That morning Lisha stood perfectly still in the doorway of our hut. Then, as if on reflex, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. If Mama had been awake, I’m sure she would have been afraid. Truth is, it wasn’t the first time I’d caught my sister doing that sort of thing first thing in the morning. Usually I’d crawl back into bed and go on sleeping. But this time, without warning, she snapped out of it and bolted—straight into the jungle.

I dragged myself up and followed at a distance, watching her vanish in and out of the foliage, afraid a snake would sink its fangs into her bare feet—feet I pictured combing through the morning moss. I stumbled over vines, ishpingos, and sharp stones. Then I heard my mother calling my name from far off. I yelled back that we were coming, offering no explanation, trying to preserve the illusion that nothing strange was happening. She stayed in the doorway for a few seconds and then disappeared again into the hut’s darkness, used to my sister’s sealed-off curiosity.

Fifteen minutes later Lisha stopped at the edge of the Marañón, where, for some reason, other barefoot children had gathered, facing the river’s black, stagnant water. My sister looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and with the others we breathed in the stench of death that had soaked the landscape. Rows of corpses floated for meters: paiches, piranhas, eels, turtles… all turned into inert silhouettes, bogged down in crude oil that spread for dozens of meters downstream.

I didn’t even have time to ask what was wrong with her. Lisha crouched and pressed her nose close to the dark liquid, whispering words that sounded like the incomprehensible things Papa used to say. I’d been told chemicals could kill you if they touched your skin, so I yanked her up by force.

A little while later a handful of men arrived in white coveralls with measuring devices, crossing their arms and huffing as they did nothing. One chewed sugarcane while talking to the others; another bobbed his head to the cumbia spilling from his battery radio. Without a word they began digging a huge pit in the ground and, when they were nearly halfway down, one of them asked if we wanted to make money. We didn’t answer, but he pointed anyway at some empty buckets stacked a couple of feet away.

“With these you’re going to scoop up that black water and dump it in this hole,” he said. “If you do it, I’ll pay you four… no, five soles per bucket!”

When we thanked him, he patted our heads and told us the oil company workers were also part of the community. That was why they wanted us to take a little cash home. To be honest, the man sounded like one of us. That’s why we trusted him.

How stupid we were.

We asked for some of those white coveralls so we could start working, but all we got was a hurried shove and a sarcastic laugh. Who does this brat think he is? He should be grateful he’s getting anything at all. There were eight of us, and none of us had on anything but what we’d woken up in. We started walking, each of us swinging an empty bucket, back toward the Marañón, waiting with its sick drool.

The men in coveralls finished digging and disappeared toward the company offices. “When the pit’s full, come find us in that hut over there,” they told us. “We’ll count it up and pay you. Just don’t get distracted with nonsense. Your work is very important. Your families depend on you.”

We found a few meters of rope and ran to the small wooden bridge over the river. We climbed up onto the railing, dropped the buckets down, hauled them back up—now full of oil—then carried them to the pit and buried, bit by bit, the evidence of the disaster. With every bucket we transported, droplets of that substance jumped and stuck to our legs, but not enough to worry about. Still, as the hours wore on, we worked faster, harder, and that’s when the first irritations appeared: sores on our fingers, eyes swelling like huge blisters in the middle of our faces.

“Stop,” one of us said. “I can’t.” But we didn’t listen, because we were already doing the math. Five soles. Three times five, five times five, seven times five. Maybe if I pooled my money with Lisha’s we could take Mama to town, beyond the mountain, and buy blankets for the highland people. Or maybe with my share I could buy a chemistry book. I loved studying—maybe because, in our community, any dream beyond fieldwork was an open act of rebellion.

We kept at it until late afternoon, going back and forth, carrying buckets and pouring into the pit great amounts of viscous matter mixed with dead animals. We were panting; our arms shook with effort. Once, one of the boys slipped and the oil poured over him, burning the skin on his belly. He started to cry, but we stayed quiet. We were afraid the men in white would get angry and cancel our deal. The boy got up, blew on himself as if that could help, and sat down on a rock.

“And your money?” we asked.

“I don’t want it anymore,” he said.

At one point Lisha almost slipped on the slick ground. I saved her, gripping her hard by the wrist, keeping her from falling. She looked at me without a word. Dozens of pearly droplets slid down from her forehead.

On one of the trips, the boy on the rock called to me.

“Mayu,” he said, and I recognized him. It was Joao, Doña Bertha’s son. He used to help his mother sell yuca and sugarcane at the market. “Mayu,” he confessed, “everything itches.”

He lifted his shirt, and on his little belly I saw the bright red of inflamed flesh. I was still carrying two buckets almost full, but I stepped aside to help him.

“You have to wash,” I told him. “You can’t stay like this. Go to town and get water.”

But I knew my advice was useless. How was he going to get it if the river was completely dead? I held out my hand and pulled him up with difficulty. Surely if Mama saw him we could give him some of what we had left from the day before.

But I had to stop.

A scream jolted my guts.

