Tears came rushing back and choked me at that moment. I felt a heavy lump in my throat that could have been my heart trying to leap out of my mouth. I swallowed hard and forced the advancing ball to retreat. I nodded my head as I wept to show Shooshi that I had understood his meaning, again my friends embraced me.
I loved my new companions. I loved our jungle. I felt baptized in holy water and washed clean of the scornful mind that had been nothing but a curse and a weight against my soul. I was reborn.
Shooshi and Takumat were father and son. Takumat was a tall brown-skinned man who appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He wore a decorative auburn loincloth, as did I, and a necklace of what looked like assorted animal teeth. His hair was black and straight like his father’s. Takumat’s carved and painted face paid homage to his father’s stern and postured but warm and caring features that brilliantly spoke silent compassion and patience toward man, plant, animal, and earth while fearlessly abstaining from embracing any of these things. Shooshi’s brow was carved with lines of kindness and ridges of honesty and deep thought.
Shooshi’s hair was the white of a cloud, but his skin still glowed with a radiance like that of an adolescent boy even though he was an ancient and gaseous old man and had to have been at least three times my age. Both men were tyrannically strong looking and magnificent to behold to someone who came from a world inhabited mostly by lumpy misshapen dumpling people. Both men were also permanently cross-eyed. (Just before I stopped watching television, I saw a special on the geography channel about how certain indigenous native Indian jungle tribes were cross-eyed.
They said it was because of how close the Indians were to the trees their whole lives, which never gave their eyes a horizon to straighten out on. I think those were the decedents of the ones who prophesized that the world would end that year.) Shooshi and Takumat both had enormous white stone lip piercings that elongated their pronounced lips passed their chins. They were my only friends in the world. I was utterly dependent on them for everything, from food and shelter to moral support. Also, the jungle juice was a great perk.
It wasn’t about me anymore. I felt so indebted for everything my companions had been doing for me and was pitiful over the fact that I could do slightly more than nothing to help add to our little community. I was a missing an arm, half blind, and incredibly out of my element in everything I did.
My friends never seemed to mind me or ever tried to make me feel guilty for eating too much anteater stew or drinking too much jungle juice. They simply laughed and drank and ate with me merrily. They humbled my soul more in a few days than society had ever galvanized it during my whole life. I asked Takumat why it was that he and his father decided to save me, but each time he would answer with what I thought to be mystic nonsense:
“You save man, Jim.” His dad would always agree with a nod and with a piercing look in his crossed eyes, “Man start real world, Jim. Man must lose his treasure to gain his fortune.”
Shooshi left early in the morning to collect all of the necessary herbs and fruits needed to make more jungle juice, and I felt awful that the journey was only necessary because I alone had drained our entire one-liter red clay jug the night before of all of its juice, though I had no regrets of dancing and singing all night long with my friends. When I awoke that morning, I was feeling exhausted and belligerently hungover. My head throbbed and my bones creaked with weariness. I felt the need to hydrate and to try again. Maybe my headache would be cured if I crawled into the water, or, I thought, maybe a better cure would be crawling into the quicksand head first. I stooped to the flap of the tepee and opened it. I was blasted with concrete pain to my head, which was caused by the ebullient light that poured from the absence of the flap of animal hide. There was no shaking the morning malaise.
I tripped on a tree root that fancied itself a doormat and fell on my face in the mud. I could hear the rhythm of Takumat’s feet beating the ground as he came upon me. He was laughing. I insisted on helping myself to my feet. We walked, side by side, for a few feet and sat on the solid mahogany log that rested by the campfire.
Neither Takumat nor I noticed the brooding thought the other was captive to for ages. Though I had done a decent job of not asking questions and being happy with the life I was lucky enough to still live, I was only suppressing these thoughts that had finally reappeared at the forefront of my consciousness. Questions began to rage in my mind with no sight of answers.
“There has to be an answer,” I thought. “What happens when I die?” “Is there a heaven or a hell?” I questioned the very definitions of truth and wisdom and sought for a use for either of these seemingly divine but mostly ineffective devices that seemed to be the answer to all of the world’s problems in my still candid mind.
