by Rick Bass
He was confused and realized only then just how drunk he was. The woman’s face was garish, streaked as if with war paint: as if she had applied it for this very occasion. She raised a brick—at first he thought it was a loaf of bread, that she wanted to feed him, and he felt a great hunger—and then, though without great force, she struck it against his head.
He felt his teeth and nose break, or so it seemed, and he was so stunned he did not even fall, though he wanted to. Now the big man hit him twice in the face hard and fast, so quick that Wilson understood he was a boxer—the man hitting him twice when once would have been enough, as he was already on the way down, but then checking his third swing—and Wilson’s knees sought the pavement, and then his elbows, a mendicant.
The woman was reaching in his pocket, wrenching his billfold from him, while the man kicked his ribs, once on each side, as if to drive the air from Wilson’s lungs so that he could not cry out for help; but Wilson had no intention of crying out for help. His ribs were not yet fully healed from his logging accident and yet here they were, being broken yet again.
The sensation of their breaking was so familiar—half a world away—that it staggered him. When the tree snag had broken, his first thought was How can something I love hurt me? And here it was again, muted but the same: he had been feeling affection, though certainly not love, and yet look, his ribs were now broken all over again.
Just a mugging! he thought, with the raw sorrow of loneliness, of foolishness. I would have given them my wallet. He felt her going away somehow, felt both of them leaving, and he thought, I miss her.
He crawled, slithering toward and then into the sweet-scented hedge, and heard them laughing as they walked away.
The wallet didn’t matter. He’d spent most of his cash on the drinks, and the credit cards were useless. His luck continued. His passport was in the room along with most of their traveler’s checks, which he had allowed Stephanie to look after on the trip. She enjoyed being the organizer, the indexer, of all things large and small, in this regard not unlike her mother. He felt warm, cared for—relaxed, even though in pain.
He lay there for a long while, napping, happy in a way that mystified him and yet for which he was grateful. As if he had somehow gotten what he had been wishing for.
When he awoke, roosters were crowing and the day was not quite light. He rose and weaved down the street, still a little drunk, trying to find his way back to the hotel but not sure where it was and unable to remember its name, or even what it looked like.
But, feeling that his great luck was continuing, he arrived, after walking a long time, at a wrought-iron gate he recognized, and saw a cat in the garden he remembered—a small black cat with a white tuxedo vest. Wilson pressed the buzzer and limped up the steep steps and went inside, back into the familiar garden, where the desk clerk looked at him with concern but said nothing. He passed an elderly couple seated already for breakfast—damn their normalcy, their sweet and enduring matrimony. He felt a desire to harangue them. Instead, he hobbled up to his room, tried to sneak in quietly and crawl into bed, but the click of the door awakened both girls, who sat up and looked at him as if without recognition.
His shirt was torn and bloodied, his bloody nose had dried to a crust, a tooth was chipped, and one of his eyes was purple-black already.
He smiled his new crooked-toothed smile at them and they both began to cry immediately, and hurried over to him. They hugged him far too hard—he could barely stand to have his ribs touched—and he yelped, which made them draw back.
They smelled the rum and cigarettes, and cried harder as some of the pieces came together, while he in turn could smell sharply, even through the dried blood in his nose, their clean nightclothes. They smelled of home, smelled faintly of the forest and of wood smoke, of their shampoos and soaps. He knew those scents, and he was loved. He saw the fear in both their faces, but another thing, too, like anger, and he wanted to explain, to defend himself: This was not my fault; this was not my doing.
Something dark—darker than a storm cloud—passed across his fevered mind and, as if paralyzed, he watched it sail from one side of his mind all the way to the other, with its chill and its pure silence. Then, in the electrical storm of his brain, he thought: How amazing that despite all this I am still in charge. How amazing that I am still in control.
There was a feeling that they all needed to say something, and yet there seemed to be no words that could suffice, for no one spoke. Some glances around at each other, but nothing else.
