The Ruins (2 page)

 Mathias
called him a fool. He'd only just met this girl, they were in
the midst of their vacation, and he didn't know the first
thing about archaeology.
Henrich
assured him that it was really none of his business. He
wasn't asking for Mathias's permission; he was
merely informing him of his decision. He climbed out of bed and started
to pack. They called each other names, and
Henrich
threw an electric razor at Mathias, hitting him on the shoulder.
Mathias rushed him, knocking him over. They rolled around on the hotel
room floor, grappling, grunting obscenities, until Mathias accidentally
head-butted
Henrich
in
the mouth, cutting his lip.
Henrich
made much of this, rushing to the bathroom so that he could spit blood
into the sink. Mathias pulled on some clothes and went out to get him
ice, but then ended up going downstairs to the all-night bar by the
pool. It was three in the morning. Mathias felt he needed to calm down.
He drank two beers, one quickly, the other slowly. When he got back to
their room, the note was sitting on his pillow. And
Henrich
was gone.

 The
note was three-quarters of a page long, though it seemed shorter when
Mathias read it out loud in English. It occurred to Amy that Mathias
might be skipping some of the passages, preferring to keep them
private, but it didn't matter—she and Jeff got the
gist of it.
Henrich
said that Mathias often seemed to mistake being a brother with being a
parent. He forgave him for this, yet he still couldn't accept
it. Mathias might call him a fool, but he believed it was possible
he'd met the love of his life that morning, and
he'd never be able to forgive himself—or Mathias,
for that matter—if he let this opportunity slip past without
pursuing it. He'd try to be back by their departure date,
though he couldn't guarantee this. He hoped Mathias would
manage to have fun on his own while he was gone. If Mathias grew
lonely, he could always come and join them at the dig; it was only a
half day's drive to the west. The map at the bottom of the
note—a hand-drawn copy of the one the girl had sketched on
the napkin for
Henrich
—showed
him how to get there.

 As
Amy listened to Mathias tell his story and then struggle to translate
his brother's note, she gradually began to realize that he
was asking for their advice. They were sitting on the veranda of their
hotel. A breakfast buffet was offered here every morning: eggs and
pancakes and French toast, juice and coffee and tea, an immense pile of
fresh fruit. A short flight of stairs led to the beach. Seagulls
hovered overhead, begging for scraps of food, shitting on the umbrellas
above the tables. Amy could hear the steady sighing of the surf, could
see the occasional jogger shuffling past, an elderly couple searching
for shells, a trio of hotel employees raking the sand. It was very
early, just after seven. Mathias had awakened them, calling from the
house phone downstairs. Stacy and Eric were still asleep.

 Jeff
leaned forward to study the map. It was clear to Amy, without anything
explicit having been said, that it was his advice Mathias was
soliciting. Amy didn't take offense; she was used to this
sort of thing. Jeff had something about him that made people trust him,
an air of competence and self-confidence. Amy sat back in her seat and
watched him smooth the wrinkles from the map with the palm of his hand.
Jeff had curly, dark hair, and eyes that changed color with the light.
They could be hazel or green or the palest of brown. He
wasn't as tall as Mathias, or as broad in the shoulders, but
despite this, he somehow seemed to be the larger of the two. He had a
gravity to him: he was calm, always calm. Someday, if all went
according to plan, Amy imagined that this would be what would make him
a good doctor. Or, at the very least, what would make people think of
him as a good doctor.

 Mathias's
leg was jiggling, his knee jumping up and down. It was Wednesday
morning. He and his brother were scheduled to fly home on Friday
afternoon. "I go," he said. "I get him. I
take him home. Right?"

 Jeff
glanced up from the map. "You'd be back this
evening?" he asked.

 Mathias
shrugged, waved at the note. He only knew what his brother had written.

