by Jeff Long
Samnang held the leech for her to see. It must have fallen on her as she was exiting the tent. The wisp of a worm had bloated to a slug the length of her little finger. What surprised her more than its size and stealth was the speed of its gorging. In ten minutes, such hunger.
She watched to see what came next. Would Samnang throw it against a rock or squeeze it in his fingers? He was contemplative. “She humbles me,” he said.
“That?”
“If only I could obey God with such faith.” He juggled it on his palm to keep the suckers from getting hold.
“What faith is that?”
“Oh,” he said, embarrassed to be preaching.
“No, go on, tell me.”
“To exist in the forest with no questions, no doubt. Imagine.” He smiled. “Someday, this lowly worm, a Buddha.” He gently tossed it to a bed of leaves.
One of Vin’s brothers went over and picked it up. He was the one named So, the middle one. He laid the leech on a twig and held it over the fire. The leech began writhing. The man grinned at Molly with yellow hepatitis eyes. She frowned, not so much distressed by the leech’s fate—the thing had sucked her blood—as by the man’s vandalism. It was pointed, his ruining Samnang’s little act of compassion. Something was going on between them.
The oldest brother, Doc, with wisps of mustache hair and geometric suns tattooed on each shoulder, made a joke. It had to do with throwing Samnang’s artificial leg into the fire. Vin glanced at Molly and did not join in the laughter. She had no idea what the problem was, but disliked seeing the old man mocked.
Samnang went back to tending the fire. He rested the pot on three neat stones above a nest of embers. The flames were trim, the heat no more or less than the morning called for.
Molly went on sitting by Samnang for another minute, mostly to show her solidarity. Then she stood casually. “Let me see what the lords of the jungle are up to,” she said.
“Of course,” said Samnang.
She walked to Duncan and Kleat and placed her white saucer and cup at the farthest corner of their makeshift bench, away from the maps. Like a skin drying, one map was pegged open with chunks of rock and food packets. Small pebbles on a U.S. military topo marked last night’s passage. From Snuol, the logging road ran east and north, and the pebbles became bits of twigs—hypotheticals—leading off to nowhere. You could conjure up a hundred phantom rivers and streams from the wrinkles and curves, all of them descending to the Mekong.
“Got us figured out?” she said.
“Not a clue,” Duncan said. He seemed frayed. He gestured at a big, boxy GPS receiver that looked almost as obsolete as his colonial-scientist compass in its brown wooden case with oiled hinges. What antiques stores had these come from? The lighted panel read “SEARCHING.”
“It’s like all the satellites fell from the sky,” said Duncan. “We’re not getting a single reading.”
“Our location can wait,” Kleat said. “No more fussing around.”
“You don’t understand. These hills may not seem like much. You can’t properly call them mountains. But they can eat you alive, especially—”
“I know,” said Kleat. “I know.”
“We’re lost,” said Duncan. “It matters. We don’t even know if they came in here.”
“We know they crossed the river. We saw their tracks. Where else could they have gone?”
“They were here,” said Molly. The two men stopped. “You didn’t see the names?”
“What’s this?” Kleat said.
She led them into the mist. After the fire, it seemed colder and darker out here.
Head craned back, she searched for the names. “They were carved on the trees,” she said. “The names of their women. Up high.”
The names had disappeared, though. There were so many trees, and she must have come in differently from the stairs. “They were here somewhere,” she insisted.
“I believe you,” Kleat said, though he didn’t really. It was simply convenient to his argument. “Once this fucking mist thins out, we’ll find them.”
They went back to the fire and their maps on the stone.
“The names don’t change anything,” Duncan said. He didn’t question that she had seen them. He took it on faith. “I still say we should backtrack, take a second look from the outside. Get a handle on the risks.”
“Leave?” said Molly.
She said it with more censure than she meant. The caffeine was kicking in. But also, his apprehension confused her. He was the archaeologist. His job was to pry open the earth and raise cities from the dead. Forget the Blackhorse bones. Forget Kleat. Even forget the typhoon and the rains. In the back of her mind, they were already trapped—held under house arrest—by the river. Something stood at the top of those stairs. This was their chance to raise Atlantis.
“While we still can,” Duncan said to her.
“I keep telling you,” said Kleat, “he’s halfway to China by now. Burma, Afghanistan, wherever the dope grows wild.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Luke?” said Molly, jolted by the sudden awareness. “He’s gone?”
“Unless he spent the night with you,” Kleat said. “No one’s seen him since we arrived.”
Molly looked at the mist. Had he been the one calling her? “He must be here.”
“That’s what I keep saying,” said Duncan.
“Sam took a try looking for him,” Kleat said. “If anybody can track a man, it’s him.”
“We don’t need to go through that again,” Molly said.
“It’s not irrelevant. Your gentle musicologist was also KR.”
The brothers were all watching now. They heard the KR and began murmuring among themselves.
“We’ve been through this,” Molly said quietly.
“And you didn’t believe me.”
“I agreed with Duncan. It’s not our business.”
Kleat gave her an owlish blink. He called across to the fire. “Tell us what you found, Sam.”
