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By Root 468 0

the flaccid white flesh of their bottoms pressing through the netting like threaded balls of cheese. Although the sight of them fills her with the usual mixture of pity and frustration, she’s glad she has come, if only so she can see for one last time the thatched structure itself. Like the rain forest surrounding it, the shapono will have ceased to exist within a couple of years. But Ursula will at least be able to carry the memory of it back to the city with her. And living in whatever anonymous apartment she finds for herself—surrounded by walls thick enough to isolate her from but not quite thick enough to block out the presence of neighbors she’ll never even know—she’ll remember the shapono and remember that once there were people who were never alone, who spent their entire lives in the company of their tribe, and that this gave them strength, and a deep understanding of their interdependence, and yes, sometimes even happiness. And she knows that when she tells people about this they’ll roll their eyes and say it sounds like hell and that they’d never want to live with their families. But hell is not necessarily other people, no, not necessarily; hell is being surrounded by people who share no solidarity, it’s like dying of thirst on the bank of a contaminated river. Hell is the Middle City metropolitan area and ten thousand other metropolitan areas just like it, ground zeros of densely packed buildings, each surrounded by a hundred-square-mile radius of flat suburban sprawl, as though our race had been so filled with the fear of a nuclear apocalypse that, like a return of the repressed, we’d ended up acting out the devastation of it by other means, making of our lives a living monument to death.

And tomorrow she’s going back.

In the middle of the shapono clearing a large campfire blazes, an absurd waste in the heat of the daytime. Near the fire a dozen tribespeople prepare for the ceremony, adorning one another’s hair with white down. Walter and Ursula walk toward the group.

“It seems weird to do this kind of ceremony in the daylight,” she says. “Is this when they told you to do it?”

“They didn’t really say. But at night we can sleep. In the day we’ve got to fill the time somehow.”

“Don’t you people have to hunt? Or do you just order out for Chinese?”

“Nowadays, with all the logging, the animals practically leap into the pot.”

Ursula points to the campfire. “And I suppose you’re not too concerned about the waste of wood,” she says.

“With half the forest burning up north? What difference could this possibly make?”

He’s right, of course, but still, the carnivalesque atmosphere here in the village makes Ursula uncomfortable. Probably half of these neotribes-people are serious, at least according to their own skewed reasoning, about preserving a culture and a way of life; the other half are just the latest brand of ecotourists. The whole forest, or what remains of it, is steadily filling with thrill-seekers of all kinds, from weekend campers to apocalyptic cultists. Ursula can’t blame any of them, really. She can’t even bring herself to hate the people who come here to hunt the remaining leopards, or the speculators who bottle rain-forest air and laminate leaves in plastic. She can’t blame people for wanting to experience this place in whatever limited way they can. After all, consumption is a kind of love, she thinks, the only kind most of us happen to be any good at.

“Yo, Walt.” The shaman takes a couple of steps toward them. His balding head is blanketed with white down, and his face is painted brown, with an orange stripe running down the center. He is short and thickly built, and his large, hairy belly is peppered with short, impressionistic paintstrokes. His penis is thicker than it is long, as though it had gained muscle mass from the daily exercise of resisting the crushing weight of his belly.

“Yo, Dan. You ever meet Ursula?”

“Yo, Ursula,” he says, holding up a meaty hand. Coincidentally, Yo is an actual Yanomama word, used in greeting. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the few Yanomama words that have