Transfigurations Page 6

  It's four days since your counterpart, Eisen Zwei, stirred things up with his disorderly three-course banquet. Since then, nothing.

  I'm walking. I'm walking among the Asadi. They fail to see me even though I'm just as solid, just as real, as they are. Even the ones I've given names to—Campy, Werner, Gus, Oliver, and the others—refuse to grant me the simple fact of my existence. This is

  hard, Ben. This is difficult to accept. Nonetheless, I continue to feel a paternal tenderness toward these few Asadi—Jane, Thelma, Dianne, Celestine, and the others—I've been able to recognize and name. . . .

  I've just walked by Celestine. The configuration of her features gives her a gentle look, like a Quaker woman wearing a parka. Her seeming gentleness leads me to the topic of this commentary: How could a creature of Celestine's mien and disposition actually eat the flesh of one of her own kind? God help me if these aliens are intelligent and self-aware, base-camp buggers, because I'm walking among cannibals!

  They encircle me. They ensorcel me. They fill me with a sudden dread, an awe such as the awe of one's parents that consumes the child who has just learned the secrets of conception and birth. Exactly thus, my dread of the Asadi, my awe of their intimate lives. . . .

  Turnbull is missing. Do you remember him? I named him Tumbull because he was small, like the pygmies the first Turnbull wrote about, like the pygmies I worked among. . . . Now I can't find Turnbull. Little Turnbull, squat and sly, is nowhere among these indifferent, uncouth people. I'd have found him by now, I know I would. He was my pygmy, my little pygmy, and now these aloof bastards—these Asadi of greater height than Turnbull—have eaten him! Eaten him as though he were an animal! a creature of inferior status! a zero in a chain of zeroes as long as the diameter of time! IVIay God damn them for their impious rapacity!

  [A lengthy pause during which only the shuffling of the Asadi can be heard.]

  I think my shout unsettled some of them. A few of them flinched! But they don't look at me, these cannibals, and I don't know whether to be outraged or gratified. A cannibal may never go too far toward acknowledging the existence of another of his kind, so uncertain is his opinion of himself. A cannibal's always afraid he'll ascribe more importance to himself than he deserves. In doing so, he discovers—in a moment of hideous revelation— where his next meal is coming from. He always knows where it's

  coining from, and he's therefore nearly always afraid.

  Cannibals—the civilized sort—are the most inwardly warring schizophrenics in all of Nature. On the one hand, Eisen, it requires a colossal arrogance to think oneself enough better than another member of one's own species to eat him. On the other, this same act demonstrates the abject self-abasement of the cannibal in his readiness to convert the flesh of his own kind into . . . well, let's be blunt about this, into shit. Grandiose haughtiness versus the worst sort of voluntary self-degradation. Have the Asadi incorporated these polar attitudes into the structure of their daily life? Does their indifference to one another result from the individual's esteem for himself? Could it be that the individual's lack of regard for his kind precipitates the practices of pariahhood and public humiliation? A schizophrenic society? Does the pattern of indifferent association during the day and compulsive scattering at night mirror the innate dichotomy of their souls? After all, who's more deluded than the cannibal? His every attempt to achieve union with his kind results in a heightened edienation from himself.

  [Chaney's microphone picks up the incessant shuffling of Asadi feet and the low sighing of a breeze in the rainforest.]

  Yes, yes, I know. This is all very bad anthropology. But I'm not really speaking anthropologically. I'm speaking metaphorically, and maybe I'm not tsJking about the Asadi at all. I realize full well, gang, that among human populations there are two types of cannibalism: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. I haven't forgotten all my training.

  Exocannibalism, Ben, usually occurs in a context of continuing warfare between tribes that are dependent to some extent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They war, you see, to protect their sedentary way of life or to expand their holdings into areas where the soil hasn't been depleted by overuse. Enemies eat one another to steal their adversaries' strength and to gain power over them. In such a context, cannibalism is patriotic, and human flesh is invariably kosher.

