“It’s a dead fish,” Alice answered. Her voice was stone.
Tilly was very hungry afterward. Alice was hungry, too, had to be, but she didn’t say so. “Thank you, Tilly,” Alice would say. And then two more would come, and the three of them would take Alice.
Tilly was always afraid they would not bring her back. It was a selfish thing to feel, but Tilly could not help it. Tilly cared about Alice, and Alice should belong to the set of things inside the tent. Everything else Tilly cared about did not. Like Steven. She missed Steven. He was so nice. That’s what everyone said about Steven. Alice was always pointing this out to Tilly. The thing about Steven, Alice was always saying, was that he was just so nice. Alice didn’t quite believe in him. “And women don’t want nice men anyway,” said Alice. “Let’s be honest.”
“I do,” said Tilly.
“Then why aren’t you married to Steven?” Alice asked. “Why are you here in the rain forest instead of home married to your nice man? Because there’s no adventure with Steven. No intensity. The great thing about men, the really appealing thing, is that you can’t believe a word they say. They fascinate. They compel.” Alice knew a variety of men. Some of them had appeared to be nice men initially. Alice always found them out, though. Occasionally they turned out to be married men. “I don’t know why so many women complain that they can’t find men willing to commit,” Alice said. “Mine are always overcommitted.”
Steven must be just starting to wonder if everything was all right. A small worry at first, but it would grow. No sight of them in Óbidos, he would hear. Where they were expected four weeks ago. Perhaps the boat would be found, covered by then in the same purple vines that choked the rest of the riverbank. Would Steven come himself to look for her? Steven had taken her to the plane, and at just the last minute, with his arms around her, he had asked her not to go. Tilly could feel his arms around her arms if she tried very hard. He could have asked earlier. He could have held her more tightly. He had been so nice about the trip. Tilly thought of him all day long, and it made her lonely. She never dreamed of him at night, though; her dreams had shadows with elongated arms and subtly distorted shapes. Steven had no place in that world. And even without him, even with the dreams, night was better.
A storm of huge green dragonflies battered themselves against the walls of the tent, but they couldn’t get in. It sounded like rain. All around her, outside, her jailers grunted as they drove the insects away with their hands. They were in front of the tent and they were behind the tent; there would be no more escape attempts. Alice was no longer even planning any. Alice was no longer planning anything. To convince herself that Alice would be coming back, Tilly played Alice’s game. She sat still with her legs crossed, combing out her hair with her fingers, and tried to think of another prisoner for their list. Her last suggestion had come from a story she suddenly remembered her father telling her. It was about a mathematician who’d been sentenced to death for a crime Tilly didn’t recall. On the night before his execution he’d tried to write several proofs out, but very quickly. The proofs were hard to read and sometimes incomplete. Generations of mathematicians had struggled with them. Some of these problems were still unsolved. Tilly’s father had been a mathematician. Steven was an industrial artist.
Alice had told Tilly she had the story wrong. “He wasn’t a prisoner and he wasn’t sentenced to death,” Alice said. “He was going to fight a duel and he was very myopic so he knew he’d lose.” She wouldn’t count Tilly’s mathematician. The last prisoner of Tilly’s whom Alice had been willing to count was Mary, Queen of Scots. This was way back when they were first detained. Tilly was just the tiniest bit irritated by this.
The river drummed, birds cried, and far away Tilly heard the roaring of the male howler monkeys, like rushing water or wind at this distance. Bugs rattled and clicked. Each ordinary sound was a betrayal. How quickly the forest accepted an alien presence. It was like plunging a knife into water; the water re-formed instantly about the blade, the break was an illusion. Of course, the forest had responded to Tilly and Alice in much the same way. And now they were natives, local fauna to an expedition from the stars. Or so Tilly guessed. “Our only revenge,” she had told Alice, “is that they’re bound to think we’re indigenous. We’re going to wreak havoc with their data. Centuries from now a full-scale invasion will fail because all calculations will have been based on this tiny error.”
