Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Read online

  He wondered again how Mawgis had known about President Delacort. In the eighteen months Father Canas had spent with the tribe, Mawgis had no doubt learned a thing or two from the priest about the outside world. The Salesian could have told him the name of the American president. But even if the Tabna chief had known Delacort’s name and title and the fact that he’d been a senator earlier, how did he figure out Jake had been born the year Delacort had originally been elected?

  An image of the tall, almost gangly Delacort formed in his mind. Not as Jake usually saw him—on television giving an address or answering questions at a press conference, his dress immaculate, his hair cut military short—but in his bedroom. He stood in front of a mirror. A tailor knelt at his feet, pinning a pair of pants to the proper length. Delacort held a phone to his ear. The scene, bizarre in its normality, made Jake feel like a voyeur peeping through the White House windows. The gauzy sleeve of a woman’s peignoir poked from a drawer. Delacort was a widower. Jake wondered who his lover might be, or if he wore the peignoir himself.

  The image faded as gently as it had come. Jake stole a look at Mawgis. The Tabna stopped his chanting.

  “An interesting way to travel, is it not?” Mawgis asked. “No passport. No jet lag.”

  Tabna words for passport or jet lag didn’t exist, but that hardly mattered since Mawgis’s lips weren’t moving.

  “Benesha is hallucinogenic,” Jake said. He didn’t feel stoned, not like he had on the peyote, but stoned he was—he knew that much at least.

  “Not at all. Benesha is a travel facilitator. Where else would you like to go? Tibet? France?”

  “Hallucinogenic.”

  “Oh no,” Mawgis insisted. “What you experience is happening at the moment you see it. With some practice you’ll be able to hear and smell the image as well. For instance, I know that Delacort was on the phone with his social secretary getting an update on his agenda for the day, and that the coffee in his cup was amaretto-flavored.”

  Update. Agenda. Amaretto. Definitely not Tabna words. Not even in the Tabna consciousness. But this was his hallucination, not Mawgis’s, and those words were common enough for him. He stood up. By stretching his arms above his head, he could almost touch the lower corner of the hut’s A-framed roof. Outside, the howler monkeys were at it again with their storming ahoooowagh roar. There seemed nothing to do except wait for the monkeys to move on and the drug’s effects to wear off.

  “Remember,” Mawgis said, his mouth moving now, forming words in English, “I knew about Delacort’s first election the year you were born, and you weren’t experiencing benesha travel then.” His English was lightly but indefinitely accented—impossible for Jake to place.

  Jake sat down again, willing in his altered state to consider believing.

  The older man smiled. “When I told you I was well traveled, I meant benesha journeys. I’ve been to places you’ve not even heard of, though mostly I stick to large cities and the people in power. They’re the most amusing.”

  “Of course,” Jake replied calmly. Who was he to cast doubt on his own hallucination?

  Mawgis leaned forward, his hands on his thighs. “Why, of all the possible people in this world, were you selected to come here and negotiate for benesha?”

  Because I’m damn good at my job, he thought. But Jake knew that no matter how well he did his work, the real reason he’d been sent was his size. His employer had reasoned that the Tabna would be more willing to listen to someone who looked something like they did.

  “Exactly,” Mawgis said without waiting for an answer. “But they were wrong.”

  “You won’t give us benesha?”

  “We will give you all the benesha your hungry food animals can gobble down. Why wouldn’t we?”

  Jake should have been happy. He felt miserable. He was drugged and hallucinating and was sure this conversation wasn’t really taking place—and Mawgis was giving in too easily. “What’s the trick?”

  “No trick. We want the world’s people to have benesha.”

  He took that in, tried to think through the ramifications. But his mind slid in a different direction. “If benesha really induces this journey ability, why didn’t the mice and other test animals that ate it travel off to different places in their minds?”

  Mawgis shrugged. “How do you know they didn’t? Anyone looking at you would see nothing more than a man calmly sitting on a mat in the dirt. Besides, benesha only induces travel when properly prepared. The poison must be washed out first.”

  “Poison?”

