Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  Her parents have asked if she’s depressed, but she doesn’t think so. It’s not that she’s sad, it’s just that all of the things she’s supposed to be doing with her life make her unhappy when she does them. She wants someone to fix this, tell her what she should be doing instead. College supposedly helps you find your purpose, but so far all college has helped her find is that she hates college, and she can’t figure out what the alternatives are because there she is, stuck in college. She has a dim sense that girls who hate school are supposed to go to a cosmetology academy, do hair or nails. But she doesn’t care about hair, and every woman who’s ever done her nails was Vietnamese. They have a lock on nail salons as far as Lizzie can tell, and why would they hire a white girl who couldn’t gossip with them?

  “Those chemicals cause health problems,” Walt told her. “You don’t want to do nails. You don’t want to be Vietnamese.”

  “Why not?” she said, feeling contrary.

  “You have a lot of privilege,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. “As a white woman. You’re very privileged.”

  “I guess,” she said, thinking that she had too much privilege if privilege meant all the childhood bullshit about how you could become an astronaut or an actress or an explorer. What were you supposed to become once you realized that you wouldn’t be any of those things, couldn’t be, that you weren’t even capable of staying awake for fifty minutes of Early Modern Europe?

  Aileen seems to have things figured out, Lizzie thinks, sneaking looks here at the dinner table whenever Aileen is occupied with her kids. She’s got money, nice jewelry, manners—for instance, she returns Lizzie’s compliment on her ring with one for Lizzie’s bracelets of woven neon thread.

  “Oh,” Lizzie says, laughing, “these are from some kids I babysit. I always feel bad cutting them off.”

  “I used to babysit,” Aileen confides. “I was an au pair. It’s how I met my husband.” After several moments she quickly adds, “He wasn’t the father. Of the children I was caring for. It wasn’t like that. He couldn’t get away,” she adds, stumbling forward. “My husband. From work. He wanted to come with us.” She spins her ring on her finger, or tries to, but the humidity has made her hand swell, and the ring gets stuck with the biggest diamond facing inward, jabbing into her palm.

  Lizzie is disappointed in these revelations, not for the facts, ordinary enough, but because the woman still cares what Lizzie thinks. Lizzie wants to believe there is an age and level of success beyond which a woman won’t give a shit whether some scruffy backpacker suspects she slept with her boss. Please don’t care what I think, Lizzie mentally urges. No one else ever does.

  Aileen cares, but she cares more that she forgot to say her husband was ill rather than busy at work. Now the guide has heard two conflicting stories. Victor eats his potatoes studiously, betrays nothing. He and Walt converse in halting Spanish: How is the food, where are you from, how old are you? Victor and Walt turn out to be the exact same age, twenty-one, and both seem surprised, a little embarrassed. During dessert, Aileen’s daughter sings a song in French about bananas. Aileen can’t tell if she’s trying to defuse the awkwardness or if she’s simply hungry for attention. The moment she’s done, the younger boy starts a song he learned during their year in Singapore, some kind of schoolyard rhyme, although Aileen doesn’t understand the lyrics. Her daughter must; her eyes widen, and the boy’s body jerks, the song stopping. She’s kicked him, hard, under the table, and he turns and punches her in the arm.

  “That’s enough,” Aileen says, and she hustles them out of the dining room, leaving her coffee unfinished. She supposes she should ask one of them what the song was about, but she isn’t sure which one to ask. And she hates to admit she didn’t understand a word of it, although both children must have realized this; it’s why the boy chose it and why the girl took it upon herself to stop him.

  After dinner, Victor helps some coworkers rearrange the games lounge. He goes back and forth in front of the lodge bar carrying bedraggled, unpleasantly moist boxes of Monopoly and Scrabble. Cardboard doesn’t last long in the jungle. Every single pass, Walt nods at him in what Victor can tell is an invitation to have a drink together now that Lizzie’s disappeared to bed. Finally Victor stops in the door and calls out, “We should have a drink another night. Tonight, I have these boxes.” He holds up a stack as proof.

