by Aaron Dries
“Really?”
“Caleb, it is never the same. I’ve been to a lot of places more than once, and it’s never as good as the first time.”
“Gee. That frightens me.”
“No; don’t be scared. Yes, it is sad, but it cannot be helped.” Tobias had cupped Caleb’s face in the warmth of his hands. “The only thing that feels as good as the first time is home.”
10
“Home,” Tobias said. The word was wan. Had the fog of dust followed him here? He was confused. It was hard to see.
Where am I?
Wherever he was, it was a hushed chamber and was empty except for the sounds of his own breathing and the faint clicking of nearby insects. His ears twitched. Were there rats in the walls of this dimly lit room? He suspected that there just might be. Something scurried. Something stirred.
Tobias stood silent, motionless, as though cast in amber and forgotten about.
Home.
Tobias went to lift his hand but felt resistance tugging against him. He tried to open his eyes but could only manage the left, which slit open just far enough to reveal a gauze of blurred shapes.
Focus. You’ve got to concentrate. It’s coming back. Can you feel it? It’s rushing at you, like thunder after the lightning strike.
The analogy was both apt and prophetic.
It struck him with brilliant clarity. As his pupil narrowed with shock.
Knives. Swords. Shards of exploding glass. They were impaling him. Over. Over and over. In his face. In his chest and back. Through his groin. His prick. His balls. Down the lengths of his legs. In the skin behind his knees. Across his ankles. In his toes. It was everywhere. The closing spikes of an iron maiden.
And that iron maiden drove further and the pain went deeper, past unchallenging flesh and splintering bone. His roar was inhuman.
Tobias was back in The Body.
It was the spiders; they existed in this world too. He was at one with their venom. They were torture incarnate, fraying whatever thread of sanity that remained in him.
Tobias began beat at the cocoon. Escaping was impossible. His limbs were heavy, but he refused to give in. Instead, he forced The Body onward. Teeth gritted together and head bent low, he rose, fighting for the surface of whatever horrible lake Matt had left him to drown in.
And he broke through. The webs snapped around him. He tumbled to the ground and heard spiders popping under his weight.
Mindless and robbed of his hatred, Tobias allowed the pain to suck him in on himself. It turned him inside out. The vomit began to flow, gurgling through his mouth and nose in a green spray. Beyond all this was the sweet air, and he welcomed it.
Tobias rolled across the deadfall, blanketing himself in the fetid leaves and water, continuing to crush spiders that refused to let go. Howling, he clawed the webs away and the world of the jungle was revealed to him. However, it was of no comfort. Where two of his fingers should have been, there was nothing but black and weeping stumps. Every inch of his flesh was puckered with purple bites.
Tobias searched inside himself for a name, found it, clung to it, screamed it out loud.
“Caleb!”
Over and over. Again and again. “Caleb! Caleb! Caleb! CALEB!”
This is not how things were meant to go.
(You’re going to die here.)
I’m still young.
(Your heart will stop.)
I don’t want to be alone.
(Look again…you’re not.)
Everything grew vivid, like the moment a dream becomes lucid, and he saw the monkeys sitting near him, perched along the tree branches. Some were cackling at him, amused by his display. Their faces were all manic grins and bared gums and teeth.
Take me below.
Please.
Hello?
Are you there?
Were they all dead, he wondered? Were all of the children ripped to shreds? Tobias could feel his heart breaking. They hadn’t deserved to be born into the life they had lived, let alone to die the way they had.
Tobias dropped his head. The pain was fading, and he was thankful. He drew his arms around himself and he wished that it were Caleb who was holding him now.
Did I tell him that I loved him?
It was hard to remember if he had. He hoped so; he really did.
Things were so hard to piece together… How peculiar it was that he’d gone on this incredible journey to begin with, leaving behind all of the people he loved in the hope of learning a little more about himself. In the end he’d discovered someone else, a stranger in some nightclub. Back home, he never would have been so brave in his advance. He was actually quite shy.