I grabbed a twig and prodded the vigilant coals that were waiting on a cue to release what was left of their kinetic energy into the pale, open sky. I noticed that Takumat’s deep gaze had stayed fixed on the chill clay earth for the duration of the silence. He held that look for more than a moment after I asked him the worst question one person can ask another,
“Is there a heaven Takumat?”
Takumat seemed like he had not heard my question. I returned to moving coals and ash about the fire pit pondering both the answer to my question and why I had bothered asking it.
“Don’t worry about it, Jim.” He answered slowly.
“Don’t worry about it?” I couldn’t understand how he could say that and how it was supposed to comfort me. I even felt insulted by his answer. Surely the man could not have been claiming to have no fear of his own mortality. I would not believe that.
“Life is frail and horrible, Takumat, and then it is taken from you whether you are a good person or not. How does this not upset you? I am missing an arm and an eye, I nearly died. I should be dead! And might as well be, whether I have to face death in another few decades or tomorrow, I am a dead man, and so are you, Takumat! Can’t you see? How is this not all you think about?”
Takumat’s gaze slowly drew from the smooth gray stone it had been warming and met mine with a severe impact. The weight of his stare made my eyes lower from his. I battled to shoulder the burden of his mighty eyes that searched and passed my shallow first few layers of mind to the deeper parts of my soul. He spoke lucidly and with a distinctly western accent.
“If there is a heaven Jim, that is not where you are heading.”
I was startled to hear what seemed to be hollow and absent words coming from a man of such care and heart. “Why shouldn’t I go to heaven? I may not be perfect and may have committed less than decent acts toward my fellow man at times, but it is not like I am unaware of these things. It’s just human nature to do bad things sometimes, Takumat, and I assure you that the bad things I do eat me up inside because I am good. That is what it means to be good, Takumat. I am a moral man.”
Takumat’s eyebrows lowered, and his face became stern. He looked truly puzzled as he tossed another piece of wood into the fire.
“Moral?” he asked.
“What is a moral man, Jim? I do not think you know.”
I was distracted by the sound of an ecosystem that hummed like a symphony while I tried to create a makeshift definition for “morality.” I thought that I should at least make an attempt to feign that I knew it. No words came.
“A moral man is a man who finds greatness in endeavors that are larger than him. An amoral man finds greatness in endeavors that specifically pertain to him. All questions of morality are answered by a man’s own sense of self, and all men seek greatness.”
Takumat was a young man who had a kindred and youthful spirit that burned with an inexhaustible passion that was impossible to ignore. He lacked none of his father’s wisdom but could sharpen his gracefulness. He had an attacking way of giving me this advice that was at first hard to swallow. When he eventually continued the revelation, his voice would begin to rumble with power and resonate to the core of the dense log we shared, but first I had to interrupt him with yet another dim question, though he seemed to not lose any of the momentum he was building when I did. I asked:
“So, if I have not been a good or moral person, then do you think that I deserve to go to hell?”
I was coming to believe that Takumat and his father were endowed with every answer to every question and listened eagerly for something that might be an answer, or at least something I could use as comfort.
“I do not think that you deserve anything, Jim, whether you have been bad or good. The very idea of hell is redemption for our egos. In order to realize an eternity of the misery and pain one expects they might be subjected to if they should ever be sentenced to hell, one must retain a somewhat familiar and rational mind; one must certainly still possess an undying abiding sense of self to recognize any hardship at all. The consequence of an eternity of being tortured and smote with fire and brimstone is still the promise of the reward of an eternity in itself. The idea of “hell” serves our egos that cannot fathom not existing at all, far greater than the idea of nothingness ever will.”
Before I could try to generate something whimsical to add to his great words, Takumat held true with a voice that gained passion with every morsel of comfort I had to abandon.
I was feeling deflated, like I had lost my footing on ground that I thought to be solid as Takumat went on.
