The All-Consuming

Santander Jimenez was one of the towns that ringed the Malsueno, a kind of border station between the insane tangle of the rain forest and the more comprehensible and traditional insanity of the highlands. It was a miserable place of diesel smoke and rattling generators and concrete-block buildings painted in pastel shades of yellow, green and aqua, many with rusted Fanta signs over their doors, bearing names such as the Café of a Thousand Flowers or The Eternal Garden Bar or the Restaurant of Golden Desires, all containing fly-specked Formica tables and inefficient ceiling fans and fat women wearing grease-spattered aprons and discouraging frowns. Whores slouched beneath the buzzing neon marquee of the Cine Guevara. Drunks with bloody mouths lay in the puddles that mired the muddy streets. It was always raining. Even during the height of the dry season, the lake was so high that the playground beside it was half-submerged, presenting a surreal vista of drowned swing sets and seesaws.

To the west of town, separated from the other buildings by a wide ground strewn with coconut litter and flattened beer cans, stood a market--a vast tin roof shading a hive of green wooden stalls. It was there that the marañeros would take the curious relics and still more curious produce that they collected in the heart of the rain forest: stone idols whose eyes glowed with electric moss; albino beetles the size of house cats; jaguar bones inlaid with seams of mineral that flowed like mercury; lizards with voices as sweet as nightingales; mimick vines, parrot plants and pavonine, with its addictive spores that afforded one a transitory mental contact with the creatures of the jungle.

They were, for the most part, these marañeros, scrawny, rawboned men who wore brave tattoos that depicted lions and devils and laughing skulls. Their faces were scarred, disfigured by fungus and spirochetes, and when they walked out in the town, they were given a wide berth, not because of their appearance or their penchant for violence, which was no greater than that of the ordinary citizen, but because they embodied the dread mystique of the Malsueno, and in their tormented solitudes, they seemed the emblems of a death in life more frightening to the uninformed than the good Catholic death advertised by the portly priests at Santa Anna de la Flor del Piedra.

Scarcely anyone who lived in Santander Jimenez wanted to live there. A number of citizens had been driven to this extreme in order to hide from a criminal or politically unsound past. The most desperate of these were the marañeros--who but those who themselves were hunted would voluntarily enter the Malsueno to dwell for months at a time among tarzanals and blood vine and christomorphs?--and the most desperate of the marañeros, or so he had countenanced himself for 21 years, so many years that his desperation had mellowed to an agitated resignation, was a gaunt, graying man by the name of Arce Cienfuegos. In his youth, he had been an educator in the capital in the extreme west of the country, married to a beautiful woman, the father of an infant son, and had aspired to a career in politics. However, his overzealous pursuit of that career had set him at odds with the drug cartel; as a result, his wife and child had been murdered, a crime with which he had subsequently been charged, and he had been forced to flee to the Malsueno. For a time thereafter, he had been driven by a lust for revenge, for vindication, but when at last the drug cartel had been shattered, its leaders executed, revenge was denied him, and because those who could prove his innocence were in their coffins, the murder charge against him had remained open. Now, at the age of 48, his crime forgotten, although he might have returned to the capital, he was so defeated by time and solitude and grief he could no longer think of a reason to leave. Just as chemical pollutants and radiation had transformed the jungle into a habitat suitable to the most grotesque of creatures, living in the Malsueno had transformed him into a sour twist of a man who thrived on its green acids, its vegetable perversions, and he was no longer fit for life in the outside world. Or so he had convinced himself.

Nonetheless, (continued on page 150)The All-Consuming(continued from page 84) he yearned for some indefinable improvement in his lot, and to ease this yearning, he had lately taken to penetrating ever more deeply into the Malsueno, to daring unknown territory, telling himself that perhaps in the depths of the jungle, he would find a form of contentment, but knowing to his soul that what he truly sought was release from an existence whose despair and spiritual malaise had come to outweigh any fleshly reward.

•

One day, toward the end of the rainy season, Arce received word that a man who had taken a room at the Hotel America 66, one Yuoki Akashini, had asked to see him. In general, visitors to Santander Jimenez were limited to scientists hunting specimens and the odd tourist gone astray, and since, according to his informant, Mr. Akashini fell into neither of those categories, Arce's curiosity was aroused. That evening, he presented himself at the hotel and informed the owner, Nacho Perez, a bulbous, officious man of 50, that he had an appointment with the Japanese gentleman. Nacho--who earned the larger part of his living by selling relics purchased from the marañeros at swindler's prices--attempted to pry information concerning the appointment out of him; but Arce, who loathed the hotel owner, having been cheated by him on countless occasions, kept his own counsel. Before entering room 23, he poked his head in the door and saw a short, crewcut man in his early 30s standing by a cot, wearing gray trousers and a T-shirt. The man glowed with health and had the heavily developed arms and chest of a weight lifter. His smile was extraordinarily white and fixed and wide.

"Señor Cienfuegos? Ah, excellent!" he said, and made a polite bow. "Please ... come in, come in."

The room, which reeked of disinfectant, was of green concrete block and, like a jail cell, contained one chair, one cot, one toilet. Cobwebs clotted the transom and light was provided by a naked bulb dangling from a ceiling fixture. Mr. Akashini offered Arce the chair and took a position by the door, hands clasped behind his back and legs apart, like a soldier standing at ease.

"I am told," he said, his voice hoarse, his tone clipped, almost as if in accusation, "you know the jungle well." He arched an eyebrow, lending an accent of inquiry to these words.

"Well enough, I suppose."

Mr. Akashini nodded and made a rumbling noise deep in his throat--a sign of approval, Arce thought.

"If you're considering a trip into the jungle," he said, crossing his legs, "I'd advise against it."

"I do not require a guide," said Mr. Akashini. "I want you to bring me food."

Arce was nonplused. "There's a restaurant downstairs."

