Saving Fish From Drowning (43 page)

women giggled when they saw Rupert, then looked away when he turned. An elderly woman grabbed his elbow and tried to lead him to a seat that was cut into a fallen log. Rupert shook his head and broke from her clutches, saying through clenched teeth, “This is getting really annoying.” In truth, he was pleased and embarrassed by the attention.

Bennie assumed his role as tour leader. While the rest ate their breakfast, he walked over to Black Spot. “We need your help,” he said, “so we can leave this morning as soon as possible.”

Black Spot shook his head. “You cannot be leaving.”

“You don’t understand,” Bennie said. “We can’t stay any longer.

Now that it’s daylight, we need to make our way down, even if our guide isn’t here.”

Black Spot was apologetic. “Bridge is not fixed. We cannot be leaving. So you cannot be leaving. This is same problem for you, me, everybody.”

Bennie launched into a convoluted and hopeless conversation over who might fix the bridge and what they might try now that it was daytime. Black Spot kept shaking his head, and Bennie wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake his whole body. He was so passive. He had no initiative. Hell, if there was a TV here, there had to be a way out of here.

“Can you make a new bridge? Who made the other one?”

If the tribe had needed a new bridge, they could have created one 3 0 6

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in a few hours. But Black Spot only shook his head. “No way making this.”

“Did anyone go down yet to see if Walter’s come back? You know, our guide Walter?”

Black Spot looked uncomfortable, for he was going to suggest what was untrue. “I think he not coming. Bridge go down. Guide . . .

I think guide go down, too. . . .”

Bennie clutched his chest. “God! No! Oh God! Oh God! Shit! . . .”

When he could catch his breath, he said weakly, “Did you look?”

Black Spot nodded and said in a flat voice: “We looking. Nothing we can do.” Which in a way was true, if you have seen nothing.

Bennie returned to my other friends. “Do you know what the

boatman just told me?” he said in a shaky voice. They looked up.

“Walter’s dead.”

For the next couple of hours, they mourned Walter. Heidi murmured, “He made one mistake but otherwise he was so dependable.”

Marlena used the words “sweet and gallant.” Moff said that he was

“articulate and damn smart.” Bennie observed that Walter was a hero, because he took the plunge for them.

Dwight and Wyatt did not know what to say about grief, so they returned to the chasm to picture exactly what had happened. This time they looked more carefully. They estimated the trajectory a body would take if it fell from the middle versus the end of the bridge. They scanned the ledges and the rocky funnel below. They applied Pythagorean geometry to their tragic calculations, and having seen evidence of blood, they pinpointed “the spot,” a sharp slab of rock with dark splotches of rust-colored lichen.

Wyatt concluded: “One bounce, and you wouldn’t know what

after that.”

Dwight appended: “Let’s hope so.”

The men returned with their field report. Walter was one or two steps away from reaching the other side and—Dwight snapped his 3 0 7

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fingers—it must have been just like that. A fraction of a second later, it’s over. That’s how it happens. You barely have time to be surprised.

Bennie thought about the surprise. The more the group talked, the more his mind became a horror show of—not Walter—but himself, plummeting, screaming, grabbing on to eternity, and then feeling one great thud, and life sucked out by a giant vacuum cleaner. It made his muscles ache. All this talk was making him ill. He went to sit on a log by himself. Every now and then, he sighed heavily, scratched at his unshaven face, and slapped at mosquitoes. He berated himself. Their current troubles were his fault. To what degree, he could not assess.

He was the tour leader, and that was the awful and unchangeable fact. How was he going to get them out of this disaster? He stared out, his eyes and mind blank with exhaustion. Without his CPAP

machine, he had slept poorly. He was in worse trouble for not having his medications, the ones for depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and most dire of all, seizures.

