“What’s that in French?” George shouted.
“That is French! Sublime is a French word. Maybe it’s ‘Pont’? Sub-lime? Subleeem? Suble-me? George, what’s ‘lost’? How do you say ‘We are lost’?”
Sara called again to the little man, but it was no use. He was rushing away, flinging rocks at them as he went.
“George, hurry up!” she screamed.
“I’m looking!” he screamed back.
The little man made it to the cliffside and nimbly climbed up the face, turning back occasionally to shout and make obscene and angry gestures. Desperate, Sara tried to climb after him, but it was no use. The tiny man was pulling up onto a ledge that led around to a higher part of the canyon.
“Perdus! Perdus! Perdus!” cried George as he rushed over to the cliff, clutching the guidebook in front of him. “Nous sommes perdus!”
But as he ran, holding the book up in the air like a flag, he stubbed his toe on a rock, and the book dropped onto the dirt behind him. The man was gone, and the sun beat down on them as they sat there exhausted and miserable, more perdus than ever.
“How could you let him get away?” Sara sobbed.
“Me?” George yelled. “You were scaring the hell out of him.”
Neither of them could even look at the other. They were still panting from the climb, shaking with both fear and adrenaline. George wordlessly got out the compass and began his ritual of smacking it and spinning in circles, trying to get the needle to land somewhere. Sara looked for any sign of the little man but saw nothing but wide expanses of woods in front of them, with no paths or mountains.
“There’s got to be something somewhere, right?” George said after another several hours of walking. “I mean, at some point we’ll end up in Italy or Spain or something.”
Sara didn’t answer him — she’d fallen into a dark silence, which put George into his usual jittery-talking mood, which only further fueled her irritation.
“We’re going north, right?” he said.
She didn’t reply. She didn’t care which way they walked.
He peered at the cheap little compass. “It says we’re going north,” he said, “but then why is the sun setting behind us?” They hadn’t been able to see the sun behind the rocks for some time, but now it was visible, dipping below the clouds, big and red.
“How can the sun set in the south?” he asked, whacking at the compass.
It was then that she snapped. “How in the hell should I know?”
“Don’t blame me for this, okay? You’re the one who was so eager to do this today. If we had waited and gone with the group, this never would have happened. I’m doing the best I can here!”
Sara shot him a deadly look. “If we’d waited, you’d have come up with some excuse not to do it! I can’t wake up one more time to find you drunk on the couch hugging her ashes.”
“Well, excuse me if I’d rather go to bed with something that isn’t running to the gym every time I turn around. You’re always anywhere but next to me!”
He gave the compass another heavy whack, but the needle continued to declare they were heading north, when all logic and physics would dictate that they were heading east, away from the setting sun.
“My skin is peeling off,” Sara sobbed. “I’m starving. And we’re going to die out here.”
“We’re not going to die,” he insisted, though he was beginning to fear the same.
“Forget where the sun is, and think about what we do when it goes down,” she shouted. “We’ll be out in the middle of the woods, with no lights, and no food—”
He smacked the compass again even harder, but it didn’t budge.
“Would you cut that out?” she screeched, angrily clawing at his arm. “You’re going to break the damn thing, and then what?”
“It’s already broken!” he shouted. “That’s not south!”
“Who gives a shit?” she shouted back at him. They hadn’t fought like this in — ever. Normally they fought about reasonable things, like what movie to see or whether to have Christmas with his family or hers. One of them would inevitably give in (usually George), and they’d move on without animus. He didn’t know how to hold a grudge, and if she did, well, she didn’t when it came to him. But here there was no giving in, no moving on. They couldn’t escape this.
It seemed to her that as furious as she was with him now, it was, in a sense, nothing new. She’d felt this way for a long time now, since he’d stopped being the George she’d always known. She wondered if he knew how much he’d changed, and if he thought she was different now. They’d been together such a long time, and partly they had managed it because they had never demanded very much of each other. Love, faithfulness, kindness: these had all come easily. It had never been very hard to make things easy for each other. But these past few years they had begun to lean harder. When Irene got sick, they had begun needing more from each other. They’d both changed, little by little, and she hadn’t minded it because she’d assumed that when it was all over, they’d return to the way they’d been before.
But what if there was no way back to before? Now it was as if he couldn’t stand unless she were propping him up. Drinking, moping, miserable. And without him, what would become of her? Would she keep running and subtracting from herself and trying to beat her life into lists of manageable tasks? And the worst thing — what she was sickest of — wasn’t George or herself at all, but the vast expanse of years ahead of them. Time upon time during which they would surely go on changing and needing each other and being disappointed and losing things they loved and having no control, and she was terrified of it, absolutely terrified, so much that it made her want to throw up.
“Who cares?” she screamed. “Who cares?”
Then George shrieked and howled like a crazy person. He set his pack down on the ground and fumbled madly with the urn.
“Don’t! What are you doing?” she yelled.
Her words bounced off the trees and vanished into the deep crimson sunset. Orange light cascaded off the clouds, which for a moment looked like great plateaus above them. When she was a girl, she’d believed that was where dead people went, fluttering around on little wings with their harps and white robes.
George looked triumphant as he heaved the great iron urn up above his head — and nearly toppled under its weight.
“What are you doing? Put that back!” she screeched.
“Irene! Irene!” he was shouting. Streaks of tears dripped from his pinched eyes. The compass. “She’s a magnet!”
He was ready to fling the urn at the nearest tree. He hated it with all his might. He wanted to see it crack in half, to watch a gray cloud of soot and sediment mushroom out and disappear onto the forest floor and be gone forever. Lost. Perdu. But even as he stood poised at last to be rid of Irene — who had sent them on this insane journey, who had nearly gotten them killed, who he saw now had ruined the past three years of their lives — George couldn’t let go.
“Stop,” Sara said softly. She eased the urn away from him and set it on the ground and held her husband closely. He breathed in and then sobbed.
They sat silently and watched quietly as the sun went down and darkness fell. They felt the forest come alive around them. They each felt the other in their arms. They wished Irene were really there. They wanted to close their eyes and sleep and not worry about waking up in the morning. They watched as one by one, tiny pinpoints of stars emerged above them — some brilliant and some barely glowing — but in the darkness there were millions and millions.