The Ruins (23 page)

 Eric
thought about sitting up, but he was still tired, and his body ached.
He lowered his head, shut his eyes again, spent a few moments
cataloging the various sensations of pain his body was offering him,
starting at the top and moving downward. His chin felt bruised; it hurt
when he opened and shut his mouth. His elbow was sore; when he probed
at the cut, it was hot to his touch. His lower back was stiff, the pain
radiating down his left leg each time he shifted his body. And then
there was his knee, which didn't hurt nearly as much as
he'd anticipated, which felt a bit numb, actually. He tried
to bend it, but his leg wouldn't move; it was as if something
were sitting upon it, holding it to the floor of the tent. He lifted
his head to look, and was startled to see that the vine had grown
dramatically in the night, reaching out from the pile of supplies at
the rear of the tent to spread across his left leg, up his left side,
almost to his waist.

 "Jesus,"
Eric said. It wasn't fear he felt, not yet; it was closer to
disgust.

 He
sat up and was just reaching to yank the plant off his body, when Pablo
began to scream.

J
eff was at the base of the
hill, too far away to hear the screams. He'd emerged from the
tent shortly before dawn, urinated into the plastic bottle. By the time
he'd finished, it was more than half-full. Later, after the
sun rose, they could dig a hole, attempt to distill what
they'd collected. Jeff wasn't certain it would
work—he still felt as if he were forgetting some crucial
detail—but at the very least it would occupy them for a few
hours, keep their minds off their thirst and hunger.

 He
capped the bottle, set it back on the ground, then moved toward the
little lean-to. Mathias was sitting cross-legged beside it; he nodded
hello as Jeff approached. It wasn't light yet, but the
darkness had already begun to diminish somewhat. Jeff could see
Mathias's face, the stubble growing on his cheeks. He could
see Pablo, too, unconscious on his backboard, a sleeping bag covering
him from the waist down, could see him well enough to read the damage
in his face, the sunken quality, the shadowed eye sockets, the
slack-looking mouth. Jeff lowered himself to the ground beside Mathias
and they sat in silence for a stretch. Jeff liked that about the
German, his separateness, the way he'd always wait for
someone else to be the first to speak. He was easy to be around. There
was no pretense; things were exactly what they appeared to be.

 "He
looks pretty bad, doesn't he?" Jeff said.

 Mathias's
gaze moved slowly up Pablo's body, came to rest on his face.
He nodded.

 Jeff
ran his hand through his hair. He could feel how greasy it was; his
fingers came away slippery with it. His body was giving off a sour,
yeasty smell. He wished he could shower, wished for it with an abrupt,
almost tearful urgency, a childhood feeling—of frustration,
of knowing that he wasn't going to get what he desired, no
matter how hard he might work to attain it. He pulled back from the
feeling, the yearning, forced himself to focus on what was rather than
on what he wished to be, the here and now in all its painful extremity.
His mouth was dry; his tongue felt swollen. He thought of the water
jug, but he knew they'd have to wait until everyone was
awake. This reflection led, inevitably, to the memory of Amy, her
furtive thievery during the night. He'd need to speak to her;
she couldn't keep doing things like that. Or maybe not; maybe
he should let it go. He tried to think of a way to address the theft
indirectly, but he felt dirty and tired and thirsty, and his mind
refused to help him. His father was good at that sort of thing, telling
a story rather than delivering a lecture. It was only afterward that
you realized what he was
saying:
Don't
lie.
Or:
It's
okay to be frightened.
Or:
Do
the right thing even if it hurts.
But his father
wasn't here, of course, and Jeff wasn't like him;
Jeff didn't know how to be subtle in that way. He felt a jolt
of emotion at this thought, missing his father even more than the
unattainable shower, missing both his parents, wishing they were here
to make things right. He was twenty-two years old; he'd spent
nine-tenths of his life as a child, could still reach back and touch
the place. It frightened him, in fact, how accessible it was. He knew
that being a child now, waiting for someone else to save him, would be
as easy a way to die as any other.

 He'd
keep silent, he decided. He'd only speak if Amy did it again.

