The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  There was that asymmetrical smile again.

  They went inside.

  “I haven’t been here in a long time,” she said. “Where should we go?”

  They approached a directory. He put his finger on the panel. Designer goods. “The second floor?”

  “All right.”

  They found an escalator in the cosmetics section. He rode a corrugated step, the Number One beside him. When they reached the second floor, Daiji suddenly remembered going shopping with his wife in a place like this. They had just gotten married. She had been looking for a new handbag, and, feeling generous, he had told her she should get herself whatever she wanted. But after a few minutes she had said all the shops were too expensive. She had found a bag, some cheap thing, on sale somewhere else.

  As he walked down the carpeted aisle with the Number One, he pictured the handbag, badly battered and pitifully unfashionable, but still in use. Five years from now—ten!—his wife would still be carrying it around . . .

  On either side of him, above his head, foreign words were lettered in brass or engraved in marble. Below the words were window displays exhibiting necklaces, purses, and dresses, each item lit reverently like a sacred relic. The Number One ignored it all, strolling along at an aimless gait, a dreamy expression on her face.

  He wanted her to hurry up and decide on a shop. She had to decide now. It was urgent. Because another part of him was rehearsing excuses, constructing lies, anything to get off the hook and away from her.

  They stopped. They were standing before a store’s arched entrance. He squinted, but could make out only flashes of gold amid the dark gleam of wood.

  “Do you want to take a look inside?” he asked after a moment.

  “If you like.”

  But he didn’t move. He was held between forces. Then, mercifully, she took his arm in a gentle guiding action. At her touch his heart began its irrevocable fall away from him, like a ripe fruit from its branch. He understood what he was willing to give for her touch. He understood too that she would not satisfy him, and that he would keep giving anyway.

  The Number One drifted through the store. Daiji followed. He asked her what she wanted. She told him he had to choose the gift himself. He begged her to pick her own present, sparing him the risk of failure; but she was resolute. She helped him, though: at times her hand would come to rest on a particular plate of glass; at other times she would pause for a beat in front of a display before moving on. She was teaching him how to read her. And when, finally, he realized what he should give, he knew even before he looked at the price that it would be the most expensive thing in the place.

  The Book of Explorers

  The “singing vine,” so named by Ian Norcross following his first expedition to this region, does not, of course, sing. Typical whimsy on his part, that designation, and now we’re stuck with it. The sound it produces when touched does not strike any of us as resembling a human singing voice. A reedy whistle, at best; an occasional atonal whine or cry.

  We plod on. Kirby in the lead with his rusted machete, hacking away. Annoyingly, he seems to be invigorated by the humid stew we breathe instead of air. Great swinging arcs of the blade; lusty grunted exhalations. Tiny toneless shrieks from the scattered singing vines.

  At a rough clearing of sorts—an area of moss, mushrooms, and rotted stumps—we set up camp for the night. Pamela stakes the tent. Kirby clears the perimeter, hoisting branches and rocks into the growing dark, expanding our territory. Wakefield attempts a fire. I remove provisions. Luntz, notepad out, sketches a plant sprouting from the cleft in a red stump. After dusk, from the Kirby-carved tunnel of forest, Esterling appears like a just-risen nocturnal creature, taking us all by surprise. We hadn’t realized he had lagged so far behind.

  Night in the tent: Luntz and Wakefield fetal, silent. Kirby heaving and grunting and making truncated machete-arm swings in his sleep, still at work, hacking his way through dreams. Pamela, I sense, is awake like me. Outside, the fire’s still going. I can hear it pop, hear Esterling pacing. His shadow wavers across the tent wall, growing and shrinking and growing again. Pamela has chosen to place her sleeping bag beside mine, unnecessarily close, it seems to me. A testing closeness, as if to prove (to me? to herself?) that, as she has always maintained, we can work together professionally in spite of the divorce . . .

  The next day Kirby is pierced by something. Thorn, insect tail, fang—we don’t know. He hacks even faster than usual, as if fueled by it. We produce the kit. We propose antibiotic ointment, antivenom, water, bandages, rest. Kirby will have none of it. He hacks furiously away.

