How the Dead Dream

8

Vera and his mother could not keep his dog again so he boarded her, recovered and walking well on three legs, in a luxury kennel. It claimed to be a resort for the dogs of the stars.

From the small plane that flew him down the peninsula in the morning the sky to the west was a light, full blue over the rolling forested mountains. He could see nothing but the green and the blue, which reminded him of a globe, a freshly printed textbook with perfect illustrations. He had a sense of beginning.

He sat next to the pilot and wore a headset; this endowed him with a sense of competence. He was equipped. If someone saw him now, they would have a false impression of mastery… he turned to look to the east, over the water, and saw thunderheads gathering. The pilot shook his head and said he would not fly again that day. A hurricane warning had been issued.

In the restaurant at the resort, where he always stayed when he came to supervise construction of his own, more modest island facility, there were large televisions on the walls. They ran a weather station constantly, but guests paid little attention. The eye of the storm was approaching, pause and swirl, pause and swirl; it was predicted to make landfall by early evening.

He had heard nothing of this before he left home.

Still the island was not far and he had to see his own place, so after a quick lunch he paid a young boatman to take him out. As they crossed the shallows he sat happily on the padded seat with the sun on his face; when his skin was hot he bowed his head and gazed down through the turquoise into the brown and orange of the coral. It was not, he realized, as bright as coral he had seen in photographs: was there something wrong with it?

A crowd of pelicans skimmed and flapped, drawn by tiny silver fish in great schools that moved back and forth in sweeps and flashes. He looked up from the water to the horizon; before them was the delicate crescent of light sand, the buildings' white facades, the thatch roofs beneath the palms-everything as he had foreseen. There were the docks, on their brand-new pilings, a single hammock swinging, birds of paradise beneath the beachfront windows.

It was more than he had expected.

Two skiffs were tethered to the dock and as the motor cut off he heard the high whine of a drill. Swiftly he left the boatman waiting, walked to the end of the dock and touched the edge of the thatch roof and the sturdy metal eye that held the hammock. He craned his neck and stared into the rafters, radiating like spokes from the high beam in the center. Then he turned and strode up the dock to the beach, eager to see the buildings. He looked at the sand under his feet: old bleached coral cracked when he stepped-soft, porous driftwood here and there-large green coconuts fallen from the palms. The empty leg of a crab; the skull of a fish. Small young palm trees had been planted among the old.

One rule of thumb, a contractor had told him: tourists could never see too many palms.

The new white sand was full of vines and roots where the native mangrove was trying to find purchase; there were rake marks where the workers had scraped it back. Up ahead the main building, with its white dome and arches; off to the sides the flanks and the cabins. On the second floor, wide verandahs with thatch awnings. The doorways and windows had been roughed in but there was no glass in the windows and the doors had not been hung.

The buildings were still only shells, but lovely.

He could come here, maybe have a new life. His beach house, not for business but to be someone else, be different.

He felt a quick surge of euphoria; then there were pats of rain on his hair and he glanced upward. The cloud cover had lowered suddenly, a dark gray obscuring the distance. He was surprised.

Ahead the white buildings were backed up against the jungle. The sand was pocked with raindrops, more and more; palm fronds against the sky floated sideways. He zipped his windbreaker and stepped onto the patio. Behind a deep white wall two workmen were bent over electrical outlets, plying duct tape; the tarp beneath their feet was splattered with plaster and a radio played from a rickety stool. They turned and smiled politely when they saw him, wiping their hands on their shirts.

He shook their hands and asked in broken Spanish for his foreman; they answered in English and pointed him out, in the next room huddled over a circuit breaker.

A few feet away, through the rough arch, the rain began to fall faster. The sound of it filled his ears and the smell of it filled his throat. As he crossed the floor toward the foreman he had a sense of tenuousness: there was a roof over their heads and there were walls, but there was no finishing. It was finishing that imbued buildings with their capacity to give comfort. Here there was no comfort yet; bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and burned with searing imprints.

They were practically outside. The rain fell harder.

T. stuck out his hand for a shake but Mario embraced him. "Tomas," he said fondly. "We're just finishing. A storm is coming. A big storm, Tomas. What we do now is, we make sure we protect what we can. Stop the water damage. Then we go home. We got to go help the wife, you know? Help before the storm comes. Most of the men stayed home today. To help the wife and children."

"Go ahead," said T. "Please. Get home."

"High winds," said Mario, nodding. "High winds."

He motioned to the others, preoccupied.

"You stay at the Grove, Tomas?"

"Always."

"Safe there. Very good."

They ran out then, Marlo with a plastic poncho on, the workers bareheaded and carrying between them a heavy toolbox. T. noticed they had brought their radio out with them, the cord wrapped carefully around it. They ran to their boats and got in. The palms were dipping and the canvas shelters on the boats whipped and flapped; the water was choppy and opaque.

