The Assamans spent much of the daylight hours foraging for provender. They netted birds and bats and frogs, they tended their few chickens and the modest sorghum crop. They hunted and trapped rats and gerbils and snakes and small scaly animals with tapering tails. They gathered nuts and berries beyond the scope of any known botanica. There were some recognizable trees, including a few gnarled and stunted cherries; the people refused to pluck the fruit, waiting to pick it off the ground once it had fallen. The same with firewood; dead limbs and rotten branches were collected, but only from the floor—their animistic way, perhaps, of honoring the vibrant earth. They went about their chores without rancor or resentment or resignation, and without being too strenuous about them. They were kind to their children. They were good to the verminous dogs. They seemed generally to enjoy life despite the limitations imposed by a community not known for a rich variety of diversions, where extravagant self-indulgence meant a laundered robe for each seventh day, not unlike workers in the West, all gussied up once the workweek was done. At twilight, they emerged from their digs in Coproliabad to stroll and strut around the square, like the population of a little Mexican town doing the paseo.

When, mercifully, the sun finally went down and streamers of mist drifted among the treetops, the people returned to their shanties and kindled fires outside the doors to ward off evil as the hour of the ghosts approached. The squall of chatter and the furry calliope laughter subsided. The women like heavy-haunched Picassos sat out the night, eyes glowing like the embers of the fires before them, while moths dove close to the flames, flirting with suicide, and the men sang in praise of themselves, their good fortune, the ancestors within them, revelries, triumphs. They bayed incantations to the moon, their shrill, unrounded notes scaring off vultures while thousands of invisible frogs joined in the chorus. They danced, communing with the forest, floating through the mist like low-flying ghosts in a graceless stomp. There was something unnerving about it; Val gripped my hand tightly as we watched. Grady quoted Dracula. “‘The children of the night,’” he said, “‘are making their music.’”

TWENTY-NINE
SEE AND TALK TO LIVE NUDE GIRL

The jingle of tiny bells draws closer, a moving carillon. Daphne Titsworth minces into my cage wearing a modified bikini—two small saucers of fluff on her chest and a gauzy triangle that doesn’t quite contain the shrubbery on her pude.

A piece of yarn, attached to the lowest point of the triangle, ducked under her thighs, disappeared between the chubby cheeks of her ass, and, reemerging, looped around the girdle of bells at her waist. Her spike heels give her trouble; still she bounces toward me as if the uneven floor were a burlesque stage, an altogether strange and unsettling apparition lugging a canvas tote inscribed BLOOMINGDALE’S.