The Man with Wooden Legs (soul-crushing fiction! READ or suffer the consequences!)

I told the police he disappeared; that I awoke to a loud, metallic rattling, and when I staggered to his room, it was empty, the window flung open, the fire-escape still clattering with his lumbering decent. I told them I gave chase, calling his name, sliding in the February rain and almost breaking my neck in the process; that by the time I reached the bottom of the Hospital’s alleyway, he was racing into the Iquitos night in the back of an auto rickshaw, the motorcycle driver struggling out of first gear and almost tipping the passenger carriage as he turned onto the street.

It was a lie.

And when the floods came, rising from the muddy Amazon to marble with the black waters of the Nanay—as I watched from the top floors of the Hospital Benito to see a foaming, formless demon rushing down the streets—I knew it was the right lie to tell.

Mother Nature licks her wounds.

I met Horatio Bautista in the Fall of 2011, two weeks after his case slid across my desk in the UCLA medical center, where I busy myself unraveling the Gordian Knot of human pathology. Since childhood, disease has fascinated me. The breathing, pulsing life beneath life; but more importantly: the causality of mutation.

My first impression was that the photograph was enhanced. In it, a man stood naked, with arms that twisted rootlike from his torso. Both fingers and hands were buried beneath creepers of tissue. They had woven themselves into clubs, and stretched all the way to the ground. His face was handsome—regal nose, broad chin, eyes of sandstone—but above that longing, almost melancholy gaze, was a cluster of clawlike growths. They punched from his hair and forehead like railroad spikes. His neck was squat and swollen, mottled with what looked like fungus. And his legs…

I laughed, and threw it in a drawer, thinking I might bring it to one of the staff soirees, get a few gasps of shock, or a possible mate for the evening. Woman revel in the strange; the dark, secretive worlds that teem beneath their own. I took a moment to imagine another Carla or Katja or Evelyn slipping from their high-society trappings, stepping naked into the pits of primal hunger. And that was when the letter slipped to the floor with a snap.

It was simple, concise, asking for my help in distinguishing and categorizing what might possibly be the first disease of its kind. I am not without hubris, and found myself dizzy with possibility: my picture in the Journal of Medicine, speaking tours, the proposition of a book. The letterhead was stamped with the Hospital Benito legend, and signed by the Medical Director. Not a fake, after all.

“To Peru,” I whispered, dreaming of what all men secret beneath their actions: Fame.   

***

The town of Iquitos is grossly overpopulated. Surrounded by rivers on three sides, in the southernmost reaches of the Maynas Province, it has all the appearance of an island. Ancient architecture marches off from the city’s center, collapsing into a ruin of hovels at the outskirts; those are the shadowed places, where stabbings and rapes and the piling of trash are as a mother’s milk to the suckling infant.

It was from one such pustule, near the lake of Moronococha, that the enigma of Horatio Bautista spilled into my world. He was a farmer—or had been, until developers stole his land. We had a conversation about it, in which he shrugged the rotting trunks of his shoulders and told me they had threatened him. In Peru, things are still done this way. The old cavilier spirit of capitalism at its best. I asked him if he knew of the Navajo’s sojourn, if he didn’t find this personal exile similar to the Trail of Tears. But Bautista couldn’t read.

He had never learned.

He smiled at my shock, sitting in the hammock outside his shack (his condition made chairs impossible), and told me, “The jungle is a book, Doctor. One your people have forgotten how to read.” He roused himself, dragging the clubbed tangle of his arms across the white sand to a row of ferns, where he pointed with his chin. “What do you see out there?”

I saw nothing but lush vegetation, and told him so.

He nodded wisely. “I see a field mouse hiding from the snakes in that tangle of roots. And there, the spider’s web. Wise creatures, the spiders. Patient. They are the artists of the jungle, the ones who practice math. And there, the white gnats, laying fungus along the palms, eating some of the fronds, and leaving the others unharmed. The plant doesn’t mind. Because the fungus repels the others; the ones that do not care how many fronds they eat.” Bautista smiled, handsome in the center of all that hideousness. “It seems I read more than you do.”

“How did you learn English?”

“Trading with the American produce exporters. My father taught me. My father could read.”

