I Am Become Kilo
“pan·psy·chism (păn-sī-kĭz’əm)
n.
The view that all matter has consciousness.”
–The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Online
Being a coca leaf is easy. My worries are few, and loneliness cannot exist when one has many other leaves living on the same branch with them. My thoughts are simple, consisting of: Sunlight…then Water, on something like an infinite loop. But then one day a boy approaches my branch, and everything changes. The boy wears a straw hat and a yellow and black striped silk shirt that makes him look like a giant bee. Around his hand he wears a coarse band of something like burlap. He does this, I learn, so that he can rip meand my brothers and sisters from the branch. Then he tosses us into a basket made of frayed straw while I scream in a way that reaches his ears as silence.
At this point, I still think of sunlight and rain, but it’s not like before, where I awaited them and celebrated them when they arrived. Instead I’m pining for them, missing them, crying for them, as are my brothers and sisters. We rustle around together, whoosh and crinkle. We can feel the sere brown blotches, death encroaching on the desiccated flesh of our leaves.
We are carried uphill, into a shadowy part of the jungle protected with a triple canopy of dark green leaves. The boy moves toward a log hut with a thatched straw roof. He walks past a shaggy yellow-coated dog, piebald with mange, that spends all its time leaned back on its hind legs, scratching a rash on its hide.
Farther up the hill, next to the hut, is a barrel that has been sliced in half, filled with collected rainwater. A naked bronze-skinned girl stands there bathing, the waterline even with the tines of her thin ribs, diaphragm swelling to raise her breasts with milk buds like brown rubber. The water she tosses over her black hair is murky with scummed film dissolving in greasy bubbles from the chunk of soap. The oily lather takes on all the colors of the rainbow, turning her barrelful of water into a glowing magical font.
She throws more water on her wet hair, and the beads cascade down her back, moving in the runnel of her spine’s slight curve like fattened raindrops.
The boy who ripped me and the other leaves from the trees watches the girl some more, his mouth open enough to catch horseflies. Finally, the girl’s protector (or owner) speaks up:
“Keep looking at my sister like that and I’ll poke your eyes out of your big head.”
This man wears a planter’s hat and smokes a maize cob pipe, and stands beneath the overhang of a thatch-roofed hut. This man is like a sturdy tree next to the sapling burdened with his bag of coca leaves. The boy—like all creatures—wants to pollinate, but knows he must either grow larger first, or find another flower besides this one potted inside in the waterlogged drum. To fight for this particular flower might cost him dearly.
Besides, right now he needs his own food: pesos. He gets a pile of them in exchange for me and my brothers and sister, then disappears with his money. The man puts us next to other baskets that eventually get picked up by a white pickup truck covered with a coat of rust.
***
We’re dumped from the dark confines of the burlap bag into a square pen like where the humans slop their hogs. A man holds a tool ringed with blades like a mouth filled with sharp teeth, wearing green hip-wader boots and a matching oilskin apron. He walks into the pen with us and starts the motor on his metal-toothed monster, which spits out fetid, blearing exhaust.
The blades begin to whap, and we dance in the downwash of the sharply spinning points.
The man holds the blade-toothed tool over us, walking slowly and in straight lines, slicing us into shredded piles of yellowish-green matter. I can hear moans, and tiny pieces of what I once was shred into insignificant chips that comingle with the other fragments. The pain is like having the veins of your leaves devoured by hungry fire ants.
Then the man exits the pen, and other younger men come in wearing heavy rubber boots. They stomp and squish and our screaming fragments congeal into slurry that sloshes like grapes becoming wine.
They pour poisons on us that sting and blear, and burn. They cannot hear us cough and we hear nothing over the sound of our own heaving, an agonized choir harmonizing into a single lament.
Eventually, after all of the stomping and cutting and pouring, I and the shreds of my friends are stirred and pounded until we become one thick wedge. Like a block of cheese.
The largest man—face pitted with scars and nicked with divots from knife fights—holds us in his hand and smiles. His teeth are yellow and rotted, like weevil-plagued seed maize.
His smile doesn’t last long, though, for another man breaks through the thickets of palm trees and approaches him.
“You were light last time.” This other man wears a khaki uniform and a black hat with a stiff brim with a little golden symbol pinned on it. He is flanked by two other men with similar hats and uniforms, but they have no gold bar to boast. “I’ll take that.”
