“How does the world look this morning?” Maya said.
We sat outside her hut, eating a light breakfast of hard-boiled eggs as the sun struggled to clear the flat-topped mountain behind us. Maya wore her khaki walking shorts and a white T-shirt; the button protrusions of her nipples against the fabric told me she wasn't wearing a bra, and I tried not to stare. I wore a pair of Bermudas— the closest thing I had to a swimsuit.
I glanced around. Everything looked the same. The sea was a deeper blue than the flawless sky, the sand a creamy white—but scored now with an odd herringbone pattern that hadn't been here last night—and the palm trees lining the beach were their usual verdant hues. Everything was in its proper place, but somehow it all felt different.
A residue from last night's mushroom psychosis, I imagined. The world was the same, but I wasn't. I'd had some sort of transcendent experience, a glimpse into nature's creative processes, a feeling of oneness with the vast cycles of life and death swirling around me, of unity with the entire universe, and it had left me subtly changed.
Was this some sort of spiritual awakening, what Maya had meant by seeing with my blind eye? Or just a biochemical hangover?
“The world looks good,” I told her. “Normal.”
My belly rumbled like distant thunder and I realized I was hungry. I broke off some egg white, chewed it carefully, but it wouldn't go down. I turned and choked the pieces back into my hand.
“You cannot swallow anything?” Maya said, looking at me with worried eyes.
“Nothing solid,” I said. “But liquids are okay.”
At least they were for now.
I'd begun drinking a mixture of goat milk and coconut milk last night, but even that wasn't going down too easy. If we were near a town I could have bought some Ensure or another similar liquid supplement. But nothing like that existed around here, so this local mix would have to do.
I'd fastened my belt another hole tighter this morning. I'd been here only a few days and I must have lost ten pounds. I knew it wasn't just the change in diet and increased exercise: Captain Carcinoma and his crew were eating me alive.
“Are you well enough?” she said. “Strong enough to swim?”
“Not all the way out there,” I said, gazing out to La Mano Hundiendo where the sun's rays where setting fire to the tips of the three tallest fingers. “Even on my best days—”
“We will take a boat to the Hand. But once there you must dive. Did you sleep well after I left you last night?”
“I slept, although I don't know if I'd call it ‘well.’”
I explained my dream to her.
“You saw your tumor?” she said, her eyes alight.
“Well, yes . . . in my dream or hallucination or whatever it was.”
“And you spoke to it?”
“I guess you could say that, but—”
“This is good,” she said, smiling and nodding.
“Why?”
“You would not understand right now, but yes, this is very good.”
She seemed heartened, and I was glad for that. The rift that had opened between us last night seemed to have closed, and I wanted it to remain closed.
I studied the herringbone pattern in the sand. It seemed to run off in all directions. I wondered if it was some sort of Mayan custom . . . go out each morning and use palm fronds to make patterns on the sand.
I was about to ask Maya about it when movement to my left caught my eye. Ambrosio and some of the village men were carrying a dinghy with a tiny outboard motor down to the water.
Maya rose to her feet. “Wait here. We will leave in a few minutes.”
I watched as she walked off toward a larger hut where the village children were beginning to gather. Actually I watched her lean, muscular legs, the ropy pull of her hamstrings, the tidal swellings of her calves. Even in my weakened state the sight stirred me.
And then I spotted Ambrosio approaching from the beach. He wore a straw hat which he removed when he reached me. He avoided eye contact.
“Ambrosio is very sorry about last night, señor. He did not think—”
“Ambrosio,” I said, rising and brushing the sand from my legs, “you don't have to apologize.”
“Yes, Ambrosio must.”
“Because Maya told you to?”
“No. Because Ambrosio did a foolish thing.”
His humility made me uncomfortable. And truly, I wasn't angry. Yes, he had done a foolish thing, but I'd suffered no harm—I'd been scared half to death, but I'd survived the ordeal, and what was more, I'd had a new experience, something I'd remember the rest of my life . . . however long that might be.
