Sick in the Head
By Owen Clarke
I was lying in a crumbling brick hotel in Huaraz, Peru, watching 1980s softcore pornography on my iPhone and shitting every few minutes into one of those squat-in-the-air, hole-in-the-ground, Christ-I-hope-nothing-crawls-out-of-this-thing-while-I’m-sleeping affairs.
The only food I could keep down was crackers and fruit juice, and my bed stank of sweat, and when I went out to buy the crackers and juice every day at a corner stall, I shambled like nails were hammered into all my joints. I’d always heard Huaraz was a nice place for visiting climbers. It probably is nice, but it was not nice for me. There was a trash-filled river that ran behind my hotel. It was haunted by cripples and women selling Chinese garbage and drunk men pissing. Used bits of toilet paper and soda bottles and chips bag wrappers rambled on the wind. The term fresh air was an oxymoron.
I’d come over the mountains from San Marcos on a motorbike five days before, to talk to a man named Carlos. I broached the high pass at 15,000 feet in a snowstorm, my fingers frostbitten on the clutch and front brake, and was nearly run off the road by a careening chicken bus. I punched it just in time to slip through a gap of blank space on the edge of the road between the bus and the abyss and then pulled over and screamed FUCCKKKKKKK into my helmet. I peered down at the gloom of thousands of feet of frigid air, laced with snowfall, and thought about my form somersaulting into the endless.
I carved my way downwards, on the bike, out of the snow and into the gray, dead air below. You pass through many two-cent villages on these roads, clusters of huts and naked children and a speed bump and someone selling chips and candy on a stick. On a bike, this means you are chased by barking dogs, who are in turn chased by little Quechua women built like cantaloupes. I felt flashes of irritation at this. Idiots! Keep your dogs in control! Anger, I find, is often a harbinger of some physical malady. It comes in the head before the body. In this case, before the gut.
I passed a dozen of these little villages and became increasingly agitated, and fantasized about kicking the dogs with my boot. Crunch! Whap!
By the time I reached the glacial lakes halfway to the cutoff running north to Huaraz, I was feverish. By the time I stepped off the bike in town, I was leaking out of my asshole.
I wanted to go back over the high pass to San Marcos, where I had a dry bag full of gear and clothing and a laptop. With me in Huaraz I had brought only a single pair of clothes, a toothbrush, a passport, a wallet, a cell phone, and a Nalgene water bottle. But the road back to the alpine valley was cold and wet and windy, and riding a motorcycle when this ill seemed moronic.
So I stayed in the hotel in Huaraz.
I assumed I’d suffered food poisoning at the hands of a grim Quechua woman a couple of days before. She had lived hard. It showed. I don’t know the location of her house-restaurant, and I’m quite sure it is not on Yelp, but it was on a wide, barren plain somewhere near a lagoon, swept with dagger wind. I’d come from smoggy Barranca on the coast, and had been stuck at a roadblock for four hours, so I told myself I was starving, though this was not true. I’d probably eaten six eggs at breakfast. In any case, I was looking for comida, and the woman said she had some. I’d paid her a sole, so about thirty cents.
After spinning something over a spit on a fire behind the hut, she brought out a charred half flank of goat—bristly black hair sticking from it in tufts—paired with a slime of lima beans and something else I cannot describe.
The woman and her child stood by, baleful, as I inspected the offering. I try to eat anything, and used to figure good courtesy is worth more than a clean stomach, so I ate as much of it as I could, making sure to sample a solid portion of each of the three “courses,” before running out the side door when the woman wasn’t looking. The child pointed at me, silent, accusatory, as I fired up the bike and blitzed off into the wind.
I was cursed.
A day later came the shits and the vomiting and shakes and chills in Huaraz, and an oppressive feeling, as I lay sweating in the thin cotton sheets, stained yellow, that I was phase-shifting between two planes of existence. In one plane I was a human being, in another I was an abomination, an evil, perverted thing that did not deserve to live. Time jumped back and forth and sideways. I could not keep it in line.
Did I eat the food before I became sick, or after?
