How I Lost My Wallet

I'm pretending to speak Spanish to a Columbian national and I'm beginning to think he's catching on. Acting as if I have to go, I point to my watch, mime snorting a line of cocaine and rush off into the Amazonian jungle. My penis had just run the gauntlet of bare-chested native women, and I'm about to experience the cerebral effects of a cornucopia of unknown venereal diseases all kicking in simultaneously.

Overcome by dizziness, the horizon shimmers and I am assailed by hallucinations of exceptionally malignant character. A raven made of bloody knives precedes a tidal wave of vomit screeching the star-spangled banner with the same volume as twenty fighter jets breaking the sound barrier above Bikini Atoll on March 1st, 1954. The vomit envelops me and carries me up four stories only to set me down skewered through the crotch by a palm tree. As my gaze roughly skews skyward I glimpse a rainbow made of bile and puss, but suddenly the Goddess Athena manifests as an angry owl swooping two inches before my nose, enormous wings blocking out all else. Each feather is emblazoned with intricate mosaics of the mortals who crossed her and won a special hell among the tortured dead of Tartarus. In her golden eyes my form is mirrored and I see myself as she sees me, a quivering animal bereft of thought, squirming in terror before an incomprehensible being who has hated me for eternities, finally seizing upon this moment to dispense infinite agony into my dying soul. Rivulets of static cascade in the distance and a feathered serpent crashes out through reality itself tackling Athena with the force of a charging planet-sized rhinoceros and the two make vicious love in front of me ripping each other to pieces in the process. At this point I realize I have misplaced my wallet and I curse my luck as the two fornicating gods begin to make eyes at me mid-thrust as if propositioning a ménage à trois. As they bear down on me I hear the sound of my consciousness being shattered and reassembled into a configuration which permits endless insanity and pain.

I awake dangling ten feet high, straitjacketed to a parachute caught in the canopy. A native wearing a red loincloth yells at me from below, and seeing me awake, climbs the tree expertly and cuts me down. The thump from my fall sends hundreds of forest birds flying away skittishly. He jumps down from the tree himself and lands crouched beside me whispering, "Aliwah togoba sibelteen magruntun. Aliwah togoba." I look at him tiredly and frown, but say nothing. After 20 minutes of trying to elicit a response from me, he gives up and undoes my bindings, probably surmising that I am too weak to do him any harm. Then he leads me into the forest beckoning me onward with a clenched fist. In two or three hours we reach a single large hut smoking through a hole in its roof. We go inside and I am soon offered a bowl of water which I gratefully accept. They all stare at me doubtfully around the fire, with a cocktail of emotions, trepidation, curiosity, excitement and others that as a European I have no name for. I lean back against the wall of the hut and stare back at them. After a time I remember something and slowly shift my knapsack onto my chest and unzip it as they look on eagerly. I pull out a box of imported cigars I bought duty-free at the airport, remove one and offer it to the one who brought me here. He takes it in both hands, takes a deep whiff and then smiles widely. The package is passed round and we smoke them wordlessly into the night with great satisfaction.