Fox Another Bone-Swapping Event

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83773-357-6
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Brad Fox's The Bathysphere Book was a winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation's Science + Literature Award and a Washington Post Top Ten Best Book of 2023 and Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 and was called 'Hypnotic . . . Beautifully written and beautifully made' by the New York Times. He is the author of the novel To Remain Nameless and has written for The New Yorker, Guernica, Public Domain Review, and The Whitney Biennial.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fox, Brad

Leseproben

THE VIRUS IS YOU

Rain falls in torrents from the sky. A palm-sized spider disappears beneath the rock near where we swim. Not hairy like the tarantula in the wall but spindly and quick.

Day and night the river’s rush blankets the garden, but now it’s inaudible beneath the storm. It feels like the rains will destroy everything—batter the houses until they fall, uproot trees. Everything will slide down to be pulverized by boulders below. But then in an hour or two the rains let up and it’s peaceful again. The sun comes out and the flowering bushes glisten.

Water drains from the tile roof, from the bamboo gutter, into the stone-lined ditch that surrounds the little house, issuing downhill toward the river now high in the storm’s wake. Behind the flowering bushes erupts a spiky wall of yellow bamboo thirty feet high. The rain stops and the air quiets and the bamboo stalks clack against each other in the breeze.

The garden is all dragon fruit trees, coconut palms, branches ripe with avocados, cascades of red flowers. Big spiny blossoms called lion’s tongues that look like penises, that sprout little yellow leaves at their tips like beads of dripping semen. The promiscuous blooms of the toé bush emit a dizzy-making fragrance in the evening.

Now in the calm after the storm, Jaru the cat hunts a tiny lizard on the shrub opposite here, rife with purple flowers. He stalks up flimsy branches, steps through thorns until he drops to the ground and leaps. But the lizard disappears into the bramble, so Jaru sits in the stone gutter licking his paws as if he’s not the most elegant cat in the world.

Nelson and Humberto returned to Juliampampa with supplies, but soon the government said the state of emergency would extend for weeks. Now no one could say how long it would last. Holding our phones in the air to receive a text or load a webpage was not going to be sufficient. We’d need to check in with our families, our various jobs. Somehow we were going to have to go on with our lives.

Miguel told us about a lodge just outside the national park with electricity and wifi, closed now because of the situation, but he knew the owner, who said they’d make up a few beds for us when we were ready to come down. It was our best option. But we could hold off a bit longer. I who’d been the most reluctant to come here now adamant we extend our stay. Lockdown had somehow rendered irrelevant any resistance I might have felt to plant medicine. I was no longer concerned about shamanic tourism. Here we were trapped together. What else could I do but embrace my circumstances?

Miguel cooked up more chuchuwasha for Nafis, more bobinsana for Akos and ajo sacha for Szilvia, but switched the plants Eszter and I were drinking. Eszter went from nina caspi to renaquillo, a plant that was half-vine-half-tree. Miguel showed it to us growing down the path beyond the yanchama tree, a thick trunk with woody, crisscrossing tendrils grasping its host. It looked even more like DNA than ayahuasca.

Renaquillo is from earth, Miguel said. It’s soft and loving. It can cure wounds. And it’s attractive to other people.

He tapped it with his walking stick.

If a man comes asking about a woman, Miguel smiled, renaquillo can summon that woman and she will love him. Curanderos use it to call spirits. If you’ve dieted on renaquillo, you can call someone who isn’t there. You can summon their spirit. If you want to talk to them you sing their icaro and they will come. But that requires longer diets.

Eszter stood admiring the unusual plant. I wondered what a week drinking renaquillo would do to her. She had recovered from her death-trance, and though we didn’t know what was happening we were getting our bearings. It was good to talk through the situation with her, to know we could count on each other. But we still returned to our huts alone.

I switched from bobinsana to another water plant, a tree called yacushimbillo. Miguel led me down a more distant path and stopped at the edge of thick underbrush. He blew tobacco smoke on me and himself to protect us from snakes and swung his machete a few times to open a path. Once inside the brush he stopped at a moderately sized tree, its trunk hairy and leafy with moss and plants growing off its bark. Where its interior was exposed, the wood was lovely, dark and striated, brown and cream-colored. It had unmistakable webbed leaves growing in sets of eight.

This is yacushimbillo, he said. A good friend. It will bring strong dreams and visions.