  We set up camp at a rough clearing of sorts, an area of moss, mushrooms, rotted stumps. I collect soil samples. Pamela takes photographs. Kirby, cross-legged in the dirt, glares fiercely through smudged spectacles at the infection in his leg, at its purplish flowering core and the pus-green tendrils radiating outward across his calf. Luntz is sitting on a rock, speaking softly to a nearby singing vine. Only Esterling stands apart, at camp’s edge, gazing into the forest. He seems never to have recovered from his year of solitary research at Lake Tanganyika. Try to talk to him and he looks back at you, face closed, vast watery distances in his eyes . . .

  The next morning, Kirby refuses to come out of his sleeping bag. His voice sounds lucid enough, but he refuses to come out of his sleeping bag. He’s sealed himself inside. He talks about the “risk of contagion,” although it’s unclear whether the contagion risk is to us or to himself. We stand above him. Our eyes meet: delirium. Whispered counsel at a jagged stump. Kirby hops from the tent, still sleeping-bagged, insisting in a hearty if muffled voice that he can go on . . .

  Now I’m on hacking duty. Pamela’s idea, basically. I’m the strongest, she says. None of the others—not even Wakefield, three inches taller than me and ten years younger—see the need to question that assertion. I’m assuming there will be a rotation. Atonal squeals shred and scatter around me.

  I think of thorns, insect tails, fangs.

  I think of Norcross. An entourage of locals to do his hacking. I picture him on a palanquin, body assuming a listless, reclining pose but face feverish under his pith helmet, glistening with exploratory greed . . . A notorious opium-eater, apparently, old Norcross. Until he discovered the jijasa root in this jungle. (Or, far more likely, it was introduced to him by the locals and he simply appropriated the credit.) A revision to the image, then: same listless recline, face still feverish, but ruminant as his jaws work the root, a brown leak of drool at mouth’s edge . . .

  Behind me, I hear a progressive crash through layers of vegetation. Kirby, hopping at the rear, has made another tunnel, this time with himself. The sleeping bag careens past vines, branches, undergrowth, a green shape hurtling through deeper green, toppling eventually into a stream, where it squirms, splashes, folds, shudders, stretches, twists, stops.

  Why does it fall to me to unzip the bag? I choose what I suspect is the end with the head and open it slightly, tentatively, enough to see what needs to be seen.

  Downstream we find a waterfall. A gentle push of collective hands sends the bag over the edge. Tears are shed and private items, separated from the useful ones in his gear, are tossed over the spray in an improvised eulogy. Pamela says something on behalf of us all, her words lost in the roaring hush of the water.

  I’m glad we decided—I decided; it was my insistence—not to bring along Mabel. Five-year-olds should not be brought on jungle expeditions, no matter how preternaturally gifted. Anyway she has a presentation to give at a symposium on TMCDB&AG (Theoretical Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Bioengineering, and Applied Genetics) and would certainly have opposed the idea.

  In our absence, she is being tended by what Pamela and I call the Gang of Nine: a retinue of research assistants, doctoral candidates, and veteran academics, hovering, fussing, fawning, and, I suspect, attempting surreptitiously to draw from her ma
terial for future books and articles. With them she acts two years younger than her age. Alarmingly imperious, she issues more or less arbitrary commands in a cloying species of baby talk she never used when she was actually a baby. As far as I know, she never gives them what they want. They are frustrated even as they are smitten with surrogate parental devotion, which frustrates them even more.

  How did we produce her? We, who are nothing but explorers. You could call it miraculous. You could just as well call it freakish. Frightening. Our offspring: off of us—off of Pamela—she sprang. My contribution a full 50 percent only in the genetic sense. Otherwise peripheral, however much I’ve tried to make up for that since. To make up for not having grown her inside me, for not having been the one to deliver her from womb to world. Waiting instead on the sidelines for my chance to be useful.

  We fail to find a decent clearing: no moss, no mushrooms, no rotted stumps. Pamela blames me in my capacity as machete wielder. We settle instead for an abbreviated glade.