  “Benesha is quite poisonous in its natural state.”

  Jake glared at him. Mawgis was playing at some stupid game, and there was much at stake. But he was stoned, there were still negotiations to finish, and this was definitely not the time to get angry. He shook his head, trying to sort out his thoughts.

  “The mice did fine,” he said, his voice harsher than he’d meant it to be. “None of them were poisoned.”

  “Animals always do. Toucans and marmosets are among the animals that are particularly fond of benesha, though kinkajou, howler monkeys, and others dislike it. Only people are affected by the poison.”

  “But the poison is filtered out or made harmless by passing through an animal’s digestion?”

  “Not at all. It’s like the poison dart frog. In these forests, there are plants that have special alkaloids. Insects eat the plants, take in the alkaloids, and get eaten by the frogs. The frogs turn the alkaloids, along with other chemicals in their bodies, into deadly toxins that pop up on their skin. You know this already. You’ve seen it on television. American and European film crews love to film Indians rubbing their arrows on frog backs, using the poison to make their weapons deadly.”

  Jake nodded stupidly. He’d watched that scene a dozen times.

  “In your land,” Mawgis said, warming to his subject, “the monarch butterfly does something of the same, eating milkweed when it’s in the larva stage so as to be poisonous to its predators when it turns into a butterfly. The caterpillar eats a poison that causes it no harm, yet is deadly to its enemies. It’s the same with benesha. Do you understand?”

  Jake nodded again, feeling more stupid by the moment. He was afraid he understood too well.

  “With benesha,” Mawgis said, “saliva and then stomach enzymes activate the poison. An animal becomes lethal with its first swallow. For humans it’s the same; one bite and they’re doomed. Any human eating a benesha-fed animal will die, just as the animal eating the frog or butterfly dies. We know this, so we don’t eat any bird or beast with a taste for it.”

  “Then if a jaguar eats a marmoset that’s eaten benesha, the jaguar dies?”

  Mawgis sighed noisily. “You should pay better attention. Benesha is poisonous only to humans.”

  Jake’s thoughts spun. No people had eaten meat from benesha-fed animals. Instead the scientists had used dogs, feeding them meat from benesha-fed mice and analyzing the canine urine to establish the overall value of the protein. Human trials were scheduled to begin soon.

  “You have an expression,” Mawgis said. “‘Your days are numbered.’ With benesha it’s truly so. Death comes when a certain number of days have passed. So many days that none would guess benesha is the cause.”

  “How many?”

  Mawgis shrugged. “More than the moon, less than the sun. The perfect amount.”

  More than a month. Several months, probably. Less than a year. Jesus.

  “But if benesha makes the meat poisonous for humans, then—”

  “Then,” Mawgis said, “the hungry will die.”

  Three

  A low-pitched sound, like a cell phone humming on vibrate, buzzed in Jake’s ears. The hazy light filtering through his tent’s yellow canvas was wrong for evening, the time he reasoned it should be.

  He used his arms to lever himself into a stand and stumbled stiff-legged the few steps to the flap door. His mouth and throat were parched. He pulled back the flap and peered ou
t. Dawn was inching its way into the forest. His skull felt like someone had poured hot coals inside. He squinted his eyes against the slim light and let the flap fall back.

  The last thing he remembered was sitting with Mawgis, green mud smeared over his chest and forehead like badly applied icing. He peered down the neck of his shirt. No trace of mud lingered on his skin.

  Bits and pieces of what had happened—the vision of President Delacort, Mawgis telling him that benesha was poisonous to humans—rattled in his brain. Was anything he remembered true, or was it all hallucination?

  His canteen lay on the floor next to the small pack that held his clothes and supplies. Jake uncapped it and sloshed water around in his dry mouth. He grabbed two high-dosage aspirin from the med kit and used a thin razor blade to cut each tablet in quarters, swallowing the pills in separate gulps. He dressed quickly, worried the Tabna chief would disappear into the forest again before he could corner him and drag out the truth. Subtly, of course. With finesse.

