Full Spectrum 3 Part 45

"Guerrilla women?" Harris repeated. "Everything. I was poisoned by female agents of the Panama Defense Forces." He took a deep breath. "You got anything here I can drink?"

His superior gestured to the wet bar. Harris poured himself a shot of whiskey. He swallowed it all at once. "The toad is an important Mayan symbol of hallucinosis." Whiskey warmed his tongue and his throat. "In medieval European witchcraft, they used to decompose toads in menstrual blood for use in potions.

" 'Toad, that under cold the stone, / Days and nights hast thirty-one / Swelter'd venom sleeping got, / Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!'" Harris said.

Harris's superior was staring at him. Harris's superior was not an educated man. "Shakespeare," Harris said, by way of apology for showing off. "I've been reading up on it. I mean I don't know these things off the top of my head. I'm not really a toad man." Harris's superior continued to stare. Harris poured another drink to steady himself. "In Haiti, the toad is symbol of the zombie." Harris tossed his whiskey into his throat and avoided looking at his superior. "What do you know about Carry A. Nation?" Harris asked.

"Make it a written report," his superior said.

Item one: There are real zombies.

The woman could see where Harris was floating above his body. She began to sing to him, low, but he could hear her even over the drums. "Ti bon ange," she sang. The egg in her hand became a jar made of clay. She held it out so he would come down closer and look. She wanted him to look inside it and not at her, because her shape was not holding. She was not a beautiful woman at all; she was an ugly woman, old and ugly. Her skin folded on her neck like a toad's. Harris found this transformation a little insulting. He remembered how much he loved his wife. He had spoken with her only today. He couldn't wait to get back to his body and home to her. He refused to be seduced by an ugly old woman instead. "Ti bon ange," she sang, and her voice was low and croaked. "Come look in my jar."

Item two: the ti bon ange. Ti bon ange means the little good angel. Every person who has ever lived is made up of five components. These are the z'etoile, the n'ame, the corps cadavre, the gros bon ange, and the ti bon ange. We need concern ourselves here only with the last three.

The gros bon ange is the undifferentiated life force. It binds you to the rest of the living world.

The ti bon ange is your personal life force. The ti bon ange is your individual personality.

The corps cadavre is your body.

Harris could see the dark opening of the jar beneath him, a circular pool of black. The circle grew until he could have fit inside it. He didn't know if it was growing because the woman was raising it or if he was slipping toward it like sand sucked into the throat of an hourgla.s.s. Either way was perilous. Harris looked for someplace dark to hide. Harris slid into the bright blackness of the stone toad, resting in the hand of his inert corps cadavre.

The American captain came and knelt on the other side of Harris. "What have we here?"

"DEA." The beautiful woman was back. The American captain wouldn't have even spoken to the ugly old woman. She turned her jar into a winegla.s.s and drank from it innocently.

Item three: creating a zombie. In order to create a zombie, you need to separate the ti bon ange from the gros bon ange. You need to take the ti bon ange out of the corps cadavre and leave the gros bon ange behind.

The bokor accomplishes this with bufotoxin, an extremely potent poison milked from the glands of the Bufo marinus toad, and tetrodotoxin, taken from the skin, liver, t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, and ovaries of the Tetraodontiformes, a family of fish that includes the blowfish. Bufotoxin stimulates cardiac activity. Tetrodotoxin causes neuromuscular paralysis. In proper doses, taken together, they produce a living corpse.

It is critical that the dosage not be too high. Too much poison and you will kill the body, forcing the gros bon ange to abandon it as well.

"I know," the captain said.

The woman wanted the captain to go away so that she could sing to Harris again. "He's had too much to drink."

The captain flicked a finger at Harris's nose. Harris saw him do it. "Undercover is p.u.s.s.y work. I wish just once the DEA would send out an agent with some b.a.l.l.s."

The woman was angry and it made her old, but the captain wasn't looking.

"Pompous self-righteous p.r.i.c.ks," he said. "The most ineffective agency in the whole U.S. Government, and that's saying something."

