Sins of the Reaper - 6

I felt uneasy … as if a threatening shadow moved stealthily along the periphery of consciousness, like a cat appearing suddenly in a room, unexpected memory shivering out of muscle and flesh. Closing my eyes, my restless breaths rose and fell as somewhere in my brain a single trembling neurotransmitter excited its neighbors.

Long forgotten details reawakened a hazy facsimile of the environment where I once sat alone long ago. A feathered serpent writhed in wooden relief on a nearby wall. A broken place in the tiled floor reappeared where dirt and a bit of food still stubbornly clung.

A door swinging open suddenly in my thoughts, a disheveled little man appeared with Pan.

“She’ll kill you,” the little man’s gravelly voice growled, “never turn your back on the jungle.”

“Really,” Pan sniffed.

“Don’t touch the needle palms, neither … poisonous spikes, they’ll kill you.”

“What should I touch?” he rejoined, mildly sarcastic.

“You’re not listening,” he exclaimed heatedly, “you don’t know what to touch so don’t touch nothin’. Don’t touch snakes, they’ll kill you. Empty your shoes before you put ‘em on, if there are scorpions in ‘em, they’ll kill you. Don’t eat any fruit; eat the wrong ones and they’ll kill you. Don’t leave the trail, stay together, jaguars won’t attack a group, but if one of you stray from the trail, they’ll kill you.”

And then the odd little man paused, perhaps looking for the right words within his limited vocabulary, the brows on his impassive face lifting in a weak imitation of earnestness. ‘One last thing … don’t talk back if you’re robbed by Chiclero’s, give ‘em your money quick and easy or they’ll kill you too.

But as quickly as it was remembered the memory suddenly halted, all my efforts to move more deeply into the experience and wonder of it rebuffed, every effort made to prod it forward merely looping back to the beginning, staring numbly at the wooden serpent, a remembered glint in Pan’s eyes, the memory repeating stupidly over and over, the events immediately preceding and following lost, forgotten … not even worth making up.

"Chiclero’s" … I said it slowly aloud, savoring the feel of the hard consonants in the roof of my mouth, a sudden twinge pulling at the muscles in the small of my back where I once strapped a k-bar under my shirt, my fingers unconsciously slipping behind me in the poncho liner to touch the absent blade.

Tendons involuntarily tightening between my wrist and elbow reawakened what mere thinking could not, forgotten memories beginning to stir in my flesh as if waiting only for the correct nuance in feeling to free them … Chiclero’s … the muscles in my back twitching a second time, my hand grasping at nothingness, rebelling against an unconscious urge to unsheath the missing blade, the memory of the little man’s admonition triggering the desire to unleash a forgotten self.

But something elemental had changed, something blurring the distinction between the present and the distant past, small blips of memory piercing formerly impenetrable darkness, something requiring little or no effort on the part of my mind. An image of a thatched hut village appeared where a hungry dog stared balefully from ancient, forgotten shadows, beautiful children peeking shyly out of darkened entryways, their long raven hair draped across white muslin.

Staring over his shoulder at the village, tears filled Miguel’s eyes as we left, some painful memory of his own sending him backward in time. For a brief moment I felt his sorrow as I never felt it while he still lived, the ache of divine reciprocity swelling within my joints, the blood guilt of long forgotten acts awakening faces and voices of a far-away past. Some shouted with deep throaty anger while others wept with inconsolable grief. Fewer still were mute with speechless horror.

Somehow my memory revived the sounds of whispering voices hidden within the jungle’s early morning mists, not of unseen animals, but of ghostly furies returning to avenge the forgotten dead. The voices of father’s, brother’s, and son’s raged as women wept and beat traumatized breasts in an orgy of unanswerable grief, my own overcome by loss of sensation on a forgotten, bloody field of battle. The tingling numbness in response began at the top of my head, this time moving so rapidly that I almost lost consciousness in the still night air.

But memory of the Lacandón Jungle was greater than the shivering exhaustion of self-anesthetization, a weak and visceral sensation of fear rising from my core and radiating outward into my unfeeling limbs. A vision of the great shadow of the canopy reappeared before my mind's eye like a fixed and visible feeling, the hoarse cough of howler monkeys and the piercing whoops of shrieking birds suddenly threatening to erase the years separating me from a distant past.

Consciousness slipping deeper into the jungle my limbs began to return weakly to life, my chest slowly filling with heat, exhaustion transforming to a physical reenactment of the long walk. The straps that bit into shoulders thirty years before recreated in my mind the heavy pack I carried in my youth, the balls of my feet burning in the present as if threatening to blister from the friction within long, lost boots. My flesh reawakened memories that my conscious self believed were long forgotten.

My stomach groaned with a sickening, acidy ache seemed to revive an inner psychic compass, my surroundings beginning to cohere into a tangled and sensuous whole. Feeling and memory became something more than remote flashes linking trembling neurotransmitters, isolated moments began to connect and lengthen into authentic, remembered experience.

“Don’t be afraid,” Pan whispered from the past, his hand reaching toward mine with a small clay pipe, the present disappearing in a smoky haze.

