Origin

by Jessica Khoury

  “It’ll get pretty hot under there, which would be a problem for most of us. But you shouldn’t have any trouble with that.” Harriet glances around. “Better hurry. He’ll be along soon.”

  “Just because I can’t get burned doesn’t mean I can’t feel heat!”

  She turns a withering look on me. “Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?”

  With a sigh, I scoot under the Jeep and work my way into the undercarriage, trying to avoid touching more pipes and bars than necessary.

  “This is the worst idea you’ve had yet,” I tell Aunt Harriet.

  “They’re all busy getting ready for Corpus’s visit, but it doesn’t mean they’re blind. Be back by dark. No later, or it will be both our heads on the chopping block. And my neck isn’t quite so impermeable as yours.”

  “I promise.”

  “And don’t get lost. Honestly, I swear, if you do, I’ll find a way to chop your head off, immortality or not. He’s coming! Got to go. Good luck!” She sticks her hand, thumb extended cheerily, under the Jeep, then dashes off. After a minute, I hear footsteps, see thick black boots, and feel the Jeep sink several inches when the guard climbs in. There’s still nearly a foot of space between the ground and me, but it feels much, much closer. The engine starts, and my various handholds begin to rattle, but I grit my teeth and hang on tighter. At the last minute I grab my hair, which was hanging to the ground, and tuck it in my shirt.

  I keep my eyes pressed shut so I can focus on holding on, but I can still hear the groan of the gate opening, then closing, and the rev of the engine as the guard driving the Jeep stomps the gas. It’s all I can do not to drop to the ground, but then I’d have to explain why there are tire tracks across my stomach. Better just wait.

  Finally the Jeep skids to a halt and the guard jumps down. After I’m sure he’s well into the jungle, I lower myself to the ground and exhale long and slow. I don’t think I took a single breath since leaving the compound.

  The jungle looms over me as I rub dirt and rust from my hands. It takes me a moment to orient myself. Eyes shut, I mentally retrace the path I walked from Little Cam to Ai’oa and compare the distances and angles to the route the guard took in the Jeep.

  “So it must be…” I face the direction opposite to the one the guard went. “That way.”

  I’m not hiking for long when Eio materializes from the leaves. He looks part jungle himself, with leaves tied around his neck, head, and arms. His khaki cargo shorts look as out of place as ever, especially with his face paint and jaguar necklace.

  When I see him, a weight I never knew existed lifts from my chest, and I feel, for the first time in the past three days, that I can breathe again. I realize I’m grinning like an idiot, but I can’t help it. “Eio!”

  “Pia bird. You came.” He stands a foot in front of me, staring at me as if he can’t believe I’m here. “Burako said I should forget about you. That you’d probably forgotten me.”

  “Forget you? I couldn’t forget you if I tried.” And not just because my memory is infallible. With my fingers feeling as clumsy and awkward as if they were Alai’s paws, I reach out and take his hand. Once I have it, his grasp feels as natural as putting on a glove, and I never want to let go. His touch is fire, sending sparks tingling up my arm. “Of course I came. I told you I would.”

  He looks at our entwined fingers and smiles. “So you found a way.”

  “With Aunt Harriet’s help, yes.”

  “The crazy-haired one.” He nods knowingly. “She helped you sneak back in.”

  “Oh, you saw that?” What has he been doing? Sitting in a tree outside Little Cam and taking notes all day?

  “I knew you would come. Every day I came here and waited, but you took a long time. Kapukiri said you would come too.”

  This is the first time I’ve really been in the jungle during daylight. When I overslept in Ai’oa and had to run home, I didn’t take even a moment to look around. Now, however, I stop dead and turn slowly in a full circle, eyes wide and thirsty to drink it all in.

  Between mighty kapoks and slender cecropias, narrow vines swoop and drop and tangle over enormous leaves of palulus and anthuriums. The air is thick and damp, even more so than in Little Cam. It’s almost like being underwater. Pale, vaporous mist haunts the darkness between low leaves and the forest floor like the ghosts Aunt Nénine fears. Orange and yellow lichen lays claim to anything that’s dead and rotting, and where the lichen stops, the moss begins. There are probably a dozen different species of it right here in this spot.

