SSmith - Ruins

by The Ruins (v1. 0) [lit]

  “I’ll get the needle and thread,” he said, and he started for the tent.

  “Wait!” Eric called. “There’s more.” His voice emerged shaky and thin; it frightened him how weak he sounded. “It’s all up and down my leg. It’s in my shoulder, my back. I can feel it moving.” It was true, too: he could feel it everywhere now, lying just beneath his skin, like a muscle, flexing.

  Mathias turned to stare at him, one step short of the tent. “No, Eric,” he said. “Don’t start.” He sounded tired; he looked it, too—slumped and sunken-eyed. “We have to sew you up.”

  Eric was silent—dizzy suddenly. He knew he didn’t have the strength to argue.

  “You’re losing too much blood,” Mathias said.

  For a moment, it seemed to Eric as if he might faint. He lowered himself carefully onto his back. The pain wasn’t diminishing. He shut his eyes, and the darkness waiting for him there was full of color: a bright, flickering orange deepening toward red at the margins. He could feel the voids the tendrils had left behind in his chest and leg—somehow this seemed central to his pain, as if his body were experiencing the vine’s removal as a sort of theft, as if it wanted it back.

  He heard Mathias entering the tent, then returning, but he didn’t open his eyes. He watched the colors pulsate in the darkness, saw how they jumped in brightness when the German bent over him and began to stitch shut the wound on his leg. There was no talk of sterilizing the needle; Mathias simply set to work. The incision was a long one; it took him some time to finish. Then he gently pushed Eric’s hands aside, lifted the blood-soaked T-shirt away, and started in on his chest.

  Eric grew slowly calmer. The pain didn’t lessen, but that familiar sense of distance was returning, so that it almost began to feel as if he were observing his body’s distress rather than inhabiting it. The sun had climbed free of the horizon now—it was becoming hot—and this helped, too. He finally stopped shivering.

  Stacy was on the far side of the clearing; Eric could hear her moving about there. It seemed to him that she was avoiding him, that she was afraid to come near. He lifted his head to see what she was doing, and found her crouched over Pablo’s pack. She pulled the remaining bottle of tequila from it. “Does anyone want any?” she called, holding it up.

  Eric shook his head, then watched as she bent to peer into the pack again. Apparently, there was an inner pocket. He heard her unzip it. She rummaged about inside, lifted something out. “His name was Demetris,” she said.

  “Whose?” Mathias asked. He didn’t glance up from his stitching.

  Stacy turned toward them, holding a passport. “Pablo’s. His real name. Demetris Lambrakis.”

  She rose, brought the passport across the clearing. Mathias set down the needle, wiped his hands on his jeans, took it from her. He stared at it for a long moment without speaking, then handed it to Eric.

  The photo inside showed a slightly younger Pablo—a bit plumper, too—with much shorter hair and, absurdly, a mustache. He was wearing a jacket and tie; he looked as if he were trying not to smile. Eric noticed—again, as though from some great distance—that his hands were shaking. He gave the passport back to Stacy, then lowered his head.Demetris Lambrakis. He kept repeating the name in his mind, as if trying to memorize it.Demetris Lambrakis…Demetris Lambrakis…Demetris Lambrakis…

  Mathias finished with the stitching. Eric heard him move off toward the tent again. When he returned, he was carrying the can of nuts. He opened it and divided its contents into three equal piles, counting them out nut by nut, using the Frisbee as a platter. Mathias was in charge now, Eric realized. All three of them seemed to have agreed upon this, without anyone needing to discuss it.

  Eric had to sit up to eat, and it hurt to do so. He spent a moment examining his body. He looked like a rag doll, handed down through generations of careless children, sewn and resewn, its stuffing leaking between the seams. He couldn’t see how he was ever going to make it home from here, and this reflection settled, siltlike, inside him. He felt himself growing heavy with it, resigned. But his body didn’t appear to care; it continued to assert its needs. The mere sight of the nuts filled him with a fierce hunger, and he ate them quickly, shoving them into his mouth, chewing, swallowing. When he was finished, he licked the salt from his fingers. Mathias offered him the plastic jug, and he drank from it, conscious of the vine once more, shifting about within him.

