CHARTIERE’S HEADGEAR
an altered version of this short story was published in the Daily Drunk Mag a hundred years ago
CHARTIERE’S HEADGEAR
“Lawrence Kasdan’s script for [Raiders of the Lost Ark] originally had his name as Victor Lovar but subsequent drafts settled on Emile Belloq, except for the fourth draft which experimented with the name Chartiere.”
With wolf spider threesomes, MFM, you’ll see a crafty male spider, waiting for a rival to begin fucking a female before he sneaks in, to climb aboard, an uninvited third party, to quickly consummate the act and dump off some sperm while she’s distracted, then he flees and leaves his rival to be cannibalized by the female in a post-coital feeding frenzy. Waiting for others to break their necks making a breakthrough, then climbing through the hole in the wall that was made by someone else’s efforts, so it is with Chartiere. His career in the field of mercenary antiquities is full of these highlights that are lowlights. He lets others do the spadework and risk their life and limb, before swooping in to pluck the treasure out of the grubby hands of his rival.
In the Peruvian Amazon, he drinks ayahuasca with the Hovitos the day before they go to get the golden Chachapoyan fertility idol from the American. The Hovitos cook it all day and night and he drinks a ladleful and then an old man in a loincloth blows a steady stream of tobacco smoke through a pipe stuck up Chartiere’s nostril until he’s weeping. It’s supposed to put you in touch with the spirits.
He's crouching in his dark hut after he retreated, the Hovitos shaman telling him he shouldn't be left alone for this experience, Chartiere shooing him away like he was a tsetse fly. There’s a campfire outside the hut which illuminates the doorway in uneven waves cut by the ebony shadow of any Hovitos passing by. It’s not long before he pukes into his colonial pith helmet, and sprays unending jets of diarrhea into a bucket. Spewing from both ends. What did he eat. They told him not to drink any manioc beer beforehand, but he did. The scrapings of the B. caapi vine in the brew are like sneaky first intruders holding the portcullis open, letting the DMT through the stomach wall unmetabolized and past the blood-brain barrier. Wait, what's DMT? It's the name for what is happening to him. He senses the psychochemistry. The name doesn't matter, words are discarded in the monstrous face of intoxication. He imagines it won't be anything, nothing profound, he'll just be "Drunk as a Lord."
A shadow envelops and darkens the hut’s interior as a Hovitos shaman comes inside. To check on him.
“You're riding the jaguar,” the shaman says.
Chartiere looks up from the basin of the upturned pith helmet he's holding up in front of him. He realizes he's been staring into his own puke for what seems like months. “Leave me alone,” Chartiere says in Hovitos. The shaman is a second person, and all second people entering Chartiere’s room will alter the hem of the psychic shame gradient surrounding him, another person’s presence introducing too much Question Space where Chartiere's self could deteriorate.
“What you are getting rid of is your evil energy. Cast it away from you.” The shaman has a shrunken, pointy head, like an anteater.
Resisting ayahuasca intoxication, the Frenchman fights off ego-death and begins the act of inspecting the walls of the strong inner compartment of Eurocentric deceitfulness he keeps hidden from the shaman, the same compartment he would hide from the dusky people in any colonial milieu: Egypt, India, Indochina. All diggers and water-carriers and errand boys on a site. The archaeological white man’s burden. He supposes Hitler will enslave these people, or wipe them off the face of the planet. Some extinct races would be wholly known by their artifacts in a museum, their trinkets and trash carving their own long gutters in time. Chartiere would be a curator of global ghosts.
He doesn’t care. The Third Reich is just another wolf spider fucking its lady, and letting Chartiere dart in and out to get his pecker wet. He’s going to get rich and powerful. The Hovitos don’t know that Chartiere will trick them, flee to sell the Chachapoyan idol in Marrakesh, then on to Cairo and the Ark…
“You have a very great evil spirit attached to you,” the shaman-anteater says. “Lay down here.” He moves helps Chartiere pick up his pants and moves him over to a bamboo pallet in the corner of the hut. Chartiere lays down and instantly begins seeing, in the darkness above his head, dazzling bright lines intersecting, cubes multiplying and hinging infinitely, pattern speeding up, the foreshortened angle on each cube suggesting further patterns, a folding and unfolding stained glass window. It means something but it's just tantalizingly out of reach what. The anteater kneels over Chartiere and puts his hands on him as if to hold him down. Chartiere’s limbs begin to feel like they are becoming concrete, gradual, then his torso, his body proceeds to die in segments until he feels that his heart is the last part of him that is free, that will die too, and he tries to say to the shaman, “Antidote,” but he can’t move his lips.
