Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “No proper nouns allowed, though, right?” Lizzie asks, missing the point.

  “I didn’t know you knew what a proper noun was.”

  She stops shuffling her tiles, one hand poised with a single letter pinched between thumb and forefinger. Her hand is shaking when she puts it back on the rack. “What you said to me today—”

  “I was afraid,” he says, cutting her off. “You scared me. You were scaring everybody.”

  She shakes her head, then keeps shaking it, shaking it, like what’s inside needs to be knocked free before it can be said aloud. “I know you think I’m dumb.”

  “I don’t think you’re dumb.”

  “I embarrass you.”

  Walt is silent, because protesting won’t turn them around, won’t whisk them back the way they came. It will only forestall what’s coming, and maybe she’s finally taking them somewhere they both need to go. He can tell he is going to remember his silence at this moment for the rest of his life, how awful it felt to hurt someone he’d once loved but didn’t anymore and the relief that what was left between them was ending.

  “We shouldn’t be together,” Lizzie says.

  Slowly, because it should look like he still needs to consider this, he says, “I think you’re right.”

  Lizzie stays curled in her chair, a hunched little eaglet, until all of a sudden she’s standing, lifting the game board, and pouring the letters into the box.

  “Do you want me to sleep somewhere else tonight?” Walt asks. He’s never had a breakup before, and this seems like the kind of question you ask.

  “Where?”

  “There are those couches in the lobby.”

  “No mosquito netting. You should sleep in the room.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t want you to get malaria,” she says, as if she’d be fine with him contracting something slightly less severe.

  “What happens tomorrow?” Walt asks.

  “How should I know? I’m just a dumb bitch.” She snaps the lid over the box.

  “I’m sorry.” Not just about that, he wants her to hear. About everything.

  “I’ll call my dad when we’re back in civilization. He’ll move my flight up.”

  “You don’t have to. I mean, you came all this way. I know there’s probably stuff you wanted to see.”

  “I came to be with you. Which was pretty fucking stupid,” she adds before Walt can say anything in response. “But I got to see an otter. I’m glad I got to be here and see that.”

  “I’m glad for the last four years,” Walt says. “I am.” He’s grateful; he regrets nothing, certainly not the sex or how he had no sisters and had never exchanged more than a few sentences with a girl in his whole life until he learned to talk with Lizzie. She was nice about his crappy gifts, the last-minute grocery-store flowers, and he’d never let her pick the movies they watched, and that was wrong, and he’d do better with the next girl, he would, he’d be different, because of Lizzie.

  “What you’re looking for here? I don’t think you’re going to find it,” she says.

  Walt’s gratitude churns immediately back into anger. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know you better than you think I do.”

  This could conceivably be true, since he feels like no one understands him at all, and he doesn’t dispute it.

  “You should go have that drink with Victor,” she says. “You were looking forward to it.”

  “I don’t think he wants to have a drink with me. He’s probably ready to be off the clock.” Walt wants her to tell him he’s wrong about this and realizes that yesterday she would have and now she won’t, and maybe that’s part of what made her look so dumb, all those lies that she knew were lies and told him anyway.

  This is the first loss of Walt’s first breakup from his first girlfriend: that all Lizzie says now is “True.”

  Just as well, because Victor is having a drink with Aileen. He’s actually having a third drink with Aileen. Only Cusqueñas, but since he rarely drinks at all, he’s feeling the beer. Fueled by pisco sours, Aileen gets more and more flirtatious, but it’s a performance, not a lowering of inhibitions. She is becoming not more herself but someone else altogether. When the bartender catches Victor’s eye, he doesn’t offer a congratulatory wink but an inquiring eyebrow. Aileen orders another round and patches together a conversation covering Saskatchewan, llamas, soccer, what candy bars are popular in different countries.