One of the children was running toward us, shouting. On his face I caught a look of terror. Then I realized it was my name echoing from his mouth, growing like a backward echo. When he got close enough I could see tears on his cheeks and snot spilling from his nose.

“Your sister fell,” he stammered. “She fell into the river.”

We ran to the wooden bridge. Everyone leaned over the edge, looking down at the black slick churning in a confused whirlpool where it was impossible to make out any shape. I screamed Lisha’s name and, when I did, the sharp reek of petroleum flooded my mouth. Instinctively I climbed the railing to jump in, but in the heat of it my eyes found Joao—he’d followed me despite the pain—and I saw the sores on his stomach again. If I jumped, I would probably die before I could help her.

We tied the buckets to the ropes and threw them toward where Lisha had gone under, hoping she could grab onto something. As we waited, desperate, for one of the ropes to finally jerk tight, I remembered my sister facing the jungle the way she liked to, eyes closed and mouth open to the Amazon. Sometimes she’d go up to the trees and speak to them softly, always in Papa’s language. Some people thought there was something wrong with her. I was afraid of losing her like this—of death taking her before I could learn what those mysteries meant.

Little by little the water began to settle back into stillness. Seeing my panic, Joao shouted at me to hurry to town—who knew, maybe they could still rescue her. In my mind I saw big hospitals, the kind you find in the capital, and I let myself cling to that small hope. How hard it was to leave the bridge behind. It felt like betraying my sister, but somewhere inside I knew we had reached the point where asking for help was the best thing.

The town police station was small, with mud walls painted a pale green. On the roof you could see a Peruvian flag that didn’t wave; it hung dirty and inert, crumpled around the pole. Beside the door a guard leaned against the wall smoking. The moment I approached he straightened up, lifting his chin. Between sobs and gasps I told him everything, pointing into the jungle. He sighed and led me inside, where a fat officer with a thin mustache sat at a desk next to a fan. The guard who’d been smoking recounted my tragedy with distance, as if it were an anecdote. They gave me a glass of water and took my statement. I wanted to scream that my sister could still be saved if they hurried with me back to the bridge, but the fat officer insisted on scratching out his version of events on paper.

“Lisha is still there. She’s dying,” I said.

They told me to go home, that the next day they would speak with the oil company so it would cover the burial expenses—tell my mother she wouldn’t have to spend a single sol.

I sprinted out of the station, tripping on stones along the dirt road to the municipal building. When I got there, about twenty people stood at the entrance, their faces stricken. I guessed word had spread about my sister’s accident. When I arrived, I hardly needed to introduce myself. Two women hugged me right away and offered their condolences.

“But she isn’t dead,” I told them. “I know she’s fighting. We can still do something.”

They brought me to the main hall and offered me a small handful of coca leaves, which I refused. Then two men appeared. One wore a rolled-up shirt and a hat; the other was bald, in a black suit. They introduced themselves as the community leader and the mayor. I begged for help, shouting that the police had misunderstood me and that Lisha was two hours into the jungle. They listened, then stepped into a corner and argued in low voices. When they came back they told me not to worry: the next day they would talk to the oil company themselves.

“You know,” they added, “about the burial expenses.”

I fled that place, too. On the way back to the bridge, as the sky began to darken, I started to cry. I imagined Lisha’s body being dragged by the slow, thick, black current, beneath the surface, alongside dead fish, eels, and turtles.

When I reached the river I saw lights floating like magic along both banks. Up close I realized they were kerosene lamps. The villagers moved through the blackened foliage, searching for the body. I found Mama minutes later, after she broke free from a group of women holding her. She stroked my head and breathed in deeply. Then she made me promise that when I grew up I would leave that damned jungle—that was what she called it. Only then did I notice the oil covering her up to the waist.

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

°°°

“Engineer?” Joao’s deep voice yanks me back to the present.

The hut I shared with my mother and Lisha is still standing. It’s hard to believe, after so many years. The floor is littered with bird droppings, and the wooden walls are swollen from the rain, but in the nostalgia of it all it feels easy to put everything back together. I remember Mama harvesting coffee without rest to send me to the capital to study. I don’t think I’ll ever fully grasp the scale of her sacrifice.

“Don’t call me engineer, Joao. Please.”

“All right… Mayu.”

Lisha’s death brought me close to Joao, the boy with sores on his stomach. You could say we adopted each other, just to endure the jungle’s hard life. When I left for Lima right after finishing school, we always found a way to stay in touch through social media. I told him about university. He never shared my passion for chemical engineering, but he celebrated each of my achievements as if they were his. He also brought me news from the village. In the end, he always came back to the same story. I loved him; after my mother’s sudden death, he became my only tie to my birthplace.

Now Joao’s face is the worn face of someone who has never known anything but field life. He looks at me without understanding what I’ve become. Maybe that’s for the best. His lean, coppery body moves through the hut, too. He turns toward me, then toward the window.

“You and I have walked very different paths, Mayu. You study the science of the visible world, and I study the science of the spirit world.”

“What is all this about?”

“That we—shamans—can speak with the river. And these waters have been calling you. It’s your duty to listen.”