 He
told Mathias about the hole with the tarp over it to distill their
urine. He described how they could collect the dew, with rags tied to
their ankles. "Now would be the time for it, too,"
he said. "Just before the sun rises."

 Mathias
turned, glanced toward the east. It wasn't true what they
said, about the darkest moment being right before the dawn. It was
lighter already, a graying quality to the sky, but there was still no
sign of the sun.

 "Or
maybe not," Jeff continued. "Maybe we should wait.
Let everyone get their sleep. We have enough water for today. And it
may rain, too."

 Mathias
made an ambiguous gesture, half nod, half shrug, and then they sat for
a minute in silence. Jeff listened to Pablo's breathing. It
was too thick—gluey with phlegm. They'd have him
pumped full of antibiotics if he were in a hospital; they'd
be suctioning clear his airway. That was how bad it sounded.

 "We
should put up a sign, I guess," Jeff said. "Just to
be safe. In case the Greeks come when no one's there. A skull
and crossbones or something."

 Mathias
laughed, very softly. "You sound like a German."

 "What
do you mean?"

 "Always
doing the practical thing, even when it's
pointless."

 "You
think a sign is pointless?"

 "Would
a skull and crossbones have stopped you from climbing the hill
yesterday?"

 Jeff
mulled over that, frowning. "But it's worth a try,
isn't it?" he asked. "I mean,
couldn't it stop someone else, even if it wouldn't
have stopped us?"

 Mathias
laughed again. "
Ja,
Herr
Jeff. By all means. Go make your sign." He waved him
away.
"Gehen
,"
he said. "Go."

 Jeff
stood up, headed off. The contents of the blue tent were still tumbled
beside the shaft—the backpacks, the radio, the camera and
first-aid kit, the Frisbee, the empty canteen, the spiral notebooks.
Jeff dug through first one of the backpacks, then the other, until he
found a black ballpoint pen. He took it and one of the notebooks,
carried them back across the hilltop to the debris remaining from
Mathias's hurried construction of the lean-to. From this, he
retrieved the roll of duct tape, a three-foot aluminum pole. Mathias
watched him—smiling, shaking his head—but he
didn't say anything. It was growing subtly lighter; the sun
was about to rise, Jeff could tell. As he set off along the trail, the
Mayans' fires came into view, still burning on the far edge
of the clearing, flickering palely in the fading darkness.

 Halfway
down the hill, he felt the urge to defecate: powerful, imperative. He
set down everything he was carrying, then stepped into the vines and
quickly lowered his pants. It wasn't diarrhea, but something
one notch short of it. The shit slipped wetly out of him, snakelike,
collapsing into a small pile between his feet. There was a strong smell
rising off it, sickening him. He needed to wipe himself, but he
couldn't think of anything to use. There was the vine growing
all around him, with its flat, shiny leaves, but he knew what happened
when these were crushed in any way, the acid sting of their sap. He
shuffled back to the trail, only half-rising, his pants still bunched
around his ankles, and ripped a sheet of paper from the notebook. He
crumpled it, rubbed roughly. They should probably dig a latrine, he
realized, somewhere downhill from the tent. Downwind, too. They could
leave one of the other notebooks beside it, for toilet paper.

 Dawn
had begun to break, finally. It was an extraordinary
sight—clear pink and rose above a line of green. Jeff
crouched there, watching, the shit-stained sheet of paper still held in
his hand. Then the sun, all in an instant, seemed to leap above the
horizon: pale yellow, shimmering, too bright to look at.

 It
was as he was stepping back into the vines to kick some dirt over his
shit—pulling his pants up, fumbling for his
zipper—that he felt his fingers begin to burn. In the growing
light, he could see that there was a pale green fuzz sprouting across
his jeans. His shoes, too. It was the vine, he realized; tendrils of it
had taken root on his clothes during the night, so tiny that they still
looked more like the spread of a fungus than a
plant—diaphanous, veil-like, nearly invisible. When Jeff
brushed them away, they crumpled, leaking their stinging sap, singeing
his hands. He stared at the green fuzz a long moment, not certain what
to make of it. That the vine could grow so quickly seemed
extraordinary, an important development, and yet what did it mean? He
couldn't think, couldn't decide, had to give up
finally. He forced himself to look away, to continue forward into the
day. He tossed the wad of paper onto the little pile of shit. The dirt
was too packed, too dry for him to kick any free; he had to crouch and
chop at it with a rock, sweat rising on his skin from the effort. He
loosened one handful of the pale yellow soil, then another, scattering
them across the mess he'd made, partially obscuring it,
burying the stench; it was good enough.