I stuck out my hand. “Ambrosio, I know you were only trying to help, and I might even be somewhat better for the whole thing, so let's not mention it again. Si?”
He looked me in the eyes and flashed that big gilded grin when he saw that I meant it.
“Si!”
I looked over to where Maya was standing by the big hut, talking with another woman with the village children gathered around her. I watched her caressing the hair of the boys and girls who leaned against her, and wondered if she had any children of her own. Terziski hadn't mentioned—
No, I warned myself. Don't think about Terziski or photos or fingerprints. Just go with it.
“What is that?” I asked Ambrosio. “A school?”
“Yes. It is the sabia's.”
“Maya's?”
“Yes. She built it. She pays for the teacher. She has built many schools for the Maya.”
Without looking for it, I'd just found the answer to the question of why someone like Maya wanted my money. Not for herself, but for the children of her people.
As I watched her with the children, my throat tightened. Not from the tumor—from guilt. This was a good person, an extraordinary woman, and I'd taken so long to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Sometimes, Cecil, I thought, you disgust me.
“Come,” Ambrosio said. “We go to the boat.”
Maya joined us there and the three of us pushed the old wooden dinghy into the gentle surf, then hopped in. Ambrosio pull-started the coffee-grinder outboard, and we were off.
“Ambrosio tells me you built that school back there,” I said as we left the shore behind.
“Did he now?” she said, giving me a sidelong look.
I held up my hands. “Oh, no. I wasn't quizzing him. Honest.”
A tolerant smile as she nodded: “Yes. I built it. Education is the only way for the Maya to take charge of their future.”
“Who's the teacher? A missionary?”
“Absolutely not!” she said, her eyes flashing. “The missionaries overrun Mesoamerica like cockroaches, but I will not allow them to teach our children. I will not have them tainted with Christian ideas.”
I felt my hackles start to rise. I remember how the Presbyterian church of which I was nominally a member supported missionaries sent to Central America to educate the peasants. These were good people with good intentions.
“Tainted?” I said. “I can think of worse things than good works, love your neighbor, do unto others, and so on.”
“So can I. But the missionaries teach the Christian view that the world is bad, a place of trials and tribulations that you must not allow to taint you. They worry so much about leaving the world that they forget about living in it.”
“Yes, but is that a ‘taint’?”
“Yes!” she said with fiery intensity. “Christianity and so many other religions warning of the supposed dangers and temptations of the earth, the Mother. They taint by teaching you to turn away from this world and set your sights on the next—turn your back on the Mother and see only the ‘Father.’ That is bad. That is evil. That is why, despite all their talk of good works and loving their neighbors and doing unto others, they still hate and kill each other, why they will go on hating and killing each other until they realize how completely wrong they have been.”
How could I argue? Maya was an inhabitant of Mesoamerica, to which the Spanish had brought not only plague, but the Inquisition, and not a day went by without the news of the rest of the world confirming what she said.
“But let us speak of better things,” she said. “Your water tine lies at the base of La Mano's thumb. You must dive for it.”
“It's not in an underwater cave or anything like that, is it?”
“No. It's at the base of the rock, in plain view.”
That was a relief. “How deep?”
“About thirty feet.”
Thirty feet . . . I was PADI-certified in open water scuba diving. I'd been down to a hundred feet in Cozumel and Little Cayman and a number of Bahamian reefs during the past dozen years or so. Thirty feet with a tank was a piece of cake. But a free dive . . . ?
I looked around the dinghy for diving equipment and found nothing.
“No fins? No mask or snorkel?”
Maya shook her head. “No. You must enter the Mother's water as you were born, then let Her guide your hand to your water tine.”
I started reviewing what I knew of free diving when something Maya had said struck me.
“As I was born? You don't mean in my birthday suit, do you?”
She nodded without a hint that she was putting me on. “Yes. As you were born . . . unless you were born with clothes.”
If she only knew.
