Dead Awake: The Last Crossing

by Hades

CHAPTER 7

  Fireflower

  The next day came all too soon and all too miserably. Again, I found myself searching for some answers that would explain what it was I had done that had taken it too far – far enough for her not to want me any more. What had I done that was so wrong?

  Still, No matter how much I tried to justify my actions; my blame, or lack of blame in the matter, ceased to be important. I could have been in my right all along, but who cared? I didn’t-any more. What did it matter when she was no longer there? It didn’t make any sense, any more, to be in the right. If I said I was sorry and got her back, then by all means, “Sorry”! What could make my pride break, if my whole soul was already broken? I couldn’t live without her any more, so who was I kidding? Fate was fate. I’d have to eventually go over to her house, beg forgiveness, grovel, and cry madly. But as much as I wanted to, subduing my ego and pride was a thing that would prove harder in deed than in thought.

  I fought hard at mastering myself, but felt the grip of fearful pride that held me back, like a giant hand around my waist. I was scared to face her. Scared as one would be that has to face someone so mad and try to say you’re really sorry, especially when that someone might not forgive any more. No, I couldn’t do it right away.

  So I did the next best thing; I snuck around and spied on her for a while.

  Behind bushes and under the cover of nice large objects dove the dark shadow that watched her house. I could run fast enough, and close enough, that I could almost get a peak inside. I had the idea that if I went fast enough, they wouldn’t be able to see me. It was a ridiculous idea, but who could get me to see the foolishness in it? The whole day was exhausted in finding new ways to get closer without being noticed. I even convinced some guy to lend me his bicycle for a moment so that I could get an edge in my spy-game.

  All the day long I watched, but never really saw Noelia. One time I got a look in one of the windows and saw some people there, but it was too fast to get a good look. None of them were familiar. That was odd. Maybe some family members were visiting, or some neighbors.

  All my pains that day were in vain, for I never got to see her. What could she be doing? The curiosity was itching like a nasty fungus. I tried much harder the next day, and the next, but never got one peek. All the while a slow paranoia began to spill into my blood. Why was she nowhere to be seen? And who were all those people? Could it be that she was in trouble, or maybe hurt?

  That thought brought the first wave of an ocean of anxiety crashing into my head. Later, it became more menacing and harder to ignore. All day long I spent looking and worrying; long eyes seeking for some focus through an open window that was so unkind. And it got the best of me, to the point that I got careless.

  So intense was the urge to know how Noelia was that I could no longer resist. I made my way right up to her door and, relentless, I refused to take precautions. Then I saw an open window. That window! But fear got the best of me right before I was able to see anything, and lucky for me, for I would have been discovered.

  Not two seconds after I dashed from the door, a lady came out. I don’t know if she saw me, but I ran like an escaped convict, and dove into a bush a block away. The door closed. Apparently the lady hadn’t seen me, but I couldn’t be sure. It was troubling that she had just gone out, apparently to do nothing, and then gone back inside. Had she seen me from inside? It could have been Higinia, but there was no way to tell, and that made it even more embarrassing. I felt like giving up and walking my silly little body over to her door, and turn myself in. I didn’t do it of course, just hid. Not daring to try a stunt like that again, I sat motionless from within the bush waiting for a chance to escape. All the while my mind saw fit to pester me with stories of a girl in trouble. I tried to shrug it aside, reasoning with myself in distressed conversation.

  “There can’t possibly be anything wrong,” I said, “I just feel this way because I haven’t seen her in a few days; but nothing’s the matter with her. Don’t be silly, Mr. Finch. Get a grip.” I said this to myself as a comfort, yet I couldn’t help to imagine something terribly wrong. It was the feeling of certain doom. The kind that could only be resisted a short while. It was amazing that I even lasted a minute before I found myself running towards Noelia’s small straw house.

  The speed only made the dread greater; fortunately, for my sanity, it made the arrival faster. Her mother was standing in front of the house, and had seen me coming from a distance. She was waving her hands in the air, signaling me to come quickly. My fears of being seen left, but all the rest remained. Could I have been right? Was there truly something wrong with Noelita? I got to the front of the house and already the tears of despair had begun to run down Higinia’s face.

  She grabbed me and pulled me inside. There was an outpouring of words, of which I caught only a few. Part of it was because I had only begun to understand Noelia’s native tongue; the other part was because of how fast and jumbled the explanation came. I understood enough though.

  She thought I’d come because I had heard the message they had sent to me. Apparently they had already taken the initiative and had sent word to me, but I told them that I had not received such message and had only come because I had felt there was something wrong. “I would have come sooner,” I said, “but I thought she didn’t want me here.”

  My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach as I found out what was happening. Her mother, with tears streaming from her eyes, said that it had happened because Noelia had missed me so much that her heart had broken. She took me over to the place where Noelia was laying and placed my hand on hers. Higinia was hoping that my mere presence would revive her daughter again.

  Jose Luis was there also and he was shaking his head at that ridiculous idea. He shouted to his wife, trying to explain what he’d probably tried to explain many times before: that it was not lovesickness, but something else. I didn’t understand what that something else was because he was using words I had never heard before.

  It was all too much for me. The strength seemed to drain from my feet as I knelt down beside Noelia’s bed. There she was lying, dark and cold. I held her hand, and it was obvious to me, at that point that she was dying. I was no doctor, but I could almost swear she had no pulse. I was scared and tried to point it out to her father, who was the most rational of the house that day.

