The Fifth Harmonic Read online

  And suddenly I knew—here, ripped from my subconscious by teonancatl juice, was the horror that had taken over my life, the one I'd anthropomorphized into . . .

  “Captain Carcinoma.”

  “The one and only. Your worst nightmare, in the flesh. The new ruler of your kingdom.” It raised a limb that vaguely resembled an arm. “The King is dead! Long live the King!”

  I didn't know what to do. How do you handle a bad trip? Maya wasn't around to talk me down as she had before, so I was on my own. I vaguely remembered hearing something about how fighting it could make things worse, so I tried to play along.

  “King of what?” I said.

  It swept its arm toward the cavern behind me. “Of all I survey.”

  I turned and found that the cavern had changed to a Mayan village. As I watched, tumor people with globular flesh like the Captain but dressed in Mayan clothing were invading the village, killing the inhabitants and taking over their huts while Mayan warriors armed with bows and spears stood by and did nothing. The new inhabitants then began to remodel the seized huts into hideous, misshapen domes with no trace of symmetry. The once quaint, orderly community was being changed into a travesty. And still the Mayan guards did nothing. They patrolled the perimeter of the village, but let the tumor people pass in and out at will.

  “See how easy it is?” Captain Carcinoma said. “Your guards are helpless against my offspring. They are too terrified to try to stop them.”

  Here in a Mayan microcosm was what was going on in my body: The Maya warriors were my immune system; they could have killed off the deadly tumor cells as soon as they appeared, but they've been programmed to fight invaders. Since the tumor consists of mutated cells from my own body, they don't see them as invaders.

  “They're not terrified,” I said. “They'd whip your ass if they recognized you as a threat. But since you come from me, they consider your cells brothers. They don't realize that their brothers are backstabbing psychos. Just like you.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Well, what would you call self-immolation?” I said, turning to face the Captain. I'd been playing along with the hallucination, but now genuine anger was rising like the tide. Why not let him have it with both barrels? “You're an idiot.”

  The Captain laughed, an awful sound, booming yet strangled. “Name-calling won't help you. You're doomed and you know it.”

  “And you're not? You and your cells are useless. You're parasites. You do nothing but feed and grow and divide.”

  “And we divide so much faster than your cells. That is our strength. That is why our victory is assured. We are a new breed. A master race. We are overrunning you. We will bury you!”

  “And when you've choked off the channel that allows nutrients into the system, when your offspring finally seal off the tube that lets oxygen reach the bloodstream that feeds them, what will happen then?”

  “You will die.”

  “And so will you, you goddamn cannibal!”

  “Watch your tongue!”

  “My tongue is where you were born! I'm your father. My cells gave birth to you. You're worse than a cannibal—you're a patricidal cannibal!”

  Another booming, strangled laugh as the Captain shook its massive, cyclopean head. “No, no, no! We call no one father! We birthed ourselves and we cannot die! We are different. We are supreme! We bring a new order, a new kind of life to your pathetic body. We will go on replacing your weak inferior cells with our own superior strain until every last trace of you is gone. Then our victory will be complete and we will rule.”

  Captain Carcinoma was Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden all rolled into one, riding a monomaniacal juggernaut to hell and dragging me with him.

  I opened my mouth to try and explain, then snapped it shut.

  What was I thinking? This was a mushroom dream, a creation of my neurotransmitters rushing through a psilocybin blender. Even if I could communicate with my tumor, I could no more talk it out of killing me than I could walk on the moon. Like all tumors, its cells had lost the Rb protein that controls cell division; it was a runaway train of ungoverned mitosis.

  Had to get a grip. Had to end this now.

  I sat down on the soft, sticky red floor and closed my eyes.

  “Yes!” the Captain said. “Kneel before your new master!”

  I covered my ears and began a tuneless humming to shut out its voice. One way or another I was going to take control of this. No more talking tumors, no more blood-red caverns and walking, talking metastases. I wanted the real world back, dammit, and I wanted it now!

