The Child, Cup and Resurrection
By María Concepción
I wake up in the TV room because Rocky is batting around his metal water dish.
The TV hisses static. I feel the night breeze from an open window.
A great bird, some kind of massive eagle, swoops in and perches on the window sill. I recognize it. It is Dr. Mike’s power animal, the Harpy Eagle.
I look down at my hand and see the crescent moon I drew there. I realize that, although I remain in the TV Room, I am still asleep. I am lucid dreaming. I am in control. I command the walls to disappear and they do.
I turn for the moon and, like the great goddess I lift up my arms to command it to rise. It does.
The bird glares at me… something sinister. I clap my hands and he flies away.
The full moon is rising, growing larger. I am excited.
But then in the corner… it’s Shekinah standing there in silence. I feel it is her even though there are no dirty streaks of tears, no blue dress.
Something is wrong… she is standing apart from the moon. She is older now. She is a woman. Then I look again. It is all wrong. It can’t be her. She must be in the moon. She is the moon. Then I see. Her eyes are vacant… white. Something is controlling her.
The imposter turns her back on me. I see the ankh of Isis on her back, and a mask around the back of her head. It is Harpy Eagle back again. Something is going wrong. I can’t move. Something terrible is happening.
She holds the moon in her hands and begins to turn it. Darkness descends across it, from a full moon to half-moon, to crescent, to a sliver. She shakes the giant orb… it is a globe… the earth. The oceans spill out onto the floor and stretch across the TV room. The static from the TV hisses loudly. I am too paralyzed to even cover my ear. She reaches into the sphere, now become a giant eye, and pulls it out… a screaming, half grown, bloodied fetus. I collapse onto the floor. The bird stares with an evil smile.
She kicks the fetus across the wet floor. It whimpers before me but I am too paralyzed to do anything. “I have to go,” it whispers.
I try to reach down and hold her. My arms slip through the water and ripples carry her away.
I look up and see him. His toothy yellow grin. He is shirtless, but he still wears his gray fedora. I hate that word. He never calls it a hat. “Why don’t you come here,” he says, his disgusting mustache rising with his grin exposing his cracked teeth even more. “You’re all wet.”
He comes to me, stroking his cock.
I want to curl up into a ball and shrivel up. Fly away to the wasteland. I see an elevator. I pull myself through the water. Suddenly I am near the dorms. I see the pyramid I put there – I know it is for escaping. I crawl into an elevator and reach up to press the buttons before he can follow me. I see the choices: the road, La Mina and then a third button. It must go deeper, go farther. I press it. The ground falls away from beneath me. I am falling. I want to go the depths, where there is no light, no sound… but not this way. I am falling fast. I stretch out my hands to fly. I am lucid dreaming and I want to fucking fly. I fall and fall into darkness.
I shut my eyes tight… and then I can hear her. She is like an angel… Tuna… “Drink from the cup, find salvation in the resurrection, save the child. “
I can still hear her voice as I awake. I check my dream symbol to be sure. It is there, a normal crescent moon.
I plant my heel on the floor to stand up, and my bare foot slips on something wet. I fall, face first, back onto the tiled floor of the TV room. My foot is wet and sticky. I put my hand on the floor. I look at it. It is all brownish red. I look between my legs. Blood soaks through my underwear and runs down my leg. I drag myself to the corner of the room. Blood streaks across the floor. I pull off my panties and throw them at the opposite wall. I crawl in the darkness, up the steps to the shower. I can’t walk. To stand, I have to lift myself up by the concrete around the sink. I see myself in the mirror.
I take a deep breath and look at myself. The moon is the mirror… it holds the sun. The order changed. Tuna changed the order. I don’t need to save the child first. . I want to crawl through… through the looking glass, and drink from the cup… I write the words -- with her blood on the mirror… The Holy Grail.
I stumble into the shower and hold onto my knees as I wash what was left of her down the drain.
Oscillate Wildly
By Mathew Hope
Travel, whether a year trek or a day trip, cannot be enjoyed if you think you can control all the variables. Women are like travel – variables. Put them together and you have constant variables.