“I have faith, Jim, that when you are no more, not only will you have no answer for any of this—he raised his arms to the trees, then to the sky, and then slapped the earth with them to add emphasis to the ‘this’—but you will accept not being granted one.”
I was beginning to understand and absorb my friend’s meanings, though it was difficult and offensive at first. (I would later give him a little bit of my own advice and tell him that when administering medicine to someone who needs it, don’t make it a suppository if at all possible, he laughed.) His explanations were certainly not real answers to any of the questions I was asking, but his words did serve as a significant comfort to me and eased the pain of not knowing anything at all.
“You say ‘faith’ because you do not know?” I asked.
Takumat replied warmly, “Yes Jim that is what faith requires, not knowing”
I thought our debate had died like the last embers of the fire that I had poked to death, but Takumat continued with the same might and drive as before, though he sustained with a new found carefulness to his tone, and he seemed to have found the grace I thought he lacked in the next words he spoke.
“I also have faith, Jim, that the only kingdom that you will ever visit is the kingdom of your mind, and when you finally realize that it is you who sits on the only throne, you will see, kneeling at your feet, two scheming servants called “heaven” and “hell.” Though these subjects are both indeed merely jesters and things of amusement, dictate them always with both courage and fear as they demand these respects from their conscious master.”
“That sounds to me to be a selfish way of thinking.” I was sure I had stumped him.
“Selfish?” He snapped back at me. He needed no time to materialize an answer; all of his thoughts and philosophies were obviously readied in his mind.
“Tell me, Jim, is it not selfish to believe that you deserve and are worthy of an eternity in heaven? What makes you so special?”
Again, I found no words to answer, and had no answer.
“The very pursuit of such a vain and unnatural reward for already being granted the wonders and beauties of life, and the cold hard fear of death, is self-serving and strictly immoral. Who are you to demand an answer for all of this Jim? And who am I to grant you one? Even if I had the answers you seek, I would keep them from you so that you may live the life you were blessed with, for if I knew the answer, I would surely be dead.”
“So, you don’t think there is a God?” I asked.
“If there is a god, he is a good God to hide from his children. A good God would not curse his children with his own perfection and omnipotence for because of those things he is not alive though he may exist. Do you not think that God would grant life to his children that he has given such life to?”
“So, you do believe in God!” I exclaimed.
Takumat had to laugh, I would have punched me in the head If I were him, but instead he gently nudged my arm with his elbow, pointed toward the pale blue sky that housed the very idea of heaven, and said:
“Jim, if he’s up there, he is looking down on each and every one of us wishing that he could play too.”
I woke up late in the night to the sound of metal striking the earth. I could hear old Shooshi grunting and his heavy breaths after each strike on the hard-cold clay. I climbed out of the tepee to investigate what my brothers were doing in the night, maybe I could help I thought.
Just beyond the fire pit near the monkey puzzle tree, I beheld Shooshi and Takumat digging with metal makeshift spades that were crumpled and shaped wrong for the job. They were fastened to a couple of broken mahogany branches, which must have been retrieved from the remains of the wreckage, a very brave feat.
I overheard the pair speaking in their native tongues, it was beautiful.
“Ha-se-shoosh-acha-hopa-meena-mow!” said Shooshi. It was the most serious look I had ever seen the man give. He stared into what looked like to me forever and eternity. What he was seeing despite of the murky dark jungle before his dreaming eyes, I still do not know.
“Uh-huh-buh-bub-uba-ticky-monaheliapah?” Takumat had a nervous sounding tone to his voice that I had never heard before. He was always such a picture of courage, I thought
.
Shooshi laid an earnest glance unto Takumat, chuckled affectionately, and gently rubbed the hair on his son’s head and said,
“Put! Puhna-poka-peka-leef.” What had seemed like tension to me smoothed into a loving and encouraged laugh that belted from deep within the bellies of both of men. I pretended like I understood what they were talking about and approached my friends laughing.