Mario stepped into T.'s boat and the captain started the motor. They huddled on a bench seat beneath the canvas. The deck was slick.

"Three generators," said Mario, nodding, and patted T.'s knee. "Three backups. At the Grove."

"I'm not worried," said T.

Marto nodded and said something to the boatman. Soon the two of them were yelling over the motor and T. heard nothing but noise; the prow of the boat lifted high and crashed down again over each wave, jolting him. He held tightly to the wet gunnel.

At the hotel dock he clambered out and watched them throttle away. When the boat vanished into the gray humid air over the waves he stayed where he was, his soaked feet planted firmly on the wood of the dock. He should have gone with them, should have helped them prepare for the storm. But likely it would pass, and tomorrow would be back to business. Still he was reluctant to go back into the hotel. Better he should stand here, wind-battered and shaking; better to feel this lassitude.. his skin and clothes were waterlogged. Water ran down his neck and his nose and the thin windbreaker glued chilly to his arm skin.

The ocean and sky were one heavy mass without a line between them. His island was nowhere visible.

Soon he found himself retreating to the restaurant with the other guests, the restaurant with its gleaming coppertrimmed oak bar and rows of glittering bottles and large windows crisscrossed with tape to guard against shattering. Waiters moved among the tables, reassuring; they were used to hurricanes, which battered the coast year after year.

Rain flooded the swimming pool beyond the windows until water spread out over the pool deck and the lawn beyond. He put his face up to a triangle of taped glass, beside a long row of children who did the same until their parents pulled them back. The pool water was a muddy yellow, afloat with red flowers and brown palm litter and even a few lounge chairs, swirling and hitting each other. Nearby the trees moved and moved, bent low. Loose bark and fronds skittered over the ground and caught on trellises and hedges, collecting at the base of low walls. Guests watched warily but tended to sit stiffly at their tables, as though the tables would protect them.

The televisions showed a weather map and at first the steadiness of the signal kept everything normal. Children ran and capered, restless; they hunched down by the windows until their parents noticed, twirled away from the windows laughing and shrieking. They played hide-and-seek, dashing back and forth across the room to conceal themselves behind potted plants and furniture.

Presently the signal was lost and the screens went snowy. In the moments afterward there was a pause in the room, almost a pause of fear. Quickly a waiter popped a movie into the VCR, and on every screen ran a movie about American astronauts with square shoulders and piercing blue eyes. Wind shuddered the walls as a great silver moon rose into the blackness of space; the elements outside and the space inside the capsule converged. On went the storm, and with pictures of wives and babies taped to the dashboards of their ship the handsome astronauts gazed out portholes in wonder, beholding an American universe.

In the late afternoon the wind abated and the rain slowed. Talk rose and there were a few barks of laughter, but then someone pointed out that the wait staff were all behind the bar, pretending to look busy there.

"The eye," whispered a woman at the table next to him. "We're in the eye."

In the quiet the wind shrilled and thudded again until it alarmed the children, who stood near their anxious parents holding onto their arms or legs, the small ones settling on laps. He heard glass shatter but did not see it. The taped windows let a white static of water sweep past; it pounded the walls and the roof with new force and the windows shook in their frames.

How was his shell faring, the empty husks on the island?

Do not think, he told himself. Useless.

Anyway he was well insured.

Everyone else had at least a wife or a husband with them. Only he sat alone. Here was a whole life Beth had missed, a hole where a life should have been. But then, he thought, the universe was made up of holes-was it so terrible to be swept into one? After all. The holes were the black between stars, between constellations. It was holes that were the fabric of the galaxy.

At the thought he was calm, though someone nearby whimpered at the sounds of breakage and impact and a man in a light pink polo shirt sweated dark stains tinder his arms.

The storm blew itself out in the late afternoon and finally the guests wandered out of the restaurant, dispersing; they emerged into the half-light, into a patter of light rain. In twos and threes they walked quietly over the wet tiles and paved paths to their rooms and their cabins.

He smelled soil and humus and warmth made the air heavy over his shoulders. A few trees were down and lay across tennis courts but most of the buildings looked the same. He kicked a sodden raft of palm fronds from a doorway of a scuba shack near the beach and saw the basement had been inundated; above the thatch roof was in tatters, nothing left but the frame.

Only the gardens had fared poorly. They were flooded and muddy, bushes uprooted, flowerbeds flattened or washed out. And without its sculpted gardens the resort lost its stateliness, its reserve, even its authority. It was a victim now, a shabby and disordered outpost that was barely secure.

He went back to the crowded lobby to ask about the telephone. Waiters and cleaning staff were leaving in droves, piling into beat-up vans and buses and jeeps to ride the rutted roads home, even to walk. The manager threatened them. But there were reports of devastation in the nearby town of huts and shanties where most of them lived. They had to go.