  I remained dimly aware of Captain Carcinoma raging around me but I steadfastly ignored it. Soon the sensation of the sticky floor faded from my bare feet and once again the netting of the hammock pressed against my back.

  I opened my eyes. I was in the hut. Through the doorway the stars were fading. Somewhere in the village, a rooster crowed.

  I sighed with relief.

  Dawn.

  10

  “How does the world look this morning?” Maya said.

  We sat outside her hut, eating a light breakfast of hard-boiled eggs as the sun struggled to clear the flat-topped mountain behind us. Maya wore her khaki walking shorts and a white T-shirt; the button protrusions of her nipples against the fabric told me she wasn't wearing a bra, and I tried not to stare. I wore a pair of Bermudas— the closest thing I had to a swimsuit.

  I glanced around. Everything looked the same. The sea was a deeper blue than the flawless sky, the sand a creamy white—but scored now with an odd herringbone pattern that hadn't been here last night—and the palm trees lining the beach were their usual verdant hues. Everything was in its proper place, but somehow it all felt different.

  A residue from last night's mushroom psychosis, I imagined. The world was the same, but I wasn't. I'd had some sort of transcendent experience, a glimpse into nature's creative processes, a feeling of oneness with the vast cycles of life and death swirling around me, of unity with the entire universe, and it had left me subtly changed.

  Was this some sort of spiritual awakening, what Maya had meant by seeing with my blind eye? Or just a biochemical hangover?

  “The world looks good,” I told her. “Normal.”

  My belly rumbled like distant thunder and I realized I was hungry. I broke off some egg white, chewed it carefully, but it wouldn't go down. I turned and choked the pieces back into my hand.

  “You cannot swallow anything?” Maya said, looking at me with worried eyes.

  “Nothing solid,” I said. “But liquids are okay.”

  At least they were for now.

  I'd begun drinking a mixture of goat milk and coconut milk last night, but even that wasn't going down too easy. If we were near a town I could have bought some Ensure or another similar liquid supplement. But nothing like that existed around here, so this local mix would have to do.

  I'd fastened my belt another hole tighter this morning. I'd been here only a few days and I must have lost ten pounds. I knew it wasn't just the change in diet and increased exercise: Captain Carcinoma and his crew were eating me alive.

  “Are you well enough?” she said. “Strong enough to swim?”

  “Not all the way out there,” I said, gazing out to La Mano Hundiendo where the sun's rays where setting fire to the tips of the three tallest fingers. “Even on my best days—”

  “We will take a boat to the Hand. But once there you must dive. Did you sleep well after I left you last night?”

  “I slept, although I don't know if I'd call it ‘well.’”

  I explained my dream to her.

  “You saw your tumor?” she said, her eyes alight.

  “Well, yes . . . in my dream or hallucination or whatever it was.”

  “And you spoke to it?”

  “I guess you could say that, but—”

  “This is good,” she said, smiling and nodding.

  “Why?”

  “You would not un
derstand right now, but yes, this is very good.”

  She seemed heartened, and I was glad for that. The rift that had opened between us last night seemed to have closed, and I wanted it to remain closed.

  I studied the herringbone pattern in the sand. It seemed to run off in all directions. I wondered if it was some sort of Mayan custom . . . go out each morning and use palm fronds to make patterns on the sand.

  I was about to ask Maya about it when movement to my left caught my eye. Ambrosio and some of the village men were carrying a dinghy with a tiny outboard motor down to the water.

  Maya rose to her feet. “Wait here. We will leave in a few minutes.”

  I watched as she walked off toward a larger hut where the village children were beginning to gather. Actually I watched her lean, muscular legs, the ropy pull of her hamstrings, the tidal swellings of her calves. Even in my weakened state the sight stirred me.

  And then I spotted Ambrosio approaching from the beach. He wore a straw hat which he removed when he reached me. He avoided eye contact.

  “Ambrosio is very sorry about last night, señor. He did not think—”

  “Ambrosio,” I said, rising and brushing the sand from my legs, “you don't have to apologize.”

  “Yes, Ambrosio must.”