Mr. Akashini stood blinking, as if absorbing this information, then threw back his head and laughed uproariously. "Very good! A restaurant downstairs!" He wiped his eyes. "You have mistaken my meaning. I want you to bring me food from the jungle. Here. This will help you understand."

He crossed to the cot, where a suitcase lay open, and removed from it a thick leather-bound album, which he handed to Arce. It contained photographs and newspaper clippings that featured shots of Mr. Akashini at dinner. The text of the majority of the clippings was in Japanese, but several were in Spanish, and it was apparent from these--which bestowed upon Mr. Akashini the title of The All-Consuming--and from the photographs that he was not eating ordinary food but objects of different sorts: automobiles, among them a Rolls-Royce Corniche; works of art, including several important expressionist canvases and a small bronze by Rodin; cultural artifacts of every variety, mostly American, ranging from items such as one of Elvis Presley's leather-and-rhinestone jump suits, a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix and Lee Harvey Oswald's Carcano rifle--obtained at "an absurd cost," according to Mr. Akashini--to the structure of the first McDonald's restaurant, a meal that, ground to a powder and mixed with gruel, had taken a year to complete. Arce did not understand what had compelled Mr. Akashini to enter upon this strange gourmandizing, but one thing was plain: The man was wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, and although this did not overly excite Arce, for he had few wants, nevertheless, he was not one to let an opportunity for profit slip away.

"I am listed in the Guinness Book of World Records," said Mr. Akashini proudly. "Three times." He held up three fingers in order to firmly imprint this fact on Arce's consciousness.

Arce tried to look impressed.

"I intend," Mr. Akashini went on, "to eat the Malsueno. Not everything in it, of course." He grinned and clapped Arce on the shoulder, as if to assure him of the limits of his appetite. "I wish to eat those things that will convey to me its essence. Things that embody the soul of the place."

"I see," said Arce, but failed to disguise the puzzlement in his voice.

"You are wondering, are you not," said Mr. Akashini, tipping his head to the side, holding up a forefinger like an earnest lecturer, "why I do this?"

"It's not my business."

"Still, you wonder." Mr. Akashini turned to the wall above his cot, again clasping his hands behind his back. He might have been standing on the bridge of a ship, considering a freshly conquered land. "I admit to a certain egocentric delight in accomplishment, but my desire to consume stems to a large degree from curiosity, from my love for other cultures, my desire to understand them. When I eat, you see, I understand. I cannot always express the understanding, but it is profound ... more profound, I am convinced, than an understanding gained from study or travel or immersion in some facet of one culture or another. I know things about the United States that not even Americans know. I have tasted the inner mechanisms of American history, of the American experience. I have recently finished writing a book of meditations on the subject." He turned to Arce. "Now, it is my intention to understand the Malsueno, to derive from its mutations, from the furies of the radiation and chemicals and poisons that created them, a comprehension of its essence. So I have come to you for assistance. I will pay well."

He named a figure that elevated Arce's estimate of his wealth, and Arce signaled his acceptance.

"But how can you expect to eat poison and survive?" he asked.

"With caution." Mr Akashini chuckled and patted his flat belly.

Arce pictured tiny cars, portraits, statuary, temples, entire civilizations in miniature inside Mr. Akashini's stomach, floating upon an angry sea like those depicted by the print maker Hokusai. The image infused the man's healthy glow with a decadent character.

"Please, have no fear about my capacity," said Mr. Akashini. "I am in excellent condition and accustomed to performing feats of ingestion. And I have implants that will neutralize those poisons that my system cannot handle. So, if you are agreed, I will expect my first meal tomorrow."

"I'll see to it." Arce came to his feet and, easing around Mr. Akashini, made for the door.

"Excuse, please!"

Arce turned and was met with a flash that blinded him for a moment; as his vision cleared, he saw his employer lowering a camera.

"See you at suppertime!" said Mr. Akashini.

He nodded and smiled as if he already understood everything there was to know about Arce.

•

Although determined to earn his fee, Arce did not intend to risk himself in the deep jungle for such a fool as Mr. Akashini appeared to be. Who did the man think he was to believe he could ingest the venomous essence of the Malsueno? Likely, he would be dead in a matter of days, however efficient his implants. And so the following afternoon, without bothering to put on protective gear, Arce walked a short distance into the jungle and cast about for something exotic and inedible ... but nothing too virulent. He did not want to lose his patron so quickly. Soon he found an appropriate entree and secured it inside a specimen bag. At dusk, his find laid out in a box of transparent plastic with a small hinged opening, he presented himself at the hotel. Room 23 had undergone a few changes. The cot had been removed, and in its place was a narrow futon. Dominating the room, making it almost impossible to move, was a mahogany dinner table set with fine linens and silverware and adorned with a silver candelabrum. Mr. Akashini, attired in a dinner jacket and a black tie, was seated at the table, smiling his gleaming edifice of a smile.

"Ah!" he said. "And what do you have for me, Señor Cienfuegos?"

With a flourish, Arce deposited the box on the table and was rewarded by an appreciative sigh. In the dim light, his culinary offering--ordinary by the grotesque standards for the Malsueno--looked spectacularly mysterious: an 18-inch-long section of a rotten log, shining a vile, vivid green, with the swirls of phosphorescent fungus that nearly covered its dark, grooved surface; scuttling here and there were big spiders that showed a negative black against the green radiance, like intricate holes in a glowing film that was sliding back and forth ... except now and again, they merged into a single many-legged blackness that pulsed and shimmered and grew larger still. Bathed in that glow, Mr. Akashini's face was etched into a masklike pattern of garish light and shadow.

"What are they?" he said, his eyes glued to the box.

For Mr. Akashini's benefit, Arce resorted to invention.