And so we stood for a while longer, and I asked if he wouldn’t come to the Hospital where he could be treated, and he said no, and after a long artful manipulation I convinced him, but only under the condition that he might leave each day to return to the jungle. A few hours. This was necessary; absolute. And if the bargain was broken, for any reason, he assured me he would leave.

I moved to shake on it, before pulling my hand back in shame. And so we nodded at one another.

***

The treatments began the next week. I had a team of eager helpers, RNs and nurses, dermatologists and pathologists, like myself. They knew how important this was, and I could sense the same awe in their gestures, as of walking into the darkness of a yet unexplored abyss. Bautista was in good spirits, laughing with us, making jokes. He could no longer use his hands, and to walk required great reserves of energy. He weighed 136 kilograms, almost 300 pounds, of which almost 30 percent came from his growths. We scraped, washed, measured, x-rayed, and at 4PM, two hours before the sunset, he met the auto-rickshaw at the hospital’s front steps.

“Where does he go?” one of the nurses asked me, watching him fade into the blue exhaust.

“Back to the jungle,” I told her. “To read.”

He returned that evening, and every evening thereafter, exactly at 10:00PM. His precision was eerie, considering his limitations. Furthermore, there was an alien peace about him, impervious to the stares of horror and disgust that met him in the streets. I found myself in inexplicable fits of obsession; to the point of stalking him on his walks through the hospital grounds. There is a botanical garden in the Hospital Benito, filled with the unique vegetation that populates this region. There are such colors in the flowers, such grace, that staring into the pedals induces a species of hypnosis. I’d watch him lumber between the walkways, bending to smell and touch and even lick the plants. He would whisper and laugh and sometimes shake his head, as if giving sober council. And when he’d leave, I would retrace his steps, smelling, touching, and thinking myself a lunatic. I wanted to understand, thought on some unfounded whim that walking in his shoes might lend some insight, an intuitive leap.

You see, our attempts to categorize his condition had failed.

The cutaneous horns, as they are known, tested negative for every catalogued disease. HPV, carbuncles, calcium-growths, bone-spurs, tumors, goiters, leprosy, parasites, bacterial infection, glandular collapse, gangrene, keratin imbalance: all were scratched from the list. Furthermore, Bautista’s white blood-cell count was off the charts, which meant infection was unlikely.

And every night, at 4:00PM, the auto rickshaw would be waiting…

***

It was a month before my cavalier spirit overrode morality.

Bautista forbade any cutting or removal of the growths. He had agreed to be studied, not cured. He said he had no issue with his limitations, that God oversaw such things. I argued with the fervor of Prometheus, saying God had dropped the spark into the minds of men, given them reign to cure and heal the lamed and useless. We must cut the growths. It was the only way to understand.

It was the only time I saw Bautista risen to anger.

He lunged up from his hammock, over eight feet tall under his branching crown. His eyes pulsed with frenzy, with pleading (and maybe warning, I thought … much later). “You are a broken species!” He actually said it that way. “What I have, God gave me, and what you have, God gave you. What makes you think this is a mistake? Is it any more a mistake than your thirst to understand. Perhaps, the error lies in you. In this!” He curled his lip, motioned to the lab and the world beyond the windows, reeking and billowing with exhaust.

“We want to help you!” I cried, “To make you—”

“Like you?” He looked at me as if I were the monster.

“Yes, like me,” I said quietly. “Normal. Don’t you want to fall in love? To farm again? Use your hands? We can do that, Horatio.”

He considered for a long moment … then shook his head. “You offer me poison in a polished flask.”

I couldn’t understand, felt the fight drain out of me. “Fine. Fine, I’ll stop pestering you. You have my word.”

But a word is only as good as the man who offers it. And when he was IV’d and preparing for another ct scan, I slipped a sleeping agent into the injection port. Bautista sunk into the small rubber mattress. The whites of his eyes fluttered, and he began to snore. His arms had to be supported by extra tables, and there they lay, curled like the torn flukes of a sun-dried whale. They were textured and waxy—hard work for a scalpel. After many a breathless pause to make sure his eyes stayed closed, I managed to slice three thin strips of tissue. His limbs felt strange beneath my gloves, bulging with melted segments like that of a full-grown ficus which has been braided in its youth.

