Free Blinding Light by Paul Theroux

others. Then he spoke to Wood in the tone of a quizmaster: “Edgar Allan Poe?”
    â€œFive eight,” Wood said.
    â€œMarquis de Sade?”
    â€œFive three.”
    Ava said, “William Burroughs.”
    â€œFive foot eleven and a half.”
    â€œJust your size,” Ava said to Steadman, and Steadman smiled, for she knew that it was Burroughs’s book that had started him thinking about this journey.
    â€œEver read
The Yage Letters
?” Ava asked Wood.
    â€œNever heard of it. Who wrote it?”
    â€œA man who came here once,” Ava said.
    As she spoke, Nestor appeared. He said, “He didn’t come here. He was in Colombia, on the Putumayo. But it was still Amazonia and the quest was the same. Not a tour, though. Now we go.”
    Emerging from the steaming pool, they were chilled by the late-afternoon air and felt tired and stewed from sitting in the hot water. Drying themselves, they saw Manfred at the top of the slope. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as though dropping from an invisible line, like a pendulous insect. He was entirely naked and unembarrassed, thrashing himself with a loose towel, pink-fleshed from the scalding water, the hair on his head spiky and damp, his penis slack and swinging as he descended from stone to stone. He was wearing earphones and carrying a Walkman in one hand and had a small spray of flowers pinched in the fingers of his free hand, and he was smiling.
    â€œIs a bromeliad!”—shouting because of the earphones.
    Nestor said, “Next stop, Lago Agrio.”
    â€œHow many kilometers until Lago Agrio?”
    â€œI will tell you later,” Nestor said.
    â€œHow many kilometers until ‘later’?” Hack demanded.

5
    T HE FIRST INDICATION that they were nearing the town of Lago Agrio was a succession of signs, most of them lettered
Prohibido el Paso,
some of them showing a grinning stenciled skull, like a Halloween mask, and the single forbidding word
Peligro.
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to be?” Wood asked in the darkness of the van.

    â€œCalavera,”
Hernán said. “Eskell.”
    It was after midnight when they entered the empty streets, lurid in the glare of small orangy light bulbs, traveling first on a bumpy road and then the uneven pavement of the main street, flanked by the same ocherous shadows. All the shops were shuttered and dark. Only a handful of shadow-faced people lurked by pillars in the arcades, where some open fires were glowing, cut off oil drums serving as braziers. Ava and Steadman were first off the bus, and even in the semidarkness, smelling dampness, ant-chewed wood, moistened dirt, dog shit, rusty pipes, and the smutty smoke from the braziers, they sensed the town was ugly—not old but hastily built, a kind of blight in the jungle, a sudden wasteland of dead trees, a slum smelling of blackened pots and stale bread and frying and decay. Another stink in the air was subtly toxic, the sour-creamy tang of fuel oil.
    â€œIt’s sensationally scruffy,” Janey said in a tone of gloating satisfaction. Then she yawned. “Promise you will tuck me in, darling? I am so knackered.”
    Off the main road, down an alley, within a narrow courtyard that looked fortified by its high walls, the Hotel Colombiana lay in darkness. Hernán backed the van into the courtyard, stopping and starting.
    â€œWouldn’t it be simpler just to park the van on the street?” Sabra said.
    â€œThen the van would not be here tomorrow,” Nestor said. “We are less than twenty miles from the Colombia border. You know the FARC? Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia? They will take the van. They will take you.”
    As he spoke, he worked, catching the bags that Hernán passed to him and stacking them beside the van.
    â€œYou mean kidnap?” Sabra said.
    â€œThey are too busy for that. They outsource the kidnapping,” Nestor said, and looked smug