I asked Shooshi what they were doing, digging a hole with rather lousy tools in the dead of night and with the sun threatening to rise so soon. They did not answer. I asked if I could help them dig, they laughed and told me to sit and to drink the dew from the flowers hanging above and to eat their fruit and that I could sing for them if I wanted to help. I decided to just watch.
After a while, I asked again what the purpose of all of this was. Shooshi answered me.
“It time to start real world, Jim.”
“Who’s starting the real world?”
“You, Jim.”
“And you too?”
“We here for you.”
“What’s happening to this world?”
“It served purpose, it finished teaching lesson, Jim. This world prepared man for the real world, all this world has built to one perfection, you. We need to keep digging Uhhg-Ook! Not very much time now, come Takumat, taareepa-noko-knokokomaulohow! Dig fast”
With that, he turned his back on me and continued digging, making painstakingly slow amounts of progress for the hardened clay was unyielding. I had a week to think about what Shooshi’s real meaning was and to reflect on my visit to the jungle that felt like a lifetime but, (it was probably only a few months at the very most).
“Me? Starting the real world? Yes of course. . .” I thought. These men must be prophets and me the messiah. The world could really be ending as I had already concluded before my ascension to my brand-new healing state of mine. “Those guys know something that I don’t, I am certain of it,” I thought. And I also started to think that I was right to turn my back on mankind, to seek my higher destiny, to find a better life for myself, and to find a perfect world as I so often dreamed of and knew was possible. Something big was about to happen, and I had inside information on it. I would escape the fate of running around idiotically in terror for my life as the end of times swallowed everyone whole.
When the week was up, we shared what I now call in my memory “The Last Supper.” The boys had claimed a family of monkeys hunting that day. We roasted them from the early afternoon till the late evening. I had a vicious appetite that had been tormented all day long by the intoxicating aroma of the roasting monkeys. I ate the baby monkey, which had the greatest flavor of any piece of meat I had ever enjoyed. They laughed and called me cruel for not eating the older monkeys. I joked back that I enjoyed eating baby meat because it was as though I could taste the stolen life that at least their tender little muscles were acutely aware of wanting to live. Takumat accused me of being insensitive and called me a disgrace to our family unit and told me that he and his father should have left me in the plane to die. Shooshi added by saying:
“And we would have been glad to; you were covered from head to toe in your own shit Jim.”
They both exploded into laughter, I felt my face turn red and I came back with:
“It was quicksand!”
We laughed for hours over anything; the night seemed unstoppable. They had such great senses of humor.
After much drinking, eating, dancing, and laughing, the mood suddenly became quite sober despite my spinning head. Shooshi cleared his throat, wiped the monkey fat from his chin, burped melodically, smiled, and said:
“It time to start real world, Jim.”
I agreed enthusiastically and then asked if I could help clean up the mess our feasting had left.
Shooshi continued.
“You left for jungle to find better world. You are ready to start better world, you have learned, you are man, ready to be perfect.”
To add to the drama of whatever the hell he was talking about, Shooshi clasped his fist in the air and pulled an arm back rapidly that had been rising open handed the entire duration of those near final words he spoke; the animated dangling skin from under his still strong bicep flapped to and fro as he returned to his normal slightly bowed posture. I agreed with Shooshi that I had felt ready to start a new world for myself but told him that my plans had changed.
“No plans, Jim. Please, get in the hole.”
With a slow wave of his wrinkled hand, he pointed toward the hole that he and Takumat had been slaving away at for over a week.
“You want me to get in the hole?”
“Yes, Jim.”
“To start the new world?”
“Yes.”
“You are crazy, Shooshi.”
I climbed in the hole. I would have done anything for those guys; it’s not like they would have buried me alive, and even if they did choose to it bury me, it would have been their right. My life was always in their hands.
It was cold, but the night was warm, so the clay hole felt icy in contrast to the humid night heat. Goose pimples pricked my skin as I finished climbing in, and I began to shiver. I looked up at the night sky; there was not a single cloud, just countless stars twinkling for my delight. I was in the ground up to just past my elbow. My friends looked down on me smiling and laughed warmly. A mosquito bit me on the chin.