  A dead scorpion and a couple of crickets fell from his boots when he shook them out. Jake tugged on the boots and tied the laces. His toes felt cramped, his feet swollen. It would be just like the old fox to get him stoned, scare him half to death, and then disappear into the forest. That’d put him one up on the American.

  He pulled open the tent flap again and was surprised to find the man in his thoughts waiting for him, a translator already wedged in—visible by the hair-thin antenna that poked out only millimeters from his ear canal. Mawgis wore a bright smile on his face. A bulging cloth pouch dangled from a thick string around his waist. He held out one of the blue-and-red-glazed mugs Jake remembered from the day before.

  My mirror image, Jake thought again, seeing how Mawgis needed two hands to hold the mug, just as he would have needed two hands. Seeing again what others saw when they looked at him. Remembering the many meetings he’d sat in, using two hands on the coffee cup that others handled with ease one-handed. Those unavoidable meals with others who watched him struggle in public with adult-sized cutlery. Did they want to lean over and cut his meat for him, butter the roll? All of which were nothing compared to the looks of shock he’d seen too many times when he first walked into a room. No one expected a well-respected negotiator to be a small man—as though the job itself demanded height to be done properly.

  He’d used it though, that shock, to his advantage. Let people think he was as naive as the child he resembled. Not that he was proud of it, but you played the hand you held.

  “Morning,” Jake said coolly. He fished in his pants pocket, found the translator, and put it in place.

  “Sleep well?” Mawgis asked.

  “Poorly. Strange dreams.”

  “You mix journeys and dreams in your mind,” Mawgis said. “The visit to your president was real.”

  Jake, his face as blank as smoothed sand, gazed at the Tabna chief and waited for him to go on.

  Mawgis raised his eyebrows and held out the mug. “Maté. You will feel better for it.”

  Jake thought he couldn’t feel much worse. He reached out both hands and took the mug, drained it, and handed it back. It irked him that he did feel better.

  “Come,” Mawgis said. “We will walk.”

  He couldn’t say no. There was a deal to settle. The aspirin had kicked in, and the maté, softening the burn in his head.

  They strode through the camp, past women preparing food, some with babies suckling at their breasts, toddlers and older children playing, and men making spears and arrows. Jake and Mawgis might as well have been invisible for all the attention the people paid them. Joaquin and Kevin and his crew were nowhere to be seen. Still asleep, Jake supposed.

  The Tabna chief never broke stride, even as they reached the camp’s edge and plunged into the forest. He moved with a purposeful and steady gait through the tangled growth. Jake half ran, half hobbled along behind, his boots slapping noisily against the wet, gummy soil where the Tabna’s bare feet had stepped in silence. A stork lifted itself heavily toward the sky—probably upset by all the noise he was making, Jake thought. He half tripped over a tree root, knocking his shoulder against a giant green-and-yellow flower that filled the air with an overripe scent. He caught his balance and picked up his speed to try and catch up with the man in front of him.

  “Mawgis,” he called several times as they went deeper into the forest, but each time the Tabna waved him off with a determined shake of his head and kept going.

  Winded and lost, Jake wondered where Mawgis was taking him and why. He was a fool to have followed the man into the forest and to have kept following until he no longer knew the way back and had no choice but to stay with his guide. He was a fool, and this was his job—to stick with Mawgis until negotiations were completed or had broken beyond repair. He silently cursed Mawgis and Father Canas, and his friend Ashne Simapole of World United, who had sent him here so ill prepared. His feet hurt and he cursed them too, but he kept after Mawgis.

  A heavy cannonball fruit crashed like a small bomb exploding from a tree in front of them. Startled, Jake covered his ears and nearly fell. The smell of decaying leaves rose from where the fruit had hit the ground. A burst of blue, yellow, red, and black filled the air as parrots and toucans took flight from a nearby fig tree.

  At the banks of a small river, the Tabna finally slowed his pace and stopped. He looked around at the landscape as if assuring himself he’d come to the right place, and then settled himself on a large flat-topped rock. He motioned for Jake to sit as well.

