by Jeff Long
In a different setting, in a museum of modern art, it would have been sardonic, nature’s revenge. Here, this morning, it scared her. Her mind careered through explanations. The rain had created a mire under the truck. In the darkness, the first night, they’d inadvertently parked on top of a tree trunk. The vines were genetically programmed to raid. Mother Nature was tripping on speed. Nothing human was to blame. There was some consolation in that. They were all victims. They were in this together now.
The brothers were in a state. Vin had the machete they’d used on the turtle last night. His brother So carried an ax. She glanced at the tools, looking for blood. There was none, and her hopes rose, foolishly, she knew.
Duncan opened his briefcase and gave Doc a pack of Camels still wrapped in cellophane. What else did he harbor in there? A sketch pad, she knew, though he was too shy to show her his sketches. Maps, surely, his obsession. A day journal, perhaps, and photos of some long-lost loved one. Had he kept the stub of his air ticket from the States as a memento?
The pack of cigarettes went around the circle, and Duncan accepted one. The Heng boys skirted their smashed plunder, gawking at their precious vehicles, afraid to touch anything.
“How could they sleep through this?” she said. It was a silly question. The same way she had slept through the destruction of her tent.
“I’m not sure any of them did sleep,” said Duncan. “They were drunk. And busy.” Hunting in the forest.
“What do we do now?”
“We need to work with them, Molly.”
“Work with them, after what they did?”
“They have the wheels.”
“We should just go,” she whispered to him. “This very minute, Duncan.” They could fade into the mist and find the causeway, and cross between the barays, and slide through the gateway. There was still more forest to negotiate beyond the fortress walls, but once they reached the sun, or at least the sky, they could navigate their way back down the mountain. Villagers would feed them. Loggers would pick them up.
“Without Kleat?”
“He’d leave us and you know it.”
Duncan shook his head. “We’re in this together.”
“That’s very high-minded. But look around. You can’t make this better.”
“No.” He had his mind made up. “The best thing is to try and help them. We’ll be okay.”
He joined the brothers again, moving with them, taking stock of the damage. He laid his hands on the metal and glass, and that simple act did more than anything else to break their terror. At least Doc quit shouting.
The brothers’ tight faces loosened. Duncan made a suggestion, and Vin handed him the machete without hesitation.
With the care of a surgeon, meticulous so as not to scratch the white paint, he slipped the blade under a creeper binding one door and sliced it free. He cut away more vines and, opening the door, made a show of returning their machete.
Little by little, he showed them how to regain control. He got So to begin unraveling the vines from the wiring. He called Molly over, and four of them manhandled a rock into place under one of the Land Cruiser’s wheels. “We’ll get this straightened out,” he said. He put Molly to work with a shovel.
After fifteen minutes or so, he came from the Land Cruiser carrying a burlap sack stuffed with other sacks. Vin trailed behind him with his machete and rifle. “All right, let’s get Kleat,” he said. He propped her shovel against the truck.
“What are we doing?” She didn’t mean for her voice to be shrill.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
Kleat was dragging another log from the brush. Sweat ringed his flak jacket at the neck and armpits. “We’ve got a deal,” Duncan said. “We’re all leaving today, before the rains return. But first we have a job to do.”
Kleat guessed from the sacks. “They want us to mule down more loot for them.”
“A little salvage work.” Duncan spoke to Kleat in the same soothing tone he’d used with Doc. “They need to be made whole, that’s how they see it. They’ll keep digging while we go up into the ruins. Vin’s going with us.”
The kid had found a pebble and was playing soccer with it, batting it between his toes, waiting, with the AK-47 on his back.
Kleat had a dark thought. “You know he’s taking us off to shoot us.”
“No he’s not. They want their share of the city, that’s all.”
“Then they’ll do it down here,” Kleat said. “Later, when they’re done with us.”
“Show some faith, John. We scratch their backs, they scratch ours. Everything will be fine.”
“They’re not on our side,” Kleat said. “They could do anything to us in here. Look what happened to Samnang.”
“I talked to them about that. They said he ran away. They were only searching for him. They wanted to bring him back to the camp.”
“They were trying to save him?” Kleat snorted. “They had a gun at his head.”
“They know that was wrong. But they say what he did was wrong, too. They only wanted to know where he hid the rest of their possessions.”
“They were hunting him like an animal.”
“They say it was the other way around.”
“The old man was hunting them?”
“No.” Duncan grew quiet. “The prêt. They say.”
Vin heard the word and stopped his little soccer game.
“The what?” said Molly.
“They’re a forest legend, like what the Romans called their night-walkers, lemures, or larva, the Latin for spirits still forming. If you die violently—”
Kleat’s face screwed up. “Not this again.” He upended the log and let it fall into the fire. Sparks belched. The wet skin of the limb sizzled.
“They claim the forest is full of them,” Duncan said.
“And you believe that?”
Duncan hesitated. “Of course not. But they do. Strip away the layers of Buddhism and Hinduism and you have an animistic religion dedicated to neutralizing the dead and pushing their spirits as far away and as quickly as possible. They were drunk. It was dark. We’re looking for American remains. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t seen things out there.”