“You want me to do yopo? No. No way. Drugs and I…”

“You talk like one of them. Whites men may use sacred plants for entertainment, but we don’t. Come to yopo with respect and it will give you wisdom.”

Joao takes my hands. His skin is hot and rough. I can see the wrinkles on his face like stone furrows in a deep valley.

“I look for wisdom in other places now, Joao.”

“Mayu, the jungle speaks to us, and plants are our ears. If it isn’t in any book, it’s because books are written by white science. See it.”

In his eyes I catch a particular shine. I haven’t seen it since the day of the accident. His plea is hard, without grimaces or lament—someone who has learned to suffer without ever lowering his head.

“I’m afraid,” I hear myself say, as if the voice belonged to someone else.

“Easy,” my friend says. “I’ll guide you. I brought some seeds in the truck.”

The drive to the river is rough, but Joao is an excellent driver. At one point we pass a farmer; I greet him. Joao greets him too—and does the same with each of his cows, calling them by name. Fifteen minutes later he stops the truck. When I open the door, a familiar stench hits me, disrupting the natural smell of earth, sap, and chlorophyll.

“Another spill?”

“For a while now there’s been one every year, more or less. The pipeline is in terrible shape, and they do nothing to repair it.”

“And the police? The mayor?”

“The company pays them for their silence. In the end, corrupting the authorities is cheaper than paying government fines. Here, whoever gets some benefit stays quiet. Meanwhile, it’s others who suffer.”

We walk slowly, and I try not to slip on the oily ground. When we reach the middle of the bridge, Joao looks at me with seriousness.

“Now ask permission from this land that shelters us.”

I do, eyes closed. It’s impossible to leave behind so many years of scientific training and step into the spirit world without feeling a little foolish. Still, I know this matters to my friend.

We sit at the exact spot where Lisha fell, that morning twenty years ago. Joao opens his satchel and pulls out a hand-carved silver tray shaped like a leaf. He places the yopo seeds on it and grinds them with a stone mortar. Then, in an egg-shaped bowl, he burns a handful of dried leaves and mixes the ashes with the powdered seeds on the tray. Finally he takes a tiny spoon from his pocket and measures a small amount of the mixture onto it.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he says, offering me the spoon. “This will be between the Marañón and you. I’ll be watching from the end of the bridge.”

With that he stands and walks away, whistling under the midday sun.

Below me stretch the Marañón’s contaminated waters. In places the pooled oil has taken on an iridescent sheen. You don’t even see dead animals anymore: the spills have progressively erased every trace of life. Over time these lands have become an infernal landscape. I’m not surprised more and more families are leaving the village behind. Still, the smell of chemicals is no worse than the smell of yopo: the powder grows more astringent as I bring the spoon to my nose. When I finally inhale, a sharp burn runs along my nostrils and seconds later lodges deep inside my head. I can’t help coughing.

Little by little the morning’s brightness dims. The edges of things blur and lose their color, as if the signal has gone bad, and a kind of fog reduces everything to black and white. The muscles in my face dry out and stiffen into an uneven grimace. I am a sculpture of clay. All I can do is fold my head between my knees. Now I am a spiral tightening around my own belly. Is that saliva sliding down my legs? No. It’s a whitish vomit. I tremble.

Mayu, brother.

I lift my head. Somehow I’ve managed to control the first shock of the trance. With difficulty I get to my feet, using the bridge rail for support.

Mayu, listen to me.

“Lisha!” I shout. “Where are you?” I search in vain for the source of the voice before realizing it comes from everywhere at once.

There is no where, and no who. I am your sister, but at the same time I am the jungle around you.

Under the yopo’s influence, it’s easy to understand her. It feels like a form of communication that is logical, natural. Ancient. An irresistible impulse makes me open my mouth and draw in deep—to swallow the Amazon, to let it flood my body with its invisible light… the way she used to.

I see her again on the day she fell. I see her body fighting in the black water, sinking, defeated, coming to rest among contaminated underwater vegetation. Then I feel, in my own flesh, her decomposition, and for an instant I become the current that dragged her remains slowly downstream. Finally I am the earth where she washed ashore, dissolving into time until she is one with the soil.

“This is impossible.”

The years have made you blind to the spirit world, Mayu. Focus. Let yopo help you, and return to your communion with the land.

I tell myself the whole hallucination is nothing but my unconscious projected outward. But what if it isn’t? What if a non-scientific truth really exists? The moment those doubts appear, my body rewards me with warmth and surrender. I can almost see myself breaking into infinite particles, floating over the great green canopy. Now I am in a jaguar’s muzzle, between a macaw’s wings, in the cry of an Indigenous child. All life is equally important.

This new dimension overwhelms me, and silently I’m ashamed of my small physical body—so limited, and yet so proud.

Thank the shaman who brought you here, because thanks to him you have been born. Now be messenger, and be message. We will see each other again when you are ready. I love you.

“No—no. Wait! Don’t leave me!” I say, though I know that, outwardly, my voice must sound like incomprehensible gibberish—the sounds of Papa’s language.

