Saving Fish From Drowning (48 page)

stricken friends were somewhat improved, enough to complain

about the menu and the mosquitoes. They sat on two logs facing each other across a clearing that was grandly called “the dining room.” Their faces, arms, and legs had been rubbed with termite powder, which Black Spot had given them to prevent mosquito bites.

The powder came from a bark or mineral that was also effective against termites, hence the name, or so they thought. It was actually the ground-up bodies of termites. Had they known, they still would have continued to use it. They did not automatically question the advice that the tribe gave them anymore. Every day, at every meal, they drank the wormwood tea.

They also drank the soup that was made especially for their

health. A bland rice broth had been suitable when they were finally A M Y T A N

able to keep down a bit of nourishment. But now their San Franciscan palates were being restored and they yearned for foods with more variety. They did not complain to their jungle hosts—that would have been ungracious—but among themselves they lamented the thrice-daily offerings of rice and the deplorable fermented sauces and dried creatures. They figured the tribe had an underground larder where food supplies rotted to the precise degree of slimy nastiness. They were grateful, however, that there was plenty of food. As they ate, birds cried to one another, shaking the leaves as they fluttered about to claim a branch above potential food droppings. The branch above Bennie made for the best territory, since he often spilled things.

Loot and Bootie were hunched at the edge of the camp smoking cheroots, and the old grandmothers who had given wormwood tea to the sick were happy to see their foreign friends heartily eating the meal they had prepared with American tastes in mind. They kept an eye on the Younger White Brother, who was seated in front of them.

“I wish we had something different to eat for a change,” Bootie heard Rupert grumble.

“Like what?” Esmé said.

“Top Ramen,” he said.

“We don’t have noodles.”

“Then I wish we had noodles.”

A few minutes later, Bootie told Black Spot what the Younger White Brother had said. He nodded. He was on his way into town to get more supplies, the fermented fish and spices the grandmothers had asked for, betel-nut leaves, and cheroots. He would find noodles.

“THIS IS REALLY WEIRD,” Rupert said that night at dinner. “I was just thinking about noodles, and here they are.”

It was probably one of the tribe’s staples, the others guessed, 3 4 4

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though it was curious that they hadn’t brought them out earlier. The noodles were delicious. Tonight the vegetables were better, too, fresh bamboo shoots and forest mushrooms. The fermented stuff seemed less rancid, and blessedly, nothing looked black, crispy, or eight-legged.

“Who invented noodles, anyway?” Roxanne said.

Marlena answered brightly: “The Chinese did, of course.”

Moff slapped his forehead. “Oh, of course. It’s always the Chinese influence. For a moment there, I was going to blame the Italians.”

“Marco Polo first ate noodles when he visited China,” Marlena added.

“I saw a movie with Gary Cooper as Marco Polo,” Wyatt said.

“He’s talking to this Chinese guy, who’s played by Alan Hale senior and has this big ol’ Fu Manchu moustache and slanted eye makeup.

So Marco Polo is eating noodles and he says, ‘Hey, Kemosabe, this stuff is pretty good, what is it?’ And Alan Hale says, ‘Spa-get.’ Ha!

Like ‘spaghetti’ is what the Chinese call it. It’s hilarious. Spa-get, like the Chinese invented spa food as well.”

Wendy laughed until Dwight broke in: “Well, there’s another

theory that the early ancestors of Italians invented noodles.”

“That’s not what the movie showed,” Wyatt replied.

“I mean it,” Dwight went on. “There are these Etruscan wall

paintings that prove that noodles were around in eight hundred B.C., if not earlier. That means noodles are in the genetic heritage of many a modern-day Italian.”

“Excuse me,” Marlena said as evenly as she could. “The Chinese have been eating noodles for over
five
thousand years.”

“Who says?” Dwight countered. “Did someone unearth a Chinese takeout menu from the Ping-Pong dynasty?” He laughed at his own little joke.

