding circle of jungle.
This was reality?
My stomach rumbled with hunger. And I was thirsty as all hell. I never did find a coconut yesterday, but the jungle floor had to be littered with them this morning.
I rested my machete blade on my shoulder like a rifle and headed across the clearing. Yesterday I'd been so hesitant to enter the jungle. This morning was different. I was different. Somehow I felt Mesoamerica had already hurled its worst at me and I'd survived. I felt ready for anything.
As I'd guessed, no trouble finding freshly fallen coconuts. Opening them, however, was another matter. On the first two tries I split the damn things in half, splattering ninety percent of the milk across myself and the jungle. Ambrosio had made it look so easy.
On the third I got it right, chipping a small opening in the top. I drank greedily, gulping the cool, vaguely sour fluid as fast as my throat would allow, letting the excess run over my jaw. When had anything, even an ice-cold Rolling Rock after mowing the lawn, ever tasted so good?
I tried another and wrecked it, but was able to pop the top on the next. Then it was time to look for food. Not much meat inside these green coconuts, so I set about looking for one that had ripened a little more. I didn't have much luck on the coconut front, but I did come across a banana tree that had been knocked down by the storm. A bright green four-foot bunch lay in the brush, waiting for me.
I'd never eaten bananas this green but I wasn't going to let that stop me. The jungle was offering breakfast and I wasn't in any position to refuse. But as I started tugging at a couple of the bananas, a huge hairy black spider hopped out from within the bunch and scuttled toward me.
I jumped back and raised my machete. This was one scary-looking creature but I wasn't going to let it keep me from breakfast. My first instinct was to squash it with the flat of the blade, but I hesitated.
“Move on,” I told it. “I had one of your cousins on my shoulder all last night. I'm up to here with spiders.”
The thing didn't budge, so I gently slipped the point of the machete under its body. It jumped up on the flat of the blade and I quickly dumped it onto a broad leaf a foot or so away. It ran down the leaf and disappeared into the shadows.
“You need a new tree anyway,” I called after it. “This one's shot.”
I had to smile as I tore off a six-fingered hand from the bunch. I'd been here less than a day and already I was talking to bugs.
The bananas were puny and didn't have much flavor, but they filled the void. I ate three, noticing a little difficulty in swallowing— nothing serious, but my gullet felt slightly narrower.
It's beginning, I thought with dismay. The traitorous tissue was extending its domain into areas where I'd be constantly aware of its presence. But I'd known this would happen, and I wasn't going to dwell on the inevitable.
I broke off another hand of bananas and took them with me as I made my way back to the clearing.
The sky was bright now, the sun cresting the trees and bathing the temple atop the pyramid—my pyramid—with golden light, but the rest of the clearing still lay in shadow. I wished I'd thought to bring a camera.
I headed back to the gully where I found red muddy water still running through it, but only a few inches deep. I made my way upstream to where I'd left the Jeep—at least where I thought I'd left it—but it wasn't there. I did find a freshly broken root jutting from the floor of the gully. This could have been what the wheels had caught on last night.
I got a queasy feeling in my gut, not so much from the missing Jeep—I was pretty sure I'd be able to find it somewhere downstream—but because of what I had in the Jeep. My duffel bag contained some extremely important equipment that I'd have no hope of replacing here in the wilds of Mesoamerica. And I wasn't thinking of my laptop.
I began splashing down the gully. How far could it have gone? And what if the duffel had washed out? It could be anywhere. The duffel was water resistant but not waterproof. And even if it remained in the Jeep, everything inside it could be water damaged by now.
I rounded a curve and there she was, upright and facing me, her rear bumper jammed into the curve of the bank. She was scratched, dented, filthy, and strewn with storm flotsam, but I thought her beautiful enough to kiss.
I slowed to a walk, gasping for breath—damn, I was out of shape. As I neared her, half a dozen screeching spider monkeys tumbled from the open side panel and scampered away into the trees. I picked up my pace. I knew from safari rides back home how much damage those little creatures could do to a car. I unsnapped the rear panel and sighed with relief when I saw my duffel, intact and still zippered closed.