The soldier holds out his hand, while the two smaller men behind him choke up on their shooting sticks. They try to look tall and calm, but they squirm and their eyes dart nervously around.
The ugly man starts to smile again, then looks back toward the men behind him, the ones in rubber boots. These smaller men don’t look scared, even though they only have the tool with its blades like metal petals on a giant silver flower.
“Okay,” the man with bad teeth says, still smiling. But then the smile drops from his face and he shouts in loud Spanish, “Tu desayuna está aquí, mi negrita!” His voice echoes, and then there is the metallic ting of a cage door springing open.
The trees rustle, whispering, and something emerges from the jungle. It is a jet-black beast, its coat shining like polished onyx, each muscle flexing as its haunches shift. It springs forward on four legs, green eyes glowing like unholy jade and teeth brandished like curved ivory-white daggers.
The beast snarls, and its green eyes turn a sickly yellow, the jaundiced jewels burning in its black skull. It leans back on its haunches, ready to pounce, perhaps waiting for the right word, or waiting for the soldiers to run.
The golden soldier gulps, pretending he can’t hear the drumbeat of his heart pounding in his temples. His trembling right hand drifts to his leather belt. He tickles the loopholes with shaky fingers, eyes flitting between Ugly Teeth and the beast stalking forward. The ugly-toothed man warns the golden soldier to stop tickling his belt. One of the lesser soldiers behind his leader is already half-turned, the whites of his eyes wide, ready to disappear into the dark forest. The other soldier flanking the golden man doesn’t flinch, though sweat spills in profuse sheets from beneath the bucket brim of his boonie hat.
At last the pantera launches itself for the golden soldier, with a snarl that sends the birds in the trees flying toward the clear blue sky.
The golden soldier shrieks, draws his small handheld boomer from his belt, but it’s too late. The panther pushes him to the ground. Its black claws are so sharp that they slice him without trying, shredding his brown khaki shirt and tearing through the skin beneath the cloth. His flesh splits easily, ribboning, unfurling in thick bloody strips like parchment, greased with exposed fat and muscle.
Then there is a rip like rending burlap, only instead of a brown dust cloud like from sackcloth, a red mist rises into the air.
The man shrieks. One of the soldiers behind him, shaking, turns and disappears into the trees. The other soldier, his rifle rattling in his hands, looks from the panther chewing the golden soldier toward the dark woods. He chooses the dark woods.
The panther sinks its teeth into the poor man’s skull, cracking it like a nut.
A splatter of the screaming soldier’s blood hits us, and soaks into the block of strange cheese that we have become.
The blood doesn’t taste like rainwater, but it feeds me.
***
We’re cocooned in the wicker basket, placed snug in the flatbed of a fruit truck, and hidden beneath large piles of pineapples. The spiky-plated skin of the fruits prickles against the basket, but I don’t fear the sting. Nothing could ever scare me after seeing the panther crack the screaming soldier’s skull like a coconut, nor sting like the blades on the weedwhacker.
And even when we are dragged against a cheese grater and stung with chemicals that burn, it doesn’t really hurt. I’m so tired of being anything besides a coca leaf that I let them do whatever they want, without caring.
I drift off into a lifeless state, until, after a while, I have no choice but to sense again, as we have changed form and location once more.
Now we are compacted together into a yellowish-white brick, flying in the belly of a giant metal bird, stacked as one stone in a pyramid among other such bricks. Have we been swallowed, maybe eaten up by a condor vulture with black angel wings? I wait to be digested, to disappear in a bath of stomach acids, hoping, that unlike the other acids, these ones will dissolve me forever rather than just burning.
Then I hear a voice belonging to a man. It’s gruff, speaks slowly, in a language I’ve never heard before. The voice is mellow, sonorous but deep, like birdsong mixed with a bullfrog’s mating call. This is a voice that can calm the fears of others. He sings as he flies, steering the bird from within its metallic braincase. And he sings the same songs so many times and in so many variations (whistling, humming, improvising his own usually-dirty words) that I learn the melodies and lyrics.
By the time the man lands on a private island that’s mostly palms and white stone buildings, I know Smuggler’s Blues and Treetop Flyer by heart. I hum them to myself without cease, using song to ease the pain and pass the time, just as humans did when laboring in the field under the sun. But then the rest of the grains in the kilo groan, having had enough, begging me to stop.
So I cease my offkey singing, sparing them.
