The Experience Collector

My attempt to adopt them didn’t go as smoothly as I imagined. Maybe that was predictable. After all, humans were involved, each a little universe bumping against the next. Maybe it was naive, but I imagined Son and Daughter staying on at Sacred Tours, growing older, having a child or two, then taking over when I retired. I envisioned us lounging in my apartment on holidays, a big, noisy family.

They accepted initially, cleaning the office and distributing my flyers in the streets to people who resembled them, tourists who might be hoping for a psychedelic adventure. They made a dwelling in the room I found them up the block. They purchased new clothes identical to their old ones. Soon my workspace shined: the posters, maps, and photo-boards covering the white walls reflected sunlight bouncing off the scrubbed wooden floor. Gone were the spiderwebs, the tiny scorpions hidden under the rugs. Son and Daughter grew healthier, too. Bathing revealed her pale, porcelain-smooth skin, and when she asked discreetly, I directed her to a pharmacy for birth control pills. Son’s face filled out, and one day little biceps peeked from under his short sleeves. They spent days off sight-seeing, learning the country’s tragic colonial history. But they still wanted to try Hoopoe.

“We appreciate what you’ve done for us,” Son said to me at a restaurant one night. He put his hard little fists on the table, ignoring his drink, a generously poured glass of the colorless national liquor. “But now we have money.”

“He’s right,” Daughter said. She was wearing a new nose stud, a tiny skull made of green and red stones set into silver. “We can afford it now.”

They weren’t thinking about other costs, I thought. Opportunity costs, costs to their sanity, costs to their future. I waved to the indigenous waiter to bring me another bottle of the sudsy national beer. “You don’t need that stuff,” I said. “You’ve got something realer now. You have jobs here. If it works out, I may be able to help you secure work permits. How many of our countrymen would kill for those things?”

“We don’t want possessions or material things,” Daughter said, ignoring her dress and new jewelry. “We’re spiritual people. But we appreciate what you’re offering. We really do.”

Son folded his hands and sat back. Giving me a solemn stare, he said, “I don’t know. For a guy who’s into reality-revealing drugs, you don’t seem to know much about reality.”

Maybe I should have cast them out then. I didn’t need them, after all, not in my business or my life. I had gotten along before they came to my door. I could have fired them and sent them to some other Hoopoe merchant (there were at least six like me in town, and I had lost sleep, worrying Son and Daughter would find one of them behind my back). But as I have said, I felt that Son and Daughter were my children, or like my children, and five weeks of caring for them had only strengthened that conviction. I was pleased to see them thriving, walking the ancient streets with the confidence of young indigenous people. Gone were the foundling ragamuffins of late summer. If I were to cut them off, I knew, they would go back to homelessness. They would eat Hoopoe sludge, then make their way south, seeking the mushrooms the shamans there ate. If they had not know of the mushrooms yet, they would hear about them soon.

“Fine,” I said, feeling a little like my own father, who used to endure my contempt with the sturdy grimace of a Economics professor. “You can use a shaman I know. My treat.”

Son and Daughter responded with joyful bursts of gratitude, then began to hug and kiss each other. It was a sweet moment, and I was happy to grant their wish, but I worried, watching them reach for their cups of liquor, that this was the happiest they would become, that in sending them to the rainforest, I might be sending them slowly out of my life.

Perhaps it is obvious that I never had children of my own. Nor have I been married. I say “obvious” because I feel, looking back, that the man I’ve described is naive in his regard for these two young tramps who walked into his office one day like two children lost in the woods. For instance, he thinks that Son and Daughter want him to be their father. He seems to have overlooked the fact that they ran away from their fathers to begin with. He seems to have forgotten that even happy children must betray their parents a little, if only to free themselves from their influence.