  The sun kept climbing higher, growing stronger. The mud was beginning to dry in the clearing, their footprints solidifying into small shadow-filled hollows. All three of them had finished their rations, and now they sat in silence, watching one another.

  “I guess I should go look for Jeff,” Mathias said. “Before it gets much hotter.” The idea seemed to cause him great fatigue.

  Stacy was still holding the bottle of tequila; it was resting in her lap. She kept twisting its cap on and off. “You think he’s dead, don’t you?” she asked.

  Mathias turned to peer at her, squinting slightly. “I want it not to be true just as much as you do. But wanting and believing—” He shrugged. “They’re not the same, are they?”

  Stacy didn’t answer. She brought the bottle to her lips, tilted her head back, swallowed. Eric could sense Mathias’s desire to take the bottle from her, could see him almost doing it but then deciding not to. He wasn’t like Jeff; he was too reserved to be a leader, too aloof. If Stacy wanted to drink herself into some sort of peril here, then that would be her choice. There was no one left to stop her.

  Mathias climbed to his feet. “I shouldn’t be long,” he said.

  Instantly, Stacy set the bottle aside, jumped up to join him. “I’ll come, too.” Once again, Eric had the sense that she was frightened of him, terrified of what was happening inside his body. He could tell she didn’t want to be left here with him.

  Mathias peered down at Eric, at his shirtless, bloodied, mud-smeared torso. “Will you be okay?” he asked.

  No,Eric thought.Of course not. But he didn’t say it. He was thinking of the knife, of being alone in the clearing with it, free to act as he chose. He nodded. Then he lay there in the sun, feeling strangely at peace, and watched as they walked off together, disappearing down the trail.

  Stacy and Mathias stood for a while at the bottom of the hill, staring out at the cleared swath of ground and the wall of trees beyond it. The sun had already baked a thin, brittle skin across the dirt, but beneath this the mud was still ankle-deep. The Mayans were moving laboriously about in it, the muck sticking in clumps to their feet. Stacy watched two of the women spreading things out to dry. They had a big pile: blankets, clothes.

  There were three Mayans standing beside the campfire. One of them was the bald man from that first day, with the pistol on his hip. The other two were much younger, barely more than boys. They both had bows. The bald man’s white trousers were rolled to his knees, in what Stacy guessed must’ve been an effort to keep them clean. His shins looked very thin, almost withered.

  Mathias stepped out into the clearing, his shoes vanishing beneath the mud. He glanced to the left, stared. His face didn’t change, but Stacy knew what he was looking at, although she couldn’t have said how. The tequila had settled into her stomach with a sour sensation, making her light-headed; sweat was running down her back. There was only one thing for her to do now—she had no choice—but she took her time with it, not wanting to join Mathias quite yet, wanting to find some buffer between his seeing and hers. She carefully removed her sandals, one after the other, set them in the center of the trail, side by side. Then she stepped forward, out into the mud. It was colder than she would’ve guessed possible—it made her think of snow—and she concentrated on that (white like the bald man’s trousers, white like bone) while she peered off toward the little mound twenty-five yards away from them, a tiny peninsula of green protruding into the cleared soil, like a finger. The day’s growing heat threw a shimmer across it; Stacy could’ve easily convinced herself that it was nothing but a mirage. She
knew better, though, knew it was Jeff, knew that he’d abandoned them, just as Amy had, and Pablo, that it was only the three of them now. She reached for Mathias’s hand, half-worried he might not let her take it, but he did, and they started forward like that, in silence.

  They moved along the base of the hill, keeping close to the vines, trudging through the mud. They didn’t talk. The bald Mayan followed them, accompanied by the two young bowmen. It wasn’t very far; it didn’t take long to get there.