Alice had offered two alternative theories. Like Tilly’s, they were straight from the tabloids. The first was that their captors were the descendants of space aliens. Marooned in the forest here, they had devolved into their current primitive state. The second was that Tilly and Alice had stumbled into some Darwinian detour on the evolutionary ladder. Something about this particular environment favored embedded eyes and corkscrew fingers. It was a closed gene pool. “And let’s keep it closed,” Alice had added. She smiled and shook her head at Tilly. Her braids flew. “South American Headshrinking Space Aliens Forced Me to Have Elvis’s Baby,” Alice said.
At first Alice had kept diary entries of their captivity. She did a series of sketches, being very careful with the proportions. She told Tilly to take pictures but Tilly was afraid, so Alice took them herself with Tilly’s cameras. The film sat curled tightly in small dark tubes, waiting to make Alice and Tilly’s fortunes when they escaped or were let go or were rescued. Alice had tallied the days in the tent on her graphs and talked as if they would be released soon. There was no way to guess how soon because there was no way to guess why they were being held. Alice fantasized ways to escape. Tilly would have liked to ink the days off on the wall of the tent; this would have been so much more in the classical tradition. Four straight lines and then a slash. A hieroglyphic of the human hand. A celebration of the opposable thumb. Anne Boleyn had six fingers. Tilly wondered how she had marked the walls of her cell.
The door clicked to the side. Tilly sat up with a start. One of them was entering, bent over, her dish in its hands. It was one of the three who had taken Alice. There was no mistaking it, because it wore Tilly’s green sweater, the two arms tied round its neck in mock embrace, the body of the sweater draped on its back. The face belonged to a matinee horror monster, maybe the Phantom of the Opera. From the neck to the waist, largely because of her sweater, it could have been any freshman at any eastern university. From the waist down Tilly saw the rest of the sacklike gown, bare legs, bare feet. Monklike, only the legs were hairless. On the dish was a duplication of Tilly’s breakfast. She stared at it, hardly able to believe in it. She had never been offered additional food before. The door rattled again as she was left alone. She took a tiny bit of the fish in her fingers. She looked at it. She put it in her mouth. She took another bite. And then another. The food was here, after all. Why shouldn’t she eat it just because Alice was so hungry? How would it help Alice not to eat this food? Alice would want her to eat it. She ate faster and faster, licking her fingers. She ate the rind and seeds of the orange. She scraped the fish bones under her sleeping pad.
Alice was pale and tearful when she came back. She lay down, and her breath was a ragged series of quick inhalations. There were no marks on her. There never were. Just an agony about her face. “What did they do to you?” Tilly asked her, and Alice closed her eyes. “I mean, was it different today?” Tilly said. She sat beside Alice and stroked her hair until Alice’s breathing had normalized.
Alice had her own question. “Why are they doing this?” Alice asked. Or she didn’t ask it. The question was still there. “They don’t try to talk to me. They don’t ask me anything. I don’t know what they want. They just hurt me. They’re monsters,” said Alice.
And then there was a silence for the other questions they asked only deep inside themselves. Why to me and not to you? Why to you and not to me?
When dinner came that night, there was nothing but crackers for both of them. Alice was given more than Tilly. This had never happen
ed before. “Look at that,” she said with the first lilt Tilly had heard in her voice in a long time. “Why do you suppose they are doing that?” She equalized the portions. “They will see that we always share,” she told Tilly. “No matter what they do to us.”
“I don’t want any,” Tilly said. “Really. After what they did to you today I’m sure you need food more than I do. Please. You eat it.”
It made Alice angry. “You’ve always shared with me,” Alice insisted. “Always. We share.” She directed these last words toward the one who stayed to watch them eat. Tilly took the crackers. The sun went down. The birds quieted and the bugs grew louder. Tree frogs sang, incessantly alto. The world outside maintained a dreadful balance. Inside, the tent walls darkened, and they were left alone. Alice lay still. Tilly undressed completely. She climbed into her bag, which smelled of mildew, and missed Steven.