He blacked out then, after watching the black cloud, and slept.
When he awoke, the girls looked pale and exhausted. He hurt far worse than when he’d gone to sleep.
While he’d been passed out, Lucy—fifteen!—had gone to a pharmacy and in pidgin Spanish purchased gauze bandages and wraps, tape, antibiotic ointment, and a tear-open packet of two aspirin, while Stephanie had sat beside him, wakeful, to make sure he did not vomit while sleeping and choke. He woke once to hear Lucy asking “Is he going to be all right?” and saw Stephanie look at her sister as if across a gulf greater than three years.
They still seemed unable to speak of it, the three of them struck equally mute, and with no discussion, the girls helped him into the bathroom. Wilson coughed and nearly fainted from the pain—he gripped their shoulders or would have fallen—but he had been down this path before and knew not to panic, to take shallow breaths, little sips of air, like a man who after swimming a great distance—days and nights—finds he must rest and tread water for a while.
Could he get better without talking about this? he wondered. How close to the edge was he? Correction: How far past the edge? His first honest thought in perhaps years. He didn’t like the weight or density of it and quickly shoved it away. Beer, he thought, I need a beer.
“I know you’re probably a little worried,” he told them. His swollen, abraded face throbbed. He felt the roughness of his chipped tooth with his tongue. His sheets were bloody. He knew he looked a fright.
“What happened?” Lucy asked. “Were you drinking?”
“I don’t know,” he told them. “Not really. It was just a mugging.” He saw the look on both their faces and paused. “Well,” he said, “yes. I was drinking a little. Not too much.” He shook his head. “I guess someone might say I had a little too much. I won’t let it happen again.”
Lucy’s eyes watered, but she didn’t cry. She had already cried.
Stephanie wanted to take a break from seeing ruins, so that same day, because Wilson was so sore, they took a cab across the city to one of Lima’s museums. In a moment of further humiliation in the hotel room, he had asked Stephanie to chip in the few hundred dollars she had on her debit card, from babysitting, to supplement what remained of their traveler’s checks. He hated to ask, he said, but he needed the extra help to tide them over. They rode through the traffic-clotted streets, through the horns and heat and the meat smoke of curbside vendors, to one of Lima’s museums, where the highlight for all three of them was the spectacular, even gothic, retablos: hammered-tin dioramas filled with doll saints and angels, some wreathed in barbed wire, all of them untouchable, anguished, beautiful. The figures were jammed into miniature houses that were too small, as if the saints and angels were poised to fly out of the boxes that housed them—and although each retablo was similar, each one was different, too. The girls lingered for some time, unable to look away from the tortured Madonnas.
After the museum, the day had cooled enough that Wilson decided they could walk back to the hotel, three miles distant. Walking like an old man, slow and steady, he found himself daydreaming, pondering how the girls had studied the retablos with the same intensity with which they had once considered their dollhouses and the sagas that attended each doll. Always, perfect families.
When he finished his reverie and looked around, the girls were gone—a sea of strangers swarmed around him, all flowing the same direction he was going: and whether the girls had gone ahead, or
he had passed them by, he had no idea, no intuition, and knew instead only the ancient and agonizing panic of solitude.
He surged ahead, certain at first they were in front of him; but after a while, he reversed his thinking, imagined that the minute they saw he was not with them, they would have stopped, and that he had therefore passed them by already, so he went back. And in this manner he traveled back and forth, doubting and re-doubting, before finally steadying himself enough to recall where he had last seen them, and return to the nearest street corner, and wait, right on the edge of the street, hoping to make himself visible.
His return to the corner worked. They had indeed gone on without him, and now looped back and found him. “Where were you?” Stephanie asked, even as Wilson was asking the same of them.
“Please don’t do that again,” he said—almost a scolding. “I can’t take it, not down here.”