  “Yeah. My treat,” Walt says, and Victor nods, glad that’s established. The drink prices are extortionate, and there’s no employee pricing because the employees aren’t supposed to be drinking. Not even to keep the guests happy by making them think they’ve made a local friend.

  The highlight of the day-two itinerary is a massive clay lick adorned by scarlet macaws, gathered across the gray cliff dense as tapestry. They’re Victor’s favorite, the bright, riotous birds, their hunger that looks like delight. The afternoon features a charismatic tarantula, hairy legs waving, and an agouti snuffling along the forest trail. Then a nocturnal caiman-spotting expedition, their eyes orange in the glow of flashlights and headlamps. Their teeth flicker white, and Victor expects the children to be frightened, but they just squeal and dangle over the side of the canoe.

  “This isn’t a zoo, kids,” he says. “Hands in the boat.”

  Aileen apologizes, but Victor waves her off. “They don’t know any better. No caimans in the United States, I guess. I don’t know about Colombia.”

  “We’re Canadian, actually,” Aileen says. “At least I am. Not that it matters. Who knows what the kids are at this point. Citizens of the world.”

  “It matters,” Victor says, surprised and pleased. Canadians have been his private jaguars, rare enough in the Tambopata that he’s never guided one.

  “I’m from Saskatchewan,” Aileen says, encouraged. “One of the provinces in the middle. Big and empty.” She grew up restless, deferred her college scholarship for a gap year au-pairing in Switzerland. Julian worked at the same company as her host father. A wunderkind, the host father said, with ambition to match. She didn’t return to Canada. Instead she took the plunge with Julian, which became one plunge after another, between countries and continents, places she didn’t speak the language, didn’t have legal permission to work. She has been in so many expatriate wives’ book groups. She has read The Kite Runner three times and three different Paulo Coelho novels. She hopes that out there somewhere is a book club that hates Paulo Coelho as much as she does, a group where she’ll find the earthy, cynical friends she’s been waiting for.

  Sometimes she feels she ought to be filling her empty hours with an affair. It isn’t a physical or romantic hunger. Sex with Julian is still good—in fact, in bed together is the time they’re kindest to each other, when they understand each other best. The prospect of sex with anyone else makes her feel more anxious than aroused. When she fantasizes, she skips over the assignations to the part where Julian finds out; he always does, and he never leaves her. I didn’t realize you were so unhappy, he says earnestly. Tell me how I can make this right. Then the fantasy dissolves to static because she has no idea. What alternate life does she worry she’s been cheated of? It’s like she shut a door behind her so long ago she no longer remembers what was on the other side. Being with another man—maybe it would be a way of knocking. Maybe something in the next room of her life would finally answer back.

  The third morning threatens rain. At breakfast Victor holds a vote on whether they want to set out anyway. The result is a unanimous yes; guests are always willing, even eager, to walk in rain, as if it proves their mettle. Victor warns them that they may not see anything, that the animals go to ground when it rains, not wanting to get wet any more than people do. The guests nod as if this is some great revelation, and to them apparently it is. Maybe that’s why they pay so much to come here, Victor thinks—they’re trying to visit a world where animals and humans get wet together.

  The group walks single file away from the river toward a system of interconnected lakes, individually small
and unassuming as farm ponds. Directly above the trail, a ribbon of gray sky threads through the dark green canopy. At the water they pile into a dented metal rowboat. Victor never rowed anything before this job, and the lake is his least favorite part of the itinerary. He delivers the safety briefing (life jackets), animal briefing (what to look for; how to silently signal a sighting), piranha briefing (keep all limbs inside). They row close along the shore. The only sound is the slap of oars, rustle of leaves, howler monkeys in the distance. The hoatzins are perched where they always are, but Victor lets the children spot them first, blue faces crowned with a rowdy crest of feathers. Walt makes an unkind comparison to Lizzie’s hair. The hoatzins croak and grunt and rattle their wings. “They aren’t upset,” Victor assures everyone, “just talkative.” He keeps the boat still while everyone snaps photos. He’s skilled at knowing when people have looked long enough to be sated. Eventually he rows on, all six of them peering into the tangle of roots and branches lining the shore, a possible freshwater-otter habitat.