Against the monochrome landscape an arabesque of bright fuchsia appears, suspended above the water like a will-o’-the-wisp. Then it begins to split into hexagons that pulse and throw off flashes of light. The hexagons cluster, spin, lock into one another in a dizzying choreography that, despite everything, I enjoy. An immense peace washes over me, and I feel my chest fill with a liquid that doesn’t exist—cold, yet without matter.

A heave throws my body forward, pouring out a great rush of vomit and forcing me out of the trance. Like a newborn, almost blind, I grope for something to hold onto. My hands find Joao’s. He blows cigarette smoke toward me to calm me as he sings an ícaro.

non papan kape
kapetima ‘inon
oxo ‘irapanen
chona ‘irapanen
kapetima ‘inon
teatima ‘inon
‘inon kana ‘e

“It was her,” I say, in small spasms.

“Could you understand her?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Good.”

On the way back I can’t speak. The truck bounces along the badly packed dirt road, and my friend watches me in the rearview mirror.

“You knew the river was calling me in Lisha’s voice, didn’t you?” I ask, before we reach the hotel where I’m staying.

“Not just me. All the shamans said the Marañón had changed its voice. The difference is that only I remember your sister.”

“That’s why you asked me to come after all these years?”

“Yes.”

We fall silent again, the afterimages still spinning in my head. I search for an explanation—something that won’t shatter my logical picture of the world. What was that voice, those strange geometric visions? Did they mean something, or were they random—scribbles from my own psyche?

Stories about fractals and animal visions are common in ayahuasca experiences. But I’m sure this was more than a trick of perception. Somehow it came to me like a secret, like the earth whispering into my nonhuman ear. Maybe they were textile patterns, a kind of map, or a schematic of—

“That’s it!” I shout, unable to contain my astonishment.

Joao jumps, and the truck brakes hard on the dirt, kicking up heavy dust that blooms into the afternoon sky.

“Those hexagons!” I tell him, still shaken. “They formed the shape… of a polymer!”

Back in my hotel room I open my laptop and start searching. Without doubt, what had been revealed to me in the vision was a polyphenol—or rather, a natural polyphenol. A tannin. But what did that have to do with me? I try to get to the bottom of it and keep running into dead ends.

Then I find a paper that sheds some light: “Efficient and sustainable treatment of industrial wastewater using a tannin-based polymer,” published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. The article discusses natural polymers as a green alternative for coagulating waste. Better yet, the method would make it possible to clean water simply, using almost exclusively the seeds of a plant unknown to me: nirmali.

My mind takes flight. What if we could synthesize a coagulant through the Mannich reaction, producing a polymer with higher molecular weight? What if we could push the process further and build a set of artisanal skimmers to clean the river safely, without depending on the oil company? It wouldn’t be an easy project—so little is known about the structure and properties of these molecules. In fact, it would probably take years to develop the technology to scale production. And yet something binds me to nirmali, from a perspective that goes far beyond science. Somehow I feel compelled to learn everything about what this plant can do. What doors have opened in my mind?

I find an image of nirmali online without trouble. Its scientific name is Strychnos potatorum, and at first glance it doesn’t look as imposing as I imagined. But the earth thinks differently, and I understand that its designs don’t have to match our expectations.

I have to shake off this absurd idea. The longer I stare at the image, the more the sense grows that the plant is trying to tell me something.

I leave the hotel and walk through town. I need perspective, a way to order the vertigo of the last few hours. At the entrance of the police station I see a young guard smoking a cigarette. I imagine a boy running to him with the news that his sister fell into the river. I imagine the guard going with him, sharing his urgency, assuring him he isn’t alone. I’m sure that boy would have felt less vulnerable, and would not have carried that death on his shoulders—still weak, still immature.

The guard watches me pass and takes another drag. Smoking here is an expensive vice. If this station and all government buildings vanished, there would be more benefits than losses. After all, Amazonian communities have lived in self-governance for thousands of years. It’s only a matter of returning to the old models.

It would be so good to return to the natural governance of beings with the land, not over it.

A few blocks away, a small man with sun-burnt skin steps out of the municipal building accompanied by another man in a white hard hat. The small man is probably the former mayor’s son, heir to a long dynasty of corrupt authorities. On his companion’s hard hat, as he turns to look at me, I make out the oil company logo.

“Good morning, Engineer!” he calls from a distance.

“Good morning,” I answer. “Have you heard about the villagers’ uprising?”

“Uprising?”

“I’ve heard they’re organizing. They say they’ll clean the river themselves first, with their own methods, and then they’ll reclaim their land.”

Both men smile.

“It’s the same old story,” the mayor adds.

I head toward where the road ends and the vegetation begins.

“Not this time,” I say. “If I were you, I’d watch my back.”

I walk into the absolute green. I feel strong and calm, like at the beginning of a battle. I think about how much it will cost to fix up my mother’s old hut. I picture it alive again, sunlight slipping through the wood, and me in the doorway, eyes closed, mouth wide open, drawing in the jungle—every last particle of it.

