by Edward Docx
Bellowing, I tugged at the hood but it caught on my neck, the cord cutting hard into my flesh and the underside of the jawbone where it would not slip past my chin. I wrenched and twisted until I thought I would garrotte myself. Hot angry tears rose. I clawed at the mouth hole to make it wider; it ripped – easily – stupidly. I tore the more until the hood fell around me like a bandanna and I found myself in wider darkness.
I squatted now with my back to the hut door, listening to the forest squawk and trill. Fear came in pulses, threatening to take hold like the onset of sea-sickness. But each time it came, I pressed my back harder against the wood. I could not have walked more than two hours. Eight miles at the outside, then. Much less in all likelihood. But I had no idea who had put me in here or why. Cordero’s men, the soldiers, the traffickers, other guerrillas, affiliated tribesmen, unaffiliated tribesmen? Was I to be used in some way? Was I to be ransomed? I knew it was not un-contacted Indians: my captors had spoken only two words to me, ‘walk’ and ‘now’, and though the accent was thick, the language was Spanish. Neither did the uncontacted have keys and storage huts. Who though? They had not spoken among themselves. I had guessed there were three but there could have been more. My mind circled lower and lower. If the intention was to kill me, then why bring me here at all? There would be water then, and there would be food. They would surely keep me alive. They would return. In any case, I told myself, these conjectures did not matter because there were only two possibilities: that either I found a way out myself or my captors let me out.
I stood up. I must check every board, every plank and every section of the roof. I must be systematic. I would escape.
I began at the door. I pushed at the bottom – then I pressed and kicked and tapped all the way up as far as I could reach. Next, the roof above the door. I reached up and thumped as best as I could. I would work my way clockwise around the hut.
Voices.
A language I did not recognize. Tribesmen?
Human voices. But sing-song, then chattering, then soft – ‘ock-olock-olock’.
I moved from crack to crack hoping for a sightline. But I could see nothing. A shadow? The human shape? I could not be sure. The gloaming was thickening the forest from trunk to trunk. Now there was murmuring, calling; strange ethereal sounds that I could not understand. Two, three different voices – it was impossible to tell. Where were they? I chased along the walls.
I called out. Waited. Called out a second time. Listened.
A moment’s stillness – silence almost.
I thumped on the door. I kicked. I shouted with all that my lungs could summon. I stopped. Listened again. Nothing. Nothing. The jungle noises were rushing in once more to fill the empty air – the toothcomb and the croaks and evening calls of the birds and no sound that was human. I pounded at the door. I was nothing but my physical self, howling inside my cage.
It was bitter to return to my task. More bitter still that the cracks were becoming merely smears and I was working with my hands rather than with my eyes. The wood was rough and splintered. I was reckless and despairing. And in the gathering darkness, my discomfort fed on itself and was soon grown to misery. Nothing was loose. Nothing moved. The cuticles of my toes were hurting in my boots from the kicking. I was stung and bitten and raging with the itchy compulsion to tear off my skin. My nails were cut, and my shirt clung to my back. I had tried to urinate through one of the gaps, using my fingers as a barrier to protect myself against the wood, but I had succeeded only in fouling my hands. And now I could no longer continue with my task because the only sections left were the low walls where the roof sloped down above the plastic sacks and I didn’t want to lie in the dirt and probe blindly in the darkness. All this in less than six hours. I had no appetite, I was not thirsty, but I wanted to wash. I wanted to be clean. I was afraid of losing my spirit. And this fear merged into all my other fears until fear was my all.
The night began. The blackness was soon so deep that I could only see my hands when I raised them before my eyes. Whatever crawled on the floor, I could not crouch on my heels any longer. I allowed myself to sit in the dirt and it eased the pain.
Unsleeping, awake, asleep, awake again, I found I was slapping at my skin. The near-darkness whined with sound. With my head in my knees, I sought other places for my mind to go. But I could think only of the immensity of the forest, the river networks, the paths, the billion trees, this clearing, the hut and my body locked inside, isolated.