  Mathias crouched beside the little mound, started to pull the tendrils from it, slowly revealing Jeff’s body. He was still recognizable, only partially eaten, as if the vine had curbed its hunger, wanting them to know, without any doubt, that Jeff was dead. He was lying on his stomach, stretched out, his arms above his head; it looked like he’d been dragged there by his feet. Mathias rolled him over. There were wounds on his throat, one on either side, and his shirt was completely saturated with blood. The flesh had been stripped from the bottom half of his face, revealing his teeth and jawbone, but his eyes were untouched. They were open, staring cloudily up at them. Stacy had to look away.

  She was startled by how calm she was acting; it frightened her.Who am I? she thought.Am I still me?

  Mathias unbuckled Jeff’s watch from his wrist. Then he reached into his pocket, removed his wallet. There was a silver ring on Jeff’s right hand, and Mathias retrieved this, too. He had to work at it—tugging—before it finally slipped free.

  Stacy could remember going with Amy to buy the ring. They’d found it in a pawnshop in Boston. Amy had presented it to Jeff on the anniversary of their first date. Over the years that followed, Stacy and she had spent many hours trying to imagine its original owner—what he’d been like, how he’d ever managed to reach the point where he’d needed to pawn such a beautiful object. They’d created a whole character out of this fantasy, a failed musician, a sometimes junkie, sometimes pusher, whose great, perhaps apocryphal claim to fame was that he’d once sold Miles Davis an ounce of heroin. They’d given him a name, Thaddeus Fremont, and whenever they glimpsed an older, downtrodden man shuffling through the world, they’d nudge each other and whisper, “Look—there’s Thaddeus. He’s searching for his ring.”

  Mathias held out Jeff’s things to her, and she took them from him.

  “I should’ve gotten Henrich’s, too,” he said. “He wore a pendant—a good-luck charm.” He touched his chest, showing her where it had hung. Then he spent a moment staring along the clearing, as if he were thinking of going to fetch it now. But when he stood up, it was to turn back toward the trail.

  They set off together, walking side by side—once more, in silence. Stacy’s feet were caked in mud; it felt as if she were wearing a pair of heavy boots.

  “Not that it worked,” Mathias said.

  She turned, glanced at him. “Not that what worked?”

  “His good-luck charm.”

  Stacy couldn’t think how to react to this. She knew it was a joke, or an attempt at one, but the idea of laughing, or even smiling, in response to it seemed abominable. The humming had returned inside her skull; she was having trouble suddenly keeping her eyes open. For some reason, talking made them ache. She kept walking, her arms folded across her chest, hugging herself, Jeff’s watch gripped in one hand, his wallet and ring in the other. She waited for enough time to pass so that it could seem as if Mathias hadn’t spoken—until they were nearly at the trail again—and then she said, “What do we do now?”

  “Go back to the tent, I guess. Try to rest.”

  “Shouldn’t one of us watch for the Greeks?”

  Mathias shook his head. “Not for another hour or so.”

  Stacy’s mind shifted toward the tent, the little clearing. She thought of Pablo on his backboard, the agony he’d suffered there. She thought of herself, how she’d bent to collect Amy’s scattered bones that morning, so casually, as if she were tidying up after a party.

  Those words were inside her head again:Am I still me?

  Without any warning, she started to cry. It was like a coughing fit—two dozen full-bodied sobs—they came and went in less than a minute. Mathias waited beside her till they passed. Then he rested his hand on her shoulder.

  “Do you want to sit for a moment?” he asked.

  Stacy lifted her eyes, looked about them. They were standing in four inches of mud. To their right, the hillside climbed steeply upward, swathed in its vine. To their left, midway across the clearing, stood the three Mayans, watching them. She shook her head, wiped at her face. “Eric’s dying, isn’t he?” she said. “It’s inside him, and he’s going to die.”

  Her hands had opened as she’d sobbed; she’d dropped Jeff’s watch, his wallet and ring. Mathias crouched to retrieve them. They were muddy now, and he tried to wipe them clean on his pants.