  The Asadi, not being agriculturists, and having no natural

  enemies here in the Synesthesia Wild, are not adherents of exocannibalism. Instead, Ben, they practice endocannibalism. Is that cleeir?

  What this means, in short, is that the Asadi regularly eat members of their own tribal unit, the only tribal unit on Bosk Veld. Usually, this form of cannibalism signifies an attempt on the part of the deceased's relatives and friends to incorporate the dead one's memories and spirit by a ritual ingestion of his flesh. Eating the dead under such circumstances, then, is an act of homage and a visible expression of the community's desire to insure the continuity of its life-style and its membership. Christians, by the way, participate in symbolic endocannibalism every time they celebrate Holy Communion. Eat this — drink this — in remembrance of Me.

  Why, you may wonder, does the endocannabilism of the Asadi so offend and demoralize me? Because, God help me, I've begun regarding them as alien projections of my own consciousness, and, expecting better of myself, I expected better of them. Does that make sense? I'm afraid you'll think it doesn't. But, damn it, just when I'd begun to see glimmerings of something lofty in their makeups, old E.Z.—like some nineteenth-century Indian headman putting on a potlatch—comes dragging three carcasses into the clearing and unleashes the ravenous animal in every one of his goggle-eyed subjects! It's more than I can stand.

  The Asadi ignore me. It's hot out here, and they ignore me. They go by, they go by, revolving about me like so many motorized pasteboard cutouts. And Turnbull's not among them, he doesn't revolve anymore, he's been butchered and consumed. Butchered and consumed, do you hear? With the same wanton self-centeredness that we used to poison the Ituri and rout out the people who lived there. Turnbull's dead, base-camp buggers, and There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no

  PART THREE

  The Ritual of Death and Designation

  From the final draft of the one complete section ofEgan Chaney's otherwise unfinished ethnography:

  DEATH

  On Day 120 the old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the general "feast," I then supposed that his sickness was unrelated to his earlier intemperance. I am still of this mind. For five days he had eaten nothing, although the other Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and heartwood they came across. They ignored the old man,

  and the old man's huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me.

  Eisen Zwei's sickness altered this pattern. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness, he abruptly rose and made the horribly glottal, in-sucking noises he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I came running from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from their old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling, and stared with great platterlike eyes whose pinwheel-ing irises had stalled on a single color. A spastic rumbling replaced the old man's in-sucking noises, and he bent over at the waist, his arms above his head, to heave and heave again—until it seemed he would soon be vomiting into the dust the very lining of his bowels. Out of his mouth came the half-digested crimson oddments of his spectacular, six-day-old meal. Abashed by the sight, stung by the odor, I turned away. The heaving continued, and since the Asadi stared on, I turned back to observe their culture in action. Duty is a harsh mistress.

  The chieftain's huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped in the air like a small, wind-collapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before, and was surprised that it was capable of flight. Its ungainly flapping excited the already well-aroused population of the clearing, and togethe
r we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back, and dip threateningly toward the branches of the trees on the western perimeter. The old man continued to vomit, but now every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the uncertain aerial progress of the huri, which, at one point, plummeted toward the perch where The Bachelor sometimes sequestered himself.

  But The Bachelor wasn't there, and I had no idea where he could be.

  Crashing downward through the branches, the huri caught itself up and returned with blind devotion to the airspace over its master. An ugly joke, it sardonically defied gravity.

  I thought that at last the huri was going to feed, that its sole diet might well consist of Eisen Zwei's vomitings. I expected the starved creature to fall to earth upon these—but it did not.

  Somehow it kept itself aloft, flapping, flapping, waiting for the old man to finish.

  Finally, it was not the huri that waded into the vile pool of vomit, but the old man's shameless conspecifics. My curiosity overcame my revulsion, and I watched the Asadi carry away their portions of the half-digested mess as if each semisolid piece were an invaluable relic. No fighting, no elbowing, no eye-searing abuse. Each individual simply picked out his relic, took it a short distance into the jungle, and deposited it in some hidden place for temporary safekeeping.

