The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Then something odd happens. The child starts pulling vines down from the trees. Gloria drags three large branches to the bank. She sets the branches over the vines. The two of them wrap the vines around the branches, in and out, over and under—they’re making a raft.

  Chopper leans back and lets the leaves close. A flash of red attracts his attention—an airplane. Now that he can see it, he can hear it. There’s no way that Gloria could hear it down on the ground.

  He shimmies to a spot on a horizontal branch amid the high canopy where he can see the horizon. By rolling under the branch, he can fully conceal himself from above and still have a barely impeded view. The plane circles a few times and then, upriver, it loses altitude and presumably lands.

  Chopper can’t figure out why it would land. The fire’s going exactly how the oligarchs want. Other than a lingering feeling of irony in the strange bedfellows he seems to have sided with, he puts it out of his mind. It’s easy now. Farley’s death has taught him how to put things out of his mind. Denial is intoxicating, and he has found that it can be implemented by listening to the model of Farley in his mind as it repeats: Get the experiential data for the burning rain forest app.

  Farley reaches for a branch to guide himself back to shore. The branch moves and he jerks back his hand. He loses his footing and the branch strikes out at him. Fangs grasp air where his neck had been a quarter of a second before.

  He lets himself fall underwater, kicks off, and swims around the outcropping of roots and vines. The current is nothing compared with a Santa Cruz undertow, but it’s tugging on his pack. The satellite phone is useless now, and maybe the rifle, too. He surfaces ten meters downstream and continues along the river. He’s tempted to dive right in, but where the river narrows the current accelerates, and the truth is, he doesn’t know how to swim in river rapids. He mulls Tahir’s statement, “There isn’t time for mistakes,” and stays near shore.

  With a rifle in his left hand and a machete in his right, Tahir cuts a swath through the brush. One of his many concerns floats to the top. Farley is likely to greet Chopper in a much different way than he would. He pushes forward at as close to a run as the brush allows.

  Chopper has covered this island a hundred times in these three days. The monkeys don’t even shriek at him anymore. Just downstream, not a quarter mile from the point where the two forks of the river that define this island converge, the whole system makes a dramatic right turn, a dogleg. He can see it from this tree. The dogleg is caused by a long sheet of rock that Chopper figures is granite. As the currents of the two forks combine, the water velocity doubles. The river then flows another thirty meters before hitting the granite wall. It continues along and then around the rock and on downstream, but the disruption results in turbulent swirls that gyrate along the dogleg like so many tornadoes across an Oklahoma plain. Over centuries, the river has chipped away at the rock and, at the point where the river curves around the end of the dogleg, violent rapids rush through a maze of sharp boulders.

  No way will that vine-joined raft survive the turbulence.

  Chopper has no interest in a VR experience of drowning. No! Gloria must burn.

  He pulls himself farther up the tree. The branch bends and swings under his weight. The rifle strapped to his back catches on something and it takes a few precarious moves to get above the canopy. From here he can see the other side of the rock barrier.

  Past the rapids associated with the dogleg, the river spreads out in an expansive, gently flowing imitation of the Mississippi. Chopper smiles when he sees a copse of trees that has fallen across the narrow, turbulent point where the river passes around the granite wall. The hot, dry wind has been blowing through the dead branches for weeks, drying them to an explosive tinder. The trunks lie along the rock and the treetops hang over the river with the upended roots on land—the perfect fuse.

  Chopper rolls over the branch, lowering himself until his feet reach another branch. He drops to that step, jumps to another, then to the primary trunk of the tree. He slides down to the ground and sprints through the underbrush maze. At the island’s north bank, a good fifty feet from where Gloria and the kid are putting together their raft, he dives into the water.

  Gloria works another vine around and between the logs. She hands the vine to Iara, stands, and stretches her back. It’s warm and wet and she’s had enough of the mosquitoes. Back in California, mosquitoes are tiny things that zip around. Here, they’re an inch long and lumber through the air like tiny storks. She grabs one and closes her fist. It leaves a red mark—great, another bite.

  A spark of light catches her attention. She steps up on a low branch and opens a window in the leaves. It wasn’t a spark. It was sunlight reflecting from the rifle slung across Chopper’s back. There he is, dropping from a tree.

  She lets the leaf window close as gently as she can, not sure if he’s seen her, but certain that they need to move right now.

  If she and Iara try to ride a log downstream, it will roll and they won’t be able to hang on. On the other hand, there isn’t time to configure the raft that Iara, bless her industrious little heart, has designed. The three logs are at least woven together, though the ends of the weave need to be tied or the whole thing will unravel.

  She pulls the vines tight and tries to tie them. They’re not like string, though. They have to be wound. Iara steps in front of Gloria and demonstrates how to braid the fine ends into a long knot. The two of them tug and tie, twist and weave vine after vine. The vines are now secure if not tight. Gloria has worked with engineers since she graduated from college. She’s not an engineer, of course, but she likes this design. The logs won’t separate, and they each have some freedom in how they respond to currents. She’s convinced that the raft will stay together.

  She drags the contraption down the bank. With one end floating in the water—it floats! this is the first good news of the day—Iara climbs on. Gloria pushes off and jumps on behind her.