That morning Lisha stood perfectly still in the doorway of our hut. Then, as if on reflex, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. If Mama had been awake, I’m sure she would have been afraid. Truth is, it wasn’t the first time I’d caught my sister doing that sort of thing first thing in the morning. Usually I’d crawl back into bed and go on sleeping. But this time, without warning, she snapped out of it and bolted—straight into the jungle.

I dragged myself up and followed at a distance, watching her vanish in and out of the foliage, afraid a snake would sink its fangs into her bare feet—feet I pictured combing through the morning moss. I stumbled over vines, ishpingos, and sharp stones. Then I heard my mother calling my name from far off. I yelled back that we were coming, offering no explanation, trying to preserve the illusion that nothing strange was happening. She stayed in the doorway for a few seconds and then disappeared again into the hut’s darkness, used to my sister’s sealed-off curiosity.

Fifteen minutes later Lisha stopped at the edge of the Marañón, where, for some reason, other barefoot children had gathered, facing the river’s black, stagnant water. My sister looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and with the others we breathed in the stench of death that had soaked the landscape. Rows of corpses floated for meters: paiches, piranhas, eels, turtles… all turned into inert silhouettes, bogged down in crude oil that spread for dozens of meters downstream.

I didn’t even have time to ask what was wrong with her. Lisha crouched and pressed her nose close to the dark liquid, whispering words that sounded like the incomprehensible things Papa used to say. I’d been told chemicals could kill you if they touched your skin, so I yanked her up by force.

A little while later a handful of men arrived in white coveralls with measuring devices, crossing their arms and huffing as they did nothing. One chewed sugarcane while talking to the others; another bobbed his head to the cumbia spilling from his battery radio. Without a word they began digging a huge pit in the ground and, when they were nearly halfway down, one of them asked if we wanted to make money. We didn’t answer, but he pointed anyway at some empty buckets stacked a couple of feet away.

“With these you’re going to scoop up that black water and dump it in this hole,” he said. “If you do it, I’ll pay you four… no, five soles per bucket!”

When we thanked him, he patted our heads and told us the oil company workers were also part of the community. That was why they wanted us to take a little cash home. To be honest, the man sounded like one of us. That’s why we trusted him.

How stupid we were.

We asked for some of those white coveralls so we could start working, but all we got was a hurried shove and a sarcastic laugh. Who does this brat think he is? He should be grateful he’s getting anything at all. There were eight of us, and none of us had on anything but what we’d woken up in. We started walking, each of us swinging an empty bucket, back toward the Marañón, waiting with its sick drool.

The men in coveralls finished digging and disappeared toward the company offices. “When the pit’s full, come find us in that hut over there,” they told us. “We’ll count it up and pay you. Just don’t get distracted with nonsense. Your work is very important. Your families depend on you.”

We found a few meters of rope and ran to the small wooden bridge over the river. We climbed up onto the railing, dropped the buckets down, hauled them back up—now full of oil—then carried them to the pit and buried, bit by bit, the evidence of the disaster. With every bucket we transported, droplets of that substance jumped and stuck to our legs, but not enough to worry about. Still, as the hours wore on, we worked faster, harder, and that’s when the first irritations appeared: sores on our fingers, eyes swelling like huge blisters in the middle of our faces.

“Stop,” one of us said. “I can’t.” But we didn’t listen, because we were already doing the math. Five soles. Three times five, five times five, seven times five. Maybe if I pooled my money with Lisha’s we could take Mama to town, beyond the mountain, and buy blankets for the highland people. Or maybe with my share I could buy a chemistry book. I loved studying—maybe because, in our community, any dream beyond fieldwork was an open act of rebellion.

We kept at it until late afternoon, going back and forth, carrying buckets and pouring into the pit great amounts of viscous matter mixed with dead animals. We were panting; our arms shook with effort. Once, one of the boys slipped and the oil poured over him, burning the skin on his belly. He started to cry, but we stayed quiet. We were afraid the men in white would get angry and cancel our deal. The boy got up, blew on himself as if that could help, and sat down on a rock.

“And your money?” we asked.

“I don’t want it anymore,” he said.

At one point Lisha almost slipped on the slick ground. I saved her, gripping her hard by the wrist, keeping her from falling. She looked at me without a word. Dozens of pearly droplets slid down from her forehead.

On one of the trips, the boy on the rock called to me.

“Mayu,” he said, and I recognized him. It was Joao, Doña Bertha’s son. He used to help his mother sell yuca and sugarcane at the market. “Mayu,” he confessed, “everything itches.”

He lifted his shirt, and on his little belly I saw the bright red of inflamed flesh. I was still carrying two buckets almost full, but I stepped aside to help him.

“You have to wash,” I told him. “You can’t stay like this. Go to town and get water.”

But I knew my advice was useless. How was he going to get it if the river was completely dead? I held out my hand and pulled him up with difficulty. Surely if Mama saw him we could give him some of what we had left from the day before.

But I had to stop.

A scream jolted my guts.