  Looking up, the sky is just a speckle of blue here and there, a realm so high above and so obscured by the jungle that it might as well be outer space. In the rainforest, the sky is made of leaves and branches, and instead of stars you have screeching monkeys and birds of every color. It is a living sky.

  Most of all—and this is what I missed most during my nighttime wanderings—is the color. The rainforest is green on green on green; the color must have been invented here, and in a thousand different forms. Against the green wash, a shot of purple orchids or orange mushrooms stands out vibrantly, demanding attention. The only thing missing is Alai at my side, but it would have been impossible to sneak him out too.

  Despite all the beauty around me, my eyes keep wandering back to Eio. He pushes every branch out of my path, careful not to let them swing back and hit me. Every time he does, water droplets rain down on his shoulders, beading his collarbone and the back of his neck. His dark hair is so damp it hangs in his eyes. My fingers itch to brush it aside.

  We reach Ai’oa in less than an hour, thanks to Eio. I could have found it on my own, but it would have taken longer since I’d never been this way before.

  The villagers don’t flock to greet me this time. Some call out or wave, but there are no garlands of flowers or dances to welcome me into Ai’oa. I wonder if I’m welcome at all. Eio must see my hesitation, because he tells me that once a person’s been given their welcome feast, they are forever a part of the village and are treated like one of the villagers.

  “They think of me as Ai’oan?”

  “In this sense, yes.”

  “Does every visitor get a welcome feast?”

  He meets my eyes steadily. “No. Only you, because you have the mark, and my father, because he loved my mother and proved himself a friend to the village.”

  I’m not sure whether I should feel honored or frightened. If they think of me as one of their own, what must they expect from me? Why did I come back here at all? Did I think we’d be dancing and laughing all day long, every time I came? What do I expect from them?

  “Eio,” I whisper, “I don’t know what to do.”

  He gives me a funny look, as if I’d asked him what blue smells like. “Just be yourself.”

  A little girl no higher than my hip runs up to Eio and leaps onto his back. He laughs and tries to tickle her, but she yanks his hair, and he stops. I recognize her from my last visit to Ai’oa; she was the one who hovered by my elbow for hours, watching everything I did with huge, curious eyes.

  “Eio!” she squeals. “You brought her back! Like you said you would!” I smile at her. Her English is very good, and her Ai’oan accent softens the consonants and adds a sweet richness to the vowels that I’d never hear in Little Cam.

  “If I say I’m going to the river to catch a fish,” Eio replies, “I will always bring back a fish. Did you doubt me, Ami?”

  “Not for a minute, but Pichira and Akue said you wouldn’t, that the lightning fence would stop you.” She peers at me over his shoulder. “Hello, Pia bird. Where’s your jaguar?”

  “Hello,” I reply shyly. “Alai couldn’t come today. Your name is Ami? It’s very pretty.”

  “It means wicked,” says Eio.

  “It means perfect child.” She looks from Eio to me with a sly grin. “Eio says you’re perfect, Pia bird. He says you’re the most perfect girl he ever saw!”

  Eio turns red and shakes her from his back, roaring t
hat he’ll feed her to an anaconda. She runs behind me, screaming and laughing, and, laughing with her, I shield her from him.

  “He does?” I ask. “And what else does he say?”

  She screws her lips up to her nose, thinking. “That your eyes are like bits of sky seen through the leaves. And that, like the rain washes the mud from the leaves, you…how did he say it? Oh, yes. That you wash the darkness from the world.”

  “He…he said that?” Now I’m the one turning red.

  Eio grabs our hands. “Come on, you awful child. Let’s show Pia where we swim.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “Here it is!” Ami announces.

  I can already tell I’ll never be able to enjoy my pool again, not after this. A crystalline waterfall about twenty feet high drops into a deep, still, turquoise stream. Orchids and heliconias hang over the water as if they’re drinking from it, heavy with pink and red and purple blooms.

  With a whoop, Eio climbs to the top of the waterfall and throws himself from it. The splash he makes drenches Ami and me.