He kept his eyes fixed on Marlena. “We can debate the origins of anything,” he said. “You make the case that all noodles originate 3 4 5

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from China. And to be fair, I say they likely evolved in different places around the same time, and that it may have been an accident the way they got invented. Doesn’t take much culinary evolution for a cook to run out the door during battle, leave the dough behind, and find it dried hard as rock when he returns. Midafternoon there’s a flash flood and—what do you know?—the dough is soft again. From there it was only a matter of time and refinement before someone discovered that cutting the dough into thin strips made it easier to boil up for a meal on the road. That’s what you might call an evolutionary spandrel, spandrels being the supports when a dome was built that later were used as decorative elements, unrelated to their original use. You create something for one purpose and it gets used for another. So it is with spaghetti, an accident made purposeful. . . .”

Marlena sat in stony silence. Spandrels, schmandrels.

“That’s what
we
need to find here,” Dwight went on, “if we want to get out of this place. Spandrel ideas. Something that’s here right now, which we can adapt to another purpose. Obvious and right under our nose. Look around at what we have here, think how we might use it. . . .”

Marlena knew she was right about the noodles. Noodles had

likely been around since the start of Chinese civilization. She remembered that dumplings had been found in the tombs of emperors, so why not noodles? Both were made of dough. But then she did not know how old the tombs were in which the dumplings were found.

What if the tombs were only two thousand years old? She thought about lying, telling Dwight that they were found as artifacts in Stone Age caves, maybe even in the excavation of Peking Man. That would make them six hundred thousand years old.

She wasn’t one to lie; it’s just that she became infuriated whenever someone tried to intimidate her. Inside she was a ball of static, snapping and crackling, but outwardly she presented the look of someone overly familiar with being dominated. This is not to say she 3 4 6

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acted cowed like the whipped and damned. Her posture remained erect, her neck long and regal. But she didn’t defend herself. She sat like a cat with its ears back, ready to spring at the next provocation.

That was what she had done all her life, turned quiet when her father belittled or bullied her, quashing any of her ideas or desires. Later in life, she was able to gain expertise in contemporary art and could exert her opinion among the elitest of the elite in the art world. In that regard, she and I had a lot in common. It was how we met. Like me, Marlena rarely backed down in her ideas about art. She learned that confidence and strong opinions are vital in presenting oneself as a curator of any collection. That manner was a cultivated skill and not part of her psyche, so outside her profession, she reverted to insecurity. I often wished I could give her the
umph
in triumph. God knows I had plenty left over from the battles I had fought.

I prodded Marlena to stand her ground now, to look Dwight in the eye with a determined scowl to match his and tell him his conjecture was so faulty it did not bear further discussion. “Speak up!” I shouted. “What do you have to lose?” But all I could muster from her was more internal sputtering-muttering.

The only person who had the confidence to argue with Dwight

was his wife, and that was because Roxanne was smarter than he was and knew his specific deficits in logic, facts, and bluffing. Like the bit about spandrels: he was always inserting that term into conversations when he wanted to impress people into silence. They didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but it sounded conceptual and smart, so they couldn’t counter him. Roxanne could have said in front of the others that the paradigm of spandrels, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould meant it, did not apply to dried-up dough turning into spaghetti. That was adaptation by accident, another form of evolutionary leap. Roxanne, however, never would have pointed this out to others. What—and show her intellectual superiority over Dwight once again? She had learned to not humiliate 3 4 7

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her husband in public. It was not an act of loyalty. He was insecure enough as it was, and she suffered the consequences. Once attacked, he fought with teeth bared, and if defeated, he would slink away and become remote and insular. She then had to bear the brunt of his wounded pride, his negativity toward everything, his anger beneath the surface. “Nothing’s wrong,” he would say, but the opposite was shown in even the littlest things. He would decline an invitation to go to the movies, telling her he was busy—couldn’t she see that? He would play solitaire on his computer for hours. He rebuffed her, but in ways she could not challenge, leaving her feeling cut off and alone.

