Insects: A Novel

by Koloen, John

  “But it works now, right?” Hamel said, hopefully.

  “Where’d you get that idea?” Boyd asked.

  “Just watching you and Duncan. It looks like he’s going to make a call, that’s why.”

  As was their practice whenever it looked like something had either happened or was going to happen, everyone gathered, this time around Duncan. He felt that Boyd had put him on the spot and was resentful but avoided showing it. At the same time, he was flustered and wasn’t certain of whom to call. His phone was in his pack safely out of the rain, and it had been so long that he had called the landline at his office in Pennsylvania that he couldn’t remember it.

  “Professor Azevedo, help us out here. Can you call your office? I just want to make sure one last time that it doesn’t work.”

  Azevedo limped forward and took the phone from Duncan.

  “This works like a regular phone?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Boyd said. “It’s already on, and the antenna is up. All you have to do is press the keypad like you would with a regular phone.”

  Azevedo studied the phone as if it were a previously unseen specimen of insect and then started pressing the buttons, holding it against his ear after he finished.

  “Nothing’s happening,” he said to Boyd, still holding the phone to his ear.

  “Did you dial the country code?”

  “I’m not sure. What is it?”

  “Plus 55.”

  “Plus 55?”

  “Yeah, a plus sign then five five. You need to include the country code and the area code, or it won’t work, not that it will.”

  Azevedo tried again, careful to enter the numbers correctly. Pressing the phone against his ear, he could distinguish a change in the static and what sounded like clicking sounds followed by buzzing. Disappointed, he handed it to Boyd who looked at the tiny LCD screen. For an instant, he thought he was seeing things. Previously, the signal strength display registered near zero, and now three of five bars appeared. Moving quickly toward the clearing they were trying to leave behind, he held the phone over his head and saw a fourth bar appear.

  “Holy shit!” he shouted. “We’ve got a signal.”

  Not wanting to risk losing the signal, he called to Azevedo to join him. While the professor lumbered toward him, he entered the country code and handed the phone to Azevedo as soon as he reached him.

  “I already punched in the country code. Just put the area code and phone number in. I think this is gonna work. I can’t believe it,” he said loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  Excitement spread through the group, and within a moment everyone had gravitated toward Azevedo and Boyd. Seeing that rain was splattering on the professor and the phone, Boyd pulled him away from the edge of the clearing.

  “Olá, olá,” Azevedo said into the receiver. “Daniel, are you there? Dan.”

  The call went to voicemail.

  “We are surrounded by floodwaters. We need help.”

  Holding the phone away from his face, he asked Boyd, “What should I say?”

  “Just keep talking,” Boyd said, “I’ll get GPS coordinates. Just keep talking, so the voicemail doesn’t quit.”

  Boyd ran to his pack, pulled out the GPS receiver and saw it had a signal as soon as he turned it on. Within several seconds, the coordinates appeared on the tiny screen.

  Racing back to Azevedo, he held the GPS so that Azevedo could see the coordinates. He waved him away.

  “I can’t read them, they’re too small. Just read them to me.”

  Azevedo repeated the coordinates into the phone.

  “Dan, call Gonzalo Juarez, he’s the captain of the boat that brought us here. His number is on a note on my desk. Tell him we can’t get to the cabin and …”

  And then the voicemail clicked off.

  Filled with optimism, Boyd suggested Azevedo call Juarez himself.

  “Maybe there’s enough water where he can get a boat to us. It’s worth a shot.”

  Azevedo handed the phone to Boyd and looked up Juarez’ number on his cell phone. Boyd handed the phone back. Azevedo entered the numbers and waited, but this time there was only static. He tried again. And again. Then Boyd tried several times. But the signal strength had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The sky was heavy with storm clouds just as it had been most of the day. The phone wasn’t working, and when he looked at his GPS, he saw that it too had lost its signal.

  “Goddamn it!” Boyd shouted at the phone. “Goddamn it!”

  Duncan watched while all this went on and put his hand on Boyd’s shoulder.

  “You can’t blame the phone,” he said, “but at least Dr. Azevedo got through to his voicemail, and you had the coordinates, so as soon as his assistant listens to it he’ll, he’ll …”

  “He’ll do what?” Hamel asked.

  “I hope he’ll call the captain,” Azevedo said.

  “Or the police,” Peeples said. “Wouldn’t they come looking for us? I mean, they wouldn’t just leave us out here like this if they know we need help. Right?”

  Azevedo smiled knowingly.

  “I think the environmental protection agency would be a good place to start. They have rangers who patrol public lands.”

  “They could rescue us, couldn’t they?” Peeples asked.

  “They could,” Duncan said, “but they’re not going to help us anytime soon. So, let’s stop thinking that someone is going to bail us out, and all we have to do is wait. We still need to decide what we’re going to do. Now let’s get out of this rain and get on with it.”

  They moved en masse to a relatively dry area on the trail but out of sight of the bodies. Everyone dripped with sweat and rain, their boots covered with mud. They looked as if they’d just finished a fifty-mile forced march though it was still early in the day, and no one was physically tired—with the exception of Azevedo, who continued to struggle.