  “He is so dumb,” says Ami. “Come on, Pia bird! It’s no fun swimming with Eio; he only tries to splash me.”

  She grabs my hand and leads me downstream, about fifty yards from the waterfall, where the water is shallow and wide, racing over a pebbly bed. The stream sparkles golden in the sunlight filtering through the trees.

  “This is our most secret place,” she whispers as she kneels on the bank.

  “What’s so secret about it?” I ask.

  “Look in the water.”

  I kneel beside her and lean over the stream, and I see it. It’s not sunlight turning the water gold. It is gold. The pebbles at the bottom are flaked with glittering freckles; there must be several handfuls’ worth of it.

  “Is it real gold?” I ask.

  She nods. “We can’t tell anyone from the outside. The sight of gold turns karaíba into monsters, and they will destroy everything to get to it. That’s what Achiri says. So we never tell the karaíba about it.”

  “I’m a karaíba,” I point out, the Ai’oan word for foreigner already filed in my memory.

  “Kapukiri says you have the tears of Miua in you, and that makes you one of us.”

  “But I live in Little Cam.”

  “You don’t have to. You could live with us.”

  “I can’t. Little Cam is my home.”

  “Then why do you come to Ai’oa?”

  I turn away so that she can’t see the conflict in my eyes. How do I explain to a seven-year-old that she represents everything I’ve been denied in Little Cam? Because you are young and free and one with the jungle. You are mortal, but instead of clinging to the hope of immortality, you embrace each day, one at a time, and never worry about tomorrow.

  She kneels beside me, her feet tucked under her, and stares up at the sky. “Have you ever been in an airplane?” she asks suddenly.

  I smile ruefully. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Oh.” She sighs wistfully. “I’ve always wanted to sit in an airplane. Way above the trees, like a bird.”

  I look up through the canopy at the flecks of sky. I have seen two planes in my life, one when I was five and one when I was twelve. They were so high and tiny they were almost imperceptible. Uncle Antonio once told me we were too far from any cities to see many planes, but even so, there are enough trees cultivated in Little Cam to cover the compound from any aerial eyes. “Where would you go?” I ask Ami.

  “Eio’s Papi told us about places where there are no trees. Sometimes it’s all buildings made of concrete, for miles and miles. Sometimes it’s just sand, so much that you can’t even see the end of it.”

  I try to imagine such a sight, but it seems impossible. “I’ve never been outside the jungle.”

  Ami takes my hand and smiles broadly. There’s a slight gap between her two front teeth. “We’ll go one day. You and me, in a plane. We’ll go to China and America and Antarctica.”

  I stare at her. “How do you know all that?”

  “Know what?”

  “All those names.” I think of my map, recall the words printed on it. “China. That’s in…Asia?” The names taste strange on my lips, like some foreign food.

  She nods. “Papi made Eio and me learn so many names of so many places. He said we should know as much as we can about the world and that…” She screws up her face, thinks for a second, then says in the same singsong manner I use when I recite the periodic table of the elements, “That ‘ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.’ That’s by some karaíba called Shakespeare.” She smiles smugly. “Sometimes I learn quicker than Eio.”

  “Shakespeare, huh?” He must have been a scientist; it sounds like something Uncle Paolo would say.

  I feel an unexpected bite of jealous anger. Someone from Little Cam has been teaching Ami and Eio about the outside world while leaving me sitting in the dark like an idiot. Sure, I can name all the parts of a paramecium, but a seven-year-old knows more about the world than I do. If knowledge is “the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,” then I am a bird with clipped wings.

  My fingers dig into the soft soil on the bank, squeezing it with all the frustration I don’t want Ami to see on my face.

  Above us, a colony of golden tamarins chatter and laugh as they chuck berries at our heads. Ami shrieks back at them, and one comes scurrying down to hop on her shoulder. It plays with her hair and hisses at me when I try to pet it.

  “Ami speaks to monkeys,” Eio says, suddenly coming up behind us and shaking water from his hair, “because she is half monkey herself.”

