Tropic of Night Read online

  Whit-purr Whit-purr Whit-purr WHIT WHIT

  My blood curdles, a fist presses down on my heart. It can’t be, but I know very well that it could. It is the unmistakable call of a honeyguide. I have heard it a thousand times in Africa, but there are no honeyguides in South Florida. We used to say it was calling my husband; that was before we knew what the honeyguide meant, its ways, that it was a kind of sorcerers’ mascot because of its magical powers, how it got men to do its work of busting up beehives, how it was never stung. How it eviscerated the nestlings of other birds with a special scalpel-like tooth on its beak.

  I go through the door to the landing and listen. Ordinary twitters and creaks. Imagination. Funk. As sweat dries on my skin, I go back to the hammock. Not a honeyguide, not yet. An auditory hallucination. Speaking of which …

  I’m thinking that it must have been just around now, a little earlier perhaps, that I first laid eyes on Marcel Vierchau. It was finals week, and I was in my Barnard room studying French and hating it, wanting to be home, out sailing, at the beach. I am quite good with languages, the speaking part at least, which put me into French lit classes over my head. This was Twentieth-Century French Prose. Colette was fine, but Sartre? Derrida? Not in balmy June. My junior year: so, fourteen years ago. I remember feeling the need to get out of the room, take a walk, get a cold one, maybe lie on the grass or join the perpetual volleyball game in front of Minor Latham for a while. The point is, I was just about to go out, I was looking for my wallet, at that very moment, that’s how close I was to not having my life changed, when Tracy O’Neill came barging in and said, Come on, we’re going to see Marcel Vierchau. And I said, Who’s Marcel Vierchau, and she said he’s the world’s greatest anthropologist, dummy, and he’s gorgeous, we’re all going to go over to Low Library and sit in the front row and masturbate. I said I wanted to get a beer and she grinned and held out the remains of a six-pack of Bud, sweaty-cold.

  So we went, maybe five or six of us, all dorm rats, sick of the lamp and up for something rich and strange. Low Library rotunda is the largest venue on the Columbia campus and they needed the seats. Maybe three hundred people showed up, well over half passing for maidens. We didn’t get to sit in the very front, but we had good position, well within masturbation range, as O’Neill remarked.

  The star was introduced by a dim old soul, a relic of the Mead era named Matson, or Watson. She told us that Vierchau was a rare piece of cheese, an ornament of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, French Academy, U.S. Academy of Sciences (hon.), author of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, twenty-nine weeks on the Times bestseller list, and on and on, lists of publications, editorships, adding up to the hottest French anthropologist since Lévi-Strauss (his mentor, in fact), ran the hundred in 10.1, could bench 350, and had a penis like a baguette. O’Neill, spluttering, added these, and we were all making a small spectacle of ourselves, when the lady came to the end of her dithyramb, and Vierchau walked out on the stage.

  Well. He really was gorgeous to the point of absolute unfairness. I am afraid we gaped. The hair was the first thing, a huge thick flowing mop, sunset-colored, touched with silver on the sides, remarkable, threw a glow out across the audience like a baby spot. Beneath this, the necessary broad brow, deep-set sea-blues behind round wire-rims, prow of a nose, icebreaker chin, and lips, as they say, red as wine. He was wearing what he almost always wore, a dark silk turtleneck, a Harris tweed jacket, and dark, beautifully cut Italian slacks.

  The applause died down, he paused, smiled, wiggled his eyebrows to show that he did not take himself that seriously, thanked Watson or Matson, reminded her that she had neglected to mention his membership in the Bicycle Club of France. Titters. “Our species,” he began, “is approximately a hundred thousand years old.” I suppose I must have heard that speech at least fifty times, and read it too; it was the basis for an article in Nature in 1986. “I must give the Speech again, Jeanne-Claire,” he would say, flourishing another invitation. He always added some new stuff, as research advanced, but basically it was the same line: his life’s work. And misleading in the extreme, he always added. Only for the goyim, he used to say. So I can easily put together the themes here in my head, swinging in the moonlight.

