A Postcard Home

This is the story of a crooked landscape-an eroded volcanic arc decked in a thicket of fog and leguminaceous, old-growth, bromeliad-heavy, liana-choked, woody and bearing toxic alkaloids, chosen by frogs, populated by hormigas, beloved of orupendulas, thick with heavy webspider strands. Aloft in the thick of it, lycaenidae, apidae, braconidae. The near-extinct jaguar, the zebu cattle, like lawnmowers, unravelling the tapestry as it hangs.

A robot warned me about changing tires here. I have been told that it usually too hot to do anything but lie around for want of beer and drinks that come with umbrellas. In fact, it is barely twenty four degrees celsius, but Central America encourages that kind of thinking, a sort of "Bueno, bueno. No lluviar ahora. Let's take off our clothes and play soccer."

Desnudar-to undress.

No local would approve of such a thing, it is the invention of young intellectuals from places where snow tires are an option.

I imagine that I am, in actuality, my hero, Alfred Russell Wallace, and that this is really the Amazon, and that all the pet Boa constrictor constrictor worldwide have been released back where they belong, and that I have spotted a black scorpion on my pillow, and though scorpions have no real sense of hearing, I whisper "stay very still.....it is highly venomous."

No, my field assistant is at home nursing a parasitic appendage. The trails here are safer than Oak Park sidewalks, except that they are owned by bullet ants, a vestige of the distant Cretaceous Period, a family so primitive that its members still possess the autonomy to regard the passerby with looks of suspicion.

In fact, the remaining forest is a lost little machine, a clock that has permanently assembled itself for the last eighty million years, with the bullet ant in its innards, now isolated among the hives of zebu cattle and highways decked in shacks serving Pollo y Cervesa, where women in shorts wander barefoot in the middle of the road for lack of sidewalks, lacking fear that the inevitable traffic fatality will somehow affect them. These people are to sensible for green lawns, too frugal and intelligent for anything like a military, trusting the world to leave them alone because, after all, why bother?

In that darkened sanctuary, bats still creep up tree trunks at night and trees fall stupidly to earth with each passing breeze. Somewhere, in Asia, perhaps, like the Anthropophagi, dangerous cannibals, and medicine men hopped ho on Jaje, eating tourists and discarding their disposable cameras by the roadside, the last few images bearing snapshot of tropical hibiscus as a backdrop to their smiling faces, handed off to brown-faced children with strange features and oddly impure intentions. I will see them too, my Lovely, I will see them too. The monkey temple, where human slaves, wait on simeon masters, the cave dwellers of Appalachia, unable to come to the surface because a recessive mutation has made it so that they burst into corpuscles at the first ray of sunlight. The eyeball finch, who pecks through sunglasses for the tasty treat below, I will see it too.

I shall see it all, my Lovely, I shall see it too. Your strange travels, through Himalayan step pyramids and goat brothels have taught me that it is OK to eat the green curry with snake venom, that it is never OK to wade through anything as deep as an anklet tatooo, and at all times, too keep enough money to tip the strippers, who after all, except for the one who brings cupcakes, are not your friends, but are likely to be the only ones who have opium.

I shall see it all. insect net in one hand and magnifying monocle in the other, ready to jump on every last mushroom and ingest it. To see stars and visions with Lil' Hatefull and encroach on some of that strange territory that the werewolf hunter regularly visits and makes plans to circumnavigate, in the afternoon, in between visits by grey blobs. Lenore, if I had your dark footwear I could make the right kind of tracks here, and tell My Clone that, with his genius for devices,I would not be locked in this sweaty cage, with nubile, tan-skinned women wearing leopard print loincloths, smoking cloves, and complaining in strange languages. Metal Brother, you have been here before. Do not insist otherwise, you have a scar from it I have seen. Parsifal, you will be here soon enough. Please, any of you, bring me the key to these handcuffs, they put them on promising wonderful things, and bring my Brother, who is the only person who can make sense of all this. These women have eaten the Giantess, and the others, for dislike of Boston. Soon, very soon, the Viking and the Zombie hunter will pull up in their trailer, their cat spies must have located me by now, and I can hitch a ride home.