“You got to ride the rap, you know,” the thrill seeker would say. “’Cause one of these days they’ll drop the bomb and we’ll all go Rocky Mountain high! You’ll all be burned away, just like me. Nothing but ash’ll be left.”
Tobias’s body stiffened. He was oblivious to the spider that was weaving its web inside his mouth, feasting on his withered tongue.
“You make me feel like comfort.”
That, at least, he knew he’d told him. But it wasn’t enough. No, not even close.
A noise danced through his ears. It was an insidious sound.
The gentle plucking of ukulele strings.
Tobias tried to smile, though the numbness made it impossible. Maybe, just maybe, some of the children had survived and were there among the roots of the white tree, listening to that melody. It boiled down to hope.
Hope was all that he had left, and so he prayed for them, not for himself. He was beyond that.
The monkeys came at him. They carved him open and ate him alive.
Chapter Seventeen
Amity, Robert and the Shark
1
At no point did Amity think she was going to die. She couldn’t. The moment she did was the moment she would fall apart.
(The rope. The rope. Hold on.)
If she began to wonder what would happen to her if she didn’t find her way back to the beach and onto that goddamned boat, things would come undone. So she couldn’t let her imagination get the best of her—even though it already had.
Amity is sure there are shapes moving through the jungle. Stalking her.
She distracts herself by grabbing handfuls of fruit from a tree branch. Scoffs it down. It has no taste except for water, but that’s enough. It is amazing. The moment the food hits her stomach, she wonders if the fruit is poisonous. What if eating those berry-looking thingies left her writhing on the ground, easy pickings for the monkeys or whatever other hungry critters the island was home to?
It’s way too late for that. You’ve got to stay focused. Stay here, in the moment.
One footstep. Two footsteps. Think it through. Now repeat.
Amity was not walking through the jungle, even though she was. She was walking the hallway that led to her mother’s bedroom, to the labyrinth of swelling trash. Her hand was outstretched before her, the fingers splayed against oak, pushing, pushing. And there it was: the aisles and piles, all in slow-motion decay. Heat waves rippled up through the floorboards, flaking old newspapers into ash. And there was her mother, but not really, perched on a hill of blankets knit out of love by old ladies, who gave these gifts to ungrateful offspring who only ended up giving them all away, perhaps because they were warm enough already, loved enough.
Amity’s mother scooped it all up. She was greedy for it. Waste not, want not.
This was what she saw, and yet what she did not see.
Twin lives running in parallel, each threaded with threat, loss—
Water splashed up onto Amity’s ankle, dragging her back to reality, and reality was what it was, no matter how much her mind refused to admit it. Even though she could still smell the ashes from the labyrinth, the bitter musk of melancholy, there was no escaping the island’s heat, its orchardways. The taste of those berries.
I’m not going to die out here.
She studied
her foot below the water’s surface. She was no longer walking through the plant life that had ripped open her shins in little red smiles. There was sand underfoot.
Sand.
Not weeds. Not shale.
Sand.
She felt it. The curious sensation that optimism brings. It quickened the pulse, made breathing a task. Amity Collins continued to stare at her foot, afraid to look up and see what lay ahead.
Be brave, Amity. You’ve got to be. You’re breaking. You got to hold on—
(to the rope)
—and look. You realize that it’s just the broken part of you that’s afraid to know the truth. Either the jungle is thinning and the beach is within striding distance…or it’s not. It’s simple.
I know.
Fight it. Fight giving in like you did before, when you bandaged your hand. Who was that girl?
I don’t know, in all honesty. She wasn’t me.
Yes, she was.
But it couldn’t have been me. I’m terrified. I feel like I’m falling apart. All I want to do is curl up and bawl my eyes out. I wish I’d died when I’d fallen back there. I wish I’d snapped my fucking neck. That’d be a mercy, at least.
Strong, fatherly hands—that were not there, though maybe they were—grabbed her by the chin and silenced all voices, both good and bad. Those fingers forced her head to rise, up-up-up to face a landscape she’d feared for no good reason at all.
