Soon, the rest of the kayaks floated up, the boats nuzzling against each other, people splashing into the water. Sam, our guide, untied a rope from the back of his kayak and pulled what looked like a boombox out of the water: our latrine. He had forbidden us from defecating in the desert because of a profound dryness that would harden our turds into joke doggie poop, creating an eco-hazard. When we left a campsite, Sam towed the boombox behind his kayak and emptied our shit out at deep sea. This service alone, it seemed to me, was worth the price of the trip.
Nancy and I had known each other for years. We belonged to the same tribe of friends, people in their 30s who took vacations together, finding some cabin in the mountains where we could hold a grownup slumber party, with tequila and poker. Always, Nancy and I would grow restless in the cabin. We’d wake up early, the others still breathing softly in their sleeping bags, and slip out with our cross-country skis, reappear five hours later with the tips of our hair frozen stiff.
A few months ago, I’d called her. It was one of those February days when the salt from the last snowstorm smears the asphalt and darkness comes at four. “Do you want to fly out West and go hiking?” I said, the cordless phone wedged into my neck. This was my craving: hours climbing up a sandstone mountain with orange dust stuck to my skin, then a beer, some Mexican food.
“You know what we should do?” she said. “We should take a week and go down a river in kayaks.”
I realized that she, the former leader of Outward Bound trips, envisioned us navigating by the stars, paddling alone on the open sea, stopping on windswept shores to forage for berries. She would not agree to any version of camping that involved watching cable TV at night.
So we compromised: we’d sea kayak, but with a guide and a group. I figured nothing could go too wrong.
Now, Nancy and I were trooping down the beach with infected-looking stones, our dry bags bumping against our legs. We were off to set up our tents for the night, away from the others. The social dynamics of our kayaking group reminded me of Gilligan’s Island. Remember how the castaways never quite formed one unit, but instead clung to the identities they’d had before the wreck? Skipper, movie star, millionaire.
In our castaway society, Nancy and I were the Superwomen, and we maintained a polite distance from the Biologists, the Adman, and the New Age Divorcee. We’d become the Superwomen because our kayak always shot out ahead of the group, and the guide had to yell at us to turn around and come back where he could see us. Nancy, of course, supplied 90 percent of the muscle.
She dumped her stuff on the sand. “Hey,” she said, as she bent over, “can you name all the American presidents, in order?”
“Washington, Jefferson, Madison,” I began, unpacking my tent. By the time I’d reached Polk, Nancy had hers set up—white fabric dazzling in the sun. It rippled a bit in the wind, but was otherwise as tight as a sail.
I was still arranging a mess of orange and purple nylon on the sand. I’d borrowed the tent from an ex-boyfriend; he’d neglected to warn me that this impressive piece of high-tech gear was designed for ice. It could wedge into the crevice of a mountain, its stakes hammered into frozen snow. A clear-plastic window trapped heat from the sun. A vent made out of fabric—essentially a shirt-sleeve that extended from the side of the tent—allowed you to fire up a stove inside, without asphyxiating on its fumes.
I coaxed the tent onto its knees. It was a rumply, wrinkled mess, because its stakes did not hold in the sand. When I crawled inside it to change out of my wet clothes, the sun clawed through the clear-plastic and sweat immediately popped out on my skin. It had to be 105 in there.
Sam had lectured us about keeping our tents closed up at all times. Otherwise, he said, “varmints” would get in. But after two days without any varmint sightings, we’d all grown cavalier. Now, I opened up the vent to a deliciously cool circle of blue. I unzipped the tent door to get a breeze moving through. I left the tent that way, and strolled off.
An hour later, I was walking out of the ocean backwards with a snorkeling mask on my face, my flippers thwacking the wet sand. One of the Biologists called out to me, but the wind tore his words away. I could hear, though, the panic in his voice.
“What?” I called.
“Nancy,” I heard and “scorpion.”
I shucked off the flippers and ran up the beach, my cheeks still throbbing where the snorkeling mask had pressed. In the sand, my sprinting gait turned into the slow-motion plod of nightmares where you can never run fast enough.