  A hundred thousand years ago, people with the same sort of brains we all have, speaking languages no less complex, lived, worked, loved, and died. Recorded history, however, begins between eight and six thousand years ago, coincident with the development of agriculture in several regions of the Old World. Before that, a great silence, some ninety thousand years of silence. And so I wonder, what were those people doing with those so excellent brains all those endless days and nights? Not working all the time. Hunter-gatherers in benign climates do not work very hard. Their tools are simply made, as are their shelters. Most hunter-gatherer tribes work fewer hours a week than Frenchmen; far fewer than Americans. So what do they do? This, to me, is one of the great tasks of anthropological science, to penetrate the great silence, using as our informants the tiny number of people who are still making their livings that way.

  So, I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books, no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk to? I think you would play with the environment, Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your environment so deep that we children of industrial civilization can scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps, than we have with our lovers or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated bodies. They would be participants in an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive, whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries, remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the manipulation of the subjective world. Now, you may be familiar with the statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term, we call this magic.

  Here he always paused, to let it sink in. The scientists in the crowd would look nervously at one another, the New Age types would beam and chortle. Yes, magic, he would say. Even the word itself connotes charlatanism, the phony, what is not to be taken seriously. From magi, the word the ancient Greeks contemptuously used for itinerant Persian conjurers. Today, in the West, to all sensible people, it means theatrical trickery, like this.

  At this point he would take an egg out of his pocket. You have all seen this a hundred times, yes? I make the egg vanish, so. I produce it out of an empty hand, so. And out of my mouth, so. I drop it from one hand and catch it in my other hand?so?but the egg has vanished from the lower hand. You all saw it drop, but it is not where you thought it was. Ah, it is still in the hand that dropped it. But no. There is nothing in either hand. Technically, called a vanish-and-acquitment. But here is the egg again out of my ear. Technically, a production. You marvel, yes. Finally, I crack the egg on the podium and abracadabra! It turns into a pigeon which flies up to the ceiling. Do not worry, please, this pigeon is an indoor pigeon and will not make a mess.

  Gasps. Screams. Vast applause.

  His eyes crinkle entrancingly behind the glittering lenses. So, let us deconstruct what you have just seen. I am French, therefore I deconstruct. First, all of us bring to this phenomenon a cultural load. We do not observe it objectively; there is no such thing. And this load tells
us that there is no magic. What you are observing is merely legerdemain. You cannot tell me how I did it, perhaps, you cannot explain what you saw, but you have utter confidence that the egg did not actually vanish, that the pigeon did not actually appear out of the egg. But let us take a poll, this being America: who here thinks I have actual magical powers?

  Half a dozen hands shot up, waving wildly, us girls, naturellement, and a few of the crystal-and-patchouli crowd. Laughter, in which he joined.

  I will be available for worship after the lecture, he remarked, to more chuckling. But most of you do not, and properly so, for you are all materialist empiricists. That is your culture. Of course there are people who simply believe in magic in the same way that some of you believe in a religion, but this is not what I am talking about. Again, this is a technology. It works whether you believe in it or not, just as a pistol will shoot you dead whether or not you believe that there are such things as pistols. What I just did with the egg and the pigeon was to demonstrate one element of this technology, which is the control of the consciousness of one person, or a group of persons, by another. I created an illusion, yes? One easily penetrated by the powers of science. But I am not interested in the mechanics; I am only interested in the psychic reality, the distraction itself. Among traditional peoples where the shamanic technologies are well developed, the manipulation of consciousness has advanced to a much higher degree. We have ample evidence that, for example, shamans and sorcerers can enter the dreams of sleeping people and stage-manage the dream state. Sorcerers can elicit in their subjects psychic states that are somewhere between dreaming and sleeping, so that the subject entertains elaborate illusions that seem undeniably real, a kind of induced psychosis. Sorcerers can play with some skill on the interactions between mind and body, an area in which scientific medicine is almost entirely incompetent. We speak, for example, of the placebo effect in a drug trial as junk data. We toss it out, yes? We are only interested in the drug effect, so we design the double-blind trial, no one knows what is the pharmaceutical and what is the sugar pill. The patients who get rid of the cancer or whatever with the sugar pill, we don’t worry about them. They are of no interest. And when someone is sick, or in pain, and we cannot find an organic, a material cause, we dismiss it. It is only psychosomatic, we say. And the mental diseases …

