The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [109]
"I walked all night, through an alpine valley following the river. No concern about where I was going; my path assured, every footstep. Sure enough, I happened upon a deserted cabin; a shepherd's roost, stocked with supplies. Stayed there until the food was gone. My strength renewed, with the voice guiding me I walked two hundred miles south, down through the Dolomites, to Padua, then finally to Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea. Spring stirring in the air. I found work on the docks as a laborer and took a room near the canal. Ate at the same cafe every evening; black olives, thick dark bread, red wine. Lots of red wine.
"I'd spent my entire life hunting my brother: I had no idea this was the way most people live. They work, eat, sleep, make love. Never concern themselves with aspects of living they can't control—meaning, purpose; they're never questioned, easier to leave all that in the hands of an employer, the Church, the tax collector. Existing from one day to the next; part of the landscape, never straying far from the ground that produced them. So self-evident but for me an entirely new conception. Living among them gave me an experience of true grace. Days ran into months, spring into summer and fall. I worked my body to exhaustion every day, slept with as many women as I could manage, and worried about exactly nothing.
"Casting off all ties to who I had been allowed me to become anyone I wanted: What are we except what we imagine ourselves to be? One morning I woke with an impulse to move on: I made myself a sailor from the Isle of Man—forged the documents I needed—and signed on a merchant steamer, bound for Portugal. A restlessness wormed its way into my blood: Out of Lisbon, I joined a freighter shipping to Brazil, where I wandered the coast, working smaller ships until I finally found a world to lose myself in.
"Four years in the city of Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon River: an international port, dozens of cultures colliding in a thousand intrigues; equatorial heat, thievery and bad intent. Surrounded by jungle, and its influence seeped into the bloodstream of every human behavior: ruthless, predatory, vampirish. Who would have guessed you could find such authenticity in a city populated exclusively by liars? Not a single soul in the place paid the slightest allegiance to the truth. I felt immediately at home.
"I made myself an Irishman, a relative exotic in that hothouse: I used the name Doyle, an homage to you. My first job; a steamboat traveling up and down the river, transport to a rubber plantation in the Amazon basin beyond Manaus, deep in the interior near the Rio Negro. A local tribe worked the fields there for the Portuguese bosses; the En-aguas, the 'good men.' Fitting name for these people. I thought I had experienced a simple life in Ravenna; the En-aguas embodied simplicity. They live in thatch huts, raised ten feet off the jungle floor as protection from the floods. In spite of their long contact with the whites, they remain uncorrupted: almost no trade; everything they need is taken from the jungle.
"I spent all my spare time with the En-aguas, slowly ingratiating myself with the headman. They had information I wanted about local pharmacology; the breadth of their knowledge about extracted medicines and the properties of herbs astonished me. The tribal shaman, their priest, used a tonic brewed from a root, ayaheusco, in ritual ceremony. After gaining their trust, I eventually took part in one; this substance severs the mind from its natural moorings; as it takes effect, they say, your spirit leaves your body and the priest guides you to enter into the consciousness of an animal, a boa, a jaguar, whichever one you own a true affinity for: your spirit guide. I became an eagle, Doyle, flew above the jungle, felt wings beating at my sides, looked down at the treetops with the same keen vision, felt the sharpness of