The old man’s snores echo about the maloca. He is seated in the dirt, leaned back against a support beam in the corner of the enormous hut. A doomed mosquito wanders into the cave of his mouth. A fire smolders next to him, exhaling a thin line of smoke that snakes its way up the thatched roof and out an airway a hundred feet up.
A voice trembles through the still air: “Hello?”
A white parrot, high in the rafters, cocks its head. “Hello?” it calls back.
Still asleep, the old man mutters: “Hello.”
“Hello!” cries the parrot, encouraged.
“Hello,” mumbles the sleeping man.
“Hello!”
“Uh, hi,” says the first voice.
The old man’s eyes spring open. He clamps his jaw and crunches the mosquito. He blinks. “‘S that you, Cucumber?”
(The parrot’s name is Cucumber.) “Hello!” says Cucumber.
“Uh, hello,” repeats the first voice. “Mr --?” It is the voice of a child. “Don Sinatra?”
“Yes!” The old man’s up now but still half-asleep; his reply comes out, accidentally, as a bellow that ricochets around the maloca, building until a dozen “Yes!”s stampede out the front door like a herd of startled cows.
Five silent seconds waddle by. “May we come in?”
The Don peers down at the red adidas shorts tied below his gut. “One minute.” From a hook on the beam he plucks a long string tied with woven palm fronds dyed black and white. He wraps the garment about his waist as a kilt. He stalks towards the door, out of sight; just as he is about to leap into the doorway, he realizes he forgot his jaguar mask. He creeps back, retrieves it, fumbles to undo the string. When the inside of the mask touches the skin of his nose, it begins to transform. The sides grope towards his ears, find purchase just behind them in his scalp and suck the rest of the mask to his visage. The features squirm about a bit and then settle. The sleek nose sniffs the stale air; the flattened ears twitch; the jaguar eyes, slitted and green, slide open. The Don works his jaw side to side, licks his teeth with a rough tongue.
“Hello?” The voice repeats and Don Sinatra turns.
The Wise and Wondrous Don Sinatra leaps into the doorway.
A few feet away are two children. The boy jumps back, eyes wide; the girl, having found an interesting ant, hardly glances up.
“Hello, children,” the old man says. A grin contorts his bespeckled jaguar face. He quite likes children, and a fair few seem to end up on his doorstep. It’s that damned Franco.
“Are you the shaman Don Sinatra?” the boy asks. He’s obviously shaken by the reception, but looks boldly up at the snarling jaguar. Perhaps four years old, he is the younger and smaller of the two, with short brown hair and large brown eyes. His left arm trails behind him, holding the hand of the girl, who looks about seven or eight.
“Yes, yes,” the old man says, sighs, and grabs his nose. The jaguar mask comes off with a grand slurping sound. “I used to be. Sometimes I still am. Come on in, then.”
As they enter, the girl peers up and about, taking in the maloca without expression. The boy is too excited and nervous to notice anything. He watches the Don closely as they are led across the room to the fire. Don Sinatra carefully hangs the jaguar mask, thinks for a moment, then disrobes back into his red adidas shorts. He tosses a couple fronds and then a log on the fire. The Don motions for them to sit.
“Welcome.”
“Thanks,” says the boy.
“Hmm… what to do with you?” the Don muses. “Ah! Would you like a Mango?”
“What? Fruit? No. Thank you. We’ve come for business.” There is a weary stubbornness in the boy’s voice.
“Of course you have,” agrees the Don gravely.
“I want you to heal my sister.”
“Ah!” Don Sinatra nods sagely. He steeples his fingers, frowns, winks. “A Mango, my darling boy, is just the thing.”
“No thank you.”
Don Sinatra sighs. “Then that makes this whole thing rather more complicated, you know.”
The boy is pacing back and forth and seems not to have heard; his little brow crinkles in thought.
“What are your names?” Don Sinatra asks.
“I’m Arthur,” says the boy, “and this is Sara.”
“Does she not speak?”
Sara had glanced up briefly at her name.
“Not much,” admits Arthur. His hands are clasped in front of him. “Not anymore, that is. That’s part of the issue, you see -- in fact, that displays the issue quite well indeed. My little sister barely talks now, never laughs, hardly eats, and won’t smile. About a year ago, I found her apartment in Vancouver a wreck and so I took her to live with me down in California. ‘The sun’ll help,’ I told her. But it didn’t help an ounce. She was just so… morose. It started to infect my wife, my kids. I didn’t know what to do. I took her to a number of doctors, psychiatrists mainly, but some of those naturos, too; that didn’t do any good. Some seemed to motivate her: she’d come home with a brusqueness (but not her old gaiety) and begin ‘getting her life in order’ and ‘starting afresh’ and whatnot but that simmered out like an untended fire. So it’d been two years, at that point, and I ask myself, ‘Arthur, what else can you try? Be creative!’ and I remembered going on this boat trip up the Amazon River a few years back -- I got a package deal with my resort in Cartagena -- and our guide Franco telling us about you. I didn’t believe him at the time, obviously, but, well… I was desperate, and so I called him up and he arranged everything: We stayed with him out in the forest and fasted for three days, after visiting this maloca in reality an’ all to get permission from your family. Then Franco prepared the… concoction and we drank it and sat beside the river and waited to see the reflection of a god.”