They both looked at him with an expression he recognized as one of his own: like parents frustrated with a child who’d repeated the same mistake once more, and it occurred to him that from their perspective, it was he who had gotten lost.
There were few injuries more painful than broken ribs—the jagged edges of the break irritating the surrounding tissue with the expansion and contraction of every breath, and the wound so slow to heal, always. He took Advil with the wine he was now openly drinking at meals. Lucy said she’d read that too many Advil were bad for one’s liver, and Wilson assured her he’d be careful and not overdo it. It surprised him how quickly they had all become accustomed to the frightfulness of his black eye and the abrasions and lacerations scattered across his face, one of which might have benefited from stitches, though it had bandaged up pretty well. He wondered if they were accepting this new visage because it was the face that fit him now, or simply because they loved him.
He felt the girls eyeing him as he drank, but there was no mistaking that the Advil and alcohol together eased the pain in his ribs. He had started with several glasses of wine or beer, taken, like medicine, throughout the afternoon and evening, but by the day before Machu Picchu, he was having an entire bottle of wine with lunch. The girls eyed his fourth and fifth glasses, the rich plum color, with skepticism and disapproval, but they let it go, perhaps granting it to him as a necessity.
And they were eating in restaurants, which, Wilson told himself, had certain standards and clearly approved of his consumption and demeanor and did not consider him a drunk. Far from it: it was important for the waitstaff, as well as the girls, to see that he was a man of great capacity, one who could not easily be brought down by the weaker forces of the world, the mugging notwithstanding. In a big life, there were always exceptions.
In truth, the broken ribs were a blessing; Wilson didn’t know what he’d do without that excuse. He imagined he’d have to find another, and was glad not to have to.
The girls were definitely rawer now, though. Even he could see that. Frightened, but also—could he be mistaken?—somehow more awake.
He felt good, beginning with that fourth glass of wine. The fifth was fine, more than fine, but it was the fourth glass that really took the edge off his pain and everything else. He needed to relax. It was important for the girls to see him happy. When he finished the bottle and the waiter asked if that would be all, he pretended not to want any more. He was proud that when he paid and rose to leave, he was in no way incapacitated, nor would it have been apparent to anyone else that he had been drinking. He just moved a little more slowly, but that was because of his recent injuries. The girls glanced back and forth at each other. He knew there was really nothing they could say, not right now, anyway. He was in control, for at least a while longer.
The day of their Machu Picchu excursion, Lucy woke them before the alarm went off. Wilson stirred slowly, and when he opened his eyes to the dim room—another soulless accommodation: no artwork, only two beds, thin carpet, ugly orange curtains, fully drawn—Lucy stood there looking at him, as though she’d been there for a while, watching him sleep. He felt a great distance from her, and that she had been regarding him, considering him, the way she had once studied the characters in her fairy-tale books.
They boarded the bus to Machu Picchu just before dawn. It had rained heavily in the night but was only misting now. They rode up a narrow winding river canyon, the diesel double-decker bus groaning and swaying, precipitous cliffs visible out one side of the bus and then the other. Today, Wilson thought, I am going to drink only one beer, a good Incan beer, simply for the taste. His aches and pains were slowly subsiding, and the mugging was far enough in the past for him to convince himself it had had nothing much to do with his being drunk.
He looked over at Lucy. In a heartbeat she would be Stephanie’s age, and then gone, too. He studied the darker blue and green flecks in the blue of each girl’s eyes. Chips of minerals, each chip a repository for the most amazing sights they’d seen together, both here and back home.
The tour-bus guide was speaking over a microphone. “No one knows why Machu Picchu was built,” she said. “Some think it was a place for sacrifices. Another theory is that it was a retreat for the kings, a place to rest and relax.”
No sooner had the bus at last circled into the empty muddy parking lot than the fog shredded to tatters before the rising sun. The mountains, earth brown and jagged as the fins of dinosaurs, stretched up through the wisps and shrouds.
