One Night in Copan Read online

  Laden with her precious cargo, a pail of water now balanced atop her head, Zion turned around and clambered back uphill. Midway, she stopped to catch her breath. She must manage her strength. She’s pregnant with her second child and she’s hardly eaten in the past two days. But Zion is no stranger to privation. Pain no longer daunts her. She has her baby to care for. Another little one is on the way in five months or less, she’s not sure.

  Slowly, night’s inky mantle dissolved, baring a pale orange sky. A new day had dawned, bringing a fresh surge of anticipation and energy. Emboldened, Zion resumed her arduous climb.

  Zion is fourteen.

  Reaching the summit, winded by the grueling ascent, Zion wiped her brow and surveyed her surroundings. Barely visible in morning’s timid glow, familiar and inescapable, an unobstructed scene of utter barrenness stretched before her, a landscape of squalor and malignancy and evil that the thick haze failed to conceal. Above it, out-of-focus, floating like a mirage over the distant haze, stretched the gleaming spires and gables of an inaccessible, forbidden upperworld. Behind her, balancing precariously on the edge of a narrow bluff overgrown with stinkweed, sat the ramshackle hut Zion calls home. Straddling a scaffolding of rotting wood pylons and corroded iron beams under which a small emaciated dog and a palsied cat cowered, the windowless shack stands defiant in its vulnerability, a symbol of the paradox that is Gehenna.

  Zion blows out the quivering flame of an old kerosene lamp and fans away the acrid emanations. She lays the sleeping infant on the floor, gently propping her head against a cardboard box where she keeps all of her possessions. There’s a rag doll, an old discolored dress, a small bundle of used baby clothes, an old photograph, a broken comb, a tin of cereal, a jar of brown sugar in which tiny yellow ants have taken up residence, a cross fashioned from popsicle sticks, a faded prayer book frontispiece in which an enraptured Aryan Christ is seen levitating above a sea of mesmerized disciples.

  Zion strikes a match, ignites kindling in the hollow of a cinder block and stirs a thin gruel of rice and water into a pitted metal bowl. She stopped breast-feeding her daughter when she became pregnant with her second child. Underweight, her ashen skin pocked with mosquito bites, the baby girl suffers from malnutrition. Zion looks at her daughter with a mixture of tenderness and despair as her own childhood, barely tasted, irretrievably lost, comes back to haunt her.

  Zion is the embodiment of innocence undone, childhood imperiled and corrupted by poverty, neglect and hopelessness. Soft-spoken and unassuming, she reluctantly relives the nightmare by evoking it at Jeremiah’s urging. Despite the horror it inspires, her narration is childlike, flat. Her voice betrays neither anger nor sorrow. She smiles timidly instead, perhaps to hide the shame and pity she feels, not for herself, but for those who so sadistically withheld their love and deprived her of her dignity.

  Jeremiah asks her what she desires most and he feels instantly shamed by the vacuity of his question. Fixing a gaze of unfathomable emptiness at some distant point in space, giving Jeremiah time to ponder his lack of tact, then turning tenderly to the toddler nestled in her arms and patting her own belly, the child-mother replies,

  “I have nothing and I have everything. I can’t ask for less or for more.”

  In Zion’s world, nothing and everything are usually too much to bear.

  Morning alit -- or something akin to morning. A faint gray glow crept out of an overcast horizon. The glow was not bright enough to disperse the misty tendrils of fog that hung like wispy ghosts over the desolation.

  Gehenna, like fungus, has spread tentacle-like, sprouting squalid slums along muddy ridges and down the slopes of dank garbage-strewn ravines. It’s in one such slum, nicknamed Limón by the locals because of the jade-green stream of sludge that runs through it that Jeremiah came across Angelica. He found her sitting at the edge of a cot, her feet pitted by insect bites and glistening skin lesions, in a shed under a leaking corrugated sheet metal roof held up by rotting wooden beams.

  In a corner of the room, under the pallid rays of a 40-watt bulb around which a squadron of moths kept circling, propped on a table littered with rags and old newspapers, rested a tall, garishly painted plaster figurine, a Madonna and child whose introspective, tortured gaze, frozen skyward where God is said to dwell, exuded pain and disillusionment, betrayal and stupefaction. Every once in a while, almost mechanically, the girl cast a forlorn glance at the Virgin Mary, perhaps for reassurance. But in her large brown eyes all Jeremiah saw were false hopes and broken promises.