“Then add one more prêt to the collection,” Kleat said. “The old man won’t make it far on a plastic leg.”
Molly still wanted to run for the causeway and find their own way back to civilization. “What if it’s a trick?” she said. “He could be leading us up so they can desert us.”
“They would never leave their own brother. Don’t you see? He’s our greatest assurance.”
“That’s the part I can’t believe,” Kleat said. “They’re giving us a hostage.”
“That’s not the right attitude, John.”
The fire glinted on Kleat’s glasses. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said.
29.
It should have been straightforward. They had all visited one or the other of the gates and its statues at least once, but the city was more alien than ever. The mist was like quicksand. Within minutes they were lost.
Molly had begun to memorize her way into and out of the heart of the ruins, but overnight the rapid forest had undone what little was familiar. Samnang had tied knots in the grass, but new grass had sprung up, higher and more lush, taking over the ruins. The saplings he’d bent into careful circles had sprung loose in the rain and grown beyond recognition. It was like entering a different city.
Vin kept sweeping his rifle back and forth at shapes materializing among the trees and temples. With the machete scabbard strapped to his back and its handle standing above his head like an exclamation point, the boy looked overloaded and self-conscious. The American soldiers with RE-1 had taught him how to moonwalk and chew Red Man. Molly and Duncan had treated him like a man, asking about his warrior sak. She could tell it was awkward for him to be using them as pack animals. Vin spoke softly to Duncan. The only word Molly understood was “please.”
“Basic
ally, he’s asking for our cooperation,” Duncan said. “The sooner we find the gate and the statues, the sooner we can leave.”
“He wants to be friends?” Kleat said. He had his eye on the boy’s rifle.
“Does anybody recognize anything?”
“If we could just find the tower,” Molly said.
She longed to return to the room of the Buddhas. The yearning filled her. It overrode her fear of what was happening to them, their disintegration and the creeping violence. As a landmark, the tower might help orient them, but that was only an excuse. It was the room on that man-made summit that drew her. It held…something.
But this morning, with visibility cut to twenty feet, the tower seemed to have dismantled itself. As they penetrated the waist-high grass, nothing was the same. The avenue and side lanes and bridges and canals were all reconfigured. The massive faces projecting from lesser towers and the crests of flattened pyramids were no help. Their serene smiles only added to the sense of entanglement and maddening circles. Molly found herself resenting the tranquil stone expressions.
They chose a canal and followed its trickle of water uphill, reasoning that vertical gain was a direction of sorts. At least, Duncan said, they would not be going in circles. The same trickle of water could not round back on itself.
As they marched higher through the ruins, Vin kept Kleat in the front of the line, where he could watch him. The boy might be naive, but his brothers had instructed him well. As Samnang had put it, with or without his fangs, Kleat was still toxic.
As if hearing her thoughts, Kleat flashed Molly a look, then another one. She was following behind Vin, which put her within easy reach of the machete riding between his shoulder blades, practically a gift to them. She understood Kleat perfectly. He wanted her to kill the boy.
She tried to convince herself that Vin was her mortal enemy, and even that didn’t work. She wondered, if things came to it, if she could even kill an animal to eat. Kleat glared at her. Her thoughts returned to the tower.
After a half hour, they found themselves back at the bridge on the canal where they’d begun. Impossibly, the downhill trickle of water had circled back on itself. “That can’t be,” Kleat objected.
Vin didn’t question it. To him, the perpetual circling of water was just another arcane loop in a city of riddles. He and Duncan had a discussion using the lines on Duncan’s palm as a map.
After a minute, Duncan said, “Okay, a slight revision. We’re going to split into pairs and spread out the search. It should be simple. All we have to do is find one section of the wall, then we can follow it to one of the gates and get what we need.”
Vin chose the teams, himself with Duncan, and Molly with Kleat. Kleat frightened him, and Molly frightened him, too, though differently. His puppy love was obvious, and out of decorum and modesty he did not choose her. It was almost cute.
“What are we supposed to do if we find something, whistle?” Kleat said.
“Stay within earshot,” Duncan said. “Let’s not lose each other.”
They separated into pairs. As Molly wove through the piles of temples and narrow corridors, Kleat railed at her. “The machete was right in front of you. They want heads? We’ll give them a head.”
“He’s a kid. He’s not going to hurt us,” she said.
“He’s one of them. And we’re going to need his rifle and machete. Think.”
“Leave him alone, Kleat.”
Kleat put his face close to hers. “Do you want to live or not?”
She had witnessed paranoia in her career. She’d photographed it in prisons and asylums and at a treatment center for foreign torture victims. She’d even argued with it, her own fears, in therapy and alone. But Kleat’s was a species all its own.
She stood her ground, or tried to. “What kind of question is that?” she snapped.
“Don’t think I’m going to die caged in like this,” Kleat said. “Now’s no time for bleeding hearts. When the time comes, just stand out of my way.”
He bulled on, and Molly slowed. The sound of his crashing through the brush dimmed. Thunder grumbled far away. It seemed early. Without thinking, Molly glanced at her useless watch. The mist was thinning. The morning was getting on.