  Yes, those mental diseases. A scratching rustle on the roof, claws, and a grunting sound. It’s happening again. I stop swinging in the hammock, my chest tightens, and my ki leaps up into my throat. I get out of the hammock and my knees barely support me. Deep breaths now, controlled breathing. When everything is reeling out of control, still you can control your own breathing, push the ki gently down where it belongs. So my sensei advised, and so I do now, and it works. The first time I was attacked by a witch, it was just like this.

  More scratching and snarling and a heavy thump on the landing at the top of our steps. The child stirs in her sleep. I walk trembling to the door, wondering if I have enough komo in my hidden box and whether I can remember the spell. If this really is a jinja …

  But upon stepping out onto the landing what I see is the fat ass of a momma raccoon waddling down my stairs, accompanied by her two kits.

  I collapse on the top step, making a peculiar noise somewhere between hysterical laughter and tears. How bland and restful nature! How like Dolores not to know that there was a raccoon nesting in the neighborhood. Jane would have known.

  The raccoon family vanishes into the thick foliage at the edge of the yard. There’s a faint breeze, but it’s blowing away from Polly Ribera’s house, and so the dog Jake does not smell the raccoons and set up a holler. I don’t go back to my hammock. This is unusual; Dolores does not like the night, a bed-by-ten girl ordinarily. The step I am sitting on is rough, however, and is pressing uncomfortably into my meager bottom, and so I stand and stretch and descend into the garden. I am wearing nothing but the size-large T-shirt I sleep in, a thrift-shop purchase, ragged on the bottom and washed thin as paper, bearing the logo of the Miami Marlins.

  Rough grass against my feet, between my toes. I used to go barefoot in Danolo; Uluné recommended it, for drawing power from the earth. And worms too. A good deal of the sorcerer’s pharmacopoeia is devoted to vermifuges. I stand in the garden and open myself to the night just a crack, arms hanging, legs apart, face up for a moonbath, so good for the complexion, as the Olo believe. Sounds, the hum of the air conditioners, distant traffic, the odd airliner. Filter those out. The tiny sigh of the breeze, creeping through the half mile of city from the bay, just strong enough to make animalish flappings in the leathery crotons, enough to stir my moronic hairdo against my ears and forehead, stir my pubic hair against the tender neglected flesh of my groin.

  Oh, and there’s night, there’s night, when wind full of cosmic void feeds on our faces,as Rilke says, O and I wish this wind would eat my face, chew me down to the old Jane, Jane before Africa, I miss her so.

  But not before Marcel, no, and that day I saw him first, golden and full of magic powers. He went on, then, to describe his theory of deep interpretation; we must be like divers he said, like Captain Cousteau, immersed in the culture, so that we comprehend its subjective reality, in our own hearts and souls. It is like literature, he said. If you ask me to tell you about Proust and I say (and here he mimicked a dry academic voice) Proust is eighteen centimeters by twelve and four centimeters thick, colored green, and consisting of five hundred and seventy-two printed pages on which the following words appear: “the”: six thousand seven hundred fifty-two times; “of”: six thousand twenty-two … bah! You would think me a cretin, yes? This is anthropology. They want to be objective, like physicists, so they don’t ever truly read the book. You must read the book and let it work on your heart, and then, if you can, interpret it to your own people. And this is dangerous, as it is for scuba divers. You may swim like a fish, and the fish may think you’re a fish, but don’t throw away your tank and try to breathe water.