 Amy
recognized some of the towns on the map—
Tizimín
, Valladolid,
Cobá
—names
she'd seen in their guidebook. She hadn't really
read the book; she'd only looked at the pictures. She
remembered a ruined hacienda on the
Tizimín
page, a street lined with whitewashed buildings for Valladolid, a
gigantic stone face buried in vines for
Cobá
.
Mathias's map had
an
X
drawn somewhere vaguely west of
Cobá
.
This was where the dig was. You rode a bus from
Cancún
to
Cobá
,
where you hired a taxi, which took you eleven miles farther west. Then
there was a path leading away from the road, two miles long, that you
had to hike. If you came to the Mayan village, you'd gone too
far.

 Watching
Jeff examine the map, she could guess what he was thinking. It had
nothing to do with Mathias or his brother. He was thinking of the
jungle, of the ruins there, and what it might be like to explore them.
They'd talked vaguely of doing this when they'd
first arrived: how they could hire a car, a local guide, and see
whatever there was to be seen. But it was so hot; the idea of trudging
through the jungle to take pictures of giant flowers or lizards or
crumbling stone walls seemed less and less attractive the more they
discussed it. So they stayed on the beach. But now? The morning was
deceptively cool, with a breeze coming in off the water; she knew that
it must be hard for Jeff to remember how humid the day would ultimately
become. Yes, it was easy enough for her to guess what he was
thinking:
why
shouldn't it be fun?
They were slipping into a
torpor, with all the sun and the food and the drinking. A little
adventure like this might be just the thing to wake them up.

 Jeff
slid the map back across the table to Mathias. "We'll go with you," he said.

 Amy
didn't speak. She sat there, reclining in her chair. Inside,
she was
thinking,
No
,
I don't want to go,
but she knew she
couldn't say this. She complained too much; everyone said so.
She was a gloomy person. She didn't have the gift of
happiness; somewhere along the way, someone had neglected to give it to
her, and now she made everyone else suffer for her lack of it. The
jungle would be hot and dirty, its shadowed spaces
aswarm
with mosquitoes, but she
tried not to think of this; she tried to rise above it. Mathias was
their friend, wasn't he? He'd loaned them his scuba
tank, showed them where to dive. And now he was in need. Amy let this
thought gather strength in her mind, a hand pulling shut doors,
slamming them in rapid succession, until only one was left open. When
Mathias turned toward her, grinning, pleased with Jeff's
words, looking for her to echo them, she couldn't help
herself: she smiled back at him, nodded.

 "Of
course," she said.

E
ric was dreaming that he
couldn't fall asleep. It was a dream he often had, a dream of
frustration and weariness. In it, he was trying to meditate, to count
sheep, to think calming thoughts. There was the taste of vomit in his
mouth, and he wanted to get up and brush his teeth. He needed to empty
his bladder, too, but he sensed that if he moved, even slightly,
whatever little chance he had of falling back asleep would be forever
lost to him. So he didn't move; he lay there, wishing he
could sleep, willing sleep to come, but not sleeping. The taste of
vomit and the sensation of a full bladder were not regular details of
this dream. They were only present now because they were real.
He'd drunk too much the night before, had roused himself to
throw up into the toilet sometime just before dawn, and now he needed
to pee. Even his dreaming self sensed this, that there was an unusual
heft to these two sensations, as if his psyche were trying to warn him
of something, the threat of choking on another wave of puke, or of
soaking the bed in urine.

 It
was the Greeks who'd pushed and prodded him to the point of
vomiting. They'd tried to teach him a drinking game. This
involved dice, shaken in a cup. The rules were explained to him in
Greek, which certainly must've contributed to how complicated
they seemed. Eric bravely rolled the dice and passed the cup, but he
never managed to understand why he won on some tosses and lost on
others. At first, it seemed as if high numbers were best, but then,
erratically, low numbers began also to triumph. He rolled the dice and
sometimes the Greeks gestured for him to drink, but other times they
didn't. After awhile, it began not to matter so much. They
taught him some new words and laughed at how quickly he forgot them.
Everyone became very drunk, and then Eric somehow managed to stumble
back to his room and go to sleep.

