I waited until I smelled the smell of tea close by, and then I opened my eyes.
I was not pinned down by an automobile tire.
I was pinned down by a tremendous coil of snake. The coil was on my stomach, exactly where I would pouch a baby if I were, as they say, With Child, which I thankfully was not. The coil showed both head and tail resting dead center. I wondered how exactly that worked; the coil seemed perfectly wound and not as if the two ends could end up in the same central location. It was extraordinarily heavy and I breathed shallow breaths. This was not from fear. I remembered immediately that the snake had already killed me quite neatly the previous night, so there was nothing more it could do. I pushed against the couch with my feet so I could sit up a little without disturbing the snake. I was not afraid but all the same, you know, I didn’t want to wake it up again. Seeing as that was exactly what had raised its ire the night before.
12
About the gravel, discussed only, if you’ll recall, cursorily quite early in the proceedings: It was no joke.
You may likely have thought, then, of the gravel one might find in somebody’s driveway in a rural community, or a vacant lot: vague scattered bits of stone, mostly dust really, covering a solid surface.
This gravel was not that gravel.
This gravel seemed to be covering nothing so much as more gravel. I don’t know a) how deep it went or b) what was below it, but my guesses would be a) deep and b) as already noted, gravel. Atop more gravel, atop marshland.
That’s how it seemed. To walk around atop this gravel was like walking in those dreams one sometimes has, where the walking one does can hardly be called walking at all. Those dreams where one’s legs seem to have lost all connection to the previously not-necessary-to-even-think-about-so-automatic-is-it mechanism attaching and coordinating the limbs and brain.
Or like how I would imagine it feels to be in one of those huge boxes of balls that they sometimes provide as an amusement for children at carnivals.
I have never, so far as I can surmise, been turned loose in one of those boxes, but I have seen the children wobble about, legs giving way under every step, and so can imagine at any rate the sensation.
There would appear to be nothing amusing about it.
The balls are perhaps less uncomfortable than gravel to thrash about in; nonetheless.
Although children evidently enjoy the chaos of such endeavors. I wonder why. Is it that their lives are generally more ordered than ours—told when to wake, brought to their various appointments and schools and recitals, read aloud to from books of someone else’s choosing, put to sleep at the proper times and so forth? Do the children who live less ordered lives perhaps not so much enjoy being plunked into the unstable world of a box of balls? The children of opium addicts, say, or gypsies? It might be something for someone to study sometime, perhaps in a report of their own if they find themselves so inclined; it however is beyond the realm of this particular account, which remains precisely and professionally focused on the matter at hand. I bring up the gravel simply to shed some light on certain realities. For instance: the difficulty we faced on an almost constant basis, in the most basic facet of locomotion; the shortness of temper at times displayed by certain members of our party; the perhaps unduly lethargic pace with which we carried out our Assignments.
But has that light been shed at all? I mean simply to suggest that in a well-ordered existence, one in which the various tasks of the various days are not so various at all but consistent, regulated, one might perchance decide that to dive willingly into a box of balls would be a fine and worthwhile endeavor.
I would not be that one.
I would not willingly dive.
I would not mind, however, getting into some stage-acting. This seems to me to be a perfect blend of the regulated and the chaotic: One is provided with a narrative, some lines of dialogue, some instruction on how to move about within an admittedly confined space among an admittedly limited cast of characters, all the while operating under a small amount of duress and uncertainty as to the outcome. This stage-acting thing, yes, I think I would not so much mind.
Which is, as it turns out, the only light that was needing to be shed in this extended descriptive passage, although I have perhaps managed to ink in the landscape a bit, which could certainly come in handy. At some point. For someone.
13
Wherever we went, wherever the concerns in need of Investigation took us, we always stayed at Tiki Ty’s Tiki Barn. And unlikely seeming as it seems, it always seemed to be exactly the same place.
One learns that certain questions are unanswerable.
This is why we need words like ‘conundrum.’
Tiki Ty’s was always where we stayed and was always a large bright generous sort of bookstore-slash-vintage surfing memorabilia museum. The books were not necessarily about vintage surfing memorabilia; I perhaps misspoke. There were few, if in fact any, books on vintage surfing memorabilia at Tiki Ty’s and perhaps in the whole of the world. Vintage surfing memorabilia being one of those memorabilias that people prefer to see accidentally or even on purpose, in person, but rarely, if ever, to read about.
Though perhaps they would enjoy a picture book of vintage surfing memorabilia?
This may not even be the case.
This may be something that warrants further investigation, but perhaps by someone else.
Tiki Ty was always expecting us, though I never saw anyone send a messenger ahead, and always had the same small rooms available for our use whenever we arrived. Tiki Ty always greeted us with a happy good nature that we without fail found vaguely alarming and suspicious at first, and then warmed up to. Tiki Ty had great massive waves of jet black hair that he piled always into a large artistic clump on the top of his head and fixed in place with an invisible elastic band and then a profoundly visible enameled stick, perhaps the length of a schoolchild’s straight-edge. Tiki Ty served shrimp in an unusual way, which is to say, not fresh and pink and pearly but battered and cooked and spiced in a manner that I would not have thought of and indeed never thought of at all outside of Tiki Ty’s immediate presence but which all the same made my mouth water in a Pavlovian sort of anticipation each and every time I entered the Tiki Barn.
My mouth watered in a Pavlovian sort of anticipation. Tiki Ty greeted us in a riot of black hair and pale green scrubbish garb and shuffling holey mules made of balsa or seagrass or salsa.
No.
This last is incorrect.
However.
He greeted us also with shrimp, arrayed around a puddle of dipping on a large metal platter that once had a painted spray of peonies featured beneath the shrimps but that now with time and with use had faded to only the idea of peonies.
Raffia.
Tiki Ty uses a different sort of dipping as well. His dipping is not red but yellow, and not spicy but quiet and like an animal.
14
We had been at the Tiki Barn not long enough to make even a dent in even the initial welcoming platter of shrimps when she came in through the bathroom window!
She did not. That was a terrible and willful untruth. Only it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it, a ring that could be put to musical accompaniment and made into a popular song, no? She came in through the bathroom window!
But she did not.
She came scraping in through a window, yes, but not a window living in the bathroom, no, nothing so catchy as that for Kiki B, whose name for purposes of clarity I reveal at this juncture of the account but which of course I couldn’t have known at the time. She scraped pathetically in