Until that moment, I had not known he had seizures. Then again, Bennie had not told anyone. And why should he, he thought to himself. The seizures were mostly under control. Besides, he reasoned, people had such uninformed notions about seizures, as if everyone who had them fell to the ground with convulsions. Most of his took the form of odd distortions—he’d smell the phantom odor of a putrefying mouse, or see lightning raining down in his room, or feel the room spinning on a turntable, and sense a spiritual elation. Those episodes were simple partial seizures, and they hardly counted, he often told himself, since they were so brief, lasting only a minute or two, and for the most part, they were rather enjoyable, like an acid trip without the acid.

But every now and then, he had another kind, a complex partial seizure. It started with a peculiar feeling that rose like waves pushing up his throat, and this filled him with morbid dread and nausea. Next, he flew like a roller coaster, propelled forward and tilted on his side, until 3 0 8

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he zoomed out of the reaches of his consciousness. Sometimes people told him later that he had taken on a zombie stare and had repeatedly fiddled with his shirt buttons, while murmuring, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Hearing these reports, Bennie would flush and say, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

More recently, the roller-coaster ride had become prelude to a grand mal. That usually happened when he was tired or had inadvertently missed a dose. Since the dosage had been increased, he had not had a really bad seizure in more than a year. He would be fine off his medications for a day or two. This thought took him back to his original dilemma. How would they get out? What if they were stuck for two more days? Don’t stress out, he reminded himself; that’s what always triggered his seizures. He wondered if this tribe—the Jalamees or Lajamees, whatever they were called—might possibly have coffee. Coffee beans grew in the mountains, didn’t they? If he did not have his daily ration, he would have an intractable headache by noon. Now,
that
would be stressful.

Heidi sat down next to Bennie on the log. “How’s it going?” For her, the night had passed without incident. She had loved the cocoon of her thatched shelter, the sounds of the jungle, the novel idea that she was experiencing an adventure rather than a catastrophe. She had slept soundly, coated in bug repellent and her Space blanket, proof that she had handled the newness of everything well. No one was more amazed than she. Here she was in the jungle, and there was no
imagining
danger, no fearing it would reveal its hideous self. Danger was a given in a place without locks, lights, hot water, or fire alarms, in a habitat teeming with poisonous creatures. And the others—look at them—their haggard faces, their eyes darting about. They now felt as she had these past ten years, always on guard, in anticipation of unknown danger, confused, and fearful of what might befall them, while she had been prepared. She felt—what was the sensation?—

free. Yes, she was free, out of an invisible prison. It was like the days before the murder, when she could go anywhere and do anything 3 0 9

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without a thought to risks and consequences. It was exhilarating.

But would it last? In any case, she reasoned, she should continue to be prudent. No use letting herself get so giddy that she turned stupid. She reached into her pack and took out a bottle of antibacterial hand lotion and doused both palms.

“What’s the plan?” she said as she saw Vera coming over.

“The plan is to make one,” Vera answered.

Within the hour, they group had discussed two courses of action.

The first was to cut their way down the rainforest, staying along the crevasse as much as possible, until they reached another village.

They would borrow a machete and take the boatmen, since they needed to get back down as much as anybody. Perhaps one of the Lajamees might also accompany them, since they were knowledgeable about the jungle. This sounded reasonable, until Roxanne brought up tales of people in the Galápagos who were lost and tried to make their way out in a similar manner, only to be found thirty or forty years later with scrawled notes tied to their shoes, the rest of them a scattering of bleached bones. Wyatt added that an adventure magazine had recently run a story about two guys who had gotten lost in Peru and survived. Of course, they were expert mountain climbers and had had pitons, and knew how to rappel with ropes.

The group settled on trying to signal for help as their first course of action. At least with that, they weren’t risking their lives. They simply had to use their intelligence. They emptied their rucksacks on a mat in the clearing. Heidi’s, of course, held the most possibilities.

She had a headlamp with possibly ten to twenty hours of light left.

Marlena had the other, and there were extra batteries as well. Amazing. They could aim the lamps up at night when planes flew overhead. The Space blanket would be excellent for creating a flash that people in rescue helicopters could see. But how would they spot aircraft overhead when they could barely see the sky? And why would 3 1 0

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the pilots think it was they who were signaling and not insurgents shooting? They settled on lighting fires day and night at the campsite and stoking them to create billows of smoke.

