Out of the ether, into one moment, she turned and he stood. Venango/Shlemmer had gone to a revival with Speck and some surly looking brutes. Wanda sat alone outside their hut, shucking plantains. Of course the heat was intense. She had learned to live in a perpetual slick of sweat.
It was hot, but she wore her hat; and the wide brim and the white veil of the mosquito netting were certainly enough to keep her brain from baking. And as she shucked, she sipped frequently at her bottle of quinine. So there was no chance of it being heat stroke.
But there he was; dark and brooding down on her from behind a nettle fern. One of them; one of the original denizens of this rain forest. An Indian, who stood and stared at her with eyes that were hard and proud and judgemental; eyes completely unlike those sad pools that barely smoldered in the faces of the boys and girls—his sorry descendants—who lived in empty refrigerator crates in the hearts of every Buena Salidan city.
Here stood one of the ancient drummer kings; a being that Shlemmer had described as hypnotic smoke. A staccato blast from a fire-tuned log-kettle drum that thunders and rattles across the jungle, treetop to treetop. Here stood one distinct echo of that primordial rhythm, clothed in flesh and holding her fixed at the focus of merciless eyes.
“Hello,” she said. “Want to help me shuck?” but her friendliness failed to deflect his stony glare. She calmly continued with her work, careful to keep him well within view. She wondered, if he were here, what Carl’s reaction might have been. She wondered if she should maybe be frightened. It didn’t seem to her as though she should. It all seemed so ordinary; he was a part of her environment, a fixture, like the vines or the rushing stream she bathed in.
In a glittering minute, she was finished with her shucking and had gathered the loose plantains into her skirt. “I need to put these under water, or they’ll be covered with flies. It only takes a minute. You turn your back and the things are just crawling. Nothing ruins a nice meal quicker than finding maggots in your porridge.”
She felt giddy; for a moment her vision turned liquid. It seemed as though there were planets the size of watermelons whirling in orbits around her. For a moment all the stars in heaven blinked against the screens of her retinas. She felt suddenly fixed in time. Right Ascension: 21.44; Declination: -17.1. 11:57:59, Universal Time. She felt the next moment like a massive pulse. The next, collapsed upon her like loneliness; and the next one seemed to explode. She shot outward, in all directions at once, screaming like a banshee against something like eternity.
“Oh please hold me,” she heard herself say, and couldn’t believe her ears. But there was a rhythm now beating inside of her. And she thought that she recognized the song it made. Like something she’d heard once, long ago. Like something sung to her in the cradle. Like the very song the children had been singing that first day she’d stepped down into Buena Salida.
She realized, then, the true reason for her presence here in this jungle; why she’d been bullied out of her oak-paneled offices in Stuttgart and Amiens. And, as she felt the planetary forces pull her toward inevitability, she recognized the agency by which this miraculous assignation had been effected. Although she knew him to be miles away, Wanda Ases felt upon her the grey, ambivalent eyes of Carlo Shlemmer.
Main photo: Photo by Kamaji Ogino from Pexels.
Accent photo: Photo by Jill Burrow from Pexels.