One of the children was running toward us, shouting. On his face I caught a look of terror. Then I realized it was my name echoing from his mouth, growing like a backward echo. When he got close enough I could see tears on his cheeks and snot spilling from his nose.

“Your sister fell,” he stammered. “She fell into the river.”

We ran to the wooden bridge. Everyone leaned over the edge, looking down at the black slick churning in a confused whirlpool where it was impossible to make out any shape. I screamed Lisha’s name and, when I did, the sharp reek of petroleum flooded my mouth. Instinctively I climbed the railing to jump in, but in the heat of it my eyes found Joao—he’d followed me despite the pain—and I saw the sores on his stomach again. If I jumped, I would probably die before I could help her.

We tied the buckets to the ropes and threw them toward where Lisha had gone under, hoping she could grab onto something. As we waited, desperate, for one of the ropes to finally jerk tight, I remembered my sister facing the jungle the way she liked to, eyes closed and mouth open to the Amazon. Sometimes she’d go up to the trees and speak to them softly, always in Papa’s language. Some people thought there was something wrong with her. I was afraid of losing her like this—of death taking her before I could learn what those mysteries meant.

Little by little the water began to settle back into stillness. Seeing my panic, Joao shouted at me to hurry to town—who knew, maybe they could still rescue her. In my mind I saw big hospitals, the kind you find in the capital, and I let myself cling to that small hope. How hard it was to leave the bridge behind. It felt like betraying my sister, but somewhere inside I knew we had reached the point where asking for help was the best thing.

The town police station was small, with mud walls painted a pale green. On the roof you could see a Peruvian flag that didn’t wave; it hung dirty and inert, crumpled around the pole. Beside the door a guard leaned against the wall smoking. The moment I approached he straightened up, lifting his chin. Between sobs and gasps I told him everything, pointing into the jungle. He sighed and led me inside, where a fat officer with a thin mustache sat at a desk next to a fan. The guard who’d been smoking recounted my tragedy with distance, as if it were an anecdote. They gave me a glass of water and took my statement. I wanted to scream that my sister could still be saved if they hurried with me back to the bridge, but the fat officer insisted on scratching out his version of events on paper.

“Lisha is still there. She’s dying,” I said.

They told me to go home, that the next day they would speak with the oil company so it would cover the burial expenses—tell my mother she wouldn’t have to spend a single sol.

I sprinted out of the station, tripping on stones along the dirt road to the municipal building. When I got there, about twenty people stood at the entrance, their faces stricken. I guessed word had spread about my sister’s accident. When I arrived, I hardly needed to introduce myself. Two women hugged me right away and offered their condolences.

“But she isn’t dead,” I told them. “I know she’s fighting. We can still do something.”

They brought me to the main hall and offered me a small handful of coca leaves, which I refused. Then two men appeared. One wore a rolled-up shirt and a hat; the other was bald, in a black suit. They introduced themselves as the community leader and the mayor. I begged for help, shouting that the police had misunderstood me and that Lisha was two hours into the jungle. They listened, then stepped into a corner and argued in low voices. When they came back they told me not to worry: the next day they would talk to the oil company themselves.

“You know,” they added, “about the burial expenses.”

I fled that place, too. On the way back to the bridge, as the sky began to darken, I started to cry. I imagined Lisha’s body being dragged by the slow, thick, black current, beneath the surface, alongside dead fish, eels, and turtles.

When I reached the river I saw lights floating like magic along both banks. Up close I realized they were kerosene lamps. The villagers moved through the blackened foliage, searching for the body. I found Mama minutes later, after she broke free from a group of women holding her. She stroked my head and breathed in deeply. Then she made me promise that when I grew up I would leave that damned jungle—that was what she called it. Only then did I notice the oil covering her up to the waist.

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

°°°

“Engineer?” Joao’s deep voice yanks me back to the present.

The hut I shared with my mother and Lisha is still standing. It’s hard to believe, after so many years. The floor is littered with bird droppings, and the wooden walls are swollen from the rain, but in the nostalgia of it all it feels easy to put everything back together. I remember Mama harvesting coffee without rest to send me to the capital to study. I don’t think I’ll ever fully grasp the scale of her sacrifice.

“Don’t call me engineer, Joao. Please.”

“All right… Mayu.”

Lisha’s death brought me close to Joao, the boy with sores on his stomach. You could say we adopted each other, just to endure the jungle’s hard life. When I left for Lima right after finishing school, we always found a way to stay in touch through social media. I told him about university. He never shared my passion for chemical engineering, but he celebrated each of my achievements as if they were his. He also brought me news from the village. In the end, he always came back to the same story. I loved him; after my mother’s sudden death, he became my only tie to my birthplace.

Now Joao’s face is the worn face of someone who has never known anything but field life. He looks at me without understanding what I’ve become. Maybe that’s for the best. His lean, coppery body moves through the hut, too. He turns toward me, then toward the window.

“You and I have walked very different paths, Mayu. You study the science of the visible world, and I study the science of the spirit world.”

“What is all this about?”

“That we—shamans—can speak with the river. And these waters have been calling you. It’s your duty to listen.”