  This time Jeremiah said nothing. Assailed by a jumble of emotions, he just looked at her cherub face. He wanted to hug her and, to absorb her within his being for warmth and reassurance. But he didn’t dare. Instead, he took her little hand in his and held it for a while. Angelica blushed, looked at the bare concrete floor and sighed.

  “Take her away from this place,” her mother pleaded.

  “Take her? Away? Where? How? What do I know about the transmigration of souls,” Jeremiah lamented, waving the mother away. “When was the last time I rescued someone from a nightmare?” Then he thought: what if this is a trap? What if Angelica is a succubus, an evil spirit, a demon who morphs into cherubim and seraphs? Jeremiah understood what sophistry can do to distort judgment, to cripple reason, to inspire fear, to justify cynicism. And as he looked at Angelica’s innocent face, he chose discretion over valor. He ran out and burst into tears.

  Outside, the vultures, the ever-present vultures, resumed their abominable vigil, gliding overhead like black-winged demons at a Witches’ Sabbath, awaiting death, smelling it, tasting it. Surely, Jeremiah reflected, even God must find Limón a very bitter fruit.

  THE FOOT FETISH

  I believe in compulsory cannibalism.

  If people were forced to eat what they killed,

  there would be no more wars.

  Abbie Hoffman

  “Tired, aching feet slowing you down? Burning, itchy toes making you frown? Are you plagued with calluses and bunions, cracks as wide as canyons? Or are you simply out of pace? Don’t be your own arch-enemy. Drag your heels no more. Put some bounce in your stride, pep in your gait. Let us anoint your feet. We’ll give them Hermes’s wings. Our dedicated, licensed practitioners will lavish you with the treatment of your life. So take that precious first step and run -- don’t just walk. We’re conveniently located a skip and a hop from anywhere. For an early appointment call The Foot Fetish at 1-800-TOE-LINE. A unique twist in foot care.”

  In a rare moment of self-pity, Ethan Caruthers turns to the pain in his feet. He winces. They have ached forever, it seems. Sly and unpredictable on busy days when mind conquers matter, the pain returns, tenacious and all-consuming after dark. But whining is not part of the Caruthers temperament. The Caruthers are a stoic, iron-willed lot not given to martyrdom, an ancient family with an emblazoned colonial past, now ruled by Major Archibald Spencer Caruthers, his father -- whom Ethan still calls “sir” -- and his mother, Lady Sarah Covington Caruthers, a woman of exceptional beauty in her youth, now fending off the ravages of time and tropics with heavy makeup and triple gins and tonic. Ethan Alcott Caruthers, their only son (more by accident than choice) quickly learns to manage the chilliness of the Caruthers code, “like a man,” a lesson further beaten into him with his parents’ consent by Jesuit bullies at Holy Cross Lyceum. But years of neglect, ill-fitting shoes -- his mother had insisted that small feet are a mark of good breeding -- and half a dozen toes broken chasing after crabs on some distant reef had claimed a cruel toll.

  Caruthers studies the leaflet and smiles. He seeks out the young hawker who providentially thrust it in his hand as he strolled on his lunch hour, but the hawker is gone, swallowed by a sea of noontime amblers.

  Ethan dials the number on his cell phone.

  “The Foot Fetish. May I help you?” The timbre is both suggestive and businesslike. Perhaps it’s the way she enunciates “fetish,” accentuating ever so vaguely on a lusty “t” with all the prim affecta
tion of a Soho fellatrix. Alas, Caruthers doesn’t notice such things. His upbringing denies him the privilege of an impious mind, much less the fun of being lured by innuendo, real or imagined. Now 24, Caruthers inexplicably had sex only three times, first with the maid in the broom closet, when he was just thirteen. A year later, his first cousin Rachel Elizabeth seduced him behind a patch of wisteria and daffodils at the Droitwich estate where the clan seeks yearly refuge from the rigors of the Malay summer. His last escapade took place in the arms of a doe-eyed Sinhalese teen prostitute whose expert services wound up costing Ethan Alcott Caruthers several million units of penicillin to his pink English bum.

  “My feet are killing me,” Caruthers says, mixing wit and metaphor.

  “I have a cancellation at four-thirty on Tuesday. Will that do?” Fluid, mellifluous, the voice paints lips of glossy crimson, full, pouting, a heart-shaped opening behind which lurks a pearly smile and a playful tongue, all of which Caruthers ignores in favor of his metatarsals.

  “Yes. I’ll be there.”

  “Your name?”