Maria and I decided to take a bit of time for ourselves and play tourists in Boquete on our way up to visit Dr. Mike. He finally had invited Steve, Estrella, Maria and I to visit him and Usnavy. We dumped the car in the town center and walked the winding road up to his “castle,” stopping first at the garden known as “El Explorador.”
Imagine what Walt Disney would do if he were a gardener on acid. An antique telephone sits in a little hut in the garden. Pick it up and it’s Bach. What was junk has been collected and turned into art with little philosophical inspirations written on the side. The plants were sculpted like Edward Scissor Hands went to town. It was Maria who insisted we come here. She walked around like she was looking for something in particular. The first variable we hit was rain. We found shelter under a covered swing and Maria dug out the wine and cheese for our picnic. She kept digging around in her bag and after concluding that the object of her search was not to be found, she glared at me. The second variable was enough to spoil the mood. When I packed the wine and cheese, the only other thing I saw in the bag was dirty laundry. Like really dirty -- they were panties that met the arrival of the Red Sox five day home stay.
That was enough to cancel our picnic, and we headed to Dr. Mike’s house in silence. I, at least, tried to enjoy the beauty of walking among the coffee plantations and savoring the smell of burning pine coming from the fires in the small shacks of the Indian coffee pickers. The rain never really materialized. A fine mist they call bajareque drifted past Volcán Barú, leaving a dizzying double rainbow. This was appropriate for our walk – the winding road we were on was called Arco Iris, which is Spanish for ‘rainbow.’
Dr. Mike’s rented house really looked like a castle, complete with natural rock and turrets. Only when you get closer do you realize that the turrets were not nearly as large as a real castle, and the ‘rock’ was merely stylized cement. Dr. Mike, Usnavy, Steve and Estrella greeted us with hugs and handshakes.
I am sometimes reminded how little I know of Maria. I was told Colombians have a hierarchy or strata in their society that is not subjective. They actually have six levels, based on their incomes and tax bracket. Because Maria speaks impeccable English, sometimes with only a subtle accent, I always thought she was from money. Maybe a strata five at least. But her awe of this upper middle class faux house only contributed to the mystery that she was. I can recognize the self-creation of the enigmatic persona to hide a lack of depth. Anyone who has ever said ‘there’s so much you don’t know about me,’ is guilty of this. This is not Maria.
The girls eagerly jumped into the hot tub overlooking the valley of coffee farms. Dr. Mike took advantage of the moment to take Steve and I into his study. Inside, it was obvious that he had filled the book cases with books he had authored himself. The kinds of books I had only pretended to read in college.
Glenfiddich, Glenamarenge, Glenlivit, other Glens. They were all offered, and we tasted them all. When we loosened up a little, Dr. Mike asked me about Maria. I realized we had all come a long ways together. Steve, Dr. Mike and I had all begun our implausible relationships around the same time. We had that in common.
I confessed to them my frustration with Maria’s sudden mood swing over what appeared to be a bag of dirty laundry. I though
t Dr. Mike would have insight.
“I have no idea. As men we can’t begin to guess the minds of women,” he said. A defeating thing for a former therapist to say. But he did offer advice in the form of a personal story.
Dr. Mike had married young, had one daughter, and then divorced. I never knew this about him. Back in the days when Dr. Mike was happily married, his wife would make brown bag lunches. Often his daughter helped her by dropping in little notes that always ended with, “I love you.”
One day Dr. Mike’s daughter gave him a brown bag with some of her most precious possessions: a dinosaur eraser, a couple of pennies, and a stick of gum. She asked him to hold onto these things “for a while.” The bag sat on the counter and one day, instead of grabbing his brown bag lunch, Dr. Mike took the bag his daughter had left for him.
When he went to open his lunch that day, he saw the junk, carelessly tossed it, and went to a restaurant with the other professors. But that night, when he saw his daughter’s eyes, when she asked for her things back, he knew her things were not garbage but gold. They were treasure. And she had entrusted her treasure to the one she trusted the most.
