The Temple of Asana

The temple of Asana is bedded down in swathes of dark foliage. Where the broad leaves of rubber plants graze its sloping sides, licks of moisture saturate the pink stone. The breadth of the temple is slashed with these markings; rosy tiger stripes paling in the sun. We remove our gear at the temple entrance (force of habit), and melt into the cool darkness.

To be within the temple is to acknowledge the existence of a haven outside of the ones we have created for ourselves back home. Mine is located on the second floor of a laundromat in Brooklyn (the first belonging to the laundromat itself). It is furnished sparsely (orientally, in the words of my wife). Its handful of contents were selected based on their reflective properties; even the mirrors are framed in silver. In this way, we procured a counterfeit American Dream.

Abreast of the temple’s foyer, the temperature has dropped several degrees. There are no reflective surfaces here; what sporadic light filters through the stonework above our heads is swept up and secreted away in the shadowy corners of the room. A salamander sporting a glossy hide of hieroglyphs twists across our path.

“It’s gorgeous.”

My colleague’s voice falls like glass spheres upon the temple floor, bouncing up to break against the low ceiling.

“It’s too humid.” This from another colleague, one whom I’d been wary about soliciting for the trip. She falls over the threshold and swoons against a whorled pillar near the entrance. “I can’t take it. This heat. And the damn monkeys! I’m going to hear them in my sleep.”

The howler monkeys had been parcelled into the excursion; I’d distributed pocket guides on native species prior to our voyage. Jaguars were among those mentioned. Emerald tree frogs and red-bellied stoats had come up as well.

My colleagues begin to unroll their bedding. I can hear the tails of marsupials swishing in the dust. Their neon tennis ball eyes will float up from the floor when we sleep and stud the darkness with sentience.

“I’m going to find the anteroom,” I call back, already migrating towards the beating heart of the sanctuary.

Back in Brooklyn, I'd had a son, and a wife, and a little Siamese cat with dainty black feet. Her name was Sativa. My wife was on a first-name basis with recreational drugs; once, the cat dipped its fine-boned head into the little jade dish shaped like a turtle (its shell was askew), and devoured two plump buds of medicinal marijuana. I’ve never seen an animal act so unlike itself. I don’t think that the poor beast ever fully recovered her wits; until the day she died (beneath the tires of a semi, mind you), she walked with a curious, lilting gait.

And the boy. His death is not so straightforward, though I often wish it had been.

I find myself in a chamber; not the anteroom, but something like a hall. A raised stone slab occupies the sun-drenched centre. Above my head, a spear of sunlight is permitted entry via a circular portal in the vaulted ceiling. It occurs to me that the temple must look rather like a mosque from without, if the roundness of the room is anything to go by.

I step up to the stone dais. There is nothing particularly moving or momentous about it. It has the pebbled texture of granite, like the floor and the walls and the cliff face it was chiseled from. There are no engravings or idols to indicate worship, nor human sacrifice. I think that I was half-hoping to find faded bloodstains, the DNA long-stagnant.

I move away from the tablet. In the northeast corner of the room, there squats a small granite throne: unadorned, backless. I hedge around it, toes parallel. Some relics I am loathe to turn my back upon. I drift along as though strung on a line, like laundry being reeled in from the street. Now I find myself in a hall, at the end of which two stone deities stand sentinel. The hall is steeped in indigo darkness, the same blue as henna. My wife used to dye her clothes and hair with the stuff. I remember the stains it would leave on her porcelain skin, for weeks! A fool, my wife. A darling little fool.

The guardians of the hallway are feline in nature. No, I am mistaken. One is feline, all arch and bristle and fang. The other, canine, all musk and snout and slather. They have unnervingly human countenances; I do hate when artists borrow human traits, as though they can be so easily swapped over! I approach cautiously, hand on the hilt of my machete. What good would it do me, against the spirits that dwell here? I stop before the door. Above it, something chiseled into the stone. But I cannot read Arabic. I dip one foot and then the other into the room.

At first, I see nothing, only dust motes illuminated by a phantom light source. Their gilded spore bodies dance in the gloom, disintegrating upon the first unyielding surface they come into contact with. And then shapes begin to take hold: a copper urn emblazoned with black pictographs; a bevy of tall clay pots huddled in a corner; fat papyrus scrolls heaped against the wall; slender twigs of charcoal bound with red twine; fine Assyrian rugs rolled into towering stalks; an ornate chair; a chamberpot; dusty, dun-coloured lion pelts. And a figure, nestled in the chair. He has his diminutive legs drawn up to his chest, naked pink arms around. A tube flows from his wrist, to the gleaming piece of machinery at his side. He blinks at me. He has his mother’s eyes.