A toad in a hole, Harris thought. It was Christmas Eve. Harris arrived late, too late for the champagne but just in time for the mixed drinks. The band was ethnic and very chic. Harris could hear a concertina, a bobla, a woowoo, the triangle. They played a waltz.
“Have you heard the one about the bitch at the dog kennels?” one of the American captains asked him. The captain had a strawberry daiquiri; he stirred the strawberries with his straw.
“I have now,” said Harris.
“Don’t pull that shit with me,” the captain said. He drank. “You some kind of feminist? You got a whole lot of women working undercover in the DEA?”
Harris ignored him. He spotted Ruiz by the windows and made his way toward him. Some couples had started to dance in the open space between Harris and Ruiz. Harris dodged through the dancers. A woman he had never seen before put a drink in his hand, alcoholic, but hot and spiced. “What am I drinking?” he asked Ruiz.
Ruiz shrugged. “You had a chance to call your wife?”
“This afternoon,” said Harris. “I’m on my way home tomorrow. You?”
“South,” said Ruiz. “What any of this shit has to do with anything I do not know.”
“It’s a statement,” said Harris. “At least it’s a statement.”
“It’s an invasion,” said Ruiz.
Well, of course there was that. Harris was sorry Ruiz was choosing to see it that way. “He collected toads,” Harris offered, by way of changing the subject. “Stone toads.”
“He collected yachts,” Ruiz said. “The Macho I, the Macho II, and the Macho III. Don’t ever tell me he had a problem in this area. And don’t tell me he lacked imagination.”
Harris took a sip of his drink. It stung his mouth. “Why toads?” His eyes were watering. He took a larger sip, drained the glass halfway.
“Maybe they were hollow,” Ruiz said.
“No.”
“Maybe just one was hollow and the others were all to hide the hollow one.”
A young woman refreshed Harris’s drink. “¿Que estoy bebiendo?” Harris asked the woman, who left without answering.
“Have some of mine,” Ruiz said. He was drinking a margarita. He handed it to Harris. Harris turned the glass to a virginal part of the salt rim and sipped. He rotated the glass and sipped again. “Go ahead and finish it,” said Ruiz. “I’ll get another.”
The music had begun to sound odd. A man stood in the middle of the dance floor. “I’ll tell you who’s coming here. I’ll tell you who’s coming here!” he shouted. He threw the contents of his drink into the rafters of the house. Others did the same. Harris laughed and drank his margarita instead. He started to say something to Ruiz, but Ruiz was gone. Ruiz had been gone for a long time.
The dancers began to stomp, and the high treble sound of the triangle reached too deeply into Harris’s ears. It hurt. Harris could smell alcohol and herbs, drifting down from the roof. The drums and the stomping worked their way into his body. Something inside him was pounding to match them. Harris resisted finding out what. He pulled the little toad from his pocket. “Look what I have,” he said to Ruiz, but Ruiz had gone; now Harris remembered, Ruiz had gone south to get a margarita. It was quite some time ago.
“In short, you were stoned out of your gourd,” said Harris’s superior.
“Now it gets a little blurred for a while,” Harris told him. This was a lie, one of several lies. The story Harris was actually telling was far from complete. He had certainly not mentioned stealing the toad. And now he was not mentioning remembering a woman in an evening gown who smiled at him, holding out her hand. There were flowers in it. They bloomed. Everyone was dancing.
“My ears hurt,” Harris told her. “Ants are crawling on me.” He tried to brush them away, but his hands wouldn’t move. She knelt and was still above him so he must have been on the ground. The flowers turned into a painted egg. “This is your brain on drugs,” Harris said, laughing. She held it out to him, knowing he couldn’t reach for it, teasing him.
“What do you want?” Her shoulders were bare; she answered the question as she asked it by breathing deeply so that her breasts swelled at the neckline. “In your heart, what do you really want?”
Harris’s soul detached from his body and floated away.
“I think I had a very narrow escape,” Harris told his superior.
“It’s a hazard of fieldwork. Sometimes you draw suspicion to yourself by refusing. We know that.” The tabloid Harris had purchased was spread out on the desk between Harris and his superior. His superior was adding a mustache to one of the cannibal aliens in the Peruvian cave painting. He blacked in the teeth. It pained Harris, who was not the sort of person to deface pictures and certainly not prehistoric pictures. “I appreciate your coming in, but I don’t think I’m even inclined to report this. I mean, in your case, it wasn’t even advertent. You were inadvertently drugged.”
“I was poisoned,” said Harris.
“What does it have to do with gorilla women?”
“Guerrilla women?” Harris repeated. “Everything. I was poisoned by female agents of the Panama Defense Forces.” He took a deep breath. “You got anything here I can drink?”
His superior gestured to the wet bar. Harris poured himself a shot of whiskey. He swallowed it all at once. “The toad is an important Mayan symbol of hallucinosis.” Whiskey warmed his tongue and his throat. “In medieval European witchcraft, they used to decompose toads in menstrual blood for use in potions.
“‘Toad, that under cold stone, / Days and nights has thirty-one / Swelter’d venom sleeping got, / Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!’” Harris said.
Harris’s superior was staring at him. Harris’s superior was not an educated man. “Shakespeare,” Harris said, by way of apology for showing off. “I’ve been reading up on it. I mean I don’t know these things off the top of my head. I’m not really a toad man.” Harris’s superior continued to stare. Harris poured another drink to steady himself. “In Haiti, the toad is a symbol of the zombie.” Harris tossed his whiskey into his throat and avoided looking at his superior. “What do you know about Carry A. Nation?” Harris asked.
“Make it a written report,” his superior said.
Item one: There are real zombies.
The woman could see where Harris was floating above his body. She began to sing to him, low, but he could hear her even over the drums. “Ti bon ange,” she sang. The egg in her hand became a jar made of clay. She held it out so he would come down closer and look. She wanted him to look inside it and not at her, because her shape was not holding. She was not a beautiful woman at all; she was an ugly woman, old and ugly. Her skin folded on her neck like a toad’s. Harris found this transformation a little insulting. He remembered how much he loved his wife. He had spoken with her only today. He couldn’t wait to get back to his body and home to her. He refused to be seduced by an ugly old woman instead. “Ti bon ange,” she sang, and her voice was low and croaked. “Come look in my jar.”
Item two: the ti bon ange. Ti bon ange means the little good angel. Every person who has ever lived is made up of five components. These are the z’etoile, the n’ame, the corps cadavre, the gros bon ange, and the ti bon ange. We need concern ourselves here only with the last three.
The gros bon ange is the undifferentiated life force. It binds you to the rest of the living world.
The ti bon ange is your personal life force. The ti bon ange is your individual personality.