My Mexican lit teacher used to gather students in the upstairs room of his apartment in the San Rafael. We’d read to each other and pick apart Revueltas or Rulfo. He told me Octavio Paz once assembled a group of friends to eat mushrooms. They’d traveled the inframundo together and had adventures and willed themselves to bring something back, something to show it had been more than a flickering figment. When they returned, my teacher told me, there was a sandal on the floor between them, a regular old leather sandal, as ordinary and solid as the floorboards.

What if I brought back an old shoe from my visions? Who would I be then?

Luis said I should ask the plants questions, and answers would come to me in dreams. I dreamt of brands of tobacco associated with famous pirates, of cigarettes that lit themselves, of a cash register of ice cream flavors.

Don’t worry, Luis said, if I kept paying attention meanings would emerge.

I dreamt we landed in Turkey, which was an island in the Atlantic, not far from Philadelphia. I dreamt of a disease named Charles that made everyone talk like Sherlock Holmes. I dreamt of a religion called Hortobagyism devoted to a small, pale flower that blooms whenever a comedian dies.

The meaning could be found in Hortobagyism, I thought. In the little flower of comic death.

But in fact the change from bobinsana to yacushimbillo revealed that the plants Miguel gave us indeed had character and personality. During ceremonies on bobinsana I’d often experienced that spark in my heart, what I’d first felt when Nafis sang Gra-ci-as so forthright and off-key. Bobinsana was meant to be a water plant, too, but on yacushimbillo my nose ran, I drooled, tears streamed from my eyes. Whatever I thought about, I cried. I’d had trouble crying for years—ever since as a crybaby kid I’d learned to suppress my pain and sorrow—but now I cried nonstop. I found I could sit with my back against the wall of the maloca with tears streaming down my cheeks. With time it became ordinary as the floorboards, too.

And it was the second week of that first stint up the mountain that I began to take walks in the jungle alone. Miguel had led us down the path beyond my hut, past the renaquillo tree-vine and three huge, majestically buttressed sapoina trees, to a waterfall some half-hour walk away. Water cascaded from a high sheet of flat rock. Stacked boxes of sheer cliff-face, it brought to mind the houses above the Mtkvari River in the old city of Tbilisi.

I remembered sitting in a basement wine bar in that city with my friend Khaled and a bunch of art historians, passing around a centuries-old silver ladle. Each of us filled the ladle with amber-colored wine and stood to give a toast before drinking it down. Our toasts became more and more elaborate, euphoric and maudlin, into the early morning.

But from the high wall here, clean mountain water came crashing down into a small pool. When we went the first time Miguel told us a hedgehog had fallen and smashed to bits, so the pool was hazardous with quills. But over the next few days Nelson and Humberto put on rubber boots and cleaned out the animal remains. Then we came back and could stand under the crashing water, feeling renewed. Huge blue butterflies flapped in the mist. We wondered if we wanted to go down the mountain at all.

I spent hours in the hammock in front of the yanchama tree. I stared at its vines and lichens, the other trees it had enveloped as it grew. I walked past it into the jungle to visit the renaquillo, the sapoinas, and the waterfall.

On one of my solitary walks I heard a horrid sound, the snarl and snort of an animal of considerable size. I stepped quietly, imagining through the thick brush, just out of view, lurked a boar with sharp horns or an ape I’d never seen before. The snorting and growling continued, and I managed to record a bit of the sound before the animal disappeared without showing itself. When I brought my phone up to the comedor to play the sound for Miguel, he told me it was an ispuitino—the orange parrot I’d seen my first morning at the yanchama tree.

It was impossible for me to imagine such a sound coming from that beautiful crested bird.

Sometimes she fights with her rooster, Miguel said.

Soon I learned to spot the fat black woodpeckers with red heads and striped beaks. I learned the swooping black and yellow birds were called caciques, like pre-Columbian nobility.

Miguel told me his full name was Miguel Tapullima Cachique. He was one, too.

At the base of the yanchama, I found, there was a nest of enormous black ants. In Miguel’s Quechua they were called isulas, but in Spanish they were called hormigas balas, because their bite felt like you’d been shot with a bullet. I learned to respect those inch-long creatures patrolling the tangled roots I stepped over every day. Their movements were robotic and menacing. So much larger than the other ants, it would be like me running into a giant taller than the yanchama tree, its jaws plump with venom, moving as if entranced.

On the door of my hut I found a...