Against this loneliness, I spoke to myself. Are you injured? No – no, I’m all right, I’m OK. Good. You’re lucky. They didn’t really hurt you. You need to keep yourself injury free. You need to look after yourself the best you can. What about water? Shut up. You can last three days, even here. Longer. You wouldn’t give it a second thought if you were heading to the station. You don’t drink water for days at home. So put it out of your mind. And food will not be serious for a long time either. So you’re not going to starve. Now, right now, you have your strength and you’re not depleted. So think. Be systematic. This is just a shack. You can get out of here tomorrow. Stop wasting your energy, man.
There was surprising comfort in this. I knew well that it was absurd, but somehow the sound of my own voice stabilized me, held back the surge and press of other thoughts. And after a while, I no longer thought of it as my own voice. Time and space became as one – both dark, all around and neither passing.
In the blackness something moved and into my mind came the image of a snake. No longer a species I had memorized but a living creature of the night, worming beneath the walls, between the fissures, alive as I was, no more than a foot long, routinely fanged with a venom that would kill me – agonizingly, without significance or purpose.
I leapt up.
I would carry on. Anything would be better than this. Unseeing, I heaved out bags until I could wave my invisible arm in the empty space. Then I lay down on the bare earth and edged backwards, my hands held above my head, groping for the far wooden walls in the darkness.
Beading.
The telltale tunnels of the termites.
VI
Dawn. I had a gap six inches tall by eighteen inches wide, beyond which, if I twisted, I could just about see the tangle of plants. I dug in my heels and thrust myself deeper until I was close against the far wall, no more than a foot high. The air smelt of the heady sweetness of rot and ferment. My fingers probed back and forth. Towards the corner, the wood was completely beaded and less dense – the pieces came away in my hand more easily like icing from a cake.
The light was strengthening. I reached both my arms above my head in order to grip the cross-spur. I expected more resistance but a single wrench and it dropped to one side. I prised away the verticals above where it had collapsed – one, two, three, four came away easily. I twisted again. The job was almost done: I had a hole through which I could crawl.
I rolled onto my stomach. I wriggled and kicked myself forward. Soil packed beneath my fingernails. I pressed myself into the earth. My shoulders caught. I spat. The wood splintered. And suddenly I was through and looking at the outside wall of the hut in the blue light of the waking forest.
VII
The Termites
Termites are easy prey so they build their little tube-like tunnels across whichever surfaces they must travel – covered walkways inside which they can move protected. Some Indian tribes eat them. The workers have guts stuffed with soil and wood though, and the soldiers’ heads harbour glands full of a noxious, sticky liquid that they use in their wars. So the alates, the reproductives, are the ones to seek out. Their dense little bodies are full of proteins and fats. Raw, they taste of uncooked prawns, but with a nutty or woody flavour. They are easy to find. They wait near the surface of the mound for the rain to come so that they can begin their mating flights. Before they reproduce and burrow out their homes, they need the world to soften.
The termites are the enemies of the ants.
Their kings do not di
e moments after sex. They live in state with the queens. All the eggs are fertilized – male and female. There are no drone-clones. And yet their progeny cooperate without any need for the sophistry of kin-selection defence. In this way, the termites mock the myrmecologists. They say, the reason you do not study us is because we live beneath mud and faeces and cannot be easily watched in the lab; they say, the reason you do not study us is that the ants are related to wasps, but we are related to cockroaches; they say the reason you do not study us is to do with human psychology; they say, Homo sapiens, you fools, do you not see your own reflection staring back at you in the lens of your microscopes and your telescopes, obscuring every object on which you cast your gaze; they say, our society is more complex than you can imagine; they say, we are born altruists for we cooperate regardless; they say, our soldiers are made to defend against our enemies the ants, which is why their heads are so big – so that they can block our tunnels against these intruders; they say, our soldiers stand behind one another – and when one falls, the next takes its place; they say, when the intrusion is bigger than a soldier’s head, our soldiers range themselves like Roman infantry in tight formations and blindly bite and squirt their toxins through their horns; they say that these sticky sprays kill or immobilize the stinging ants at a ratio of twenty ants lost to only one termite soldier; they say that while their soldiers fight, the workers repair the breached tunnels behind them, leaving all the soldiers stranded beyond the repair with no retreat and so to die; they say blessed are the meek for they might inherit the Earth after all.