"They are among the great mysteries of the Malsueno," he said. "And thus, they have no name, for who can name the incomprehensible? They are insect absences, they live, they prey on life, and yet they are lightless and undefined, more nothing than something. They are common yet the essence of rarity. They are numberless, yet they are one."

At this, words failed him. He folded his arms and affected a solemn pose.

"Excellent!" whispered Mr. Akashini, leaning close to the lid of the box. He made one of his customary throaty growls. "You may leave now. I wish to eat alone so as to maximize my understanding."

That was agreeable to Arce, who had no wish to observe the fate of the spiders and the fungus-coated log. But as he turned to leave, pleased with the facility with which he had satisfied the terms of his employment, Mr. Akashini said, "You have provided me with a marvelous hors d'oeuvre, señor, but I expect much more of you. Is that clear?"

"Of course," said Arce, startled.

"No, not of course. There is nothing of course about what I've asked of you. I expect diligence. And even more than diligence, I expect zeal."

"As you wish."

"Yes," said Mr. Akashini, fitting his gaze to the glowing feast, his face again ordered by that impenetrable smile. "Exactly."

•

Although for weeks he obeyed Mr. Akashini's instructions and sought out ever more exotic and deadly suppers, to Arce's surprise, his employer did not sicken and die but thrived on his diet of poisons and claws and spore. His healthy glow increased, his biceps bulged like cannon balls, his eyes remained clear. It became a challenge to Arce to locate a dish that would weaken Mr. Akashini's resistance, that would at least cause him an upset stomach. He did not care for Mr. Akashini and had concluded that the man was something more sinister than a fool. And when Nacho asked again what was the nature of his business in room 23, Arce had no qualms about telling him, thinking that Nacho would make a joke of his employer's diet. But Nacho was incredulous and shook his fist at Arce. "I'm warning you," he said, "I won't have you taking advantage of my guests."

Arce understood that Nacho was concerned that he might be swindling Mr. Akashini and not cutting him in for a percentage. When he tried to clarify the matter, Nacho only threatened him again, demanded money, and Arce walked away in disgust.

It was evident by the way Mr. Akashini used his camera that he had no regard for anyone in the town. He would approach potential subjects, all smiles and bows, and proceed to pose them, making it plain that he was ridiculing the person whose photograph he was preparing to take. He posed confused, dignified old men with bouquets of flowers, he posed Nacho with a toy machine gun, he posed a young girl with an ugly birthmark on her cheek holding an armful of puppies. Afterward, he would once again smile and bow, but the smiles were sneers and the bows were slaps. Arce understood the uses of contempt--he had witnessed it among his own people in their harsh attitude toward Americans. Yet they were expressing the classic resentment of the poor toward the wealthy, and he could not fathom why Mr. Akashini, who was wealthier than an American, should express a similar attitude toward the poor. Perhaps, he thought, Mr. Akashini had himself been poor and was now having his revenge. But why revenge himself upon those who had never lorded it over him? Was his need to understand, to consume, part and parcel of a need to dominate and deride? All Arce knew of Japan had been gleaned from books dealing with the samurai, with knights, swords and a chill formal morality, and he had the notion that the values detailed in these books were of moment to Mr. Akashini, though in some distorted fashion. Yet, in the end, he could not decide if Mr. Akashini were as simple as he appeared or if there were more to him than met the eye, and he thought this might be a question to which not even his employer knew the answer.

Be he complicated or simple, one thing was apparent--Mr. Akashini did not know as much as he pretended. He could spout volumes of facts concerning the Malsueno. Yet his knowledge lacked the depth of experience, the unifying character of something known in the heart of the mind, and Arce could not accept the idea that consumption bestowed upon him a deeper comprehension. The things he claimed to understand of America--rock-and-roll music, say--he understood in a Japanese way, imbuing them with watered-down samurai principles and a neon romanticism redolent of contemporary Tokyo night-club values and B movies, thereby transforming them into devalued icons that bore little relation to the realities from which they had sprung.

However, Arce was not such a fool that he claimed to understand Mr. Akashini, and putting his doubts aside, he made an interior renewal of his contract and set himself to feed Mr. Akashini the absolute essence of the Malsueno, hoping to either prove or disprove the thesis. He was beginning to feel an odd responsibility to his job, to a man who--though he paid well--had shown him nothing but contempt, and while this conscientious behavior troubled him, being out of character with the person he believed he had become, he had no choice but to obey its imperatives.

Arce's searches carried him farther and farther afield and one morning found him in a clearing three days' trek from Santander Jimenez. Mr. Akashini would be occupied for the better part of a week in devouring his latest offering, which included lapis bees and lime ants, a section from the trunk of a gargantua garnished with its thorns, an entire duende cooked with blood vine, various fungi, all seasoned with powder ground from woohli bones and served with a variety of mushrooms. Thus, Arce, being in no particular hurry, stopped to rest and enjoy the otherworldly beauty of the clearing, its foliage a mingling of mineral brilliance and fairy shape such as occurred only within the confines of the Malsueno.

At the center of the clearing was a cloud pool, a ragged oval some 12 feet in diameter, whose quicksilver surface mirrored the surrounding foliage--yellow weeds; boulders furred with orange moss; mushrooms the size of parasols, their purple crowns mottled with spots of vermilion; mattes of dead lianas thick as boas; shrubs with spine-tipped viridian leaves that quested ceaselessly for some animal presence in which to inject their venom; and, dangling from above, the immense red leaves of a gargantua, each large enough to wrap about oneself several times.

Through gaps in the foliage, Arce could see the slender trunks of other gargantuas rising above the canopy, vanishing into a bank of low clouds. And in the middle distance, its translucent flesh barely visible against the overcast, a rainbird flapped up from a stinger palm and beat its way south against the prevailing wind. Arce watched it out of sight, captivated by the almost impalpable vibration of its wings, by the entirety of the scene, with its gaudy array of colors and exotic vitality. At times like this, he was able to shrug off the bitter weight of his past for a few moments and delight in the mystery he inhabited.