  Then he told about his seven years with the Chenka in Siberia, his training as a shaman, his adventures in the spirit world. There were slides with this part. Marcel in native dress, Marcel with various shamans, Marcel on a shaggy pony, indistinguishable from a dozen other Chenkas on shaggy ponies. Middle-distance shots, these, no faces showing. He had lived with these guys for seven years on the Siberian steppe, during which he had virtually no contact with the outer world.

  I whispered to O’Neill, “This is like Castaneda, with yurts.”

  “Not like Castaneda,” she said. “You read his book?”

  I had not. “Read it,” she said. “It’s got forty pages of footnotes. He’s got reams of data, tapes, the works. It’s real science; he kept his hose connected while he was doing all that. Castaneda is fiction.”

  We got shushed. Marcel went into his peroration, a rant about the imbecility of objective, reductionist explanations of human consciousness. It was, he said, like a New Guinea tribesman being plonked down in New York. What would he understand? Next to nothing. He would not even be able to see anything but vague and alarming shapes. When Captain Cook arrived in Australia, the aborigines failed to see his frigate, although it was sitting just offshore. They had no mental compartment to put it in, so they ignored it. The city of consciousness is just as baffling to the Western mind as Manhattan to the tribesman. Do we understand pain? No. Do we understand dreams? No, nor addiction, nor mental illness, nor desperate love, nor the anger that creates war and crime. Consciousness, the one common experience of mankind, is also the last unexplored country, a challenge to the scientist, but the very métier of the sorcerer. Thank you. Thunderous applause.

  My head was, as they say, in a whirl. O’Neill noticed and asked me if anything was wrong. Nothing was wrong. I had found my Life’s Vocation. I didn’t say that, though; I made my face all phony-dreamy and said, “I’m in love!” True also, but I didn’t know it then. O’Neill released her famous dirty snicker.

  We all giggled out of Low, like
a bunch of teenies from a boy-band concert, and down Low steps. And then we all went back to the books, except me. I snuck off up the hill to the bookstore, where I bought Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, and the text for Anthro 101; to the corner place, where I bought an Italian hero and a quart of Coke; and back to my room, where I shit-canned Sartre in French and read Vierchau and Lévi-Strauss in English, all the night through, and in the morning I bought a couple of whites from the dorm pusher and went into my French exam flying.

  I should have failed but, magically ( magically!), one selection for translation was from Colette’s Mes Apprentissages, which I love, and knew well, and the other was from (wait for it!) L’Apprenti du Sorcier, and screw all of you who memorized vast uncharted realms of Foucault and Derrida.

  Then I went to my adviser and got my major changed to anthropology, and later to the registrar and talked my way into a couple of already-closed summer session introductory courses, and signed up for sixteen credits in anthro and related subjects for my senior year. They wouldn’t let me into the seminar that Vierchau was teaching in the fall, distinguished visiting professor, very selective, no way, that was by invitation only, but I could audit with the instructor’s written permission. Which was an excuse to go see him.

  Back here in the now, the moon pops out from behind her low cloud, casting into silhouette the tall coco palms in the next street, and the breeze picks up a trifle and veers north. The palm fronds set up a gentle clatter and at that moment a mockingbird starts to sing. Entrancing. I am entranced, which I have not allowed myself to be for some time. I used to be quite good at it, so said Uluné. A technical term in sorcery, of course, ilegbo in Olo, but among us materialistas most often only figuratively used. Tears are rolling down my cheeks now, as the creature sings its tiny heart out against the castanets of the coco palms and the low hissing of the other foliage. The American nightingale, so called, a good substitute and no hungry generations tread it down either. Oh, I don’t need this, and I need it badly. For the first time since Africa it occurs to me that this life-in-death is not forever. I look up at the moon and in my trance it seems to stop moving against the clouds, the wind stops, and the clatter stops, and even the nightingale stops singing, and everything is for one long instant made of shining stone.