Iboga Dreams

I mixed fine gray illegal powder with a shot glass of orange juice. It didn't dissolve. The silt eyed me from the bottom, thick, resolute. It lifted its shoulders in smug ennui.

You're a poser, girl. You don't know what the hell you're doing, mixing us with frickin' orange juice? Geeze. Get a grip. Go back home, little girl. You're outta your league. This will end in death.

I gulped it. The talking powder, my depression, the last four hundred days of sidewinder pain, swallowed it whole.

Iboga, African plant, ethnobotanical wonder, she calls you to drop your emotional addiction, your grief. 

While I waited, my young sons skied on five feet of powdered snow. Their dad led them down double diamond slopes, fed them greasy burgers and Cheetos, let them sleep in a double feather bed, held them willing captive in a Taos alpine lodge.

"Please take the boys this weekend. Please. I have to do something. Go somewhere. Okay? Please. Please."

He did as I asked, even though it meant canceling a job, a chance to exchange music for money. We had been married for five years, divorced for eight. It was the first time I ever asked him for anything. He breathed into the phone, frustrated with my usual lack of information. He agreed, drove twenty-three hours into the bleak winter desert separating his ocean from my mountains.

I waited for the substance to shake my body, to give me the swollen tongue, the scratchy skin I knew would come first, would signal the start of my journey. I sat in bed, on top of a brown faux-fur throw, a green Tupperware basin ready to catch vomit between my legs.

Be sure to have a sitter when you take the iboga.

I ignored the cardinal rule, the instructions written in careful Spanish. I sat alone, me and one stainless-steel barf bucket, waited for death, for life. The man who sold me the African drug mocked me from the window. I could see him, a thousand miles and two years away, a Tijuana Shaman, suspended in hot sidewalk ice. I handed him fifty American bucks for a tiny baggie filled with a bitter ground shrub said to open the gateway guarding one's secret motivations.

Welcome to Tijuana. I was not a well-behaved tourista...

"Señorita, you need to sneak it across the border. Maybe hide it in your body. You don't want the Border Patrol to know."

He smiled, his teeth straight and narrow.

"Lady, I tell you the truth. This is not an easy drug. There is enough in this bag to let you see your ancestors, but not enough to join them. Be safe."

He faded. My tongue swelled.

Fourteen months ago my mom died. She died at home. I held her hand. She died. Her spirit fled her body, but when it happened I would have told you I denied the existence of it, that her spirit was nothing, was talk and memory, talk and fear. She died. I squeezed her fingers, let my mouth say "I love you," but my heart said something else, said "Forget it" said "I don't believe in anything."

My dad died, too, the phone close to his chest, a 9-1-1 operator pleading him to wait, to breathe. He died eleven months later, while I plotted ways to get him out of my daily life, to scrape his mind from my mom's bleached bones. He died. My mom died. I held the bucket between my legs. I vomited.

The Thursday before last a friend emailed me.

"C'mon, Birdie, tell me something interesting. I don't have a question, you have to make up your own question. Just tell me something good."

I groaned. I wanted to be kind, but he didn't know that grief saturated my eyes, optic nerve, brain stem, impulse, fingertip.

You're a kind man, but I have nothing to say to you! I don't even know you, haven't met you, know nothing, know only that the last year has been death, death in my lap, in my throat. I breathe it like cigarette smoke, eat it, slices of orange death, full of mold citrus, full of invisible gallows flavor. I live death. I have nothing to say to you. Everyone wants me to smile, to hand them trinkets from my pocket. I only carry dust.

Waiting in line at the US/Mexico border crossing

I remembered the baggie, the iboga I purchased on a whim two years in the past, hid in the wheel well of my rusted minivan as I crossed the border, the powder I thought I'd take with a man, with a new boyfriend, perhaps on a sailboat, on the sea, hours after making salt-driven love. Tabernanthe iboga. A substance used in initiation rite by traditional tribesmen and women in the African Congo, a substance said to introduce travelers to the ghosts of their past.

No boy captured my difference, wanted to know me beyond his needs. No boy took me on the sea, gave me reasons to toss the kelp covering my body. They all had their own troubles, their own kelp to keep salted, keep shrouded in tide-churned water.

I removed the goods from a locked cabinet, placed it on my dresser.

The Friday before last I hesitated. I don't want to be hasty. This drug is strong. It might be dangerous. That Tijuana man might have lied. Maybe it's not iboga. Maybe it's poisonous.

I held the plastic in one hand, stared at the fine spray of gray pressing against the bag. My parrot saw my grief, knew the year of trial, knew I fed him peanuts and mango, caressed the undersides of his wing. He knew me better than any man, any animal. He whistled. He spoke a phrase he knew.

"Birdie. Bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird birrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd."

Ramses, African Grey parrot, Birdie's constant companion, true emissary for all that needed to happen.

A truck rattled the windows, almost slid on black ice as it passed my house, my place of indecision.

My bird comes from the Congo.

I lifted the phone, called my ex.

The vomiting stopped. I breathed deep, smelled snow, the dead coffee left cooling on the kitchen counter, smelled the orange my stomach couldn't process. The night began, though it was eight in the morning, though my boys were shifting cold butt onto poma lift, skis trailing in morning snow. The night began, and I saw my ancestors, my favorite gramma, my mom, my dad, the silhouette of a man I knew still loved me.

"Birdie."

My gramma moved toward me. Her Cherokee skin shone like abalone, blue, green streaks of ivory inlaid in something hard, precious, eternal.

"Birdie."

My body flew above the bed, the Tupperware forgotten.

"Birdie."

All of my dead relatives chanted me home, blew me toward Taos, toward my living boys. My house shrunk to a pinpoint, to an elapsed monument of grief. Forgotten. Old, as pallid as my mom's November body, as buried as her coffin. I flew. I flew. My parrot flew beside me. Death flew behind me, tried to reach me with his wingtips. I felt my arm, my wing, my body lose feathers, lose weight. A black cloud fell beneath me, dropped like lead lightening. I escaped.

This is the way of my world. I live. I die. Nothing lasts forever.

It's a week later. It's the first week of February. It's the weekend. My parrot rests, eats a salted peanut. My boys build a snow fort. The men I've loved do what they do, watch the Super Bowl, click mouse against pad. I stand in my kitchen, consider whether to toss the empty baggie in the trash. I resist, stick it in the junk drawer with the birthday candles, with the postcards I bought  on the old Route 66. I sit, ready to tell my friend, my parrot they saved my life. My mouth forms a smile, the first genuine motion in fourteen months.