I tried to look cool about it, but the uptight-white part of my psyche—a not inconsiderable percentage of the whole—was going ballistic. I'd never been much for nudity, had never been comfortable with it. With Annie, sure, but never with my daughter. I'd never been crazy about locker rooms, either. That was how I was raised. If I ever saw my mother's breasts while I was nursing, I don't remember. Certainly I never saw them after I was weaned. Maybe my being an only child had something to do with it. But if you'd known my family, you might have thought we all bathed and slept fully clothed.
Don't get me wrong. I hadn't a thing against nudity—other people's nudity. As a primary care physician I'd seen more undraped human bodies than I cared to remember. And now that I was thinking about it, I refined my statement: I had nothing against female nudity. The unadorned female form is one of the visual wonders of the world. The male form, however . . .
Really . . . is there anything uglier than a scrotum?
But all that aside, the bottom line of the here and now was that I was going to have to get naked in front of Maya.
Remember, I told myself. You're the new Will Burleigh. If you could trip out like a hippie last night, you can skinny dip this morning.
As we approached the thumb of La Mano Hundiendo, I reviewed what I remembered about free diving. Every thirty-three feet of descent added one atmosphere of pressure to the lungs. At a depth of thirty feet I'd be subjected to two atmospheres—no big deal. But I'd read about something called shallow water blackout that happened to free divers who stayed down too long. The key was not to over hyperventilate before diving.
All right. I wouldn't hyperventilate more than the recommended three or four breaths. But could I get down to thirty feet and find the tine before running out of air? Piece of cake for an experienced free diver, but I was far from experienced.
Well, I'd just have to find a way, wouldn't I.
La Mano Hundiendo turned out to be much bigger than I'd originally thought. The spires of the fingers towered over us like the tops of undersea mountains. Close up, the craggy cinnamon walls looked like a bad stucco job. Swells surged relentlessly against the bases, spraying white against the flat surfaces and insinuating foam into the crevices . . . in and out, in and out, like sex.
Like sex? Where had that come from?
This was not the time to start thinking about sex. And yet, now that I was, I recognized an increasing attraction to Maya. But I couldn't let that progress. I knew I was vulnerable now, and if I let myself become infatuated with this shaman woman—infatuated, hell . . . I was sure I'd fall madly in love with her in a heartbeat if I let myself go—I'd no doubt make a complete ass of myself. She'd shown no sign of physical attraction toward me. Warmth, yes, but on a purely professional level.
Keep your head, Burleigh.
Just waves . . . Pacific swells . . . nothing sexual about waves . . .
The spires of La Mano Hundiendo weren't quite the naked rock they seemed from the shore. A fuzz of brush crowned their tops, accented here and there with scraggly trees and slim cacti gesturing defiantly with fifteen-to-twenty-foot fingers. And beyond those tops, screaming gulls wheeled on the morning breeze like vultures waiting for something to die.
Ambrosio cut the engine as we rounded the north side of the thumb, and I spotted a carving on one of the flat surfaces: another of the crude, big-breasted, fat-bellied women I'd seen near the fire tines.
“The water tines are directly below that carving,” Maya said.
Thirty feet below . . .
I could do it. I had to do it. The hardest part might well be stripping off my clothes.
I hesitated, then said, “Oh, hell. Let's get this over with.”
I pulled off my hat and T-shirt, then stood and turned away from Maya and Ambrosio as I unbuttoned my shorts. I removed them and the jockeys beneath together. Wondering what Maya was thinking as she watched my skinny, lily-white butt, I faced the carving and took four slow, deep breaths. Then I dove in head first.
The saltwater bit my healing burns and stung my eyes when I opened them and squinted into the depths. I immediately began stroking and kicking toward the bottom. The water was warm, blood warm, like the amniotic fluid of some giant womb.
I'd always loved the sea, had always been drawn to it. I'd been a water rat as a boy, one of those kids who'd go in and stay in until he was dragged out blue with cold. With scuba diving, no matter how large the group, I'd found a splendid isolation in the deeps: just me and the sea.