“I’m sorry, Horatio.” I whispered. “But I must know.”

***

The samples came back the next week without a successful pairing—this time, from the CDC, who are unmatched in their catalogues of biological destruction. Bautista began to stagnate. His conversations became a series of one word replies. He no longer looked into the eyes of those speaking to him. And when he went on his walks through the gardens, he stayed silent and kept his eyes on the ground. He acted as a man driven to melancholia, by a guilt for which no action can atone.

Then came the night when he failed to meet the auto rickshaw.

The pug-faced cabby stormed into the office with his face bundled in a scarf, asking for the hombre árbol, and holding his hand out for the money usually waiting at the reception desk. They called me down, and I shrugged at his attempts to communicate, holding a finger up to keep his rapid-fire Spanish from driving me mad.

In five minutes I found myself standing outside Bautista’s room, sweating, and for the first time afraid. There were sounds coming from his quarters. Clipped bursts of speech, followed by a distant scratching. I knew it was his voice, could hear the tensed vibration of his vocal chords … and yet it was more. Layered with the surge of distant oceans, the crackle of shifting stones. It was as if a hurricane lay slumbering in his chest.

I pressed an ear to the door, no longer aware of the light in the hallway, paralyzed by the fear felt only by children who have not yet acquainted themselves with the limitations of the world. It wasn’t English, but it wasn’t Spanish, either. The words themselves were fluid, sibilant, and (though I know it must sound ludicrous) natural. It seemed for those long moments that I stood on the shores of a primordial beach, listening the lows of great beasts as they stampeded through the jungles. I could feel my own biology changing, detonating charges of impulse, to hunt and feed and procreate. I bit the soft flesh of my cheek to clear it, pulling back from the door, and—

“Horatio?” My voice was harsh. “Horatio, your driver is here.”

The noises stopped instantly, as of a lid being capped.

His voice, when it answered, was a cancerous growl. “Come.”

I opened the door with a trembling hand, went cold and stiff as my eyes adjusted. Bautista was collapsed in his hammock, covered in sweat, his arms in a tangle beneath him. Thick yellow fluid had pooled onto the floor and collected between the tiles. “Horatio, what’s wrong with you? What’s—”

His eyes snapped onto mine, roiling with accusation, with betrayal. And it seemed to me in that moment that we were lovers, both doomed; I, by selfish disregard, and he, by his secrets. A marriage of destruction.

He struggled to lift the bulbed club of his arm. “You…” was all he could manage, and I knew, if he still had fingers, one of them would have been pointing at my soul.

“Me…” I whispered. It wasn’t a deflection of the truth, as was my habit. It was the first time, perhaps the very first in my life, that I had owned up to ills of my nature. I stepped forward, nodding, trying to reason, to apologize, but he shook his head, closing his eyes with a dignity that seemed out of place amid such physical ruin.

I wandered down the halls, lost, not seeing the faces that passed me. I told the driver to leave, paid him for the inconvenience, then I floated back to small research office requisitioned for my team. The door slammed, but I barely heard it. It seemed an ocean had suddenly opened in my chest, crashing and pulping all before it. I grabbed the magnum of wine hidden in my desk—a choice, aged red from Western France—and decorked it with a scalpel. I had brought it to celebrate my victory, and there I was, celebrating my failure as not just a doctor, but a human being. The wine made me swimmy, but it ebbed the guilt, and that was good. It is a mercy to be distanced from one’s sins.

***

I was awoken by one of my staff the next morning—from the floor, no less, where I had bundled up my labcoat as a pillow. My head was filled with needles; my eyes, with swimming gnats, and I was vaguely aware of a nightmare: tall shadows closing from all sides, freezing rain, and a deep, grinding vibration from the jungle floor.

I looked at her. “What do you want?”

She studied me—on the floor, hung-over, smelling of sweat, speaking to her as if she’d barged into the bathroom while I was wiping—then sighed. “Bautista is gone.”

“What?” I was up and moving quicker than my punished body allowed, almost tearing my labcoat as I shoved my arms into the sleeves. “What do you mean, he’s gone? The man has palm trees on his arms!”