“You want me to do yopo? No. No way. Drugs and I…”

“You talk like one of them. Whites men may use sacred plants for entertainment, but we don’t. Come to yopo with respect and it will give you wisdom.”

Joao takes my hands. His skin is hot and rough. I can see the wrinkles on his face like stone furrows in a deep valley.

“I look for wisdom in other places now, Joao.”

“Mayu, the jungle speaks to us, and plants are our ears. If it isn’t in any book, it’s because books are written by white science. See it.”

In his eyes I catch a particular shine. I haven’t seen it since the day of the accident. His plea is hard, without grimaces or lament—someone who has learned to suffer without ever lowering his head.

“I’m afraid,” I hear myself say, as if the voice belonged to someone else.

“Easy,” my friend says. “I’ll guide you. I brought some seeds in the truck.”

The drive to the river is rough, but Joao is an excellent driver. At one point we pass a farmer; I greet him. Joao greets him too—and does the same with each of his cows, calling them by name. Fifteen minutes later he stops the truck. When I open the door, a familiar stench hits me, disrupting the natural smell of earth, sap, and chlorophyll.

“Another spill?”

“For a while now there’s been one every year, more or less. The pipeline is in terrible shape, and they do nothing to repair it.”

“And the police? The mayor?”

“The company pays them for their silence. In the end, corrupting the authorities is cheaper than paying government fines. Here, whoever gets some benefit stays quiet. Meanwhile, it’s others who suffer.”

We walk slowly, and I try not to slip on the oily ground. When we reach the middle of the bridge, Joao looks at me with seriousness.

“Now ask permission from this land that shelters us.”

I do, eyes closed. It’s impossible to leave behind so many years of scientific training and step into the spirit world without feeling a little foolish. Still, I know this matters to my friend.

We sit at the exact spot where Lisha fell, that morning twenty years ago. Joao opens his satchel and pulls out a hand-carved silver tray shaped like a leaf. He places the yopo seeds on it and grinds them with a stone mortar. Then, in an egg-shaped bowl, he burns a handful of dried leaves and mixes the ashes with the powdered seeds on the tray. Finally he takes a tiny spoon from his pocket and measures a small amount of the mixture onto it.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he says, offering me the spoon. “This will be between the Marañón and you. I’ll be watching from the end of the bridge.”

With that he stands and walks away, whistling under the midday sun.

Below me stretch the Marañón’s contaminated waters. In places the pooled oil has taken on an iridescent sheen. You don’t even see dead animals anymore: the spills have progressively erased every trace of life. Over time these lands have become an infernal landscape. I’m not surprised more and more families are leaving the village behind. Still, the smell of chemicals is no worse than the smell of yopo: the powder grows more astringent as I bring the spoon to my nose. When I finally inhale, a sharp burn runs along my nostrils and seconds later lodges deep inside my head. I can’t help coughing.

Little by little the morning’s brightness dims. The edges of things blur and lose their color, as if the signal has gone bad, and a kind of fog reduces everything to black and white. The muscles in my face dry out and stiffen into an uneven grimace. I am a sculpture of clay. All I can do is fold my head between my knees. Now I am a spiral tightening around my own belly. Is that saliva sliding down my legs? No. It’s a whitish vomit. I tremble.

Mayu, brother.

I lift my head. Somehow I’ve managed to control the first shock of the trance. With difficulty I get to my feet, using the bridge rail for support.

Mayu, listen to me.

“Lisha!” I shout. “Where are you?” I search in vain for the source of the voice before realizing it comes from everywhere at once.

There is no where, and no who. I am your sister, but at the same time I am the jungle around you.

Under the yopo’s influence, it’s easy to understand her. It feels like a form of communication that is logical, natural. Ancient. An irresistible impulse makes me open my mouth and draw in deep—to swallow the Amazon, to let it flood my body with its invisible light… the way she used to.

I see her again on the day she fell. I see her body fighting in the black water, sinking, defeated, coming to rest among contaminated underwater vegetation. Then I feel, in my own flesh, her decomposition, and for an instant I become the current that dragged her remains slowly downstream. Finally I am the earth where she washed ashore, dissolving into time until she is one with the soil.

“This is impossible.”

The years have made you blind to the spirit world, Mayu. Focus. Let yopo help you, and return to your communion with the land.

I tell myself the whole hallucination is nothing but my unconscious projected outward. But what if it isn’t? What if a non-scientific truth really exists? The moment those doubts appear, my body rewards me with warmth and surrender. I can almost see myself breaking into infinite particles, floating over the great green canopy. Now I am in a jaguar’s muzzle, between a macaw’s wings, in the cry of an Indigenous child. All life is equally important.

This new dimension overwhelms me, and silently I’m ashamed of my small physical body—so limited, and yet so proud.

Thank the shaman who brought you here, because thanks to him you have been born. Now be messenger, and be message. We will see each other again when you are ready. I love you.

“No—no. Wait! Don’t leave me!” I say, though I know that, outwardly, my voice must sound like incomprehensible gibberish—the sounds of Papa’s language.