She had to urinate during the night. She waited and waited until she couldn’t wait anymore, afraid she would wake Alice. Finally she slid out of her bag and crawled to the empty bucket that sat by the tent door. She tried to tilt the bucket so that the urine would make less noise hitting the bottom, but every sound she made was too loud in this room. Of course Alice would hear her and wonder. Alice rarely used the bucket at all now. Tilly wished she could empty the bucket before Alice saw it. She got back into her sleeping bag and missed Steven until she finally fell asleep, sometime in the morning.
When she woke up, she missed him again. Alice’s eyes were open. “That teacher who killed that doctor,” Tilly said. “The diet doctor.”
“Jean Harris,” said Alice. “I already said her.”
“No, you didn’t,” said Tilly.
“I don’t want to play anymore. It was a stupid game and it just upsets me. Why can’t you forget it?” Of course the mornings were always tense for Alice. The day’s ordeal was still ahead of her. Tilly tried not to mind anything Alice said in the mornings. But the truth was that Alice was often rather rude. Maybe that was why she was treated the way she was. Tilly was not rude, and nobody treated Tilly the way they treated Alice.
“I have another one,” said Tilly. There was already a film of sweat on her forehead; the day was going to be hot. She climbed out of her sleeping bag and lay on top of it, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “And you certainly haven’t said her. I can’t remember her name, but she lived in Wales in the 1800s and she was famous for fasting. She lived for two years without eating food and without drinking water and people said it was a miracle and came to be blessed and brought her family offerings.”
Alice said nothing.
“She was a little girl,” Tilly said. “She never left her bed. Not for two years.”
Alice looked away from her.
“There was a storm of medical controversy. A group of doctors finally insisted that no one could live for two years without food and water. They demanded a round-the-clock vigil. They hired nurses to watch every move the little girl made. Do you know this story?”
Alice was silent.
“The little girl began to starve. It was obvious that she had been eating secretly all along. I mean, of course she had been eating. The doctors all knew this. They begged her to eat now. But they wouldn’t go away and let her do it in secret. They were not really very nice men. She refused food. She and her parents refused to admit that it had all been a hoax. The little girl starved to death because no one would admit it had all been a hoax,” said Tilly. “What was she a prisoner of? Ask me. Ask me who her jailers were.”
Shhh said the door.
“You must be very hungry,” said Alice. “Diet doctors and fasting girls. I’m hungry, too. I wish you’d shut up.” It wasn’t a very nice thing for Alice to say.
Alice was given crackers for breakfast. Tilly had a Cayenne banana and their own dried jerky and some kind of fruit juice. Tilly sat beside Alice and made Alice take a bite every time Tilly took a bite. Alice didn’t even thank her. When they finished breakfast, two more of them came and took Alice.
They brought Tilly coffee. There were sugar and limes and tinned sardines. There was a kind of bread Tilly didn’t recognize. The loaf was shaped in a series of concentric circles from which the outer layers could be torn one at a time until the loaf was reduced to a single simple circle. It was very beautiful. Tilly was angry at Alice so she ate it all, and while she was eating it she realized for the first time that they loved her. That was why they brought her coffee, baked bread for her. But they didn’t love Alice. Was this Tilly’s fault? Could Tilly be blamed for this?
Tilly was not even hungry enough to eat the seeds of the limes. She lifted her pad to hide them with the fish bones. Many of the tiny bones were still attached to the fish’s spine, even after Tilly had slept on them all night. It made her think of fairy tales, magic fish bones, and princesses who slept on secrets, and princes who were nice men or maybe they weren’t; you really never got to know them at home. She could imagine the fish alive and swimming, one of those transparent fish with their feathered backbones and their trembling green hearts. No one should know you that well; no one should see inside you like that, Tilly thought. That was Alice’s mistake, wearing her heart outside the way she did. Telling everybody what she thought of everything. And she was getting worse. Of course she didn’t speak anymore, but it was easier and easier to tell what she was thinking. She felt a lot of resentment for Tilly. Tilly couldn’t be blind to this. And for what? What had Tilly ever done? This whole holiday had been Alice’s idea, not Tilly’s. It was all part of Alice’s plan to separate Tilly from Steven.