 Unlike
the others, who were heading off to graduate schools of one sort or
another in the fall, Eric was preparing to start a job. He'd
been hired to teach English at a prep school outside of Boston.
He'd live in a dorm with the boys, help run the student
paper, coach soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring. He was going
to be good at it, he believed. He had an easy, confident way with
people. He was funny; he could get kids laughing, make them want him to
like them. He was tall and lean, with dark hair, dark eyes; he believed
himself to be handsome. And smart: a winner. Stacy was going to be in
Boston, studying to become a social worker. They'd see each
other every weekend; in another year or two, he'd ask her to
marry him. They'd live somewhere in New England and
she'd get some sort of job helping people and maybe
he'd keep teaching, or maybe he wouldn't. It
didn't matter. He was happy; he was going to keep being
happy; they'd be happy together.

 Eric
was an optimist by nature, still innocent of the blows even the most
blessed lives can suffer. His psyche was too sanguinary to allow him an
outright nightmare, and it offered him a safety net now, a voice in his
head that
said,
It's
okay, you're just dreaming.
A moment later, someone
started to knock at the door. Then Stacy was rolling off the bed, and
Eric was opening his eyes, staring blearily about the room. The
curtains were drawn; his and Stacy's clothes were strewn
across the floor. Stacy had dragged the bedspread with her. She was
standing at the door with it wrapped around her shoulders, naked
underneath, talking to someone. Eric gradually realized it was Jeff. He
wanted to go pee and brush his teeth and find out what was happening,
but he couldn't quite rouse himself into motion. He fell back
asleep and the next thing he knew Stacy was standing over him, dressed
in khakis and a T-shirt, rubbing dry her hair, telling him to hurry.

 "Hurry?"
he asked.

 She
glanced at the clock. "It leaves in forty minutes,"
she said.

 "What
leaves?"

 "The
bus."

 "What
bus?"

 "To
Cobá
."

 "
Cobá
…"
He struggled to sit up, and for an instant thought he might vomit
again. The bedspread was lying on the floor near the door, and he had
to strain to grasp how it had gotten there. "What did Jeff
want?"

 "For
us to get ready."

 "Why
are you wearing pants?"

 "He
said we ought to. Because of the bugs."

 "Bugs?"
Eric asked. He was having trouble understanding her. He was still a
little drunk. "What bugs?"

 "We're
going to
Cobá
,"
she said. "To an old mine. To see the ruins." She
started back toward the bathroom. He could hear her running water, and
it reminded him of his bladder. He climbed out of bed, shuffled across
the room to the open doorway. She had the light on over the sink, and
it hurt his eyes. He stood on the threshold for a moment, blinking at
her. She yanked on the shower, then nudged him into it. He
wasn't wearing any clothes; all he had to do was step over
the rim of the tub. Then he was soaping himself, reflexively, and
urinating into the space between his feet, but still not quite awake.
Stacy herded him along, and with her assistance he managed to finish
his shower, to brush his teeth and comb his hair and pull on a pair of
jeans and a T-shirt, but it wasn't until they'd
made it downstairs and were hurriedly eating breakfast that he finally
began to grasp where they were going.

T
hey all met in the lobby to
wait for the van that would take them to the bus station. Mathias
passed
Henrich's
note around, and everyone took turns staring at the German words with
their odd capitalizations, the crookedly drawn map at the bottom. Stacy
and Eric had shown up empty-handed, and Jeff sent them back to their
room, telling them to fill a pack with water, bug spray, sunscreen,
food. Sometimes he felt he was the only one of them who knew how to
move through the world. He could tell that Eric was still half-drunk.
Stacy's nickname in college had been "
Spacy
," and it was
well earned. She was a daydreamer; she liked to hum to herself, to sit
staring at nothing. And then there was Amy, who had a tendency to pout
when she was displeased. Jeff could tell that she didn't want
to go find Mathias's brother. Everything seemed to be taking
her a little longer than necessary. She'd vanished into the
bathroom after breakfast, leaving him to fill their backpack on his
own. Then she'd come out to change into pants, and ended up
lying facedown on the bed in her underwear until he prodded her into
action. She wasn't talking to him, was only answering his
questions with shrugs or monosyllables. He told her she
didn't have to go, that she could spend the day alone on the
beach if she liked, and she just stared at him. They both knew who she
was, how she'd rather be with the group, doing something she
didn't like, than alone, doing something she enjoyed.