"We will be understaffed throughout the rest of the dinner hour," said the receptionist to T. "We regret this deeply."

The power was out, which they said was temporary; the generator would soon come online again. At the door to the lobby a waiter handed out candles.

No one was available to ferry him to his island; no one could be reached by telephone because the lines were down. He went to his room with his candle and his opened bottle of wine; he lay on the bed with the door open to the wet dusk, the candle guttering. He heard the other guests traipsing by, the snatches of their conversation and the drip of palm fronds.

Mastery was only a moment in the mind-of other men, of yourself. Like the stock market, a consensus of opinion, a pure abstraction; nothing to the tsunamis, the boiling sun, the plate tectonics. The social compact was abstractionroads, buildings, and a temporary agreement about behavior. That was it. The matter beneath it all was what lasted, and meanwhile, always, the world of people was on the edge of dissolution.

Soon, on a flimsy bed between thin walls, he had drained the whole bottle of wine.

In the morning he waited in line in front of the hotel. It was hard to press himself through the crowds; there was a second wave of staff leaving, those who had worked through the night and were now desperate. Vans and trucks left without him again and again. Finally money talked, and he joined a cook and two maids in a beat-up four-wheel-drive taxi.

The dirt roads were deeply braided with new ditches. Cables lay across them, cars were mired deep in the drying mud, and the taxi driver careened off the road at high speed whenever there was an obstacle, splattering mud that browned out the rear windows and the windshield. T. had to get out and wipe the windshield for him whenever they achieved dry ground and could stop the car without sinking. Then they started up again and the taxi lurched over holes and debris, leaving deep gouges in lawns that were already swamped. When they got to their destination they were still nowhere, because the center of the town was only a series of piles in a field of mud. It looked like a landfill.

He glanced sidelong at the driver, who was stony. In the back one of the young chambermaids started to cry, and the other put an arm around her shoulders. The cook stared out the window and shook his head.

Huts were mostly collapsed, wood and plastic and metal piled on the wet ground. Here or there a lone stilt or two leaned forlornly where a building had been. Water ran across the road in what looked like a natural stream, it was so deep and wide. As he got out of the taxi he smelled sewage; people wandered wet and dirty, mothers with their babies on their backs, men shirtless and shoeless and carrying piles of belongings, shovels and jugs of water. Once the beach had been hidden from the road by dwellings but now he could see straight through where these buildings had been, straight out through a hole to the sea. There had been no trees among the shanties, no source of shade but the huts themselves, so now there was emptiness.

He set off on foot toward Marlo's house over piles of twisted rebar and cinderblock and streams of sewage, sinking into the mud past his ankles until his shoes and socks were boots of caked mud. He stopped to help a group of women lift a piece of cement wall off a chicken coop: the chickens inside were flattened, dirty white pads of feathers and beaks and talons. He wondered where the blood was.

After a while, a few false turns and circles, he saw the house ahead of him, intact. Everywhere else had been motion, the bustle and hurry of urgency: but Marlo's house seemed curiously still. In the yard beside it a black goat stood munching flowers, almost in slow motion. For a second he gazed at the goat as though both of them were similarly idle, similarly suspended. Then he broke the stare and started walking again. A fencepost had fallen down and the fence was sagging.

He knocked on the front door and waited and he knocked again. He was turning away when it finally opened, and a small girl in a red dress was looking tip at him.

"Hola. Yo soy Tomas," he said, in his rudimentary Spanish. It was hard to know what to speak: some of them preferred English, some Spanish, some spoke English Creole or Maya or a language called Garifuna. "Esta Mario aqui?"

"Papi," called the child, turning.

Mario stepped out from a door and picked her up; he held her as he spoke to T. He was different. For once he did not smile.

"Are you-are you OK here?"

"It is my son," said Marlo, in a monotone. "He was out on a boat. He has not returned."

"He might have had to put in somewhere," offered T. "Right? One of the atolls, or an island? Waiting till the storm passed?"

"He was at one of the atolls, where they take the tour boats," said Marlo. "They radioed in. They found his boat. But it was upside down. And he was not inside."

T. did not find words; he was inadequate.

"I don't want to intrude," he said.

"Come in. Please. Have coffee."

Marlo's wife sat with three teenage girls on the couch in their living room. They stood and smiled faintly when he entered, polite and miserable.

"The other boys, they are all looking for Javi," said Marlo.

"I'm very, very sorry for your situation today," said T., and Mario translated. His wife bowed her head slightly and went into the kitchen, where she busied herself at the stove. The girls stood and followed her save the toddler on Marlo's lap, who played with a necklace of red and orange beads.

"Is there anything I can do? To help the search?"

Mario shook his head.

"Let me know. The one thing I can offer is money. If that would help at all. To mobilize a larger search, anything. To help find him."

"That is generous, Tomas. But no, no thank you."