  Caruthers complies as soothing thoughts of pain relieved dance in his head.

  A faded beauty still lingers in old Chinatown, deep in the shadow of Singapore’s cut-glass, steel and neon-lit skyline, far from the lush gardens, vivid orchid-clad esplanades and immaculate tree-lined boulevards. Here, narrow streets and cul-de-sacs are home to medicine halls and shop houses and pleasure dens where no perversion is denied, where no vice is too odious to contemplate. Caruthers often ambles past their red and gold vaulted porticos, unable to muster the courage to go in, preferring to be vicariously thrilled by both the lure of temptation and the empty redemption of self-denial. He lingers there when the doors are ajar, taking in the tang of freshly ground spices, the heady aroma of rose water and jasmine, and the faint but unmistakable scent of lusting bodies wafting past him from the cool shadows beyond. He will never cross the threshold. Instead, he collects the images and sensations and stores them for later retrieval and solitary use in the privacy of his bathroom. While his libido has escaped unscathed, the fear of risking yet another loathsome chancre has forever dulled any penchant for promiscuity.

  Caruthers turns left on Sago Street. Songbirds in bamboo cages, paper lanterns and slender poles heavy with drying clothes sway from upper-level windows. Calligraphers and scribes sit huddled on the pavement, gilding strips of lucky red paper with gold ideograms, or taking dictation from the old and the unschooled. On Smith Street, wooden sculptures of deities as ancient as the dynasties of carvers that gave them life stand the test of time and faith amid papier-mâché replicas of earthly effigies destined to go up in flames at the funeral of some venerable patriarch.

  Outside, the Sri Mariamman Temple, where cherry and lime-green painted gods, goddesses and sacred beasts guard the towering gateway, a soothsayer burns aromatic incense and consults the oracles. The swish of saris, the jingle of glass bead bracelets and the stirring strains of Tamil love songs fill the air.

  Caruthers stops and beckons a trained parrot to pick out a fortune card from a brass bowl.

  “Never raise arms when washing hands lest water trickle down sleeves,” the card warns with cryptic sarcasm. Baffled, Caruthers urges the parrot to do better. The bird squawks with impatience, sifts grudgingly through the bowl with his beak, picks another card and hands it to Caruthers.

  “Only a hair’s breadth separates paradise from hell.”

  “That’s more like it,” Caruthers smiles, his spirituality appeased.

  She is very young, a raven-haired beauty in a jade-green silk dress with side slits that bare alabaster thighs. Her eyes twinkle playfully as she glides toward him.

  “May I help you?”

  “My name is Caruthers. I have an appointment.”

  “Welcome to the Foot Fetish, Mr. Caruthers. I am Koo Mai. Do sit down, won’t you? Someone will be with you shortly.

  Koo Mai has more, much more than a lascivious “t” to her credit.

  The phone trills softly. Koo Mai picks up the receiver and answers the call in a singsong of Malay and Chinese. She turns to Caruthers.

  “Dr. Vollbrecht will see you now. Second floor, first door on you right.”

  Vollbrecht is in his fifties, a Curt Jurgens clone, handsome and suave. He wears an immaculate white frock. Self-assured and focused, he handles the scalpel with skill. With each deft stroke, a small mound of dead skin shavings rises in a white ceramic bowl before him.

  “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘dead weight,’” Vollbrecht asks with noticeable pride. He lifts the bowl and pours out the contents on a scale. “Four ounces!” Vollbrecht is beaming. “Do you realize you’ve just shed a quarter of a pound -- and it all came from your feet?”

  Caruthers wiggles his toes and caresses the baby-smooth contours of his soles, heels and big toes. He feels positively rejuvenated.

  Vollbrecht smiles. “Miss Tung will tend to you now. Su Lin,” he calls out.

  Su Lin, a shapely adolescent as delicate as a bisque figurine, kneels before Caruthers, raises one of his legs and proceeds to lick and suck his toes. Caruthers stiffens, a mixture of surprise and embarrassment etched upon his face, a blissful jolt shooting up his rectum and radiating to his scrotum. He looks quizzically at Vollbrecht, averting his eyes from the spectacle of this voluptuous if bizarre seduction.

  “That’s all right, think nothing of it. It’s included in the fee. Besides, it’s standard practice in modern chiropody. And that’s just for starters.”

  Reassured, if not altogether convinced, Caruthers relaxes and Su Lin resumes her carnal commerce. Feigning indifference, he picks up a dog-eared edition of The Economist.