  During the solemn recessional, the huri quickened the air with its wing beats and an anonymous Asadi supported Eisen Zwei by clutching—tenderly clutching—his mane. When everyone had taken away a chunk of regurgitated flesh, the chieftain's attendant laid him down in a dry place, and the huri descended to squat by its master's head.

  I should mention that The Bachelor was one of those who appeared in the mourning throng to select and depart with some memento of Eisen Zwei's illness. He came last, took only a palm-sized morsel, and retreated to the clearing's edge. Here he climbed into the tree above which the huri had flown its nearly disastrous mission only minutes before. Until sunset The Bachelor remained here, observing and waiting.

  On Days 121, 122, and 123, Eisen Zwei continued in his illness, and the Asadi paid him scant attention. They brought him water twice a day and considerately refrained from stepping on him. The huri sat by the old man's head. It seemed to be waiting for him to die. It never ate.

  At night the Asadi deserted their dying leader without a glance, and I was afraid he would die while they were gone. Several times, looking out at his inert silhouette, moonlight dripping through the fronds, I thought he had died, and a mild panic assailed me. Did I have a responsibility to the corpse?

  But the old man did not die, and on Day 124 another change occurred. Eisen Zwei sat up and stared at Denebola as it crossed

  the sky—but he stared at the angry sun through spread fingers, hands crooked into claws, and he tore impotently through the blur of light that Denebola must have seemed to him. The huri sat smug and blindly knowing, as always. But the Asadi noticed the change in the old man and reacted to it. As if his writhing dissatisfaction with the sun were a clue, they divided into two groups again and formed attentive semicircles to the north and south of Eisen Zwei. They watched him wrestling with the sun's livid corona, tearing at its indistinct streamers of gas with gnarled hands.

  At noon the old man rose to his feet, stretched out his arms, sobbed, clawed at the sky, and suddenly sank back to his knees. A pair of Asadi from each group went to his aid. They lifted him from the ground. Others on the clearing's edge selected large, lacquered palm leaves and passed these over the heads of their comrades to the place where the old man had collapsed. The Asadi supporting Eisen Zwei took these leaves, arranged them in the shape of a pallet, and then placed the old man's fragile body on the bed they had made.

  The second cooperative endeavor I had witnessed among the Asadi, the first having been the shaving of The Bachelor's mane. It was short-lived, though, for aimless shambling replaced chieftain-watching as the primary activity within the two groups on either side of his pallet. Denebola, finally free of the old man's gaze, fell toward the horizon.

  I walked unimpeded through the clearing and bent down over the dying chieftain, careful to avoid the huri that eyed me with its uncanny, eyeless face. I looked down into the genuine eyes of its master.

  And experienced a shock, a physical jolt.

  The old man's eyes were burnt-out, blackened holes in a hominoid mask. Utterly dead they were, two char-smoked lenses waiting for the old man's body to catch up with their lifelessness.

  And then the diffused red light that signaled sunset in the Wild came pouring through the foliage, and the clearing emptied.

  Alone with Eisen Zwei and his huri, I knew that it would be during this night that the old man died. I tried to find some

  intimation of life in his eyes, saw none, and withdrew to the cover of the Wild and the security of my lean-to. I did not sleep. But my worst premonitions betrayed me, and in the morning I looked out to see Eisen Zwei sitting cross-legged on his pallet, the huri once again perched on his shoulder.

  And then, filtering through the jungle, the tenuous, copper-colored light signaling sunrise and rejuvenation on BoskVeld. The Asadi returned, once again taking up their positions to the north and the south of their dying chieftain. Day 125 had begun.

  I call the events of Day 125, taken as a cumulative whole, the Ritual of Death and Designation. I believe that we will never fully understand the narrowly "political" life of the Asadi until we can interpret, with precision, every aspect of this Ritual.

  The color of the eyes of every Asadi in the clearing—only The Bachelor's excepted—declined into a deep and melancholy indigo. And stalled there. Profound indigo and absolute silence. So deeply absorbent were the eyes of the Asadi that Denebola, rising, could throw out scarcely a single dancing, shimmering ray. Or so it seemed. The morning was an impressionist painting rendered in flat pastels and dull primaries. A paradox.