The captain looked at her. She was beautiful and drank red wine. Her eyes were as bright as coins. "I wish..." said the captain. He moved closer to her. "Shall I tell you what I wish?" he said. Harris was relieved to see that the captain was not going away, not unless the woman became old before him, and this was something she was, apparently, reluctant to do. Perhaps she wanted to surprise the captain with it. It served the captain right, seducing some old crone. The party spun around Harris, dancing couples, drinking couples. The black opalescence of the toad cast a yellow filter over the scene, but Harris could still see, dimly, that inside every woman there, no matter how graceful, no matter how beautiful, there was an old crone, biding her time.

"What are you writing?" Harris's wife asked him. She had come in behind him, too quietly. It made him jump. He leaned forward to block the screen.

"Nothing," he said. Harris loved his wife and knew that her dear, familiar body did not conceal the figure of a hostile old woman. Hadn't he always helped with the dishes? Hadn't he never minded? He was safe with her. Harris wished she wouldn't sneak up on him.

"What are you reading? Children's books?" she asked incredulously. She taught British, American, and women's literature at the junior college. She was, Harris thought, but lovingly, a bit of a sn.o.b. In fact, he had a stack of books on his desk-several j.a.panese pharmacologies, several volumes of Voudon rituals, and a couple of temperance histories. Only one was for children, but this was the one Harris's wife picked up. The Girl's Life of Carry A. Nation, it said on the spine. "Are you coming to bed?" Harris's wife asked.

"In a moment."

She went to bed without him, and she took the book with her.

Five-year-old Carry Moore sat on the pillared porch and waited impatiently for her mother to come home. Her father had bought her mother a new carriage! Little Carry wanted to see it.

The year was 1851. Behind Carry was the single-story Kentucky log house in which the Moores lived. It sat at the end of a row of althea bushes and cedar trees. The slave cabins were to the right. To the left was the garden: roses, syringa, and sweet Mary. Mary was Carry's mother's name.

Carry's mother was not like other mothers. Shortly after Carry was born, Mary decided her own real name was Victoria. She was not just playing let's pretend. Mary thought she was really the Queen of England. She would only speak to Carry by appointment. Sometimes this made Carry very sad.

Carry saw one of the slaves, Bill, coming down the road. Bill was very big. He was riding a white horse and was dressed in a fine red hunting jacket. Didn't he look magnificent? He carried a hunting horn, which made loud noises when you wound it. Honk! Honk! The Queen was coming!

Carry could see the carriage behind him. It was the most beautiful carriage she had ever seen. It had curtains and shiny wheels and matched gray horses to pull it. Henry, another slave, was the coachman. He wore a tall silk hat.

The carriage stopped. Mary got out. She was dressed all in gold with a cut-gla.s.s tiara. She wanted to knight Farmer Murray with her umbrella. Farmer Murray was their neighbor. He was weeding his onions. Farmer Murray tried to take Mary's umbrella away.

"Oh, Ma," said Carry. She ran down the road to her mother. "Take me for a ride."

Carry's mother would not even look at her. "Betsey," said Mary. Betsey was one of the slaves. She was only thirteen years old, but she was a married woman with a baby of her own. "This child is filthy. Take her away and clean her up."

"Ma!" said little Carry. She wanted so badly to go for a ride.

"We don't want her in the house," said Mary. Queens sometimes say we when they mean I. Mary was using the royal we. "She is to sleep with you tonight, Betsey," said Mary.

Carry didn't mind sleeping with Betsey, but it meant she had to sleep with Josh, Betsey's husband, too. Josh was mean. "Please don't make me sleep with Josh," Carry asked, but her mother had already walked past her.

Sometimes Carry's mother was not very nice to her, but Carry had lots of friends. They were her slaves! They were Betsey; and Judy, who was very old; and Eliza, who was very pretty; and Henry, who was smart; and Tom, who was nice. Carry ate with them and slept with them. They loved Carry.

One night Henry told a scary story. It was dark in the slave cabin, and they all sat around the fire. The story was about a mean slavemaster who died but came back in chains to haunt his slaves. They all believed in ghosts, which made the story even scarier. The story made Carry shiver.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Carry jumped right out of her seat. It was only Mr. Brown, the overseer. That made Carry laugh. "We thought you were someone bad coming," Carry said. Mr. Brown laughed too. He had just come to talk to Eliza. He took Eliza away to talk to her in his cabin. Judy and Betsey scolded Henry for telling a story that frightened Carry.