He went back to the university and ended up digging through the big dumpster at the back of the psychology building with the janitor (who understood Dr. Mike’s plight since he had two children of his own). Dr. Mike returned the treasure to his daughter and a few days later he was entrusted with them again. This went on for weeks. Each time he held onto her knickknacks, she asked for them back, until the day came when she did not ask.
Dr. Mike said he hid them away on the top shelf of his home office, and they were the only things he would risk his life to save in the event of a fire. After his divorce, he put them in a safety deposit box, and when his daughter, now 20, gets married, it will be part of his wedding gift to her.
We don’t know what can be important to people or why. As men we just need to be the best listeners we can.
Dr. Mike continued the tour of his home and lit candles in iron-wrought candle holders -- candle holders like I had seen once at an art show, that I had imagined buying for my imaginary loft in Brooklyn.
The girls joined us, steam drifting off their bodies from the hot tub. More scotch. The candles burned brightly and melted down quickly. The soft yellow light played on Maria’s face. Her red streaks flitted, intertwined and disappeared among her dark black tresses.
Miles Davis but then Tom Waits. Then the Gorrilaz. Tom Waits sort of fit. The Gorrilaz blew my mind, then cozied right in. Here we played billiards, not pool, with both kinds of balls in a separate room with the red felt, not the green.
I sensed the drifting smells of rooms in the distance, rooms that were never even hinted at except by my curiosity. Some of the distant rooms echoing at me from lonely dark corridors smelled like Christmas candles, and others had the faint tint of the chlorine from a pool. Hardwood floors. Knotted oak. The draft from a cellar – a wine cellar. Vaulted ceilings. Humidors. Fuck, like I even smoke cigars. Glowing lights under an outdoor pool. Leaves floating on the surface. Ornate Turkish tapestries. Cedar in the library. You can’t even find these hardcover books in Panama. Leather. A fireplace with ages of soot.
Maria danced, first with Estrella, who bounced and gyrated, and then disappeared with Steve. And then Maria danced for herself, with her skirt floating back and forth in the wind like Stevie Nicks in a Fleetwood Mac song. Then she danced for everyone, and finally she danced for my ego-centric intuitiveness. She looked at me. And danced for me. The way she tugged at her bottom lip. The way food fell from her mouth when she laughed. I loved her. I had loved her for a while but this night I was proud that she loved me.
Close your eyes and listen. Imagine you are there and she is thinking of you as she dances. What is she telling you? Feel a little of how I felt that warm evening.
I looked out at the trees around the pool. I could hear the leaves of the banana trees rustling against the door. Plants with large white bells like hanging heads waved back and forth. “It’s like they’re waving to you,” Dr. Mike said. “Beckoning for you to follow them into the unconscious. Like there’s something there for you -- waiting.”
Dr. Mike poured me more scotch and that was it. My memories of this night are like the shy glances of little girl hiding behind the doors, arches and alcoves of my brain
I woke up in the dead of night with a bad headache. I looked over and Maria was not in her bed – although this kind of thing annoyed me, it was not uncommon. There was nothing in my bathroom medicine chest, so I wandered through the house. I went upstairs. Dr. Mike’s bedroom door was open, so I went in quietly. He was not there either. I found some Tylenol and took it. After putting it back, I noticed something that meant little to me at the time. A clear vial with the words ‘Essence of Brugmansia.’ But I was a little more concerned with Maria.
In the living room, Dr. Mike was talking quietly with Estrella. I could sense it was personal. My head still pounded, so I slipped away and passed out again. In the morning Maria still hadn’t returned. No one knew where she had gone. The clothes she wore from the previous night were still there and honestly, I was worried.
I walked down the short way around the Arco Iris loop and had a strange hunch. I walked past another one of Boquete’s famous gardens, Mi Jardín es su Jardín. It was early. I am not really even sure if it was open yet to the public. But I did find her there, in a tiny chapel guarded by the Virgin Mary. She was lying in a small pew. She was in a daze, staring at a picture of The Last Supper. It didn’t even seem like she knew it was me when I found her there.