She followed me into the hall. “No one saw him. The night crew did their check-ups. The last one was done two hours ago. And he was there.”

“Two hours?” I paused, licked my lips. “Then we have time.”

She followed me to the stairwell, calling after me: “Time for what, doctor?”

But I was gone, no longer listening, filled with a need to understand like I had never felt before. Those voices from the room. The fluid—thick and yellow upon the floor. None of it made sense. And yet all of it held a rudimentary shape, just beyond my grasp. I snatched my coat and wallet, rushing out of the lobby, into the hot, wet pulse of the boulevard.

It was storming hard. Freezing rain, I thought, cupping my palms and walking out from beneath the awning, the streets a blur of dented cars and scooters, donkeys, and cyclists honking their rubber-bulb horns. It was a circus. A madhouse. Is this what I had wanted for Bautista? To become one of these wild-eyed creatures, in an endless race to that fated destination: happiness. To lose touch with the quiet, gentle things, the grandeur and patience of nature, for which he seemed to live and breathe.

I hailed an auto rickshaw, and was not surprised to see the same pug-faced man I had paid the day before. He was smiling, brass caps and all, as he pulled his motorcycle to the curb. In one breath I glimpsed the reality of the world—a massive spider’s web in which all strands were perfectly separate and yet connected; a thing that could be crawled upon but which could never be escaped. I stepped off the curb, held out my money.

He took it all. “¿A dónde?”  

I understood enough to know he was asking for my destination. And from some distant string upon the web, I felt the vibration of a memory. Of this man in the lobby, barking for his pay, barking for:

“Hombre árbol.”

When I spoke the words, a dangerous light shimmered in his eyes. The driver nodded slowly, inclining his head to the passenger cart. And off we sped into the noisome chaos of Iquitos. I closed my eyes, trying to think, the wine making hard work of it. I saw Bautista walking in the garden, Bautista standing by his hovel to educate me of his world, Bautista accusing me with those glassy eyes. The undefined logic inched closer, more uniform, the vaguest nature of an idea taking shape. But it quickly got too big, too ridiculous. My mind was made for science, for cause and effect. And the paranoid shiftings of my heart had no hope to survive in that wasteland of logic.

***

It took an hour to reach the mountains, and the driver was nearly out of gas. He ticked his chin to a shelf of palms. Sharp purple flowers were everywhere, flicking in the rain. A gale ripped up the hillside, slapping the trees, and sending strange white birds darting from the canopies. I stepped from the richshaw, telling the driver wait, trying to communicate that I would have more money for him once he brought me back.

But as soon as I made for the thin path snaking deeper into the darkness, he screamed: “Hombre árbol. Diablo. Trees.” He shook his head. “Trees. Muy embrujado. Lo siento. Sorry.” And off he went in a puff of blue exhaust, almost tipping as he turned into the cut.

There was no use in calling after him. I was alone, and in a way had always been. Until Bautista.

The vegetation was thick and reedy. Rivulets babbled in an endless maze beneath festoons of lichen and ivy and every species of fern. There were bright white blossoms covering the base of the largest tree I had ever seen. It was wider than a house, its branches fanning outward like the rays of some alien sun. I lost sight of pale gray boughs as they twisted into the distance. And there, along the bark, numerous beyond comprehension, were the sharp-beaked birds I had seen. They twisted their heads in silence to mark my passage, dark knowledge glowing in their eyes. I saw snakes and a leper slinking in the distance. I saw parrots and monkeys and droves of rodents fleeing the charge of a fox. It was a mecca of life, impossible to comprehend. I was overwhelmed by the beauty, fell onto my knees, laughing, holding my hands up to the feel the tears drip through the leaves.

And that’s when I heard it, deep in the jungle.

Cracks and snapping branches rent the air. A strange warble, as of tuning rod equalizing, pierced the center of my mind. And just as soon, the beauty around me began to burn, melting in pools of yellow wax, unmaking itself until all was flat and barren, a smoking black scab of collected bones. I could smell the cyanide, the exhaust, and there were shapes, rising higher, larger than the tree, shapes with faces that bent in menace—

And then it was gone.  