  Duncan made the case for finding high ground.

  “Once we get there, we can stay there and wait for someone to find us,” he concluded.

  “But you want us to go in the same direction the bugs are going,” Hamel retorted. “I, for one, would rather get my feet wet.”

  “You won’t be saying it when it’s up to your waist,” Boyd said. “This whole forest is going to look like a lake, won’t it, Antonio?”

  “Yes, there will probably be lots of water.”

  Boyd was hoping for a more forceful reply.

  “And you don’t know what’s gonna be in the water,” Boyd continued. “There will be snakes, maybe rays, maybe even caiman.”

  “What about piranhas?” Alison Peeples said.

  “Yeah, piranhas, too,” Boyd said.

  Hamel sighed. Maggie Cross patted him on the shoulder and whispered, “I’m not sure there’s a better way.”

  Hamel tried to argue with her, but she shushed him.

  “I suppose there’s no chance of going back and crossing the river?” Stephanie Rankin asked.

  “Not a chance,” Johnson said.

  “But you don’t know that for sure, do you?” Rankin said.

  “It’s for sure,” Duncan said. “The only reason we’re not flooded now is because the ground is a little higher here than back there. Cody’s right. This whole forest is gonna turn into a lake, probably sooner rather than later.”

  “You know, we could try to climb trees,” Hamel suggested. “That’s what our guide did, right?”

  “Yeah, but he’s an excellent tree climber. And he only spent the night in a tree. It could be a week or more for the water to go down, and that’s if it stops raining soon,” Boyd said.

  No one wanted to climb a tree, and Hamel dismissed his own suggestion with a wave of his hand.

  “Maybe the bugs can’t swim,” Rankin suggested.

  “That�
��s possible,” Duncan said. “We don’t know, of course. But insects drown just like any other terrestrial animal.”

  “Unless they’re adapted,” Azevedo said. “Insects that are very light and distribute their weight, like mosquitoes, can walk on water. But the heavier and larger they are…” he held out his left hand, his thumb pointing down.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Boyd blurted. “We can’t just stand here talking. Somebody needs to take the lead here.”

  Carlos Johnson nudged and gestured slightly toward Duncan, who shot an angry look at Boyd who, recognizing it, smiled weakly and stared at the ground.

  “Cody’s right,” Duncan said. “We don’t have alternatives. I think we should pick up any machetes we find around here and keep moving to where the high ground is. Professor Azevedo’s assistant will realize we need help. He has the coordinates. He’ll send someone.”

  “But we won’t be at these coordinates,” Hamel said. “Am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s true, but we should be within a few miles of our destination. We won’t be far away.”

  “We can leave a message of some kind, can’t we?” Rankin said optimistically. “Like we could carve it into something.”

  “Great idea,” Duncan agreed. “Why don’t you and Cody take care of that? Do it quickly. We need to get moving.”

  60

  Dan Rocha worked part-time for Professor Azevedo. He spent most of his time drinking coffee and working on class assignments when he was in the professor’s tiny office. As an underfunded biology undergraduate, he was happy to be paid to help the professor but felt occasional pangs of guilt when he thought he was being paid to do essentially nothing. He had instructions to take messages and review the professor’s voicemail. Of which there were few. Most of the time, the tiny LED on the professor’s phone was off. This time it blinked.

  At first, he didn’t realize the voicemail was from Professor Azevedo. The voice was stressed, frantic, and the professor was always soft-spoken and deliberate. It didn’t help that the connection was filled with static. Listening to it several times, he transcribed the message into his laptop. All that he had known about Azevedo’s trip was that he was going into the forest with a group of American scientists and that he’d be back in several days.

  He studied what he’d typed into his computer, and it was clear that Azevedo was in some kind of difficulty. He didn’t understand the reference to the cabin, but he opened Google Earth and entered the coordinates and saw that they were in the middle of nowhere. There were no nearby roads, no villages or towns, nothing within twenty kilometers or more. He did notice what looked like a small building in a clearing near the coordinates. The satellite image was more than a year old.

  Rocha wondered when the call was made and replayed the voicemail. According to the time stamp, the call was made yesterday. This heightened his anxiety as he was supposed to check the phone every day but didn’t come into the office yesterday. He’d taken the day off. It was common among undergraduate assistants when the boss was away. Nothing ever happened anyway, or so he’d thought.

  Now, he was confronted by the result of his own laziness, and he immediately began imagining that the professor somehow knew what he’d done, and when he returned he’d dismiss him. But the message sounded urgent. Rocha heard the stress in Azevedo’s voice, and it made an impression because he’d never known the old man to get stressed about anything. Even as Rocha was constantly agonizing about his grades and assistant professors whom he didn’t get along with, the grandfatherly professor always counseled him to maintain calm.

  “Stress releases hormones that cause inflammation, which can lead to all manner of physical and psychological problems. Learn to relax, my boy. Learn this while you’re young, and it will help you more than any class you ever take,” Azevedo had counseled the young student.

