by Kim Dinan
A few minutes later Brian stood above me. “Get up,” he said. “I found a hose.” Out on the barren lawn I stripped down to my underwear and twirled slowly like a dervish in the predawn twilight as Brian sprayed me down. He started laughing. “Spin!” he yelled. “Faster!” It was funny. I bent over at the waist and laughed the maniacal laugh of the sleep deprived.
We finally crawled into bed as the sun began to rise. A rosy light fell across our room. A swelling of love rose in my chest for him. We had our issues, but I felt grateful that he always seemed to pull me back from the ledge. He knew almost instinctually what I needed.
“The last twelve hours have been terrible,” I whispered. “Right now I just want to go home.”
“Oh, baby, I know you’re pissed,” he said, emphasizing piss with a playful grin, “but you’ll feel better when you wake up.”
• • •
I did feel better when I woke up, alone, in bed. By the bright light outside I guessed it early afternoon. When I stumbled out of our bungalow I found Brian, and Alice and Carver, leisurely swinging from hammocks. A salty breeze blew off of the ocean. “Hungry?” asked Carver. I nodded and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.
The four of us walked into downtown Mancora, a dusty, gritty little street lined with bars and restaurants and thatched-roof stalls selling beach towels and sun hats. My stomach grumbled, and I counted the hours since my last meal—twenty—and realized that I was, in fact, starving. We walked past a burrito stand that smelled delicious. “What about here?” I suggested.
Carver looked at the menu. “Ten soles for a burrito? Are they mad?”
Eating meals with Carver was terrible. Back in Baños we’d walk and walk, circling the entire town, checking menu after menu while Carver declared each place too expensive. When we’d finally find a place with a cheap “almuerzo,” an inexpensive set-lunch menu, I’d be unable to eat it because I was a vegetarian, and the almuerzos were always all meat. So we’d trudge on, endlessly, and by the time we finally agreed on a place I’d be grumpy and hungry and momentarily over life in general.
Things were pretty good when my biggest complaint in life was the annoying task of tracking down a meal, but I felt like I spent half my days trying to figure out where and what to eat. I desperately missed my refrigerator and the predictable peanut butter sandwiches I used to take to work each day for lunch.
Alice, Carver, and Brian were ahead of me when I stopped abruptly on the sidewalk. “You know what?” I called toward them. “I’m going to have a burrito. Why don’t you guys find a cheap almuerzo, and I’ll meet you back at the bungalow.”
Carver nodded. “Brilliant idea!”
Alice mouthed the words thank you.
At the burrito stand I sat down alone in a plastic chair and ate my meal, staring out at the dark blue ocean. A gray layer of clouds hung low over the water, and a few beachcombers walked slowly along the shore. In the shop next door a TV blared the news in Spanish. As frustrating as it could be to not know the language, there were times that I appreciated my obliviousness. The chatter from the TV faded into the background, and I sat alone with my thoughts. The last time I’d spent more than fifteen minutes without Brian an arm’s distance away was back at La Bib. My lungs expanded as I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The sound of the waves rolling toward the shore and the beating of my own heart filled my ears. A tension that I hadn’t known I’d carried loosened in my neck. It felt great to be alone.
• • •
During our time in Mancora I spent hours lounging in the hammocks that were strung between the bungalows, writing in my journal. For the first time in a decade I filled an entire notebook with my thoughts. Most of it was mundane scribbling, simple day-to-day recording of events, but I also reflected on my growing desire to be alone, scary as it was to see it there on paper. It felt so wonderful to make writing a daily part of my life again. Regardless of the problems that nagged, a cup had tipped over inside of me, and a steady feeling of rightness spread like water.
Our schedule was entirely open. Each morning when we woke I’d ask Brian if he wanted to stay in Mancora another night. Then I’d track down the owner of our bungalow and extend our reservation. Back in Portland, I’d once turned down the offer to join a book club because gatherings were held on unpredictable days of the week and I disliked not knowing in advance what day the next meeting would fall on. It wasn’t just a type-A thing; I’d been a world-class control freak. Now, it shocked me to see how flexible I was becoming. As I watched my own actions from afar, I felt like a silent observer of a woman that, some days, barely resembled me.