 I was in the woods, the same woods, on my knees, shivering in the cold.

“You should not have come,” a familiar voice said, behind me.

I turned, saw Bautista standing beneath a stout tree with black bark and red shelves of fungus. He seemed taller, and moved with a grace that should have been impossible, stepping over rivulets, and plunging his bulbed feet into the mud. He slipped the brown trunk of his arm under my armpit, and brought me to my feet without resistance. The strength of it made me gasp. It was like the trunk of an elephant, limber, filled with muscle.

“What’s happened to you, Horatio?”

He looked at himself, seemed please. “I am myself. But who are you, doctor? Just a man. An oathbreaker.”

“No, Horatio. You’re moving! Your arms, your feet…” And I suddenly understood, at least more than I had before. I looked around me. “This place. What is it? What’s it done to you?”

“This is the Jungle’s Cradle. The breast of the mountain. She nurtures all who kneel to her, all who read her book.” His smile cramped into revulsion. “Go now, doctor. Back to your land of money and things. Back to your rivers of death.”

“I can’t leave. I have to know what this is. What you are. Is that flesh, or…” My eyes trailed to great tree, blurred by distance. One of its branches stretched above us, and I saw the texture of it, rippled and wefted with segments. Like muscles. Like… “It’s impossible. You! This place! It’s impossible!”

“Nothing is impossible.” He looked up, opening his mouth, the crown of branches from his head shivering and clattering, making hollow windchime gongs that chopped into my lungs. I felt the sudden swell of primordial beach that had paralyzed me outside his door, the ancient roar of life before ever man sought to pervert it.

And from the trees they spilled, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, their shapes longer, taller. They moved with the slow grace of underwater plants, the ground quaking as roots were torn from the mud, and re-plunged in great clouds of muddy soil. Faces strung in fungus and lichen swept below the great tree’s branches, pulling with limbs of gnarled root and whipping vine and flowers that hummed with light. They snapped their mouths open, and the warble of their roar was as the earth tearing itself open.

I collapsed, dragging myself back, feeling the blood rush from my ears, suddenly hating the alien feeling of my clothes. I ripped them off, running naked, rubbing mud across my face, jumping and beating the river with my fists. I could hear myself shrieking, and yet understood that it was language. I was speaking in a way that had been discarded for this new and polished jewel of civilization. A thing that shined from the outside, but stowed poison in its center.

They gathered around the great tree, the mother tree, clamping their arms together in a circling wreathe. And as their growls coalesced into a single note, a cannonade of thunder stomped up and down the mountains. The rain fell harder, until it seemed the God’s of every civilization lay along the clouds with their throats cut.

Light bled from all their eyes, from the creases in their bark, until the jungle was a womb of hot blue radiance. I closed my eyes to keep from going blind, but not before looking at Bautista, who turned his regal face, flushed with the yellow sap that was his sweat, and called: “We have sworn off your world! We will rebuild once it has died! Think hard, Doctor, on what it is that makes a life! Is it measured in triumphs, or the moments of silence between them? Go! Warn them! Change them! Or die with them!”

But by then I was unconscious.

***

I returned, and told the police my fabricated tale, speaking little to my crew, or anyone else that tried. Soon I found myself in the hospital garden, roaming the same paths, bending to smell the flowers, to sometimes lick them. The world, all its noise and need and pain, began to pale, until it seemed as if I shared the streets with ghosts. And then the floods came, and I understood what we were doing, what the word humanity actually meant. All these years I’d used it to define one’s character, steadfastness to moral virtue. I see now that it should be catalogued beside the other diseases I made my life’s work of studying. The supreme disease of need. Nowhere else in nature is there a race so vile, so murderous, so driven to eviscerate its threats. We have strived to build a kingdom, and in the process poisoned the ground over which it towers.

And so I leave it now. My profession. My misinformed dreams. I leave it for the Breast of the Mountain. That place of flowing rivers and sharp-eyed birds. That place where there is no individual, but the strings of an endless web, where one might crawl forever, but never escape.

January 16^th 2014 7:43PM, Hawthorne, CA

(Thank you for reading! Comments are appreciated! Find Novelist Carson Standifer on Facebook!)