  Victor has not been to any other countries, and eventually he is ready to be done with whatever it is they’re doing. “It’s getting late,” he says, and then Aileen puts her hand on his leg. “No,” he says. “We can’t”—he surprises himself by finishing the sentence with—“be obvious.”

  Aileen tilts her body to better conceal her hand but doesn’t remove it.

  “It’s against company policy,” Victor says.

  “So we’ll leave separately. Meet in my room. You remember the number?”

  Victor nods, which is good because Aileen doesn’t remember it. She knows it’s the fourth doorway after the giant carved parrot on the walkway. When she passes her children’s room, they’re disputing the winner of Trouble and complaining about a set of Uno too limp to shuffle. She hears water running, toothbrushing. Her lovelies, brushing their teeth without reminding. They will enter the adult world with clean, white teeth. There are things she has done correctly. She knocks softly on the door frame—there are no actual doors in the lodge, only curtains. “Good night,” she calls out. “I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up too late talking.” She wants to go in and kiss them, see them safely under the mosquito netting, but she forces herself to keep walking. She is practicing, she thinks, for the next part of her life. They will leave her someday, like the farmer’s twelve children—she must be ready.

  In her room she lights the candles and sees that the rain has soaked the side of the room open to the jungle. Her bed and suitcase are dry, close to the inside wall, but the hammock is drenched. So is Julian’s money, she realizes, crawling on hands and knees to extract wads of bills from where she hid them in fissures in the rough-hewn floor. She smooths out the bills, shakes them, although the air itself is so moist she doesn’t imagine she can flap them dry. She fans the stack, puts it on the nightstand of the unused bed. Brushes her teeth, changes into her pajamas. They aren’t sexy—drawstring pants, a tank top—but better for an assignation than her hiking boots and khakis. Once her arms are exposed, she retreats under the mosquito netting. To her it looks romantic, like a lace canopy, but maybe to someone who lives here it’s like wallpaper or medical equipment. She thinks he’ll come but she can’t be sure, and the minutes tick by excruciatingly.

  Footsteps echo along the walkway outside—an employee turning down the kerosene lamps. Finally, a soft knock on the door frame. No doors. What is she doing, in this room without doors, only curtains, open to the jungle? Her children on the other side of the wall.

  Still, she says, “Come in,” and he does.

  He hasn’t changed clothes, she notices, then wonders if he has any other clothes to change into. She hasn’t seen any of the lodge employees out of uniform. He’s abandoned his binoculars and machete somewhere, but otherwise he’s dressed for an expedition. This is an expedition, she thinks, and tries to smile. If she were meeting him anywhere else there’d at least be a bottle of wine. Maybe a minibar. A bucket of ice. She is desperate for something to do with her hands. When he comes close enough to reach, she pushes his safari vest off his shoulders, and it slides to the floor with a thud, surprisingly loud. She tries to remember what’s in there. Compass, knife, first-aid supplies. A professional Boy Scout. She’s been assuming he’s done this before, that the lodge’s supply of eager, foreign strangers offers a steady stream of action for the guides. But Victor stands very still, looking uncertain, almost unhappy. Aileen’s worried he’ll back out, and she’ll have to wonder what’s wrong with her. She goes for his belt and pulls him cl
ose to the unused bed, the sheets still fresh, until she can reach up with her other hand and flick the mosquito netting around them both. Finally he starts to move, stripping his clothes off with brisk efficiency, pulling her tank top over her head. He looks at her appreciatively, but he isn’t hard, and she realizes that in all her fantasies, her shadow lover has always been ready to go, ready to take care of everything.

  She presses her palm to his side, goes in for a kiss. He’s brushed his teeth. His body is compact, sturdy. Everywhere she touches, she can’t help comparing to Julian. She wonders if this is normal or her own inexperience. She wonders who Victor is comparing her to. They’ve slipped their hands beneath each other’s underwear when he says, “I don’t have a condom.” Aileen can hear that there’s something else he doesn’t say, but she can’t tell what, whether it’s a story about not finding another guide to give him one or not asking another guide because of the gossip or about how he didn’t have one himself because he was faithful, he had a pregnant girlfriend he was going to marry.