There was a glaze over Marlo's eyes; he was kind but not there.

"I just wanted you to know."

"Later, I will talk to Paolo," said Marlo, and nodded. "He will take you out in the boat. Maybe you want to leave after that, and come back other times. When the storm is cleaned up.

"What I want," said T., directly as he thought it, "is a guide. I want a guide with a good boat to take me up the river, to the preserve where the jaguars live."

"Jaguars?" asked Marlo, surprised.

His wife brought them small cups of coffee on an enamel tray. One of the girls in the kitchen burst into tears and the toddler turned in her father's lap to gaze at her sister.

"I am so sorry," he said again, awkwardly.

As the boat curved around the end of the island and his beach hove into view he saw the tall trees were down. He was looking at their root balls, straggly brown masses along the sand. He could see at least three thick trunks that had fallen across the white walls, caving them in.

The white sand was mixed with brown again.

"It's totaled," he said to Paolo the boatman. "I can see from here. I don't need to go there now. Go ahead, turn the boat. Turn the boat!"

They cut a wide U and headed back to the mainland. He could not force himself to look over his shoulder.

At the hotel he gathered his belongings; he had a couple of sweatshirts and a pair of good boots, but no tent or tarp or sleeping bag. He had very little. He lent his hotel room to the family of the maid who had cried in the taxi. Eight of them would stay in it-an old woman, five children, and the maid and her husband-along with the next-door suite, which he rented for them. They would stay there while the husband and the oldest son rebuilt their own two-room house; they would eat at the hotel restaurant on his tab, because they did not have transportation into town to buy groceries. It would help to assuage his conscience when he left the ruins.

He called his mother from a satellite phone at a medical clinic and got Vera, who went to look for her. There was a delay with the phone that made conversation desultory.

"Who is this?" came his mother's voice, wavering.

"It's T. Remember me?"

"— I can't hear them," he heard her complain to Vera. "It's staticky. It has an echo on it."

Vera took the phone again.

"She's having trouble hearing you," said Vera.

"We had a hurricane here," he said, enunciating. "I would have called sooner. There was a storm. It destroyed my new project."

"… me to give it back to her?"

"No, you tell her what I say. OK? There was a big storm."

"… big storm?"

"There was a hurricane here. I'm going to be out of touch for a couple of weeks. I'm calling now on a satellite phone."

"… been going on the walks… little more fragile…"

"Tell her I miss her, and I'm thinking about her and hoping she's doing well. Tell her I'll be home soon."

"Who is this?"

It was his mother again.

"It's me, T. It's a bad connection. Can you hear me?"

"No one there," said his mother to Vera, fading in waves. "You know who it is? It's one of those crank calls. It's no one."

In Paolo's small metal motorboat, slapping the waves as they went south toward the mouth of the river, he felt flat but satisfied, equal to what came. Now that the buildings were gone and the telephone lines were down, he could not fly home anyway, not now. Nothing to do but go tip the river toward the mountains. Was that where everyone would go, once the coastlines were gone? Higher ground.

The white lines spread behind the boat, further and further apart, disappearing into the gray of the deeper water as they grew separate.

His mother had loved him a long time ago, he thought. He squinted, trying to discern the precise moment when the frothy lines of white were subsumed by the background of gray.

A long time past she had known him.

That was over. But it would be all right. Once the work of love had been hers, and she had done it. Now she was unable. It was not a turning, it was a simple erosion-what happened when the self fell away. It floated and sank, joined a deep well of souls, spreading. Where are you, rest of me? Fumble and glimpse but no worry; there was nothing to be done once it left. Child child, there there. And now I let you go.

It did not need to see itself anymore or be conscious of its boundaries. Vigilance fled in old age and man was like the other animals then, who science said could not see themselves. Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender… you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned.

And you did not have to know yourself to be fully human. There were always those who did not, and no one said they were beasts.

Most of the roads were washed out so they traveled by water. From dock to dock, the open ocean to the wide mud-brown delta: and two days after the hurricane he lay back in a long, low boat moving slowly upriver.

There was a canvas shelter on the boat and the guide was quiet at the wheel. The two of them spoke rarely, so that birds would not startle. The guide, Delonn, was a gruff and modest old man, grizzled and heavyset with dark skin and a light gray beard. He had worked for the national parks and attended a program for foreign students at Cambridge University; he spoke English with a clipped British accent. He had a vast knowledge of the rainforest, knew the common and the Latin names of plants and animals, the history of foods and medicines and poisons that came from the fruits and the bark and the leaves. He had reference to a long catalog of oddities and hazards.

They drank beers from a cooler. On the overhanging trees large green iguanas crawled lazily; on the bank stood a gray stork, and on a log sticking out of the water small bats were clustered sleeping. The water was torpid. When they came to a bend in the river, where the river's elbow reached out and flattened into a calm, sunny pool, Delonn encouraged him to jump from the boat and swim.