“And did you?” the Don asks.
“Oh yes, it was Sara who spotted him --”
“-- her,” interjects Sara. “She was laughing.”
“... who spotted her,” continues Arthur, “and somehow she got bigger and bigger -- Franco shooed us towards her and then we… entered into her mouth and were walking along the bottom of the river.”
“Did you drown?”
“No, we were fine. We walked back up to the shore and everything was very similar to how it was before but so much… louder, fiercer. I experienced the forest like…. Anyway, Franco was gone but he’d said to just go ahead and follow the path to your maloca. And now we’re here.” For a long moment little Arthur looks completely lost; his brown eyes gaze in a stupor. They focus on Don Sinatra. “So,” he continues, regaining some of his composure, “can you heal her?”
The Don is silent for a long time. He looks from one child to the other. “You’re not really children, are you?” he asks.
“Of course not,” replies Arthur. “This whole child-body business is a bit strange and inexplicable for the both of us, I’m afraid. We weren’t told this would happen. We didn’t even notice it until we stood outside there, but I think it happened when we entered the mouth of the god.”
“Goddess,” corrects Sara.
“Did you enjoy your expanded experience of the forest, children?”
“Yes,” says Sara without hesitation.
“I don’t know,” says Arthur.
“Well then. Reflect on that for a moment, my darlings, that journey. Now, let’s look back further, to the root.” The Don leans forward earnestly and stares into Sara’s eyes. She looks away. “Don’t retreat, child. I want you to reflect on your time in wherever it is you were. What were you feeling?”
Arthur speaks with a crispness of tongue; Sara, on the other hand, drawls her words out slowly, as though dragging them with tremendous effort from mud. She says: “I felt... miserable.”
“I see. Go on.”
She stares back at him, looks down; small tears well up in her eyes. “Lonely.”
“Ah,” says the Don sadly. “Ah, yes, I see. Disconnected, my darling?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s a clear enough prognosis: Your spirit is starving.”
“Starving?” says Arthur.
“My spirit?” asks Sara.
“Indeed. Your spirit craves succulent life juices! You’d better come with me, then, and have a Mango of Spiritual Sustenance.” The Don leads them out the back door into the forest, where it is complete darkness.
“What happened to the daylight?” Arthur asks.
“It got bored and cavorted off,” explains the Don. “Now, children, this is the Garden of Life.”
Arthur reaches out and takes Sara’s hand.
“I can’t see a thing!” he whispers.
“All for the best, darling,” the Don says. “Trust your feet and just listen.”
~
Pale light breaks the foliage before them and suddenly they’re at the top of a hill. Sara gazes at the full moon and the million stars around it, wondering what seems so odd about them. After a moment she realizes that they’re moving, very slowly, and not in a streak across the sky, things in the sky usually move, but in lazy circles, figure-eights, or perhaps they’re floating about randomly. She shakes her head and looks about. Long grasses wave at her; to their left is a large tree with thin green leaves and fat yellow fruit sagging in the branches. A thin river snakes in the distance.
“It looks so small from here,” says Arthur.
Sara shakes her head. “Don’t you know where we are?”
“We’re in the Amazon,” Arthur says defensively. “That’s the River, that’s the Rainfor.. wait…” He gazes around at the dancing fields. “Where’d the forest go?”
“We’re back home,” whispers Sara.
“Oh.”
Don Sinatra lets them have another moment to themselves, then points at the tree. “And this, my darlings, is the Mango Tree of Spiritual Sustenance.”
He leers happily down at them. “Pick a Mango, children.”
Arthur looks at Sara; she shrugs.
“Oh, I see!” the Don says when Arthur picks his, and “ahhh…” when Sara hers.
“What?” Arthur asks.
“That is very significant, little Arthur. You see the slight yellowing on the rotund side of your mango? Yes, yes, quite indicative.”
“Indicative of what?”
Don Sinatra winks, and then sighs. Sara has noticed he does this quite often and still has no idea what either means. “It’s just not quite ripe enough, you see. Never will be, no matter how hard it tries -- and oh it shall -- for now you’ve plucked it, of course. The matter shall settle slowly.”
Arthur sits in the grass, frowning.
“What about mine?” Sara asks.
“Yours,” replies the Don, inspecting it, “has several tell-tale implications of the most profound sort regarding the temperance of your underlying nature. So it does.”
“What’s my underlying nature?”