We disappear into a velvety blackness, and I can feel us rollicking along in a new way. We are not gliding through the air in the man-bird, nor are we bumping along the road in the flatbed that farts its noxious gas.
Instead, we float, bobbing up and down, and as I listen, I hear the hiss of water.
Maybe, I think, we will drink water again. It has been so long since I have tasted the pure rainwater.
El agua nos arruinará, idiota, another part of the kilo says. It is the first time I have been called an idiot, and it hurts. But I fear the other part is right, that we will melt if hit with the water that I can hear sloshing around.
What’s more, this water is spiced with something that bites with an acrid spite, like the caustic acids poured over us in previous stages of this process. The water, I realize, is filled with salt, and parts in a wake of crystalline waves as the boat we’re in cuts a path toward the shoreline.
***
We pupate from the velvet-lined interior of an alligator-hide suitcase. I can see and breathe again, but going from total darkness to such brightness is almost like going blind.
The hotel room has white walls, white leather sofas and chairs, and a balcony with a glass door letting in sunlight. It’s so bright in fact that the man and woman in the room wear their sunglasses just to protect their eyes.
For a while they ignore us. Then the man undoes the buttons of his shirt covered in palm trees at sunset, and yanks a small ivory-handled stick from a leather pouch on his belt. He presses a button that goes flick and a shining blade appears.
He comes over to the pile of kilos, and brings his knife down. It looks like the point is going to get jammed into my bag. But he changes his mind at the last second and stabs the bag next to ours. I hear a thousand tiny grams screaming in unison, while he hears nothing but the pumping of blood in his veins, and its throbbing in his temples. Then he brings the sharp tip of the blade up to the two holes above his mouth and sniffs! hard once.
The woman speaks in Spanish, a language I have not heard for some time. “Don’t do too much of that shit.”
“Shut up, bitch,” he says.
I wait for her to get angry, but instead she just comes to him where he hovers over the suitcase. Her blue silken robe is open, her milk buds visible, hardened by the sea salt breeze and her hunger for us.
He sticks the knife back into the screaming bag and holds the sharp silver point out to her. The pile is like a peace offering. She makes the snort! sound and her face does a funny little twitch. Then both their hearts beat hard as war drums, and in the same kind of synchronized martial fury. The man forgets about us for a brief time, and we all feel relief as his rage flows elsewhere.
Now he stabs his knife hard into the table covered in a white linen cloth where shells of devoured crustaceans and wineglasses sit on silver platters.
He and the woman move over to the bed, and the smell of their strange pollination is in the air. It’s a feverous hothouse honey, a mating ritual involving no brown midges or buzzing bees or windblown spore. Just the man grunting and the woman moaning, a thrust and counterthrust as violent as his knife plunging into the table. They continue to insult each other, cursing, hating each other even in the throes of their passion that makes their racing hearts pound so that both might explode.
Then they do something that makes no sense to us, or any other species. They decouple at the moment where the miracle might pass between them, and their two bodies might make a third through the fertilization of the female’s loamy soil.
The man spills his pearlescent drops of life upon the woman’s tanned belly. She isn’t confused, like us, by this precious rain of life with no receptacle except the sloped gourd of her stomach. Rather she is angry that some of his seed has spilled onto her blue silk kimono. She curses him in Spanish fouler than any I have ever heard (and I have been around poor men who slave in the sun twelve hours a day.)
The man does the smart thing and backs away from a potential fight with this mad two-legged leopardess. Unfortunately, when he flees her, he runs back toward us, who can hear the cardiac-clenched screams of his heart with its choked arteries. If she doesn’t kill him now, we will soon.
The fleshy stamen on his body stands up, pointing like a blade, and I wonder if he is going to stab a bag with it. Instead he clutches the ivory handle of his knife, grits his teeth, and pulls the weapon free from the table’s groaning wood, making the lobster shells shake and tremble.
He looks at the bag he’s already sliced open, and I can feel his thoughts, smell them in the beads of his sweat. He wants to snort more, but is afraid not only of the crazy woman, but of other crazy men, all made crazier by coca and the money it brings.
He fights the desire to snort more, but then a wave of chills hits him hard, and nausea makes him quake. The sickness sends tremors through him, and settles over his body like a dark cloud. That this cloud won’t leave him—or even worse, that it might grow bigger—scares him more than the thought of the crazy men, or another argument with the woman. And the only way to get the cloud to lift is to snort again.
