Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Some of the packages were missing, so he pulled out the contents of the pocket in his backpack where they were kept and piled everything up in his cooking pot. There were six extra flashlight batteries, and two jackknives and a second compass, and a roll of electrical tape. There was James’s miniature ax in its sheath, and a roll of fishing line, and a small plastic box containing fishhooks and tackle. There was a metal file and a box of nails, and a tiny notebook with a matching pen and metal covers that were held tight together with miniature magnets. But he found no wayward packages and no crumbs of disintegrating tablets lodged in the canvas seams. As he emptied the pocket and then filled it again, he sensed without conscious calculation that since two hundred and sixty one tablets were accounted for, thirty nine were missing, more than two weeks’ worth. He knew the numbers in the same wordless way that he knew, in the pit of his stomach, what they meant: That with all his estimations, his endless compass readings, his maps, his hours of research, he was like an arrow hurtling past its target. He had missed his mark.

  The thought was more than he could grasp. That his compass, so precise, with its needle as thin as a hair, had offered him unreliable counsel was a thought that, strangely enough, he had never stopped to consider. Last time, he and James had seen to their left, as they approached, a hazy cloud of light that announced a clearing in the distance, and in that brightening cloud they had caught glimpses of silhouettes flickering across a brilliant screen. There had been signs in the dirt since the morning before, and twice James had pointed out logs that had been deliberately felled and laid across their stumps. Thinking back over the past few days, Larry remembered no such signs, and feared in his heart, that he had become so lost in time that he never allowed himself to look for them. He zipped up the pocket in his pack and sat down, seeking, in immobility, escape from the reality of his predicament, and protection from whatever in the forest has the sharpest nose for fear.

  There is no loneliness like that of someone who has sought it out, whether knowingly or not, and found it. Jorge had called him ill-prepared, but he had got it wrong. Larry knew how to collect condensation in a metal cup, and how to build a shelter out of rope and sticks. He knew how to tell the jacu from its tracks, and how to light a fire with a bow drill. Most of all, he knew that finding one’s way involved more than following a compass, or a set of instructions, more than being led by a map, or by a guide. But everything he knew was clenched up, like a fist inside his heart, grasping something hard and round and silver in its palm, something that displaced Sara’s coin and the concern behind it. Larry didn’t remember how it got there, but sensed it had been there forever, a perfect, lifeless, reflective sphere in which, looking in, he could see only himself. It was the thing that had indentured him to the needle of the compass and its impulsive, twitching whims. It was the thing that made time unbearable. It was the thing that had stopped him from swiveling in his fiberglass seat in the airport in Belem and telling James—what? He couldn’t begin to know. No amount of preparation could dislodge it, not even the sight of a lone figure in the forest, crying into his hands over the losses he had brought upon himself, yet still clinging in terror to his lonely fate.

  From high in a treetop, a macaw turned its head to look down at the seated figure, its bright plumage and serious expression giving it a comical demeanor. An agouti stopped in mid-step and stood up on its haunches, its nose and whiskers quivering. At the thick base of a kapok, in a dark indentation between two knotted roots, a tarantula stood like a shopkeeper at the door of his establishment, looking out at the passing traffic with an air of detached ennui. None of them could know of the effort it took on the part of the figure to rise, to wipe its eyes one last time with the corner of its shirt, and to reach into its pocket for its compass. Larry flinched as he shouldered his pack, feeling an ache in his neck and his knees, from crying, he thought, taking a long drink from his water bottle. Overhead, the macaw took off with a flash of red and green, and on the ground, the tarantula shifted slowly backwards until it disappeared into its doorway, as though it had been summoned back into its shop by its assistant but was in no great hurry to respond. Only the agouti, who froze at the sight of Larry’s upright presence, might have understood that the cold internal thing that had so often rendered Larry immobile, that had commanded him so often to rebuff the world’s advances, that told him, in almost every situation, to play dead, was, for all its coldness, driven by a wish to live and not a wish to die.

  Larry stood and pushed himself through the heavy air with the sort of frantic, reflexive effort that one might see in a man who, contemplating suicide while walking beside a lake, accidentally falls in and finds himself thrashing furiously and gasping for air. After an hour, his legs began to shake, and he remembered that he had forgotten to eat. He pulled out a handful of nuts and a piece of jerky and moved on, feeling less revived than he had hoped. The undergrowth seemed to thicken as he went; he hadn’t remembered encountering so many thorns, or such dense vines. At last, he was forced to pull his hunting knife from its leather case, wielding it like a scythe, carving a tunnel through the hanging lianas. The compass was undaunted and cheered him on, promising that he had merely taken a small detour through a rough outcropping of branches and would soon find his intended path again. “Look,” he commanded himself in desperation, almost shouting at himself, and what he saw was his own shirtsleeve, cut to tatters by the thorns, and through the strips of fabric, a spreading stain of blood. He thought of reaching into his pack for bandages and ointment, but knew that he couldn’t afford to stop. Instead, he tore one of the strips of fabric from his sleeve and knotted it tight with his other hand and his teeth around his forearm, level with the center of the stain.

