Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (9 page)

Jeremy was confused about exactly what occurred next, but the woman's clicking noise seemed to swell louder and louder, as though echoed by a hundred other voices, until the world was split with a lightning bolt close enough that he felt more than heard the crack of its impact in a tree perhaps twenty yards behind him. In a flash of light more brilliant than any he had seen before, the scene engraved on his pupils seemed to show the whole jungle leaning over him making the noise
,
the trees clicking their branches at him, birds clacking their beaks, animals snapping their teeth. In the darkness afterward, in the depths of this jungle, he needed no further encouragement.

He sprinted down the path, Otombe quick on his heels.

Jeremy ran on and on, his legs high and reaching until the village had long disappeared behind them, until the crops had faded back into the underbrush, until at least three hills were between them and the women. No one chased them, nothing bad happened. The rain ended as quickly as it had started. He gradually slowed, listening behind him. In the newfound silence, the frogs started up again and drops of water ticked off the leaves all around. Already he felt a distinct sense of mortification, Otombe must think him a coward. His Grandpapi would feel such shame. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, gasping. Rain dripped off his nose. Whispering, his breath was harsh. “What were they?”

Otombe shook his head, led him further down the path. Ten minutes later, they stepped out of the jungle at the base of the railroad's embankment, perhaps half a mile from camp. Out from under the shadowy trees, the landscape seemed abruptly so spacious and light. The sky was clearing, the moon scudding in and out of clouds. Climbing the embankment, Jeremy was able to see everything: the railroad tracks glittering into the distance, the small puddles of rain by his feet, even the muscles shifting in Otombe's lean legs. The visibility seemed miraculous. Here, the steel rails shone straight and plumb. Here, he understood things. Even with his eyes closed, he felt confident he could swing his foot forward with geometric exactness onto the next railway tie. This clarity, in comparison to those women and the rain, to that terrible clicking, reminded him why he had gone into the profession of engineering in the first place. Science, he thought, made the world so understandable.

“My tribe,” Otombe said, “has a myth of a giant metal snake. Like the story of how the world started, it is one of common knowledge shared among the tribes. It is said, in a time of hunger, drought, and disease, the metal snake will arrive. It will stretch itself across the land to strangle the life from our tribes.”

After a moment's thought, he added, “The women back there, they don't wish you to build your railroad.”

Looking back at the forest, Jeremy could still almost hear that distant insectlike clicking.

H
er Aunt Tilda was chasing her. Sweaty in a pink flowered dress, wide as a sumo wrestler, Tilda thundered after Max, her breathing grunting in her throat. She ran down the hall, grabbing at Max, deadly serious, demanding a hug.

Max jerked awake, standing across the cabin from the bed, thrashing her arms through the air, defending herself.

She blinked around. The dream gradually faded.

It was morning. She was in Africa. She'd slept twelve hours.

Out on her cabin's porch, she ate oatmeal, gazing around at the field dotted with the research station's cabins. Beyond the field, in every direction, rose the jungle a hundred feet into the air. Animals shrieked, birds called. She approved of the gorillas' taste, far from the crowded lower elevations, among the plants. Born anywhere in Rwanda, she would have moved up here too.

After breakfast, she did deep breathing meditation for eight minutes, then walked twenty-nine times around the inside of her cabin flapping her hands and shouting, “Fuckity fucking fuck.” Afterward, ready for the day, she walked across the field to the cabin that Mutara had told her was Dubois'.

Standing at the door, she could hear voices inside, arguing. As soon as she knocked, the voices stopped dead.

“
Entrez,
” called out a woman's voice.

Stepping inside she found three people standing quite still. From long experience, she recognized the intensity of this silence. They'd been talking about her.

One woman's toes in pink fluffy slippers. From her direction came the scent of coffee, acidic like espresso, no softening of milk. The woman probably held a cup in her hand.

The second person wore beat-up hiking boots and grungy athletic socks. Max assumed this was a man, until she noticed the calves were thin and hairless.

Mutara's feet Max could recognize, bare and dark and solid on the earth. She nodded at his toes. (Many times in the past she'd meet someone, converse for a while, but never more than shoot a single flash-glance at the face. The next time she bumped into the person, there'd be these unfamiliar shoes, different clothes, and she'd introduce herself all over again.)

“My name is Dr. Max Tombay. I'm the ethnobotanist that Panoply Pharmaceuticals sent.”

“Oh, I think we figured that one out,” said the woman in the hiking boots. Dry amusement. “We don't have a lot of visitors up here these days. I'm Kiyoko Matsuki. You can call me Yoko. I believe you've met Mutara. And this is the station's director, Geneviève Dubois.”

There was a moment of silence. Perhaps Max was supposed to say something here. Before she could figure out what it was, Dubois spoke. “Are you sick?”