He shook his head.

"The crocodiles are very small," said Delonn, smiling.

T. stuck his foot up against the edge of the bench and pulled up his pant leg.

"I see you already know them!" said Delonn, and chuckled. "I thought you were a city boy."

"I am," began T., but the guide's smile fell and he leaned forward slightly, holding his arm.

"What's wrong?" asked T. "Are you OK?"

"A little heartburn," he said. T. waited while he breathed slowly for a few seconds and then smiled again. "You realize, Thomas, what the chances are of seeing a jaguar in the jaguar preserve?"

"Low," said T.

"Seventeen thousand to one. Approximately."

"It's OK," said T. "I just want to be where they live. I want to be in the theater. You know? But I don't expect them to give me a show."

There were a number of final animals here-crocodiles, parrots, turtles and anteaters. He knew he might not see any of them. He had mostly wanted to get away.

They jumped out of the boat around midday to walk through a forest thick with stands of bamboo, where T. stooped to inspect what Delonn said was a jaguar print. These were what most people saw of the jaguars, said the guide, and even then only in the rainy season. Black howler monkeys swung in the trees but were also difficult to see, fuzzy shapes in the canopy. At night they slept on the benches of the boat underneath the shelter, and T. listened to the whine of mosquitoes outside the net.

Mornings Delonn radioed back to his contact in the town, checking in; they drank bitter coffee and ate bananas and bread. They would only take the boat as far as the falls, after which they would travel by foot, leaving the beer and the ice behind in the boat and taking only what they needed. They would be carrying heavy packs, T. sixty pounds and Delonn eighty. He claimed to be accustomed.

After that they would wash off by splashing themselves from shallow creeks; they would eat mostly nuts and dried food and filter stream water to drink. This early leg of the trip was a pleasure cruise, said Delonn: T. should drink up.

The river narrowed and moved more quickly as they traveled; a light rain fell and pricked the water. When it let up the guide pointed out birds-a white-collared manakin made a clicking sound like two stones banged together and a bird called an oropendola screeched and rocked back and forth on its branch. There were tanagers and flycatchers and bat falcons; T. saw them fleetingly. It left him disoriented, all of them in the trees, so many.

Then the heat and the humidity. It laid him out.

He drank the last warm beer and fell asleep on his bench, the motion of the boat steady beneath him.

When he woke next Delonn was tying the boat to a strangler fig. Upriver was a series of white cascades, a fringe of thin streams threading their way down a pale gray escarpment. He watched as the guide prepared their backpacks, locked down the food hampers against scavenging animals, folded the shelter and tarped the boat. Then they swung their packs over the side and jumped down. His pack was heavy but this did not bother him; doggedly they tramped up a narrow, muddy trail away from the river, upward through dense foliage.

"Rain coming," said the guide. "I want to get to the campsite in time to set up beforehand."

Presently they stopped at a rocky outcrop, still in the shadow of trees. Up through the leaves he could barely see sky. It was late afternoon and the air felt thick. Delonn strung up the tarps overhead, tying complex knots with quick efficiency.

"I was only a Boy Scout for three weeks," said T. apologetically, watching. "They kicked me out for trying to sell merit badges on the black market. So I didn't have time to learn knots."

Just as Delonn tossed the sleeping pads through the open flaps of their one-man tents the rain started. T., watching from a perch a few feet away, brought the hood of his slicker up over his head. The wood in the forest was too wet to serve as fuel, Delonn said, so they would have no campfire. But he cooked for them over a small stove; he stirred soup and set it out in metal bowls. He poured whiskey into metal cups and they drank it under their vinyl roof, listening to the rain.

T. thought how comfortable he was in the company of Delonn, who was easy to be silent with. The guide spread his presence over them both, as much an umbrella as the tarpaulin. Falling asleep in his tent, stomach full of soup and bread and whiskey, he was glad to be where he was-in the midst of a thick field of sound with a thin, taut barrier between himself and the falling water.

He woke and realized the rain had stopped. He knelt and unzipped the door flap and got out; the guide's door was still zipped. He did not want to wake him so he scrawled a note and set off for a short walk up the trail.

Everywhere there were dripping leaves in a uniform shade of bright green. His shoulders and arms brushed wet branches and soaked his shirt instantly. He walked on, liking the feeling of being wet. He was wet all the time since he came to the tropics; he was never dry. He was steeping. The soil of the trail was so slick that he slipped and fell and soon his knees were pads of drying mud. Toes splayed on a tree was a bright orange frog; he almost stepped on a slug that was as long as his foot. He heard the sharp cries of something overhead and wondered if it was a bird or a monkey.

On his own he was barely equipped. To know that an animal was a last animal he needed other people, foresight and planning, research. He could not know it alone. He relied on data gathered by others; without the guide along he had none. For all he knew the frog was a last frog: but all he knew was nothing. When you knew the name of something that meant it was part of your life already. But here there were things he had never known. It was a new place and frightening, but it made him younger. The lightness was a boon, partly.