But it was wet. My fingers shook a little as I yanked back the zipper and pawed through the clothing, toiletries, emergency medications, and sundry items inside. Everything seemed dry so far. Finally I found it—a small black leather case about half the size of the laptop. I unzipped that and checked the contents of the Ziploc bag inside. The two 250cc bags of dextrose and water were intact; the IV tubing and needles looked fine; and none of the ampoules of potassium chloride were broken.
I leaned my head on my arms and let go a deep sigh of relief. This was my escape hatch. If—I should say “when”—the tumor extended to the point where I could no longer swallow, or I was having too much difficulty sucking air past my swollen larynx, this was my exit ramp. Rather than let them cart me to some hospital where I'd be hooked up to IVs and feeding tubes, I'd brought along my own IV.
When it was time to check out, I'd empty the amps of potassium chloride into the D5W, hook up the tubing, hang the bag from a branch, stick the needle in a vein, and let it flow. The KCl cocktail would stop my heart muscle dead in its tracks.
Quick, clean, easy, and painless.
Well, relatively painless. I figured that high a concentration of KCl had to burn when it hit the vein, and I could count on some chest pain when my heart seized up, but nothing I couldn't tolerate for less than a minute. That was all it would take. A hell of a lot better and more dignified than the alternative. And best of all, I'd be pulling the plug, not the tumor.
I'd prevailed on Dave, as a last personal favor, to arrange to have my body shipped back to Bedford if I died down here. I hadn't told him that I fully expected the “if” to be a “when.”
I heard a car engine somewhere far behind me. More relief. It could only be Ambrosio. I quickly zipped up the leather case and shoved it back into the duffel.
Now. How to play this? Should I be furious at being left alone in the jungle overnight in a storm, or be cool?
Curiously, I was not furious. I could have been killed, yes, but instead I'd had a once-in-a-lifetime experience that left me with a different take on the world, especially this part of it. Yesterday I'd been a complete stranger here. Now, although I was not by any means an integrated part of Maya's Mesoamerica, I no longer felt like an interloper. I felt tenuously . . . connected.
I'd come here for an adventure, and sure as hell, I was having one. So try as I might, I could find no anger in me.
But I wasn't cool either—I was going to be overjoyed to see Ambrosio. Damned if I wasn't ready to kiss his homely face when he showed up.
But I could play it cool. Very cool.
So when the other Jeep rounded the curve, I was lounging on the hood, back against the windshield, a machete through my belt, and a half-eaten banana in my hand.
Ambrosio jumped out of the driver side, and from the passenger side—Maya. Despite Terziski's “discrepancies at her primary sources,” my heart gave a little tug at the sight of her. So she hadn't abandoned me in the forest. She wasn't Xtabay.
But though this Maya bore little resemblance to the woman I'd met back home, she was just as striking, if not more so. She'd plaited her hair into two long braids and was dressed in an ankle-length shift of coarse white cotton, embroidered at the neck and hem and cinched at the waist with a colorful cloth belt.
“Dr. Burleigh!” she said, hurrying toward me. “Are you—?”
“Care for a banana?” I said, holding up my leftovers. With food and fluid, my hoarseness had receded.
She slowed her pace and grinned. Those dimples appeared, and her jade eyes flashed.
Ambrosio began laughing, and rattled off a string of clicks, shhshes, and hard consonants that definitely was not Spanish. Mayan maybe?
Maya was sauntering toward me now, hands on hips, smiling. “I was so worried about you, and yet how do I find you? Looking as if you have been on a picnic.”
That smile. I was glad I could make her smile.
“Just because I'm the shining blind man in the fortress doesn't mean I'm not adaptable.”
Over her shoulder I spotted a second man crawling out of the rear of her Jeep. He'd been cut from the same stuff as Ambrosio; looked like they even had the same dentist.