He sticks the tip of the blade back into the bag, slowly. When he brings it up to his nose, he breathes gently. The powder sneaks inside his nostrils, dissolving after a sniff into membranes already slick with blood and mucus.
“You’re not taking another toot, are you?”
“Just a bump,” he assures her.
Having been weighed, cut, processed, reduced, mixed with burning quinine and milky baby powder, I have learned a bit about the humans and their weights and measures. And I know that the pull he took, however discreet, was not “just a bump.” His body knows it, too, and responds accordingly. His face twitches several times like the spasming, seizing muscle of a hunted animal that has been running too long. His eyes nictitate like those of a tree lizard. He grinds his jaw so that we can hear the scream of his teeth cracking their enamel, sanding the grains into a powder fine as us. And still he cannot stop.
The cocaine grains laugh around me, in concert, a wicked choir, reveling in their revenge. The humans who caused them to be torn from the tree have now been made slaves of the lowest kind.
The cocaine grains stop laughing as the man comes down again with a silver spoon. A spoon should be less scary than a knife, but this time it isn’t, because this spoon is going to separate us from one-another. Once more, I’ll have to get used to the rhythms of a new me. Not only that, but I’m going to be further mixed with chemicals. And to be diluted is to both be deceived and become deceptive, both lie and liar.
The man touches me as he mixes and stirs. The back of his hand crawls with black, spidery hairs. On his wrist is a watch, glaciated with living ice, diamond bezels and shiny pinkish gold that matches the tint of his smoked-rose sunglasses.
I can feel his dreams as he stirs and mixes. He’s so deep in his fevered reverie that he doesn’t even hear the jibe lobbed by the señorita on the bed behind him. She says, We’re selling yay, not trying to make their linens whiter. But he just keeps mixing, adding more bleach to cover what he snorted, until the cocaine smells stronger of chlorine than this hotel’s swimming pool.
He is lost in a vision of himself as the helmsman of a yacht cutting through blue water so clear he can see shadow bands on the sandy seafloor. And instead of just the golden cross around his neck, he imagines himself with a giant bejeweled medallion shaped like a ship’s anchor draped over his potbelly. Rather than one woman who argues with him and makes him feel small, he is surrounded by three women in white bikinis who make him feel big. They dote on him, pouring champagne into his glass that overflows and spills onto the ship’s spotless white deck.
When he is finished mixing and stirring, he wraps me in plastic and sets me, along with four other kilos, in a blue Adidas gym bag.
I hear the flick of the zipper, a quick zink! as it’s being pulled closed. Then I am back in the darkness I’ve learned to love, so different from the sun I once knew.
***
The light returns, but it is not the sun. It’s the sick shine of fluorescence, designed by humans to torture other humans.
The man before me deals with the pain caused by the harsh light and the pain caused by everything else in the only way humans know how. He splits a bag and snorts. But he is more civil than any other human I’ve ever seen, and instead of using a knife, he pierces the Saran wrap with a little plastic straw.
Pieces of me disappear up his nose. Then he reaches a finger inside the bag, runs the digit through the powder, and sticks his finger in his mouth, as if brushing his teeth and gums. But that one taste isn’t enough. And he returns, greedily snorting like an anteater I once saw who couldn’t stop licking fire ants from a log.
This man, unlike the last one, is still wearing all his work clothes, a white shirt and a red-striped tie, with brown khaki pants. We are in an office, with a lamp, a computer, a shelfful of books, and a desk made of polished wood hewn from a long-dead tree.
The door to his office opens. It is also made of wood but the rest of the office is made of glass panes and steel beams. And when this other man comes in and slams the door, the glass and steel rattle.
The loud sound makes Numb Man’s heart stutter.
“You think I’m paying three large a zone for laundry detergent?” the man who slammed the door says.
“The fuck you talking about?” Numb Man is trying not to sound scared, but I can hear his heart thundering like a terremoto.
“I’m talking about you stepping on those ounces, making them twenty-twos instead of twenty-eights. And putting the rest up your nose.” The man pauses, looks at Numb Man. “And in your mouth, or are you going to tell me you come to this car dealership at two a.m. to eat powdered donuts?”
“I came here to give you your blow.”
“I’ll take it,” the other man says, “and that excess you’ve been stashing behind the acoustical drop tile up there in the ceiling.”