Just as I cannot deny that I was the man in this story, I cannot deny my disappointment when Son and Daughter returned from the rainforest energized by Hoopoe visions. I was in my apartment above the office when the shuttle spattered with psychedelic designs rumbled to a stop at the curb. The indigenous driver and porters opened the back doors, letting out older, richer tourists who had paid to go along and who would soon return to salaried positions in our home country, where they would brag to colleagues about Hoopoe adventures in the rainforest, inspiring others like them to come my door. These people were followed by drifters with inherited money, the ones who had been my original customers. Then came Son and Daughter, smaller and younger-looking and scrambling a little, like two teenagers, their upper bodies straining as they hefted their backpacks. As I watched from the dusty upstairs window, everyone gathered their bags from the back of the shuttle and said goodbye. I was disappointed to see Son and Daughter embrace the taller, older-looking customers. By the way they touched, clutching hands and shoulders longer than was necessary, I saw they had made new connections. It is difficult, looking back, to catalog all I felt in that moment, but it is safe to say that one of those feelings was jealousy.

They came into the office calling to me in happy voices. I lay on the couch beneath a large mural of the glacier-capped mountains rising out of the jungle, waiting for them to deduce that I was upstairs. I tried to look indifferent when they crept to the top, first Son, then Daughter, both wearing the unslept, thunderstruck expressions of Hoopoe initiates. I had been one myself, years earlier, and though it had been decades, I retained a vague sense of how I must appear to them, a businessman moping in the silence of his upstairs office, a grayheaded charlatan getting older. Seeing me, they smiled like a brother and sister who have decided they must care for their elderly father, and their eyes took on a glint I had not seen before, a pitying quality I resented.

Daughter came forward, arms spread wide, offering or perhaps imposing a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”

Son was right behind her, his smile tight, very nearly a smirk. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to be back here in the world.”

I had risen to embrace Daughter, and now I released her small body, not without regret, for the protective urge I felt in her presence was quieted somewhat when I was holding her or had a hand spanning the small of her narrow back. I offered to hug Son. After hesitating a second, he darted forward, pressed his chest to my stomach briskly, then stepped back. “You were out of the world?” I said. “That sounds like quite a trip.”

“It was amazing,” Daughter said, drawing out the last word. “I saw my whole life, and the life of my whole extended family. I learned my family is the whole human race.”

“That’s great,” I said. My own Hoopoe memories were dim. When I stopped taking drugs, I had begun doubting the truth of my visions, and shortly thereafter I began to forget them. By the time I met Son and Daughter, I no longer recognized the difference between true descriptions and cliches. “I’m glad you got some insight.”

“As if there was a choice.” Son’s eyes bulged like he was being prodded from behind. “I got way too many insights to remember any one.”

“I know, right?” Daughter blinked at me wonderingly. “I talked to God, and I saw some fairies. They’re real, you know.”

Son glanced off to the side and said, “Yeah,” in a voice sufficiently curt to make Daughter wince and blush. “Anyway, it was pretty amazeballs.”

I wanted to tell him to be nicer to Daughter, that it was only his youth that made him fear getting close to her, that while that would fade, the emotional scars he left would remain, and she might one day leave him. But I knew better than to say those things. I would never have listened to such advice at that age. “I’m glad,” I said. “I hope you’re ready to get back to work.”

“Yes, definitely,” Daughter said, frowning and looking out the window.

“I should tell you,” Son said. He blushed but went on staring into my eyes. “I saw some of your life, too.”

An anxious ripple moved through my chest. I wondered whether he could possibly be telling the truth. Some rational part of my mind refused to consider it, but a strange, nagging feeling, something like a memory I could not have translated into words, suggested he was. I did my best to remain composed. “And what did you see?”

Son looked at Daughter, who stared at the floor in her discomfort. He looked around the office, then through the windows at the winter clouds gathered over the city’s countless tiled rooftops. He was blushing. “Have you really been running this business for like twenty years without tripping yourself?”

I folded my arms and took a small step back. “I guess I have.”

“Damn,” he said. “Kind of seems like false advertising, doesn’t it?”