⸻
I am feeling wired as I write this, sitting in a coffee shop near my house in Huntsville, Alabama. I am here often. It is a pretentious sort of establishment. Everyone has piercings and dyed hair and seems embarrassed to smile. The men are either paunchy or lean or muscled but manicured, and wear t-shirts of custom motorcycle manufacturing brands that don’t actually exist, and sport tattoos of snakes and tigers and daggers, with slogans like “SINNERS STRIKE FIRST” and “NO GODS NO MASTERS” that would perhaps fit at a muay thai ring in south Asia, but do not feel relevant for life in the suburbs.
The WiFi is strong and the coffee is also quite strong. The former is why I take my laptop here to write, the latter is why I am feeling wired. But food is bad and everything is overpriced, and the people who work here make me cringe.
I was sick, but I am starting to feel better. I think I have the coronavirus. I feel slightly bad about being out in public, but I’ve started to tell myself the coronavirus is now much like the common cold. Maybe if you are ill, I imagine, you should not tongue an aging cancer patient, but you can walk around and order coffee from hipsters.
It feels like I am the happiest when I am moving so quickly that I can’t see my feet. If I am going to stop moving, I need something very strong, like a bleeding intestinal tract and shitty hotel room, to stave off the real sickness. This makes me wonder if my illnesses are acute viruses that sporadically catch me, or actually chronic conditions that have been riding my shoulders this whole time.
Many people seem to spend their whole life searching for the sunlight.
Some warm place where they can bask and be happy and understand the world around them and feel it understands them. I used to think those people were fools, pack mules who stuffed their own saddlebags with bricks and then stood on the scale and said, “Shit.”
I've always thought I knew exactly where the sunlight was. Maybe I do, but I’ve never worn sunscreen, and they say skin cancer will eventually catch up to you.
I get lunch with my dad some days, and he tells me I am drifting. He asks me where I see myself in five years. He tells me my career does not appear sustainable, and asks me when I will consider attending law school like him. I should “try it out.” I tell him that freelance journalism is quite fulfilling, and I have no desire to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans merely to “try something out.” My dad makes a face like he has bitten into a cherry, and is trying to separate the juicy flesh from the pit. We come at the conversation from another angle, then. My mom makes similar queries.
In bed at night, I ask myself, “Am I drifting?” I cannot make sense of the question, so I try to fall asleep as quickly as possible.
I feel I can never escape a general illness in life. It is always shambling behind me. It has chased me all over the world, pale and shaking and feverish, and it leaps onto my back when I slow down.
I know nothing about close quarters combat, so when it does catch me it is a dire affair and a complex disentanglement, but I eventually escape, though it seems to take longer and longer every time. But even when I extricate myself from its clutches and start running again, I cannot bring myself to attend a martial arts class, much less therapy. Instead, I tell myself I need to learn how to run faster and longer and drink more Red Bull, and carry a big fixed blade knife on my hip so people will know I am hard.
⸻
I had come to San Marcos and Chavín de Huántar and Huari and these other little Ancash towns to investigate a strip mine poisoning the local water supply. I was an amateur, with a middling grasp of Spanish and none at all of Quechua. Save for the ten or so days holed up in Huaraz bleeding out of my asshole, I spent several weeks riding around the mountains on a motorbike chatting with locals but uncovering mostly gossip and hearsay.
In Lima, I waited for five hours outside the iron-barred gates of the Peruvian Ministerio de Energía y Minas, with no idea how to make anyone talk to me. They never did. A secretary returned my emails and phone calls with vague platitudes. A city official in San Marcos later said that if I kept asking questions they thought I would be killed, which excited me. I felt like a character in a Graham Greene novel, who doesn’t have to make hard decisions about life because he finds himself in situations that are larger than him, because great forces conspire against him. But my assassination did not come to pass. I did not work for The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but for a magazine about rock climbing that no one had ever heard of. The mine and the Ministerio de Energía y Minas were not intimidated by me, and I was too lazy to make them be.
One afternoon, whether before or after the food poisoning I cannot remember, I rode along one of those trash rivers in the slopes above San Marcos, hounded by barking dogs who were hounded by canteloupe women. I came across an old man in a fedora and three-piece suit sitting in a plastic chair. It was abominably hot. My skin prickled in the sun. A pearl-tipped cane rested on the man’s knees. His nose and ears were elephantine. I asked him about the mine poisoning the water.
