There was also, still, the problem of Tallent, whom I could barely look at and around whom I was trying to become more fluent and less stuttery. He stayed up late in the evenings, writing in his notebook, and from my mat I’d watch him as the darkness filled the air like bats. He was careful never to use the flashlight unless we really needed to — to relieve ourselves, for example — and so even after the light disappeared completely he would continue to write, and I would lie there, as still as I could, listening to his pen skritching across the page; for some reason this was a beautiful image to me, Tallent writing without any illumination to guide his way, and when we were walking, I would sometimes close my eyes and turn it over in my mind, savoring it like a candy. On those long hikes, I also tried to make — and sometimes succeeded in making — interesting observations to him, but whenever I managed to do so, there was Esme, ready to offer her own opinion on whatever the subject was.
Esme was a difficulty of a different sort, of course. Aside from her bossiness and smugness and general possessiveness of Tallent (which, frustratingly, I was still unable to determine whether he noticed or not, and if so, whether he cared), there was the simple fact that she was unpleasant to regard. With each day her hair grew wilder and less manageable, until it floated like a penumbra above her puffed face, and her skin, as I’ve mentioned, had taken on a more or less permanent rash. This ought not to have bothered me, but it did.
There were more serious problems with Esme as well. Late one night I walked to the stream — the same one I mentioned earlier; its source seemed to be high in the mountains, where we were headed — and saw a crumpled blossom on the jungle floor. Against the dark, it was gloriously, impossibly white, the white of fresh paper, and at its center was a splash of deep burgundy. Here the flowers were waxy and indistinguishable as flowers: where there should have been stamens there were grossly suggestive plasticky lips upon which bugs alighted to rest; where there should be leaves there were aggressive, thrusting planes. But in that white flower I was reminded of the blooms I had grown up with: sugary peonies, as frilled and shirred as ballet skirts, gauzy clumps of asters. It seemed the loveliest thing I had seen for many days, and I stood there staring at it.
But as I continued stumbling over to the creek, I saw that the flower was no flower at all but rather a crumple of tissue, at its heart a smear of blood. I felt a sort of fury — first, rightly, that Esme should be so careless with disposing of her own trash, and second (and I admit less defensibly), that she should have spoiled for me an image so soothing.
Back on our mats, I poked her awake. “You have to be more careful,” I told her.
She was slit-eyed, wild-haired. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Your waste,” I said. “I nearly stepped in it.”
“Leave it alone, Perina,” she said, and flopped back over onto her other side.
“Esme!” I hissed. “Esme!” But she was already feigning sleep, and I dared not speak louder for fear of waking Tallent. “Esme!” I shook her shoulder, and under her shirt her flesh was repulsive, a quaking blancmange, its surface pimpled with perspiration.
The next morning we ate breakfast (more Spam, scooped out of the tin with the splintery slices of a hard yellow papayalike fruit that Fa’a had found and cut for us) in silence, with Tallent writing in his notebook and even Esme, for once, wordless. I did not look at her, but around her seemed the sickening scent of menstrual blood, a tinnily feminine smell so oppressive that it was a relief finally to begin the day’s climb and to find it vanishing slowly into the odors of the jungle. And from then on I was unable to look at her without thinking of oozing liquids, as thick and heavy as honey but rank and spoiled, seeping from her every hidden orifice.
After some days of walking (I am sorry, but the exact length of time eludes me now as it did then; it could have been five days or fifteen), we entered one afternoon a different sort of place. I cannot describe it any better than that, except to say that the very quality of the air seemed to change: one step behind us was the jungle we knew, sodden and creeping and thick with secrets, like something in a fairy tale, and in the next was someplace else. Suddenly the air was drier, the trees less assertive, the sun — the sun! — visible, actually casting shifting, fuzzy-edged parallelograms of light across the elaborately ferned and twigged forest floor. Above me I could see a crochet of spiderwebs stretched between two trees, glinting like a tangle of jeweled necklaces.
Fa’a said something quickly and excitedly to Tallent, who in turn told us that we were little more than a day’s walk from the place where Fa’a had seen his people. He had marked the location by scratching a large X with a stick in the bark of something called a manama tree. The manama’s bark grew in scales, Tallent said, and when pierced it wept a jammy sap that dried in a crust of hard blemishes: we would know it when we saw it.
But now, he announced, we would rest, and we did at once, all six of us dropping our bags on the ground. It was good, and odd, to lie there, to have survived the jungle (even though later I would have to admit that the jungle was without any real dangers, that then was really the time to feel frightened), to feel the sun creeping over our faces, to hear the first faint birdcalls; their music seemed like fairy song, so strange and beautiful was it, so otherworldly.
We slept then, all of us, even the guides, and when I woke and saw the others’ still bodies, I thought for a minute that they were dead and I was alone in this strange, sunlit place, surrounded by trees I did not know the names of and birds I could hear but could not see, and that no one would ever know I was here or remember I had ever existed or would ever find me. The sensation was fleeting, but what I would remember is how quickly, like a breath, I moved from despair to resignation, how well equipped the human mind is to readjust to its realities, to soothe oneself of one’s deepest fears. And then I felt proud, I suppose, of my very humanness, and briefly invincible, and sure that I would be greeted with nothing in the next day that I could not bear.
I walked in the direction of the stream, which had become perversely wider and more powerful the farther uphill we climbed, a clear, quick channel of cold water, its taste, oddly, more intensely sealike than it had been at the lower elevation. I drank from it and then sat at its bank, watching it move over pebbles, admiring the small orange flowers that trimmed its edge. And it was then, sleepy, daydreaming of nothing, that I saw something move from beneath one of the boulders that lay across the river: a dark form, no more than that, like the shadow a cloud casts when it scuds over the sea. But as it grew closer it began to take shape, and I saw it was a turtle, the ridge of its peaked and bony back breaking through the skin of the water, and knew at once what it was.
“Opa’ivu’eke! Opa’ivu’eke!” I was shouting, and I could hear the others running toward me.