Son could not have seen into my past. If he had, he would have known why I stopped taking drugs. He would have known that years earlier, I had sought other substances, just as I feared he and Daughter would. He would have learned about Angel Vine, which would have killed me, had I taken a second cup from the shaman who cooked it for me. Son would have known what terrified me, the vision of myself alone in black space with a single bright doorway, one through which I could pass into a new realm, knowing I could never return. In that moment, forced to confront my true wishes, I was thrust back into my body, down on all fours in the shaman’s hut. I was vomiting profusely into a plastic bucket. Outside, three small monkeys, scrawny and red, peered down from a long tree branch, shrieking with what I saw was laughter. The shaman stood at a distance, shaking the last drops of Angel Vine tea into the fire. He regarded me with amused contempt, though there was compassion in his dark eyes as well. Please, his face seemed to say, go home. If Son had been able to see that moment in my personal history, he would have mentioned it. He would have behaved differently later.

All the same, these youngsters I considered my children must have learned something about me, for it was now that they began to call me Father. At first, I felt gratified and pleased, even joyous, to hear these two beautiful children acknowledging how I felt toward them. The feeling was short-lived. My ears pricked up at the note of irony, the faint sarcasm, with which they said my new name. It became clear to me that they had gained some insight into my mentality, though whether from the drug or simply being away for a couple of days was impossible to determine.

Despite their tone, I took pleasure in being called Father. For even though I knew they did not perceive me exactly as their father, they were in a sense admitting that this was who I was to them, just as they were my children to me. The patterns were clear. When I found them shelter, they had accepted it. When I offered them food, they ate it without thinking to compensate me. When I gave them work to do, they did it. When I shared my knowledge of the world, they took what they wanted.

When Son asked me the question I had dreaded for months, he did so using the tone of a young man who wishes to borrow his father’s car for the evening.

“Father, what do you know about Tiger Mushrooms?” He occupied the chair behind my desk. He had closed a consultation with a seventy year-old couple, having gotten the old-timers to recall their student protestor years. They were going to eat Hoopoe in two days, and before leaving, they had shaken Son’s hand gratefully. It had been an impressive display of salesmanship. Son had cut his hair and trimmed his beard, revealing more of his small, angular face, and in his collared shirt and khakis he looked like a tiny lawyer on holiday. He turned the swiveling chair and said, “I hear the trip is bananas. Beyond Hoopoe.”

“I thought you’d ask someday.”

“Is it true?” he said. “That it lets you read minds?”

Daughter came downstairs and sat on the bottom step, watching me closely. She too had cut her hair short and brushed it to frame her round face, and now looked like a child who has sneaked out of bed late at night to spy on the grownups. I felt a jolt of terror, imagining her in another country, one with a worse crime rate than this one, asking around for a drug that was illegal there.

“You know he’s going to try to talk us out of it,” Daughter said.

“Don’t lie, Father,” Son said. “Just give us a straight answer.”

At this point, one might have expected me to banish them. Looking back, I see how odd things had grown, perhaps even creepy. Maybe I sensed this, or was partly to blame for the creepiness. But even now, I saw Son and Daughter as two lost and wayward children who needed protection. In fact, their rebellion made them appear more in need of my guidance than ever. “I’ve never tried it,” I lied, though it might as well have been the truth, given how little I remembered. “But you know its status there is different from Hoopoe Flower here. You can go to prison for asking around. One thing you don’t want to try is third world prison.”

Son flashed a sneer at Daughter. He had predicted I would react along these lines. “I know, Father. I know. I’ve done my research. The good news is, there’s a pretty easy way to get it. There’s a guy in this one town. He’s got an office, just like this. Except he also does rafting tours. Only works with people from back home.”

I knew I could not talk them out of it. They had me at their mercy, for I would wait for them to return, fearing for their safety, imagining terrible deaths for them and feeling an unmistakable twinge of desire, too, the same twinge one feels looking over the edge of a cliff at the possibility of falling hundreds of feet, wishing, if one must fall, for the pain to be over already. We all knew I would feel guilt for wishing for relief, that days of self-torture and anxiety lay ahead of me. I buried my face in my hands.

Daughter came over and wrapped an arm around my waist. She smiled up. “Thanks for worrying, Father. It will be fine.”