She sat on a puke-colored rock, holding one hand up against her chest, looking even tinier than usual, those shorts that would fit a twelve-year-old girl, those sinewy legs extended, her head big on her body, curls beating at her cheeks. She must have been clenching her teeth—her mouth looked all wrong.
“There was a bug on my shirt. I brushed it off. Can you believe I did anything so stupid?” She shook her head.
Sam, the guide, arrived with a leather-bound book, his finger marking a page. At first I took it for an encyclopedia, but then he said, “see if you can identify it by the picture,” and held the book in front of her. Over her shoulder, I saw the engravings. This was not an encyclopedia of words. It was an encyclopedia of scorpions. And also of rattlesnakes, of heart attacks where there are no defibrillators, of blood poisoning and parasites and broken bones. The book seemed to be smeared with all the bad news it carried.
Nancy examined the engravings and finally pointed with her good hand.
“You sure?” he said, poker-faced.
“Pretty.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the worst of the lot,” he said. “It sometimes kills kids and old people, but you’re going to be OK. If you were going to have a reaction, you probably would have had it by now.”
The beach, dimming now, the sand turning from white to gray, seemed to warp, to pulse along with my heartbeat. Sam said the scorpion wouldn’t kill a healthy adult. But Nancy was so small. She weighed no more than a hundred pounds.
“We’ve got to get her out,” I told him.
“We can’t,” Sam said, closing the book and carefully sliding it into a dry bag.
“Of course we can. There must be people somewhere.”
Sam shook his head. “There’s no way to evac.” He pointed to a shrimp boat parked out near the horizon, its nets folded like bat wings. “The best we could do is try to radio that boat, but there’s probably no radio on board.”
“I’m OK,” Nancy said, and she slid off the rock and onto the sand, rubbing some of it over her bad thumb, as if this were medicinal. “It feels like I stuck my finger in a light socket. But I can stand it. It’s tolerable.”
Something about her calm unsettled me all the more.
“Don’t you have anything to give her?” I demanded.
He squatted beside her. “Look, she’ll be OK. The Mexicans get stung all the time and they don’t take anything for it.”
In other circumstances, I would have sided with him—denouncing spoiled Americans and the way they ran whining to emergency rooms and demanded painkillers. But panic brought out the first-worlder in me. I believed that just because we were Americans, a hospital should materialize in the desert, its sliding doors swooshing open to frosty air-conditioned air, end tables piled with People magazines, doctors padding around in their surgical booties. Nothing materialized. Instead, the beach darkened. The waves made their death rattle.
“What’s in your first-aid kid?” I tried, “An epi pen? Antihistamines?”
He ignored me. “Do you think you can make it without aspirin?” he asked Nancy. “It would be better to let your body clean out the poison, without adding anything else into the mix.”
“Yeah. This is the strangest feeling. Buzzing. Like there are bees inside. And the weirdest part is, it’s slowly going up my arm.”
He nodded. “It’s moving to your heart.”
“It’s here now,” she pointed just above her elbow.
He continued to nod as sh
e spoke, and I guessed that rather than paying attention to her words he was listening for slurred speech.
She began to ask him something, but he interrupted.
“Nancy, let’s get you out of that sweater,” he said. And then, like a gentleman helping his date take off her wrap, he maneuvered her Polartec sweater backwards off her shoulders.
I assumed that he wanted to examine the arm. But instead, he snatched the sweater and danced a few feet away from us. He trained his flashlight on the fabric as he shook it. Something small and yellow fell off. He followed the dot with his flashlight, but it had disappeared into the sand. “Another one,” he said. “They’re everywhere. They live under those rocks.” He pointed with his light at one of the strange stones. “Now that it’s night, they’re going to come out.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be sitting here,” Nancy said, struggling to her feet.
We ate dinner huddled on a blue tarp, all in a clump, nobody so much as sticking a toe out onto the sand. Except Sam. He squatted in front of the fire, putting a pot of water on the grate, so we could wash dishes. His face, flickering yellow, was impassive as the cliffs that we’d paddled past today. Was he really sure that Nancy would be OK? Maybe he was only pretending, so as not to spread fear.