  Farley works his way around another outcropping, half swimming, half walking.

  There she is.

  Twenty feet from shore, a good hundred feet from Farley, the sight takes his breath away. Sunlight glints from her hair, making those black locks look like a fire-tinted orange halo.

  She’s alive. She’s fine and she’s getting away from the fire. But that raft looks bad. He calls her name at the top of his lungs. She turns, but he’s hidden in the shade of the bank. She looks frightened. Horrified.

  The raft floats, but that’s the extent of its stability. Gloria can’t control its direction and it’s slowly spinning. He sees the child Ringo told him about.

  He sprints farther up the bank, waving and calling. He maps out the course of the river in his mind. He remembers the dogleg and its rapids. The current is pulling her away faster than he can run.

  He takes one arm out of the backpack shoulder strap—but stops. It will slow him down, but he’ll only get one chance. Tahir’s words come back to him as though they were spoken by a ghost standing at his shoulder: “We must assure that we are going to the right place with the right tools or we might as well stay here.” In addition to the useless satellite phone and dubious rifle, the pack holds a coil of rope, a hatchet, and some medical supplies. As for time, the raft will drift no faster than the current. With or without the pack, Farley can swim faster than the current.

  He tightens the backpack straps. The rifle is firm along his spine. He takes a mental snapshot of the distance between the raft and himself and dives in.

  Tahir hears Farley yell Gloria’s name. He’s behind and inland from the sound. He ducks a branch, jumps over another, and hacks aside a mess of vines with the machete. Then he stops to listen again. Nothing. Near the base of a tree, the underbrush rises four feet from the ground, another dark tunnel. He ducks and runs. As he zips through the jungle, heedless to anything but progress, something demands his attention.

  It sounds like a roar. For an instant he expects a lion or tiger. But this
roar doesn’t stop for breath. Then he recognizes it. This is not a foreign sound. It is the raging anger of a napalm firestorm. He throws himself to the ground just as the blast consumes the brush above him.

  Tahir is accustomed to the feeling that all is lost, that this time he won’t be able to survive. But every time he’s had this feeling, a way has appeared before him. Though he doesn’t trust this appeal to fortune, it encourages the irrational belief that he will find his daughter right now.

  He rolls under the flames, expecting the gasoline taste of napalm. Instead it’s just heat, a single, immediate, foreboding jet of heat. He senses a cool spot, emerges to his feet, and sprints toward the riverbank where he heard Farley’s voice a minute or two before.

  He collides with a wall of leaves wrapped tight by vines and moss. Instead of cutting it with the machete, he rams in his shoulder and works his way through. It’s like being caught in a web. He drops to the ground, but it’s even denser here. He’s trapped.

  Chopper emerges from the river. Behind him, the fire is about to jump the riverbank and take the island. Also behind him, he sees something floating. He can make out the red T-shirt on the kid.

  He sprints along the riverbank and works through a few meters of foliage to the long granite slab that causes the dogleg. He climbs up and runs along its edge. It’s like running along the rim of a dam. At the end of the rock, he jumps down to the blown-over copse of trees. The trunks are nearly horizontal, and every one of them trails dead vines. The vines and upward-pointing branches snap off, thoroughly dried by the hot winds.

  The fire has now worked all the way down the riverbank where he sprinted seconds ago. He breaks off a long, thin branch to use as a giant match. He runs back along the granite slab, inland toward the encroaching flames. He dips the branch into the fire. It lights like a well-oiled torch.

  Gloria pins little Iara to the raft with her body, holding on with one hand and cupping water over her skin with the other.

  Flames leap across the river. First one and then several, the same way that they lick the sky. Gloria can sense the explosion that’s coming. It feels like the air itself is going to combust. It’s been a few days since she last smelled burning hair and felt the immediacy of blistering skin.

  The river carries them spinning downstream. The flames walk, step by step, closing on them. Tumbling spheres of fire dance in the canopy of the island next to them, racing downstream to the eastern edge.

  The island explodes.

  She pulls Iara into the gap between two logs. Iara takes a breath and buries herself underwater in the basket of vines that hold the logs together. Every exposed inch of Gloria’s skin demands that she immerse herself, too. But if she moves to the unoccupied second gap between the three logs, she won’t be able to protect Iara.

  She endures the pain by rotating herself back and forth. The river water dampens the blisters just slightly faster than they form.

  The raft clears the eastern edge of the island.

  The river is calm right here. She can see whirlpools where the two forks of the river combine, but right here, a few feet upstream, it’s calm. Iara takes a breath.

  Gloria raises her head and looks around. She sees something behind them, swimming in their direction. It’s long enough to be a crocodile. She tries to paddle but her effort makes the raft spin faster.

  Farley uses the river currents to accelerate. They vary at different depths. It feels like he’s being carried by a wave, like body surfing. He’s already had to surface twice to breathe, so he knows that about three minutes have passed. He kicks up again and, as his face breaks the surface, he sees her.

  Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A. Gloria.

  She’s paddling away from him. He knows better than to try to talk but takes a mouthful of water anyway.

  Then her eyes meet his and they get even bigger. She stops paddling.