One of the strangest things about being a parent, if I may say that as someone who has merely imagined himself one, is that one becomes capable of a kind of prophecy. When Son and Daughter caught a bus south to search for Tiger Mushrooms, I knew they’d be back. They had the necessary money and information. They were both resourceful people, Daughter more so when it came to solving little problems like using foreign languages and reading maps, though she let Son think did the work. I knew their quest would be successful, that they would enjoy themselves immensely and come back temporarily satisfied. After a month or so, they would start to wish for stronger, more obscure drugs, drugs which they were sure to learn about, if they had not heard of them already, while mixing with tourists who were also looking for Tiger Mushrooms, for such people are always sharing their drug experiences, in part from a desire to boast and relive their adventures, but mostly from the drive to collect a new experience. I knew this because I had once been one of them. Eventually, I knew, Son and Daughter would find something as potent and dangerous as Angel Vine. In the end, the path they were walking led to two destinations: sobriety and retreat, or to permanent damage, whether from the drug itself or the people who controlled it.

These two possible outcomes were on my mind the whole ten days Son and Daughter were gone, days which passed slowly, because I felt like a father whose children have run off on an ill-advised mission. Like such an anxious, guilty father, I imagine, I sought distractions, first in drink and then in the company of a fellow expatriate, a woman who ran a hostel for tourists cut from the same cloth as Son and Daughter, tourists who came to this place to get high somewhere exotic, to hallucinate on mountaintops and beside sacred tribal monuments. In short, the woman was someone who knew what I was going through.

She was about my age, tall and stoutly built, with a pretty face and a constant smile that concealed irritation for long periods of time if one did not know how to read it. She was known for tolerating rowdy hostel guests until very late, when she would grow furious without warning and expel the louts, who would then spend the remaining nocturnal hours walking frigid streets with their belongings strapped to their backs, dodging pickpockets and ringing buzzers at hotel gates and being told to come back in the morning.

I knew I could tell this woman my problems and that she would give me good, well considered advice. She had lived in that city since before my arrival, since she was Daughter’s age, it occurred to me as I settled into a high chair across the narrow table from her familiar smile and unreadable brown eyes. This woman and I, I remembered, had a great deal in common. She smiled and placed a hand on the back of mine, and we set about getting drunk and interested in each other.

“They are very cute,” she said when I’d told her my story. She was familiar with Son and Daughter, as were all the expatriated countrymen in this city, because there were so few of us, and we noticed each other. “But don’t ask me to sympathize with them. I’m not their mother.”

“Maybe, but I have different feelings about them. They’re so young. Who will look out for them if I don’t?”

She raised her eyebrows and lighted a cigarette of the national brand. “Nobody was looking out for us, and we turned out fine. You should get rid of them.”

“But maybe we were lucky,” I said. “The world feels more dangerous than it used to, and I’m not sure I’ve only gotten older. There are so many new ways to die.”

She was smiling, no longer taking me seriously, the flat look in her eyes saying she was bored with my problem. She was looking past me, watching a group of young indigenous men and women dancing in the back of the bar. She was probably wondering whether getting laid was worth the trouble of listening to me whine. “Look,” she said. “Dad. You know how this ends. You’ve already lived this, on the other side. The best thing for everyone is to send them someplace where they won’t be able to come back.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, remembering how my mother and my overweight siblings had ignored me when I went home for my father’s funeral, years earlier. It was my nieces and nephews who welcomed me, who begged for stories, who promised to someday come eat Hoopoe sludge in the rainforest. I lifted a hand to get the waiter’s attention. “Let’s focus on having some fun.”