  “Am not!” She holds her arm toward him, and the tamarin runs down it and leaps onto Eio’s head and begins pulling his hair. He yells and swats at it, and Ami and I laugh, my anger falling away.

  When Eio finally rids himself of the little golden monkey, Ami scoops it up and charges into the pool, startling a pair of hoatzins who squawk and flutter away, the tufts of feathers on their heads rippling behind them.

  “Her parents died, so she was raised by Achiri,” Eio says. “She is like my little sister. That means I’m her protector.”

  “She’s an angel,” I say. “I’d give anything to have a little sister like her.”

  Eio throws himself onto the ground beside me, stretching his length across the thick layer of leaves that blanket the jungle floor. He stretches his arms over his head, giving me a full display of his abdominal muscles flexing. I feel my cheeks flush, and I swallow, trying not to look like I’m mentally diagramming every inch of his tanned skin.

  “How can you believe in angels?” he asks. “You’re a scientist.”

  “I don’t.” Or Uncle Paolo doesn’t, anyway. I pause for a moment. “But I think some of the others do, like Aunt Nénine. She just doesn’t say so, or Uncle Paolo gets mad.”

  “You can’t take someone’s gods away. You can try, but they’ll hide them and pray to them anyway. That’s what Kapukiri says.”

  “You put a lot of faith in what he says.” I think of the villagers’ reaction to what he said the second time I came to Ai’oa. Jaguar, mantis, moon.

  “He is our medicine man, our miracle worker. If we are sick, it is Kapukiri who heals us. He sees things before they happen, and sometimes he walks in the spirit world without even using yoppo.”

  “Anadenanthera peregrina,” I say automatically. “A hallucinogen.”

  He nods. “You wouldn’t like it though. Karaíba never do. It makes your brain”—he spreads his fingers on either side of his head—“pyoo! Like an explosion.”

  “You’re right. I don’t think I’d like it.” Yuck.

  My distaste must show on my face, because he laughs. “We Ai’oans do things a lot differently, yes, but in many ways we are just the same as you.”

  “How?”

  He shrugs and picks a fern frond, pulling one tiny leaf off at a time and rolling them into little beads. “We eat, we sleep, we breathe. We smile when we’re h
appy, and we cry when we’re sad. When we swim, we must come up for air. When we work all day, our backs get sore. When we get cut, we bleed.”

  I look at my pale wrist. Not all of us.

  “Those of us who are strong take care of the weak, and we live to please those in power over us.”

  “Uncle Paolo thinks the weak should be culled,” I say quietly. “He says that the rest of the world disagrees. That’s why the scientists first came here; they had to work in secret because their ideas were too advanced for everyone to accept. They were scorned and discredited because their way of strengthening the human race meant making hard decisions.” They called them monsters, Uncle Paolo told me. And they despised men like Dr. Falk. So Falk came here, to the jungle, where he heard a legend of a flower that could make one immortal.…

  Uncle Paolo is angry at the outside world that forced Dr. Falk and his colleagues into hiding. “They were stupid, Pia, and they still are. They don’t understand that taking life can sometimes be a greater mercy than saving life. You have to see the bigger picture, have to look at the whole and not the individual. Once you focus on the leaf and not the whole tree, you lose your objectivity, and your reason is compromised. Always see the tree, Pia. Always be objective. Your reason must rule your heart, not the other way around.”

  “And what do you think?” Eio asks, rolling onto his stomach and staring me straight in the eye. “Do you agree?”

  “Me?” I stare at him. No one’s ever asked me how I feel about Uncle Paolo’s views. In Little Cam, everyone thinks that way. “Well, I don’t disagree. I mean, Uncle Paolo is a scientist. He reaches his conclusions through careful observation and documentation and—”

  “Look.” Eio says suddenly. He brushes some leaves aside and draws a line in the dirt with his finger. “What is it?”

  I look from the line to Eio uncertainly. “Huh?”

  “Well, is it a line or a circle?”

  “What is this, a trick question?”

  “Just answer it.”

  Guardedly, I reply, “It’s a line.”

  “So it’s not a circle? You’re sure?”