  “I don’t know if I can handle it, Mathias. Watching him die.”

  Mathias slid Jeff’s ring into the wallet. His hands were bleeding, she noticed, the skin cracked and scored from the vine’s sap. His clothes were hanging off him in shreds. His stubble was thickening into a beard, and it made him seem older. He nodded. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  Stacy turned, stared toward the three Mayans. They had a way of watching her without ever meeting her gaze. She assumed this was something they’d consciously learned to do, a trick to make their duty here less arduous on themselves. It seemed to her that it would have to be much harder to kill someone once you’d looked them in the eyes. “What do you think they’d do if we stepped forward now?” she asked. “If we just kept walking, right at them?”

  Mathias shrugged. The answer was obvious, of course. “Shoot us.”

  “Maybe we should do it. Maybe we should just get it over with.”

  Mathias watched her; he seemed to be giving the idea serious consideration. But then he shook his head. “Someone’s going to come, Stacy. Eventually. How can we say for certain that it won’t be today?”

  “But it might not be. Right? It might not be for weeks. Or months. Or ever.”

  Mathias didn’t answer; he just stared at her. From the first moment they’d met, she’d found his gaze—so somber, so unflinching—a little frightening. After a few seconds, she had to look away. He reached and took her hand then, and, still not speaking, led her back along the clearing to the trail.

  Eric could feel the vine moving about inside his body. It was in the small of his back, his left armpit, his right shoulder. The knife lay ten feet away from him—mud-stained, still damp with his own blood. He’d assumed that he’d immediately begin to cut himself, as soon as Stacy and Mathias left the clearing, but then the moment arrived and he’d discovered he was too scared to do it. He’d already spilled a terrifying amount of blood—he could just look at his body and see this—and he wasn’t certain how much more he could afford to lose.

  He sat up, took a deep breath, then folded into himself, coughing dryly. There was no phlegm, just the sense of something residing in his chest that shouldn’t be there, something his body was trying, unsuccessfully, to expel. Eric had been battling this cough all night; it seemed strange to him that he shouldn’t have realized earlier what its source was. It was the vine, of course—he was certain of this. Yes, there was a tendril growing inside his lungs.

  I should go into the tent,he thought.I should lie down. It doesn’t matter if it’s wet. But he didn’t move.

  He coughed again.

  It would’ve been easier, he believed, if Stacy had stayed with him. She could’ve talked to him, argued. He might’ve listened—who could say? And if he hadn’t, she could’ve always grabbed at his arm, held him back. But she wasn’t there—she’d abandoned him—so there was no one to stop him now when he stood up and retrieved the knife.

  He sat back down, holding it in his lap.

  He tried his word games again, his imaginary vocabulary test, but he couldn’t remember what letter he’d reached last. The shiftings inside his body made it hard to concentrate. It
seemed important that he keep track of them.The top of my right foot…the nape of my neck…

  Eric leaned forward, scratched at his left calf, felt a lump there. He stared down at it, watching it flatten itself out, then bunch together again slightly lower on his leg. It was nearly the size of a golf ball. When he probed at it with his finger, there was that familiar sense of numbness.

  The incision wouldn’t hurt, he knew; it was the pulling forth that would make him cry out. As he sat thinking this, he noticed another bulge. This one was on his left forearm, much smaller than the others, about three inches long and thin as a worm. He touched it, and it vanished, burrowing down into his flesh.

  All this was too much for Eric, of course: he couldn’t just sit quietly, watching these things appear and disappear across his body. Something needed to be done, and there was really only one solution, wasn’t there?

  He lifted the knife from his lap, leaned forward, began to cut.

  Somehow, the trail up the hill seemed to have grown much steeper since Stacy’d last climbed it. As they made their way ever higher, she started to pant, her clothes clinging to her sweaty body. She had a cramp in her side. Mathias appeared to sense her distress, and—even though they were nearly to the top—he stopped so she could rest. He stood beside her, staring off across the hillside while Stacy struggled to catch her breath.