  Rocha had heard this before. By nature, he was a bit on the anxious side, fearful of failure but intelligent and quick on the uptake. His parents constantly told him not to take things so seriously, but it was his nature and might well be responsible for the few scholarships he’d earned and the likelihood that he’d be accepted into graduate school next year, though he knew he would remain anxious until he’d actually received the acceptance letter.

  He searched the web for Gonzalo Juarez and decided after fifteen minutes that the man did not exist, at least not in cyberspace. He’d grown up in the computer age, and as a consequence had little experience using telephone directories, catalogs or virtually any paper reference other than books, many of which he could access online. His parents had a landline when he was growing up, but his first phone was cellular, and today he carried an iPhone wherever he went. Fortunately, Azevedo had several phone directories, which Rocha began to use when he finally gave up on finding the captain online.

  He first looked through the listings and found several persons named Gonzalo Juarez. He called them all, getting through to only one, who told him he worked in an office. He left a voicemail on two of the calls, and the remainder did not take messages. Then he turned to the commercial pages and started going down the listings for guides. Most of the ads named companies, not individuals. No Gonzalo Juarez.

  Rocha was not by nature very organized, relying on his phone to keep schedules and notes. He didn’t like to waste time and kept notes in a personal shorthand on his phone that even he sometimes struggled to decipher and had virtually no experience in locating businesses or individuals who had no web identity.

  He then started shuffling through the piles of papers on the professor’s desk. Azevedo’s handwriting was almost indecipherable. The old man scribbled like a child learning cursive, which made his writing difficult to read. Rather than trying to read every paper, Rocha scanned for phone numbers, but those that he found were mostly all campus numbers.

  Exasperated, he returned to the digital answering machine and wrote down the phone number that Azevedo had called from. He punched the number into his iPhone and waited. The phone’s speaker erupted in various tones, which were unfamiliar to him, but which he concluded were either busy signals or indicating that the call did not go through. He redialed twice with the same result.

  Frustrated, sitting in Azevedo’s ancient wood chair, he scanned the walls. There were a chalkboard and several cork boards, photographs of the professor with colleagues and dignitaries and several prints of landscapes. There were no phone numbers or names on the chalkboard. The cork boards were filled with notes held by pins, some of which looked as if they’d been there for decades. Some of the notes contained phone numbers, including several with names. Most of the names were of academics at the university, which he recognized. Retreating to the desk, he slumped into the chair. He tried calling Azevedo again, and again he couldn’t connect. He listened to the recording several more times as if somehow he’d missed something important.

  Leaning back in the chair, an old swivel type on wheels with a padded seat once popular in government offices, he folded his hands behind his head and stared at the slowly turning ceiling fan. After a moment, he leaned forward and started rifling through the desk drawers. Each side consisted of a large file drawer on the bottom and two smaller drawers above it. The file drawers were filled with hanging folders. He didn’t bother with them. The other drawers were filled with accessories such as staplers, tape dispenser, rulers and an assortment of items that the professor had accumulated over the years, apparently with no purpose in mind. Finally, he opened the center drawer. In it were a pile of receipts held together by a large paperclip. He cleared a space on the desk, pulled the clip off and spread the receipts in front of him, shuffling them, spreading them across the desk. Examining each one and creating a pile with the discards, he found a note with the hastily scribbled initials G.J. and a phone number. It was not among the numbers he’d already called.

  G.J. did not pick up, so Rocha left a message to return the call to his
cell phone.

  “If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call back,” he said. “It’s very important.”

  Before leaving the office, he tried to call Azevedo, but the call didn’t go through. He assumed the professor had used a satellite phone, being in the forest, but he knew nothing about how they worked and assumed the lack of a signal was not uncommon. Meanwhile, he had a class to attend.

  61

  Gonzalo Juarez was taking stock of his fleet, the small, battered aluminum V-hull boats and the ancient thirty-footer he used to tow them. He was already a day late to pick up the old professor and his American friends. The Rio Negro was well above flood stage, and all low-lying areas were underwater. Most of the land within twenty kilometers of the river would be flooded. He’d been caught in the forest during floods and knew there was little to be done except find high ground or climb a tree unless you had a boat.

  Trouble was, no one in his right mind would take a boat on a hike in the forest. It was always something one wanted after the fact—after the floodwaters had inundated the forest. It was one of the reasons he refrained from guiding sportsmen during the rainy season, except by boat. The minute they wanted to hike overland was where his work as a guide ended. Flooding during the rainy season was a given, and he understood why other guides would lead their customers through the forest no matter how risky it was if that’s what they paid for. It was all about the dinheiro and, to some extent, pride. The younger guides were always trying to prove themselves, and as a person in his early fifties who thought of himself as a businessman more than as a guide, Juarez had adopted a more discreet style. Young guides had little to lose while he had a business with two employees to think about, including himself.

  After Azevedo contacted him about ferrying the Americans to a cabin in the forest, he reminded him that there were heavy rains in the east that were headed their way, but it did not sway the professor. In fact, he took a taxi to Juarez’s dock to check out the boat to make sure it would handle eleven people and their equipment. Upon first seeing the boat, he shook his head and chided Juarez for wasting his time.