But now, naked, wet, and warm, I felt an even stronger bond. I was one with the sea. I felt as if I'd . . . come home.
I continued my descent, following the coral bedizened rock wall and waiting for a thermocline that never came—the water maintained its same blood-warm temperature all the way down. A rainbow of angelfish and clown fish made way for me. Popping, squeaking pressure built in my middle ears but I didn't want to break my stroke and risk wasting air to equalize them. I bore the steadily increasing pain. I wasn't going to be here long anyway.
The water was clear—not as clear as Cozumel's, but it had a good fifty feet of horizontal visibility. I spotted a wavering reflection below me. That had to be it.
My lungs started complaining then. I put more effort into my strokes and kicks, but I seemed to be swimming through molasses. Water plays tricks with light, and one of its favorites is making objects appear closer than they really are—just the opposite of the side-view mirror on your car.
I could see the underwater geode directly below, but my lungs were screaming for air now, the pressure driving ice picks into my ears, and I knew I wasn't going to make it the rest of the way. I turned and kicked toward the surface, aiming for the shadow of the dinghy and letting loose a stream of bubbles as I ascended.
When I broke the surface I clamped a hand on the boat's gunwale and clung there, gulping air.
Maya's face hovered over me, her expression hopeful.
I shook my head. “Found it,” I gasped, “but couldn't reach it. Have to try again.”
“Rest a moment first,” she said, and reached down to give me a hand back into the boat.
“In a minute,” I said.
I knew I'd have to get back into the boat. A surface dive wouldn't get me down to the tines—I needed the extra momentum of the leap from the boat. But I wasn't anxious to sit around nude as a jaybird up there while I caught my breath. Besides, the water was so warm and comfortable, I didn't care if I ever got out.
Finally, when I felt rested enough, I clambered up over the gunwale and immediately poised myself on the bow. I lined myself up with the carving, took four deep breaths, then plunged in again.
I had a better idea where I was going this time, and spotted the reflected light of the underwater geode soon after I opened my eyes. It beckoned from directly below. I stroked and kicked toward it with everything I had, but couldn't move as fast as I needed to. I was about ten feet from it when air hunger began hammering at my lungs again and I knew I wasn't going to make it. I forced another couple of kicks, got my outstretched hand to within about five feet of the geode, but couldn't go an inch farther. My air was gone.
Cursing my wimpy, inadequate lungs, I turned and kicked toward the surface with what little strength I had left. The need for air, the screaming urge to breathe was so strong I feared my mouth would open on its own and inhale water.
I was clawing upward, aiming for the dark wedge of the dinghy hovering above when another shadow intervened—about six feet long, blunt-snouted, swimming with a sinuous, almost serpentine motion. It moved off to my left as I rose past and I got a better look— slate gray body and black-tipped fins. I had a sense of it wheeling around to come back to me but I didn't pause to make sure. Sudden terror outstripped the air hunger already propelling me to the surface. I kicked like a madman. I had to get out of the water—now!
In a single motion I broke the surface, grabbed the gunwale, and scrambled over it without help. If the boat hadn't been right there I might have sprinted across the water to reach it. I tumbled onto the floorboards and crouched on my hands and knees, gasping hoarsely, not giving a damn that I was naked. Someone threw a blanket over me.
“What is wrong?” Maya said.
“Shark,” I managed. “Big one.”
Neither Ambrosio nor Maya spoke. Finally, when I'd caught my breath, I sat up and faced them with the blanket wrapped around me.
“Did you reach the tine?” Maya said.
“No. I got close but not close enough. I don't . . . I don't know if I can do it.”
“You can do it, señor,” Ambrosio said. “Ambrosio will teach you.”
“That is a good idea,” Maya said. “Ambrosio is an excellent diver. We will go into shore and he can give you some pointers while we wait for the shark to go away.”
“Sounds good to me. But what makes you think it'll go away?”
“I have seen this shark before,” she said. “He tends to come and go and he has never hurt anyone.”
“You mean, not yet.”