One frog-a golden frog was what he remembered, or maybe a golden toad-had lived in a misty cloud forest not too far from here. It had vanished only last year, or maybe the year before.

After an hour he turned back toward the small camp. The guide was still in his tent. T. consulted his watch: nine o'clock. He ate a granola bar and coughed loudly. Finally he walked up to the tent and spoke.

"Delonn? I think you might want to get started in there."

No reply.

"Delonn?"

He knelt and unzipped the flap. Delonn lay on his side, a sheet wrapped around his legs. T. reached out and touched a leg through the sheet; no movement, so finally he grabbed the sheet away. On the kneecap he noticed deep old scars, shining.

"Delonn! Delonn! You there?"

But Delonn was inert.

He climbed through the tent opening, up over the guide's prone body. He put his fingers against his neck, where he thought the pulse should be, but found none. Chest pains, he thought. Delonn had felt chest pains. He checked and rechecked, but still no pulse. He felt wired and nervy with alarm; his unfitness nagged at him. He was unqualified.

"Delonn. Come on. Don't be…"

He was playing a joke, possibly. At the expense of the rookie.

"Really. Not funny."

He shook Delonn's leg, then his arm, then rolled him onto his back and squatted beside him, looking down. The eyes were closed; the guide could still be sleeping. It was when the eyes were wide open and dull that you knew they were dead. His fear for himself warred with disbelief… he had never been by himself. Not like this. With Beth at least there had been others there, the steady hand of the institutions.

He was lost. Nothing else had ever happened to him.

This was it.

For a time he lay in his tent, staring up at the orange and blue of the roof; several times, in a half-hearted gesture, he called out the guide's name. The silence confirmed him, but it was still not enough. Then he was suffocating; the tent oppressed. He went out.

He could not carry Delonn on his back, he knew that much for certain. It was at least five miles back down to the riverbank, five miles in slick mud, in dense foliage.

He would have to drag him.

He checked again and then again for signs of breath: could Delonn be in a coma? But the lips were drying. There was a dryness on the lips. He tried to pull Delonn into a sitting position; lamely, he tried CPR, vaguely recalling kneeling over his mother. He tried to press the feel of the dead lips away from him. He should have done this when he first found him. Now it was too late; it was sickening.

After several false starts he collapsed Delonn's yellow tent around the body and bundled it up. This tent, he noticed, was older and cheaper than his own, patched and taped at the seams. Delonn had let his client sleep in the good tent… he couldn't cover the face, for what if Delonn was not dead after all? What if the tent material blocked his month?

He cut a hole for the face.

He would pay them for the tent, he thought. Who was them? He saw Marlo's family. He would pay them for everything. He would cover them in money.

On Delonn's stomach he set down the second pack. He would need it, he thought. His own pack contained water and food, maps in a plastic casing, a flashlight and a mosquito net. He found a bungee cord, which he attached to the package; then he tried pulling it over the ground. It was slow going, and the tent ripped and had to be retied and jeny-rigged frequently. Delonn must weigh more than two hundred pounds. The ground was slick in places, wet in others, then dry and crumbly. Wet was too wet: the package sank and got mired. Dry was too dry: the package snagged and bumped. Slick was good.

By his watch it was only eleven when he left the camp pulling Delonn, back down the narrow path the way they had come.

Once or twice, exhausted, he found himself weeping, though he did not feel grief. It was more like fear, fear and confusion. He had liked the guide but had no time to get attached; yet there was a shock to it unlike any he knew. Even with Beth it had not been like this: she had been contained by an institution, both of them had. Walls around them, walls humming with energy. In this he was abandoned. His limbs and nerves jangled with it, chaos under the skin.

He had never steered a boat before, never even pulled the cord on an outboard motor. He had watched it done but he had never done it. He did not know boats and he did not know rivers. He did not know corpses.

It took him a long time. He stopped for Minch, a chocolate bar he ate sitting on the ground, turned away from the guide's body. The afternoon wore on and his progress was painstaking; his palms were blistered from dragging and his fingers burned. His feet ached. The package was mud-splattered and torn. But he soldiered on with a lasting sense of incredulousness. It kept him separate from real things.

By night he would still be able to walk, he thought, but the flashlight batteries might not last. He recognized a stand of bamboo, the angle of a broken branch behind a black stump. A brown and blue butterfly flitted at the periphery of his sight. He was almost there. He thought of the skin of Delonn's back and the back of his head and shudderedthey must be ripped open, gaping. If the guide had not been dead when they started, by now he had murdered him. Maybe he should have left the body, spared him the brutal abrasion; maybe he should have run down to the boat alone, sped down the river and brought rescuers back with him. But there were carnivores in the forest.