Once he had carefully inspected the area, he settled on a boulder and opened the face plate of his protective suit. The heat was oppressive after the coolness of the suit, and the air stank of carrion and sweet rot, yet it was refreshing to feel the breeze on his face. He took a packet of dried fruit from a pocket on his sleeve and ate, ever aware of the rustlings and cries and movement about him--there were creatures in this part of the jungle that could pluck him from his suit with no more difficulty than a man shelling a peanut, and they were not always easy to detect. Absently, he tossed a piece of apricot into the cloud pool and watched the silvery surface effloresce as it digested the fruit, ruffles of milky rose and lavender spreading from the point of impact toward the edges like the opening of a convulsed bloom. He considered collecting a vial of the fluid for Mr. Akashini--that would test the efficacy of his implants.

Yet to Arce's mind, the cloud pool did not embody the essence of the jungle but rather was a filigree, an adornment, and he doubted that he could provide his employer with any more quintessentially Malsuenan a meal than some of those he had already served him. Mr. Akashini had eaten fillet of tarzanal, woohli, ghost lemur, jaguar, malcoton; he had supped on stews of tar fish, manta bat, pezmiel, manatee; he had consumed stone, leaf, root, spore; he had gorged himself on sauces compounded of poison, feces, animal and plant excrescence of every kind; yet he appeared as healthy and ignorant as before. What, Arce thought, if it were the very efficacy of his implants that kept him from true understanding? Perhaps to attain such a state, one must be vulnerable to that which one wished to understand.

He unzipped another pocket on his sleeve and removed a packet of pavonine spores. Arce was no addict, but he enjoyed a taste of the drug now and again, and when attempting to seek out certain animals, he found it more than a little useful. He touched a spore-covered finger tip to his tongue, enough to sensitize him to his immediate environment. Within seconds, he felt a tightening at the back of his throat, a queasiness and a touch of vertigo. A violent cramp doubled him over, bringing tears and spots before his eyes. By the time the cramp had passed, he seemed to be crawling along a high branch of a gargantua, hauling himself along with knobby, hairy fingers tipped with claws, pushing aside heavy folds of dangling leaves with ropy patterns of veins, inflamed by a dark-red emotion that sharpened into lust as he was being lifted, shaken, pincers locked about his chitinous body and, above him, impossibly tall pale arcs of grass blades and the glowing white blur of an orchid sun; and then, fat with blood, he hung dazed and languorous in a shadowy place; and then he was leaping, his jaws wide, claws straining toward the flanks of a fleeing tapir; and then his mind went blank and still and calm, like a pool of emerald water steeped in a single thought; and then, his shadow casting a lake of darkness across a thicket of sapodilla bushes, he roared, on fire with the ecstasy of his strength and the exuberance of his appetites.

Less than three minutes after he had taken the pavonine, Arce came unsteadily to his feet and started hunting for the calm green mind that his mind had touched ... like nothing he had touched before. Calm, and yet a calm compounded of a trillion minute violences, like the jungle itself in the hour before first light, brimming with hot potentials, but, for the moment, cool and peaceful and hushed. Whatever it had been was close by the pool, Arce was certain, and so he knew it could be nothing large. He overturned rocks with the toe of his boot, probed in the weeds with a rotten stick and at length unearthed a smallish snake with an intricate pattern of red and yellow and white tattooed across its black scales. It slithered away but did so with no particular haste, as if--rather than trying to elude capture--it was simply going on its way, and when Arce netted it, instead of twisting and humping about, it coiled up and went to sleep. Seeing this, Arce did not doubt that the snake's skull housed the mind he had contacted, and although he had no real feeling that the snake would implement Mr. Akashini's understanding, still he was pleased to have found something new and surprising to feed him.

•

On his return to Santander Jimenez, he served Mr. Akashini a meal that included a palm salad with diced snake meat. Then, leaving him to dine alone, he walked across town to the Salon Tia Flaca, a rambling three-story building of dark-green boards close to the market, and there secured the companionship of a whore for the night. The whore, his favorite, was named Expectacion and was a young thing, 19 or 20, pretty after the fashion of the women of the coast, slim and dark, with full breasts and a petulant mouth and black hair that tumbled like smoke about her shoulders. Once they had made love, she brought Arce rum with ice and lime and lay beside him and asked questions about his life whose answers were of no interest to her whatsoever. Arce realized that her curiosity was a charade, that she was merely fulfilling the forms of their unwritten contract, but nevertheless, he felt compelled to tell her about Mr. Akashini and the peculiar business between them, because by so doing, he hoped to disclose a pattern underlying it, something that would explain his new sense of responsibility, his complicity in this foolhardy mission.

When he was done, she propped herself up on an elbow, her pupils cored with orange reflections from the kerosene lamp, and said, "He pays you so much, and still you remain in Santander Jimenez?"

"It's as I've told you ... I'm as happy here as anywhere. I've nowhere to go."

"Nowhere! You must be crazy! This"--she waved at the window, at the dark wall of the jungle beyond and the malfunctioning neons of the muddy little town--"this is nowhere! Even money can't change that. But the capital ... with money. That's a different story."

"You're young," he said. "You don't understand."

She laughed. "The only way you can understand anything is to do it.... Then it's not worth talking about. Tell that to your Japanese man. Anyway, you're the one who doesn't understand." She threw her arms about him, her breasts flattening against his chest. "Let's get out of here, let's steal the Jap's money and go to the capital. Even if the theft is reported, the police there don't care what happens in the Malsueno. You know that's true. They'll just file the report. Come on, Papá! I swear I'll make you happy."

Arce was put off by her use of the word papá, and said, "Do you think I'm a fool? In the capital, the minute I turned my back, you'd be off with the first good-looking boy who caught your eye."