The group went to Black Spot to ask him to enlist the tribe’s help in finding more rocks and fuel, certain they would be grateful for American ingenuity. But instead of exuberance, Black Spot looked resigned. He had to tell them now. “They cannot be helping you.

When the soldiers are finding you, they are finding the Karen people, too,” he said. “Then they killing us.”

Oh no, my friends assured them, no one would blame the tribe for the tourists’ getting lost. It was the bridge that fell down. That was plain to see. And when they were found, the group would be sure to say right away that the tribe had helped them and were wonderful hosts. Maybe they would even get a bonus from the tour operator.

“Tell them that,” they urged Black Spot.

“They are not believing that,” Black Spot said. He again tried to explain to his guests that there was a reason these people lived in No Name Place. They had come here to hide. To the SLORC soldiers, they were like goats, animals to be hunted and slaughtered. They would keep hunting them until a SLORC leader’s dream had come true: that the only Karen you could see in Burma was stuffed and in the glass case of a museum.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Roxanne agreed, while thinking that the tribe, like many other uneducated folks, had taken things so literally. “But it’s an empty threat. They couldn’t possibly do that.”

Black Spot put his hand over his chest. “This here empty,” he said.

“We all empty.” Sweat poured down his face. “If the soldiers then finding us in No Name Place, we already dead people. We better be jumping into big hole in the earth.” He paused, and then decided to tell them why he had brought them there. “We cannot helping you leave No Name Place. We bringing you here to help us.”

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“And we would,” Vera said, “if we could get out of here—”

“This boy,” Black Spot interrupted, and looked toward Rupert,

“he can helping us. He can making us invisible. He can disappearing us. Then SLORC cannot finding us.” Black Spot added a version of what Rupert had been heard to say with his card tricks: “Now you seeing, now you not.”

My friends looked at one another. Moff broke the news: “It was a magic trick. He can’t really make anything disappear.”

“How you know?” Black Spot said.

“He’s my son,” Moff said.

Black replied: “He also Younger White Brother to Karen people.”

My friends decided it was no use arguing with the boatman. They would have to find their own way out.

THAT EVENING, Rupert was the first to shiver. Moff felt his son’s forehead and whispered in a hoarse voice verging on panic: “Malaria.”

Others would follow over the next few days—Wendy, Wyatt,

Dwight, Roxanne, Bennie, and Esmé—knocked down one by one

with bone-racking chills and delirium-inducing fever. Those who had not yet taken sick were occupied with tending their compatriots and frantically warding off buzzing mosquitoes they now viewed as mortal enemies.

But it was not these female mosquitoes that infected them with the
Plasmodium
parasites. It takes at least a week for the parasites to incubate before bursting from the liver. Seven days earlier, they were in China. Seven days earlier, they were being cursed by the Bai minority chief at Stone Bell Mountain. As Miss Rong had told them before she left, the chief had promised that from here on out, trouble would follow them wherever they went and for the rest of their days. And even before she informed them, he had already made good on his word, for at the very next rest stop after visiting the grottoes, the mo3 1 2

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ment my friends stepped off the bus, a cloud of mosquitoes followed and feasted on promised flesh.

Throughout the night, the tribe walked past Rupert and listened to his nonsense pleas for help. They were doubly concerned. How could the Younger White Brother be so sick? How could he make them invulnerable to death when he was now slipping from the edges of life? Before they could carry on with more of this talk, the grandmother of Loot and Bootie scolded the doubters and disbelievers.

Don’t you remember what happened to us, when Loot and Bootie and I swam the River of Death? Through trial with death, you discover your power. Through trial, you shed your mortal flesh, layer after layer, until you become who you are supposed to be. If you die, you were mortal all along. But if you survive, you are a god. So don’t go speaking your doubts so loudly. This god might waken and arise, and if he hears your fickle and fomenting talk, he’ll put you in a place with no pretty maidens, just barren rice fields. When all of us are ready to leave, he’ll make you stay right here in No Name Place.