“Buenos dias,” he said with a gilded smile.
“That is Jorge,” Maya said. “He knows engines. He and Ambrosio are going to stay here and get this first Jeep going again while you and I travel on in the new one.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
I hauled out my duffel and carried it to the new Jeep. I waited for Ambrosio and Jorge to remove the tool box, oil cans, and gas jugs from the rear, then tossed it inside. I turned and found Maya in the driver seat, nibbling delicately on one of my bananas.
“Want me to drive?”
She shook her head. “Maybe later, but here I know the way better.”
Ambrosio and Jorge waved as we drove off.
I watched Maya drive. She was relaxed, almost casual, and worked the standard shift like a pro. Her long legs pulled at the fabric of her shift as her bare feet worked the gas and clutch pedals.
“Is that a native dress?” I said.
“It's called a huipil. It's very comfortable.”
“That and the braids make you look like you belong here.”
“Thank you. In Westchester the braids would be seen as an attempt to look girlish. Here they are simply practical.” She glanced at me. “And you . . . you look . . . different.”
“Besides needing a bath and a shave?”
“Yes. Different inside.”
I told her about last night. She nodded often as she listened, smiling now and again.
“You became closer to the Mother last night,” she said when I was done. “Some of the walls of your fortress were weakened.”
I didn't know about the Mother business, but I knew the night spent sitting in that ancient temple had taken me farther from my old life than the whole day of flying that had preceded it.
I began to wonder if that might have been Maya's plan all along: Have Ambrosio fake a breakdown and leave me alone overnight; a trial by fire, so to speak—or in this case, by storm.
I wanted to ask her, but didn't know how she'd react. She might take it as an insult. I decided to see how things went and ask her later. I might ask about the “discrepancies” in her CV then too. Or I might wait until I heard more from Terziski.
Right now, as we splashed along the green tunnel of the gully, I had another, more immediate question.
“Where are we going?”
“To find your first harmonic.”
“Harmonic? What's that?”
“Do you remember the tines I used to survey your chakras?”
“Of course.”
“We are going to find some for you and let you make them your own.”
“Find? You make them sound like they spring from the ground, like mushrooms.”
“They don't grow. They were fashioned, and then hidden away.”
“By whom?”
“No one knows.”
This was starting to sound like science fiction. “Okay, we find these tines, then what?”
“You will see.”
“These tines,” I said. “They aren't anything like crystals, are they?”
A tiny smile. “You have a problem with crystals?”
“I do,” said, thinking of the mythology that had grown up around them. “But let me ask first. What do crystals mean to you?”
“The Mother forms them deep within her, putting sand and water under heat and pressure for millions of years, and then she pushes them to the surface. Some say they are her tears.”
“You don't believe that do you?”
She shrugged. “I feel it is a bit romantic, but who is to say?”
“Do you believe they have mystical powers?”
“What do you believe?”
Remembering the crystals hanging in her office, I chose my words carefully.
“I'm not looking to offend you, Maya, but I've got real problems with that whole crystal business.”
“You will not offend me. Ask—ask anything you want. I will tell you what I know. That is the only way you will learn, the only way blind Cecil will learn to see.”
“I can question anything and everything? I can speak bluntly and you won't mind?”
“I insist.”
“Oh-ho,” I said, grinning. “You may regret that.”
She returned the smile. “Yes, I am sure I will.”
“Okay. Crystals. They're just rocks. All rocks except meteorites come from the earth—‘the Mother,’ as you call her. So why should crystals have more powers or healing properties than, say, slate? Or granite?”
“If you had to guess, how would you answer?”
“I'd say it was because they're prettier and make nicer jewelry than slate or granite, and therefore command a better price.”
Another smile. “So, you are a cynic as well as a skeptic.”
I shrugged. “You haven't been dealing with HMOs and the other zillion breeds of managed care companies like I have.”
“No,” she said. “Insurance companies would never approve of my methods.”
