The Ruins (32 page)

 Mathias
ignored him. Cutting and stomping and tearing at the vines, faster and
faster, but still too slow, the tendrils fighting back, wrapping
themselves around his legs, hindering his movements.

 "
Mathias,
"
Jeff said, and he stepped toward him, grabbed his arm, pulled him away.
He could feel the German's strength, the taut, straining
muscles, but also his fatigue, his surrender. They stood side by side,
watching as the vine pulled the severed limbs into itself, the white of
the bones dragged into the larger mass of green, vanishing altogether.

 They
were still standing like this, all four of them, perfectly motionless,
when, from across the hilltop, there came that familiar chirping again,
the sound of a cell phone plaintively ringing at the bottom of the
shaft.

S
tacy sat beneath her
jerry-rigged umbrella, in her little circle of shade, cross-legged,
hunched into herself. She kept having to resist the temptation to
glance at her wrist, kept having to remind herself that her watch
wasn't there, that it was resting on a table beside a bed in
Cancún
, in her hotel
room, where she ought to be right now, too, but wasn't. Or
perhaps not: perhaps her fears had finally come true and a maid had
stolen the watch. In which case, it would be where? With her hat, she
supposed, and her sunglasses, adorning some stranger, some woman
laughing over lunch at a restaurant on the beach. Stacy could feel the
absence of these possessions in a way that was almost physical, an ache
inside her chest, a bodily yearning, but it was her glasses that she
missed most of all. There was too much sun here, too much glare. Her
head throbbed with it—throbbed with hunger, too, and thirst,
and fatigue, and fear.

 Behind
her, up the hill, they were amputating Pablo's legs. Stacy
tried not to think of this. He was going to die here; she
couldn't see any way around it. And she tried not to think of
that, too.

 Finally,
she couldn't help it: She gave in, glanced at her wrist.
There was nothing there, of course, and her thoughts began to circle
once again—the night table, the maid, the hat and sunglasses,
the woman eating lunch at the beach. This woman would be rested and fed
and clean, with a bottle of water at her elbow. She'd be
careless, carefree: happy. Stacy felt a wave of hatred for this
imaginary stranger, which quickly metastasized, jumping to the boy
who'd squeezed her breast outside the bus station, to
the—probably fictional—felonious maid, to the
Mayans sitting across from her with their watchful faces, their bows
and arrows. One of the boys was there now, the one who'd
followed them on the bike yesterday, the little one, riding on the
handlebars. He was sitting in an elderly woman's lap, staring
toward Stacy, expressionless, like all the other Mayans, and Stacy
hated him, too.

 Her
khakis and T-shirt were covered with the pale green fuzz from the vine,
her sandals also. She kept brushing it away, burning her hands, but the
tiny tendrils quickly grew back. They'd already eaten several
holes in her T-shirt. One, just above her belly button, was as big as a
silver dollar. It was only a matter of time, Stacy knew, before her
clothes would be hanging off her in shreds.

 She
hated the vine, too, of course, if it was possible to hate a plant. She
hated its vivid green, its tiny red flowers, the sting of its sap
against her skin. She hated it for being able to move, for its hunger,
and its malevolence.

 Her
feet were still caked with mud from the long walk across that field the
previous afternoon, and the mud continued to give off its faint scent
of
shit.
Like
Pablo,
Stacy thought, her mind jumping up the hill, to what
was happening there, the knife, the heated stone. She shuddered, shut
her eyes.

 Hate
and more hate—Stacy was drowning in it, dropping downward,
with no bottom in sight. She hated Pablo for having fallen into the
shaft, hated him for his broken back, his fast-approaching death. She
hated Eric for his wounded leg, for the vine moving wormlike beneath
his skin, for his panic in the face of this. She hated Jeff for his
competence, his coldness, for turning so easily to that knife and
heated stone. She hated Amy for not stopping him, hated Mathias for his
silences, his blank looks, hated herself most of all.

 She
opened her eyes, glanced about. A handful of minutes had passed, but
nothing had changed.

 Yes,
she hated herself.