“He went this way into the forest,” Samnang said. “Then his footprints disappear.”
“He’s still here,” said Duncan.
“Isn’t that the direction of the gate?” Kleat asked.
“Yes. The gate is that way,” Samnang said.
“He’s not finished with us,” Duncan insisted.
“He’s harmless,” said Kleat. “You’re making monsters.”
“He could be hiding twenty feet away and we wouldn’t know it.”
“Do you want this or not?”
“Maybe you want it too much,” said Duncan. “Think back to last night when we saw him in the restaurant, your own words. You said he must be hunting us.”
Kleat set his knuckles on the map. “Not anymore. Look around. We’re the ones with all the guns.”
“He brought us here for a reason,” Duncan said.
“The reason of a seriously disturbed mind. He brought us here to unload a secret. A big secret. A secret that freaked him out. He found something here and needed to hand it off. Don’t ask me why he chose us. What counts is that now he’s freed. In his mind, he’s released from his burden. We freed him.” Kleat grabbed at the wood smoke and opened his hand to the air. “He’s gone.”
How could she have missed his absence? It seemed ungrateful and wrong to forget someone so easily.
“This was all he had,” she said. “Wouldn’t he hang on to it for dear life? Why leave?”
“For that, Molly,” Kleat said, “you’d need to ask your mother.”
Her mother, again. He was relentless, like a jackal after meat. “What on God’s earth does she have to do with it?”
“You were all she had,” Kleat said, “but she still left you. This place was Luke’s baby. Now he’s thrown it away. You think love heals all. But we’re talking about the damned here. Love is a horror to people like them.”
Molly slapped him. The damned. She slapped him so hard it hurt her hand. His glasses flew off. Coff
ee spilled across the map.
The brothers halted their low drone.
Molly pulled her hand back. She didn’t know what to say. For better or worse, she wasn’t wired for conflict, much less a lightning bolt like this. She shouldn’t have let him get to her. She shouldn’t have slapped him. Then she thought, The hell with it, maybe she should have slapped him a long time ago.
Kleat nodded his head, thinking, making up his mind. The bared pouches under his eyes were even darker in the daylight. After a minute, he bent to retrieve his glasses. He fit them onto his face.
“Don’t apologize,” Duncan said to her. “If you do, I’ll have to hit him myself.”
“I’m not.” She’d hit Kleat too hard for that. He would take any apology as patronizing, and besides, she wasn’t sorry. “You know,” she said to him, “we could work together here. We came for the same reason.”
Kleat looked at Duncan’s scarf around her neck, red and white checkered like the KR—and millions of other Khmer people—used to wear. She couldn’t tell if he distrusted the scarf or the giving of it to her, again, by Duncan. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he said. “I know why I came. But there seem to be other temptations in the air.”
That quickly, Molly’s anger dissipated. She owed Kleat nothing, not one more emotion, not another thought, and least of all her little flight of fancy about Duncan.
One of them had emptied two MRE packets on the stone top. Molly made a show of pocketing the energy bar. She ripped open the scrambled-egg packet with her teeth and squeezed pieces of it cold into her mouth, wolfing the food down. It took sixty seconds flat. “There, done.” She wiped her mouth. “Later.” She started off into the mist.
“Where are you going?” Kleat said. She looked back at them. Duncan was rearranging his pebbles and twigs on the map. Kleat stood rooted in place with his hands on his hips. The Khmers seemed content hanging by the fire, waiting for the mist.
“I’m getting my socks and shoes out of the truck. Then I’m going up the stairs,” she said. “The light’s too fine to waste.”
16.
By the time she finished tying her shoelaces, the rest were ready to go. They left Samnang and his leg by the fire to watch over the vehicles, and started off in a bunch.
The three brothers soon sprinted ahead, the slaps of their flip-flops fading into the mist above. Molly wanted to go bounding up the stairs with them, but curbed her excitement and stuck with Duncan and, by default, Kleat.
“There will be one hundred and four steps,” Duncan told them. He seemed very certain of it.
“You’ve been here before?” Kleat said, mocking him.
“I could be wrong, of course,” Duncan said. “But the place is monumental, and the statues are like half-breeds, part Buddhist, part animal. My guess is that they built it to a blueprint, one dictated by their gods. They would have dedicated a stair to each of the Buddha’s hundred and four manifestations.”
They were tall, steep, narrow steps, like those found on Mayan pyramids, the kind that take confidence to climb upright without hands. Greasy with fluorescent green and blue moss, they would need special care coming down. Tourists, someday, would require a handrail or a chain to hold on to. Vendors would sell them warm Cokes from the stone terraces.
“You could bleed the ecotourists white with something like this,” Kleat said. “There’s room down there for a parking lot and a lodge. Put it on the water’s edge. Spray the pools for mosquitoes. Clear out the trees.” He pretended only to be tormenting Duncan, the purist. He accused them of giving in to the temptations of the place, and to each other, but Molly heard him warring with himself, the dutiful brother versus the building contractor, the bones versus his visions of development.
“That would destroy everything,” Duncan said.
“Do you seriously think you can hold on to this for yourself? The jack is out of the box. There’s no stuffing him back in again.”
