“Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say it is true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, likeennnnnhk! And across the sky in humongous letters, GAME OVER. Or we might learn not only how to observe the quantum world but to actually change it. Actually manipulate the intimate fabric of space-time and mass-energy!”
“This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”
Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.
Six
Jenny tossed a broken banana into the blender to keep company with the celery, the beets, the spirulina protein powder, and the psyllium husk extract and goosed the HI button. Through the glass top she watched the smoothie come into being, a pinkish gray vortex. Making the midmorning smoothie for Rupert was one of Jenny’s tasks, along with feeding the birds, the cats, the boyfriend, and recently Moie, the Indian; or the Runiya, as she had to remember to call him. But Moie didn’t eat, which worried her, although she herself did not think much of the cuisine at FPA. Rupert thought that it was wrong to consume animals raised for food, and thought that they should set a good diet-for-a-small-planet example, and also establish solidarity with the indigenous people of the rain forests. Rupert got Professor Cooksey to question Moie about his diet, and how to prepare it, but Moie didn’t know about any foodstuffs but meat (in which he included fish, which in turn included turtles, reptiles, and waterfowl) and seemed somewhat affronted to be asked about “women’s things.” Meat and women’s things were how he divided edible substances.
She was supposed to watch him as well, which was not difficult, much easier than minding a kid, for he was in general docile and gentle. In the mornings, when she did her chores, and during the times, as now, when she had to prep and serve food, she parked him in front of the big TV in the living room. They had cable, and she usually punched up a nature program for him. He seemed to like these, and he would also sit solemnly with her while she took in One Life to Live, her favorite show, although here she had to explain what was going on, because it was kind of hard to get into the plot if you hadn’t been watching for a long time.
She poured the smoothie into the special smoky green glass that Rupert liked to drink it from, placed it on a serving tray, added Luna’s herbal tea and Geli’s coffee and Professor Cooksey’s regular tea, extra-strong with milk, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a Sprite for herself, and brought it into the office. They were all talking about Moie and what to do about him now that there was this murder of the old Cuban guy, and she was sort of interested in that, so after she’d placed the tray on the table and everybody had their stuff, she sat down in a chair away from the meeting table and listened. That was cool according to Rupert because she wasn’t to think of herself as anything but a full member of the community and not just, like, a maid or anything. Which she mostly thought. She had been an actual maid at one time and so she knew the difference.
Jenny thought that coming into a meeting in the middle of it was a little like coming into the middle of One Life to Live, it took a while to figure out what was going on, but you knew the characters, so in a little bit it made sense. Luna was all about using Moie to make a big stink about the people trying to cut down his forest. She had a friend who was a TV producer on Channel Four, and she thought she could get a feature made, and also some of the national enviro groups might pick it up. It was a great story, how this little guy had traveled all that way from South America in a canoe. Geli said, unfortunately he’s not a Cuban, and when Luna asked what that meant, Geli said, he’s illegal, he’s in the country illegally, and if he comes out in public the INS will arrest him and he’ll be stuck in Crome Avenue behind a wire with all the Haitians, and then Luna said, oh, shit, I didn’t think of that, and then added, Rupert, you should talk to your congressman, because Rupert gave a lot of money to this congressman, Jenny always forgot his name, something like Woolite, and he sometimes got him to do stuff, like make a speech about something the FPA was hot on, in the Congress. But Rupert said, maybe that’s not such a good idea at this point until we have clarified about this murder. And he asked Professor Cooksey what he thought, was Moie capable of killing someone that way?
“Well, he says no and I believe him, up to a point,” Cooksey answered, after a considered moment. “He says Jaguar killed the man, which gives me pause.”
“What do you mean?” asked Luna.
“I mean it sounds like this ‘jaguar’ is a kind of god to him, so it might be a figure of speech, as we would say when someone of whom we disapproved met with a bad end, ‘God punished him.’ On the other hand, it could be a case of shape-shifting.”
“Which is…?” said Luna.
“It’s a form of ritual. I’ve observed it any number of times in the field. A shaman takes some drug, usually a form of ayahuasca, which is an extract of the Banisteria vine together with other plant materials, and goes into a trance, during which his animal tutelary spirit takes possession of him and confers special powers. These can be things like superhuman strength, the ability to see in the dark, the ability to travel in spirit form, and so on. It’s no longer him, d’you see, but the animal spirit. And in that case, our Moie could possibly have committed a murder and have no real knowledge of the crime.”
Jenny noticed that Rupert’s face had assumed the dreamy half smile that it wore when he had heard something he didn’t want to hear and wished that someone would do something to make it go away. “That’s unfortunate, then,” he said. “Obviously, that greatly reduces, or rather eliminates, the possibility of him being of any value to us as an organization. In fact, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be the best thing, all things considered, for us to inform the police.”
Luna’s face had become pale under her tan, and her eyes had become all pinched looking, which Jenny knew was a signal that something bad was going to happen, and so it did.
“Thepolice! Rupert, what thefuck are you talking about? What the hell have we been fighting against besides the kind of shit that’s going down in the Puxto, of which Moie is living evidence?Living evidence! And you want to lock him up because some Cuban scumbag got himself killed?”
In his most maddeningly reasonable voice, Rupert replied, “Of course I don’t want to lock him up, but giving, ah, refuge, to someone who may be a serious felon would compromise the principles of our organization and open us to, ah, the possibilities of criminal prosecution. You can see that, surely?”
That was a big mistake, Jenny thought: when Luna got that pinched look what you wanted to do was either agree with her or get the fuck out of town for, like, three days.
“No,” said Luna, “what I see is that, in fact, this organization has no principles at all, except making some rich people feel good about their money. Oh,I don’t buy tropical hardwoods and I use shade-grown fair trade coffee in my three-thousand-dollar espresso machine, give me a fucking good citizen medal! And so let me make it really, really clear. If anyone calls the cops on that man, I personally am off the reservation on it. I will blow the whistle. I will let every enviro in the world know what went down, who he is, and what’s happening. I will call every TV station in town. There’ll be TV crews in permanent residence outside that gate, and you can explain why the preservation of the rain forest is important but not quite important enough for Rupert Zenger to take any risk at all of even being suspected of doing an illegal act. I don’t care if you kick us out, I don’t care if me and Scotty have to sleep in our fucking van and live on rice and beans-”
“We could make a tape,” said Geli Vargos into the angry speech; Luna stopped her rant, and they all stared at Geli. “We could tape his story, just him talking into the camera, with a voice-over, and then we could add subtitles translating what he said. And send out copies to the media. That would expose the Consuela company and put pressure on the Colombians to stop them from destroying a national park, especially since the Puxto got set up by contributions from enviro organizations in the first place.”
Rupert said, “I don’t see how that solves our problem. A tape like that is meaningless to the media unless they have confirmation that the man is what and who he says he is. A little brown man with a bowl haircut and