  Victor feels excitement out of proportion to the dismal odds of actually spotting a highly endangered otter. This is his job, and he takes it seriously—he would like to show these people an otter—but he would also like to see one for himself. He’s genuinely excited by every wild creature lumbering or flitting or scurrying into view, envoys from a nonhuman world, their magic so durable he always feels it. He can’t imagine giving it up for good, trading it for mountain bus tours, speaking into a crackly microphone about Incan wall-building techniques while guests sleep or stare out the windows. Besides, he’d still be gone for days, maybe weeks, at a time. He tries to imagine what Ana wants their life to be so he can decide whether he can give it to her, whether he can make himself want it as much as she does. He wants her; he does. He thinks he wants their baby. But everything else about their future feels lurching and blurry.

  In his distraction Victor steers over a tangle of branches under the water’s surface. The hull grinds, the boat jerks to a stop. Victor almost swears but catches himself, tries to give the guests a smile one-quarter sheepish, three-quarters confident reassurance. He braces an oar against the branch and pushes backward. The rowboat barely budges. He lowers an oar straight down, testing the depth and consistency of the bottom. Chest-height, he guesses.

  Then Lizzie shouts, “Otter!” In her excitement she forgets the silent hand signals, just yells and leans forward, flinging her arm over the water to point, and Aileen, imagining leaping piranhas, tries to stuff Lizzie back into the boat. Lizzie, grabbed from behind, struggles reflexively. The boat seesaws over the fulcrum of the branch. There’s a splash in the direction of the otter sighting, but in the racket of an entire flock of hoatzins taking flight, it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, Lizzie saw. “An otter. It was just over there. I saw it.” She bends over the gunnel.

  “Get back in the boat,” Walt barks, but she leans out farther, scanning the water to either side. The boat tilts sharply, and Aileen’s daughter shrieks. “Are you trying to kill us? You dumb bitch,” Walt says, yanking her back onto the thwart beside him.

  They’ve already made so much noise that everything around them has fled; even the breeze has stopped, and there’s nothing left to drown out Walt’s words. Victor shifts his weight, and water laps audibly against the side of the boat. Finally a branch falls somewhere deep in the jungle. The clouds thin and sunlight dazzles the water. Aileen’s golden children flash.

  Great, Victor thinks; now the day’s weather forecast is something else he’s screwed up. “I’m going to get out and push,” he says. They all look at him like he’s crazy. “There are almost definitely no piranhas. It’s just something we’re told to say.” This is true, but Victor’s stomach twists. What if Lizzie did see an otter? What if the realms of the possible and improbable are colliding, and there are piranhas after all? Not like this, Victor thinks. I do not want to die like this, with these people. He unlaces his boots, takes them off, and slides out into the water barefoot; he’s relieved when his feet hit bottom and the bottom holds. He walks around to the bow of the boat, grips the painter, and pulls. At first nothing happens, but then there’s a splash on the other side of the boat and it lurches forward. Walt’s hopped out too and has joined him at the rope. Victor is annoyed and grateful. Mostly annoyed. It will be hard enough to explain why he’s sopping when he walks into the lodge, harder still to explain why a guest is wet and filthy.

  Victor assumes that this is Walt’s apology for yelling at Lizzie, but then Walt gives him a needy, eager look, meant for Victor alone. Braving the lake is to impress Victor, not Lizzie. If there’s an apology, it’s for having paid money to let someone else row him around a pond, risk piranhas to free him. Once the boat is liberated from the snag, Victor holds it steady while Walt climbs in, then heaves himself ungracefully over the gunnel, more like a caught fish than a wilderness expert.

  “See?” Victor says. “No piranhas.” The kids look both relieved and disappointed.

  The group walks slowly back to the lodge, spreading farther and farther apart along the trail, like beads coming unstrung. Victor, then Walt, then the kids, then Aileen and Lizzie, falling so far behind they aren’t in earshot of anyone else.

