The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (10 page)

Everything is fine here… really
enjoying it actually.

Gabriel is keeping busy carrying rocks
down the hill.

Garden died though. Guess you need to
water it.

Not really saving up much money to
build the zip line, either. Seems to be less male backpackers these
days for some unknown reason. Luz is not happy about it. Well
that’s not true -- she is happy one second, pissed off the next.
She is going to group therapy alone.

Guess I missed your call. Best not to
call before ten… I like to sleep in. Heard you do too. And you take
lots of naps. I don’t believe what they say though. That you sneak
away with the BlackBerry to download Bestiality porn before nap
time, then cry yourself to sleep over the latest sad news of
Lindsay Lohan.

Email me back so I can taunt you
again.

One of your few friends,

Steve

P.S. Rocky is fine. Do you have the
number to his vet?

Foosball More
Fun

By Steve Banks

Hey Andy,

Matt and Maria are like two nuts in a
banana hammock.

To get a more optimum ration of guys
to girls, girls now drink for free all night in the bar if they
play foosball topless.

It’s nicer talking to you than
Patrick… his thought train has no caboose.

Nico does all the check-ins now. He’s
a little slow… takes an hour and half to watch Sixty
Minutes.

I bought a wife beater. Goes well with
my Panama Hat. Girls are digging me and Estrella keeps trying to
get pregnant. How do you keep your sponsored child from wanting to
spawn?

Your Bud,

Steve

P.S. Still warm.

Response:

Steve,

I told her if I want to hear the sound
of little feet going pitter patter, I would put shoes on
Rocky.

Andrew

P.S. No. Would you fuck her if you
knew she had crabs?

I Am the Jaguar

By María
Concepción

I am alone when I find the green rock
on Río del Oro.

I take my clothes off and stretch
out.

The curve is perfect for the back, sun
perfect for my skin.

I play.

I sleep.

I awake. It is black. So black I
wonder if I am just in my mind. But it is too cold to be a lucid
dream.

I stumble on the rocks but find my
shoes… put my clothes in my day pack.

I need my hands to feel ahead of me.
Crawl on all fours.

Misery. Then ecstasy.

I hear the whispers of
trees.

The spirits of the jungle.

I find a cave and pass out
exhausted.

I awake to the sight of the jaguar’s
breath.

I find my power animal.

I am the jaguar.

New Pet

By Steve Banks

Hey Patti Cakes,

Not much news.

Gabriel is carrying the rocks back up
the hill. I don’t know what’s eating him… looked kind of
frustrated. Must have thought Manual Labor was the Panamanian
president.

Good news about the zip-line. The male
backpackers (seem to be less of them every day) are paying a not
paying attention tax to help us save for the zip line. Very few
guys complain.

Heard you tried to call yet again.
Fuck what is it with you? Try calling Sunday.

Started the garden up again, with
marijuana this time. Had a hard time buying seeds, so I gave out
stacks of Lost and Found business cards. Finally got seeds and
better yet, lots of customers lined up.

Your mother was a hamster and your
father smelled of elderberries.

P.S. Rocky looked kind of unhappy.
Don’t worry, we solved the problem. We died him green with Kool
Aid. This will help him stay camouflaged in the jungle so the dogs
that have been coming around for scraps have a harder time catching
him. Oh, also, his name now is Kermit. And now he likes Red Bull
and Vodka. Can you cover his bar tab when you get back?

Foosball Not Fun

By Steve Banks

Hey Buddy,

Bought me suspenders to wear with my
Panama Hat.

Dude, last night’s topless ladies
night was a disaster. So many double chins I thought I was staring
at pancakes. We lost the foosball in one chick’s belly button.
Didn’t really smell too bad though after… nor she. Anyway, don’t
want that to happen again so we built the door to the bar so no fat
girls can get in.

Patrick doesn’t seem to understand
about this guy/girl ratio… keeps talking about stupid stuff like
profit. He has a PBS brain in an MTV world.

Steve

P.S. I would fuck her under any
condition you could think of and I would eat the roots of her hair
until she was bald.

Response:

Hey Steve,

Don’t worry about Patrick and all his
MBA talk of profit. He talks too much and is possessed by a
retarded ghost.

Andrew

P.S. And you know what hair follicles
taste like?

Yesterdays on the
Road

By Matt Hope

There are no yesterdays on the
road.

When you travel you can be free to
reinvent yourself. Steve tells people he is a brain surgeon and
even writes this on his departure and arrival cards at airports –
unless he writes ‘prince.’ You can take all that is you, dust it
off and paint over the ugly parts.

Unless … somebody finds your diary. No
one should have to face the temptation of stumbling on a diary.
María and I had been sharing a room at The Lost and Found and one
night, when she was out on the night safari with Gabriel, I was
chasing a gecko out of the room. I was moving her bag and a book
fell out. It was leather bound with no title, and when I picked it
up, my picture, the Facebook picture I saw in Panama City, fell
out. Stop fucking looking at me like that and just read!

I flipped through the pages trying to
find where to put the photo back, and discovered an eclectic mix of
English and Spanish ramblings, photos of places (not many people)
and sketches of weird esoteric symbols and graphic sex. Some things
kind of rang a bell for me, like a picture of a bald man that
looked like one of the cross bearers at the pilgrimage of the Black
Christ. The sketch looks like a self-portrait where María has her
lucid dream symbol on her hands, but in the sketch they are
bleeding.