The Frenchman does not belong, he is an alien among these people.
A week or longer of frightening visions in the dark, worse in their details than any nightmare, then the ancient anteater above him speaks.
"I am here to guide you,” it says. “You have a choice. Be rid of this evil festering within you and one day die. Or you can learn the secret of death from the grandfathers."
Chartiere doesn’t want to die, not even “one day.” But he can’t speak the words. With terrifying intuition he senses the decision will need to be made within himself. Can he trust himself to communicate without words the right answer to the anteater man and the spirits beyond, the "grandfathers" watching from the rainforest?
He doesn't know what he answers, or even what a question is. He conceives of further patterns in the dark above his reclining mind's eye, truth-mosaics vs death-mosaics, seeing the pointillism of disparate insight-squares sifted next to each other like Scrabble tiles and suggesting a third, piercing insight about death hidden to all eyes. Chartiere, the European, has enough of his mind left to see that this thing here has the trappings of a more modern and civilized insight than a primitive Amazonian one, selected in a 1936 gringo language he would understand. Chartiere is from an advanced technological race, and though the headgear—the action of the ayahuasca mechanism—is the ultimate technology, the lesson must be given with concepts close to where the Frenchman lives, to the grandfathers' displeasure.
Somewhere in this civilization, time got recorded as spirals in media. The tightly wound grooves of the Turkish folk music record, the tight spool of the motion picture cliffhanger reel shown at the movie theater, where the hero dodges a falling round boulder in a cave. Essentially if life is a movie to these Westerners then the death scene will be edited out and spliced over by Chachapoyan angels, angels Chartiere sees them as. Omitting not only his inevitable death scene as a Nazi collaborator one alias away, the head exploding at the tabernacle, but all his other potential death scenes at the end of all other potential life-movies, this is how you gain immortality, as you skip from movie to movie all your dying scenes will be edited out…
Chartiere wakes much later, his head feeling empty and light like an apartment cleared of furniture. He props himself up on one elbow and peers out the hut to see three Hovitos children playing some kind of game on the ground. It's like marbles. Somehow this children's game is a flag indicating to Chartiere that he did not die, this is no afterlife, he's still there.
He gets up and stretches. He sees his pith helmet on the ground. Somebody has cleaned it out while he was sleeping. The same with the bucket. The Hovitos really seem to care for him. He feels monstrous for wanting to betray them, them and everyone else. He's still going to.
He stands by the door, looking out at the rich, vibrant green of the jungle. He looks back at the bucket. The English have an expression: "to kick the bucket," to die.
A formalism there exists in film, missing in life, whereby the audience can sense a character's death approaching. The character is given a chance to make a kind of oblique summary or gesture to give one last stroke of meaning to their finite life, unaware of what lies a few shots ahead. If his audience could see the death coming, he could appeal to celestial editors to edit it out, and somehow carry on in continuity without missing a step. It's not perfect, he's left with the fanciful notion that with each omitted death scene, there will always be hidden away in the nearby cauterized footage the inferred aura of mortality. A look on some actor's face about to watch you disappear. Thus the suffering of death will be distributed across the continuity and consistency of edited time.
Toxic drug-fueled gibberish. Life is infinitely more complex than even the grandfathers can imagine.
Chartiere walks out into the camp. It's already mind-meltingly hot. He finds a chieftain and gets a canteen of warm manioc beer and drinks half of it down. The warriors start assembling their spears and blowguns, smearing darts with curare. The Chachapoyan temple is three hours away. The Hovitos have been following their quarry for three days. They have waited for Chartiere to, if not lead them, be a spiritual guide for their mission. They don't know what's heroic and what's villainous. After having him among them, partaking in their most sacred rituals and secret connections, they don't know who Chartiere is.