  “It isn’t my business,” Aileen says, and she waits for Lizzie to bristle and tell her that she’s right, it isn’t, but Lizzie looks up at her expectantly. Such pretty eyes, but not so pretty they will solve her other problems, Aileen thinks. Lizzie is not beautiful in any way that could be a life plan. I was so pretty, Aileen could tell her. I suppose I still am, and it doesn’t make that much difference in the long run. Instead she says, “You shouldn’t be with him. It’s none of my business, but the two of you, you’re not going to make it. I’m sorry if that sounds awful, but you aren’t. You should end it now, while you’re both so young.”

  Sometimes Lizzie feels very young; sometimes she feels very old. What she feels in this moment is gratitude—finally, someone willing to tell her what to do.

  “I’ve been fighting with my girlfriend too,” Victor says to Walt farther up the trail, not entirely sure why he’s saying it. Guilt, maybe, that he didn’t even offer Walt a thank-you at the lake. Especially since he hopes Walt will keep quiet about the rowing mishap, invent some other story for his soggy clothes.

  “I just got nervous back there,” Walt says. “I didn’t want her to do anything to hurt the kids.”

  “Sure.”

  “What are you and your girlfriend fighting about?”

  Even though Victor can tell Walt tried to say it casually, he can hear Walt’s hunger for revelation, for some connection Victor doesn’t understand. It’s too much, this neediness. Tourists are all the time so hungry. For food, for conversation, for friendship, for magical glimpses of endangered animals over which Victor has no control. For some reassurance that their ability to pay for all this doesn’t make them assholes. Victor doesn’t actually think Walt’s an asshole, but the prospect of trying to convince Walt of this feels exhausting.

  “Stupid things,” Victor lies and picks up his pace. He draws his lodge-issue machete, although the current trail is wide and clear. He attacks the foliage on either side, forcing Walt to walk well behind him, out of the blade’s range.

  On the trail, between the two pairs of adults, the kids quietly experiment with the phrase dumb bitch. Lizzie doesn’t seem like one, not to them, but they try it out for their gym teacher and whoever designed their school uniforms.

  The rain Victor predicted that morning finally comes, so torrential that the west end of the open-air dining room is soaked, and the guests squeeze uncomfortably around the remaining tables. The banana cage swings and creaks. Victor keeps bumping elbows with Walt. The children complain that fruit salad does not count as dessert, and if that’s all there is, can they be excused to the games lounge?

  “You can wait a little longer,” Aileen says, showing her full cup of coffee.

  “I’ll take them,” Lizzie says. “I’m quali
fied. And I can see them back to their room after.” She holds up her kid-made neon friendship bracelets as proof. “Are you staying or going?” she asks Walt.

  “I don’t know. What do you want?”

  Lizzie shrugs, and Walt gets up to follow. The new games lounge turns out to be only a small annex to an upstairs play area, huddled under the pitched roof. There are a few shelves of plastic toys holding up better in the humidity than a pile of damp picture books. All the available furniture is child-size. The kids pull out a copy of Trouble, the dice protected under a plastic dome. Lizzie chooses Scrabble, unfolds the board on a tiny table, and arranges two racks for tiles. Walt sits down on one of the kid-size chairs. Lizzie’s so small she fits almost normally, but his knees are up by his armpits.

  It’s a Spanish Scrabble board, and he gets the LL and the RR and the Ñ and doesn’t know what to do with any of them since they’re playing in English. He loses a turn cashing in his letters for new ones, ends up with H-E-T-H-E-R and hopes for both a W to make a bingo and a spot on the board to put it. Then he remembers that Spanish Scrabble won’t have any Ws. He can’t spell his own name in the Spanish tiles. He doesn’t need Lizzie to look out of place. All those faces he was peering into, they all knew him for a foreigner even without her. He is carrying a neon sign, a disco ball of unbelonging, and he’s never going to be able to put it down. He can’t concentrate—he knows his turns are taking forever—so he tries to make a joke about the absent W, about his name, to explain the delay.