‘Slow Descent’ by Dylan Brennan

I

Breakfast consists of a plate of blackened comal-fried eggs and beans flavoured with those ever-present, anti-flatulence leaves of epazote. An ancient woman sells me some tepache on the roadside and I alternate gulps of that with the sweet coffee that comes free with the eggs. A familiar fizzle and rumble in the gut follows – caffeine mingling with the fermented juices of the hacked skin of a pineapple. Warm liquids darkening each other on the way down. Slow explosions of vapour must have risen from behind the hills and blotted out the sun while I slept. I look around to see myself breakfasting inside a cloud and, from the steps of a wooden shack, being spied upon by a kitten, a dog and a duckling.

II

First time in San José was with you. Spaghetti and cacao-infused mezcal at the Italian restaurant and, later, a small family of mushrooms. We were nervous and thought we’d been conned until, with the rain pelting down on our cabin and the fire blazing, the floorboards began to move. A state of euphoria, an injected brown sugar, danced through the bloodstreams for a while before dying. Tired of leaning through the mirror I stood on the balcony and stared at the charcoal trees. Just a day before I’d read how the eye works by continually moving. If you grab your eyelids to prevent the natural activity of instinctive twitching and look straight ahead, your vision will disappear – you are left with a grey blindness. On the wooden balcony, staring into the forest, I tried to do it myself without touching my eyelids. The dilated pupils lay dead still and a dark blur began to form around the edges of my vision like an early photograph. All that was left was a conifer that slowly dissolved before me, leaving me standing cold in the void.

III

San José del Pacífico. They say you can see the Pacific from up here on a clear day. I’ve never seen anything other than heavy flying carpets of water. The beans and eggs are tepid but the salsa made from crushed chillies in oil warms the tongue. Breakfast finished, I wipe my mouth and beard with a warm tortilla of which I then take a bite followed by a last gulp of the sweet coffee. Cinnamon and piloncillo. The first truck south delayed for about ten minutes as the driver has to change a wheel. I’ve been rationing my intake of food for days and so, despite the eggs and beans, am still quite hungry and half asleep. Time enough to dash into the internet café, check my email (nothing from you), order a coffee and a slice of blackberry pie. I get a seat up front and settle in. The road from San José to Pochutla is long and winding. It rises slightly to San Miguel Suchixtepec before beginning its descent towards the coast. The conifer’ s dominance soon challenged by the swaying alien tentacles of dispersed, and later, widespread, magueys. More tropical fronds come later. The barbecued goat meat, so popular in the mist, is seen less as we creep south. Sheep-wool gloves and key-rings in the shape of the hallucinogenic mushrooms begin to make way for organised rows of fruit. Opened and wet watermelons lie gaping at the passing traffic as pips and flies swarm in buckets of discarded flesh. The soursops are green and deformed. The tough skin, when pierced, gives way to the warm sweetness of a dirty white mush. The coconuts are the best. Nothing like the hairy nuts from Halloween back home. Living bubbles of water with sloppy meat liked cooked codfish.

IV

I’d decided to stay at La Cumbre. High up above the town it had normally been the perfect place to be alone. However, as soon as I arrived I realised that Easter week was a busy time up there. A wooden structure clinging strangely to the mountain slopes, La Cumbre is dusty and cold and multiple blankets and a mezcal or two are needed at sundown. I was shown to a one-bed room. Mattress on the floor, eight woolly blankets and mushroom-trip graffiti on the walls. I took out my battered Toshiba and got ready to settle in for some work. I stopped. I thought I’d lie down and think for a while and look at the mountains through a light vapour. Talk to you. I’ve told you before that I have conversations with you when you’re not around. I always say what I feel. I told you that I missed you. I must have dozed off as I remember drool on my chin followed by a hazy awareness of the insistent comfort of Familyman Barrett on the bass from the speakers next door, shaking La Cumbre. I heard a table fall and some heavy shuffling around the room. Oh god! Jesus! said a Southern accent. I went outside to see what was going on and my neighbour, clearly American and probably Texan, was shaking dirty clothes from his rucksack, crusty and creased. Six soft pellets of pinkness on the floor by his feet. A mouse must’ve come into my room one night to nest, he said. I found her babies in my clothes. Man I need to get my stuff washed. I knelt down to look at the little fleshy lumps. They were pink but almost transparent. I could see blue and purple veins and capillaries pulsating on the floor. Each one vulnerable, cold and living. Tiny lucent eyes looking for help. I feel bad, man, but what can I do? I can’t be looking after a family of mice. He placed them carefully on the corrugated ceiling of the lower floor’ s mezzanine that jutted out from our own floor. They lay in the shade for a few hours as the sun continued to rise and its reddening light encroached. The next morning I saw them in the same place. Dry and dusty; of course they were dead.