VIII
I found the mound easily. Nasutitermes costalis. I scraped and sifted. Workers teemed about the damage. I watched the soldiers scramble. Then I scooped out handfuls of alates – white, winged, plump as beans – and filled my pockets. Three times, I stripped wings and swallowed. I would not be consumed by hunger at least. I would ward off that madness for as long as I could. I smeared the dirt from their mound on my skin against the mosquitoes.
I turned to face the little clearing.
A grey-necked wood rail was singing what remained of the dawn – its call like hysterical laughter. There were no other buildings. The hut looked feeble from the outside – small, contingent. I circled the clearing seeking where the path came in and where it must surely leave. I breathed in the cool and filled my lungs as if it were some life-giving draught of resilience and resolve.
I found two tracks, diverging, and was pleased that there were no more. I remembered that while they had been leading me by the hand, the ground had sloped down a little. On this remembrance and nothing more, I chose the upward gradient and hurried away, smeared in filth, bruised and bitten and hobbling where I had damaged my toes.
But I had taken no more than two dozen steps before I faltered. Already, the hut looked like a place of great security. I stopped and the sounds of the forest seemed likewise to pause as though to say: you have half an hour’s amnesty – be wise. Indecision held me. I considered the possibility of crouching in the forest, waiting for my captors to return. But what then – if ever they did? Attack them? Besides, the march here had not been that long. No, my hope was surely that this path on which I had started remained distinct and clear and soon intersected with that on which we had been carrying our equipment. If I was lucky, I would hit the river. If not, I could always come back to the clearing and walk out of the other side. I set off again.
The light was no longer changing but had settled into its uniform green-brown and time soon became impossible to judge. The heat was itchy and close – and it felt like the jungle was slowly being simmered, warmer and warmer, on the instruction of some malign spirit whose kingdom bustled beneath the thin topsoil. Whether I was following an old rubber trail or one of the Indian paths, I had no idea. Perversely, the places where the jungle thinned were the most treacherous – since the way was clearer where it had been hacked through dense undergrowth.
I became lost only when I turned around and saw that behind me the path forked and I did not know which of the two I had just emerged from. Instantly, the anxiety surged and I felt my fragile composure drowning in the onrushing tide. I retraced my steps. I was still holding to the idea that I might return to the hut if I did not come upon the river this way.
At a low thorn-spiked loop I did not recognize, I turned back on myself again – in the original direction of my flight as I thought – but now the path forked ahead of me. I ran on. Ten paces, twenty.
Here, inexplicably, the forest had almost no understorey; the ferocious impenetrability of vine and thorn and frond and bush had mysteriously disappeared. I had the sense of being in a cathedral. There were mighty trees all around me, their trunks soaring like columns towards the distant canopy. I swayed. Creation was singing all about my ears.
Tricks, I thought. Tricks of light and space and time. Everything looked the same. Everything looked different. I felt dizzy. My tongue felt alien in my mouth. I imagined that my sweat was thickening. Fear swamped me again. I dug in my pocket. My hands were cut and smarting and caked in every shade of dirt. I held up the termites in my palms, licking them up, swallowing them alive, greedily, without stripping their wings.
There was wildness in admitting that I was lost – exhilaration in the despair, in the abandonment of even the possibility of caution. Instead, I could now plunge on, fast, wherever the path led, without the anxiety of becoming lost, sure instead that the only new eventuality was that I would find my way again.