  “Because Maya told you to?”

  “No. Because Ambrosio did a foolish thing.”

  His humility made me uncomfortable. And truly, I wasn't angry. Yes, he had done a foolish thing, but I'd suffered no harm—I'd been scared half to death, but I'd survived the ordeal, and what was more, I'd had a new experience, something I'd remember the rest of my life . . . however long that might be.

  I stuck out my hand. “Ambrosio, I know you were only trying to help, and I might even be somewhat better for the whole thing, so let's not mention it again. Si?”

  He looked me in the eyes and flashed that big gilded grin when he saw that I meant it.

  “Si!”

  I looked over to where Maya was standing by the big hut, talking with another woman with the village children gathered around her. I watched her caressing the hair of the boys and girls who leaned against her, and wondered if she had any children of her own. Terziski hadn't mentioned—

  No, I warned myself. Don't think about Terziski or photos or fingerprints. Just go with it.

  “What is that?” I asked Ambrosio. “A school?”

  “Yes. It is the sabia's.”

  “Maya's?”

  “Yes. She built it. She pays for the teacher. She has built many schools for the Maya.”

  Without looking for it, I'd just found the answer to the question of why someone like Maya wanted my money. Not for herself, but for the children of her people.

  As I watched her with the children, my throat tightened. Not from the tumor—from guilt. This was a good person, an extraordinary woman, and I'd taken so long to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  Sometimes, Cecil, I thought, you disgust me.

  “Come,” Ambrosio said. “We go to the boat.”

  Maya joined us there and the three of us pushed the old wooden dinghy into the gentle surf, then hopped in. Ambrosio pull-started the coffee-grinder outboard, and we were off.

  “Ambrosio tells me you built that school back there,” I said as we left the shore behind.

  “Did he now?” she said, giving me a sidelong look.

  I held up my hands. “Oh, no. I wasn't quizzing him. Honest.”

  A tolerant smile as she nodded: “Yes. I built it. Education is the only way for the Maya to take charge of their future.”

  “Who's the teacher? A missionary?”

  “Absolutely not!” she said, her eyes flashing. “The missionaries overrun Mesoamerica like cockroaches, but I will not allow them to teach our children. I will not have them tainted with Christian ideas.”

  I felt my hackles start to rise. I remember how the Presbyterian church of which I was nominally a member supported missionaries sent to Central America to educate the peasants. These were good people with good intentions.

  “Tainted?” I said. “I can think of worse things than good works, love your neighbor, do unto others, and so on.”

  “So can I. But the missionaries teach the Christian view that the world is bad, a place of trials and tribulations that you must not allow to taint you. They worry so much about leaving the world that they forget about living in it.”

  “Yes, but is that a ‘taint’?”

  “Yes!” she said with fiery intensity. “Christianity and so many other religions warning of the supposed dangers and temptations of the earth, the Mother. They taint by teaching you to turn away from this world and set your sights on the next—turn your back on the Mother and see only the ‘Father.’ That is bad. That is evil. That is why, despite all their talk of good works and loving their neighbors and doing unto others, they still hate and kill each other, why they will go on hating and killing each other until they realize how completely wrong they have been.”

  How could I argue? Maya was an inhabitant of Mesoamerica, to which the Spanish had brought not only plague, but the Inquisition, and not a day went by without the news of the rest of the world confirming what she said.

  “But let us speak of better things,” she said. “Your water tine lies at the base of La Mano's thumb. You must dive for it.”

  “It's not in an underwater cave or anything like that, is it?”

  “No. It's at the base of the rock, in plain view.”

  That was a relief. “How deep?”

  “About thirty feet.”

  Thirty feet . . . I was PADI-certified in open water scuba diving. I'd been down to a hundred feet in Cozumel and Little Cayman and a number of Bahamian reefs during the past dozen years or so. Thirty feet with a tank was a piece of cake. But a free dive . . . ?

  I looked around the dinghy for diving equipment and found nothing.

  “No fins? No mask or snorkel?”