  I looked to see if I could feel her breathing, but I could not. Tears were already pouring down my face, and I didn’t realize I was asking him in English: “Is she dead?”

  All the darkness and fright returned telling me that I had lost forever my time with her. Never again would we walk through the forest, where I could hold her hand and promise all my love. Everything was lost, and never would I find another in the world to fill her place. All the agony came and swept the strength from me. For a moment I did not breathe. Her father must have thought that I was asking what was wrong with her, instead of “is she dead?” for he certainly would not have thought that a smart city guy like myself would have asked such a stupid question. Her abdomen was moving up and down, which was her breathing, and she definitely had a pulse; it was stronger than usual.

  Ah, the things one can imagine while one is frantic. It’s astonishing. You can even change the way reality is in front of your own eyes, if you’ve already convinced yourself to think a certain way.

  In broken fragments of Guarani, I understood what was really the matter with Noelia. She had contracted a rare fever from a mosquito, for which there was no cure at this time of the year.

  “She will die,” said Jose Luis with a hint of human frailty. His tough heart had finally given way to tears as he spoke. A jumble of questions poured out my mouth. Among them were: What was this fever all about, and what exactly did he mean by “no remedy at this time of the year?” (It seemed to me that what I’d heard was an expression in Guarani that really meant there had not been a cure found yet, but I was willing to cling to any straw.)

  My mind thought out the qu
estions, but my mouth only spit them out in fractions. It was a miracle that he even understood (if that was what really happened). I think he only answered because he could guess what I wanted to know. “Why no remedy now?” was the best sentence I produced. I shouted it several times, even as he tried to explain. But he did his best, and eventually the explanation filtered through the layers of my gibberish.

  The cure, he said, was a thick substance the natives made from the petals of a certain flower that grew high up in the peaks of the island mountains. The area was always covered with ice and snow. Very inhospitable; and yet the only place the flower ever bloomed.

  It was a seasonal flower that began to grow early in June, and stopped growing altogether in July. I couldn’t comprehend his explanation on exactly why they couldn’t just pick enough of these flowers and store them throughout the year, except that something about their magical qualities only lasted for a very short time after the flower was picked. Since it was early May, there was no way a flower of its kind could be found anywhere in the country.

  Not until June – and by then she would be dead. It was a strong fever that doubled itself in its intensity almost daily. No one had ever survived its effects without drinking the remedy. The most they could hope for was two weeks, and it was now her third day since she had first become ill. There was no hope, he said. She would die.

  “But there is a cure!” I protested, “I thought there was no cure... and there is!” I clung to that. It was great to understand something in their tongue. Now there was something to be done.

  I wondered what sort of drug it was that was active ingredient in the flower, for there had to be some real medicinal properties to it, other than magic. Something had to make the infection go away. Was it anti-viral in some way, the same way penicillin is used to fight off infections? Back in the States the doctors would have most likely known what was wrong with Noelia and fixed it by now. Instead we had to be here, in this forsaken place, where there was no hope of that.

  It wasn’t the time for it, but I couldn’t help playing with the fact that this was the kind of place she had been so immovable from, and that I was right to have asked her to go with me. “This place is backwards, and I am right,” I said to myself.

  Jose Luis spoke again. He seemed to be insistent on the fact that there was no way to save her, and that she would die. It was as if he needed his perception to be the right one, and that I was wrong to think there was a way. His statements got me mad at all the island and its dim-witted mentality. It showed up again and again, this irrationality about magic and voodoo. That’s all these people ever talked about: magic and voodoo. If it wasn’t about their lovely Gauchito, spoken from every corner, it was about witchcraft or magic, and potions made from magic. I was sick of it!

  So what could this sickness possibly be? If we could just take her to a clinic, I was sure they could help her. This place had to have a real hospital somewhere! Of course there wasn’t, but I shouted my questions to Jose Luis, just the same. “Hospital! Hospital?” but his head shook in reply, answering again that it was “impossible,” “incurable,” and that the only way was the flower of which there was none of this month.

  “Incurable? What kind of disease can you get from a mosquito that is incurable?” I was angry with him. Of course he didn’t understand the word “mosquito” because I shouted it in English. I thought about it for a moment, trying to figure out what kind of disease it could be. Maybe malaria, but that was treatable, wasn’t it? What about this tsetse fly? No, that was in Africa. Either way, there had to be a cure for both of those.

  I couldn’t bear to have it end this way. In frantic search I turned to her father and tried to get more out of him. “What was this flower?” I asked, “And what did it look like?”

  Again, he only shook his head. “There is no flower. It is too early; we will not find it now.” It wasn’t that I believed in the flower, but he was so irrational; I was sick of it. These people would rather die than try. I shouted again to him, salivating like a mad dog with rage right to his face.

  “I will find the flower! I will find the damn flower; give me the name!” (Asking for the flower’s name was, once again, all that I could come up with in their tongue, but he understood that what I wanted was for him to describe it to me.)

  He described what they called a “Fire Flower.” He told me what it looked like and where I had to go to find it. That is, where it grew in season but “where I would not find it now”

  It was preposterous for a man like me to take sides with this magical flower; but the more I heard the negatives (could not, and would not), the more I took a stand and became enraged with a determination to find it. I asked Jose Luis to tell me how I would know that it was the right plant, once I found it. He said that (“if I found it”) I would know when I saw it. So I made my mind up, and determined to go after it.