I sat down in the pew behind her and gave her a moment. “What happened?” I asked finally.
“I got caught masturbating with Grover,” she whispered.
I realized then that she had been dreaming… she was still dreaming, and maybe sleepwalking since she left Dr. Mike’s house. I decided not to wake her.
“It was Grover. My Grover puppet from Sesame Street. Grover’s nose is really hard see... I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d just slip my hand inside him and he’d talk to me. He’d talk to me down here. I’d bury his nose as deep as I could get it. Sometimes it went pretty far.”
“Who caught you?” I asked.
She shook her head as if clearing a thought.
“Who caught you masturbating?”
“My family’s Catholic,” she muttered. “My father...” she began without finishing.
“What happened?”
“Punishment,” she said. She remained silent for a moment, and then changed the subject. “Never feel guilt. Never let them make you feel guilt. That is their power. If they control the right to forgive you, they have even more power.”
She pointed at the painting. “Look at Mary Magdalena next to Jesus at The Last Supper. They got it wrong. Look at the deep red streaks of blood flowing from his crown of thorns. An open mouth screaming out a muted cry. For what? His eyes lost in the distance. He sees out over the hills of Golgotha, past the ruined temple and the hills of Jerusalem and into the future where maybe someone, one day, might discover and understand.”
My heart was pounding. I was feeling claustrophobic in the little chapel. I picked Maria up, put my arm under her shoulder and slowly walked back to the road. We decided to walk back to Dr. Mike’s house. Half way up the winding road she turned to me as if she recognized me for the first time.
“Matt,” she said. “If you knew me, really knew me, you wouldn’t want to fuck me anymore.”
There are variables in a travel. Sometimes you have to know when to just enjoy the ride or cut your losses and plan for another day. The weather is a variable. There are people that are variables. When you have fallen in love with them, all is cloudy when they oscillate wildly.
Black Alice
By María Concepción
I grow more powerful i
n my lucid dreaming and in my attempt to break the paralysis he seems to have cast over me. At a certain point, I learned to fly. It allows me to completely maneuver in my physical surroundings while exploring the deep corners of my unconscious.
I stole Mat’s keys to get what I need from his car and I go back to El Explorador. I have to take a chance climbing over the fence. This is the last day of the full moon. I find the swing seat and take a few of the drops. I spread my legs and insert the syringe into my vagina. I leave it there as I fall asleep, looking at my palm.
I am Black Alice and I go down the dark hole.
I walk past the rioting painters that gutted the old TV and moved in. They are incestuous exhibitionists, they multiply, and they bar people from changing the channel.
There is the sewing machine that is blackened by years of caked blood. “Soy remendidor de corazones rotos . . . Cómo está el tuyo?” it taunts. It knows there is always a hole in your heart, and that you are always dumping shit into it, trying to fill it. It offers to repair you. I dump my bloody underwear. Shekinah’s last attempt to break through… there. “Fix that fucker.”
I ease out the syringe in full view of the moon. Mat, we don’t have full synchronicity… now we will. I bury the blood under the light of the moon.
I fall deeper into the hole-- into the cave. I see the moon on my hand ignite into the Grail. But I am still in the garden.
I go to the hanging artwork that promised God’s greatest miracle. I turn to face what was on the other side. It is a mirror. I see Shekinah reflected back. I remind myself that this is a dream, and I am in control. She has a muddy face and salty white streaks under her eyes. I know then it is her.
I hear the tick tock tick tock of a metronome.
The moon burns red, glowing in the shifting bajareque. It licks everything and leaves a wet stink. Red dancing fire now and crying blood.
It is Shekinah’s tears falling out of the mirror, drip, drip, drip, splattering onto the ground.
I know what will come next and I have to leave. I can fly now. Usnavy, the real shaman, gave me the wings to fly, and I fly around Arco Iris to the chapel in Mi Jardín es su Jardín, along the path of the Holy Goddesses. And I know I will see them there in the number 13, the ones who held the body of Christ. The women.