Then he saw the boat through the trees, floating in the water. He was pacified; he was rewarded.

By the time he had taken the tarp off, erected the shelter and drunk fresh water it was getting dark. The boat had no spotlights. It had no light at all, only an electrical lantern Delonn had hung off the shelter to read by. In any case he was chilled at the thought of heading downriver by night. He would wait. With some difficulty he propped the package against the hull and then heaved it over the side onto one of the cushioned benches. He thought it was balanced but under his feet the boat rocked and it rolled off and fell heavily. He pulled it to the back of the boat and left it there.

He tried to honor it with a thought but was dull with fatigue. No strength left to hang the tarp or the mosquito net, so he wrapped the net around his head and torso and lay down, breathing thickly through it, on the bench he had slept on in better times. He and Delonn were both cocooned.

He had to shift his arms often to hold the netting away from his skin, for the mosquitoes landed on it directly; and trying to fall asleep in this awkward defensive posture he saw poor Delonn waking, screaming suddenly at the recognition of his flayed back and ragged scalp. He lay on his thin bench in constant terror that Delonn might not be entirely gone from his ripped body, that by accident or laziness he had halfbutchered him. It was a fear that he was lacking a center, or he was a murderer.

He got up finally and pulled out one of his hairs. With the flashlight he found the guide's lips, now blue; over them, with great care so as not to touch them, he placed the hair. In the morning he would be sure… but almost touching the lips he feared he might also be dead, that deadness enfolded both of them.

How could it not? They were so close.

With the first light he woke, nervous and shivering though it was far from cold. Already the air was humid and he saw flies buzzing over the package. Their presence actually reassured him.

He had relaxed his hold on the netting during the night and been bitten on his arms and his face. He itched from the swellings, compelled to scratch at them right away.

The river was lovelier than he had seen it before, its water slow and gold with a blue haze over the surface. Trees hemmed the sky and made it small but there were pink clouds over the tree line to the east. Around him on the still boat were the sounds of crickets and birds; the water rippled and sucked at the underside of the hull.

He was starved.

He drank water straight from a jug and found a small can of black beans with a pull-tab, which he tipped into his month and guzzled. Quickly it was over; his stomach was heavy; he put the can in a plastic bag and looked at the tentwrapped package with its oval of face showing. He checked the hair on the mouth, which was still perfect. The hair and the flies: he had not been wrong.

There was a gap between the lips, however, as though they were beginning to pull back off the teeth. The sight of it jarred him. He pulled the fabric sharply to one side so that the face was covered. He was almost antagonistic toward Delonn now, or at least Delonn's body. It had become an opponent, and a stubborn one.

He took a deep breath to steady himself. He tried the radio, though he was not convinced he was operating it correctly. He heard only static. Then he climbed off the boat again, jumping down onto the muddy bank, and untied the ropes from the strangler fig, fumbling with the guide's expert knots. Back on the boat, feet braced and arms trembling, he jerked twice on the cord and the motor started with a violent spit.

He exhaled shakily, grabbed hold of the wheel with wet palms and steered away from the bank.

Stay a course down the middle, he told himself, fewer snags there and greater depth. He did not want to let go of the wheel to grab the water jug or dig food out of the sacks; he did not want to cut the motor. So he stayed at the wheel steadily, wiping the metal with his shirt sleeve where his hands sweated, urinating once off the side of the boat. He was almost dozing at the wheel, his eyelids heavy in the heat of rising noon, when he heard something scrape loudly and the motor whined. The boat lost speed.

He walked to the back to look down. He had seen Delonn raise the propeller once or twice, why he had not known, but he knew it could be done. He leaned past Delonn at his feet, reached down and heaved it up. Two of the blades were sheared off and a third was broken. It must have hit a rock, he thought. Nothing could be seen through the turbid brown.

The current would still carry them downstream, but he had no way to steer. And the prow of the boat was pointed toward a bank already, moving steadily toward an eddy in the shallows. He glanced around in a panic and saw a white oar on a pair of hooks along the side. This he grabbed and grappled with and held out as they drifted; he stuck it over the side without judging distance, stuck it out and pushed away fiercely: and the boat slanted lightly away from the bank again.

For a while he used the oar on both sides of the boat, keeping afloat straight down the middle of the channel. It was tiring and his arms ached. As he rounded the meander with the still pool, where Delonn had offered him a swim, a large bird flapped over his head without warning; his hand slipped. The oar slid swiftly through the oarlock and into the water.

He watched it float away, hit a ridge of rocks and catch there as the boat moved downstream and left it behind. The boat stayed straight until it knocked into a low branch and slid up into a tangle of brush. A stick, he thought, and balanced tenuously on one of the side benches to reach up. After a struggle he was able to break a long branch off a tree and use it to push the boat off the bank, but the slant of the boat was hard to manage, the stick was awkward for steering, and at the next meander, where a short clay-red cliff rose on one bank, the boat lodged itself in the mud wall of the cliff.

