The Ruins (46 page)

 "How
do you know it's a plant?"

 "What
else would it be? It's got leaves, and flowers,
and—"

 "But
it moves. And it thinks. So maybe it just looks like a
plant." He smiled at her, as if pleased, once again, with the
vine's many accomplishments. "There's no
way for us to know, is there?"

 The
smell changed, grew sharper, more intense. Eric was reaching for the
word inside his head when Mathias said it: "Meat."

 Stacy
lifted her face skyward, sniffing. "Steak."

 Mathias
shook his head. "Hamburgers."

 "Pork
chops," Eric countered.

 Jeff
waved them into silence. "Don't."

 "Don't
what?" Stacy asked.

 "Talk
about it. It'll only make it worse."

 They
fell
silent.
Not
pork chops,
Eric
thought.
Hot
dogs.
The plant was still inside him; he was certain of this.
Stitched inside him, biding its time. But maybe it didn't
matter. It could mimic sounds and smells; it could think, and it could
move. Inside his body or outside, the vine was going to triumph.

 Jeff
divided the orange into four equal piles, two and a half segments
apiece. "We should eat the peel, too," he said. And
then he portioned that out also. He gestured at Stacy. "You
choose first."

 Stacy
stood up, approached the little mounds of fruit. She crouched over
them, appraising each ration, measuring with her eyes. Finally, she
reached down and scooped one up.

 "Eric?"
Jeff said.

 Eric
held out his hand. "I don't care. Just give me
one."

 Jeff
shook his head. "Point."

 Eric
pointed at a pile, and Jeff picked it up, carried it to him. Two and a
half slices of orange, a small handful of peels. If there'd
been five of them still, there'd only be two segments apiece.
That Amy's absence could be measured in such a paltry manner,
half a slice of orange, seemed terribly sad to Eric. He put one of the
sections into his mouth and shut his eyes, not chewing yet, just
holding it on his tongue.

 "Mathias?"
Jeff said.

 Eric
heard the German stand up, go to claim his ration. Then everything was
silent, each of them retreating to some inner place as they savored
what would have to pass for their breakfast this morning.

 The
smell changed
again.
Apple
pie,
Eric thought, still not chewing, and struggling
suddenly, inexplicably, against the threat of
tears.
How
does it know what apple pie smells like?
He could hear the
others beginning to eat, the wet sound of their mouths working. He
pulled his hat down over his eyes.

 A
hint of cinnamon, too.

 Eric
chewed, swallowed, then placed a piece of orange peel in his mouth. He
wasn't crying; he'd fought off the impulse. But it
was still there—he could feel it.

 Whipped
cream, even.

 He
chewed the tiny strip of peel, swallowed, slipped another one into his
mouth. He could see the pie's crust in his
mind—slightly burned on the bottom. And it wasn't
whipped cream; it was ice cream. Vanilla ice cream, slowly melting
across the plate—a small tin plate, with a mug of black
coffee sitting beside it. Imagining this, Eric felt that urge to weep
again. He had to squeeze his eyes shut, hold his breath, wait for it to
recede, while the same four words kept running through his head.

 How
does it know? How does it know? How does it know?

T
here are some things we need
to figure out," Jeff said.

 The
orange had been divided, then eaten, peel and all. Afterward,
they'd passed the jug of water around their little circle,
and he'd told the others to drink their fill. Water
wasn't his chief concern anymore; after the previous
night's downpour, he felt confident it would rain
again—almost daily, he believed. And he knew it would help
morale if they could manage to eliminate at least that one discomfort.
So they ate their meager breakfast, then drank water until their
stomachs swelled.

 Later,
they could try to sew a pouch out of the leftover blue nylon. Maybe
they'd even manage to collect enough rain to wash themselves.
That, too, would help lift their spirits.

 They
weren't sated, of course. How could they be? An orange, split
between the four of them. Jeff tried to think of it as fasting, a
hunger strike: how long could these last? In his head, he had a
picture, a newspaper photograph, black and white, of three young men
staring defiantly from their cots—weak, emaciated, but
undeniably alive, their eyes ablaze with it. Jeff struggled to see the
headline, to remember the story that went with the picture. Why
couldn't he do this? He wanted a number, wanted to know how
long. Weeks, certainly—weeks with nothing but water.