“We’ll have to keep it secret until we can get the proper protections in place,” Duncan said. “You don’t rush something like this. The restoration will take years, even decades.”
“First thing,” Kleat said, “I’d clear the trees. The quickest way would be explosives. Give me a few pounds of C4, I could open up the sky. Better yet, bring in the loggers. Let the development pay for itself.”
Duncan stopped on the stairs. “Kill the trees and you kill the city. Without the trees, it would fall to pieces.”
What city? It was all conjecture. But like them, Molly was eager. She craved whatever waited above, in the mist. The stairs were building to a climax. Something was up there, she could feel it.
“After the destruction we saw coming in last night?” she said. “It looked like the forest is ripping the place to shreds.”
“I know that’s how it looks. But the trees are the only thing binding it together,” Duncan said. “It’s true, the trees have invaded the architecture, but they’re also locking it in place. I’ve seen this at other sites. The forest is like a living glue.”
He started pointing out the phantoms of trees in the mist. “Banyan trees. Giant strangler figs. And that one there, the most common invader, a form of ficus. ‘Spong,’ the Cambodians call it, Tetrameles nudiflora. They can live for up to two hundred years, and all the while birds are scattering more seeds, spreading the forest’s skeleton.”
Kleat lost interest in his game. “We didn’t come for this. The ruins are a distraction. Ignore the city, if that’s what it is. Our mission is to find the remains of the Eleventh Cavalry men.”
“You need to be prepared to find nothing,” Duncan said.
“We know now they were here.”
“Were. It’s entirely possible they left the names of their women and headed on.”
“On to where?”
“I don’t know. But there’s no sign they stayed. Did you see any of their tracks in the clearing?”
Kleat was quiet for a minute. His boots methodically slugged at the steps. “Our gang of mercenaries will have the place looted to the ground before we even see it,” he growled. He accelerated, stumping upward, leaving them behind.
Molly held to Duncan’s leisurely pace. They were going to be the last ones up. It wasn’t a race, she told herself. If this proved to be half as big as it promised, Duncan was going to be the crux of her story. Let the others disperse into the ruins, out of frame. She would make him a hero. And herself a name. Kleat could find his bones. There could be something here for everyone.
As they passed the ledges leading off to the tents, she could see how the brothers had spaced them apart last night. Knowing the Americans liked privacy, they’d pitched each tent on a separate terrace. She began counting the steps from her ledge to the top so that she could find her own shelter even in the dark, but gave up. She let go. She was not alone. She was with Duncan. The two of them could manage somehow.
“How does it feel?” she asked Duncan. This could be his triumph. If only he would climb a little faster. Then she realized that he was lagging on purpose.
“I’m afraid,” he said. “What if it’s not what we think?”
“What do you think it is?” In her head the tape recorder was running. She had her camera out.
“I don’t know. Have you ever had a dream that wouldn’t let go of you? I don’t know how to put it. These stairs, it’s like I’ve climbed them before. But I’ve got no idea what comes next.”
“You deserve this, Duncan.” And so do I, whatever comes.
She’d paid her dues. She’d turned her sweat and blood into black ink, and made her eye the camera’s eye, thinking to make the world a little better through her witnessing. But over the years, for one reason or another, she had squandered herself on trivial events and prideful men and women who tried to manipulate her pen and camera. She’d become a cynical hack. A hireling with no faith. That was about to change. The stairs were leading to something larger than life. Every writer should have that.
They worked hi
gher into that netherworld of green mist, and when she looked down, the abyss seemed bottomless. At last she could make out the shape of cobra hoods, poised along the crest like gargoyles. The stairs reached their apex. One final step, and the ruins heaved up before them.
17.
There was no transition from below to above, no sense of arrival. They took a few steps and the architecture seemed to hurry around, enclosing them.
It was a city, a phantom city of buildings and statuary and the tangled network of the forest, a city of hints. If anything, the mist was thicker here, lush and aquamarine. Molly took a deep breath, and the air was so dense she could taste the smell of vegetation growing from its own rich compost, and flowers that were as invisible as ideas. The mist deformed the ancient metropolis. It softened the squared corners, revealing and devouring hints of towering spires, and washing against vast stone heads like a tide.
“God,” said Duncan.
She got his astonishment on camera, his blank, plain daze. Every square in the red and white scarf around his neck jumped out from the mist. The background was pure Seurat, tiny dots of color flooding the air. The suggestion of a massive stone head peered over his right shoulder.
That would be the cover photo. This was a book, not an article. Done right, it might stand as a classic. She took a step and it felt like planting a footprint on the moon. They were the first, it seemed, to discover this place.
“How can this be?” she said. “A lost city in this day and age?”
“Why not?” said Duncan. “They’re still finding Mayan cities and Incan tombs. There are species in these mountains that scientists thought were just myths. And look at the forest canopy. The ruins have been buried for centuries, not forgotten, just lost.”
She was too stunned to arrange her thoughts. Shoot, she commanded herself. Sort it out later.
“Where did the others go?” Duncan said.
“Who cares?” For the time being, the two of them owned the ruins.