Indecision (24 page)

Pretty soon we’d come to higher, uncontaminated ground, where, in the dregs of the grapefruit-colored light, with uncomfortably large bats patrolling the air, you could make out an abandoned hut to one side of what must have at one period been a clearing. The treeless chunk of space was thick with new-ish ferny growth, so that the jungle reached to touch you from all sides in a fashion guaranteed to remind the human person of his native fear of an unknown touch in the dark.

Edwin placed the lantern on the ground and began pacing the perimeter of its light, swinging the machete. He hacked away at the ferns or fern-ish verdure with slow, deliberate, brutal strokes, meanwhile talking to Brigid.

Eventually I said, “Why’s he saying nada nada?”

“Nothing is here, nothing is left.”

“Tell Edwin I think he’s a very good guide. And maybe we can pay him an oil spill–related bonus? He doesn’t usually take people here.”

“He doesn’t usually take them anywhere. You know he has not enough business! That is why we came at all.”

By now Edwin had stood up and stopped hacking away. He was talking to Brigid in tones of a certain shakiness.

“He is saying perhaps he should follow them down the river.”

I found him sympathetically reminiscent of something too basic and also vague to be identified.

Brigid looked at me, blinding me with her headlamp. “I am sorry to everyone that I did this! I am sorry to bring us here. I mustn’t always do these things.”

“Come on, don’t make a meaning out of it. Today is only today. You don’t do
these things.
”

But without a word she’d walked off into the woods. There were several possibilities for why this might be, and I was unable to estimate how long she would be gone. The reason I wondered was that while I had painfully little idea what to do about Brigid, vis-à-vis Edwin I had come up with a plan I felt most comfortable executing just between man and man.

I flipped in a hurry through my Spanish phrasebook/dictionary, looking for the words. And possibly Abulinix worked after all, since now I was very deliberately shaking half my supply into my hand, stuffing the pills in my pocket, and presently going up to Edwin with the prescription bottle in hand. With a certain stealthy gesture—like a drug dealer in the Washington Square Park of bygone years—I folded the bottle into his cool, flat, somewhat stub-fingered hand.

His eyes shone a little, but whether this was just the common human moistness wasn’t something I could tell. In any case I said, “Estes te puede aider. Maybe. Uh, these can help you. What is Spanish for maybe? Anyway, tiene una para día. Solamente uno. But each day. Todo los días, okay?”

Probably if he remained in Baños I could get his address somehow and send him some more if they worked, and he wanted. Although if the way they worked was to make him go back down the river, then he was out of luck medication-wise. In any case I could hear more than see it as he took one Abulinix, chewed it up—not the recommended procedure—and swallowed it dry. Then somewhat violently—almost somewhat sarcastically I felt—he knocked his forehead into mine.

I shook his hand in the most general fashion.

When the rain began to pour Brigid and I took shelter under the rasping thatched roof of the hut. Standing between the leaks that were drilling the ground at our feet, I switched on my headlamp and looked around. At first when my eyes registered all the poised dark blotches covering the wall, I figured there were so many of them that they must be patches of moss or I don’t know what. But then with a feeling of slowed-down time and horrific lucidity I determined that the spots were in fact enormous spiders, and some were on the move.

“Brigid,” I said. “There are spiders all . . . over . . . the . . . They’re everywhere in here.”

I’m not sure if outside of movies I’d ever heard someone literally gasp in horror before.

I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the hut.

Brigid and Edwin and I trekked all night through and out of the jungle, until eventually we stood without talking by the side of the road in the dawn. After a while a courteous gap-toothed fruit seller slowed down to pick us up and in his truck we hitchhiked back to Edwin’s van. Seated on fragrant crates of guava, lemons, grapefruit, papaya, guanabana, and oranges, we listed around curves, jounced violently over washboards, and said basically nothing to each other as we watched the red dirt road unspool behind us or else looked out the slats of the truck bed at the trees and more trees, the occasional chicken, pig, mule, guy on a bike, barefoot schoolkid, raw garden plot, or hut raised on stilts, TV set bawling inside.