  I am going to marry her, Victor thinks, with Aileen’s hand wrapped around him, working.

  “We can do other things,” Aileen says, trying to sound encouraging rather than disappointed. And they try, but none of the other things go very well. With the kids next door, everything happens in vigilant silence. She can’t relax enough to come, although Victor does his best. They trade places, and she needs such frequent direction he might as well be jacking himself off. In her mouth, finally, he’s close to coming but gives her so much warning that it slips away when she moves, and he finishes himself off with an urgency Aileen can tell is anticipation of being done more than anticipation of pleasure.

  Afterward, they lie together under the netting. Something rustles above them, risking the maze of filament to shelter from the rain. Aileen cringes, expecting to be strafed by damp feathers or clicking talons. The room, soggy and bare, with vermin in the rafters, feels sinister, the bed the only safe space. The jungle in time will lick all this to nothing, she thinks, the wood and thatch collapsing like soft cheese, the only remnants clouds of fishing line glinting in the mud, the white bones of whatever has entangled itself above them.

  “I have a girlfriend,” Victor says, and Aileen doesn’t know if this is a confidence or confession or explanation. He’s going to marry her, he says, and keeps talking—the baby, Ana’s hounding, how badly she wants out of Puerto Maldonado, how he doesn’t know what to do.

  Aileen wonders how lonely he must be if he’s confiding all this to her. She wonders what she’s supposed to say. She has just two kinds of advice, she thinks: cut and run, which she already gave to Lizzie, and stay and follow, which is the only way she’s known how to live her own life. “You should try,” Aileen tells him, “leaving. You can always come back here if it doesn’t work out.”

  But she doesn’t know if that’s true. If Victor gives up this job, can he be guaranteed another? She grew up without money, had little enough to understand its weight and value now. It is plush and silky, like the otter-fur coat Julian bought her though they hadn’t lived anywhere cold in years. The coat stayed in her parents’ storage closet, deployed on rare winter visits home. She knew it had cost more money than every coat her mother had owned through every winter of her life. She’d urged her mother to wear it when she wasn’t home, to get some good out of it, but it stayed in the closet. That was the weight of money, the glossy heft you might feel guilty over but couldn’t help being grateful for when you stepped off the plane in Regina and there it was to keep you from the cold. Her kids didn’t understand what this felt like because they’d never been without it. They never would be, unless Aileen tried to inflict on them lessons she had no heart for, no stomach. She thinks of Julian’s money in the abstract, and then she thinks about it in the specific, in the here and now, in the pile of wet bills on the table.

  “I want to give you something,” she says and rises naked from the bed. “A wedding present.” The bills are still wet as she hands them to Victor; she starts to rummage for an envelope or Ziploc.

  “I can’t accept this.”

  “Of course you can.” She removes sunscreen and Tylenol from a sandwich bag, creeps back under the netting to find his face hard and angry. The money sits on the mattress.

  “Do you know how much this is?” he asks.

  “Of course I know.” Did he think she was too rich to bother counting or too helpless? “I want you to have it.”

  He reaches for his clothes, starts to dress. “Why?”

  Aileen blushes. “Not for—this. I’m not—paying. You.” She gestures helplessly at the bed. It enters her mind to say that this is his tip, but that would make everything worse. “It really is just a gift. I want to give it to you. For the baby.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “Not for me.” She says it flatly, a plain fact like the weather. “It’s just money. Only money.”

  “Money is not just money.”

  “It can be,” Aileen says, though she knows this isn’t true. She puts the cash into the bag, holds it out until he takes it.