  Jake stood half bent over, trying to catch his breath. His pulse hammered. Dirt stuck to every exposed inch of his sweat-washed skin. Mosquitoes buzzed through the air. His frustration with Mawgis burned brighter by the second. When his heart had slowed its pounding and he could breathe normally again, Jake adjusted the translator to make it more comfortable in his ear and sat next to Mawgis on the rock. He leaned forward and loosened the too-tight laces on his boots.

  “Feet first?” Mawgis said. They were the first words he’d said since the two of them had left the camp.

  “My shoes pinch, if that’s what you mean.” Irritation was in Jake’s voice. He swallowed it back down. Now that Mawgis had dragged him all this way, the Tabna might feel he’d sufficiently won the game and be ready to talk seriously about benesha. Showing anger risked offending him or giving him even more points in this game of one-upmanship they were playing. Jake didn’t want to do either.

  “You’re growing,” Mawgis said.

  Jake rubbed his sore feet through the thick socks. “I doubt it.”

  Mawgis smiled. “It’s true, though. You paid for the benesha with yourself. It’s no longer true that you stopped growing when you were a child, never to grow again. Soon you will be the height you were meant to be.” The older man folded his arms and looked away downriver.

  Jake’s face warmed. Mawgis knew just what to say to weaken him, a statement so ludicrous as to be laughable—the one thing Jake longed for.

  “Can we talk now about benesha?” he asked. “Are you willing to share the mineral and help end hunger?”

  Mawgis swiveled his head with studied slowness. “I have already said. We want the hungry to have our gift.”

  Jake let a few moments pass, the silence between them broken by the hum of insects swirling over the river and a flock of green parakeets flying overhead. He felt Mawgis’s eyes on him, but stared back toward the forest. Mawgis shifted on the rock where they sat.

  Jake turned and looked at him. “Tell me what happens to people who eat meat from a benesha-fed animal.”

  A harlequin beetle made its way up Mawgis’s leg. He flicked it away. “I have told you that, too. They die.”

  A cold numbness crept through Jake. To hear those words in a drugged state was one thing. To hear them in normal conversation, quite another.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  Mawgis shrugged. “Because to not believe me is to risk that I told the truth and you did nothing t
o stop it.” He leaned close, peering into Jake’s eyes. “You are still under the influence, you know. Perhaps a bit more benesha travel . . .”

  Jake felt his muscles tense at the suggestion, the idea that Mawgis could send him off to God-knew-where again with what? A flick of his hand? Unless Mawgis had wet benesha in the pouch he was wearing.

  Mawgis grinned. Jake drew a deep breath and looked around.

  A half-dozen wood-sided buildings now stood by the river, a different place than where he and Mawgis had first settled onto the rock—the water so wide here that Jake could no longer see to the far shore. Bloated bodies drifted on the greenish-brown water, some facedown, some face up. More bodies lay on the ground outside the buildings, arms flung out or clutched tight to sides, legs twisted oddly, heads turned to the side. Men, women, and children, their faces distorted in looks of surprise or horror. Flies buzzed in the air, thick as lowering clouds. Vultures tore at the flesh. A distance away, chickens pecked at plates of feed—feed that was flecked with tiny bits of green stone.

  Jake slammed his eyes shut to block out the sight.

  Mawgis tapped his shoulder. “You can look now. It’s just the two of us again.”

  Jake opened his eyes and glared at the other man. “Why would you do this?”

  “Too many people wanting too much. It’s time,” Mawgis said. “The hungry will eat benesha meat and they will die, as they should, and the earth will come back into balance. The world will be better for it.”

  Jake’s throat went dry. “I won’t be returning to the camp, will I?”

  Mawgis hiked up one shoulder in a shrug. “You wandered off alone sometime last night or early this morning. Who knows why? To think, perhaps, or out of curiosity to see the forest. Your companions will spend a lot of time looking for you before they reluctantly give up and go back without you.” He smiled kindly. “They like you very much, you know. They were impressed with your bravery and clear thinking when the canoe turned over on the river during your journey here. Except Ian, of course. He finds you disgusting.”