At every fork in the path, I chose the left and then the right, the left and then the right. My only rule was to alternate. Many times, I reached a wall of tangle and turned around. Panic raced in, overwhelmed me, abated a little, left me alone. My clothes were as a second rancid skin. But I knew that as long as the sweat continued my dehydration was not acute. There was water in the vines but I had no knife, nor could I trust myself to know which was fresh and which poisoned. No senseless running, Lothar had said. No panic. Time does not matter in the forest, only staying alive. Already, I had only the most primitive plan: to find the water and to follow it.
I fell into a trance. My forward stumble was broken only by a new sound or a gap where a tree had fallen and the sun could be glimpsed. Then I would come to my senses and rally. Anger permeated my limbs and I made faster progress and I called it progress. I told myself that I had been deprived for less than forty hours . . . that it was as nothing; a faddish diet; a minor illness; a busy day.
A bird was singing a song that sounded like a sparrow’s. I saw my city and my former life and a spirit of great clarity overtook me. And I understood that the old relationship had been reversed; that I had been growing more sane with every step; that I was insane before I came here; that the jungle had not made me mad but that it had returned me to my right senses; that I would survive and come to know and see the world as it truly was; that I would no longer be uncertain, guilty, agitated, distracted, enraged, maddened, preyed upon against my will, isolated, isolating. Then my mind flew up and I saw my own human existence as a flashing moment in the endless expansion of the universe. And I saw, too, that it must always be our compulsion to fashion meaning – from soul to the stars and back again. What else could we do? We must throng the empty heavens with our imaginations. And our imaginations must forever outshine our reason – for how else could we redeem our solitude?
I saw that we are indeed the authors of our own story and that it is ours to write.
And laughing, I walked on.
I ate termites. I invented rituals. I counted steps. At forks, I broke branches and twisted them so that I would know if I came to the same place. I saw a snake and marked the place as evil with a cleft stick. And when I came on them again, I found that these signs made to myself had swollen into a great significance. The news that they conveyed – of intelligence, of concern – this news seemed transcendent to me; though I knew well, with another part of my mind, that the intelligence was only mine and the concern but a genus of my own despera
tion. And all the while the animal was there – thirstier and thirstier, sickening.
I stopped and stood by a tree bearing berried fruit. Everything was nourishment. Everything was poisonous. I squeezed a berry and the juice ran. I dared not eat. I had not seen even a stream.
The gloom was deepening when I heard a faint buzzing. I was shocked out of my shambling stupor. I stood still. Then I walked on. The noise rose a little. I walked faster. I thought that it might be a chainsaw somewhere. I thought that there must be people ahead – loggers, happy loggers. I tore on through the undergrowth of the vanishing path in the direction of the noise, my hopes surging uncontrollably. But the buzz had become a whine and I grew more and more confused and could not tell where the sound was coming from. I stopped and tried to listen.
Ahead, I thought.
I stepped forward and caught my foot and the noise disappeared and there was a great swishing sound and something dropped from above and swung and slapped heavy and wet and soft on the side of my face.
I fell and twisted around in the leaf litter. A glinting black mass of flies swarmed above my head – seething, shining, oily. Broken-necked and swinging from the vine-rope, in the midst of their fury, was a dead monkey – its mouth forced open into a silent scream by an upright stake through the tongue. Beneath, hanging from its slit belly by the congealed rope of an umbilical cord, dangled a blood-stained foetus, curled up, pink and lipless, empty-eyed.
IX
I did not believe in the light until it revealed my legs to me: lifeless, rigid, twin cylinders of mud. I was the first man on Earth. I was numb. I raised my head from my forearm pillow and looked up, following the trunk of my tree far into the indefinite light of the canopy. My mouth was an open sore. I rocked slowly from side to side. My blood was surely thickening; I hauled my arms around my shoulders and so began a shooting agony as it pushed its sticky way into forgotten limbs. For a long time, I dared not climb down.