"You are a fool to think I'm just a slut." She drew back and seemed to be searching his face. "I've been a whore since I was twelve, and "I've learned all I need to know about good-looking boys. What gets my heart racing is somebody like you. Somebody rich and refined who'll keep me safe. I'd marry a guy like you in a flash. But even if I was the kind of woman you say, no injury I did you would be worse than what you're doing to yourself by staying here."

He thought he detected in her eyes a flicker of something more than reflected light, of an inner luminescence like that found in the eyes of a malcoton. It occurred to him that she herself was of the Malsueno, one of its creatures, the calm green habit of her thoughts every bit as inexplicable to him as the mind of the snake he had captured. And yet there was something in her that brought back memories of his dead wife--a mixture of energy and toughness that tempted him to believe not only in her but in himself, in the possibility that he could regain his energy and hope.

"Maybe someday," he told her. "I'll think about it."

"Don't kid yourself, Papá. I don't think it's in you." She arched her back, and her breasts rolled on her chest, drawing his eyes to the stiffened chocolate-colored nipples. "I guess you were born to be a marañero. But at least you've got good taste in whores."

She went astride him and made love to him with more enthusiasm than before, and as he arched beneath her, watching her in the dim light that penetrated the fall of her hair, which hung down about his head, walling him into a place of warm breath and musk, he imagined that he knew her, that he could see past the deceits and counterfeits in her rapt features to a place where she was in love not with him but with the security offered by his circumstance. Not truly in love but--like a beast that has spotted its prey--in the grip of a fierce opportunism, a feeling that might as well have been love for its delirium and consuming intensity.

•

The next day, when Arce visited the hotel, Nacho Perez, dressed in a sweat-stained guayabera and shorts, questioned him about his activities in room 23.

"What's going on up there?" he asked, mopping perspiration from his brow. "I won't have any funny business. Is he a drug addict? A pervert? What are you doing with him? He never lets anyone in the room, not even the maid. I won't tolerate this kind of behavior."

"You'll tolerate anything, Nacho," said Arce, "as long as you're paid to tolerate it. Ask your questions of Akashini."

"Listen to me ..." Nacho began, but Arce caught him by the shirt front and said, "You bastard! Give me a reason--not a good reason, just a little one--and I'll cut you, do you hear?"

Nacho licked his lips and said, "I hear," but there was no conviction in his voice.

On reaching the room, Arce discovered that Mr. Akashini had spent a sleepless night. His color was poor, his brow clammy, his hands trembling. Yet when Arce suggested that he forgo his meal, the Japanese man said, "No, no! I'm all right." He passed a handkerchief across his brow. "Perhaps something simple. A few plants ... some insects." Arce had no choice but to comply, and for several days thereafter, he served Mr. Akashini harmless meals from the edge of the jungle; yet despite this, whether because of the snake or simply because of a surfeit of poisons that had neutralized his implants, Mr. Akashini continued to deteriorate. His skin acquired the unhealthy shine of milk spore, his eyes were clouded, his manner distracted, and he grew so weak that it took him three tries to heave himself up from his chair. Nothing Arce said would sway him from his course.

"I feel"--Mr. Akashini had to swallow-- "I feel as if I am ... close to something."

Close to death, was Arce's thought, but it was not his place to argue, and he only shrugged.

"Yes," said Mr. Akashini, as if answering a question inaudible to Arce. He ran a palsied hand along the linen tablecloth, which--like its owner--displayed the effects of ill usage: stains, rips, embroideries of mildew. Even the candelabrum seemed afflicted, its surface tarnished. On a chipped plate were the remains of a meal: philosopher beetles thrashing in a stew of weeds and wild dog. "I ... uh...." Mr. Akashini's eyelids fluttered down and he gestured feebly at the plate. "Stay with me while I finish, will you?"

Astonished at this breach of custom, for Mr. Akashini had never before permitted him to remain with him while he ate, Arce took a seat on the futon and watched in silence as his employer laboriously swallowed down the stew. At last, he fell back in his chair, the muscles bunching in his jaw ... or so Arce thought at first, his vision limited by the flickering candlelight. But then, to his horror, he realized that this was no simple muscular action. It appeared that a lump was moving beneath Mr. Akashini's skin, crawling crabwise across the cheek, along the cheekbone, then down along the hinge of the jaw and onto the neck, where it vanished as if submerging into the flesh. However, the truly horrifying aspect of this passage was that in its wake, the skin was suffused with blood, darkened, and the lump of muscle left--as a receding tide might reveal the configuration of the sand beneath--an expression such as Arce had never seen on any human face, one that seemed a rendering in human face, one that seemed a rendering in human musculature of an emotion too poignant for such a canvas, embodying something of lust and fear but mostly a kind of feral longing. The expression faded, and Mr. Akashini, who had not moved for several minutes, his mouth wide open, let out a gurgling breath.

Certain that he was dead, Arce leaned over him and was further horrified to notice that the man's arms were freckled with vaguely phosphorescent patches of gray fungus. Closer inspection revealed other anomalies: three fingernails blackened and thick like chitin; strange whitish growths, like tiny outcroppings of crystal, inside the mouth; a cobweb of almost infinitesimally fine strands spanning the right eye. Arce's thoughts alternated between guilt and fear of implication in the death, but before he could decide how to proceed, Mr. Akashini stirred, giving him a start.

"I really believe that I am making progress," Mr. Akashini said with surprising vigor, and gave an approving growl.

Arce was inclined to let Mr. Akashini have his illusion, but a reflex of morality inspired him to say, "I think you're dying."

Mr. Akashini was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, "That is not important. I am making progress, nonetheless."

This confused Arce, causing him to wonder whether or not he had misjudged Mr. Akashini by labeling him a fool. But then he thought that his original judgment may have been correct, and that Mr. Akashini's judgment concerning his own enthusiasm must have been in error. Arce felt sympathy for him, and yet, contrasting Mr. Akashini's attitude with his own detachment, he envied him the rigor of his commitment.