It was then that I felt the hole shift and start to constrict around me. It pinned my arm and legs and rendered them useless. I became stuck. Takumat told me to look at myself during my panic and to be amazed. I was nothing short of amazed when I looked down at the portion of my body that had not been gripped and swallowed by the clammy earth. I noticed that I was self-illuminated; my whole body was glowing with bright golden light. The light started by creeping out of my torso and then exploding out of my face. I tried to scream but only let out light. It was like a visual noise that was to be heard by everyone within the hemisphere. A noise that came from only me, shining like a spotlight from the swallowing hole in the earth, all the way out of the jungle, into the outer space, without ever dwindling or loosing radiance.
Fear struck me as hard as the clay that tightened around my chest and pulled me further into it. My heart was racing, I continued trying to call for help, nothing left my lips but more blinding light. My companions were bowed on the ground praying and paying no attention to me.
“What did they do to me?” I thought as tears formed, and as if Shooshi heard my thoughts, he spoke his last words to me.
“Do not be too important to lose yourself, Jim.”
Slowly I sunk into the ground; it seemed like an eternity of uncertainty and frightfulness. My head was the only thing above ground at the point when I looked up and gazed straight into the sky and then darkness washed over me.
I remembered days in the old world where I would wake, sometimes even in my own bed, totally confused with no recollection to where I came from, who I was, or where I was. Sometimes in those very brief confused moments, I would even forget that I was a person and what people were. I was having that feeling again when I awoke, and I was not in a tomb; however, it didn’t fade away in an instance by a reassuring glimpse of a familiar desk or messy pile of laundry. I was unable to spy anything that might give me a hint as to where I might have ended up.
I was shocked and ecstatic to behold with two eyes that I had both my arms again. My skin glittered gold, and I was surrounded in an atmosphere of light that followed me as my aura throughout my entire stay in the new world I had arrived in.
I felt no pain either - one of the very first things I noticed, and the constant heartburn that was a festering and burning inflammation in my chest that was a result of my poor diet and chosen vices was gone altogether. I tested my new eyesight by observing the thick and massive jungle I had somehow found my way to.
There were trees. Awesome trees that stretched from the rich earth upward as far as my new sharpened eyes could see. Each tree bore what seemed to be unlimited amounts of fruit of all different hues, shapes, and sizes, making each boundlessly colorful and was an immense pleasure to witness. Any plant I could tug out of the earth would be attached to a vegetable, some vegetables would be thick and meaty unlike anything I had ever seen, some of those new sorts of veggies would even taste like poultry or roast lamb, and no two pieces of fruit or veggies ever tasted the same as the last. Food could not taste bad, though I later discovered that I didn’t need to eat.
There were animals everywhere of every specie and genus, including many new animals I had never seen before. I called them dinosaurs, but you wouldn’t have guessed by how docile they were. I met a tyrannosaurus that day.
I was helping myself from the warm sunbathed earth and examining the hole that birthed me to a brand-new utopia when the ground began to shake violently. I rose and braced for whatever the catch had to be to live in such beauty in one golden piece. My heart was filled with terror to find that the pounding was coming from a fifty-foot tall, twenty-foot wide, big blue stupid dinosaur.
The monster had its tongue hanging out one side of his mouth and was galloping over thick masses of peaceful animals. Even though the beast seemed clumsy and terrible, he failed to make chunky animal pulp on the jungle floor as he stormed toward me. In fact, Billy seemed to be going at a slightly slower pace as he neared the massive group of animals that were beginning to assemble around me and as the crowd thickened, Billy practically tiptoed over the other creatures.
The brute knocked down a younger tree as he exploded into my proximity. “This is it,” I thought. “I have been sent back to the Stone Age, and now I am going to be eaten by a dinosaur.” At least I had yet to stare a potentially uninteresting death in the face. I could be grateful for that.
To my relief, Billy did not eat me, and instead, with the massive purple tongue that had been dangling out of his mouth, Billy gave me a hot slobbery dinosaur-sized welcoming lick, which started from my feet and ended at my head. It was so powerful that I ended up doing a backflip as a result and landed on my face.