For a few, brief moments the air smelled intensely of rotting vegetable matter and black palm, the dread of truly remembering sending a new and more forceful wave of numbness racing across trembling flesh. But this time the memories do not immediately retreat, a distant thunder rumbling strangely in a cloudless sky, my eyes blinking in terror at a great tree towering overhead in the midday brilliance.

I am not a religious man, but horror and awe close my throat, the blazing light cascading down the undulating trunk through ten thousand ancient and twisted limbs, its protruding roots thrusting into the earth with inexpressible power.

The stranger who I once was and briefly now am watched numbly as it began to rain, flickering butterflies descending out of the tree like great, iridescent drops, a swarm of brilliant Morpho’s slowly descending with something akin to a chaotic form of grace.

Some landed on the exposed roots of the great tree, others clung to heads and torsos as my fellow students grinned stupidly at one another, their consciousness briefly merging with the jungle surrounding them even as I slipped further and further away, a distant contempt the last true emotion remaining within me. Save for love of Bea, I might have floated away, amnesia threatening to steal from me what little feeling still remained.

Self-awareness melted away into meaningless noise as I was overcome by a sudden and unexpected sense of otherness – of not I – like a moment of irreversible dissociation, the door to one past abruptly closing as another slowly opens.

How many forgotten times have I passed silent and unknowing from one life to another, how many forgotten selves lie hidden within the deep earth of the past?

Did my earlier incarnation remember any of the life that passed before the one lost that day in the jungle? Did he recall his mother’s face or the laughing sounds of his sibling’s voices; did favorite memories flit across his consciousness before sliding past the barrier of the unopened door? Or had the amnesia infected him long before, his life a long series of forgettings, a stranger newly born at every major crisis in his life, his bridges so thoroughly burnt that no amount of sifting through the rubble of his life could ever tell him who he once was or who he might one day become.

The butterflies continued falling like blue iridescent leaves, their flickering wings covering Bea's head and upraised arms in shimmering waves, thousands more tumbling down to cling to her heaving torso, her head jerking violently with eyes lolled back, the blood running so profusely from her mouth that her chin glowed crimson in the last shaft of light before the darkness, the butterflies shivering and falling at her feet in mounds as if sharing in her terrible suffering. Even as I gazed in terror at the memory of the upraised whites of her eyes, I felt a hidden and penetrating stare.

The day of reckoning.

Impossibly I saw the priest of La Venta, like a pale light in the darkened jungle, his headdress trembling as his voice thundered overhead like a heathen god of old. My body seemed frozen in place as I turned my terrified gaze to fellow students blissfully unaware of his shouted curses or of Bea as the fit racked her body before mounds of dying butterflies.

Her lips curled in a low, animal snarl, her arm raised as if lifted by the fluttering wings of the few remaining Morphos, her finger weakly pointing at him, the blood bubbling helplessly from her mouth as she hissed a terrible, alien oath. Sitting up blindly in the distant present, I cannot shake loose from this terrible vision of the past, the haunting sound of a howling baby floating above the jungle mists.

Bits and fragments of true memory flit before my uncomprehending eyes, phantom women pulling their hair and rocking in helpless grief in the shadows, the butterflies on the ground trembling weakly before lying still one by one. A woman’s peaceful countenance appeared as she breast fed her child, a soldier in a torn and bloody uniform bent over double in despair.

Bea falling to her knees, the blood and snot hung in strings from her pale face, her eyes gazing helplessly into the Lacandón’s darkness where he still loomed threateningly, reality’s cold truth unable to fully awaken me from a mystic crossroads where myth and memory once melded.

And then the darkness came … as it always comes … my earlier incarnation surrendering to billowing anesthetization, a final image returning to memory before surrendering to the all encompassing blackness, a man pointing a pistol in my face, his unshaven face smeared with filth and despair, his crooked teeth bared in terrifying rage.

The priest's voice crashing overhead like the last trump, the words reverberated across my prostrate and weeping flesh, his judgment condemning me to a nameless future, his fury stripping my last remaining dignity – robbing me of any remaining hope and love.

But my friends were lost and hope abandoned long ago, the thought of it slowly pushing the terror back into the darkness of the past, the tingling numbness returning to claim the dead even as the memory of his terrible voice began to fade and slip away.

Lifting my face from the tear dampened poncho liner I wondered Is it memory? –nightmare? –drug induced hallucination? Weakly rising to my knees the Lacandon slipped softly away, its secrets forever secret, its darkness forever unfathomed. Let the dead bury the dead.

In a separate life where dark is light and earth is sky the man I once was and sometimes now am sleeps helplessly within the mysterious earth, the world he once knew passing into nothingness and dust, the consciousness connecting him with the past slipping into oblivion.

Bea briefly reappearing, her phantom hands reached desperately for my cheeks as she whispered for the last time – “Did you see it? Did you see it?”

“No,” I answered aloud, the terrible weight of semi-consciousness bearing once more cruelly downward, murky visions from the past flickering at the edges of thought like half-remembered dreams, my flesh trembling with waves of otherworldly feeling, threatening to plunge me again into darkness even as I renounced with terrible oaths the feeble desire to remember still remaining.