“Yeah, well, they were never too crazy about mine either. I tended to ignore their guidelines. I can't tell you what it did to me to hear of their CEOs taking home millions of bucks a year—I read of one guy getting eight million in cash and stock one year—while the care and services their companies offered were cut to the bone. Make the patients crawl for days through a bureaucratic maze to get an antibiotic that's less than ten years old, but keep that bottom line where it does the most for the stock. And on the doctor side, build in disincentives to actually treat people. Squeeze the doctors, squeeze the patients so that some MBA can get a bigger year-end bonus, because God knows eight million isn't enough—he's got to have more. I know doctors saving lives every day who don't make one twentieth—one fortieth of that. And how many lives has this CEO saved?”
My voice was getting hoarse. I stopped and cleared my throat.
“You are very angry,” Maya said.
“Yes. I am.” I hadn't realized just how angry. Dealing with managed care companies was one part of my practice I didn't miss. “So maybe you can understand why I get an attack of cynicism when I see lots of money being made in medicine, established or ‘alternative.’ And believe me, somebody's making a killing on all those zillions of crystal pendants being sold because of their supposed healing powers.”
“Yes, that is true. Wherever there is a need, profiteers are sure to rush in. But that says more about the sellers than what they are selling. Crystals are indeed rocks, but not ‘just’ rocks.”
“Basically we're talking about quartz, right?”
“Yes. You have heard of a quartz radio, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Have you ever heard of a slate radio or a granite radio?”
“Touché,” I said.
She had me. No slate or granite or any other rock I could think of had piezoelectric properties.
Obviously she'd had this conversation before. How many times? Lots, I'd bet. She seemed so very comfortable with it. And with whom? I watched her long slim fingers on the steering wheel, the play of the muscles just beneath the skin of her forearms as she guided us along the gully, and wondered if she had a man in her life. And if not, why not? So much I didn't know about this woman.
“And can slate or granite rotate the plane of polarized light?” she said.
“Of course not.”
“Then you will grant that quartz is not just another rock? That it has properties other than being ‘prettier’ which set it apart from other rocks?”
“Granted, but not necessarily healing properties.”
She glanced at me, her expression serious. “Do you know that they do not?”
“No,” I admitted, “I don't know much at all about this stuff. But I haven't seen any concrete evidence to convince me of any healing properties in quartz, and until I do . . .”
“You will go on doubting.”
“Right. How can I do anything else? It's the way I've been trained. The scientific method. Double-blind randomized trials. I can't accept anecdotal evidence—you know, ‘Aunt Sophie tried it and after one sip she threw away her hearing aids.’ You've got to rule out placebo effect, investigator error, and prejudice. And the results have to be reproducible. That's the key.”
“Then I suppose you must disbelieve much of what most people do believe.”
“You've got that right. I don't believe in psychic hotlines, flying saucers, visiting aliens, astral projection, channeling, tarot, telepathy, spoon bending, clairvoyance, seances, remote viewing, reincarnation, astrology, aromatherapy, psychic surgery, perpetual motion, Genesis, Revelation, Kaballah, palmistry, phrenology, levitation, the Bermuda Triangle, Edgar Cayce, Jean Dixon, Immanuel Velikovsky, L. Ron Hubbard, the Loch Ness monster, and lots of other stuff I can't think of at the moment.”
“I really do have my hands full with you, don't I, Wilbur Cecil Burleigh.”
“I warned you.”
“Surely you are the most skeptical man in the world.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” I said.
Maya hit the brakes, and as we skidded to a stop, she threw back her head and laughed loud and long. A wonderful sound, bursting from deep within her.
But what was so damn funny? And then I realized what I'd said and began to laugh along with her.
When was the last time I'd laughed like this, sharing it with another person? I couldn't recall. Not since the divorce, certainly, and probably not for a good long time before that. It felt so good to lean back and roar—at myself, of all things. What a wonderful release. I couldn't remember when I'd felt so alive.
For the first time in too, too long, I was having fun.