“He will be gone later. It is a Maya word, you know.”
“Shark?”
“Yes. Only a few of our words have found their way into the languages of the world. That is one.”
Maya fell silent. She frowned as she tugged on her braids and stared at the carving on the rock wall.
“What's wrong?” I said.
“So little time. You must obtain your water tine today, for tomorrow we travel to El Silvato del Diablo for your air tine.”
“That means ‘something of the Devil’—what?”
“The Devil's Whistle. And you must return with that tine in time for the full moon two nights from now.”
“And if I don't?”
Her expression was grave. “Then all this will have been for nothing. You must bring all four tines to the holy place up there,” she said, pointing to the plateau behind the village.
I followed her point to the flat-topped mountain with its single tree. “Holy place?”
“Yes. Tradition has it that a branch of the World Tree grows there.”
“That tall skinny tree?”
“A ceiba tree. Some call it a silk-cotton tree, but my people call it Yaxche, the tree that holds up the world and the sky—the World Tree. They say the tree up there is a branch of the World Tree that has broken through from below. You must go there with your tines and place yourself between Gaea and the moon when she is full.”
“That's a small window,” I said.
She nodded. “The moon is Gaea's barren daughter. When she is full, she draws Gaea's power toward her, like the tide. The human body is mostly water—salt water. We all harbor a small sea within. The human body and its spirit have tides like the sea. When you place yourself between Gaea and her daughter at the proper time, the moon will draw her mother's power through you. Gaea will fill you . . . and change you.” She looked away. “We will have only one chance.”
I knew what she was saying, or rather, not saying: Barring a miracle, this coming full moon would be my last.
Ambrosio and I spent much of the rest of the morning and early afternoon practicing breath-holding in the shallows. He could stay under an amazingly long time. But as for technique, he wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know. Practice, practice, practice, sure, but a large part seemed to be natural ability, which I didn't have.
By late afternoon I was as good as I was going to get, so we hopped back into the dinghy and returned to La Mano Hundiendo.
I made three more dives, all unsuccessful. As a matter of fact, none of them brought me as close as this morning's second dive.
“I don't think it's a matter of breath,” I told Maya as I sat panting in the boat. “I think it's strength. My muscles are too weak to take me deep enough before I run out of air.”
“Can you try once more?”
I shook my head. “No use. Each successive dive is worse than the one before it.”
Her crestfallen expression tempted me to change my mind, but then I glanced around and saw a gray, black-trimmed dorsal fin cut a winding path along the surface between us and the thumb.
“And besides, how could I concentrate on reaching the tines with him around?”
We all watched the shark until it wandered away.
Maya said, “Very well. We will postpone the water tine. Instead, we will leave early tomorrow for El Silvato del Diablo and return tomorrow night. You can practice your breathing while we travel and then we will try again for the water tine on the last day before the full moon.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I said.
“But not as good as my original plan. I wanted you to have at least a full day's rest before you climbed to the holy place. Now that will be impossible.”
“Will I need all that rest?”
Her eyes locked on mine. “You will need every last ounce of your strength when you meet Gaea.”
Meet Gaea . . . I didn't believe in Gaea, but that didn't stop a chill from dancing down my spine.
All that time in the water had exhausted me, so after a liquid dinner I was ready to turn in. But I had to speak to Maya first. I asked her to come to my hut where I opened my duffel bag and pulled out the Kevorkian kit.
I explained what it was for.
“Why do you tell me this?” she said, staring at the IV solution bags, KCl ampoules, and coiled tubing as if they were poisonous vermin.
“Because . . .” I wasn't sure how to say it, but I had to settle this. “Because I may need your help with it when the time comes.”
“When the time comes?” she said. “That is your problem, Cecil. You do not believe, and because you do not believe, you have no hope.”
She was right—oh, how right she was. And today had brought that home to me more clearly than ever.