She had long known that their marriage was faltering. She guessed that he felt the same, but they could not openly admit it. That would have made the end inevitable. But the reality was clear: As a couple, they had evolved from well matched to mismatched. She wanted a baby so much it made her anxious, and at times depressed her with a vague sense of hopelessness. She was used to defining the parameters and controlling the outcomes, of creating academic success out of near disaster. Why wouldn’t her body, of all things, cooperate? The baby was her priority in this marriage, and Dwight was her best chance at fulfilling that. Who knows, the baby might even give their marriage a purpose. She pictured a baby girl for some reason. Girls were about hope. If her marriage ended, the baby would still be hers, a gurgling bundle of burps. But what would happen if she did not get pregnant? How long before their marriage collapsed for good?

Like Marlena, Bennie viewed Dwight as an adversary. He found it maddening that Dwight made critical assessments of others in front of everybody. Dwight had insinuated that Bennie should be more assertive with the tribe and demand that they help the Americans get out. “I’m sorry,” Bennie had said huffily, “but I just don’t think that’s appropriate. And I think we should wait until everyone is completely well.”

Dwight also questioned Bennie’s poor decision-making, his in3 4 8

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ability to set priorities. Bennie was sick of it. Who the hell was Dwight to say these things to him? These criticisms had been more frequent in recent days. If anyone objected to Dwight for his being either wrong or rude, he would say, “I’m just trying to point something out that might be helpful to you as a person. I’m a psychologist, so I have expertise on such matters. The fact that you interpret it as rude says something more about you than me.” It drove Bennie crazy that Dwight could turn a situation around and make it seem that the other person was at fault. The night before, he had lain awake replaying Dwight’s insults, then imagining verbiage he could fling at the brute the next time.

They were sitting around the fire one evening after dinner, when Dwight insulted him again. Yet another discussion had come up about how to be rescued without exposing the Lajamees to danger.

Dwight started by saying that the Lajamees might be suffering from paranoiac delusions. There were plenty of tribal people around Inle Lake who were not on the lam or in fear of their lives, he said.

They’d seen the women in those turbans, wearing red-and-black clothes, Karen women. You couldn’t miss them. And nobody was lining them up and shooting them, let alone doing what Black Spot said. Dwight knew of cults in America that were built around a shared culture of persecution when none really existed. The cults talked of mass suicide, just as the Lajamees did. Some actually carried through with it. The People’s Temple, for instance—nine hundred people died, most of them forced to drink poison. What if that happened here? They didn’t want to be caught in that insanity, did they? “We have to do whatever we can to get rescued,” Dwight said.

“We can keep fires going and draw attention with smoke. Or a couple of us who are strong enough can hack our way down and bring back help.”

“But who knows for sure if the danger isn’t real?” Heidi responded. “What if the soldiers kill the tribe? How can we face our3 4 9

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selves the rest of our lives?” She did not tell them that she had seen a man who had been murdered. “I’d be uncomfortable,” she said,

“putting them at risk.”

“But we’re already uncomfortable,” Dwight retorted. “And
we
are at risk! Don’t you realize where we are? We’re in the fucking jungle.

We already had malaria. What’s next? Snakebite? Typhus? When do we factor
us
into the equation for what we do?”

He had brought up their unspoken worries and a series of morally ugly questions. Whom do you save? Can you save both? Or do you save only yourself? Do you do nothing and risk nothing, or die from whatever happens to come along as you sit on a log waiting for whatever comes?

They agitated over the questions in private thought, wishing to forget morals and just be out of this place. Who else had discarded morals and saved themselves? Could they live with themselves later?

If they put away the concerns of the Lajamee, how soon would they push aside one another’s welfare? At what point do people resort to

“every man for himself”?

Dwight spoke again. “A few of us can try getting down.” It was the idea they had discussed when they first learned they were stuck.

They would follow the crevasse, the ancient dry stream. It was possible that the sinkhole closed farther down the mountain. They would have to go quite a ways, since Wyatt and Dwight had already done an initial exploration, and the split went on as far as the eye could see, before it disappeared around yet another bend.