He shrugged. “Sí, la mina envenena el agua. También lo envenenamos.”
He gestured with a gnarled finger to the dry, litter-filled riverbed behind me. The mine poisons the water, and so do we.
“Está todo enfermo. La tierra. La gente. Todo.” It’s all sick. The land. The people.
He kicked at an empty beer can by his foot.
I asked this old man who he was waiting on, who he was dressed up for, but he began mumbling inscrutable responses and I got the impression that he was tired of talking with me. I rode away.
A few hours later and a few thousand feet higher, I crashed my bike on a steep slope, and pinned my right thigh into the mud. The mud was so soupy and deep that it felt like I was sinking down into the earth, and at this weird angle, lying on my hip, head downhill, one leg pinned up to my groin, I could not lift the motorbike so much as a foot. It was like trying to bench press while hanging upside down. I felt like a turtle flipped onto its back. I was mostly over the food poisoning by this point, but I could feel another bout of diarrhea coming on.
After several minutes of wrangling, I realized I was overthinking it. I did not need force. I needed savvy. I didn’t need to lift the motorbike. I just needed to cock my leg at an angle, so that the bulge of my knee could slip by the crash bar. Then I could push the bike not up, but sideways, and extricate my leg.
I did so, and rode back down into San Marcos with bruised bones and a suit of mud.
On the way back to Lima a week or so later, I began ripping the bike. Really gunning it. I spilled gasoline over myself while filling up at a desert station, and the smell was nauseating and empowering. Fuck it, maybe I’ll catch on fire, I thought. The road was straight and flat and it wrapped over the curve of the horizon, and the wind was so strong it blew my goggles off my face twice. I moved like a bolt of lightning and played heavy metal in my helmet.
A few dozen kilometers north of the city, I began feeling the illness—the big one—creeping on. Instead of staying on the Pan American highway, I checked my map and found a winding coastal route, on the edge of the cliffs of the Pacific, labeled the “Serpentín Pasamayo.” Signs and barricades indicated that Serpentín was off limits to the public, closed to all but commercial transport vehicles, but I decided it was unlikely there would be police on the road, so I turned on.
(I would later learn this undulating, precipitous road was also known as the Pasamayo Maldito [“Cursed”], because so many people have died on it.)
I blitzed along the snaky, sand-covered road, which rimmed the edge of crumbling sea cliffs. There was no guardrail. Grit was in my eyes and nose and between the folds of my skin, the Pacific crashed on the right far below, the sky was gray, and the world was dull and muted. It was physically cold, but there was a warmth in the maritime fog that enveloped everything like a big, sad hug.
I blazed through this murk, and came around a curve into the mouth of a flashing siren and a police car blocking the road. ABS kicked in, police started yammering at me, and I pulled the bike over and pretended to have a case of utter amnesia and no understanding of Spanish.
We went through the usual motions.
They asked me who I was, threatened to arrest me, and teased jail, then one walked away and pretended to look off into the horizon and pick his pants out of his asscrack while the other demanded bribes. All I could think about was jacking off in a hotel room and eating cheap sushi and drinking Cusqueña, so I haggled weakly and I paid them an amount I instantly regretted, and they let me continue riding my motorcycle along the Serpentín.
In Lima, everyone was wearing masks on the streets because of the coronavirus. The rainstorm that had lurked on the coast was battering the city. I booked a swanky hotel for cheap, and I watched a kung-fu movie in my spacious room on the fifteenth floor. The big illness caught up with me that night, after I’d jacked off and eaten the sushi and drunk seven beers. I lay defenseless on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and it washed over me.
“Why are you doing this?” the policeman on the Serpentín had asked me in Spanish.
“I didn’t know the road was closed,” I responded.
But he knew and I knew and so he smiled an unfriendly smile and shook his head and counted the soles I’d handed him.
“Vete de aquí,” he’d said. “Get out of here.”
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of Dead Foot Collective. You can find his work on his website.