The chapel is in the likeness of a grotto, similar to the natural cave at The Lost and Found. When I arrive, they are all waiting for me. Steve is there, standing with a bloody spear. I see Estrella, with her cup blazing with light. Usnavy and her polished stone. Mat is wearing a crown and seated on a throne – he is wounded with blood between his legs. Only Dr. Mike has no symbol. He has his drum, and he bangs it like he is running the whole show. I know where I have to go. I take my clothes off and open my legs on the altar. I know that this is the wedding of Cana. I heal Mat and we fuck on the altar. Dr. Mike brought the alabaster jar and afterwards we all drink the Holy Communion. We smile. We know this is why we have me. When the lost gather… they are found.
I am ecstatic… I am almost there. Now, as Tuna says, to partake of communion, to drink from the cup in reality before the salvation… then I can save the child.
And like a sign, Mat comes in reality. There is no toothy grin. No fedora. Just Mat, and I am saved. I save myself, and I will save Shekinah.
I am not alone.
The Holy Grail
By Mathew Hope
The twilight walk back to Dr. Mike’s house was surreal. María stopped at each statue of the Virgin Mary and had eyes that seemed to ask for help. At Dr. Mike’s house everyone was gathered around the kitchen table, staring at us.
“Well?” Dr. Mike asked. “Tell us what you dreamed.”
Maria sat down, looked briefly at her hand, and then closed her eyes. “I was in the garden of El Exlorador and saw Shekinah. But before I lost control I flew. I flew to a cave where I met all of you there. Steve, you were carrying a spear that was dripping…”
“…blood.” He finished for her.
“And I was carrying a cup,” Estrella shouted in Spanish. “And Matt, you were sitting on a throne.”
I looked down at the symbol on my hand, and I too remembered this odd dream – so unlike any dream I had ever had. The lucid dreams made sense to me. The events at the blue rock rituals were definitely surreal but can be attributed to the mushrooms we took. But this betrayed my agnostic world view. This betrayed all logic and reason, everything I thought I knew about the world and my existence.
Dr. Mike stood up and almost shouted. “Do you see what we have done everybody? Our lucid dreaming, shared in ritual, has tapped into our collective unconscious. We have bridged the gap together. We have connected psychically!”
The others giggled over every detail, trying to see who remembered what. They called it the wedding of Cana.
I had to leave and clear my head. I apologized to Maria, and asked Steve to take her home. I don’t know why, but I needed advice and I didn’t know who to turn to. In the end, I dropped by an internet café and emailed Patrick, one of the owners of The Lost and Found.
When I got back to The Lost and Found that night, no one was there. On the bed I share with Maria was a note:
Dear Mat,
Maybe you are far from your unconscious today.
Maybe you see I am distant.
Mat I am afraid. I am afraid that if you knew what happened to me you wouldn’t have said that you loved me. There are things in my unconscious Mat. Dark things. So dark that they have been repressed into symbols and I am too afraid to let them out alone. I need friends, Mat. I need you. I love you.
I am at Tuna’s cave. Please come.
I guessed from everyone else’s absence that they would be there as well. I crossed the river in the dark and already I could hear chanting coming from the cave. Although I don’t know a stitch of Latin, the chanting was familiar to me. They had lit torches to light my way. As I approached I could see they were wearing their ceremonial robes from the ritual at the blue rock. I didn’t want to take another step. They couldn’t possibly think to reenact the dream literally?
But there she was, sitting on a rock inside the cave, naked, legs spread open.
“You have got to be fucked!” I shouted. Then I looked at each one of them in the eyes and repeated myself. “You have all got to be fucked!”
Maria stood up off the rock and walked toward me. “The Grail, the Sang Real, Royal Blood, is in the ocean of the unconscious. We seek it with the symbols we have chosen. You have the crown. In the beginning was the word. Creation begins. The ultimate secret of the Holy Grail -- the blood and the bloodline. First Communion, then salvation, and then we can save the child.”