His name was Dan and he was strange and memorable. He told me he couldn’t drink mezcal because he used to go down to Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz to drink until he could drink no more because he wanted to die. I wanted to die, he said. Why? Well I had a lot of problems. My dad’s a Baptist preacher and he doesn’t approve of the way I live. I just wanted my parents to love me but I thought they didn’ t and, for that reason, I wanted to drink until I died. I once spent seven thousand pesos in one night down there. Are you one of those guys that goes binge drinking, buying shots for everyone in the bar so that they’ll hang around with you? Yeah, I guess I am. He told me that he had just put a suppository up his arsehole and that he was feeling good but kind of sick. Over the next few days I learned a lot about Dan. Too much to set down right now. He was the son of a missionary couple and he grew up in Kenya. That’ s where he started smoking weed. Then he was moved to Corpus Christi to attend high-school. I wasn’t too good at school, he told me. I’m dumb, he said. He left school to join the army. He thought that would set him straight and so did his parents. He was involved in communications and lived in Germany. He was kicked out of the army in Germany for smoking weed and for being an alcoholic. I didn’t talk much to Dan but I did listen to his life story many times. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault he was the child of missionaries growing up in Kenya and Texas. It wasn’t his fault that a part of his brain never worked. He didn’t stay off the drink for long. About six weeks later I heard the news. He was stabbed in the belly outside a cantina in Miahuatlán.

V

She gets onto the truck just outside Candelaria and sits in the seat frequently reserved (unofficially, but oh so obviously) by the truck drivers for girls travelling on their own. In other words, she takes her seat between the driver and me. The conversation starts and it’s clear that they’re sure I don’t understand their Spanish. Just coming from work? Yes, that’s right. Where do you work? I work at the coffee plantation we just passed. Picking the coffee, right? No, I do the cleaning. Finished for the day now? No, just a few hours off in the afternoon to go down to Pochutla to the Banco Azteca. I’ve seen you before haven’t I? With a couple of youngfellas? That’s right but I’ve left them with their grandmother now. And their father, a skinny lad, always wears that cap? Ah, sure he left about six months ago. He said he wasn’t ready to be a father. He said he’d rather leave and not be their father than to stick around and be bad. He was right I suppose. Do you have some free time in Pochutla? I know a place. I’ll pay for the room. No, my mother expects me back at six. Call her and tell her you’ll be late, go on. Ah go on. Ah, stop that I can’t. This goes on for the best part of an hour as we get closer and closer to Pochutla. They talk about her bills and how she’s struggling to make payments. He badgers her relentlessly to go to a room with him for a while. It won’t cost her anything and she’ll make enough to pay the bill she’s on her way to pay anyway. It makes sense, the driver insists. He won’t leave her be and she keeps saying no. When we reach the terminal, she stays behind when all the other passengers alight. I want to tell her to get out, to choose for herself without any pressure and to only do something that she wants to do. I don’t say any of this and I tell myself that she has made her own decision, to stay behind and to go with the driver, some twenty years her senior, to a room to make some money. I picture the room with one window and a rusty fan whirling slowly. Their bodies sweating and heaving, sticky foreskin peeled back in the half-light. She’s a young, round-faced girl with a tight pink t-shirt and shorts. She’s as fat as the driver. A single mother with two children in rural Oaxaca.

VI

Almost dusk in Pochutla and, after stopping at a cash machine, I make my way to the plaza for a glass of fresh hibiscus water. I place the glass up against each cheek, my forehead and neck. Sweat streams pool in the small of my back. My shirt is sodden. I have a look around the square. People are listening to a marimba duo, laughing at one of the clowns, smoking or just leaning up against the evening. They call it the Plaza de las Golondrinas and it’s no surprise. The crisscrossing power cables above the square are always lined with swallows in the evening. Not a millimetre of cable is spared the hopping feet of birds getting ready to settle in for the night. I see that the odd pair of sneakers has been slung upon the cables, splattered with bird shit. I finish my drink and turn off towards the truck-stop. The truck to Mazunte is empty and I jump in the back so I can stand in the open air and let the warm rush shake the dust from my hair and beard.