The jungle had opened up into a ravine of towering boulders and sand. Trees still soared above her on both sides, like sentries waiting for the right moment to open fire, but they were thinner. The sight brought a smile to her face. The stream was thicker too, flowing harder and faster toward the thin V of light at the end of the ravine that appeared to veer to the right and led to sunlight.
This is it.
When she closed her eyes and focused her senses, she could taste the fresh and tangy salt being carried on the wind. Yet that wasn’t all. There was also the smell of dead fish, brine and minerals, the ocean’s unmistakable perfume.
I’m here. I’m really here.
Seaweed hung from the bulks of the jagged rocks standing between her and the jungle’s exit—they were clashed together to form an almost impassable terrain. Almost. When the wind blew, the seaweed flapped like streamers strung across the finishing line of a school carnival field track. She’d never been very good at such events; this was Caleb’s forte, not her own. Winning had rarely been within her reach. Finishing, on the other hand, was. And to prove it, somewhere in her mother’s Memory Lane albums, between her brother’s colored sports ribbons, were her certificates of effort and achievement—pride pinned beneath wax paper.
Almost impossible terrain. I can do this. I know I can.
Amity sensed the movement before seeing it. She tensed up and almost fell over. The relief that followed was as sweet and cool as the water splashed across her thighs. The animal was above her, behind the boulders, at the jungle’s edge. The deer was tenacious, if a deer was what it was. It radiated age, wisdom, despite its pygmy size. It bore no antlers and its chestnut body dwarfed peg legs, but she knew it was strong. Its eyes were not complacent with its face, and instead furrowed with intelligence. Determination.
How on earth did you survive out here, sweetheart?
How do you do it?
How much do you fight and how much do you give in to?
Aren’t you afraid, like I am?
Without seeming to judge or show pity, the deer turned its tail on her. Amity watched as it was welcomed back into the arms of those sentries, and was gone for good.
The man who had grabbed her chin earlier now leaned in close and whispered in her ear.
Go. Go now and don’t look back. Run!
2
Robert had given up on chasing the scream and the trumpet’s blow. The jungle had swallowed both up. It had tricked him into thinking that there might be people here, and if there were people, then there would be shelter, food—hell, a motherfucking radio. But no. The jungle was tricky. It fed on hope. Robert sighed. Now he doubted if he’d heard anything at all. It wouldn’t surprise him.
Crickets and birds competed against one another, stitching the air with an impenetrable thrum. It rose and fell in pitch, in sync with the wind moaning through the trees. The island was breathing, and he was nothing more than a bug caught in its throat. Robert had gone too far down to be spat out, so he was scrambling, pained, as it slowly swallowed him whole.
It was too much. All of it. He allowed himself the indulgence of exhaustion and sat down on a nearby rock. Once upon a time, he never would have done such a thing. I laid out sixty-five big ones on this set of hiking shorts, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to go and get them all soiled over nothing. That person was distant now, if he still existed at all. He tried to weep, but nothing came. Dry.
The pain in his guts was fierce, and he was worried he needed to shit again. Before hadn’t gone so well. Robert didn’t know if it was something he’d eaten or if it was the stress of this whole situation or if it didn’t matter in the end. Either way, he’d been crippled by it, forced to squat like some pathetic animal. He’d learned a valuable lesson: unlike toilet paper, jungle leaves were not measured in ply.
Huddle in kids. Today was brought to you by the letter “H”. As in humiliation! Oh, ain’t life grand? Robert couldn’t help but be a little disturbed by his laughter. He might not be able to cry, but he could still be a wiseass. This godforsaken place couldn’t take that away from him. Not yet, at least.
The stream had petered out again. Robert bent down and scooped water into his mouth, wiped the back of his neck. Its coolness trickled between his shoulders, ran across the late-night scratch scars.