He sat there for some time, listening to birdcalls and looking up at the clear blue sky.

When the current failed to dislodge the boat he decided to get into the water and push; he had to swim around and force it off the bank. He peeled his shirt off and then his grimy jeans, perched on the gunnel and slid into the warm water gently. Feet in the mud, he pushed against the side of the boat until it seemed to loosen; as he pulled himself up a hard thing in the water slid down his calf. The cut was not deep but bled right away, freely. He left bloody footprints on the deck, which gratified him-as though someone else had finally acknowledged his injury. The blood collected into a thin ribbon.

River sand had gathered in the crotch of his boxer shorts and the crotch hung heavy like a sling, so he slipped out of the shorts and hung them from one of the shelter poles. For a while the boat moved nicely downstream; but then the river curved and despite his exertions it drifted into the bank again. He dropped into the water and pushed; again it drifted. Finally he was sick of the boat and furious.

He tied it to a tree and threw a fall pack of food onto the bank, the water filter, his tent and sleeping pad and flashlight. He went to Delonn and touched the tent fabric at the shoulder. He laid a tarp over the body, covering the face, and tucked it carefully beneath.

He was sorry for Delonn but partly envied him too.

He clung close to the bank, wary of losing his bearings if he strayed too far into the jungle. At times there was no trail and the vegetation was thick where the trees were set back. He had to beat his way through. At times he had to stray from the bank, careful to keep the water in sight. Soon he had cuts on his arms and knees; he allowed himself small sips of bottled water but was eager to conserve it, and his head ached from dehydration. In the late afternoon he found himself at the edge of a large marsh that extended north from the river's edge.

He stood uselessly, despairing. The marsh reached far away from the river, too far to see-miles, clearly. He tried stepping in and sank up to his knees; he almost lost a boot trying to pull his foot out. Better to swim the river, he thought. The river was not swift, but was the other bank a marsh too?

The further from the river he walked the further the swamp seemed to stretch. He got anxious. The sun was behind the trees. Finally he chose a hummock to set up his tent and struggled manfully with the tent poles until they held up the nylon. Inside he took off his bungee-cord belt and army pants, heavy with moisture, and sat down on his sleeping pad with his bare legs stretched out. He dabbed at the cuts with alcohol pads from Delonn's first-aid kit; then he found he was shivering and wrapped himself in his sheet. He had been wrong to leave the boat, clearly; for sooner or later, after the snags and the holdups, the spins and the drifts, it would have reached the coast.

It would have been safer than this.

He ate dry oatmeal from a plastic bag. The texture made him thirsty, parched his throat, but he took a single gulp from his small bottle of clean water and decided he had to save the dregs; he could not bring himself to glug from the flask of yellow-brown liquid he had filtered from the swamp. He studied it briefly with the flashlight, whose bulb was dimming rapidly. He believed he could see protozoans swimming, the whirring of their cilia.

Delonn was still on the boat, in his yellow wrap. The boat might be loose by now, loose but still tethered. He thought of it rocking lightly on the surface, Delonn bundled inside, and felt a pang of regret, almost fondness. Without Delonn's death he would never have known this fondness, the odd gratification of having, for a short while, guarded what was left of Delonn, the protector of his honor.

Of course he would also not have known the resentment, the disgust or the repulsion. Those were part of knowing. Taking care of the deceased he had established a certain intimacy: they were not opponents after all but only companions.

He listened to the night; he curled in. Take stock, he thought, take stock. He would be fortunate if he got home at all. There were hazards beyond being lost, being hungry. Delonn had told him about a certain local tree species that grew near the stream bank and exuded a toxic sap. You could brush against the trunk or the branches unknowing and if the sap touched your skin it caused third-degree burns, raising welts up to six inches long. Delonn had been able to identify the trees; of course he himself had no idea what they looked like. For all he knew he was surrounded.

He had had a strong faith once that the world was, at its best, its warmest and most glowing, a network of cities. He recalled a map of the continent at night-a map or a time-lapse satellite photograph-anyway the North American continent seen from the sky, with lights winking on all over, the clusters of population like beacons in the blackness of space. This had seemed to him once to be the epitome of the real, of the hopeful and the farseeing. A night starred with fires, with the fires of habitation. The world had been buildings, he had always believed, and the invisible structures that imbued these buildings with roles, keeping some persons outside them and others within. The whole world had been the systems of men, and he recalled faintly what a comfort it had been to admire it.

And it was not-as he considered now, huddled and wretched and further from cities than he had ever beenthat these systems and the rules that bound people to them were not close to the core of life: but the life they described was a narrow life, a fast life. It was a small life, the life of certainty and straight paths, that life of crowds and buildings.

And look. Look!

It had passed.