The corps cadavre is your body.
Harris could see the dark opening of the jar beneath him, a circular pool of black. The circle grew until he could have fit inside it. He didn’t know if it was growing because the woman was raising it or if he was slipping toward it like sand sucked into the throat of an hourglass. Either way was perilous. Harris looked for someplace dark to hide. He slid into the bright blackness of the stone toad, resting in the hand of his inert corps cadavre.
The American captain came and knelt on the other side of Harris. “What have we here?”
“DEA.” The beautiful woman was back. The American captain wouldn’t have even spoken to the ugly old woman. She turned her jar into a wineglass and drank from it innocently.
Item three: creating a zombie. In order to create a zombie, you need to separate the ti bon ange from the gros bon ange. You need to take the ti bon ange out of the corps cadavre and leave the gros bon ange behind.
The bokor accomplishes this with bufotoxin, an extremely potent poison milked from the glands of the Bufo marinus toad, and tetrodotoxin, taken from the skin, liver, testicles, and ovaries of the Tetraodontiformes, a family of fish that includes the blowfish. Bufotoxin stimulates cardiac activity. Tetrodotoxin causes neuromuscular paralysis. In proper doses, taken together, they produce a living corpse.
It is critical that the dosage not be too high. Too much poison and you will kill the body, forcing the gros bon ange to abandon it as well.
“I know,” the captain said.
The woman wanted the captain to go away so that she could sing to Harris again. “He’s had too much to drink.”
The captain flicked a finger at Harris’s nose. Harris saw him do it. “Undercover is pussy work. I wish just once the DEA would send out an agent with some balls.”
The woman was angry and it made her old, but the captain wasn’t looking.
“Pompous self-righteous pricks,” he said. “The most ineffective agency in the whole U.S. Government, and that’s saying something.”
The captain looked at her. She was beautiful and drank red wine. Her eyes were as bright as coins. “I wish…” said the captain. He moved closer to her. “Shall I tell you what I wish?” he said. Harris was relieved to see that the captain was not going away, not unless the woman became old before him, and this was something she was, apparently, reluctant to do. Perhaps she wanted to surprise the captain with it. It served the captain right, seducing some old crone. The party spun around Harris, dancing couples, drinking couples. The black opalescence of the toad cast a yellow filter over the scene, but Harris could still see, dimly, that inside every woman there, no matter how graceful, no matter how beautiful, there was an old crone, biding her time.
• • •
“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING?” Harris’s wife asked him. She had come in behind him, too quietly. It made him jump. He leaned forward to block the screen.
“Nothing,” he said. Harris loved his wife and knew that her dear, familiar body did not conceal the figure of a hostile old woman. Hadn’t he always helped with the dishes? Hadn’t he never minded? He was safe with her. Harris wished she wouldn’t sneak up on him.
“What are you reading? Children’s books?” she asked incredulously. She taught British, American, and women’s literature at the junior college. She was, Harris thought, but lovingly, a bit of a snob. In fact, he had a stack of books on his desk — several Japanese pharmacologies, several volumes of Voudon rituals, and a couple of temperance histories. Only one was for children, but this was the one Harris’s wife picked up. The Girl’s Life of Carry A. Nation, it said on the spine. “Are you coming to bed?” Harris’s wife asked.
“In a moment.”
She went to bed without him, and she took the book with her.
• • •
FIVE-YEAR-OLD CARRY MOORE sat on the pillared porch and waited impatiently for her mother to come home. Her father had bought her mother a new carriage! Little Carry wanted to see it.
The year was 1851. Behind Carry was the single-story Kentucky log house in which the Moores lived. It sat at the end of a row of althea bushes and cedar trees. The slave cabins were to the right. To the left was the garden: roses, syringa, and sweet Mary. Mary was Carry’s mother’s name.
Carry’s mother was not like other mothers. Shortly after Carry was born, Mary decided her own real name was Victoria. She was not just playing let’s pretend. Mary thought she was really the Queen of England. She would only speak to Carry by appointment. Sometimes this made Carry very sad.
Carry saw one of the slaves, Bill, coming down the road. Bill was very big. He was riding a white horse and was dressed in a fine red hunting jacket. Didn’t he look magnificent? He carried a hunting horn, which made loud noises when you wound it. Honk! Honk! The Queen was coming!
Carry could see the carriage behind him. It was the most beautiful carriage she had ever seen. It had curtains and shiny wheels and matched gray horses to pull it. Henry, another slave, was the coachman. He wore a tall silk hat.
The carriage stopped. Mary got out. She was dressed all in gold with a cut-glass tiara. She wanted to knight Farmer Murray with her umbrella. Farmer Murray was their neighbor. He was weeding his onions. Farmer Murray tried to take Mary’s umbrella away.
“Oh, Ma,” said Carry. She ran down the road to her mother. “Take me for a ride.”
Carry’s mother would not even look at her. “Betsey,” said Mary. Betsey was one of the slaves. She was only thirteen years old, but she was a married woman with a baby of her own. “This child is filthy. Take her away and clean her up.”
“Ma!” said little Carry. She wanted so badly to go for a ride.
“We don’t want her in the house,” said Mary. Queens sometimes say we when they mean I. Mary was using the royal we. “She is to sleep with you tonight, Betsey,” said Mary.
Carry didn’t mind sleeping with Betsey, but it meant she had to sleep with Josh, Betsey’s husband, too. Josh was mean. “Please don’t make me sleep with Josh,” Carry asked, but her mother had already walked past her.
Sometimes Carry’s mother was not very nice to her, but Carry had lots of friends. They were her slaves! They were Betsey; and Judy, who was very old; and Eliza, who was very pretty; and Henry, who was smart; and Tom, who was nice. Carry ate with them and slept with them. They loved Carry.
One night Henry told a scary story. It was dark in the slave cabin, and they all sat around the fire. The story was about a mean slavemaster who died but came back in chains to haunt his slaves. They all believed in ghosts, which made the story even scarier. The story made Carry shiver.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Carry jumped right out of her seat. It was only Mr. Brown, the overseer. That made Carry laugh. “We thought you were someone bad coming,” Carry said. Mr. Brown laughed, too. He had just come to talk to Eliza. He took Eliza away to talk to her in his cabin. Judy and Betsey scolded Henry for telling a story that frightened Carry.
Item four: On Christmas Eve, at a party at the house of Señora Villejas, I narrowly survived an attempt by the Panama Defense Forces to turn me into a zombie. The agent of the attack was either a beautiful young Panamanian woman or an old one. She appeared to me as both.
Under ordinary circumstances, the body’s nerve impulses are relayed from the spine under conditions of difference in the sodium and potassium concentrations inside and outside the axon membrane. The unique heterocyclic structure of the tetrodotoxin molecule is selective for the sodium channels. A change in the sodium levels, therefore, alters the effectiveness of the drug. My escape was entirely fortuitous. I had just drunk half a margarita. The recent ingestion of salt was, I believe, all that saved me.