One other couple stayed at the bungalows, and I tried on a few occasions to meet their eye, to find an opportunity to invite them to join us for dinner or to sit with us in the hammocks as we passed around quarts of beer. But they kept to themselves and seemed uninterested in socializing.
They appeared very much in love. Occasionally I’d spot them as they made their way to the beach or out to dinner in the evenings and they were always laughing and holding hands. And because their thin-walled, thatched roof bungalow stood spitting distance from our own, I knew that they had very loud and frequent sex at all hours of the day and night and always in the evenings as Brian and I lay side by side in bed trying to ignore the sounds wafting through the air.
This alone was the gray cloud that hung over me during our time in Mancora. Things between Brian and me were not right, and I knew it, but it had been easy to ignore with the everyday distraction of travel. Plus, the tension between Alice and Carver had grown so intense that I felt like Brian and I were a great couple in comparison. Their relationship was disintegrating right in front of us. Carver was a complainer who hid his complaints in jokes, a one-man comedy routine that I particularly enjoyed. I considered him funny. But Alice’s tolerance had obviously withered. At the first sign of any topic that might degrade into a rant (politics, working in advertising, English Premier League soccer, or how you can’t get anywhere in Australia unless you’re a rugby fan) Alice would preemptively snap, “Oh, shut up about it Carver; no one wants to hear it.”
Alice and Carver bickered over everything, while Brian and I grew apart in a quieter way. The truth was, things had not been right with us since before we left Portland. Deep inside I’d known it, but the not-rightness of my relationship was a small, nagging matter when compared to the pulsing, blaring truth of my desire to travel. So I’d thrown all of my energy at our trip.
The thing about telling one truth, though, is that it opens up space for the next truth to slide in. Now that my biggest truth had been born, the next one began chirping in my ear.
Maybe if we’d never left home I could have stayed busy with the everyday distractions of life and convinced myself that the troubles in our relationship were normal. But our twenty-four-hour together time illuminated the problems between us.
We’d been together since I was twenty-one years old and Brian twenty-two. We’d spent a decade growing up together. But how much could I grow with someone who still saw me as a twenty-one-year-old girl? Likewise, Brian often accused me of holding over his head dumb decisions he’d made when he was twenty-two or twenty-three. Neither of us gave the other room to change.
And there were other problems too, deep-seated cracks that’d been growing wider since we’d landed in Quito. Brian was loving and kind but reserved. He rarely shared his deepest emotions, never without prompting, and because he was so closed off, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing mine. When we fought back in Portland this was what we fought about: his silence, and my desire for a deeper connection.
Another problem: since we’d left home we weren’t having sex, at least not much of it, and that had become a contentious point in our relationship. The trouble was, I could feel the gaping distance between us and could not bring myself to have sex until we closed it. A good, long conversation would have done the trick, but t
hat wasn’t happening. Brian, on the other hand, pulled away emotionally because he could not express himself physically. And the more he pulled away the wider the chasm between us grew. We’d entered into a stalemate. The lovers fornicating in the bungalow next to us reminded me that, though we may have been doing better than Alice and Carver, we weren’t anywhere near whole.
• • •
On our last night in Mancora, Alice, Carver, Brian, and I bought rum and Coke and pizza, and we sat under the thatched roof veranda outside of our bungalows. A full Peruvian moon hung in the sky.
Alice dropped a piece of pizza onto a paper plate and turned to me. “Hey, have you given any more yellow envelope donations since La Bib?” Back in Ecuador I’d explained the yellow envelope gift to Alice when she asked why we put Michele and Glenn’s name on the donated brick. “Wow,” she’d exclaimed, and looked genuinely touched by the story. “Those are some incredible friends you have.”
My eyes fell on Alice, and I shook my head. My mouth was full of pizza and I let out a garbled “no.”