Tilly got out Alice’s papers, looking to see if she’d written anything about Tilly in them. But Alice hadn’t written anything for a couple of weeks. PD, the last entry ended. PD. Tilly traced it with her index finger. What did that mean?
When Alice came back, Tilly was shocked by the change in her. She was carried in and left, lying on her back on Tilly’s mat, which was closer to the door, and she didn’t move. She hardly looked like Alice anymore. She was fragile and edgeless, as if she had been rubbed with sandpaper. The old Alice was all edges. The new Alice was all bone. Her bones were more and more evident. It was a great mistake to show yourself so. “What does PD mean?” Tilly asked her.
“Get me some water,” Alice whispered.
They kept a bucket full by the door next to the empty bucket which functioned as the toilet. A bug was floating in the drinking water, a large white moth with faint circles painted on its furry wings. If Tilly had seen it fall she would have rescued it. She doubted that Alice would have bothered. Alice was so different now. Alice would have enjoyed seeing the moth drown. Alice wanted everyone to be as miserable as she was. It was the only happiness Alice had. Tilly scooped the dead moth into the cup of water for Alice, to make Alice happy. She held the cup just out of Alice’s reach. “First tell me what it means,” she said.
Alice lay with her head tilted back. The words moved up and down the length of her throat. Her voice was very tired and soft. Shhh said the door. “It’s a cartographer’s notation.” Her eyes were almost closed. In the small space between the lids, Tilly could just see her eyes. Alice was watching the water. “It means position doubtful.” Tilly helped her sit up, held the cup so she could drink. Alice lay back on the mat. “Prospects doubtful,” said Alice. “Presumed dead,” said Alice.
Outside Tilly heard the howler monkeys, closer today. She could almost distinguish one voice from the rest, a dominant pitch, a different rhythm. She had once stood close enough to a tribe of howler monkeys to connect each mouth with its own deafening noise. This was at the zoo in San Diego. In San Diego, Tilly had been the one on the outside.
It was so like Alice to just give up, thought Tilly. Not like Alice before, but certainly like Alice now. Alice now was completely different from Alice before. Living together like this had shown her what Alice was really like. This was probably what the South A
merican Headshrinking Space Alien Children of the Boto had wanted all along, to see what people were really like.
Well, what did they know now? On the one hand, they had Alice. Alice was completely exposed. No wonder they didn’t love Alice.
But on the other hand, they had Tilly. And there was no need to change Tilly. They loved Tilly.
THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY
This One Is Also for Queequeg, for Kato, for Spock, for Tinker Bell, and for Chewbacca.
His first reaction is that I just can’t deal with the larger theoretical issues. He’s got this new insight he wants to call the Displacement Theory and I can’t grasp it. Your basic, quiet, practical minority sidekick. The limited edition. Kato. Spock. Me. But this is not true.
I still remember the two general theories we were taught on the reservation which purported to explain the movement of history. The first we named the Great Man Theory. Its thesis was that the critical decisions in human development were made by individuals, special people gifted in personality and circumstance. The second we named the Wave Theory. It argued that only the masses could effectively determine the course of history. Those very visible individuals who appeared as leaders of the great movements were, in fact, only those who happened to articulate the direction which had already been chosen. They were as much the victims of the process as any other single individual. Flotsam. Running Dog and I used to be able to debate this issue for hours.
It is true that this particular question has ceased to interest me much. But a correlative question has come to interest me more. I spent most of my fortieth birthday sitting by myself, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon, over and over, and I’m asking myself: Are some people special? Are some people more special than others? Have I spent my whole life backing the wrong horse?
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