  He carried on until his breathing became labored and his heart pounded in his ears, and then finally lowered his pack and sank down onto it, knowing he could go no further. “Look,” he told himself weakly, though he saw nothing but thorns and brambles close about his face. All the joints in his body ached, the small ones in his fingers and toes no less than his knees and his elbows; his eyes ached from trying to squint through sweat and vines. Apparently, this was how one died in the forest, not violently, but of hopelessness, languishing due to weakness brought on by despair. He drained the third of his four water bottles in one long breath and put his head down on his knees, pulling himself in close. He wished he had a shell, or a blanket, to draw over himself despite the relentless humidity, a barrier to protect him from the stings of the nettles and the taunts of the mosquitoes he was too tired to try to slap away. As he drew in all his senses but listening, the hum of the forest seemed to expand, until it pushed from all sides against his imaginary blanket, until it became the blanket itself. The world ended at the edges of that blanket, Larry sensed, beyond which there was only emptiness, endless space in which his doomed frigate floated off to meet the darkness and the stars. He felt his body move unimpeded through a nothingness devoid even of sound and yet, as he glided on, he was surprised to notice that he did hear sound, a soft but unmistakable muffled breathing noise of the sort one might hear by holding a shell to an ear. He stood up and listened, waving away the mosquitoes. What he heard in the distance in front of him, though still far off, was the sigh of water rushing over rock.

  As Larry shouldered his pack and pushed on, he let himself be guided not by the compass this time, but by the stream’s beckoning call. What drew him forward was not so much the allure of water itself—having started off on the tail end of the rainy season, the way had been laced with tiny veins, and he had not yet developed a fear of water’s scarcity—but the promise of a clearing, of a place to string up his hammock, to replenish all his stores, and think, and sleep. He no longer told himself to look, but to listen, and as he did, he heard the stream’s breath swell. The undergrowth began to thin until he could walk upright again and then, suddenly, the forest gave way and he stopped short at the threshold of a gleaming praia, an opal crescent of sand nested between the green
hand of trees and the blue hand of water.

  L

  LARRY COULD FEEL the shadows cover him over as he slept, as his own weight pulled him down into his dreams. But someone was trying to get his attention, and as he stirred awake, he realized it was the chill of twilight that was tapping on his shoulders and pressing at his sides. He sat up and brushed the sand from his face, looking out at the shimmering purple river and the darkening curtain of trees. As he strung up his hammock at the edge of the forest and cleaned the cut on his arm with antiseptic and ointment, he felt relieved but still weak; his arms and legs still ached when he moved them. He went to the edge of the river to bathe, but when he put his feet in the water, a shiver ran through him, and he decided to wash just his face and fill his bottles before returning to sleep. He knew he should be hungry but wasn’t, so he pulled only his flashlight and his jacket from his pack and then crawled between the layers of netting, wrapping the jacket around him. On his descent into sleep, he felt a sudden pinprick of relief at the thought that he hadn’t tried to bathe in the river with an open cut on his arm, which would have drawn the attention of piranhas, as it did, that night, in his dreams.

  LI

  KAMAR SODEIS WAS a principled man, although it would have been hard for an outsider to discern the particular set of principles to which he adhered. He himself would have identified it effortlessly in a word: progress. Against those who would decry Brazil’s push to become an economic power worth reckoning with, Sodeis understood the necessity of commerce, of capitalizing on available resources, of self-determination, of modernization. Yet he and Diego Melo, his former partner, managed to disagree as vehemently as they embraced their shared credo. For progress, as it turned out, it was a far more difficult concept to put into practice than, in the eagerness of youth, they had at first believed. Where Sodeis had come to appreciate the native population as one more among Brazil’s bounteous resources which, to the extent to which it could be helped to assimilate into the modern world, could be fruitfully exploited for the benefit of all, his partner was far more impatient as regards the native question, and eventually left prospecting altogether, abandoning Sodeis with a few allies, a pile of contracts (most of them untenable), and an even deeper allegiance to an investment in idealism. Meanwhile, Melo found his second career in politics to be far more satisfying than his first, and could soon afford to be generous to his old friend (who was, undeniably, a repository of certain unflattering facts regarding his history), and protected him from some unfortunate constraints of law, particularly regarding the Indian question. But Melo could not, as it turned out, protect Sodeis from the difficulties that arose from the even deeper principle to which he adhered unwaveringly: that every hard-won victory, every effort to find his way, was to be undermined, undone, wrecked, blocked, quashed, drowned out, sacrificed in tribute to those harsh ancestral Gods in whom, in his wish to view himself as powerful, as enlightened, he refused to believe that he believed.

  LII

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG with Larry’s having arrived at the edge of a river twenty yards wide and slow-moving and deep. He was, at most, four hours from the place where he turned around, four hours in which little distance had been covered. The rivers he had encountered thus far were more like streams, and he had crossed them without incident, using sticks for balance, filling his water bottles at their farther banks. None had been wide enough even to necessitate a parting of the crown of trees, nor deep enough to harbor fish of any substantial size. Larry lay back in his hammock, trying to envision how a bend in a river might protrude into his path. He closed his eyes and the sun pressed on the lids, creating flickering shapes that confused his efforts to plot out in his imagination the river’s twisting course, or the one he would have to take to get around it. Whatever path he took, though, would necessitate his re-entry into the tangled undergrowth in order to move forward.