Item four: On Christmas Eve, at a party at the house of Senora Villejas, I narrowly survived an attempt by the Panama Defense League to turn me into a zombie. The agent of the attack was either a beautiful young Panamanian woman or an old one. She appeared to me as both.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, the body's nerve impulses are relayed from the spine under conditions of difference in the sodium and pota.s.sium concentrations inside and outside the axon membrane. The unique heterocyclic structure of the tetrodotoxin molecule is selective for the sodium channels. A change in the sodium levels, therefore, alters the effectiveness of the drug. My escape was entirely fortuitous. I had just drunk half a margarita. The recent ingestion of salt was, I believe, all that saved me.

I hardly need point out the usefulness to the drug cartels of a DEA agent entirely under their control.

Harris's hands were sweaty on the keyboard. He licked a finger to taste the salt. There was a map on the wall beside him, marked with five colored pins. One pin went through the Vatican emba.s.sy in Panama. One was in the Senate Bar in Miami. The others continued northward in a more or less direct line. If extended, the line would pa.s.s through Washington, D.C.

Item five: the loa. At death, the ti bon ange survives and returns to live in another body. Each of us has a direct spiritual lineage back through history. After many such renewals, the individual spirit metamorphoses into disembodied, undifferentiated energy. It joins the cosmic pool of life where the loa reside. When a loa is called back, it returns from this pool as a purified, mythological version of itself. The individual ti bon ange has become archetype. The same mythological figures we know as saints of the Catholic Church also appear to the Voudon as loa.

On the evening of December 24, 1989, I convinced several DEA agents to join me in calling forth a loa. We did not call forth a specific spirit by name. We called to our own spiritual ancestors. We asked for a weapon in our struggle against the drug cartels.

"Send us a DEA agent with b.a.l.l.s," Harris shouted. He was laughing, ecstatic to be in his body again. His hands tingled, his lips were numb, his thighs were warm. The war was over and he was not among the dead. It was Christmas Eve. Ruiz and Casteneda and Martin and several others, ties loosened, suit jackets askew, shoes off, danced the dance with Harris in Senora Villejas's garden. They threw the contents of their drinks into bushes pruned to the shapes of elephants and camels and giraffes. They crushed flowers with their hands, and Martin had unzipped his pants, rezipping them so that a white hothouse iris extended from his crotch. Of course, it hadn't really been the dance. It had only been something they made up.

I would prefer not to identify the men who joined me in this ceremony since the suggestion was entirely my own. I would like to repeat, in my defense, that I was at this time under the influence of bufotoxin, known for its hallucinogenic properties, as well as alcohol. I was not conducting myself soberly. We did not for a moment believe that we would be successful in calling up such a spirit. The entire enterprise was conducted as a drunken lark.

Clinically speaking, I suppose we were trying to protect ourselves from our fear of the Voudonist by making a joke of it. I had just survived an attack on my soul. That I did not believe in this attack, imagining it to be purely hallucinatory, does not change the fact that I was unnerved by it.

In the light of recent events, however, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible to me that we have underestimated the effectiveness of the South American drug cartel Voudon. The Haitian zombie is typically described as dim and slow-witted. Among our top government officials are men who fit this description, men known also to have been in Latin and South America. The DEA should make a list of these men, meet with them on some pretext, and offer them heavily salted foods.

Ruiz was gaping at him. A z'etoile fell from the sky into the garden. It came in the form of a burning rock. It landed in one of the camel bushes and melted the garden.

The shapes of the flowers and trees remained, but now they were made of fire. The DEA agents burst into flames. Harris could see their shapes, too. They continued to dance, stamping their flaming feet into the liquid fire of the lawn, shaking their flickering hands.

A woman emerged from the camel bush, not a real woman but a woman of flame. She grew larger and larger until she was larger than he was, wrapped her fiery arms around him. The air was so hot he couldn't breathe it. Harris panicked. He fumbled for the toad in his pocket, remembering how he'd escaped into it once already, but she touched it with one finger, melting it into something small and phallic. She laughed and melted it again, shapeless this time, a puddle of black gla.s.s.