Each new day meant more tumor. I accepted that. But where else besides my throat? Captain Carcinoma had its tentacles all through my body by now, eating me alive from the inside. That was why I was dropping pounds and losing inches. And more than just fat was disappearing. When cells—even tumor cells—shout for food, the body isn't particular about where it finds it. Fat cells are good storehouses of nutrients, but muscles cells also offer a rich supply. So I wasn't simply burning fat—I was losing muscle mass as well.
And that worried me the most.
“I'm wasting away, Maya. I've never been a terribly physical man, and I've spent my life in a sedentary profession. So no matter how much I practice breath holding—and I've got to admit Ambrosio has increased my hold time—I'm steadily losing the strength I need to propel me down to thirty feet. I'm losing this war, Maya, and you know it.”
“I know no such thing.” She looked away. “And even if I did, that doesn't mean I will help you kill yourself.”
“Hopefully it will never come to that,” I said. “But what if I hurt myself and can't insert the needle? That's all I'll need you to do— help me start the line flowing, and I'll take it from there.”
“No.” She rose and started toward the door. “I will not do that— I cannot do that.”
“Then I'm out of here.”
That got her. I didn't know if I truly meant it, but I had to make her believe I did. And I knew I had to talk tough to wring a deal from her.
She turned and stared at me. “You do not mean that.”
“Absolutely. I have to know I can chose between a quick death and the lingering agony of dehydration and starvation. If you won't promise to be there for me when and if I should need you, then I'll go find a hotel room somewhere and wait for the end.”
I wasn't bluffing, and she must have known that. She looked torn, uncertain. I decided to push her a little harder.
“You talk about my lack of belief and hope. What about you? If you really and truly believe I have a chance at a cure, why don't you simply say yes, you'll help me. What's to lose if it's a promise you'll never have to keep? That is, if you truly have belief . . . and hope.”
I hated putting her on the spot like this, but I had to have the assurance of her help if I ever needed it. It was my security blanket.
“Very well,” she said in a tight, flat voice. “You have my promise.”
Then she turned and walked out.
I sat alone, feeling none too proud of myself. But this wasn't a game I had ever played before. I didn't know the rules, so I was making up my own as I went along.
The hut was stifling. The heat kept me from sleep, but it had help from a nagging guilt about backing Maya into a position she loathed, plus my worries about ever being able to reach the water tines. And then came all the regrets of my life—Annie, Kelly, roads not taken— recycling through my head for the thousandth time. I managed to turn them off . . . regrets were useful only when you had time to rectify them, and I didn't.
Desperate for some air, I crept outside to lay on the cooling sand and gazed at the night sky.
The moon wasn't up yet but Venus was low on the horizon, and so bright it cast a wavering bridge of light across the water like a miniature moon. I lifted my gaze and gasped when I saw the stars. They didn't have stars like this back in the U.S.—at least not in the Northeast. Where did they all come from? I hadn't seen the Milky Way since I was a boy, had almost forgotten what it looked like, but here it was now in all its speckled glory, a pale path of distant stars trailing overhead from horizon to horizon like a smear of semen from an infinitely fertile ejaculate, its countless spermatozoa streaming away into the night . . .
Semen? Ejaculate? I'd come up with another sexual image. Too long sitting naked in front of a woman with jade eyes and glorious thighs. I felt a long-lost heat growing in my groin as I fantasized a reversal of our roles in the boat today: I was the guide and she was the tine diver. I saw her clothes come off, watched her long lithe body poised to dive into the water—
I jumped as something pinched my leg. I sat up and saw a crab— a dozen, two dozen, a hundred crabs. The sand was alive with dark scuttling forms. Land crabs? Sand crabs? Fiddler crabs? Venus and the stars didn't provide enough light to tell and I wasn't hanging around until the moon rose to find out.
I jumped up and danced back to the hut, trying my damnedest not to step on them. For a moment I watched from the doorway as they scuttled back and forth across the sand in some sort of dance of their own. At least I knew the origin of the sand's morning herringbone pattern.
I retreated to the safety of my hammock. The hut was still hot but it was better than risking getting nibbled to death by crabs.