  Larry couldn’t say exactly how he decided not to move on that day; he simply performed all the rituals of the morning as though he were planning to stay. He ate his breakfast slowly, without once looking at his maps. He changed into his shorts, and then put on his zinc ointment. He took out his pants and his underwear and his shirts and washed them in the river, hanging them from the branches that overhung the sand. Then he untied his hammock and strung it up farther from the sun. Soon, he gave himself over to a sleep so deep that he awoke from it only infrequently, for minutes at a time, over the following four days.

  The sleep of fever overflows with dreams, which appear not intermittently, serially, but rather in a rush, as a waterfall can draw from many rivers at once, crashing them together on the rocks below. Larry tried to elude them as they swept over him from all sides; in his tiny world of praia fringed by forest, he clung to what he recognized, and then saw it eroded and transformed again and again. In the mornings, his dreams confined themselves within the banks of sleep, whose surface they only gently, occasionally ruptured, but by mid-day, both he and the world had grown torpid with fever, and their boundaries, and especially the boundary between them, began to shimmer and blur. He lay in his hammock with his water bottle in one hand and his sheathed knife in the other, raining sweat onto the sand beneath him, and watched as the scene outside himself, while still glistening with a fantastic beauty, began to grow untrustworthy, its sublime aura of stillness disrupted by a sinister displacement of solidity and color.

  As he drifted off at sundown, he would always make one last attempt to reach the world as he remembered it. He would plan the route he would take the next morning after the fever had lifted and he was rested, not so much to be prepared to start off as to counteract the fear that he would never start off again. He would imagine himself turning back at the threshold of the forest to look one last time at his shimmering mirage of water and sand, and then moving on with great vigor and authority through the tunnel he had cut for himself on his way in. But that tunnel, he found each night as he crossed its threshold in his mind, brought him not to the heart of the forest, but to the center of his own dark thoughts, in which the undergrowth had rewoven itself even more densely than before, its tangles covered over with even sharper thorns.

  In those dreams of the night, Larry could not afford to sleep. He patrolled the confines of his praia like a military guard, shouldering an imaginary rifle, alert to signs of immanent intrusion by any number of known and unknown enemies. He saw eyes glowing all around him, and feared they were the eyes of wild boar, who roam in packs and eat a man to the bone, clothes and all, in half an hour. He looked up in the sky and saw an infinity of eyes leering down at him from the very ends of the universe, pairs of eyes and Cyclops eyes, all pinpointing him for some terrible, impersonal fate. He heard a rustle in the sand near the shore, and bolted up to see a giant, gray-green train moving inexorably toward him, guided by an engine decked with two yellow lamps as unnaturally bright as a train’s headlights. As it came into closer view, Larry saw in horror that the train was a snake, an anaconda long enough to stretch from the shore to his hammock, with a girth far wider than his, on which a hundred pairs of diamonds shone. It moved toward him with the kind of rustling, chugging silence that a train makes in the night as it passes sleeping towns. Larry watched its slow advance for a minute, paralyzed, mesmerized by the glint of its scales in the moonlight and the rhythm of his own pounding heart, and then reached for his knife, training his gaze on the soft parts behind the snake’s two level glowing headlights. As it approached him, he slowly pulled aside the netting with one hand and cocked his other arm like a trigger. For an endless moment, their eyes met and locked, and all the sounds of the forest hushed; the river itself fell silent. Then suddenly he snapped his arm with all his might, hurling his knife through a foot of flesh, pinning the serpent to the sand. Its thrashing filled the clearing; it threw its tail to the tops of the trees and sent it crashing down again, writhing and furling. Exhausted, Larry sank into his hammock and slept so soundly that by the time he awoke, the sun was already glinting off the knife bl
ade that stood erect a few yards from his hammock, piercing the soft skin of the sand.

  LIII

  THOSE WHO APPROACH the Museo at Alter de Chao can’t help but shudder at the masks lining the walkway, the skulls and shrunken heads and garish, growling visages of the fiercest of the fierce. They warn all comers: Enter if you dare, and they compel all to enter. But Martina’s anxiety as she stepped through the doorway and looked around in the dank foyer was even deeper, more immediate. And Martina was not easily cowed.

  “Sara Moretti?” she asked in a low voice at the desk, as a woman with white hair rose to scrutinize her.

  “And you are?” She shuffled off slowly, leaving Martina among the shards and spear-heads, sharp as thoughts, lining the walls in their glass vitrines.

  “Martina! I was thinking of calling you,” said Sara, approaching. She led Martina back to her office, which was strangely cheerful, brightly lit and filled with variously colored objects. “But I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.”

  “So what is it with your son?” said Martina. She and the other makers of masks shared an appreciation for the power of an aggressive mien to vanquish their own fear and doubt.