  Before the marriage, in our trysts, our assignations, our impulsive couplings, our flash fucks, Pamela and I chose natural settings: parks, wooded glens, semi-secluded folds of land. We had cause then to be secretive, yet we chose green public places. I remember we did it in high grass a lot. This in spite of insects, pebbles, thistles, branches, assorted litter . . . Things poked at us, swarmed us, rubbed us raw, and we didn’t care. Then we got married and became explorers . . .

  Night in the tent. Even Esterling has retired to his sleeping bag. He sleeps rigid, silent. The entire tent is silent. No heaving, no grunting. No truncated swings. Am I the only one awake?

  Luntz makes a discovery halfway through the next day’s trek. He’s found the jijasa root; or believes he has. We set up camp for the night near a brook, the sound of a waterfall somewhere above. After dinner I hack the root into equal portions. We chew in a circle around the fire and imagine ourselves—or I imagine myself—in an ancient ritual, a link to something primeval. The root tastes primeval, anyway. We wait—I wait—for a vision . . . On the other side of the fire, Wakefield and Pamela are doing things I prefer not to see . . . I wander off by myself, away from the camp.

  “We should go back,” Esterling says to me. He appears to have been standing next to me. Back where? To the fire?

  “We don’t belong here. Not anymore.” I can’t remember the last time he said something. Days, maybe. Days of silence, and when he chooses to speak, it’s to utter ominous words after I’ve chewed a psychotropic root. Aside from the fact that he’s talking, he seems unchanged by the plant, as grimly affectless as ever. I agree with him, for something to say. The forest makes its forest noises, only somehow more deeply, more three-dimensionally. Wakefield and Pamela: I didn’t see it coming . . .

  I look around: Esterling is gone. Through the black cage of branches, the fire, very distant, mechanical in its glow, its crackle and sputter. It’s like one of those fake, glowing yuletide logs, pulsed in apparently random patterns by some hidden circuit. Made to seem natural. Only the fire is not distant. I’m sitting right in front of it. Eager noises from the tent, one of them familiar, belonging to Pamela. It occurs to me that the mosquitoes swarming me are not just hungry on their own; they are the emissaries, the mouths of a hunger out there beyond the yuletide fire. This is not a terrifying thought. Why shouldn’t I be food? I watch the mosquitoes work. It’s a kind of communion. An offering. Wakefield meanders past, unclothed, dragging a burnt stick. More food for the hunger out there. But then, in that case, if he’s here, what about the noises coming from the tent? I remain outside, watching the zipped flap. I must have failed at some point in my vigil, though: in the morning I find myself on my side in a pile of bark chips, the base of the tree trunk beside me denuded in a perfectly even ring.

  No sign today, in anyone’s behavior, of last night’s excesses, of unmentionable tented debaucheries. All of us are absentminded and irritable, all of us except for Esterling. He emerges, surprisingly, as the leader. For the moment at least. Not that he issues orders or even speaks, but his no-nonsense consumption of breakfast and matter-of-fact packing put us on notice and get us moving too.

  My mind keeps returning to the tent. “About last night,” I say to Pamela, pausing beside her as she zips her pack. “You don’t have to apologize, Daniel,” she says. “You weren’t yourself.” She tugs at my arm. I realize that it’s the machete arm. She gives me a gentle push forward, toward the wall of vegetation.

  Hacking, hacking. Thorns, tails, fangs . . . I think of Mabel, orphaned. Of all the things I still had to learn from her. Lessons on the plaid couch that will never take place again. Mabel propped in a corner, primly professorial, small hands at the knobs of the Etch A Sketch she uses as her blackboard . . .

  I realize that no one is behind me. I return through the tunnel I’ve carved to find Wakefield, Luntz, and Pamela stopped, faces uptilted, staring at something in the trees. A green sleeping bag, Kirby’s from the look of it. It hangs full above us, a torn end snagged on a cluster of drooping branches, swaying slightly. After a while Esterling marches by, oblivious, as if he doesn’t see anything unusual dangling overhead, as if we’re hallucinating it . . .

  Back into the tunnel. Hacking. Hiking. Collected soil samples. Camp. Sleep (fitful). Repacked packs.

  Nobody has mentioned Kirby’s sleeping bag.