“Excuse me?”

“If you are sick, you can not go up to see the gorillas. Mutara tells us you have disease.” A strong French accent.

Max was confused for a moment. Then said, “Oh. No, what I said was I have Asperger's.”

Yoko's torso turned toward her. “Really?” At her movement, there wafted through the air the slightest odor of manure and straw, a stable ready to be mucked out.

Max examined Yoko's boots, scuffed and stained with red mud up to the ankles. The shorts she wore looked like they'd been intended for a linebacker and hung down past her knees. “Yes.”

“Well, fucking shit,” said Yoko.

Surprised by the swearing, Max looked fast at her face to see if she was an aspie. Saw rumpled hair, a blunt face filled with life and frank admiration. Max jerked her eyes away and stared at the wood floor.

“You're a brave one,” added Yoko.

“Excuse me. What is this—euh—‘Ass Burgers?'” asked Dubois.

Yoko said, “No. As-PER-ger's. Not a contagious disease. A mild version of autism.”

“
Autisme
?” said Dubois. There was a silence while she took in this information. Perhaps an exchange of glances. When she spoke again, her voice was brusque. “Well, it matters not. She could still have another sickness. She can not see the gorillas for three days.”

“Fine,” said Yoko, “but after that she goes.” Dubois and Yoko were talking to each other rapidly and under their breath. A continuation of some argument, probably the one Max had interrupted by knocking.

“If she has no fever.”

“It's a deal. But, Dubois, get a hold of yourself. I don't want you screwing this up. You hear me?”

Exasperated, Dubois puffed air out her mouth in a very French way.
Pfff.

“What's going on?” asked Max.

Yoko inhaled before she spoke. “There are only three hundred and fifty mountain gorillas left in the world. They haven't been exposed to human diseases. A simple flu could wipe out half of them. In the interest of safety, Dubois is being overly cautious.”

“But after this period of three days I can see them as much as I want?”

“Yes,” said Dubois. “But you keep the gorillas safe. Yoko tells you the rules. You break even one, you leave these mountains.”

“Of course.” Max was good at following rules.

Dubois took two steps closer, the pink slippers slapping along. Above them she wore Gumby pajamas. There was that cup of coffee in her hand, her fingers short as a child's, chewed nails. Her voice: no nonsense and low. “Understand well. You are here because Yoko persuades me. We do not trust that Roswell or . . . ahh . . . ”

“Stevens,” Max supplied.

“Yes, him. We think they cheat if they are able.”

“But you have a contract with them, don't you?”

“Making a contract be respected across international borders, you know how difficult this is?
Non
, on that we cannot depend. They stop paying their money; we have no park guards. Without guards, the hunters come and kill gorillas. Yoko says so long as you are here, Roswell and Stevens hope for the vine and keep sending money. You search as long as you want, very long I hope, but I am not helping.”

“And when I find the vine?” asked Max.

“Ahh, but these are big mountains, many many miles of land. I do not believe you find the vine.” Her voice was full of her smile. “When you give up, they send others, and then others, and then again.”

Max herself didn't smile or argue. She knew she would get the vine. “OK,” she said and left the cabin. Closing the door behind her, she heard a different sort of silence from them.

At her cabin, she collected the necessary equipment and then walked twenty feet into the jungle. Not allowed to observe the gorillas yet, she could at least learn the local plants. Under the forest canopy, the air was heady with wet earth, rotting wood, and growing plants. She marked off a survey area of three square yards with stakes and then plucked the first plant from inside it. Using her botanical encyclopedia, she identified the specimen, then memorized its attributes: stamens lanceolate and homandrous, petiole incomplete, venation parallel. With these details fresh in her mind, she scraped her thumbnail across its different components—the leaves, the roots, stem, fruit, and flower—and held it under her nose, inhaling small sniffs.

Most people believed their sense of smell to be vestigial, that once humans learned to walk around on hind legs, moving away from the odiferous earth, the olfactory sense began to atrophy. Max knew better. Research shows that four-legged creatures, so low to the ground, shoving their snouts regularly into decaying meat or feces, had to have nasal passages like mazes to stop dangerous bacteria from getting sucked into the lungs. Down those convoluted byways, their olfactory receptors needed to be magnified many times in order to catch any scent at all. Humans, on the other hand, with their noses up high, far from the bacteria, had passageways direct as arrows, could catch a smell from just a few errant molecules.

Unfortunately most people didn't understand this sense and didn't know how to use it, didn't get the nose close to the object and didn't take small sips of air. Whenever, for instance, her mom happened to catch the smell of something, she generally didn't pay much attention, didn't consider it long enough to analyze its various components. And in those unusual cases where she did linger on a scent, she had only a rudimentary vocabulary with which to describe it, words like “sweet,” “sour” and “yucky.” With such inexact terminology, it was hard to accurately label or file the scent. The memory of it so quickly fading.