Brian spoke up. “Not yet… It’s actually harder than we thought it would be.” He took a sip from his cup. “And to be honest, we kind of forget about it sometimes.”
I swallowed my pizza. “Well, we don’t really forget…” It was a white lie, and my cheeks flushed pink from the embarrassment of telling it.
Brian shook his head. “Yes we do. We forget.”
I felt ashamed about forgetting. When Michele and Glenn had given us the yellow envelope I assumed it would be the light that guided our travels, elevating our experiences and helping us forge meaningful relationships with people we met along the way. But so far the yellow envelope was less like a beacon and more like a beautiful plant that I kept forgetting to water. Each time I saw it drooping in the corner a stab of guilt consumed me.
As the hours rolled by I got more than sufficiently dehydrated for our long bus ride the following day. We emptied our first bottle of rum and opened another one, and Carver began his slide from funnyman to belligerent rambler. The topic turned to religion. Carver ranted about God. In his opinion, God was a wacky figment that depressed and small-minded people turned to for solace from their meaningless lives. Personally, I was unsure of where I stood on the existence of God but thought Carver sounded ignorant in his complete certainty that it was all garbage.
Normally I lacked the confidence to debate big topics like religion. But our time on the road had given me courage, because stepping away from home had shown me that I could travel the world for the rest of my life and still not know it all. The rum gave me courage too. I didn’t need to be an expert in order to speak up. My opinion was as valid as anyone else’s.
“I hear what you’re saying,” I said to Carver. “But if it’s all bullshit, and there’s no God, no higher power, no ethereal energy or whatever you want to call it, then where does that leave the soul?”
“The soul,” scoffed Carver, “is bullshit, just like the rest of it.”
“I think you’re wrong about that.”
“Prove it,” he demanded.
“Prove that the soul exists?”
“Yes.”
I thought about the voice that rose up from inside of me during my run in Forest Park. I thought about the prodding I felt, day after day, to keep going in the direction that I was headed: to travel, to write, to be vulnerable enough to give the yellow envelope money, to find the truth with Brian. My soul had led me to that thatched veranda, to that full moon in Peru, to these new friends, to this very conversation, I was sure of it.
“I can’t prove it,” I said. “But I know it’s real.”
• • •
Flying would have been the reasonable option, but we had more time than money, so we settled in for a thirty-six-hour bus journey from Mancora to Puno, a dirt-colored town on the edge of Lake Titicaca. It was a lot of ass-in-seat time, but as long as there was a bathroom, long bus journeys were becoming enjoyable. I looked forward to the hours I’d spend staring idly out the window, pockets of time where the real world felt out of reach. On the bus, there were no museums to visit, hostels to find, or restaurants to track down—just open hours for my mind to wander.
The first leg of our journey would take us as far as Lima, eighteen hours down the road. Once there, we planned to stay for a few days and complete the final leg to Puno when we grew bored of the city. We treated ourselves to cama seats, which folded almost completely into a bed, on a posh two-story bus. We’d stayed in hostels that were not as nice. “Traveling in the lap of luxury,” Brian declared as we settled into our seats.
The ride was so comfortable that I felt almost sad when our bus arrived in Lima the next morning. I pulled the velvet curtain from the window and looked out onto the city streets. Lima was a massive urban center, and I did not feel up for dealing with it. All I wanted was to pull a blanket up to my chin and stay in my little bus oasis.
“Brian look,” I said, as our bus drove by a crowded street corner where a man crouched, a black briefcase unfolded in front of him. Inside it, a selection of brass knuckles and handguns were on display.
Brian gave a low whistle. “That is crazy.”
The curtain on the window fell closed. I just did not have the energy to face a gigantic city, especially one where men sold weapons openly on the street.
“Do you really want to stay in Lima?” I asked Brian.
He shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s up to you.”
A pulse of anger throbbed from my center. “Can’t you make a decision for once?” I just wanted someone to tell me what to do.
