On the 28th day he resumed his shameless staring. I was gratified, too, even though he now pursued a strategy different from that of the previous day: He moved tirelessly about the clearing, weaving in and out of the clusters of Asadi, but always staying close enough to the western sideline to be able to see me. His eyes remained as dead as the insides of two oyster shells. I was fighting stomach cramps and bouts of diarrhea, and by late afternoon his stare had grown annoying again.
I felt better the following morning, my 29th day. The light from glowering Denebola seemed softer, the tropical heat less debilitating. I left my lean-to and went out on the assembly ground.
Bathed in the pastel emptiness of dawn, the Asadi came flying through the lianas and fronds of the Synesthesia Wild to begin another day of Indifferent Togetherness. Soon I was surrounded. Surrounded but ignored. Great ugly heads with silver, or blue, or clay-white, or tawny manes bobbed around me, graceless and unsynchronized.
At last I found The Bachelor.
Undoubtedly, he had had me in his sight all that morning – but, moving with circumspection among his fellows, he had not permitted me to see him. And I had fretted over his apparent absence.
Then Denebola was directly overhead. Our shadows were small dark pools around our feet, like fallen trousers. The Bachelor threaded his way through a dissolving clump of bodies and stopped not five meters from me, atremble with his own daring. I, too, trembled. Would The Bachelor fall upon and devour me as the Asadi males had fallen upon and devoured the old chieftain’s gift of meat?
Instead, The Bachelor steeled himself to the task he had set and began his approach. My shadow wrinkled a little under my feet. The grey head, the patchy silver-blue mane, the twin carapaces of his eyes – all moved toward me. Then the long grey arm rose toward my face and the perfectly humanoid hand touched the depression under my bottom lip, touched the most recent of my shaving cuts, touched me without clumsiness or malice.
And I winced.
A Running Chronology: Weeks Pass
From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney:
Day 29: After this unusual one-to-one contact with the Asadi (hereinafter referred to as The Bachelor), I did my best to find some method of meaningful communication. Words failed. So did signs in the dirt. Hand signals attracted and held his attention, but I have no training in the systematic use of American Sign Language or any of its several variants and so eventually gave this method up, too. I don’t really believe it’s a likely solution to our communication problems.
Nevertheless, The Bachelor couldn’t be dissuaded from following me about. On one occasion, when I left the clearing for lunch, he very nearly followed me into my lean-to. I was almost surprised when at dusk he left with the others, he had been so doggedly faithful all day. Despite this desertion, I’m excited about my work again. Tomorrow seems a hundred years off . . .
Day 35: Nothing. The Bachelor continues to follow me around, never any more than eight or nine paces away. His devotion is such that I can’t take a pee without his standing guard at my back. He must think he’s found an ally against the indifference of the others, who blithely ignore us. I’ve begun to weary of his attentions.
Day 40: I’m ill again. The medicine Benedict dropped during an earlier bout of diarrhea is almost gone. It’s raining. As I write this, lying on my pallet in my lean-to, the odor of the Asadi’s morose, grey dampness assaults me like a poison, intensifying my nausea. In and out they go, back and forth . . .
I have formulated the interesting notion that their entire way of life, in which I’ve had to struggle to see even one or two significant patterns, is itself the one significant and ongoing ritual of their species. Formerly, I had been looking for several minor rituals to help me explain this people. It may be that they are the ritual. As the poet said, ‘How tell the dancer from the dance?’ But having formulated this new and brilliant hypothesis about the Asadi, I’m still left with the question, What is the significance of the ritual the Asadi themselves are? An existential query, of course.
The Bachelor sits cross-legged in the dripping, steam-silvered foliage about five meters from my lean-to. His mane clings to his skull and shoulders like so many tufts of matted, cottony mold. Even though he’s been dogging my footsteps for eleven days now, I can’t get him to enter my shelter. He always sits outside and stares at me from beneath an umbrella of leaves. Even when it’s raining. His reluctance to come under a manufactured roof may be significant. If only I could make the same sort of breakthrough with two or three others I’ve made with The Bachelor.
Day 50: After the Asadi fled into the jungle last night, I trudged toward the supply pickup point where Benedict leaves my rations and medicine each week. The doses of Placenol I’ve been giving myself lately, shooting up the stuff like a junkie, have gotten bigger and bigger – but Eisen, at the outset of this farcical expedition, assured me that P-nol, in any quantity, is absolutely nonaddictive. What amazes me beyond this sufficiently amazing attribute of the drug, though, is the fact that Benedict’s been dropping more and more of it each week, providing me with a supply almost exactly in tune with my increasing consumption.
Or do I use more because he drops more?
No, of course not. Everything goes into a computer at base camp. A program they ran weeks ago probably predicted this completely predictable upsurge in my ‘emotional’ dependency on P-nol. At any rate, I’m feeling better; I’ve begun to function again.
Trudging toward the pickup point, I felt a haunting