VII

What opinion do you guys have of me? Tell me the truth, I’ll know if you’re lying. An uneasy silence followed as always it must when someone asks you what you think of them out of the blue. While I had always preferred to eat down in the village, for some reason, that night I decided to dine up at La Cumbre. Amarillo de pollo, something similar to a light curry. Don Esteban, permanent resident and owner of at least part of the property, had managed to rope me into a small but dedicated drinking group after dinner. Shots of mezcal flavoured with nanches. Alberto from Chiapas, a very thin boy with long hair and an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things hallucinatory, was part of the group. He had come up to La Cumbre to give himself some time to think after finding out his girlfriend was expecting his baby. I wonder if she got to go anywhere to think. I had dismissed his Paulo Coelho as a charlatan, an empty proponent of the worship of the self, and he had gone quiet. So there we were, about five of us, drinking and all smoking something or other. Esteban, an ex-convict, had to get up early to go to the jailhouse in Oaxaca (a three-hour drive) to register and, thus, prove that he still resided within the state. He’d have to wake up at four. His wife and daughters watched nervously from the kitchen to see how much he was drinking. They gently asked us to intervene. Take it easy Don Esteban, don’t forget you need to get up early. Sure we’re all gonna hit the sack soon enough and so on. Then he stunned us with his question. The silence began to hurt my face and so I told him that while I didn’t really know him he seemed like a nice guy to me. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? No, I said. Good, he replied and urged me to down another shot. We finally got him to go to bed. His wife and daughters led him away by the arm and he stumbled towards the family cabin. Alberto said he had a button of peyote. I told him he needed more than that. I told him he needed at least three per person. But no, he told me he was going to smoke it. I’d never heard of anyone smoking peyote. We went down to the balcony overlooking the black valley of clouds and he skinned up some weed and peyote. We swigged from the nanche flavoured mezcal and smoked that bitter cactus mixed with the weed. Time to sleep. I slept instantly and with dreams of stars. Then, cold and uncovered, I awoke in convulsions. My body shook and I wretched and felt a mustard-coloured acid in my stomach and tried to picture a river of cooling milk. I recovered, drank some water and stared below into the abysmal woods. I was never going to write anything up there. I needed to go to Mazunte to meet you as we had planned before later deciding we would never see each other again. I needed to go and to believe that you would be there and I needed to go soon.

VIII

I arrive in Mazunte just before dusk and know what to do – hike up to Punta Cometa (a small peninsula slightly west of town) to watch the sun go down. The sun is always red in the evenings in Mazunte. Its hacked body trickles its rivulets across the horizon. A hand-beaten drum counting down the seconds, getting quicker and quicker as the sun approaches its disappearance. I feel your hand on my shoulder just as the sunlight begins to disintegrate like an effervescent vitamin pill. A quick flash in your eye. A flame in the retina, kindled then quenched. The sun now subaqueous. An apricot lava oozing through saltwater. You have some worm-salt mezcal in your bag and you give me some and it makes me feel warm. Are you really here? As darkness floats in from the sea like a sad fog we decide to head down to the beaches to find a palapa or a hammock or somewhere to sleep later on. While the morning began in mist, the humidity in Mazunte is different. A hot steam that emanates from every pore and you feel the evening as a gelatinous residue in your nostrils. Just before the descent we stop to catch our breath in the small unfenced-off graveyard. Desperate wet gulps of oxygen. My shirt heavy and pointless. Did you see that? Yes, did you? Yes. One followed by another, then another, then another. The paparazzi madness of a hundred drunken fireflies. I capture one then feel guilty and let it go. I tell you to bury me in that place. I tell you I want the tendrils of the saffron cempasúchiles to hook onto my dead bones and to use me as an anchor. Flashes of light all around us. You smile, but I’m only half joking.

From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015

About the Author
Currently based in Mexico City, Dylan Brennan writes poetry, essays and memoirs. His debut collection, Blood Oranges, was published by The Dreadful Press in 2014. His co-edited volume of academic essays Rethinking Juan Rulfo’s Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film is available now from Legenda Books (2016).