TWENTY

The wool-upholstered modernist couch in Alice’s living room had been so forbidding-looking, the night before, when we’d gotten to her apartment after such a long day of hanging out with mom at Dr. Hajar’s place and watching the footage on CNN, that she’d said I might as well sleep on her bed. I’d flopped down on top of her comforter with my clothes on, had fallen asleep on a plumb line and slept deeply all night, like nothing had happened; and now I had opened my eyes and was looking at Alice—her mouth went tight for a second with the idea of a smile—in the early gray light of the following day.

“There’s you at least,” she said.

“Exactly. I mean about you.” Looking into her kind blue bloodshot eyes, the big tenderness-based sensation of two nights before revived somewhat, and pushing forward my neck I kissed Alice lightly, with a laugh, on her actual lips.

Next thing I knew I was on the floor—and my head hurt from hitting the wooden chest beside the bed.

“Ow,” I said. “Ouch!”

Alice had turned on the green-shaded banker’s lamp by her bedside. “What is wrong with you? Who raised you?”

“I’m sorry, Al.”

“No, go!”

I got up to my feet. “Come on. Kissing’s just a physical sensation—come on!” Nevertheless I had started looking for my shoes. “I’m sure there are cultures where it’s totally fine to kiss your . . . And it’s not like, you know, second or third base was on the way. I was just—”

I sat in her fancy Aeron desk chair and started lacing up my shoes.

“You’re just too weird to deal with.”

“One kiss was going to be all. The other night on Chambers St. we all took a bunch of Ecstasy and everybody kissed everyone else! So it’s not like . . .”

“Oh, just a slow Monday night before the country is attacked, so you and your Chambers St. buddies find some girls and take a bunch of E. ‘Hey dude it’s Monday night, dude!’ Yesterday must’ve been a really fun day for you. I thought you seemed more out of it than usual.”

I was standing up shod and groggy, ready and reluctant to go. “Look I’m sorry Alice—let me try and explain something.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Nothing is normal to me. See? In human life . . .”

“What are you saying, you’re immune to acculturation? Fine. I guess it’s partly my fault—we’ve been too close. Go kiss somebody else.”

“Just as long as you know that my
tongue,
for example, would never have been involved. . . .”

“Thanks. Think of me as banishing you for your general estrangement from all human customs rather than for any specific perverted act, okay?”

“I
am
sorry.”

“Thursday’s off. Psychotherapy’s off. I can’t believe I thought—”

“It was useful while it lasted.”

“Not very.”

“All right. Good night. Or I mean have a nice day.”

I went into the bathroom, pretending to use it for its sanctioned purpose, and actually looking into the mirror instead. Alice possessed one of those illuminated cosmetic mirrors that, flipped to one side, allow you to study up close the precise eccentric course of a nose hair straggling out your left nostril, or to determine exactly how much urban grime (even on a day of normal smokiness and no ash) has been slugged into your pores. I leaned into the mirror looking into my questionable eyes and porous complexion, and like the exact reverse of God when He could see His Spirit on the face of the deep, I felt my features kind of blending back with chaos, and I had to resort to some words. “What is your problem?” I watched my magnified lips form the shapes. Then I flipped the mirror over, and on my way out flushed the toilet.

Turning around in the living room I said, “Al, I’m never going to get over you, you know.”

She bolted up furiously in bed. “What do you think it means to be in a family? We’re the people we never get over. Now go!”

Entering digits into a pay phone on the corner, inhaling the tang of pulverized industrial materials in the air, watching the morning unroll down Sixth Ave., and punching myself repeatedly in the thigh, I called Vaneetha Trivedi.

“I’m . . . glad to hear from you. Even if you are waking me up—at God, what time is it? Are you all right? You didn’t know anyone?”

“Not so far. You?”

“I don’t actually know too many people in New York—I’ve realized. Do you have anything to do just now? Or would you like to come over for some breakfast?”

I went down into the subway—amazed that it was still running despite the carnage downtown, and that I continued living my life, doing everything I did, despite the confusion involved, like it was somehow regular and automatic—and got on a train to Brooklyn. In less than thirty minutes I had rolled off naked Vaneetha and was lying beside her, naked myself, in her big white bed. I had taken the express.