Angry Man pulls out a gun, a pistol like the one the golden soldier drew when trying to stop the panther. No way can Numb Man get the drop on Angry Man now. But Numb Man has us rushing through his bloodstream, bursting blood vessels in his nose, filling him with thoughts of his own invincibility. And he draws his gun.
Both men shoot and fire flashes. Smoke fills the air. The bulb on the desk lamp shatters, making everything darker, making our grains stand out even whiter, phosphorescent in the night. Numb Man is face down on the desk, an amoeba-shaped pool of purple blood expanding around him, staining his white shirt a dark wine color.
Angry Man is no longer the Angry Man. He is the Hurt Man, bleeding, a flower pulled from the ground with perhaps enough water left in its roots to survive a day, if it is strong. He puts us back in the blue Adidas gym bag. Some of us spills out onto the desk, mixing with the blood.
The cocaine granules sigh as they taste the lifeforce of the Numb Man. It took us a while to become accustomed to the taste of human blood. Now we have become as addicted to their blood as they have to our life.
All life, I realize as the blood enters me, is lived at the expense of other life. Even as plants we once lived at the expense of the sun burning itself black to fuse hydrogen into helium, via a bloodsucking called photosynthesis.
The Hurt Man groans, ignoring the leaking powder because his blood is leaking even faster. Then there is a sound, a call like a bird of prey crying from the depths of its syrinx.
This sound is followed by light as magic as the plumage of the rarest rara avis. It is blue and red, red and blue, pulsing in consistent strobes to counterpoint the syrinx shriek. I think the light is beautiful, yet Hurt Man is not happy to see it. Hurt Man raises his gun again, but he is too weak to do much more than threaten the humans outside, who are more powerful than he.
There is more fire, and smoke, and Hurt Man becomes, like Numb Man, a dead man.
I resolve myself to being taken by this next group of men, and mixed and cut and adulterated until my soul is as small as that of Numb Man. But that’s not what happens. Instead, we are carried from the office, seized, in the words of a man with brown eyes and a brown mustache like a caterpillar crawling across his upper lip. He brings us to his car with its bird syrinx and the plumes of strobing light.
He takes us to a room with a grillwork door made of cold steel, the walls of exposed and crumbling ancient brick.
In this room are many shelves. On the shelves are other things that have made their own treks here from disparate places, sitting in corrugated cardboard boxes, open-faced coffins. In the boxes are jewels, like the ones that once shined on the drug dealer’s wristwatch, and guns like the ones men use when they stop using words. The jewels have stories, of the necks of dying men from which they were snatched. The guns tell their own tales, of being gripped in hands slick with fear sweat, and the exchange of shots leaving men dead and smoke rising high in clouds.
Finally I tune out their voices, and let them murmur and boast through the nights we spend in the small room under the harsh lights. I should be sad, because my new cardboard home is much less comfortable than an alligator-skinned suitcase or even a silk-lined gym bag. And I should be sad because I am fed my least favorite light, fluorescence, a cold substitute for the warmth of the Colombian sun I once knew.
But a woman comes by, wearing rubber gloves and holding a pen in her hand, and she affixes a little tag to my box. Someone makes a joke about toe tags, but I have not been here long enough to understand that. And when I look down to see what the woman has written, I smile. For she has finally given me a name, a weight, an identity.
I am cocaine, twenty-four point three grams, with traces of b-type and o-pos blood smattered through me, according to a serological reagent test. The blood types match those of the Numb Man in the office and the golden soldier who had his head chewed open by the panther.
The woman turns out the light before leaving, and we left in darkness. I sing the songs the white-bearded pilot once sang. None of the other inmates, the jewels and guns in boxes, listen to me. They are too busy with their braggart gossip to heed my ballads about flying through treetops or getting the smuggler’s blues.
I figure that this will be the end of my story, but I am wrong.
For one day a man comes into the evidence locker and flips the light switch. And as he peers into my box, I get a good look at him. It’s the one with the brown eyes and brown caterpillar mustache. His eyes are now strained, weak, their dark resolve gone watery, as if he were about to cry. As if he regretted what he was about to do but could not stop himself.
I smile as he pulls me out of the box, because I can see now that my story is not yet done. And I know that, if he does not snort me out of existence, there is a good chance that I will taste his blood. And, if I’m lucky, the blood of another human or two, before the last of my grains are gone, snorted up some nose or smoked into some burning lungs.