“Why,” continues the Don with a soft cry of surprise, “don’t you know it, child? Can’t you feel it in the Mango? The softness! The colour! A gorgeous specimen, indeed, very fine to look at and containing oodles of lovely juices -- but,” he takes a great sniff of the fruit, then holds it out for Sara to do the same, “the smell is a bit off. We’ll find that it’s got some rotten bits it’s hid ever so well.” Sara frowns down at the mango cradled in her grasp. “But now, as with your brother, it is plucked and its fate is set. You may as well eat it, or else toss it to the ants. But, as you both well know, seeing as you’ve made the very long journey from wherever it may be that you’re from and from whatever bodies you may jig about in out in what you so innocently dub reality into these dainty little ones, the choice is yours to make. Will you eat the fruit you’ve plucked, my darlings?”
“Sure, I guess so,” Arthur says. “Do you have a knife? Here, Sara, I’ll cut out the rotten bits for you.”
“Okay,” says Sara.
The Don intones, with the finality of an epitaph: “No.”
“But you said hers is rotten. What if we trade? Or -- I can pick you a new one, Sara.”
“No, how absurd. You only get one Mango of Spiritual Sustenance, you know.”
“But now I don’t really want mine either, not if it’s unripe.”
The Don ignores him. “Children, children. Before we eat the sacred Mangoes, I must tell you that they are, in fact and in deed, sacred. So I shall: they are sacred. Fruit is one of the purest essences of life we can ingest. And these, being magical sacred dream fruit, grown with the greatest care from this existence, such as it is, and the greatest love from my own self, such as it is, are even more so infused with the unripe and rotten juices of life! Plus, you picked them yourself.” The Don’s smile stretches his face to such unnaturally taught degrees that his eyes are lost behind a jam of wrinkles. “Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” replies Arthur.
“No, it doesn’t!” the Don barks, amused. “It’s all nonsensical, of course, that’s the fun.”
Arthur sets his mango in his lap with great deliberation, and turns a cold and steady eye upon the Don. “When are you going to make my sister better?”
“I’m not.”
Arthur takes a deep breath and anger flashes in his four-year-old’s eyes. “I was told you could.”
“Oh, you silly boy. That was a lie. I can’t do squat for her that I haven’t already done.”
“But you haven’t done anything.”
The Don glares at Arthur, who glares fiercely back at him. “Are you blind, child? I offered her a mango.” He looks to Sara. “How are you feeling, my darling?”
“Excellent,” she replies. Arthur blinks in confusion at the sight of her smile. “Very… peaceful.”
“And yet you haven’t even eaten your Mango!” the Don cries.
“It’s ever since we entered the forest, Arthur. Something inside me shifted. All the thoughts and worries and anxieties that were bouncing around my head -- I became so aware of them, and then… they just sort of settled.”
“Yes, you’re one of those. I could tell the moment I saw you. You know, you can have that peace anytime you like -- and anywhere, though some places are more challenging than others. But! that’s where the healers are most needed. Don’t you want to be a healer, my darling?”
“Yes,” says Sara.
The Don looks back to Arthur. “Look -- there is one thing you can do for your sister; one thing and one thing only and you’ve gone through ever so much just to do it, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have. Tell me what it is!”
Don Sinatra sighs gravely. Shadows chase each other across his face. “I shall tell you,” he says.
“Well… what?”
The old man leans forward, the children lean forward; when he speaks his voice is a hoarse whisper. “Eat your own damn Mango!” He lies back in the grass and winks at Sara.
Sara nods. “Please, Arty.”
“And you too, sweetie,” the Don urges. “Even the rotten bits -- especially the rotten bits! After that, we watch the stars dance.” He yawns as they bite into their mangoes. “Then we take a nap and you go back to your silly reality.”
“What then?” asks Sara. “What if I go back to the way I was?”
“Well of course you will. Your old habits will return, and your loneliness along with them. For such as you, loneliness with always trail you a mangy old dog. It’s your choice how to treat it -- so far you’ve been terrified of it and been obsessed with pretending it doesn’t exist. Stop that. It’s but a shadow of yourself, dear girl, your deepest, darkest shadow. So love it, dear girl, give it all the compassion you can. Let it be and live your life, even if it’s whining at you: go out into the world and listen and talk and dance and laugh and sing and eat and read and sleep and keep an eye out for other people’s mangy dogs so you can scratch them behind the ears. And if you ever need me, Sara, you know where to find me. I’m but a dream away.”
They are all silent for a while. “Thank you,” says Sara finally. She’s feeling quite sleepy, having eaten her mango down to the pit and then licked her fingers. “Goodnight, Don Sinatra.”
“Goodnight,” mumbles Arthur.
“Goodnight, children.”
~
They awoke hand-in-hand beside the river. Arthur guiltily removed his hand from hers and then made a show of scratching his moustache. “Well, that was strange,” he said.
“What happened?” asked Franco.
“He invited us in,” began Arthur.
“And he took us to our old home.”
“And he fed us mangoes.”
“Good, very good. Sara. How’d yours taste?”
“A bit nasty,” she said with a grin, “but I kinda liked it.”
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