I spent a portion of the following day exploring the skull, negotiating channels that often led to other channels, but occasionally to small chambers, all so scrupulously clean that I suspected someone must have snuck in and done the sweeping. Nothing was out of the ordinary about the majority of the chambers (aside from the extraordinary fact of their existence), but the chamber to which Yara went each morning had a soporific effect on me, making me drowsy whenever I entered it. I would have asked Yara about this had she given me reason to anticipate a straight answer – as things stood, after determining that the drowsiness was not the product of my imagination, I marked it down as an anomaly, a minor mystery in the midst of a greater one.
My initial impression of the adherents had been that they were timid, sullen, and ignorant, dimwitted in some instances, and that they represented the disenfranchised, their lives ruled by poverty and informed by delusion. Yet though they lived rough, and though I continued to believe that the foundations of their community were based upon a significant delusion, I came to acknowledge that I had mistaken distraction for temerity, self-absorption for sullenness, and that a majority of the approximately five hundred people dwelling beneath the canopy were upper middle class: educators, doctors, artists, researchers, and professionals of various types. Of course there were also a good many laborers and shop clerks, and a number of ex-derelicts, reformed drunks and addicts, but these were counterbalanced somewhat by the presence of people like Major General Amadis de Lugo, who inhabited a shack close by the skull. A smallish man in his seventies, with a time-ravaged yet still handsome face, ragged white hair, and an untrimmed beard, customarily dressed in fatigue pants and a white T-shirt, he was nonetheless an imposing figure, at least to me. When I first arrived in Temalagua he had been the titular head of Department 46, the country’s notorious internal security unit, and thus had been responsible for the deaths of several of Ex’s colleagues at the university, not to mention thousands more deemed politically untrustworthy by the government. I was shocked to see him (I recognized him from newspaper photos), astonished that he could survive in the community. Someone in the camp must have lost a friend or relative to de Lugo’s death squads – I presumed that they would seek to exact vengeance, but the cult made a point of ignoring all sins committed before joining, even those of a villain like de Lugo, and the policy had not thus far been contravened.
Four days after I moved in with Yara, she spent the morning sequestered in her little bone chamber and in mid-afternoon she went about the encampment, conversing with the adherents. They were less conversations than counseling sessions – she did the lion’s share of the talking and the adherents were limited to nods and affirmations. I tagged along behind her and from what I could hear she appeared to be offering advice designed to shore up their commitment to some nebulous goal, generic hogwash of the kind that enraptures the fans of asswipes like Tony Robbins and Dr Phil. She had a ways to go before she perfected her spiel, but she had Tony and Phil beat all to hell in the looks department and I thought with proper management and a team of make-up people and hair stylists, she could be coached up into a serious money maker. She had a terrific back story: the abused street urchin who had learned life’s secrets from the rain forest swamis and was engaged in hauling herself up from society’s rat-infested basement to become every loser’s dream of success, a Rolex-wearing, couturier-clad, self-help diva striving to reach a platform that would enable her to sell the world some perfumed brand of bullshit. I imagined myself her advisor and complicitor. I’d warm up the audiences, an Armani-wearing stooge delivering a well-rehearsed message of non-denominational love, toothless liberalism, and capitalist greed, yielding the stage to Yara in order to seal the deal with a double shot of the same rendered in her charmingly accented English, all the more charming for having been polished so as to achieve a desired effect.