“Where’s it up to now?” I asked Nancy, who sat crunched beside me on the tarp.
“Here,” she said, touching just below her shoulder.
“What about when it gets to your heart?”
“It’ll be OK.” Her voice floated up to me through the dark. “It’s starting to throb less.”
“You didn’t eat anything.”
Instead of answering, she lay down onto the tarp. The Adman readjusted his legs to make room for her. “I just want to look at the stars right now,” she said.
Later, I walked her back to her tent. We switched off our flashlights and listened to the surf for a while.
“You look miserable,” I said, though I couldn’t see her face. The only thing visible besides the salted sky was the winking of the campfire, way down the beach. I thought I heard scuttling in the sand all around us, those tiny demons in their armor, dragging stingers behind them. I hated this place.
“Really, I’m fine,” Nancy insisted. “My whole arm is buzzing like it’s fallen asleep times a hundred, but I wouldn’t say it hurts.” She paused for a moment, and I heard her shift something. “I’ve never been stung by a scorpion before,” she said. “It’s kind of cool.”
“Maybe I should sleep in your tent tonight, just in case.” In one corner of my brain, I knew Nancy would be OK by morning; in another corner, I was convinced she might die in her sleep.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“You sure?” I wanted to stay up all night beside her, with my flashlight trained on her arm, to watch for any new symptoms. Even better would be if I could wake her up every hour or so and ask her whether she felt better. But I knew she would never allow that.
“I’ll yell if I need anything.” She leaned down and I heard her unzip her tent.
I flicked on my flashlight; in the profound dark, it illuminated only a small circle of sand, the pebbles and twigs cast their own mini-shadows. I was exhausted. I stumbled along, training the flashlight this way and that, until the tent appeared in the spotlight. It looked like an old drunk sleeping on a sidewalk grate, half-collapsed, a mess of wrinkles and folds. The open vent waved at me. The door flapped, yawning wide.
I remembered now: I had left everything open. Scorpions loved to crawl inside and under. An army of them could have filed through the gaping holes in my tent. I would have to examine every last inch inside.
I duckwalked through the door—I didn’t dare put my hands or knees down in the gloom—and shone the flashlight at my dry bags, books, sleeping bag, t-shirt. I was so worn out that I could have happily collapsed into my pile of belongings. But I wouldn’t allow that. The sleeping bag, for instance. I should take it outside and shake it, then unzip it and examine every fold. I picked it by pinching its nylon shell and tried to steer it outside. The bag bunched up, got caught on a zipper. Forget it, I thought, and heaved the sleeping bag into the dark. It landed somewhere invisible with a sad rustling sound. I figured I’d deal with it in the morning. I picked up the books and tossed them out too. Next went my clothes. And the extra pair of shoes.
Then, with all my possessions gone, I squat-walked around the edges of the tent, checking under folds and up the walls, in every crevice and wrinkle. Finally, when I was reasonably sure that I’d secured a scorpion-free environment, I lay down. I could feel the grains of sand shift under the nylon. Without a pillow, my cheek flattened against the ground. My neck ached. I shivered. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. The starlight seeped through the plastic window. The tent made polite rustling sounds, as if it were trying to adjust itself without waking me.
That night, I didn’t have dreams so much as revelations. At one point, I heard a faint gurgling underneath the sand, a slurpy intestinal sound. It was then that I understood the purpose of the oddly colored rocks on the beach. They blocked the entrances to the bowels of the earth. And in a flash, I knew the terrible and most essential fact of life could be summed up in one word: digestion. Right now, in the desert, insects crawled over a coyote carcass and gnawed it clean. Right now, inside my skin, cells shredded and sorted. The tent itself was a digestive apparatus, an intestine of sorts, that was melting me down into a nub. My tent was sucking me away, like a candy. Soon I would be gone.
I startled awake. I was back in the real tent, back in my ordinary sense of my body, with its damp feet and achy back.