 Then
it was back to the trail, where he stooped to retrieve the tape and
pen, the notebook and the aluminum pole. He was just turning to resume
his downward journey, when he hesitated,
thinking,
There
should be flies. Why aren't there flies?
He
crouched again, puzzling over this, staring back toward his
half-covered pile of shit, as if waiting for the insects to appear,
belatedly, buzzing and swirling. But they didn't, and his
mind kept jumping—too rapidly, without pause, like a burglar
rifling a desk, yanking open drawers, dumping their contents to the
floor.

 Not
just here but on Pablo, too. Flies hovering over his smell, crawling
across his skin.

 And
mosquitoes.

 And
gnats.

 Where
are they?

 The
sun continued to rise. The heat, too—so fast.

 Maybe
the
birds,
Jeff
thought.
Maybe
they've eaten all the insects
.

 He
stood up, stared across the hillside, searching for the birds,
listening for their calls. They ought to be awake now, flitting about,
greeting the dawn. But there was nothing. No movement, no sound. No
flies, no mosquitoes, no gnats, no birds.

 
Droppings,
he
thought,
and scanned the surrounding vines, searching among the bright red
flowers, the flat, hand-shaped leaves, for the white or amber splatter
of bird shit. But, once again, there was nothing.

 Maybe
they live in holes, burrows they gouge from the earth with their beaks
. He
remembered reading of birds who did this; he could almost picture the
creatures, earth-colored,
taloned
,
hook-beaked. But he could see no sign of tunneled dirt, no shadowed
openings.

 He
noticed a pebble at his feet, perfectly round, no larger than a
blueberry, and he crouched, picked it up, popped it into his mouth.
This was something else he'd read: how people lost in the
desert would sometimes suck on small stones to keep their thirst at
bay. The pebble had an acrid taste, stronger than he'd
expected; he almost spit it out, but he resisted the impulse, using his
tongue to push the tiny stone behind his lower lip, like a pinch of
tobacco.

 You
were supposed to breathe through your nose, not your mouth; you lost
less moisture that way.

 You
were supposed to refrain from talking unless it was absolutely
necessary.

 You
were supposed to limit your eating, and avoid alcohol.

 You
were supposed to sit in the shade, at least twelve inches off the
ground, because the earth acted like a radiator, sucking your strength
from you.

 What
else? There was too much to remember, too much to keep track of, and no
one here to help him.

 He'd
heard the birds last night. Jeff was certain he'd heard them.
He was tempted to stride off across the hillside, searching for their
burrows, but knew that he ought to wait, that it wasn't
important. The sign first. Then back up to the tent, so that they could
ration out the day's water and food. Then the hole to distill
their urine, and the latrine—they'd need to get the
digging done before it got much hotter. Then, after all that, he could
find the birds, search for their eggs, string up some snares. It was
crucial not to lunge at things, not to become overwhelmed. One task and
then another, that was how they'd make it through.

 He
started down the trail.

 The
Mayans were waiting for him at the bottom, four of them, three men and
a woman. They were crouching beside the still-smoldering remains of
their campfire. They watched him approach, the men rising as Jeff
neared the foot of the hill, reaching for their weapons. One of them
was the man who'd first tried to stop Jeff and the others,
the bald man with the holstered pistol. He held the gun in his hand
now, hanging casually at his side but ready to be raised. Ready to be
aimed, fired. His two companions each had a bow, arrows loosely
nocked
. There were half a dozen
more Mayans along the far tree line, Jeff saw, wrapped in blankets,
straw hats hiding their faces, sleeping. One of them stirred, as if
sensing Jeff's approach. He jostled the man lying beside him,
and they both sat up to stare.