Deep in the verdant jungle of his dreams, it was a long journey before Buddy Crapo, intrepid assistant to the Empathic Botanist, Doctor Mikare, arrived at the place he and his friend, Samson Seamus, journalist at large, had been seeking for so long. First having traveled by blimp along the Sirocco winds, they followed a route that they transcribed from an etched obsidian plate uncovered from the sea after three thousand years of burial. At the map’s end, a quick turn down a massive sinkhole, half-hidden by an ancient beech forest once sacred to the Carthaginians, led the hovering craft through seemingly endless ways of strange, star-crossed void. They found themselves on the side of a dormant volcano overlooking the coast of some far-flung place, choked with jungle as green as an emerald under the eye of a sun that was as fiery as a citrine, and just as radiantly hot. Knowing a good place to stop when they saw one, Buddy and Samson asked the blimp pilot to leave them off. 

The pilot stared at the two of them a good long while, figuring they were nuts for chartering him, and crazier still for wanting to venture into this unfamiliar landscape. He chewed his pencil with the left side of his mouth and used his right hand to pull the lever to send down a long wrought-iron anchor on a polished cable, which whistled through the firmament before emitting a thud and a tiny swirl of sand on the distant sandbar below. After bidding the pilot adieu, Buddy and Samson shimmied down on pulleys with rucksacks full of camping gear. 

Traveling by day, and setting up camp each night, Buddy and Seamus took note of everything they saw as they searched for the rare sybilline onion, the most empathic of the psychic alliums known, to date, in the world. After Seamus wrote his entry for the day in his tall reporter’s notepad labeled, “The Misadventures of Buddy Crapo: By Land, By Sea, and By Air,” Buddy would stay up late, half in his sleeping bag, and gaze up at the stars, biting his fist as tears rolled down his apple cheeks. In the morning, the two young men spent their time washing up, Buddy scrubbing down his crew cut, and Samson dusting off his curly long-on-top ‘do, before setting out. 

It was about a fortnight of this routine before they found themselves at the threshold to a village ringed with solar panels and wind turbines.  They pled their case with the village mayor, a woman with arms as powerful as the oldest of the regional mangroves, who took pity on them and opened up an old palm leaf codex for them, offering her best guess as to where they should direct their search. She gave them her blessing to investigate and sent them towards a lagoon deep in the jungle.  They found themselves in the shadow of a ruined palace, square in shape, built of massive, porous volcanic stone blocks that were fixed without mortar. 

“This looks like our place,” said Buddy, pulling aside a curtain of vines and exposing a mysterious wood-framed doorway, engraved with a repetitive undulating pattern of lines and dots.

“We’re lucky we had the blessing of the local Mayor,” replied Samson, “I remember her saying that without that, the kudzu would have gotten us in its clutches again.”

“That was that Brazilian kudzu. I don’t think the stuff that grows around here is nearly as feisty. Hey, check this out, Samson!” 

Buddy found himself passing under the eaves of the doorway into a massive space, walled in on four sides and without a roof. The interior was paved with dark, cracked stone, and a large central basin of lighter stone held a pool of rainwater. At the northern end of the cloister stood a vine-tree embedded in the wall, covering a central niche.

Buddy pulled aside some of the vines, and caught sight of something in the half darkness within the hollow of the niche. Before long, Samson was next to him, helping him pull back the rich foliage. A tall idol carved of a massive block of lapis lazuli stood before the two of them, its form unlike anything they had ever seen before. Its face – wherever it was, seemed to look through them without eyes, smile without lips or a mouth, and smell them without a nose. In time, the colors around the two young men faded to gray. The sounds of the forest beyond the ruined palace dimmed and gave way to a crackling electricity, with the smell of plasma carried on the wind. The statue emitted a faint blue aura, and the electric glow intensified by the moment. A distant hum struck the horizon, and Buddy lost control of his right hand, lifting to his ear, and closing his eyes to focus even more on the sweet sound. A melodious chant echoed through Buddy’s senses, and Buddy knew it by heart in an instant. He more than knew it; it was a part of him, and he couldn’t resist chanting it back. The statue and Buddy chanted in unison until it seemed as though moments no longer had any meaning, and suddenly Buddy and Samson were one person. Bamson himself, standing taller and wider than either of the young men, separated slowly, as though he were an animal cell going through the process of division. Out of the ectoplasmic morass that joined the two forms rose the sybilline onion, their nucleus rising of its own accord, and hovering within reach. 

An eternity later, the two young men came to their senses, and the pale phosphorescence of the purple sybilline onion came drifting to rest at the base of the statue, which looked as pitted and ancient as the rest of the complex, no more than another piece of andesite. The boys both knew it by sight and by heart, they had found the grail they had been seeking. Beholding the onion so suddenly was too much for Buddy to bear. He wept, so much so that it became torrential, and before he knew it, Samson, the onion, and he were in a flooded space, swept out of the complex on a wave of tears and sped downhill at blinding speed. They caught themselves on an old coracle of woven branches, tethered on a little stone piling just beyond the ruined harbor, Buddy clutching the onion under his arm. The vine tether stretched with the rush of tears until it snapped, and sent the coracle adrift on the bright blue ocean, aimless, until the two of them waved down a passing giant albatross. The titanic bird took pity on them and swooped down to give them a lift back to Santa Ninfa.

~~~

A fortnight after Doctor Orfeo and Doctor Mikare met, they secured a little blue skiff and rowed out to the mysterious island that held the azure jewel of the flooded forest which Doctor Mikare had been studying. Doctor Orfeo kept a small straw box full of metaphysical seedlings in his lap, and Doctor Mikare wore a crystal vial full of Buddy Crapo’s tears.   Together they had hatched a plan to foster cooperation between the plants of the flooded forest and the ghostly vegetables that had plagued Santa Ninfa. Above them, a speck blotted upon the horizon. If the two Doctors squinted, they could just make out the shape of a giant albatross and his passengers, who waved to the Doctors below.