Part Three

TWENTY-ONE

We said goodbye to Edwin in the dim shop decorated with photos of rare jungle animals we hadn’t had the luck to see. Also there was a picture of a watchful hairy spider which Edwin presented me as a mock gift. I asked Brigid to thank him for everything else instead and wish him good luck. Heading out toward the street I called back a fond and useless “Adiós.”

Brigid stepped out of the shop with her sunglasses on. “He seems rather shaky.”

“Are
you
okay?”

“He made a promise to update me on his decision. And you—back to Quito?”

“What about you?”

She shrugged in her Brigidesque fashion. “I would like to go on to Cuncalbamba—if only to remain on vacation from my future for a while.”

The trouble with going on living would seem to be the mortifying implication that somehow you approve of yourself—and I’d started to wonder if instead of waiting for the prostate cancer (or car accident, or large-scale terrorist attack) I should take things more into my own hands and set about making firm plans to kill myself. However this was a question I wanted to postpone dealing with more conclusively until I got back to New York.

“Cuncalbamba?” I said. “I’m there.”

“After twenty-four hours on the bus maybe you are there.”

It was more like twenty-seven and I should probably say now, unless I should have already, that travel in Ecuador can’t really be recommended in good conscience to anyone who dislikes buses or hates listening to endless loops of the same vallenatos and cumbias (words I would here translate freely as
crazy mountain bus music
) or who resents having to hold on his lap a squalling child, handsome of face but with a shitty diaper, loaned to him by a peasant woman; and if you’re inclined to take umbrage at a bus driver’s willingness to stop for anyone who flags him down, then it’s also the wrong country for you.

Yet at last we came over the final pass and began to drop down into the Cuncalbamba valley. The bus crested a hill, its engine sighed, and we began to descend into a glowing green valley along the swinging curves of a potholed road. The shoulder of the road was planted at random intervals with rude home-style crosses apparently commemorating roadside fatalities and these, being white, stood out particularly against the hazy vista of graduated hills in the dimming light of this or any afternoon. “Your life is still passing before your eyes?” Brigid asked.

Back in Baños, I’d told her about my memories but hadn’t said which ones they were. Basically I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Or will you tell me what you have been thinking of? I am sure it’s not so fascinating that it must remain a secret.”

I figured at this point I didn’t have much to lose by the truth, and went ahead and admitted that my inappropriate feelings for Alice would seem to have ruined me for love.

She scoffed: “Nothing so obvious could be true.”

I confessed furthermore that the memory of the abject circumstantiality and total contingency behind my relationship with Vaneetha led me now to mistrust what I had previously been inclined to consider my “impulses.”

“But this is nonsense—you are the most impulsive person!”

Moving right along, I informed Brigid that I’d had the misfortune of taking lots of Ecstacy in the early hours of 9/11; that I’d submitted therefore to an orgy of reckless optimism, soon disproved; and that this had caused me to doubt the truth-revealing features of drugs in general.

“I can hear from how you say it that you don’t believe it. But really you ingested these drugs on September the Eleventh? Not a good idea.”

“Well we didn’t know what was going to happen—or we would have given our E to the terrorists!”

She looked at me with either admiration or dismay.

“Well just to sum up, I’ve come to doubt the wisdom of my behavior in general. I can never decide what to do, so I just end up doing it—or something else instead.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Honestly that’s just as well,” I said, and vaguely wished to have lived a different life.

At least all the hype about Cuncalbamba looked true. We climbed off the bus on the early side of dusk and went to find a room in the beautiful hillside pensión/spa that Brigid’s guidebook apparently praised. They had only one habitación left: this stuccoed cottage, yellow-orange on the inside like a peach, and boasting a perfectly matrimonial-looking queen-sized bed, as well as a finer-quality couch than we’d enjoyed on Chambers St. The cost was thirty-five dollars a night—thirty-five dollars in quasi-bankrupt and increasingly sad-seeming Ecuador—and the sum should convey some idea of the luxury. I’d never been to a
spa
before and wondered if this would become something for me and mom to bond over.