The Encounter Read online

  counted on, and at the end of thirteen dots there’s this huge

  great big animal, above the thirteenth dot, and it’s thirteen

  weeks, thirteen quarters of the moon after the Pleiades

  emerges is when this happens. To understand time you have

  to understand something a bit ritualistic, something which is

  repeating…

  NOMA

  . One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.

  Ten…

  The

  ACTOR

  stops dancing and returns to the desk.

  ACTOR. Meanwhile, downriver, men from Loren’s world were

  busy elaborating plans that would deliver Tuti to the world of

  machinery, and televised news, soft drinks and government

  welfare.

  The

  ACTOR

  picks up a small speaker that begins to play an

  advertising jingle, moving it around the binaural head.

  Tuti danced on unsuspectingly. Some of us are friends.

  Petru recording, played on the

  ACTOR

  ’s phone.

  PETRU.

  Every time you go and spend time with a tribe like

  that, you change them to an extent. You bring them over to a

  stage of civilisation that they would reach perhaps, but you

  bring them over too fast. On the other hand you, as the

  scientist, you gain immensely from having been immersed in

  the experience. So it is our gain, we the modern people, and

  it is usually their loss. If we decide never to contact tribes

  any more, then we will never… we will never… find out the

  deepest, most interesting and controversial things about

  ourselves. We will not find it out. On the other hand, how will

  they develop? More slowly, although they have always

  developed more slowly. They will still get to our civilisation

  at one time or another. Material progress is unfortunately

  unavoidable. More coffee?

  ACTOR. A little while later, the fires were restarted and beiju was

  cooked. And Loren noticed that Barnacle had not eaten. He

  was back making his whistling arrows. Why hadn’t he eaten?

  LOREN. He’s fasting. Why is he fasting?

  ACTOR.

  Some of us are friends.

  (

  Looped.

  )

  SFX: door creaking open. The following is a conversation

  between the

  ACTOR

  , live, and a child, Noma McBurney,

  recorded aged five.

  NOMA.

  Dada, I’m hungry.

  ACTOR. Sweetie, please… You’re supposed to be in bed.

  NOMA.

  Dada, why have you got your shoes on in the house?

  You don’t want to get the floor dirty.

  ACTOR. Well, I know, but Mama’s not here, so…

  NOMA.

  I’m hungry! Can I have something to eat please?

  ACTOR. There isn’t anything. Well, okay, I’ve got this packet

  of crisps. There you go, there’s a crisp. Now, I am working…

  NOMA.

  Night-night, Dada, give me a kiss.

  ACTOR. Now go to bed. And don’t slam the door please, I’ve

  got a headache.

  SFX: door slamming.

  9. Around the Face of Time

  ACTOR. What’s in these?

  The

  ACTOR

  reads some of the ingredients from the back

  of the packet and then crunches a few crisps. The bag

  rustles. The sound is looped and turns into the crackle of

  a burning fire.

  He woke feeling fingers on his left wrist. He felt up with his

  right. His watch was gone. He looked up. And saw faces

  looking down at him… A nauseating smell of burning rubber

  and smoke filled his nostrils… He looked over the side of his

  hammock and he realised what it was.

  LOREN. My Adidas trainers. They’re burning them; they’re

  burning my shoes.

  ACTOR. He swung out of his hammock and pushed his way

  through the group of people out into the plaza. There was a

  fire. His shoes were melting, on the flames. His watch was

  already a black disc.

  LOREN. Hey, fellas! I need those. Those are my Adidas

  trainers. You don’t need them I do.

  The

  ACTOR

  slips into them and reacts violently, as if the

  soles of their feet were scalded.

  Okay, you’ve burnt my shoes. You’ve killed my watch. At

  least I’ve still got my camera.

  SFX: camera shutter.

  My camera! I’d fallen asleep with it on my hip and now I

  didn’t have it.

  I rushed back to my hut and searched my hammock. No

  camera anywhere. I pushed back out into the plaza. My heart

  was racing in front of me. The community were all gathered,

  looking at me. I wanted to seize them, shout, where is my

  camera? Give me my camera! Calm down. They’re naked,

  they can’t hide a black box anywhere.

  I saw Red Cheeks watching me, his arms folded. When I

  caught his eye, he turned away. Calm down, calm down.

  Across the plaza I saw Barnacle arriving. He seemed

  innocent in all this, looking to right and left at his people to

  see what was going on. They avoided his eyes and started to

  drift away. Then I realised they had been trying to hex me.

  Burning personal belongings is almost always a hex. I knew

  I had to act. I had to do something before the moment

  passed. I was being ostracised. I had to get their attention. I

  had no idea what I should do… so I did the first thing that

  came into my head.