They disembarked, stood in line to receive their passes, then edged through the already crowded turnstiles and entered the hallowed playground of royalty. Other travelers shuffled around them, but inside the park, there were any number of stone stairways and terraces that could be traveled; the clots and masses dispersed.
Wilson and the girls had received their own guide. What great luck, Wilson thought. We can ask any questions we want. He’d been fucking up the whole trip, he knew—paying attention only intermittently, and even then without true focus or resolve. His life was passing by with the speed of a plummet. Try hard today, he told himself. Be present. Try.
But already the guide was talking too fast, gesturing and animated, and though Wilson tried to listen and engage, to ask questions and learn, he couldn’t. The concentration required was too overwhelming.
They went up, they went down. The steps had been worn smooth by the passage of feet across time, with their own adding to the smoothness. The guide’s words simply would not attach to Wilson’s mind—it seemed there were catacombs inside his head, spaces through which the words passed—and he tried to slow things down, but it was coming at him too fast: the verdant terraces, the teeth of the sunlit peaks opening all around as if to swallow them.
They were walking between those teeth now, and the rain clouds and fog wreaths kept peeling back and away as if funneling down a drain. Ivory torrents of waterfalls plunged down forested canyons on the other side of a great cleft. Far below, at the bottom of the cleft, surged the rushing river along which their bus had labored to get them here.
The guide was saying that the headwaters of the Amazon were on the back side of Machu Picchu. He was saying something about lookouts and sentries being posted, though against what danger was not clear—a threat so obvious it apparently did not need to be named. He said they would flash mirrors to one another across the great distances from one peak to the next and would blow conch shells to sound further warnings.
Much of the talk went past Wilson, but he became aware that what had started for the girls, earlier in the day, as a kind of determined happiness was giving way to something more natural. Their smiles were the most free and unguarded he had seen on the trip. They snapped photos of each other on promontories and in stone cottages. Everywhere they turned, they saw majesty, beauty, here at the top of the Incan world.
And there was farther to go—a special hike, through the last of the forest and up to the very highest peak, torturous and straight uphill. They passed through the next turnstile, narrow as a birth canal, and continued on, ascending now, with the help of ropes,
over haphazard steps. The path felt like a secret passage and the girls charged up it with great spirit. Wilson followed, the stones slippery and mossy, the spray of sunlit waterfalls moist with rainbows.
The girls emerged at the top with even wider smiles. Nowhere higher to go.
Lucy posed swanlike for her sister, on one leg, arms outstretched atop the cone-shaped peak, all the world below her.
He was proud of them, and as if crawling up from some pit, he realized that part of the reason they were so capable was that he’d been screwing up these last couple of years. These last three or four years. They were tough and resilient, stronger than he’d known. He’d almost ruined the trip, and yet they were happy. The novelty of this idea—that their happiness was unmoored from his own and they could go on without him—struck him hard and deep; jarred something in him that, while good, still felt more like fear than pleasure.
If, even in his blindered state, he could see this, how much more was he missing? He gaped at the mountains around him with the sudden intensity of a man trying to burn away fog with the focus of his will alone; but the effort made his head hurt, and he found that still, or only, he wanted a drink.
Another memory. Who is chosen to stay; who is chosen to leave? As a child Wilson had been a poor swimmer, yet drawn, now and again, to the very thing that could destroy him. On numerous occasions, while other children splashed and plunged in waters where he could perceive no bottom, he would edge out, pale and tentative, toes gripping the bottom, stretching his child’s frame upward until the water was up to his thin chest, then his neck, then his chin. A buoyancy, a toppling.
Still, he would push a bit farther: hopping, bobbing on his toes, trying to join the others. If he fell forward, he would be lost. How many times in his life had he approached this invisible but distinct barrier? Balancing on as little as one toe, sometimes. And yet, always, he had been lucky; always, he had been saved, as if by the hand of another. Fate went his way and he made it back into the shallows, when so easily he could have been lost.