Yet I held out hope that my fellow expatriate would be wrong, that when Son and Daughter returned, I would welcome two worn out children who had learned a harsh lesson, children scared just enough to be good from now on. At first, that seemed to be what they were. Responding to a knock at the door, I found them standing on the sidewalk, scared and trembling faintly, their hair and clothes caked with dirt. They had been gone less than two weeks, but Son and Daughter looked emaciated, as if neither had eaten from the point I saw them off at the bus station. They smiled tentatively, hesitating until I held out my arms to embrace them, at which point they came to me, hugging me tightly. The reunion was intense. I felt like a father reclaiming his lost children, and like lost children who have come home after a great ordeal, Son and Daughter began to cry into my shirt, muddying the fabric with their dirty face and tears, though this only moved me to gather them up more closely. Not surprisingly, Daughter was the first to wail, but then Son joined her, cracking a loud comical sob of relief, at which point they confessed the difficulties they had encountered in finding their ways back to the city.

“The roads in the forest are unpaved,” Son said when he’d had his cry and caught his breath. He gazed at me with a sense of awe. “I thought I remembered the way back, and I even cut arrows into the trees, telling me which way to go, but it didn’t work.”

“We couldn’t find them,” Daughter said. “It was like the trees themselves had hidden them from us. There were so many animals. So many noises, I couldn’t hear myself think.”

“That’s what I think happened,” Son said. “The forest didn’t want us to leave.”

“I can see why,” Daughter said. She looked at me very solemnly. “The Tiger Mushroom deserves to be kept a secret.”

“How did you get out?” I said.

“We promised the forest we wouldn’t tell anyone about the mushroom.”

I was used to the talk of people temporarily deranged by psychedelic experience. I smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry. If that were real, you wouldn’t tell me about it now.”

Son and Daughter looked at each other and began to laugh. They were so relieved now that laughter wracked their bodies, causing them to bend forward while their faces convulsed with pleasure and pain. This went on so long that I became impatient for it to stop.

“What’s so funny? Tell me.”

“You are, Father,” Daughter said. “We know you’ve eaten that mushroom.”

“Who told you?” I said. It occurred to me that they might have gone to the shaman I’d visited years ago. It seemed strange he might remember me, but I supposed it was possible. The Tiger Mushroom being illegal in that country, there must have been a limited number of shamans working with guides from the cities. Besides, times were changing. Maybe word of my Hoopoe business had reached him, down there in the jungle. I immediately saw the possibilities.

Son looked at me in disbelief. “You really have forgotten, haven’t you? The mushroom told us. Oh, Father. It’s like there’s this whole untapped universe inside of you.”

Daughter shook her head. “In a way, it’s impressive. How you’ve convinced yourself that you’re normal.”

I knew all too well that people who have come fresh from a drug experience can go on talking about it for hours. I changed the subject. Fully aware that they needed food and rest, I ushered them inside and directed them to wash in my shower and change into some of my spare clothes. I would be taking care of them for the night. Once they had cleaned up, I took them to a buffet in town, where they promptly ceased talking and gave themselves over to feasting on the national dishes on offer until they could do nothing more than sit in their seats, holding bellies stuffed with chicken, rice, and fish, and smile in wonder at the traditional dolls, masks, and musical instruments that adorned the restaurant walls.

“The spirit of the mountains is very much alive here,” Son said. “You know, I never noticed that before.”

Daughter nodded. She looked sleepy. “This is a very spiritual country.”

I ordered a beer and did my best to ignore their drugged talk. In a few days, I knew, the effect would fade, and they would once more become the sweet and promising children I knew. I turned my attention to the musicians onstage, an ensemble consisting of men in animal masks playing stringed instruments. Aware that Son and Daughter were watching me, smirking like a pair of mischievous brats, I did my best to tune them out and enjoy the strange performance.

The onset of late winter, with its ceiling of clouds and its heavy rains, marked the end of my hope for their return. When the usual mudslides buried villages in the rainforest and the relief and emergency workers and medical staff began appearing in town on weekends, resting up before going back into the labor of digging out the dead and the rare survivor, I asked whether they had seen Son and Daughter, two children from my home country lost in the forest. They shook their heads and shrugged, eyeing me with weary indignation and sometimes outright fury. They did not care about two unloved lost children from a foreign country. That was up to the families, they seemed to suggest, if it was up to anyone. Sometimes I think Son and Daughter might still exist in some form I cannot perceive, or on some plane of reality beyond my access, but the idea leaves me with more sadness than comfort.