"Will you continue to help me?" Mr. Akashini asked, and Arce, suddenly infected with a desire to know his employer, to comprehend the obscure drives that motivated him, could only say yes.

Mr. Akashini nodded toward his suitcase, which lay closed on the futon. "There ... look beneath the clothing."

In the suitcase was a fat sheaf of traveler's checks. Arce handed them to Mr. Akashini, who--barely able to hold the pen--began endorsing them, saying, "You must keep them away from me ... the people who would report my condition. Someone tries the door when you are away. I want nothing to interfere with ... with what is happening."

Considering Nacho's suspicious questions and avaricious nature, Arce knew that Mr. Akashini's worries were well founded, yet he could not understand why his employer trusted him with such a vast sum of money. When he asked why, Mr. Akashini replied that he had no choice.

"Besides," he said, "you will not betray me. You have changed as much as I these past months, but one thing has not changed--you're an honest man, though you may not want to admit it."

Arce, convinced that because of his proximity to death, Mr. Akashini might have clearer sight than ordinary folk, asked how he had changed, but his employer had fallen asleep. Watching him, Arce thought it might be possible for him to know Mr. Akashini, and that they might have been friends, though only for a brief period. If they were both changing--and he believed they were, for he sensed change in himself the way he sometimes sensed the presence of a lurking animal in a shadowy thicket--then they were changing in different directions, and in passing, they were likely to experience a momentary compatibility at best.

•

Unable to care for Mr. Akashini every hour of the day, Arce recruited Expectacion to assist him, bestowing trust upon her with the same hopeful conviction with which Mr. Akashini had bestowed it upon him. Yet he was not so thoroughly trusting as his employer. When forced to be away from the room, he would leave valuables tucked into places where a cursory search would reveal them. Not once did he discover anything missing, and he took this for an emblem not of trustworthiness--he believed Expectacion had made a search--but of wisdom. He understood that she was interested less in making a minor profit than in changing her life, and since wisdom was an ultimately more reliable virtue than trustworthiness, he came to value her more and more, to dote upon the sweetness of her body and the bright particularity of her soul.

Yet as they watched Mr. Akashini being transformed into the artifact of his understanding, a strong bond developed between them, one that stopped short of untrustworthy passion and yet had many of the dependable consolations of love. It would have been unnatural had they not developed such a bond, because the event to which they were bearing witness was so monstrous it enforced union. Within the space of a few weeks, fungi of various sorts grew to cover much of Mr. Akashini's body, creating whorls of multicolored fur--saffron, lavender and gray. His visible skin became pale and puffy, prone to odd shiftings and spasms, and his right eye was totally obscured by glowing silver webs and green spiders scarcely bigger than pinheads, and more cobwebs spanned between his shoulders and neck and the walls, and a bubbled milky film coated his tongue, until finally, he had undergone a metamorphosis into a fearsome creature whose eyes glowed silver with greeny speckles in the darkened room, burning out from a head shaped like a tuber, his body sheathed in a mummy wrapping of cobwebs and moss, with stalks of mustard-colored fungi clumped like tiny cities here and there, a thing capable only of emitting croaked entreaties for food or asking that a photograph be taken. On one occasion, however, he appeared to regain something of his old spirit and strength and engaged Arce and Expectacion in conversation.

"You must not be concerned, my friends," he said. "This is glorious."

The effect of his lips, almost sealed with clots of fungus, splitting and the effortfully spoken words oozing forth, struck Arce as being more ghastly than glorious, but he refrained from saying as much.

"Why does it seem glorious?" he asked.

Mr. Akashini made a noise that approximated laughter, the heaving of his chest and diaphragm causing puffs of dusty spores to spurt into the air. The candle flames flickered; a faint tide of shadow lapped up his legs, then receded. "I ..." he said. "I am ... becoming."

Expectacion asked in a tremulous voice if he wanted water, and he turned his head toward her--the laborious motion of a statue coming to life after a centurieslong enchantment.

"Sitting here," he said, ignoring her question, "I am arrowing toward completion. Toward ... everything I wanted to believe but never could. I understand...."

"The Malsueno?" Arce asked. "You understand the Malsueno?"

"Not yet" was the answer. "I understand ... not everything. But I had no understanding of anything before."

He appeared to drift off for a moment.

"What's happening to you?" Expectacion asked him.

"When I was young," he said, "I dreamed of becoming a samurai...."

He gave another horrid laugh.

Expectacion looked perplexed, and Arce wondered if his employer were rambling as men would in the grip of fever; yet he could not quite believe that. He sensed a new rectitude in Mr. Akashini, one that accorded with the ideas about Japan he had gleaned from his reading. But neither could he accept that what he sensed was wholly accurate, because Mr. Akashini's horrifying appearance seemed to put the lie to the notion of beneficent change.

In that stomach where once he had envisioned cars and paintings and other oddments of culture, he now pictured a miniature jungle, and sometimes, on entering the room from the bright corridor, he would think that a demon with eyes of unreal fire had materialized in Mr.Akashini's chair. He and Expectacion spent hours on end sitting side by side, listening to the creaky whisperings of new growth emanating from the man's flesh, gazing at the awful pulsings of his chest and belly. Mr. Akashini was so self-involved that they were not embarrassed about making love in the room. Sex acted to diminish the miserable miracle before them and to make their vigil more tolerable, and if it had not been for Nacho's questions, knockings on the door and general harassment, they might have been happy.

