WE MOVED back to New York shortly after that trip with Mac and her crew, and it was months before I had a chance to return to Peru and be with Julio again.
The next time I drank ayahuasca, my son Marco drank as well and the focus on him—and my four guests—allowed me to have a relatively easy time, with the doctors not even making an appearance. For Marco—who, like Italo, had cultural ties to traditional Amazon healing and had grown up around curanderos and ayahuasca—it was a marvelous, if scary, night, during which I held him for hours.
In the morning one of my guests came to me in Julio’s kitchen area and angrily demanded to know how on earth I could have let a 12-year-old drink ayahuasca. “What on earth could Marco have possibly learned at his age?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Let’s ask him.”
We did.
“Well,” he started, “before last night I was always afraid of the dark because I thought that’s when ghosts came and I was afraid of ghosts. But last night I realized they’re always here, right here with us. Only it takes ayahuasca to be able to see them and hear them and talk with them.
So now that I know they’re everywhere all the time, and now that I talked with them and see they’re not all just trying to kill me, like I thought, I don’t think I’ll be afraid of the dark anymore.”
On the next trip, I brought five guests up to see Julio. They were a terrific group, open to Iquitos, to the overcrowded riverboat, to the filth of the marketplaces, to everything I loved.
Among them was a former captain in the US Special Forces who simply exuded strength of a kind most people don’t possess. His presence alone pushed me to promise that I would not panic this time when the doctors appeared, not be so cowardly in the face of such a man.
Unfortunately, I caved in almost the instant that Julio blew out the last of the coffee-tin kerosene lanterns that lit the little unwalled area of the hut where we sat. It was a dark night, with a hint of rain in the thick clouds overhead.
In the darkness the twinkle of green lights appeared. I tried to stay calm as they connected into beams, and the beams connected into the great arched cathedral ceiling. And then it all turned red and I knew I was there again, in the world where the doctors worked. I made my way over to a railing by the platform’s edge and stood. Julio wasn’t five feet away, shaking his shacapa in time with the icaro he sang. I clung to the sounds like a lifeline, breathing deeply to try to get past my fear. I looked out at the jungle past the little clearing around Julio’s home and saw that everything was alive and moving and ominous. Julio had called a lot of spirits to join us and they were coming in droves. It was going to be a long night if I could not control myself.
I couldn’t, of course, and when a few minutes later I began the wonderful and violent retching, I was relieved to have something tangible to cling to. Up from my stomach came the residue of the ayahuasca I’d drunk; then up from deep within myself came the bile of my life, all of it bursting out of me like great chunks of something filthy I’d been carrying for too long. I roared like a lion, spewing like a waterfall into the jungle night while Julio sang. Over and over I roared, eliminating junk.
There was nothing to see on the physical level, of course, no real vomit to speak of since I’d fasted all day. But with ayahuasca eyes it looked like a pile of bad things at my feet that grew with each violent retch. What a fantastic feeling to eliminate so much so effortlessly, what a gift from the medicine to clean another closet in my personal wasteland.
When I finished, I sat down where I was and made my way over to my original spot on the hut floor. The others were in the throes of their own cleansings, and I hoped they enjoyed them as much as I had.
My joy at momentarily forgetting what I’d come to learn quickly dissolved as I heard the familiar rustling of tall grass. The rustling became louder than Julio’s singing; it was filling me up. I crawled across the floor and stood against the railing, facing the jungle again. The rushing grew still louder until I thought my head would burst, then abruptly stopped. The sudden silence was deafening.
“We’re here again,” one of them said.
“I know,” I heard my inner voice answer.
“There is still work to do and not much time.”
“I don’t know how to let you work. I want you to, but after all this time I still can’t do what you want.”
“Would it be easier to work on you if we looked like this?” they asked, suddenly transforming themselves from the tiny creatures I’d never really seen into a young woman. I couldn’t see her face but felt she was lovely.
“Is this better?” she asked, chiding me.
“You’re still the doctors,” I said.
“I’m just me,” she said plainly.
“It’s a trick. If I relax you’re going to turn back into the doctors and tear me to pieces.”
“Not this time. It’s not going to hurt a bit,” she laughed.
“Bullshit. I don’t trust you.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not going to hurt at all. It might even tickle.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just reached into me and grabbed my heart and began to massage it. “You really don’t have a choice. I’ve got to get this work done.”
I didn’t know if I was talking out loud or not, but I knew I was moving around and disturbing the others, so I made my way down the three-step ladder to the clay earth outside the hut.
“Bien?” Julio asked as I left the platform.
“Los doctores,” I said.
“Yah!” he laughed. We’d never really spoken about them, but Julio seemed aware of them anyway. “Not that far,” he said in Spanish as I began to step outside of the immediate area of his voice, drawing me back to the base of the hut.
Outside was as frightening as it was inside, but I had no place else to go so I lay on the ground and listened to Julio singing as I looked up at the red world around me.
“That’s much better,” the woman laughed, taking out my heart and beginning to reshape it.
Her voice startled me, but her demeanor was so open and light-hearted that even though I knew she was just the doctors pretending to be a woman, I didn’t fight her.
And in not fighting her, the work went easily. She didn’t provoke fear. She just seemed to be tickling me. Up came the question I’d been asking for years: How can I make Chepa happy?
What does she want? And the old follow up: To make her happy you must be her. I still didn’t know how to do that and asked the woman.
“This isn’t the time for that. I’ve still got a lot of anger to take out.”
Images of things I’d done in anger, or wished to do, came pouring out. The sourest moments of pain from my marriage came back to life and I was forced to relive them in wretched detail.
A hundred things, a thousand moments or hours I wish I’d never lived, were all relived horribly.
But something about this nurse, this woman and the joy with which she worked, allowed me to allow her to dredge all those things up, things I’d fought the doctors over reliving for years.
I don’t know how long she worked. I remember that it started to rain and my wonderful assistant Corina told me to come into the hut, but I told her I was fine. I was more than fine. I
was singing something, an ayahuasca song was coming out of me effortlessly and I was singing it and laughing and anyone seeing me would have surely thought I was crazy. But I knew better.
I was letting some of that stuff go, some of that stuff that was keeping me locked in a sour place, and I was getting lighter and more giddy with each bad memory I relived and threw away.
Finally, she said she’d done enough for one night and put my heart back into my chest. I tried to see what she looked like, but as I did she crumbled back into a thousand little doctors, all of them laughing at me.
“That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” they asked.
“You should have done that years ago,” I said.
“We couldn’t. You weren’t ready.”
And then the rustling of the leaves began and they disappeared, taking the sound with them until only the sound of Julio’s singing and the che-che-che of the shacapa remained.
I lay where I was for a long time, until I realized what I must have looked and sounded like to my guests—then stood on ayahuasca-drunken legs and made my way to them one by one to see if they were alright.
They were. Corina, Jairo and MaBel had seen to that.