Against the monochrome landscape an arabesque of bright fuchsia appears, suspended above the water like a will-o’-the-wisp. Then it begins to split into hexagons that pulse and throw off flashes of light. The hexagons cluster, spin, lock into one another in a dizzying choreography that, despite everything, I enjoy. An immense peace washes over me, and I feel my chest fill with a liquid that doesn’t exist—cold, yet without matter.

A heave throws my body forward, pouring out a great rush of vomit and forcing me out of the trance. Like a newborn, almost blind, I grope for something to hold onto. My hands find Joao’s. He blows cigarette smoke toward me to calm me as he sings an ícaro.

non papan kape
kapetima ‘inon
oxo ‘irapanen
chona ‘irapanen
kapetima ‘inon
teatima ‘inon
‘inon kana ‘e

“It was her,” I say, in small spasms.

“Could you understand her?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Good.”

On the way back I can’t speak. The truck bounces along the badly packed dirt road, and my friend watches me in the rearview mirror.

“You knew the river was calling me in Lisha’s voice, didn’t you?” I ask, before we reach the hotel where I’m staying.

“Not just me. All the shamans said the Marañón had changed its voice. The difference is that only I remember your sister.”

“That’s why you asked me to come after all these years?”

“Yes.”

We fall silent again, the afterimages still spinning in my head. I search for an explanation—something that won’t shatter my logical picture of the world. What was that voice, those strange geometric visions? Did they mean something, or were they random—scribbles from my own psyche?

Stories about fractals and animal visions are common in ayahuasca experiences. But I’m sure this was more than a trick of perception. Somehow it came to me like a secret, like the earth whispering into my nonhuman ear. Maybe they were textile patterns, a kind of map, or a schematic of—

“That’s it!” I shout, unable to contain my astonishment.

Joao jumps, and the truck brakes hard on the dirt, kicking up heavy dust that blooms into the afternoon sky.

“Those hexagons!” I tell him, still shaken. “They formed the shape… of a polymer!”

Back in my hotel room I open my laptop and start searching. Without doubt, what had been revealed to me in the vision was a polyphenol—or rather, a natural polyphenol. A tannin. But what did that have to do with me? I try to get to the bottom of it and keep running into dead ends.

Then I find a paper that sheds some light: “Efficient and sustainable treatment of industrial wastewater using a tannin-based polymer,” published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. The article discusses natural polymers as a green alternative for coagulating waste. Better yet, the method would make it possible to clean water simply, using almost exclusively the seeds of a plant unknown to me: nirmali.

My mind takes flight. What if we could synthesize a coagulant through the Mannich reaction, producing a polymer with higher molecular weight? What if we could push the process further and build a set of artisanal skimmers to clean the river safely, without depending on the oil company? It wouldn’t be an easy project—so little is known about the structure and properties of these molecules. In fact, it would probably take years to develop the technology to scale production. And yet something binds me to nirmali, from a perspective that goes far beyond science. Somehow I feel compelled to learn everything about what this plant can do. What doors have opened in my mind?

I find an image of nirmali online without trouble. Its scientific name is Strychnos potatorum, and at first glance it doesn’t look as imposing as I imagined. But the earth thinks differently, and I understand that its designs don’t have to match our expectations.

I have to shake off this absurd idea. The longer I stare at the image, the more the sense grows that the plant is trying to tell me something.

I leave the hotel and walk through town. I need perspective, a way to order the vertigo of the last few hours. At the entrance of the police station I see a young guard smoking a cigarette. I imagine a boy running to him with the news that his sister fell into the river. I imagine the guard going with him, sharing his urgency, assuring him he isn’t alone. I’m sure that boy would have felt less vulnerable, and would not have carried that death on his shoulders—still weak, still immature.

The guard watches me pass and takes another drag. Smoking here is an expensive vice. If this station and all government buildings vanished, there would be more benefits than losses. After all, Amazonian communities have lived in self-governance for thousands of years. It’s only a matter of returning to the old models.

It would be so good to return to the natural governance of beings with the land, not over it.

A few blocks away, a small man with sun-burnt skin steps out of the municipal building accompanied by another man in a white hard hat. The small man is probably the former mayor’s son, heir to a long dynasty of corrupt authorities. On his companion’s hard hat, as he turns to look at me, I make out the oil company logo.

“Good morning, Engineer!” he calls from a distance.

“Good morning,” I answer. “Have you heard about the villagers’ uprising?”

“Uprising?”

“I’ve heard they’re organizing. They say they’ll clean the river themselves first, with their own methods, and then they’ll reclaim their land.”

Both men smile.

“It’s the same old story,” the mayor adds.

I head toward where the road ends and the vegetation begins.

“Not this time,” I say. “If I were you, I’d watch my back.”

I walk into the absolute green. I feel strong and calm, like at the beginning of a battle. I think about how much it will cost to fix up my mother’s old hut. I picture it alive again, sunlight slipping through the wood, and me in the doorway, eyes closed, mouth wide open, drawing in the jungle—every last particle of it.