Even though he knew it was of no use, he reached into the pocket of those sixty-five-dollar hiking shorts and pulled out his iPhone. Somehow, it had survived the fall intact, a fate unshared by the bones in his rib cage, which he was reminded of every time he inconvenienced himself with a breath.
There was no reception, just as there had been none the thirty other times he’d checked since waking up in the mud. Those little bars. Ha. They meant nothing when they were there on the screen and meant everything when they weren’t.
There ain’t no reception in hell, big fella. Get used to it.
Robert was the kind of guy who would tongue a sore tooth, regardless of the somehow-pleasing discomfort it awarded, so it came as no surprise to him to find that his fingers were now scrolling through his photos, revealing faces he knew deep down he would never see again.
“Fuck you,” he said to himself, looking away. “Why are you doing this? Christ.”
He knew the answer to that one. He wanted to look at the photos because hurting could be pretty damn sweet. Sometimes hurting yourself was the only thing you could do; it convinced you that there was something better, a less painful alternative worth fighting for.
Don’t do it, Mann.
And yet he was. His fingers were moving over the touch screen, fat fingers with a life of their own. The same could be said for his eyes, which scoured all that should be avoided. His daughter. His wife. A scanned reproduction of a photo he’d found in a shoebox featuring his parents when they were young and happy and so very, very alive. He missed them all. His thumb continued to swipe, revealing further variations of lives he was no longer a part of.
She was in there too, even though he’d sworn he would remove all traces of her. All visible traces at least. Her fingerprints, it was hard to deny, were still imprinted on him where they once counted. After he’d broken off their relationship—which was to say, after being caught—he deleted all of her emails from his computer, wiped the messages from his phone in a rage. But were someone to ask him whom he was angry at, he wouldn’t have been able to figure a reply. His pain was a lot of things, but mostly it was of the unfocused kind. And pure. Regardless, he’d torn it all up. Stripping her from his hard drive was hard, but the sickness hit harder. Control, Alt,
Delete.
And it had to be a sickness. There was no other reason for it.
He knew his wife and daughter would never forgive him, and he knew that he’d ruined whatever had been sacred between them, but that other life had to vanish.
Which was why he figured being lost in this jungle was his punishment. This is what he deserved. And he deserved it because he was yellah.
A coward’s penance lies in remembering his cowardice. His father had taught him that. This was why there was still that one photo of her on his phone. Just one. She.
He dared speak her name. “Bonita.”
The jungle did not reply.
The photo didn’t do her justice. Her brown skin looked too dark, her smile not quite wide enough. It had been taken on his iPhone. In it, she had a mean case of bed hair lit in morning light and spread across the hotel pillow. The elegant simplicity of the shot hinted at the life inside her.
Bonita. Once a wonder, now just an ache.
Robert rubbed his face. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Like this all isn’t fucked up enough as it is.” He shook his head and laughed; if he didn’t, he might break again. “Stop talking to yourself.”
“Look at me again, Soldier,” Bonita said from beneath the screen.
Soldier, her little nickname for him—’cause you make me feel safe. She often had bad dreams. In them, there were endless telephone calls, white noise from a muted television. Her dead husband scratching at the window of the bedroom they had once shared, his body made of ash.
“I don’t want to look.”
“But Soldier, you got to. It’s meant to hurt. Isn’t that what your old man used to say?”
“No.” But Robert Mann looked anyway.
She was smiling in the photo. She had that look about her, frisky and a little wounded, which he’d found so damn attractive in the first place. They had met at a magazine launch in Chelsea; there, his work was on display in a series of highly awarded articles. The accolades were going to the photographer and design team, not him, of course, which was why his wife and daughter never came to these events. He was okay with all of this, both with their absence and his well-paid inferiority. He was a ghost between the written lines, a machine whose purpose was simply to complement and sell. That would never change, but he liked that Bonita thought his words had some weight. She had been leaning forward, scrutinizing a sentence on the blown-up one-sheet when he approached her. Their conversation started out innocent. Being charming wasn’t as easy as it had once been; he was out of shape in more ways than one.