  The schedule includes one last morning nature walk before the canoes depart. The guests’ luggage is already piled in the hallways. Victor sits with his charges at breakfast, and the kids, picking up on the stony silence between Walt and Lizzie and the awkwardness between Victor and their mother, make caps for everybody out of orange peels. Victor wears his until he feels it slide off the back of his hair. The money’s in his vest, too precious to trust to the staff dorm, and he’s not sure whether he’s hearing the plastic swish as he moves or if he’s only imagining it. He feels the bag’s strange buoyancy in his legs, its heaviness on his chest.

  With his thoughts snagged on the money, he accidentally leads the group down the old mammal path, toward the harpy eagle nest, instead of along the new route. He stops suddenly when he realizes where he is, and the group accordions, the children squashed between Walt and their mother. The boy howls, and Victor turns quickly to shush them.

  “You are going to see something very special,” he says, deciding to play off his mistake as part of the tour. “Not everyone gets to see this, so please don’t tell the other guests.”

  So much of his job is storytelling, and he begins this one with the harpy eagle’s size, its rarity. Harpy eagles are the national bird of Panama, though they are driven almost to extinction there. The Amazonian population is healthier, but the birds are still endangered. Pairs mate for life and raise only one chick every two or three years. Like humans, Victor says. The female lays two eggs, but whichever hatches first receives all the care and attention; the second is left to die. Not like humans, he says. At least he hopes not. The girl whispers something to her little brother that makes him elbow her.

  “We have to be quiet,” Victor says, “so the parents don’t scare. Or they’ll fly away and leave the baby to die.”

  “Really?” Lizzie asks, as if alarmed that after the lake, Victor trusts them with any information whatsoever.

  “It’s true,” Victor confirms. “That is completely true. Not like the piranhas.” The mother has a seven-foot wingspan, he adds. She can carry away a full-grown howler monkey squirming in her talons. He gets caught up in his own facts, in the anticipation of seeing the eaglet. This is what Aileen was paying him for, he thinks, even if she didn’t know it. He is a very good guide. He has earned every sol he’s ever been given. He doesn’t need a lotto ticket. This is what he’ll tell Ana about the money. A Canadian gave it to him for showing her a secret, magical bird.

  The stick nest is huge, probably five feet across, but it’s also nearly a hundred feet up in a tree, and for people unaccustomed to looking through binoculars, the scale isn’t clear. Only the eaglet sits in the nest, the parents out hunting or possibly perched somewhere nearby. Victor scans the trees but can’t find them. The eaglet humped in the middle of the nest looks dingy and distant. The five guests nod solemnly without removing the binoculars held to their
faces. Every chin tilts upward at the exact same angle. They look like shabby robots—part man, part machine—attention fixed on this clot of sticks they want to appreciate, knowing it’s the last and only time they’ll see anything like this. Victor can tell the magic isn’t working and passes around his own binoculars, higher-powered than the guests’.

  They are all trying very hard to feel the right thing, to see whatever Victor sees, but they just can’t do it. Victor’s binoculars, his guide knowledge, aren’t enough. Finally he takes his binoculars back. He raises them to the nest. But after the guests’ polite indifference, he can’t see it either. He sees the bird clearly enough. Slightly larger than the last time he came here alone but otherwise no different. What had been so special about it? Fuzzy gray beastlet. Fat little idiot. Chump, he thinks. Enjoy your jungle life, bird. Enjoy your breakfast vomit. Enjoy growing up and being shot by a logger or a construction worker.

  Goodbye, he thinks toward the eagle and the caimans and the invisible otters, testing it out in his mind. Goodbye to the friendly tarantula and the imaginary piranhas. He feels nothing. He wants to cheer and he wants to cry. None of these love him back the way he’s tried to love them. It’s not that kind of place. As the group returns to the lodge, he creates a story about the Interoceánico Highway slicing its way through the eagles’ habitat. He exaggerates their peril, or maybe it’s not an exaggeration. Maybe the highway will finally bring the transformation that everyone has been talking about his entire life, wiping all of this away. The group is wary; are they being lectured? Is the highway something they’re supposed to feel guilty about?