 Fifty
days?

 Sixty?

 Seventy?

 But
eventually, there had to come a moment past which fasting blurred into
starving, and in Jeff's mind this was connected in some way
to their meager store of provisions, to its continued existence, no
matter how little they might actually be consuming. He'd
convinced himself that as long as some small scrap of food remained for
them to portion out, they'd be okay; they'd be in
control. Because they were rationing, not starving.

 Denial.
A fairy tale.

 And
then there were the things he knew and couldn't hide from,
the things he'd read about over the years, the details
he'd absorbed. At some point, their hunger pangs would
disappear. Their bodies would start to break down muscle tissue, start
to digest the fatty acids in their livers, the machine consuming itself
for fuel. Their metabolic rates would fall, their pulses slow, their
blood pressures drop. They'd feel cold even in the sun,
lethargic. And all this would happen relatively quickly, too. Two
weeks, three at the most. Then things would rapidly get worse:
arrhythmia, eye problems, anemia, mouth ulcers—on and on and
on until there were no
more
and
s for them to claim. It didn't matter if he
couldn't remember whether it was fifty or sixty or seventy
days; what mattered was that it was finite. There was a line drawn
across their path—a wall, a chasm—and with each
passing hour they edged one step closer to it.

 After
bread had come meat and after meat apple pie and after apple pie
strawberries and after strawberries chocolate, and then it had stopped. "It's so we don't get used to
it," Jeff had told the others. "So it catches us
off guard each time it comes."

 There
was something they could do, of course, a resource at their disposal,
but Jeff doubted the others would accept
it.
Unpalatable
was the word that came to mind, actually—
They'll
find the idea unpalatable
—and, even in his present
extremity, he saw the humor in this.

 Gallows
humor.

 There
are some things we need to figure
out.
That
was how
he phrased it, the words sounding so misleading in their banality, so
falsely benign. But how else was he to begin?

 Eric
was still lying on his back, his hat covering his face. He showed no
sign of having heard.

 "Eric?"
Jeff said. "You awake?"

 Eric
lifted his hand, removed the hat, nodded. The skin was puckered around
his wounds, drawn tight by the stitches, still oozing blood in places.
Ugly-looking—raw and painful. Mathias was to Jeff's
left, the water jug in his lap. Stacy was sitting beside
Amy's body.

 Amy's
body.

 "You
need some
sunblock
on
your feet, Stacy," Jeff said, pointing.

 She
peered down at her feet, as if not quite seeing them; they were bright
pink, slightly swollen.

 "And
take Amy's hat. Her sunglasses."

 Stacy
shifted her gaze toward Amy. The sunglasses were hooked into the collar
of Amy's T-shirt. Her hat had fallen off, was lying a few
feet away—mud-stained and misshapen and still damp from the
rain. Stacy didn't move; she just sat there staring, and
finally Jeff rose to his feet. He stepped forward, picked up the hat,
carefully plucked the sunglasses from Amy's shirt. He offered
them to Stacy. She hesitated, seemed about to refuse, but then slowly
reached to take them.

 Jeff
watched her put on the glasses, adjust the hat on her head. He was
pleased; it seemed like a good sign, a first step. He returned to his
spot, sat down again. "One of us ought to go and watch the
trail soon. In case the Greeks—"

 Mathias
stood up. "I'll go."

 Jeff
shook his head, waved him back down. "In a minute. First we
need to—"

 "Shouldn't
we, you know…" Stacy pointed at Amy's
body.

 Amy's
body.

 Jeff
turned to her, startled. Despite himself, he felt a strange mix of hope
and
relief.
She's
going to say it for me.
"What?" he asked.

 "You
know…" She pointed again.

 Jeff
waited her out, wanting her to be the one, not him. Why did it always
have to be him? He sat watching her, willing her to speak, to say the
words.

 But
she failed him. "I guess…I don't
know…." She shrugged. "Bury her or
something?"

 No,
that wasn't it, was it? That missed the point entirely. It
would have to be him; he'd been a fool to imagine any other
possibility. He inclined his head, as if nodding, though it
wasn't a nod at all. "Well, that's the
thing," he said. "Sort of. The thing we need to
talk about."