  The

  ACTOR

  goes to a multi-pack of water, removes the

  packaging and uses the packaging to create a loop of

  scrunching around the binaural head. They breathe heavily

  with each movement, then begin to run, still using the

  packets to create the sound of feet on leaves.

  SFX: looped version of the above.

  I started jogging around the perimeter of the village.

  I watched my feet pound the grass. One lap. Two laps. Three

  laps. I heard my own thoughts projected right back at me in

  panic. Calm down. But running felt good, liberating.

  I passed Red Cheeks, screaming something at his friends.

  They had hexed me, now I was hexing them, casting a spell

  of my own. Now they were starting to watch, they were all

  coming back. Barnacle was scanning his crowd, trying to

  interpret their reactions. Whenever I passed him, I exploded

  into a hammering of fists and feet, almost a parody of intent.

  LOREN (

  pre-record

  ).

  I can’t think of anything else to do. I’ve

  got to get through to you.

  LOREN. Five laps.

  LOREN (

  pre-record

  ).

  We have to communicate. We are

  communicating.

  LOREN. Ten laps.

  LOREN (

  pre-record

  ).

  I want to survive. I want you to survive

  as well.

  LOREN. I ran on. Fifteen, twenty laps. I slowed down, walked

  a lap. Stopped in front of Barnacle. Dripping with sweat.

  What was he going to do? Then he turned and started

  jogging. Just the way I had gone
.

  SFX: loop plays in reverse as the

  ACTOR

  stands, watching

  the track of Barnacle running.

  Following my tracks. But in the opposite direction.

  Counterclockwise. He was undoing my spell. And as he

  passed me, he beat his fists and feet as I had done.

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  I don’t know if this will

  work. I don’t know if my people will follow me.

  LOREN. Was I losing my mind?

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  I have no alternative…

  I have to try to make it work.

  LOREN. I felt I was inside his head, literally thinking his

  thoughts.

  I’m not psychic; I don’t believe in that shit… Still I

  received it.

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  Other white people have

  been before. They brought death. My people are dying now

  to avoid that death.

  LOREN. This was some bigger emergency – a threshold of

  some kind in the tribe’s life…

  Barnacle ran until his chest became a mirror of sweat. He ran

  at the limit of his strength, and he was fasting, remember.

  His people now began to utter cries of encouragement, as if

  wanting to instil him with energy… Red Cheeks had drifted

  off, disgusted. Barnacle ran on but now, his messages no

  longer glowed in my mind, but had dissolved into a residual

  beaming, a sort of leftover. It crystallised into this.

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  The face of time.

  LOREN. The face of time? Eighteen, nineteen, twenty laps.

  He slowed to a walk and everyone hailed their chief.

  Barnacle stopped in front of me. He raised a finger and said

  something solemn. I looked at the space he and I had circled,

  performing our competing spells. What was that in my head?

  Did he really say that? The face of time.

  I slipped my feet into the remains of my chargrilled Adidas

  trainers… I looked into the forest, trying to calm myself

  down. I looked up at a black creeper… Fuck! That’s not a

  creeper, that’s my film. A black strip of film, hanging from a

  branch. Fuck! I’ve been running with two rolls of exposed

  film in my pockets. Only one roll of film left. Those are my

  shots! Who put that there? And then I looked a little higher

  up the tree and I saw my camera. In the hands of a woolly

  monkey. A woolly monkey clutching my camera… It must

  have been a pet of one of the kids.

  ‘Hey… Hey!’ He climbed higher. ‘For god’s sake, don’t open

  it!’ What was I doing, I was talking to a monkey? I threw a

  stick. He caught it. Bad idea. He was poking with it at the

  camera. The back flew open. He ripped out the film. The spool

  popped out. And he ripped the camera apart in one movement.

  SFX: camera is ripped apart. A jumble of voices. The words

  ‘The. Great. Shot.’ are heard.

  ACTOR. Loren McIntyre’s knees gave way and he just sank to

  the floor. He sat there. Inches from his damaged camera.

  Useless. Reduced. Reduced to one roll of film. How could

  he prove that he had been there? What was he going to give

  National Geographic

  ? He was reduced to just a body.

  Purposeless. He was a tourist now. No watch. He would have

  to live by nature’s clock. He would have to be like these

  people.

  Petru recording, played on the

  ACTOR

  ’s phone.

  PETRU.

  After this, Barnacle, as is described in the book,

  became extremely friendly, and he started to spend time with

  him. And to sort of protect – anyway, Barnacle and McIntyre,

  became a sort of inseparable item.