Again, I bounced back onto my feet. I looked out at the masses of varied critters and insects that had surrounded me. The birds blackened the trees with their masses. There were ferrets, fish, dogs, sheep, deer, mammoths, marmots, raptors, boars, and turtles. There were alligators, stegosauruses, spiders, slugs, bugs, and bees, all unalike one another but peaceably assembled nonetheless, for there was no need to fight in a world where no one had to worry about hunger.
I felt like they may have wanted me to say something. I cleared my throat and spoke sheepishly.
“Hi, hello, creatures of paradise.”
None seemed to understand, I continued.
“I am man.”
“I will do you no harm.”
Still there was no reaction from the mass. I kept on with even more strength in my voice and thought that I needed to try harder. I felt that my presence grew with each word.
“I am your friend, animals and nature. Though mankind can be nasty sometimes, have no fear, I am mankind now, I am humanity, and I am good, I am a moral man, I am incorruptible.”
Again, no animal seemed to understand, and the crowd had begun to thin out, they had come to see what all the fuss was about, as I’m sure my entrance had been as dramatic as my exit from the old world.
Billy, however, hung around as my shadow for a while. He seemed to be the most curious of all the animals, or at least the friendliest. Billy quickly became my companion and means of exploring the new world. I would ride on his back for days scouring the earth for adventure and trying to take in all of its beauty.
There were more than just jungles in paradise, and everything I saw was of extreme proportions. When the jungle opened up into a salmon dessert, I saw the sky for the first time. In the hanging sky, there were massive rolling silver and golden clouds that were touched lightly with puerile shades of tangerine shadows. In the dessert, I found decrial florescent cacti that scraped the sky and observed some of those cacti being trampled by gargantuan, clear-haired dessert mammoths. In the marshlands, I saw electric gators that dwarfed the highways of the old world. Billy was terrified of the creatures.
Billy and I found bluewood forests that spanned the size of the entire planet I had left behind. I used to lay in the forest and watch the sun dust speckles sparkle and fall into the tall grassy metropolis while I listened in wonder to the closest thing I had to real music, which was the song of the carrot snakes and the ant lion moles. I named the creatures “carrot snakes” because they were orange in color and had swollen big heads that progressively thinned out to a pencil lead tail. The creatures would sit at the forest floor and vomit their neon-green insides out that I thought resembled the greens atop a carrot and wait for insects to stick to their trap; the insects were attracted to the snake’s florescent green guts and their beautiful, sad, wailing alto tones that seemed a bigger sound than what the tiny creatures could produce. The lamenting cry reminded me of thea sound an Indian flute would create. The carrot snakes would sing in harmony with the deep voices of the ant lion moles that sounded to me like an incredibly deep trumpet, like a sad laugh.
Sometimes I would leave Billy behind and try to climb the tallest mountains I could find (which were always endlessly larger than even the largest mountains of old) but would lose interest after a day’s hike. The oceans were the only thing that had not seemed to be any larger or greater, for even in the old world, they seemed immeasurable and incessantly deep.
“I will always return to the jungle.” I told myself in my mind that it was because that’s where Billy was most comfortable, but I knew inside why I made the jungle my home. I never wanted to be too far away from or to be gone too long from the hole. Besides, I am Jungle Jim.
“Where is God?” I began to wonder. Incredible prophecies being fulfilled planted a seed in my restless mind that grew to think that there might actually be a God and that I was to meet him if this was in fact paradise. “Am I God?” I wondered.
During my scouring of the new earth, I had kept an eye out for anything that might have resembled marijuana or tobacco with no luck. I began to look for plants that could produce drugs I didn’t even prefer and was formerly against. The goal was to get high, whatever that meant. None of the colossal fungi that I encountered on one of my increasingly boring adventures had any psychoactive properties at all or would even make me sick for eating. I tried to make alcohol in many failed attempts. I should have learned more about that while I was still bound to the fate of the old world. I reflected on this for a lifetime.