She strayed alongside a panel of more bas-reliefs, and, like yesterday, they were dense with stories both alien and familiar. The carvings seemed to whisper to her. She imagined herself written in the stone, the lone bird-woman living in a tree, the queen—or goddess—watching over the city, or that infant being held up to the sky by her mother.
Then her eye chanced up, and she was being watched again. This time there was a small troop of the ghostly gray monkeys, perched in the branches and sitting on ancient masonry and terraces. They unsettled her, like in the tower room that afternoon.
It wasn’t that she thought they might attack. They were cute and fuzzy, with a few infants at the long nipples and some wide-eyed youngsters. But they were wild, and there were no bars separating her from them. And they were watching her, not eating or playing, just watching, like the huge, inescapable god heads. Even the infants were staring at her.
They’d been fighting. Slowly she detected the blood. It was mostly on the larger males, whose red penises jutted out from the furred hoods between their legs. The rain must have washed much of it away, but there had been a lot of blood and it stained them in patches.
They had something up there on the ledge with them, and it occurred to her that they had taken a piece of an animal. These adorable vegetarians were feeding on some kind of meat. She started to back away. Let them feed.
One stood on the shelf and she couldn’t help but look when it lifted the thing. It was a pink human leg, smeared with blood. Her mind shunted the possibility away. Then she recognized the blue high-top sneaker wired at the ankle. It was Samnang’s prosthesis.
She froze. What have you done to him?
The monkey pounded the leg on the ledge, foot down. The sneaker didn’t make a sound. But the message was clear. She was trespassing.
Stand or run, she couldn’t decide. In the Rockies, you made yourself larger. You put your hands over your head to appear taller and lowered your eyes. If a bear attacked, you played dead. If it was a mountain lion, you fought. This wasn’t the Rockies.
Before she had time to decide, the canopy stirred. It was the softest of breezes, just a whisper. The monkeys shifted. They looked around them, at the trees, down the corridor of ruins. The whisper was approaching. Molly remembered the gust of wind that had crashed on her and Duncan their first day up here, and this had the same rising force to it. Molly glanced up to see where it was coming from and how it would strike her.
The monkeys fled.
It was that simple. They bolted into the branches and were gone. The gust of wind rushed overhead. It missed her, and plunged on with a howl.
She was left alone. White and orange flower petals drifted down onto her head and shoulders. It was so quiet she could almost hear them land.
“Kleat,” she shouted. “Kleat. Duncan.” She waited. No one answered.
After a minute, bracing herself for the carnage, she climbed up onto the ledge. It was both worse and better than she was ready for. Samnang’s leg lay where the monkey had dropped it, and clearly it had been clawed and wrenched from his body in a great struggle. But the object of their feast was not his body. One of the monkeys had been killed, perhaps in the fight with Samnang. They had been eating one of their own.
30.
“Samnang?” she called out.
From the ledge, she could see a thicket of towering bamboo. It swayed gently. The canopy stirred again. The breeze was starting up. Somewhere the forest was letting it in. This time she could smell the coming rain on it.
The bamboo shivered. The feathery tops soared to various heights. The stalks clattered, lines and shadows luring her. Samnang might have escaped into there, she decided.
It was like entering a giant wind chime as she sidled among the gree
n and yellow rods. They were a grass, not a tree, she knew that much, but some of the stems were as thick around as small kegs.
“Samnang,” she called again.
The stand was many generations old. On the outskirts, youngsters stood no taller than her thigh, their stems as thin as pencils. Deeper in, the stand was older and taller and denser. Dried, gray, dead monsters—thirty, fifty, a hundred years old—had pierced the canopy.
The breeze stirred their long wings of leaves, sending tremors down the stems. The shafts quivered under her open palms. They pressed against her, then pulled away. They jostled her with long, arcing nudges. Samnang slipped from her mind. She was barely aware that her attention was shifting from him to the forest.
How did you capture this in a photo? It rose in her like a desire, the urge to hold the green light and the moment. There was no controlling the sensation with her lens. Surrender, she thought. It came to her in a whisper.
Yesterday they had been in a race against the rain. Today she felt in synch with it. In a strange way, the rain gave them an advantage over their captors, if that’s what Vin and his brothers truly were. Unless the Khmers made a quick exit, the river would trap them and the forest would devour their vehicles. By contrast, the only thing the Americans stood to lose was a season stranded, and probably some weight.
Surrender. The idea grew. She and Duncan could melt off into the forest and outwait the others and inherit the ruins. If it was in the stars—in this starless place—they might become lovers. They would survive. The city—the forest—would provide.
The quaking leaves reminded her of aspen. Their shape was different, like minnows, not coins, but they shuddered and flipped with the same playful motion, and their colors ranged from blood red to green to yellow veined with gold.
The stand tightened around her. Her senses took on new intensity. Every stem had its own pulse. She could practically taste the light.
Molly went slowly, trying to balance her progress with the bamboo’s rhythm. At first she looked for a simple left-to-right or back-and-forth pattern, but it was more complicated than that. You had to feel for it, yielding and then invading, stealing through its openings. Resist, push back, and it only wore you out.
