Soul

Colonel James E. Huntington

Lavinia had dressed in a mauve evening gown, the garment she had worn the morning after their wedding night. She stepped into the Colonel’s bedroom searching for a clothes brush. It was an innocent intrusion and she expected her husband to be at his dresser.

Instead, the bedroom was empty, the hearth still glowing. A pile of folded letters sat on the polished rosewood desk, tied with a ribbon. Unable to contain her curiosity, Lavinia pulled one out and read the first two lines: Dearest boy, I cannot describe the desolation I feel when I am apart from you…

Lavinia didn’t need to read any further; she assumed they were her husband’s correspondence with Hamish Campbell. Possessed by a furious impulse, she threw the pile into the fire, where they were quickly consumed.

The Colonel knelt in front of the hearth, the firelight throwing gold and red stripes across his face. An oval mirror stood propped against the wall. His reflection stared back from the smoky glass: the jowled pallid face of a middleaged man, eyes tentative but intrigued.

This is my other self, he thought, the wood hard under his knees, my spirit brother in a mystical world where right is left, where the laws of physics are distorted.

The study had been transformed into a mysterious cavern. The servants had lighted several dozen candles, which now shone from every shelf and alcove. The masks hanging from the ceiling formed a critical audience of celestial beings; the candlelight transformed their spiralling tassels of coconut fibre into hangman’s nooses, their protruding wooden lips into screams. Painted wooden shields and spears around the walls seemed to dart between the curious shadows in the labyrinth of light created by the smouldering tapers.

The Colonel pulled off the thin cotton smock, letting it fall to the ground. My nakedness will be a metaphor; all that defines me is now stripped away. I am Adam, the first man. The corpulent white male stared back at him defiantly. Was he this being? He touched the cold mirror in genuine wonder. How had he become so old, so heavy in his flesh? He recalled his younger self, beautiful even to himself.

‘The ochre.’ He reached out with a flourish, his movements already taking on a ceremonial gravity, his nudity giving him a vulnerable dignity.

Lavinia handed him a basin full of the sticky reddish ground earth the Colonel had brought with him from the Amazon. He smeared it across his chest and shoulders in the ceremonial pattern the shaman had taught him, slowly touching his own skin as if he were exploring an unfamiliar body.

There were questions he needed to ask, signs to look for, symbols of the unconscious, which, by the cold light of the next morning, he would draw upon to construct a useful logic. Do all men share the same gods? How does culture create perspective? He hoped to find evidence of his thesis that the dreams and fantasies of men were universal, that there was a shared language of myth.

The goddess would help him: Jubbu-jang-sange, the Virgin Madonna, Mother Earth—however she was named was unimportant. She had helped him before; on the battlefields of the Crimea, in the opium dens of Indo-China, on the beaches of the Irish Sea. I have to surrender myself, he thought, and glanced at Lavinia. She will be my deliverer or my executioner.

The last daub of ceremonial paint ran in a lurid yellow line from throat to abdomen, separating left from right, Heaven from Earth. Already, as the paint dried on his skin, he had begun the process of making magical his own image, an empowerment that would climax with the donning of the mask.

Lavinia’s figure was a medley of purples and blues, the pale crescents of her breasts rising from her dress. The Colonel felt the desire to make her unquestioning again, as she was at the beginning of their courtship. He felt that he had begun to stiffen, her gaze exciting him. If Eros joins with Hecate, so be it, he thought. Ignoring his erection, he stretched out his left arm.

‘It is time.’

Lavinia handed him the stone ceremonial goblet with various deities carved upon its surface. The dark spiciness of the Jurema mixture wafted through the room. Holding the goblet with both hands, the Colonel drank its contents completely then handed it back to her. He knew it would be some time before the potion took effect.

Hoisting a pigskin cape painted with totemic symbols over his shoulders, he lifted one leg and one arm, mimicking the movements of a long-legged flightless bird, as he had seen the Bakairi do.

Opening a notebook, Lavinia watched. James had instructed her to write down each step of the ritual and to note the physical symptoms of the drug. The task distanced her; it was an objectification that gave her courage.

‘And now?’ she asked.

‘Now we wait.’

The Colonel closed his eyes. Lavinia slipped the snuffbox out of the purse hanging from her waist. In her hands it felt immeasurably heavy despite its small size. How much did a man’s life weigh? How much was her future worth, her freedom? Silently she placed the snuffbox in front of her husband.

The Colonel took two large pinches, inhaling both deeply. His head jolted back as the powder shot up his nose like lava piercing rock. Giddy, he swayed a little. Already his hearing had sharpened to the point where he perceived the breath of the maid polishing the silver one flight below; the sound of his wife’s hair slipping across her silk dress metamorphosed into wind through a forest. He knew the next sense to be affected would be his vision.

‘This is happening faster than I expected,’ he said. ‘Make a note: at six o’clock aural distortion began.’ His voice boomed through his body like the growl of a foghorn and the scratching of Lavinia’s pen against paper was unbearable.

‘Hand me my mask,’ he commanded. He wondered if his words were audible, for to him they sounded like gibberish. His lips felt heavy as his jawbone tightened like a jailer’s screw. ‘And quickly,’ he slurred.

His speech was thickening, Lavinia observed, as she lifted the mask to his face and secured it tightly, as he had instructed, with a cord that ran behind his head.

Suddenly the Colonel’s gravitational axis shifted dramatically. Through the mask’s eye-slits he watched the ceiling extend, becoming the in

ky-black stretched membrane of a bat’s wing opening to the hot heavy sky of the Amazon.

‘I am back,’ he whispered. He looked to his other self, the naked white man whose head lolled under the weight of a carved wooden mask, and, with painful clarity, saw that he had become his spirit echo. A bluish mist streamed from the man’s head, filling the room.

Convinced that he would die when the room filled completely, the Colonel clawed at the mask. ‘It’s happening too quickly,’ he screamed. Doubled over in agony, his body thrashed like a landed fish.

The Colonel’s spirit self gazed down at this latest indignation. Why am I not frightened? he pondered. Then, sensing another presence, he turned. A creature he did not recognise sat rigidly in a chair.