Not long after Dr. Mike taught us
about lucid dreaming, he led us on what he called shamanic
journeys. Most recently we travelled to the “underworld” where we
searched for our power animal – a kind of spiritual soul mate. When
our power animal came to us, we started something Dr. Mike calls
‘dynamic meditation.’ For me, it was all just a kind of let’s
pretend playtime, but the dynamic meditation was kind of cathartic.
Anyway, not the waste of time I thought it would be. Dynamic
meditation is the opposite of the Buddhist meditations where you
slow your mental projections. Instead you exhaust yourself until
your mind is no longer cluttered. No secret really. It’s like
runner’s high. We jumped up and down with our hands stretched up
and then exhaled violently until dizzy. (Or in a state of ecstasy
if you are so inclined to believe) Then we let loose, shouting.
Usnavy cried and María shouted violent obscenities. Then we danced
with our power animals to some tribal drumming Dr. Mike had on his
iPod. I didn’t take it seriously, but I pretended to find an owl as
my power animal. They have been on my mind lately because of the
owl at The Lost and Found that startled me. An automatic light on
the back path to bathrooms clicked on and an owl turned his head.
We had a solid five second moment before he swooped off.

So there in María’s diary was my power
animal, the owl, but beside it a threesome. I have never had a
threesome. Nor has María, for that matter. There was Steve’s power
animal, the snake, but with someone that looked like it might be
Steve tied to it.

After the dynamic meditation, when
most of us were dancing with our power animals, María slipped away.
She muttered something about her power animal not coming and looked
upset. I am not the type to chase after girls, especially strong
willed girls like María, and especially when I am not the cause of
her frustration. I admit I had a sleepless night when she didn’t
return. I didn’t know if she went to sleep in the volunteer dorm or
took off to Boquete or something. She came back the next morning
and shocked us all – cut up, bleeding from her forehead again and
covered in bug bites. But she smiled and announced that she found
her power animal. It came to her in the forest, literally. Her
spiritual guide was a jaguar.

She had a sketch with the naked body
of a woman and the head of jaguar, and a girl lying naked with
something coming out of her vagina. Half the page was torn off. It
was good work. I had no idea that María was such a talented
artist.

Gabriel, the local nature expert, was
surprised that she saw the jaguar and I don’t really think he
believed her. During all of his years living in the area, he has
only seen paw prints. Maria said she fell asleep on a rock in the
river they call Fornication Point, and woke up in the dark. Somehow
she ended up on the other side of the river, thinking she was on
the same side as the lodge. She ended up at a cave.

“
The cave of the hermit
woman,” Gabriel said. It seems that years ago people lived deeper
inside the reserve. The hydro dam displaced them and many of them
moved to a spot along a new road being built to access the dam.
That town is Valle de la Mina and apparently the hermit woman still
lived there. Her name was Tuna. María insisted on meeting this
hermit woman who had lived in the cave and begged Gabriel to take
her.

I felt a little like a third wheel
tagging along, but Maria did invite me. We walked down to Valle de
la Mina, a cute little town that sees no tourists. Although María
is Colombian, she might as well have been from Neptune - it was
clear that she is not from around those parts. Children scurried
behind long skirts and men stared at her.

Ten minutes down a gravel road no car
could pass, was a tiny, leaning shack of a house smothered with
beautiful crimson bougainvillea. María knocked on the door without
hesitation. When there was no answer, she cupped her face and
peered into the glass. Gabriel fidgeted with his nose, a peculiar
mannerism that I had already learned meant that he was nervous. I
felt like we should follow his lead to avoid trampling the local
cultural norms, but María edged open the unlocked door. The little
place was quiet. María slipped inside, and Gabriel waited behind
for an invitation.

Gabriel and I sat on some rocks a few
yards away for several minutes before María reappeared and waved us
in. Tuna was seated facing the door in worn old wooden armchair
surrounded by sagging, dusty furniture. She was breathing hard and
sweating. I thought the poor woman was having a heart attack.
Gabriel said she was in her eighties, and she looked very frail.
She was hard to look at – like she was barely clinging to life, a
spirit trapped in a corpse that had already begun to
rot.

“
Pensé que nunca
vendrías
,” she whispered, her wide eyes
fixed on María
.
I thought you would never
come
.

“
Mi nombre es María pero no soy la madre de Jesús,” María
replied.
I am not the mother of
Jesus.

It seemed that Tuna had not been
feeling well. As much as María tried to convince her otherwise, she
thought María had come to take her to heaven. She was startled, but
not afraid. She was ready. Gabriel asked if she wanted us to leave,
and she protested, trying to rise from her chair. She insisted on
making us coffee in a kitchen just off to the side of the living
room. We urged her to sit back down, but she wouldn’t calm down
until Gabriel went and made the coffee himself.

María told her story about getting
lost in the forest near the Río del Oro and how she had found the
cave. She told her that she had spent the night in the cave and
that when she had woken the next morning, she came face to face
with the jaguar.

There was a long pause. The woman
stared ahead as though she could see nothing but the images in her
mind.

“
She is old now,” she said
of the jaguar. “How does she look?”

“
Strong,” María
said.

“
The first time we met she
was tearing apart the flesh of a sloth.”

Tuna lived in that cave, that much was
true, and she lived there alone for a time. But she was not a
hermit and she did not live in the cave forever. She built a house
nearby that has since been reclaimed by the jungle. She moved
before the dam company forced people to leave the area.

“
We moved because of the
gold,” she hissed with spite. “The cursed gold.”

Her husband never told anyone,
including her, where he found the gold, but everyone assumed it was
not far from where they relocated and where she was living when we
visited her. Her husband pulled out a nugget of gold every time he
needed money it seemed, and showed it to everyone who wanted to
see. Everyone assumed it came from the long lost Spanish gold mine
from whence the town got its name- Valley of the Mine.