“Well if we don’t stay here, what will we do?”
I sighed. “I don’t know? Catch the next bus to Puno?”
“Okay,” said Brian, “let’s do that.”
Our bus pulled into the station, and we disembarked and fetched our bags, then piled them in the bus station food court. I plopped down on top of them while Brian wandered off to find out about booking tickets to Puno.
“Good news,” he said when he returned. “Our bus leaves in half an hour.”
“Half an hour? Shit.”
“That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Yes, but, aren’t you hungry?” I gestured toward the food stalls. “And I want to stretch my legs for a while.”
Brian groaned. “Jesus, I can’t do anything right.”
“Oh, don’t act like a victim,” I hissed. “You should have used common sense.”
Brian only did what I’d asked of him. I was acting irrationally and being mean. But my fuse felt like it’d been halved, and the prospect of immediately boarding a bus for another eighteen hours sent me over the edge.
As I stood, I slung my backpack on and marched out to our bus terminal, expecting to see a rig similar to what we’d just disembarked from. But the bus parked in front of me was no high-end tourist bus. This bus looked like someone had plucked it from a junkyard, slapped some bright blue paint on it, and towed it to its current location. I glared at Brian, shoved my backpack in the storage compartment near the wheel well, and climbed aboard.
Inside, the seats were stained and the fabric ripped, exposing their battered plastic frames. Large TV consoles dropped from the ceiling above every third seat, a loud car-chase movie already blaring. We were the only tourists. I squinted down at our tickets for our assigned seat numbers and then at the rows as we passed them. My heart sank as I realized that our seats were in the very last row, on a long plastic bench right next to the toilet.
Brian looked at me guiltily. “I got the last tickets.” He paused before adding, “At least the bathroom works.”
A lump rose in my throat as I wedged myself into a space that even a three-year-old would feel uncomfortable in. A short Peruvian man sat next to me knee-to-knee. He had a colorful alpaca wool hat on his head. “¡Hola!” he said. “Where you from?”<
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“¡Hola!” called Brian. “The USA.”
Over the next four hours we cobbled together our stories. The man played the flute in a traditional Peruvian band. We told him about our lives as best we could, practicing our Spanish and miming the rest. My frustration at having the worst seats on the bus dimmed in the presence of our new good-natured friend. When our bus slammed into a pothole or whipped around a blind curve he would grin, his brown eyes bopping around in their sockets, and yell, ¡Aventuras! During our time in Peru and Ecuador I’d been impressed by the general grittiness of the people we encountered. If my neighbor could grin and bear this long bus ride, I could too. I felt a sudden kinship with everyone onboard. We were all trapped for a maddening amount of hours on a dilapidated, overcrowded bus. And that was okay, because we were getting where we needed to go.
The yellow envelope money crossed my mind again. It’d be fun to treat the entire bus to lunch, assuming we ever stopped to take a break. Back in Mancora, Brian and I had stocked the envelope with soles, the Peruvian currency, and it lay at the bottom of the silly lockable purse I kept at my feet along with my computer, passport and a few other valuables. For a moment I ruminated on the idea but then dismissed it completely. If we were traveling in the United States, I’d do it, I told myself, but it was too weird to make a big, unexpected gesture like that in a foreign country. We didn’t speak the language, and, more importantly, we didn’t understand the cultural norms around giving. In the United States, people would probably be open and accepting to a free surprise lunch by a random do-gooder. It might even make the news or go viral on social media. But in Peru? I had no idea. What if the people on the bus misunderstood the gesture? What if I offended someone? My hesitation was a complete and utter failure of rule number one, but how could I not overthink it?
When we did finally stop to refuel, there was no place to eat lunch anyway. Instead, everyone on the bus disembarked, pulled toothbrushes from their pockets, and brushed their teeth communally in a gigantic outdoor trough. Between spits, our bus neighbor looked up and waved at us. I elbowed Brian in the ribs and pointed out the toothbrush trough. “I wish we would have known; I’d have kept my toothbrush in my purse.”