  The little raft is bearing down on the vortices caused by the impedance mismatch in the connection of the two river forks.

  He spits out the water and, as he takes a breath, he can see that Gloria recognizes the danger. She’s paddling downstream.

  Farley kicks back underwater and drives himself after the raft.

  When Gloria sees Farley, her first reaction is disbelief. Her second is a hope-fueled burst of desire to survive. She sees the little water tornadoes in front of the raft. Iara is hanging on tight. She lowers her legs farther into the water and grips the center log. She kicks for all she’s worth. The raft stops spinning and she maneuvers it downstream.

  Her position makes it impossible to see in front of the raft.

  Right now, Farley can’t see it either.

  But Chopper can. The raft is headed straight for the granite slab. Water approaching the granite wall combines with the water reflected from that wall to form a stationary hill of water. Two things can happen when the raft reaches it. The hill of water can push the raft away from the wall and guide it downstream to the rapids, where it will be caught in the fallen trees. Or, if the raft floats to the top of the stationary wave, it will slide down the other side, collide with the granite, and break apart. Should it collide, Gloria and the child will drown.

  Chopper must assure that the raft makes it to the trees. He sets the burning torch down in a dry spot. There will be time to ignite the fallen trees when Gloria is appropriately caught in them.

  Chopper does not see Farley behind the raft.

  Farley realizes that he won’t catch the raft before it hits the granite dam. Instead, he prepares for an in-water rescue. He’s done it before with drowning tourists caught in riptides. He twirls around, feet forward, kicking to reduce the speed of his impact. On his back, zeroing in on the wall about fifteen feet upstream from the raft, he sees Chopper.

  He calls out but can’t be heard over the water and fire.

  Chopper leans over the wall above the point where the raft will impact. He’s holding a sturdy branch and it looks like he’s preparing to cushion the blow. It’s dangerous, though. The wall is too steep and the water too violent for Chopper to successfully pull Gloria to safety, and there’s no way he can save them both.

  But the raft never hits the wall. As it climbs the stationary wave, it begins to rotate and then careens parallel to the wall, accelerating toward the rapids and fallen trees.

  A second later, Farley hits the rock wall. He bends his legs, keeping his feet against the rock. The current is most powerful a foot from the wall, but it’s not too bad at the point of contact. He glides along, feeling for a foothold. The rock is slick with algae. He slides farther, spying a rock ahead. Again, he maneuvers his legs ahead of him. This time he coils his legs before they impact the rock and, when they hit, he kicks up out of the water and onto the wall. He gets hold of the top.

  Again, Tahir’s words resonate in his head. “We only get one chance.” Instead of yielding to the desire to jerk himself straight out, he confirms the stability of his grip and only then pulls himself up.

  Gloria braces herself for impact. She’s not sure whether she should try to stop against the wall or cushion the blow and continue downstream. If she can just slow enough for Farley to catch up, she’ll be fine.

  Farley! Everything is all better.

  She braces Iara for impact.

  The raft floats high in the water. She looks up. Chopper stands above them. She cowers between the logs, expecting a bullet. Instead, the raft starts spinning again. It catches a current and accelerates parallel to the rock, rushing toward what appears from her perspective to be a waterfall.

  As the raft sweeps away, Chopper sprints along the wall. He stops and lifts the torch. It’s down to cinders. He raises it and the hot wind feeds the fuel with fresh, dry oxygen. The flame builds and seconds tick away. Timing is everything and Chopper is in the zone.

  He jogs along the rock just ahead of the raft.

  Gloria, kneeling, pulls the child up onto her hip. The raft accelerates, veering off of one rock into the current between two others. Glo
ria reaches up with her free arm. The trees are draped over the water; she can’t miss, and even if she does, there are a dozen trees farther along.

  Chopper waits, poised. The instant he lowers this giant match, the entire mess of trees and vines will explode in flames, just as the island upstream did a minute before. He’ll wait until Gloria and the child are firmly enmeshed in the trees, until their raft has broken to pieces down the rapids, until they begin working their way toward presumed safety. This will provide the ideal allegory, the quintessential virtual experience for Homo sapiens to realize the consequences of their actions.

  From his position perched on the granite wall, halfway between the land to the north and the rapids to the south, some fifty feet from Chopper, Farley screams for his friend’s attention. As Chopper lifts a flaming branch and runs to the trees hanging over the rapids, Farley calls him again, screams for him. How can he not hear? Farley can’t recall ever having to call Chopper twice. Rarely has he had to call him even once. Farley’s always had Chopper’s attention. It’s built-in, like being right-handed, like knowing there will be air when you take a breath.

  Nothing makes sense. Or does it?

  How can Chopper bring harm to Gloria? Stranger than that, how can Chopper stand there with that torch when he can take three steps and rescue her and the child?

  He must choose.

  Farley reaches his right arm over his shoulder, takes the stock of the rifle, and pulls it from the pack. As he brings it over his shoulder, resting the chamber in his left hand, water pours from the barrel. He slides the bolt in place, hears a round slide into the chamber, and raises the weapon to his shoulder. He aligns the sights with Chopper’s torso.