  10. What Was in the Dark

  LOREN. Barnacle indicated that we should walk into the forest

  together. We passed children gathered round a shaman. They

  were looking at caterpillars, insects, plants. I imagined he

  was showing them the law of the forest. Pretty soon they’ll

  be able to survive on their own in the forest.

  Once we were alone, the communication started again.

  Smooth and implicit. And even though he was a few yards

  away, he communicated to me that:

  You are sad because what was in the dark should have stayed

  in the dark.

  It was so clear, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t spoken. Was he

  talking about my camera? No, how could he be? But it was

  so much like speaking… for a moment, I couldn’t accept it

  and I shouted:

  ‘Fala Português?’

  He leaked into my mind somehow that he didn’t understand

  my words. I went and stood quite close to him. I had to

  accept what was happening, or else I had to assume I was

  hallucinating. Barnacle communicated something like:

  Here’s the forest; if you run away right now, I’m not going to

  stop you.

  I said nothing. Again he said:

  Other white people have been here. They brought death.

  It is almost impossible to describe the exact nature of the

  communication between us. The clearest description I can

  give is that it was like a kind of dialogue. He said:

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  We have been moving

  around.

  LOREN. I tried to communicate back: have you been attacked?

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  Yes. By white people that

  came down from the sky.

  LOREN. So where are you moving to?

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  We’re going to the

  beginning?

  LOREN. What beginning?

  BARNACLE (LOREN

  voice-over

  ).

  The beginning.

  LOREN. We walked back to the village. Barnacle scanned me

  with his eyes. What they spelled was clear, no beaming

  necessary: what was I going to do? I was asking myself the

  same question. What am I going to do?

  What am I going to

  do?

  (

  Looped

  .)

  Petru recording, played on the

  ACTOR

  ’s phone.

  PETRU.

  But he kept telling us, ‘How can I say this

  –

  the

  Geographic

  is going to jump on me?’ I said, Loren, no one is

  going to jump on you. You may create some controversy,

  regarding whether you believe that what happened

  happened, but that’s not like, it’s not a case for fraud or

  anything…

  IRIS

  . …I would say that, we got him comfortable though…

  PETRU

  . …We got him comfortable, and, he was towards the

  age, to which he wanted to talk about it.

  ACTOR. He was towards the age at which he wanted to talk

  about it.

  SFX: collage of voices from the

  ACTOR

  ’s unconscious.

  NOMA.

  Can you know wha
t I’m thinking, inside my head?

  STEVEN ROSE.

  Of course you need your brain, I need my

  brain to think, I need my brain to be conscious. But that

  doesn’t mean that consciousness is in my brain, any more than

  the fact that I need my legs to walk means that it’s my legs

  that are doing the walking.

  IAIN McGILCHRIST.

  Everything in the world is only known in

  comparison to everything else that we know. There isn’t a

  way of getting out of this. The myth that we’re up against

  nowadays is that there is some abstract, objective reality that

  is beyond our myth-making, beyond our language, beyond

  metaphor, which is absolute rather than relative. But there is

  no such thing.

  11. The Night Hunt

  The

  ACTOR

  returns to the desk and loops breathing into the

  microphone.

  LOREN. I slept until I thought I was dreaming of a jaguar and

  its grunt. And then I woke. There was a jaguar. In the village.

  A jaguar in the village. I sat bolt upright. In the nearest hut,

  children cried in panic, the noise of the village tripled in

  volume.

  I heard Red Cheeks screaming. Six or seven other young men

  brandishing spears and burning branches, ganged up in the

  middle of the clearing. I found myself in front of the gang of

  young men and Red Cheeks gestured for me to follow him. I’d

  always wanted to see a jaguar hunt so I stepped closer to him.

  But I was furious with myself for not having my camera.

  SFX: jaguar grunt.

  We scrambled over the wet grass into a solid wall of fogged-

  up forest vegetation. The torches went away into the

  darkness like flares. Keep up, come on. I’m in my mid-

  fifties, they’re in their twenties. The worst scenario would be

  to be left alone in the dark. The grunt rang out again.

  SFX: jaguar grunt.

  Where are they?

  AYYYAYYA!

  I heard Red Cheeks shout unexpectedly. The young men had

  stopped right in front of a spiny thickness. The beast had

  crawled underneath it – a cluster of thorny plants between

  the roots of a huge tree. I headed for it as fast as I could so as

  not to miss the spectacle. Red Cheeks suddenly pushed me.

  Powered by this and my own momentum, I ran straight into

  the thornbush.

  He dropped his torch and stepped on it. The other burning

  branches disappeared in the same instant.

  Total dark followed.