"Who are you?" Harris asked, and she told him. Then she scorched the bottoms of his feet until he fainted from the pain and had to be carried home.

The next morning, the toad was in his pocket and his feet were healed. Ruiz came to say good-bye. "Feliz Navidad," said Ruiz. He brought a present of candied fruits. "Kiss your wife for me. You lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Harris thanked him for the gift. "Great party," said Harris carefully.

Ruiz shrugged. "You had a good time," he agreed. "You were a wild man."

They said little else. On his way to the airport, Harris directed his taxi past the home of Senora Villejas. The garden was green.

Carry's mother was sometimes better when she had new places and people to see. Carry's father, George, had trouble with his real estate business. The Moores moved often, and they grew poorer. When Carry was ten years old, they moved to Ca.s.s County, Missouri. Carry missed Kentucky. She missed Bill and Eliza, who had been sold. She missed her beautiful Kentucky house.

But Ca.s.s County was an exciting place to live! Just across the border, in Kansas, people who liked having slaves were fighting with people who didn't. The people who liked slavery were called bushwhackers. The people who didn't were called jay-hawkers. Kansas had an election to see if they would be a free state with no slaves. Bushwhackers from Missouri took the ballot boxes and said they would count the votes for Kansas.

They said that Kansas had voted to make it illegal to even say that you didn't like slavery. Anyone who said they didn't like slavery could be killed. So many died, people began to call the state "Bleeding Kansas."

This was a hard time for Carry. She went to bed for five years.

Psychologists now say maybe having a mother who thought she was Queen Victoria is what made Carry sick for such a long time. Psychologists are people who study how people feel and behave.

In 1857, her doctor said she had consumption of the bowels.

But George, her father, said her sickness was a punishment for not loving G.o.d. He came to see her sometimes in her bedroom. "Why won't you love G.o.d, Carry?" he would ask. He would have tears in his eyes. "You are going to die and break my heart," he would say.

Carry didn't want her father to be unhappy. She tried and tried to love G.o.d better. Carry thought she was a horrible sinner. Sometimes, when she was a little girl, she stole things for her slaves, little bits of ribbon, spoonfuls of sugar. Her own heart, Carry said, was the blackest, foulest place she ever saw.

One day when Carry was twelve, George took her to a revival meeting. "Who will come to Jesus?" the minister asked. Carry said that she would. Carry had a fever. George was afraid she was about to die, so even though it was winter, the minister and George took her right away to an icy creek. The water was cold! Carry waded into it, and the minister pushed her under.

When she came up, Carry said that she had learned to love G.o.d. She made her slaves come to her bedroom so she could preach to them. Carry told them that G.o.d sent you troubles because He loved you and wanted you to love Him. G.o.d loved Carry so much He made her ill. G.o.d loved the slaves so much He made them slaves. Now that Carry loved G.o.d, she began to get better, and in two more years she was able to get out of bed.

The slaves thought that since they loved G.o.d, maybe they didn't need to be slaves anymore. They told George they wanted to go to Lawrence, Kansas, where slavery was illegal. Lawrence, Kansas, was very close to Ca.s.s County, Missouri.

George told the slaves they were all moving to Texas instead. Texas was very far from Lawrence, Kansas.

Item six: I don't know where she got the body. A loa usually manifests itself through possession, but I remember no one at the party as large as this woman is reported to be. In addition, I have a memory of the loa materializing out of flame. I need not repeat that I was under the influence of bufotoxin at the time.

Item seven: The loa are frequently religious archetypes. Carry Nation, by her own account, spoke to angels when she was still a child and saw the Holy Ghost at her bas.e.m.e.nt window. She performed two miracles in her life and applied for sainthood, although the application was turned down. Since the DEA agents and I performed only a quasi-Voudon ritual, there is a certain logic to the fact that we got only a quasi-saint in return. The loa I summoned was Carry Amelia Nation. She told me so herself.

Item eight: Ask the General why he left the Vatican emba.s.sy.

Harris already knew the answer to item eight. Harris had friends among the attorneys on Miami's "white powder bar." It was not that their interests were compatible. It was merely a fact that they saw each other often.