•

Early one morning, before dawn, Arce went to buy breakfast for himself and Expectacion--they had slept poorly, disturbed by the noises of Mr. Akashini's body and his constant troubled movement. On returning, he heard angry voices issuing from room 23. The bulbous form of Nacho Perez was blocking the door. He was haranguing Expectacion, while two men--marañeros, judging by their tattoos--searched the suitcases, doing their utmost to avoid contact with Mr. Akashini, who sat motionless, emitting a faint buzzing, shifting now and again amid the fetters of his cobwebs, the shifts redolent not so much of muscular contractions as of vegetable reflex. In the dimness, due to the activity of microscopic spores, his glowing eyes appeared to be revolving slowly.

Arce drew his knife, but Nacho caught sight of him, seized Expectacion and barred an arm beneath her chin.

"I'll break her neck!" he said.

Expectacion threw herself about, trying to kick him, but when Nacho tightened his grip, she gave up struggling, other than to pluck feebly at his arm. Behind him, the two marañeros had drawn their knives. Arce recognized one of them--Gilberto Viera, a thin, sallow man with pocked skin and a pencil-line mustache.

"Gilberto," said Arce, "you remember the time on the Blanco Ojo? I helped you then. Help me now."

Gilberto looked ashamed but only lowered his eyes. The other man--taller, darker, with the nappy hair of a man born in the eastern mountains--asked Nacho, "What should we do?"

"Well," said Nacho, beaming at Arce, "that depends on our friend here."

"What do you want?" Arce had to exert tremendous restraint to resist aiming a slash at Nacho's double chin.

"There must be something," said Nacho archly, paying no attention to an intensification of Mr. Akashini's buzzing. "Isn't there, Arce?"

When Arce remained silent, he tightened his grip--Expectacion's feet were lifted off the ground and her face grew dark with blood. She dug her nails into Nacho's arm but with no effect.

"There's some money hidden behind one of the bricks," Arce said grudgingly. "Let her go."

Another flurry of buzzing from Mr. Akashini, accompanied by a series of throaty clicks, as if he were trying to speak. The two marañeros edged away from his chair, bumping against Nacho.

"Which brick is it?" Nacho asked, and Arce, thinking furiously of how he might extricate Expectacion from the fat man's grasp, was about to tell him, when--with the ponderous motion of a bloom bursting from its husk--Mr. Akashini came to his feet. With his glowing eyes and dark, deformed body, puffy strips of pallid skin showing through the fungus and moss like bandages, he was a gruesome sight. Gilberto tried to shove Nacho aside in an attempt to escape from the room. However, the other man spun about and slashed Mr. Akashini with his knife.

The knife passed through Mr. Akashini's side, its arc slowing as if encountering resistance of the sort that might be offered by sludge or mud; the dark fluid that leaked forth flowed with the sluggishness of syrup. Mr. Akashini staggered against the wall; his buzzing and clicking reached furious proportions, sounding like a nest of bees and crabs together. A tiny spider scuttled out from his right eye, diminishing its glow by a speck of green. His cheek bulged. One arm began to vibrate, his skin bubbled up in places, his chest puffed and deflated as if responding to the workings of an enormous flabby heart. Arce was repelled and retreated along the corridor, but when Mr. Akashini gave out a growly hum--of satisfaction, Arce thought--he realized that some fraction of his employer's personality was yet embedded within this vegetable demon. The man who had wielded the knife shrieked, and Nacho half-turned to see what had gone wrong, blocking the doorway entirely. Arce seized the opportunity to leap forward and stab him low in the back. The hotel owner squealed, clutching at the wound, and released Expectacion, who slumped to the floor and crawled away. Arce prepared to strike a second time, but the hotel owner lurched to the side, permitting him an unimpeded view into the room, and what he saw caused him to hesitate, allowing Nacho to stumble out of range.

Clouds of spores were pouring up from Mr. Akashini, filling the air with a whirling gray powder that reduced the flames of the candelabrum to pale yellow gleams, like golden tears hanging in the murk, and reduced the figures of the two marañeros to dimly perceived bulks that kicked and shuddered. One--Arce could not tell which--collapsed on the futon and the other crumpled beneath the dining table, both holding their throats and choking. Looming above them was Mr. Akashini, his luminous eyes the brightest objects in the room, the outline of his body nearly indistinguishable from the agitated gray motes around him, looking as ominous and eerie as a Fate. There was a flurrying at the edges of the body, along with a rustling sound--a horde of winged things were developing from the frays of skin, fluttering up to add a new density to the whirling spores, darkening the air further. Several danced out through the door: big carrion moths with charcoal wings. He must have inadvertently fed Mr. Akashini some of their eggs, Arce thought, and now they were hatching. And more than spores and moths were being born. Spiders, centipedes, insects of 100 varieties were burrowing up through his skin, pustules opening to reveal the heads of infant snakes and baby beetles, bulges erupting into larval flows, as the process of Mr. Akashini's understanding, a process of adaptation and fertilization and fecundity, at last reached fruition.

Within a minute or two, the room grew as dark as night, and yet still those strange silver eyes burned forth. It seemed to Arce that the body must have dissolved, that the eyes, thickly woven cobwebs, were suspended by a clever arrangement of strands. But then the eyes moved closer and he realized that Mr. Akashini was taking one unsteady step after another toward the door.

Expectacion caught Arce's arm. "Hurry!" she cried. "Nacho has gone for help!"

Turning, Arce saw that, indeed, the hotel owner was nowhere to be found, a snail's track of blood along the wall giving evidence of his passage toward the stairs.

"For Christ's sake, Papá!" Expectacion gave him a push. "Don't just stand there gawking."

"No, wait!"