  And then the Asadi's heads began to rock from side to side, the chin of each individual inscribing a small figure eight in the air. The heads moved in unison. This went on for an hour or more as the old chieftain sat nodding in the monumental morning stillness.

  At last, as if they had inscribed figure eights for the requisite period, the Asadi broke out of their groups and formed several concentric rings around the old man. The members of each ring began to sway. The inaudible flute I had once believed to be in the Wild had now certainly been exchanged for an inaudible bassoon. Ponderously, the Asadi swayed, their great manes undulating with a slow and beautifully orchestrated grief. And The Bachelor—all by himself, beyond the outermost ring—swayed also, swayed in lugubrious cadence with the others. The rhythmic swaying lasted through the remaining hours of the forenoon and on toward the approach of evening.

  I retired to my lean-to, but thought better of just sitting there

  and climbed the tree in which The Bachelor had often perched. I forgot about everything but the weird ceremony in the clearing. I gave myself up completely to the hypnotic movements of the grey, shaggy-headed creatures that a bewildering universe had given me to study. . . .

  I nodded but I did not sleep.

  Suddenly Eisen Zwei gave a final sob, maniacal and heartrending, and grabbed the beast clinging with evil tenacity to his mane. He grabbed it with both palsied hands. He exerted himself to what seemed his last reserve of strength and, strangling the huri, lurched out of the dust to his feet. The huri flapped, twisted, and freed one wing. The old man squeezed his hands together tind attempted to grind the life out of the creature who had imprisoned him even as it did his bidding. He was not successful. The huri used its tiny hands to scour fine crimson wounds in Eisen Zwei's withered cheeks and buckled forehead. Then it flapped out of the old man's grasp and rose to tree level.

  I feared it would dive upon me in my borrowed perch, but it skirted tlie perimeter of the clearing, dipping, banking, silently cawing. Its imaginary screams curdled my blood. Meanwhile, Eisen Zwei fell sideways across his pallet and died.

  The Asadi chie
ftain was dead. He died just at sunset.

  I waited for his people to flee into the Wild, to leave his brittle corpse for an Earthman's astonished scrutiny. They did not flee. Even though the lethal twilight was gathering about them, they stayed. The attraction of the old man's death outweighed their fear of exposing themselves in an open place to the mysteries of darkness.

  In my arboreal lookout I realized I had witnessed two things I had never before seen among the Asadi: Death and a universal failure to repair.

  DESIGNATION

  The Ritual of Death and Designation had passed into its second stage before I truly comprehended that stages existed. I ignored my hunger and put away the thought of sleep.

  The Asadi converged upon the old man's corpse. Those of smallest size were permitted to crowd into the center of the clearing and lift the dead chieftain above their heads. The young, the deformed, the weak, and the congenitally slight of stature formed a double column beneath the old man's outstretched body and began moving with him toward the northern end zone.

  Arranged in this fashion, they forced a new revelation upon me. These were Asadi whose manes were a similar texture and color: a stringy, detergent-scum brown. They bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei with uncomplaining acquiescence. The larger, sleeker specimens of Asadi—those with luxuriant silver, silver-blue, or golden manes—formed single columns on each side of their lackluster counterparts; and together these two units, like water inside a moving pipe, flowed toward the north—

  —The one direction that Eisen Zwei had not entered from on the day he brought those three dressed-out carcasses into the clearing.

  Driver ants in Africa use just this sort of tubular alignment when they wish to move great distances as a group: the workers inside the column, the warriors without. And nothing on that immense dark continent is more feared than driver ants on the march. With, of course, the singular and noteworthy exception of Humankind.

  Almost too late I realized that the Asadi would be out of the clearing and beyond my reach unless I got out of The Bachelor's tree. Nearly falling, I scrambled down. As if viewed through a photographer's filter, the foliage through which the mourners marched gave off a soft gauzy glow. I ran. I found that I could keep up with very little effort, so cadenced and funereal was the step of their procession. I slowed to a walk behind it.