"So what was it?" the attorney told Harris he had asked the General. "Why did you come out? Was it the white room with no windows and no TV? Was it the alcohol deprivation?"

"It was a woman," the General said.

"You spoke to your mistress." The attorney knew this much. She had been in U.S. custody at the time. "She persuaded you?"

"No." The General shuddered violently. His skin turned the color of eggplant. "It was a horrible woman, a huge woman, a woman no man would sleep with." He was, the attorney told Harris, very possibly a h.o.m.os.e.xual. Hadn't he started dressing in yellow jumpsuits? Hadn't he said that the only people in Panama with b.a.l.l.s were the queers and the women? "She sang to me," the General said.

"Heavy metal?" asked the attorney.

"Who Hath Sorrow, Who Hath Woe," said the General.

Harris did not include this in his report. It was an off-the-record conversation. And anyway, the DEA would trust it more if they found it themselves.

Harris pushed the key to print. Only the first part of his report fit on the DEA form. He stapled the other pages to it. He signed the report and poured himself a bedtime sherry.

The Moores did not live in Texas very long. Many of their slaves developed typhoid fever while walking there from Missouri. All their horses died. George tried to farm, but he did not know how. Mary told one of their neighbors that she was confiscating his lands and his t.i.tle, so he threw all their plows into the river. Soon there was nothing to eat.

George called his slaves together. He told them he had decided to free them. The slaves were frightened to be free with no food. Some of them cried.

It was very hard for the Moores to leave their slaves. But Carry said her father had done the right thing. She believed that slavery was a great wrong. She admired John Brown, a man who had fought for the rights of slaves in Kansas and was hanged for it when Carry was thirteen years old. All her life, John Brown was a hero of Carry's. "When I grow up," Carry said, "I will be as brave as John Brown."

Between Texas and Missouri was the Civil War. The Queen's carriage had been sold. When the Moores went back to Missouri, they had to ride in their little wagon. One day the ground shook behind them. They pulled off the road. It was not an earthquake. It was the Confederate cavalry on their way to the Battle of Pea Ridge. After the cavalry came the foot soldiers. It took two days and two nights for all the soldiers to pa.s.s them.

On the third day, they heard cannons. The Moores began to ride again, slowly, in the direction of the cannons. On the fourth day, the Confederate Army pa.s.sed them again. This time they were going south. This time they were running. The Moores drove their little wagon straight through the smoking battlefield of Pea Ridge.

They spent that night in a farmhouse with a woman and five wounded Union soldiers. The soldiers were too badly hurt to be moved, so the woman had offered to nurse them. She told Carry she had five sons of her own. Her sons were soldiers for the South. Carry helped her clean and tend the boys. One of them was dying. Mary knighted them all.

"Are you enjoying the book?" Harris asked, surprised that she was still awake. He took off his clothes and lay down beside her. She had more than her share of the comforter. He had to lie very close to be warm enough, putting an arm across her stomach, feeling her shift her body to fit him.

"Yes, I am," she said. "I think she's wonderful."

"Wonderful?" Harris removed his arm. "What do you mean, 'wonderful'?"

"I just mean, what a colorful, amazing life. What a story."

Harris put his arm back. "Yes," he agreed.

"And what a vivacious, powerful woman. After all she'd been through. What a resilient, remarkable woman."

Harris removed his arm. "She's insane," he suggested stiffly. "She's a religious zealot with a hatchet. She's a joke."

"She's a superhero," said Harris's wife. "Why doesn't she have her own movie? Look here." She flipped through The Girl's Life to the collection of photographs in the middle. She skipped over Carry kneeling with her Bible in her jail cell to a more confrontational shot: Carry in battle dress, threatening the photographer with hatchetation. "She even had a costume. She designed it herself, like Batman. See? She made special dresses with pockets on the inside for her rocks and ammunition. She could bust up bars and she could sew like the wind. Can Rambo say as much?"

"I bet she threw like a girl," said Harris, trying for a light tone to mask the fact that he was genuinely upset.

His wife was not masking. "Her aim was supposed to have been extraordinary," she said in her schoolteacher tone, a tone that invariably suggested disappointment in him. "Women are cut off from the rich mythological tradition you men have. Women are so hungry for heroines. Name one."