 She
hated herself for not knowing what time it was, or how much longer
she'd have to sit here.

 She
hated herself for having stopped believing that Pablo was going to
live.

 She
hated herself for knowing that the Greeks weren't going to
come, not today, not ever.

 She
tilted back her umbrella, risked a quick look at the sky. Jeff was
hoping for rain, she knew, depending on it. He was working to save
them; he had plans and schemes and plots, but they all had the same
flaw, the same weakness lurking within them—they all involved
a degree of hope. And rain didn't come from hope; rain came
from clouds, white or gray or the deepest of black—it
didn't matter—they had to be there. But the sky
above her was a blinding blue, stubbornly so, without a single cloud in
sight.

 It
wasn't going to rain.

 And
this was just another thing for Stacy to hate herself for knowing.

T
hey decided to drop back into
the hole.

 It
was Jeff's idea, but Amy didn't argue. The Greeks
weren't coming today. Everyone was admitting this
now—to themselves at least, if not to the
others—and thus the cell phone, the perhaps mythical cell
phone calling to them from the bottom of the shaft, was the only thing
left to pin their hopes on. So when Jeff proposed that they try one
final time to find it, Amy startled him by agreeing.

 They
couldn't leave Pablo alone, of course. At first, they were
going to have Amy sit with him while Eric and Mathias worked the
windlass, lowering Jeff into the shaft. But Jeff wanted her to go, too.
He was planning on making some sort of torch out of the
archaeologists' clothes, soaking them in tequila, and he
wasn't certain how long the light would last from this. Two
sets of eyes down there would be more efficient than one, he said,
allowing the search to be more thorough, more methodical.

 Amy
didn't want to go down into the hole again. But Jeff
wasn't asking what she wanted; he was telling her
what
he
wanted, describing it as something that had already been decided, a
problem they needed to solve.

 "We
could carry it to the hole," Mathias said, meaning the
backboard, meaning Pablo, and they all thought about this for a moment.
Then Jeff nodded.

 So
that was what they did. Jeff and Mathias lifted the backboard out from
under the little lean-to, carried it across the hilltop to the mouth of
the shaft—carefully, working hard not to jostle Pablo. There
were some terrible smells coming off the Greek's body: the
by-now-familiar stench of his shit and urine, the burned-meat stink of
his stubs, and that sweeter scent, lingering underneath everything
else, that first ominous hint of rot. No one said anything about it; no
one said anything about Pablo at all, in fact. He was still
unconscious, and appeared worse than ever. It wasn't just his
legs Amy had to avoid looking at; it was also his face. When
she'd first applied to medical school, she'd gone
on some campus tours, and she'd seen the cadavers the
students dissected: gray-skinned, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed. That was
what Pablo's face was beginning to look like, too.

 They
set him down beside the shaft. The chirping had stopped, but now, as
soon as they arrived, it started up again, and they all stood there,
staring into the darkness, heads cocked, listening.

 It
rang nine times. Then it stopped.

 Mathias
checked the rope. He
unspooled
it from the windlass, the whole thing, laying it out in a long zigzag
across the little clearing, searching its hemp for weakness.

 Amy
stood beside the hole, peering into it, trying to gather her courage,
remembering her time down there with Eric, just the two of them, the
things they'd spoken of to keep their fear at bay, the lies
they'd told each other. She didn't want to return
again, would've said no if only she could've
thought of a way to do so. But now that they'd carried Pablo
all the way across the hilltop, she couldn't see how she had
a choice.

 Eric
crouched, began to probe at the wound on his leg, muttering to himself. "We'll cut it off," he said, and Amy
turned to stare at him, startled, not certain if she'd heard
correctly. Then he was up and pacing once more. The vine had eaten
holes in his shirt, almost shredding it. He was covered in his own
blood, spattered and dripped and smeared with it. They all looked bad,
but he looked the worst.