Experiments have shown, with a little training and concentration, a quick primer in the vocabulary of common odor descriptors (“grassy,” “citrusy,” “woody,” “urinous,” etc.) humans could sense distinctions between, not dozens of scents or even hundreds, but millions. Many more than they could see of different colors or hear of different tones.

She crushed a leaf, then waved it under her nose, sniffed lightly. A spicy vanilla with the overtones of a used Band-Aid. The roots of this plant had a different aroma, subtle, close to microwaved water. She opened her eyes and looked once more at the plant, memorizing it visually while she held the smells fresh in her mind. This way she never forgot a plant.

The aromas also gave her a lot of clues about internal chemistry. The next plant she plucked had a strong kerosene scent to its bark (behind that was the flavor of a rubber eraser). Terpins of some kind inside. The sweetness of the flower's aroma suggested an aldehyde compound. After all, what was scent but actual molecular compounds floating through the air? The olfactory bulb was a portable gas-chromatography lab, instantaneous and astonishingly accurate.

Methodically she examined each plant in the survey area. The only ones she didn't pluck were the trees and bushes that were too big for her to pull up. These, she walked around and visually noted their identifying characteristics, then scraped at different parts of them, sniffing. Remembering it all.

Her mom had once described a car accident she'd had at the age of twenty, the way her vision had tunneled down until the whole world consisted only of the wall she was skidding toward. The texture of its brick, its lines of mortar. No sound of the wheels squealing, no feel of her leg stomped on the brake. This story surprised Max, not because her mom had been in danger, but because the way she described that intensity of focus implicitly stated that kind of attention was unusual for her.

For Max, it happened several times a day. Her awareness closed down to encompass only the plant she held in her hand. When she was a child her focus had been more extreme. She used to spin, arms extended. Twirling like this, immersed in the swirling chaos, her normally jittery senses were so busy they didn't bother her. The only time she felt serene.

Her mother would have to push her to the ground to bring her out of it.

Even as an adult, when Max was working on an interesting problem, her lab mates sometimes had to tug on her sleeve before she'd hear their voices or see their hands waving.

Sitting on the jungle floor, crouched over a specimen, movement flickered through the trees. Monkeys screamed. Birds called. She didn't notice. Anyone watching her work would have a hard time reading her flat expression. Only her mom would have noticed the ease of her movements, seen how gently Max handled these plants, content.

For lunch, she opened a box of raw tofu and scooped the insides out with a spoon. Not only was it white and nutritious, she hardly had to chew to ingest it. The perfect food. While eating, she glanced back toward the research station and noticed a researcher—looked like Yoko—standing in a cabin door watching her. Max didn't wave or call hello, but continued to spoon the food into her mouth. Was back to work within three minutes.

After she'd finished examining every plant inside the first survey square, she pulled up the stakes and marked out a new area. This time she plucked only the plants she didn't recognize. After that square, she did another. By the end of the day, she was leaving almost every plant in the ground.

She worked until darkness, went back to her cabin and fell right to sleep.

The second day, at dawn, striding across the field to the jungle, she let her eyes range upward. About fifteen feet up the trunk of a massive
Hagenia abyssinica
, she spotted a nettle bush growing out of the crotch between several branches. Dirt, leaves, and water must have puddled in there, enough for the plant's roots.

She stopped dead. Of course, she should have thought of this possibility. She searched the trees, noted more and more plants growing up there, a long way from the ground. Conventional plants—bushes, small trees, and vines—were rooted in the dirt that collected in crevices and crannies. But there were also mosses hanging in long sheets off almost every branch, as well as epiphytic ferns, orchids, and bromeliads growing out of the bark of the trees, the plants needing nothing more than the nutrients and rain that fell from the air.

Gorillas were primates. They must climb. Because of their weight, they probably couldn't get much higher than thirty feet, but they would go that high. In order to learn all the plants they came in contact with, she would have to ascend the trees that far.

As with climbing mountains, scaling trees was not one of her skills. She found a trunk not more than a foot wide and, hugging it hard, tried to shimmy upward. After a minute of working hard at this, her feet were still on the ground, but her inner arms now had some significant abrasions. She searched for another way. In the end she found a fallen jungle giant, its root ball rising twelve feet into the air. Clambering to the top of the roots, she managed to pull herself up into the branch of a nearby
Pygeum
. She grunted with her movements, holding on tight and concentrated, her face pressed flat against the bark. The branch was slippery with moss. Finding a somewhat stable perch, she straightened to pluck the nearest plant. As soon as she'd finished examining that plant, she humped her way up a little higher.