She reached down and undid the zipper of my pants and slipped her hand in. I let her do it. Nothing was moving. At that moment all my desire for her withered and died. But then I felt a horrible, sharp pain. I keeled over and almost threw up. She didn’t hit me there… it was like something inside me.
“Pour the sun into the moon. Lead me into the house of Osiris and let me give in to his hand what is in my hand, to his mouth what is in my mouth, to his body what is in my body, to his wand what is in my womb.”
“I’m done.” I said, struggling to my feet. “Something is completely fucked here.” And I turned and walked away, thinking that I would never again return to The Lost and Found.
Patrick’s Letter to Matt
By Patrick McGreer
Dear Matt,
Sorry things are not going well at The Lost and Found. Where is Steve in all this? I thought you guys are all best friends.
Listen, I made some calls to some friends of mine who are very knowledgeable about the area. I also did a little research on the internet. It is not all good news. First of all, however, you are not losing your mind when it comes to the blue rock phenomenon at the petroglyphs in Caldera.
All over the area the stones serve as a kind of treasure map to the locations of buried Indian gold in the area.
When Christopher Columbus visited Bocas del Toro in 1502 during his fourth and final New World voyage, he was so taken by the beauty of the area that he affixed his name to many sites, including Isla Colón (Columbus Island), Isla San Cristóbal (Saint Christopher Island) and Bahía de Almirante (Admiral’s Bay). He found the Ngäbe Indians with large gold disks around their necks, and, eager not to return to Spain empty-handed, asked about the gold. But the Indians pointed towards the high mountains. They pointed to the rugged highland cloud forests, where The Lost and Found is currently located. The Indians did not use the gold as currency, but it was very valuable for ceremonial purposes.
Later, when the forces of the Spanish conquest arrived, they did everything they could to get their hands on gold, and Indians did everything to hide it. Their chiefs would burn themselves alive rather than surrender. There is an ancient lake about seven miles from The Lost and Found where it is rumored that the Ngäbe lord Urracá, the bravest and most cunning of their chieftains, flooded his own stronghold rather than give up its treasures to the invaders. An entire clan of hundreds of individuals voluntarily drowned in underground chambers they collapsed around themselves, dedicating their spirits to protect the sacred gold artifacts, made holy by their most powerful shamans and gods. Dozens of years later, the waters receded. The blue light you saw is produced by a reaction from the methane gas that still is being released, little by little, from the mass grave. It is a little known secret that grave robbers sometimes camp out in remote area and just wait for a glimpse of the phantasmal blue lights that give away the location of a secret graveyard. The blue light you saw at the petroglyphs was methane gas from graves dug during the time of the Spanish genocide, and it may have caused you to pass out.
Now a little about brugmansia, the essence of which you saw in bottled form in a vial in Dr. Mike’s house. I got most of this from Wikipedia, so you can google it yourself. Brugmansia is a genus of seven species of flowering plants in the family solanaceae, native to subtropical and tropical regions of South America, along the Andes from Colombia to northern Chile and also in southeastern Brazil. They are known as Angel's Trumpets for the eye-catching large white bell-shaped flowers that hang from their branches.
All parts of brugmansia are toxic – ingestion of the roots in particular is fatally poisonous. But a tea made from the flowers is sometimes ingested for recreational or shamanic intoxication, as the plant contains the tropane alkaloids scopolamine and atropine. However, because the potency of the toxic compounds in the plant is variable, the degree of intoxication is unpredictable and can lead to psychosis and even death.
Ritualized brugmansia consumption is an important aspect of the shamanic complexes noted among many indigenous peoples of western Amazonia. Likewise, it is a central component in the cosmology and shamanic practices of the Urarina peoples of Loreto, Peru.
Matt, I am glad you contacted me. It seems as if Dr. Mike may have drugged all of you with brugmansia – this would account for Maria’s irrational behavior, your passing out and even the shared dream the four of you believe you experienced. I suggest you confront no one until I am there. Lay low in Boquete and I will meet you in a day or two.
Patrick McGreer