 Jeff
was making his torch. He used a tent pole, wrapping duct tape around
its bottom for a grip so the aluminum wouldn't grow too hot
for him to hold. He knotted some of the archaeologists'
clothes around the top—a pair of denim shorts, a cotton
T-shirt—tying them tight. Amy couldn't see how it
was going to work, but she didn't say anything, was too
worn-out to argue about it. If they had to attempt this, she wanted
just to do it and get it done.

 Mathias
stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. The rope was fine. They all
watched as he carefully wound it back around the windlass. When he was
done, Jeff slid the sling over his head, tucking it under his arms. He
was holding the box of matches, the already-opened bottle of tequila,
his flimsy-looking torch. Mathias and Eric stepped to the windlass,
leaning against the hand crank with all their weight. And then, without
the slightest hint of hesitation, Jeff stepped into the open air above
the shaft. He didn't say anything in parting to Amy; they
hadn't talked about a plan. She was supposed to follow him
into the hole—that was all she knew. The rest,
they'd have to make up once they got down there.

 There
was that familiar creaking of the windlass. Mathias and Eric strained
against its pull, letting the rope out, turn by turn, sweating with the
labor of it. Amy leaned over the shaft, watched Jeff drop into the
darkness; he seemed to grow smaller as he descended. She could see him
for longer than she would've anticipated, as if he were
somehow drawing the sunlight with him into the depths. He grew shadowy,
ghostlike, but she could still discern him long after it seemed he
should've vanished altogether. He didn't return her
gaze, didn't lift his face to her, not once, kept his eyes
focused downward, toward the bottom of the hole.

 "Almost
there," Mathias said. It wasn't clear whom he was
talking to, perhaps himself; that was how quiet his voice was.

 Amy
turned, glanced at him, at the windlass. The rope was nearly played
out, just a few more rotations to go. When she looked back into the
shaft, Jeff was gone. The rope went down and down and down into the
darkness, swaying slightly as it uncoiled, and she could no longer see
its end. She had to resist the urge to call out to Jeff, the sense that
he'd vanished not merely from sight but altogether.

 The
windlass finally stopped its creaking. Eric and Mathias joined Amy
beside the hole, all three of them staring into it. Amy could hear the
other two working to catch their breath. "All
right?" Mathias called.

 "Pull
it up," Jeff yelled back. His voice seemed far away, full of
echoes, not quite his own.

 Mathias
rewound the windlass by himself, and it went quickly, weightless, the
creaking sounding different now, higher-pitched, with an odd hint of
laughter in it, which was a creepy thing to hear. It made Amy shiver,
hug
herself.
Say
no,
she was
thinking.
You
can say it. Just say it.
But then Eric was handing her the
sling, helping her into it, and she still hadn't
spoken.
It's
not that bad,
she told
herself.
You've
already done it once. Why shouldn't you do it again?
And those were the words she kept in her head as she stepped out into
the open air, swaying there for a moment, before she began her slow
descent into the hole.

 It
was different in daylight. Better in some ways, worse in others. She
could see more, of course, as she moved downward—could see
the shaft, with the rocks and timbers embedded in its walls, the vine
growing here and there in long, looping strands, like decorations for a
party. But the light also heightened the feeling of transit, of
crossing a border as she dropped, moving from one world into another.
It was an oppressive sensation. Day into night, sight into blindness,
life into death: These were the connotations. Looking up
wasn't the right idea, either—it only made things
worse—because, even at this relatively shallow depth, the
daylight already seemed impossibly far away. And, just as Jeff had
appeared to grow smaller as he descended, now the hole looked to be
shrinking, as if threatening to close altogether, like a mouth,
swallowing her into the earth. She gripped the sling, concentrated on
slowing her breathing, struggling to calm herself. The sling was
damp—from Jeff's body, Amy assumed, his sweat. Or
maybe it was her own. She was beginning to sway back and forth, almost
touching the walls of the shaft, and she tried to stop herself, but
that only seemed to make it worse, a wobbly, seasick feeling stirring
in her gut. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth, and this
didn't help things, made it seem all the more possible, even
with her stomach empty, that she might throw up here, puke spewing from
her, splattering down on Jeff, waiting in the darkness below.