Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller by Alexes Razevich Page B

peace—magic seemed as good an answer as anything else.
    Except it was “magic” that drove the exorcism he faced in the morning—and he didn’t believe in demons. He drank some more of the brew. He thought maybe he should gulp it down in hope of falling unconscious. He’d grown tired of thinking. Of plots and plans. Whatever was in the brew was working. He found his mind too lazy to worry. His body felt heavy. He slumped back against the wall.
    “ How’d you wind up here?” he asked, unwilling to let sleep have him just yet.
    Pilar seemed relaxed, too. She too slouched against the wall, her arm resting across his leg. Jake liked the casualness of it. How they’d slipped into a sort of “we’re in this together” mindset. How maybe that could turn into something more.
    “ Two years ago,” she said, “I came on a research mission with another anthropologist, a man. We stayed a year with the Lalunta. I learned their language. I seem to have a facility for languages. And the women appreciated that I’d eat monkey brains and grubs without flinching—a good trick for a middle-class, all-American, white-bread girl like me. Mike—Dr. Samuelson—was more squeamish.”
    “ White-bread?” Dark-skinned and dark-haired, with round brown, almost-black eyes, she looked anything but that.
    “ As white as they come,” she said. “I’m fourth-generation American. I have a sister named Heather, a brother named Brent, and another named Taylor. We watched American TV, not the Spanish channels. We sang ‘Baby Beluga’ and ‘The Streets of Laredo’ as kids, not corrido songs. I’m no more Mexican than you are of whatever culture your ancestors came from.”
    He knew what she meant. “Euro-trash, my mother calls our forbearers. A mix of poor and working-class people from six or seven countries who fled famines and wars or chased dreams to America. I guess you could call us mutts.”
    She smiled at that.
    “I chose my work because I felt I’d lost my heritage,” she said. “If I couldn’t have it myself, at least I could try to help others preserve their cultures for themselves.” She took another swallow of the oily brew. “Naheyo took a liking to me and asked me to come back alone. She said if I came again, I could come to the compound—we’d been in the main village before—and she would teach me to be human. For a researcher, the opportunity was too precious to turn down. It meant the women would share their entire culture with me, not just the parts they wanted the outside world to see. I was able to get a grant based on the uniqueness of the research, and here I am.”
    His eyelids felt heavy. He tried to hold back from falling asleep. “If the Lalunta don’t want their entire culture exposed, aren’t you betraying their trust by doing your job?”
    Pilar nodded slowly. “I’ve thought about that. Of course I’m recording everything. I keep notebooks and I have a camera. When I go home, I’ll lecture and write a book.”
    “ It is a betrayal, then,” Jake said.
    She set her now-empty cup on the floor. “Cultures are fluid. All cultures eventually die or are so absorbed into another that they might as well be dead. If I don’t record everything accurately, knowledge of Lalunta life as it exists now will be lost forever. Fifty, a hundred years from now, the children’s children of these women will be able to see what I recorded here and know their true past. I think that’s worth doing. They do too, or they wouldn’t have invited me here.”
    The voices of the women grew louder, coming toward the window.
    “They’ll be singing out there for a while,” she said. “These are songs your companion is supposed to sing. I haven’t learned them, so they’re doing it for me. They’re supposed to help you sleep.”
    They weren ’t what he would have called lullabies—more like spirituals, with intricate, soaring tunes. Still, they did their job. Pilar slid down next to him, drowsy, as he