A relief, except that I was still on a hellish, vermin-infested beach. I had chosen to be here. That was the crazy thing. I was the one who had done this to me.
When I woke, I knew by the angle of the sun that it must be past 7 in the morning. Why hadn’t anyone come by to wake me up? I could hear nothing but the thrashing of the surf. I scooted out of the tent. My possessions lay on the white blankness of sand as if they’d been posed there by a photographer for some surreal art-rock album cover, the sleeping bag curled in a C, a book face down, a flipper. Nancy’s tent had disappeared. It was as if she had never been there.
Way down the beach, people milled about, clumping together and then coming apart. The sea flashed with light, stabbing my eyes. The people, silhouetted against the waves, seemed to wink in and out of existence. I thought I saw one of them quivering with sobs. Out past the rolling surf, Sam’s red kayak bobbed, heading toward the horizon. Something had happened. I sprinted down the beach, sand flying up and sparking against my calves.
But then, I slowed to a trot and snorted with relief. As usual, I’d been too quick to panic. They were packing. One of the Biologists stood over the pile of water sacks, his finger pecking the air, figuring out how many we’d each have to carry. Nearby, Sam dragged the latrine along behind him, like a pull-toy. And the red kayak out in the cove, bobbing in the waves? That was Nancy. I knew her by her hair. It flew around her face in a whirlwind.
“Hey,” I yelled, waving my arms. And then, because she hadn’t seen me yet, I jumped up and down. “Hey, hey, hey.” And every time I landed, the sand caught me.
“What are you doing?” Sam scolded. “We’re just about ready to go.”
So I ran up the beach again, to my fallen tent. I picked up a book, shook it vigorously, and sand rustled from its pages, but no scorpion, no scorpions anywhere, for it was a new day and I had just chugged the last of the coffee from a plaid thermos like the ones in 1950s Life magazines, and we were not dying in the desert, we were on a lark! Now I held snorkel mask in my hand—it reflected the sky, the blue leaping across its surface. It sent up a perfume of the ocean, the briny smell of childhood vacations. A cactus in the distance caught sunlight in its spines, glowed with a golden nimbus. Just when I had no time for it, everything around me had swelled into beauty. I picked up the sleeping bag, and remembered how it terrified me the night befo
re, with all its folds and secret places. Now it was warm as dough. I shook it out gaily, enjoying the way the breeze took over and lofted it up. Then I stuffed it into its sack, without worrying too much about my hands disappearing into wads of fabric.
I peeled off my sweatpants and took possession of the air with my bare legs. I was out in the middle of the world in my underpants, a t-shirt and sneakers. For a moment, I flirted with the cliff beside me, and I let the ocean see a little more of my ass than was proper. Then I picked up a pair of shorts, gave them a cursory shake and lifted one leg to step into them.
I froze. I slowly lowered my leg, and adjusted the shorts ever so carefully so I could peer down inside. A scorpion clung to the seam just below the waistband. It was the gold color of sand, half the length of my pinkie. Its tail curled so tightly that the creature looked like it would sting its own head. My heart began to pound everywhere in my body—my cheeks, my feet, my eyes. I had come so close to putting my leg into that tunnel of fabric.
I shook the shorts gingerly. Nothing fell out. I tried again. In the end, I had to pull on my sweatpants and go fetch Sam. He followed me with a stiff-legged gait of annoyance, picked up the shorts, sized up the scorpion, and gave a shake. I expected it to fall out immediately, cowed by him. But it didn’t. He flapped more vigorously. Then he found a stick and used it to fling the shorts back and forth in front of him. The shorts flew at waist height, whooshing up specks of sand that turned into glitter in the air. Then he waved it up high, against the blue, so that I was afraid the scorpion might fall on his head. Sam seemed to be intoxicated, as if he were waving a flag after a revolution, the flag of his own newly formed country. It would be a land of gringos with their hair burned blonde, and wilderness guides who carry tidal charts in their shirt pockets, and people who figure everything will be OK once the poison reaches their heart. This was Nancy’s country too. But not mine. My country, for better or worse, was America.
The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Page 15