For a long time, I blamed myself. After all, I had told them about the Angel Vine and where to find it. It was predictable that they would, like me, go in search of it. It was also predictable that, unlike me, they would drink the second cup of medicine and pass through the door beyond which they could not return to their bodies, which the villagers would then drag out into the forest and leave by the river to dissolve like lozenges in an equatorial mouth.

And yet this was all probably inevitable. In the weeks following their return from eating Tiger Mushrooms, Son and Daughter acted like very different people. They skipped their shifts at work to wander around, looking at graffiti art. It was as though they had forgotten they had jobs, and I was tempted to withhold their paychecks, though like an indulgent father I knew I might relent in the end and give them their allowance. When they did visit, they came after I had closed the office. They let themselves in with their keys while I worked on my accounting ledgers and schedules, or while I swept the floor with a broom. They lounged at my desk, saying strange things, laughing whenever I tried to talk to them.

One night I dreamt I was back in the Angel Vine shaman’s hut. He brewed the tea, and I drank. I was immediately transported into dark space, facing the bright doorway through which I could pass but not return. When I turned, I found Son and Daughter standing behind me. I stepped aside to let them pass.

I woke in the cold dry air of my bedroom. Someone was pounding on the door downstairs. They slipped a key in the lock and let themselves in.

Son called out to me, “Father, wake up. We’re here.”

When I came downstairs, they had turned on the lamp on my desk. They were sitting in the consultation chairs. Daughter was smiling at me.

“What were you dreaming about just now?” she said.

“What?” I said, confused, still waking, though I sensed I knew what she meant.

“Come on and sit down, if it makes you feel better,” Son said. “We can wait.”

I came to my chair and hesitated, looking down into their tiny, smirking faces.

“As long as you tell us,” Daughter said. “You owe us that, Father.”

“She’s right, you know,” Son said.

“You can’t help wanting what you want,” she said. “And neither can we.”

“Did you really want to adopt us, Father?”

“Did you really want me to have babies?”

“Do you really want me to take over this business? To become you?”

Their questions were too much for my mind to handle. I had to tell them what they wanted to know, to get them out of my office that night, even if it meant getting them out of my life forever. I told them what the drug was, where to travel to get it, who to talk to. It would take a week to get there, I explained, but that once they reached the country where certain tribes cultivated it, finding it would be easy. I told them it was the most powerful substance I knew, and that I was sure it had nearly killed me. The whole time I spoke, Son and Daughter listened raptly, their faces cleansed of the arrogance of recent weeks, so that they once again appeared like a pair of innocent children imagining a house made of candy in the woods. With each word I spoke, I became a little less desperate, until I had finished explaining what I knew, and collapsed in my chair, dismayed. Son and Daughter looked very small, sitting in the consultation chairs, holding hands. Outside, bands of tourists walked by, their drunken voices braying in the mountain air.

“He’s telling the truth,” Son said. He stood up quickly, grinning fervently at Daughter. “Wow, Father. I didn’t know you had that in you.”

“Thanks, Father,” Daughter said, laughing under her breath. “I guess we know where we’re going now.”

“Yeah, I guess this is goodbye,” Son said. He was already at the door.

“Maybe not,” I said weakly, hopefully.

“Oh, look at him,” Daughter said. She hesitated, tugging on Son’s sleeve. “Look at him. Let’s give him a hug goodbye.”

We embraced once more. I held on, for now it was my turn to sniffle, like an elderly father sending his grown children into the world. I worried and perhaps knew they were going to their deaths in rainforest, that this had been their fate all along, to be two little children who wandered into the forest to be swallowed by something inside of it. I sensed their derision as they hugged back, the contempt of tiny hands patting my back, and already I missed that, too, their doubt in me, for knowing it would soon be gone.

When they finally withdrew from me and walked purposefully out the door, I followed them onto the dark street. There, in the late night chill, I watched their strong young figures descend the ancient cobblestones into darkness. And then I went on waiting, staring after them, hoping against what I knew, for the change of heart that might bring them home.

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