Arce shook her off, ripped off his shirt and wrapped it about his face. Then he dashed into room 23, dived onto the floor and groped for the brick behind which he had hidden the money, trying not to breathe. Once he had secured the packet of checks, he scrambled to his feet and came face to face with Mr. Akashini--with a gray deformity, with newborn moths breaking free from a glutinous grain of skin and mold, with a shadow of a mouth, with tepid slow breath, with two eyes of green and cold silver. The webs of the eyes were a marvelous texture admitting to an infinite depth of interwoven strands, and Arce saw within them a tropic of green and silver, a loom of event and circumstance, and felt that if he were to continue staring, he would see not only the truth as Mr. Akashini had come to know it but also his truth and Expectacion's. Then he became afraid, and the eyes were again only webs, and the face before him, with its hideous growths, appeared a thing of incalculable menace. Yet the spores and the insects and the moths that had transformed the marañeros into anonymous heaps were keeping clear of him, and he realized even then that some relic of Mr. Akashini's soul was employing restraint.

Arce wanted to say something, to convey some good wish, but he could think of nothing that would not seem foolish. With mixed emotions, not sure what he should feel for Mr. Akashini, he retreated into the corridor, grabbed Expectacion by the arm and sprinted for the stairs.

A line of pink showed above the black wall of the jungle, and only a few stars pricked the indigo sky directly overhead; the neon signs over the bars were pale in the brightening air, and shadows were beginning to fill in the ruts in the muddy streets. The coolness of the night was already being dispelled. There were only a handful of people out--two drunks staggering along arm in arm; an old Indian man in rags hunkered down beside a door, smoking a pipe; farther along, a whore was yelling at a shirtless youth. Arce led Expectacion out of the hotel and started toward the jungle, but after about 20 yards, she balked.

"Where are you going?" she asked, pulling free of him.

"The Malsueno. We'll be safe there. I know places...."

"The hell with you! I'm not going in there!"

He made to grab her, but she danced away.

"You're nuts, Papá! Nacho'll have everybody looking for us! We have to get far away! The capital! That's the only place we'll be safe."

He stood gazing uncomprehendingly at her, seeing faces from another time, stung by old pains, experiencing a harrowing fear of displacement like that he had felt on being forced to flee the capital.

"Come on!" she shouted. "Nacho'll be here any second. We can take one of the cars parked back of the market."

"I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?" She went back to him and pounded on his chest, her face twisted with anger and frustration. "You're going to get us killed ... just standing here."

Although the blows hurt, he let her beat on him, ashamed of his fear and incapacity. Even when he saw Nacho turn the corner, at his back a group of marañeros armed with machetes, he was unable to take a step away from the place where he had hidden from memories and pain and life itself for all these years.

Expectacion, too, had begun to cry. "You really blew it, Papá! We had a chance, you and me." She went a few faltering steps toward the highway. "Damn you!" she said. "Damn you!" Then, with her arms pumping, she fled along the street.

In the other direction, Nacho was limping forward, holding his back with one hand, pointing at Arce with the other, while at his rear, like a squad of drunken soldiers, the marañeros whooped and brandished their machetes. Arce drew his knife, determined to make a final stand.

At that moment, however, torrents of spores and insects and serpents and unidentifiable scraps of life exploded from the windows and the door of the hotel, making it appear that the building had been filled to bursting with black fluid. A whirling cloud formed between Nacho and Arce. At its core, Arce thought he spotted a shadow, an indistinct manlike shape with glowing eyes, but before he could be certain of it, the edge of the cloud frayed and streams of insects raced toward him and stung his face and neck and arms.

Blinded, he staggered this way and that, harrowed by the insects, and then he ran and ran, the dark cloud sending forth rivers of tormenting winged things to keep him on his course. As he passed through the outskirts of town, a white pickup rocketed out of a side street and swerved to the side, barely missing him, coming to a rest against a light pole. Through the windshield, he made out Expectacion's startled face. Without thinking, desperate to escape the insects, he flung himself into the truck, began rolling up the window and shouted at her to drive. She gunned the engine and, pursued by the swarm, they fishtailed out onto the highway.

•

They drove into the hills with the sky reddening at their backs, and after experiencing a flurry of panic on recognizing the course that had been chosen for him, it seemed to Arce that with every mile--in a process of self-realization exactly contrary to Mr. Akashini's--he was shedding a coating of fear and habit and distorted view, as if a shell were breaking away from some more considered inner man. Not the man he had been but the man he had become without knowing it, tempered by years of solitary endeavor. He felt strong, directed, full of youthful enthusiasms.

He would go to the capital, he decided, not to inhabit the past but to build a future, to make of it a temple that would honor the eccentric brotherhood that existed between himself and Mr. Akashini, a brotherhood that he had not embraced, that he could not have acknowledged or understood before, that he did not wholly understand now, but whose consummation had filled him with the steel of purpose and the fire of intent. He realized that they were both men who had lost themselves, Mr. Akashini to the persuasions of arrogance and wealth, himself to the deprivations of pain and despair, and how because of the fortuitous propinquity of a peculiar ambition and a woman of energy and strength and a magical jungle, he at least had been afforded the opportunity to move on.

He could not take any such pleasure, however, in Mr. Akashini's death, and when he looked at Expectacion, the lines of her face aglow with pink light, when he felt the tenderness she had begun to rouse in him and saw the challenge she presented, the potential for poignant emotion, for grief and joy and love, those vital flavors he had rejected for so long, the prospect of an adventure with her was dimmed by regret that he had been unable to do more than speed Mr. Akashini to his end.

It wasn't fair, he thought.

He had done little, risked little, and yet he had won through to something real, whereas Mr. Akashini had only suffered and died among strangers far from home. This inequity caused Arce to think that perhaps he had won nothing, to wonder if everything he felt was the product of delusion. But as they climbed high into the hills, on glancing back toward Santander Jimenez, he saw there a sight that seemed to memorialize all that had happened: Trillions of insects and spores and things unnamable were spiraling above the miserable little town, a towering blackness that--despite a blustery wind--maintained its basic form, at one moment appearing to be the shadow of a great curved sword poised to deliver a sundering blow and at the next, a column of ashes climbing to heaven against the crimson pyre of the rising sun.