 The
others were silent. No one was going to help him here, he realized; no
one but him had made the
leap.
Like
cows,
he thought, examining their faces. Perhaps the orange
had been a bad idea—maybe he should've waited,
should've spoken at the height of their hunger, with the
smell of bread in the air, or meat.

 
Yes,
meat
.

 "I
think we're okay," he began. "
Waterwise
, I mean. I think we
can count on the rain coming often enough to keep us alive. We can
maybe sew a big pouch even, out of the nylon." He waved
across the clearing, toward the scraps from the blue tent. The others
followed his gesture, stared for a moment, then turned back to him.

 Like
sheep,
he
thought.
He was waiting for the right words to arrive, but they
weren't coming.

 Stacy
shifted, reached, picked up Amy's hand again, held it in her
own, as if for reassurance.

 There
were no right words, of course.

 "It's
all about waiting, you know," he said. "That's what we're doing here. Waiting
for someone to come and find us—the Greeks, maybe, or someone
our parents might send." He was having trouble holding their
eyes, and he felt ashamed of this. It would be better if he could look
one of them in the face, he knew, but somehow it didn't seem
possible. His gaze drifted from his lap to Stacy's sunburned
feet to the puckered wounds on Eric's leg, then back again. "Waiting. And surviving through the waiting. If we can
maintain a supply of water, that'll help, of course. But then
it becomes a question of food, doesn't it? Because we
don't have that much. And we don't
know…I mean, if it's not the Greeks, if we have to
wait for our parents, it could be weeks we're talking about,
weeks before someone comes and rescues us from this place. And the food
we have, even if we ration it, it's not going to last more
than a couple days. If we could hunt, or snare things, or catch fish,
or dig up roots, or search for berries…" He
trailed off, shrugged. "The only thing besides us on this
hill is the vine, and obviously we can't eat that.
We've got our belts, I guess—and we could figure
out a way to boil them, maybe. People have done that sort of thing,
people lost in the desert, or adrift at sea. But it wouldn't
really change much, would it? Not when we're talking
weeks."

 He
girded himself for a quick scan of their faces. Blank, all of them.
They were listening, he could see, but without any sense of where he
was headed. He was trying not to startle them, trying to creep up to
the thing that needed saying, and in this way give them the chance to
anticipate it, to prepare themselves for it, but it wasn't
working. He needed their help for it to work, and none of them was
equal to the task.

 "Fifty,
sixty, seventy days," he said. "Somewhere in there,
I can't remember—that's as long as anyone
can last without food. And even before that, long before that, things
start to go wrong, start to fail, break down. So let's say
we're talking thirty days, okay? Which is what? Four weeks or
so? And if it's not the Greeks, if it's our parents
we're waiting for, how long will that take? Realistically, I
mean. Another week before they expect us home, maybe a week beyond that
before they really start to worry, then some calls to
Cancún
, the hotel,
the American consulate—all that's easy enough. But
then what? How long to trace us to the bus station, to
Cobá
, to the trail
and the Mayan village, to this fucking hill in the middle of the
jungle? Can we really depend on it being less than four weeks for all
that to happen?"

 He
shook his head, answering his own question. Then he risked another
glance at their faces—but no, they weren't
understanding him. He was depressing them—that was
all—frightening them. It was right in front of them, and they
couldn't see it.

 Or
wouldn't, maybe.

 He
gestured toward Amy's body, kept his arm out in front of him,
pointing, long enough so that they didn't have any choice.
They had to look, had to stare, had to take in her graying skin, her
eyes, which refused to stay shut, the burned, raw-looking flesh around
her mouth and nose. "This—what's happened
to Amy—it's terrible. A terrible thing.
There's no way around it. But now that it's
happened, we need to face it, I think, need to accept what it might
mean for us. Because there's a question we have to answer for
ourselves—a really, really difficult question. And we have to
use our imagination to do it, because it's something
that'll only start to matter as the days go by here, but
which we have to answer now, beforehand." He scanned their
faces again. "Do you understand what I'm trying to
say?"