  Am I the group’s leader now? It’s a question I ask myself again and again as the days pass. If Kirby, carving away at the front of the line, was leading our expedition, that should make me the leader now. I don’t feel like the leader. But if I am, where am I leading us?

  Overheard while collecting soil samples:

  Wakefield: “Well but it’s not a question of faith, is it? It’s a question of what can actually be accomplished.”

  Pamela: “Tell him that.”

  Hacking, hacking: the forest is a membrane, reluctantly yielding, resisting our advance. There is always more forest. An occasional cavity, a pocket with mushrooms and rotted stumps, then more forest. Years of exploring, and this is what I’ve learned: there’s always more . . .

  I make a decision. I turn to the others, shuffling along in my wake, and, proffering the machete, suggest a rotation. A changing of the guard. Wakefield interests himself in a translucent egg sac blobbed on a nearby leaf. Pamela fiddles with equipment, untangling cords, turning dials. Luntz has produced his notepad; lifting a pencil, he puts a fingertip to its pointed end. Esterling, trailing somewhere behind, a caboose unlinked from the train, would probably take the machete if I offered it to him, but do I really want to place a large, sharpened blade in his care?

  Esterling’s year alone at Lake Tanganyika: it’s difficult to imagine. I’ve never been on an expedition without Pamela. He returned and promptly published a series of papers describing what he’d learned: the “diplomatic protocols” in territorial disputes between neighboring species of African ants; a hitherto unknown stage in the life cycle of the aphid; the parthenogenetic mating patterns of the Tanganyikan humphead, the only cichlid—Esterling discovered—capable of asexual reproduction. He spent months observing algae. In his final published paper he claimed that algae distribution patterns on subsurface mineral shelves constituted a “holographic representation” of the health of the lake’s larger ecosystem . . .

  Unpublished, unrevealed: whatever it was in his solitary research that changed him.

  Or was it the solitude itself? Just Esterling and a lake. I can’t imagine being alone like that. Yet . . . A life alone, without Pamela: Isn’t that what I have now, even if we are still exploring together?

  Together and not together.

  Midmorning. Rain comes without warning, sunlight still in tatters all around, then continues all day unabated. Behind me I can hear Luntz whistling tonelessly. The hacking is slow and sprays wet now as well as vines. When the rain stops, it’s also without warning, a faucet that’s been turned off. Some
species of leech (we think) has secured itself to Wakefield’s forehead. We attempt to peel it away. It declines. We pull, pry, salt, and slather it, trying to urge it off. It holds fast to the unlined skin, curved there quizzically like a third eyebrow with no eye beneath it . . .

  More forest. Always more forest.

  I gave Mabel a book when she was little. Littler, I mean, than she is now. It’s called The Book of Explorers. One glossy page shows a painting of a grizzled mapmaker. The picture captures him just as he’s finished pushing his way through a thicket, into the open. He’s at a cliff’s edge. And before him—he stands agape—are vistas, tier upon tier, a sudden and unexpected richness of view, rumpled and multicolored and apparently endless . . .

  I approach Pamela. I want to talk. About the jijasa night, about Kirby’s sleeping bag, about the expedition’s growing loss of focus. About Mabel. “You can see that now is not the time,” she says. “I’m examining the flauna.” Pamela uses this word. Flauna. She uses it to mean the interrelationship, the symbiosis of flora and fauna. She uses the word in public. At dinner parties, at lectures. I’ve talked to her about it. She won’t stop.

  “Besides,” she says, “don’t you have soil samples to collect?”

  “Pamela,” I say.

  “Onward, Roald.” She points away into the forest. She calls me Roald sometimes. After Roald Amundsen, the first explorer to reach the South Pole. A hero of mine, for some reason that I can no longer remember. Something other than being the first, surely. Surely I had something better in mind than making a hero of someone simply because he got there first. I don’t remember. Roald: it was an endearment, used by Pamela in those moments—more and more infrequent near the end—when irony and genuine feeling were able to coexist. I’m not sure it sounds like an endearment now . . .

  If I could have spawned Mabel myself, parthenogenetically, no need for Pamela, my gifted daughter springing off me like Athena from the split in Zeus’s skull . . .