  Koo Mai joins Su Lin, kneels beside her, unzips Caruthers’ pants and loosens his belt. Her intentions are less than honorable, Caruthers surmises, but he is ready for her -- prudence be damned, to hell with everything. He closes his eyes, his chin drops and his lips part to receive Su Lin’s strawberry tongue and the fullness of her mouth upon his. Su Lin’s nimble caresses help Caruthers rise to the occasion and Koo Mai takes him in her mouth. Her head bobs up and down like a penitent before the Wailing Wall. Rapture is near. He lets it come. Pleasure slowly swells within him, submerging him. Bliss. Oblivion. Then pain.

  The pain is real, obstinate, all-pervading.

  Koo Mai is dining on a tumescent, mauve, glistening shaft, the very one she had so greedily milked, now an alien, mangled, lifeless bloody shank that had once been his.

  He cries out, a feeble whimper, a would-be scream stifled by horror and disbelief, the kind of mournful, guttural lament that dies in one’s throat when nightmares take over.

  Pain turns to agony.

  Su Lin has ripped his big toe clear off the bone and is now tearing into his Achilles tendon with her bare teeth. Blood trickles from the corners of her mouth -- his blood -- and he can hear the crunching sounds of sinew and cartilage being chewed to a gritty pulp.

  “Noooo,” he shrieks, his face contorted, eyes ablaze, arms flailing against the steely grip of his tormentors. “I beg you.”

  Vollbrecht, a bon vivant to his manicured fingertips, goes for a more substantial cut of meat and digs into Caruthers’ mid-section.

  Su Lin now attacks his calf, rupturing muscle, severing veins and arteries, shearing nerves, swallowing whole chunks of featureless flesh with shark-like frenzy.

  Caruthers closes his eyes, thinking himself in Hades. Or in the grips of a nightmare, as it were. He is being devoured alive.

  Ethan Alcott Caruthers’s remains are found on Gull Crescent Lane the next morning, the toeless stumps that had once been his feet oozing blood, his penis ripped clear off, his belly a gaping, eviscerated, festering cavity in which maggots and rats are now feasting.

  I wake up tasting blood, my tongue savagely bitten in the course of a phantasm that has run amok, an exquisite hallucination bound to take me closer yet to the brink.

  ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN

  The Lords of Xib
alba burst out laughing;

  they were dying of laughter; they writhed from pain

  in their stomach, in their blood, and in their bones,

  caused by their laughter, all the Lords of Xibalba laughed.

  The Popol Vuh

  An eerie pall of mystery wafts over Copán late at night when villagers slumber and the ghosts of the mighty Maya awaken in otherworldly darkness. Their presence, wraithlike, elusive like the last frames of a dissolving dream, had often kept me awake, or stirred me from a paralyzing sleep. But nothing could have prepared me for what I’d experience on a moonless night in February 2006. It is so farfetched an event, so devastating a blow to my self-view as a skeptic, a debunker, that I waited almost a year before I told anyone -- and only on condition of anonymity.

  I’d paid the bill, left Doña Delsey her usual tip and was about to leave the El Sesteo cantina where I’d dined that evening when the lights went out. This is not an uncommon occurrence in Honduras but one that, depending on duration, elicits emotions ranging from exasperation to contempt. I’d left my flashlight in my studio at the other end of town in a sparsely populated residential area overlooking the lush Copán River Valley. And I knew better than to venture in the dark, risking life and limb in an attempt to negotiate my way back to my flat across cobbled alleys and rain-filled potholes.

  Instead, feeling full and in need of a workout, I headed in the opposite direction and proceeded down the main road that leads out of the village and runs alongside the Archeological Park, less than a kilometer away.

  It was pitch-black but the star-studded sky above sparkled like a diamond-studded wreath. Suddenly, as I neared the Park’s main gate, a bright object appeared out of nowhere. Far brighter than the stars, encircled by a bluish metallic halo, it began zigzagging erratically at unimaginable speeds. Then it stopped, sloped to a lower altitude, and hovered motionless for about ninety seconds. I calculated its position to be directly above the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairway, a sixty-five foot high terraced pyramid made of stones carved with Mayan pictograms, many yet to be decoded. It was then that I noticed that the object was elliptical in shape and ringed with pulsating, oscillating lights. I believe I saw a humanoid figure peering from one of the portholes that lined the perimeter of the craft. Then, like a flash, the object zoomed away, shrank to a shimmering point of light and vanished in the immense starry blackness of space.