35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘BHAGAVAN IS STILL WITH US’
swept past my nose, and something large buzzed near my right ear.
Soon several smaller things had prodded red-hot needles into various
extremities. I tore at the sheets, wrapping myself in items I could
not identify, all of them, I suspected, woven from hog bristle. It would
be a long night – not the long night you get when you can’t sleep,
but the interminable one that imprisons you because you keep waking
up. I’d often pictured time as a device to stop everything happening
at once; that night it seemed more like a way of making everything
happen forever. At one desperate point I stumbled off the pallet and
rummaged blindly through my bag for a box of mosquito coils I’d
sensibly brought along, locating it with scarcely believable ease. It
was the matches I couldn’t find. And waking again after three minutes
a decade long, I had the distinct impression someone was in the room,
watching me. I shouted out, and was convinced I heard footsteps
tiptoe off through the walls, back into that endless night.
I did not so much awake to find that a dim, cloudlike dawn light
had returned form and substance around me as struggle back up to
consciousness using my nervous system as rope, too wary of the
mind’s tricks to be convinced the night was really over. Boy, did I
ache, and my body was spattered with red welts. Half the jungle had
been guzzling my blood, throwing a booze-up at my place all night.
I rubbed my puffed eyes. It took me some moments to realise that a
very small man in a fur bodysuit was rifling my bag, quietly picking
out items of interest and putting them to one side.
‘Oi!’ I yelled, leaping up.
The monkey bared its teeth at me, grabbed a plastic tub of
diarrhoea pills, and bounded across the room to make a mighty leap
for the recess in the far wall. Which was not a recess, I now saw, but
a narrow rectangular opening leading outside. Safely out of reach,
the monkey looked down mockingly, proceeded to open the tub,
and started to eat its contents with relish.
I began to laugh. Two of those diarrhoea pills did the trick; sixty
or so would probably turn a monkey’s bowels into concrete for a
month.
It seemed to know something was up – I wasn’t supposed to be
laughing – but continued crunching away. It was not alone, either.
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