  Maya shook her head. “No. You must enter the Mother's water as you were born, then let Her guide your hand to your water tine.”

  I started reviewing what I knew of free diving when something Maya had said struck me.

  “As I was born? You don't mean in my birthday suit, do you?”

  She nodded without a hint that she was putting me on. “Yes. As you were born . . . unless you were born with clothes.”

  If she only knew.

  I tried to look cool about it, but the uptight-white part of my psyche—a not inconsiderable percentage of the whole—was going ballistic. I'd never been much for nudity, had never been comfortable with it. With Annie, sure, but never with my daughter. I'd never been crazy about locker rooms, either. That was how I was raised. If I ever saw my mother's breasts while I was nursing, I don't remember. Certainly I never saw them after I was weaned. Maybe my being an only child had something to do with it. But if you'd known my family, you might have thought we all bathed and slept fully clothed.

  Don't get me wrong. I hadn't a thing against nudity—other people's nudity. As a primary care physician I'd seen more undraped human bodies than I cared to remember. And now that I was thinking about it, I refined my statement: I had nothing against female nudity. The unadorned female form is one of the visual wonders of the world. The male form, however . . .

  Really . . . is there anything uglier than a scrotum?

  But all that aside, the bottom line of the here and now was that I was going to have to get naked in front of Maya.

  Remember, I told myself. You're the new Will Burleigh. If you could trip out like a hippie last night, you can skinny dip this morning.

  As we approached the thumb of La Mano Hundiendo, I reviewed what I remembered about free diving. Every thirty-three feet of descent added one atmosphere of pressure to the lungs. At a depth of thirty feet I'd be subjected to two atmospheres—no big deal. But I'd read about something called shallow water blackout that happened to free divers who stayed down too long. The key was not to over hyperventilate befor
e diving.

  All right. I wouldn't hyperventilate more than the recommended three or four breaths. But could I get down to thirty feet and find the tine before running out of air? Piece of cake for an experienced free diver, but I was far from experienced.

  Well, I'd just have to find a way, wouldn't I.

  La Mano Hundiendo turned out to be much bigger than I'd originally thought. The spires of the fingers towered over us like the tops of undersea mountains. Close up, the craggy cinnamon walls looked like a bad stucco job. Swells surged relentlessly against the bases, spraying white against the flat surfaces and insinuating foam into the crevices . . . in and out, in and out, like sex.

  Like sex? Where had that come from?

  This was not the time to start thinking about sex. And yet, now that I was, I recognized an increasing attraction to Maya. But I couldn't let that progress. I knew I was vulnerable now, and if I let myself become infatuated with this shaman woman—infatuated, hell . . . I was sure I'd fall madly in love with her in a heartbeat if I let myself go—I'd no doubt make a complete ass of myself. She'd shown no sign of physical attraction toward me. Warmth, yes, but on a purely professional level.

  Keep your head, Burleigh.

  Just waves . . . Pacific swells . . . nothing sexual about waves . . .

  The spires of La Mano Hundiendo weren't quite the naked rock they seemed from the shore. A fuzz of brush crowned their tops, accented here and there with scraggly trees and slim cacti gesturing defiantly with fifteen-to-twenty-foot fingers. And beyond those tops, screaming gulls wheeled on the morning breeze like vultures waiting for something to die.

  Ambrosio cut the engine as we rounded the north side of the thumb, and I spotted a carving on one of the flat surfaces: another of the crude, big-breasted, fat-bellied women I'd seen near the fire tines.

  “The water tines are directly below that carving,” Maya said.

  Thirty feet below . . .

  I could do it. I had to do it. The hardest part might well be stripping off my clothes.

  I hesitated, then said, “Oh, hell. Let's get this over with.”

  I pulled off my hat and T-shirt, then stood and turned away from Maya and Ambrosio as I unbuttoned my shorts. I removed them and the jockeys beneath together. Wondering what Maya was thinking as she watched my skinny, lily-white butt, I faced the carving and took four slow, deep breaths. Then I dove in head first.