The Ruins (20 page)

 The
moon had risen, finally, but it was tiny, a faint silver sliver hanging
just above the horizon. It didn't give off much light; she
could make out the shapes of things, but not their details. Jeff was
sitting cross-legged, looking oddly at peace—content, even.
Amy dropped to the ground beside him, reached out and took his hand, as
if she hoped by touching him she might claim some of his calm for
herself. She was making a conscious effort not to glance beneath the
lean-
to.
He's
asleep,
she told
herself.
He's
fine
.

 "What
are you doing?" she whispered.

 "Thinking,"
Jeff answered.

 "About?"

 "I'm
trying to remember things."

 Amy
felt a catch at this, a dropping sensation inside her chest, as if
she'd reached for a light switch in a darkened room and
encountered someone's face instead. She remembered visiting
her mother's father, an old man with a smoker's
cough, as he lay on his deathbed,
tubed
and monitored, clear fluids dripping into him, dark ones dripping out.
Amy was six, maybe seven; she didn't let go of her
mother's hand, not once, not even when she was prodded
forward to kiss the dying man good-bye on his
stubbled
cheek.

 "What
are you doing, Dad?" her mother had asked the old man when
they'd first arrived.

 And
he'd said, "Trying to remember things."

 It
was what people did, Amy had decided, as they waited for death; they
lay there struggling to remember the details of their lives, all the
events that had seemed so impossible to forget while they were being
suffered through, the things tasted and smelled and heard, the thoughts
that had felt like revelations, and now Jeff was doing this, too.
He'd given up. They weren't going to survive this
place; they were going to end just like
Henrich
,
shot full of arrows, the vines coiling and flowering around their
bones.

 But
no: it wasn't like that, not for Jeff. She
should've known better.

 "There's
a way to distill urine," he said. "You dig a hole.
You put the urine in it, in an open container. You cover the hole with
a waterproof tarp, weigh it down to hold it in place. In its center you
place a stone, so that the tarp droops there. And beneath that spot, in
the hole, you leave an empty cup. The sun heats the hole. The urine
evaporates, then condenses against the tarp. The water droplets slide
down to the center and drip into the cup. Does that sound right to
you?"

 Amy
just stared at him. She'd stopped following almost from the
start.

 It
didn't matter, though; she knew Jeff wasn't really
talking to her. He was thinking out loud, and might not even have heard
her if she'd bothered to answer. "I'm
pretty sure it's right," he said. "But I
feel like I'm forgetting something." He fell silent
again, considering this. She couldn't make out his face in
the dim light, but she could picture it easily enough.
There'd be a slight frown, a wrinkling of his forehead. His
eyes would appear to be squinting at her, intensely, but this would be
an illusion. He'd be looking through her, past her. "It doesn't have to be urine," he said
finally. "We could cut the vine, too. Place it in the hole.
The heat will suck the moisture right out of it."

 Amy
didn't know what to say to this. Ever since their arrival
here, there'd been a jitteriness to Jeff, a heightened
quality to his voice, his gestures. She'd assumed it was
merely a symptom of anxiety, the same fear, the same nervousness the
rest of them were feeling. But maybe it wasn't, she realized
now; maybe it was something more unexpected. Maybe it was excitement.
Amy had the sudden sense that Jeff had been preparing for something
like this all his life—some crisis, some
disaster—studying for it, training, reading his books,
memorizing his facts. Trailing along behind this thought was the
realization that if anyone was going to get them out of here, it would
be Jeff. She knew this ought to have made her feel more safe rather
than less, but it didn't. It unsettled her; she wanted to
pull away from him, creep back into the tent. He seemed happy; he
seemed glad to be here. And the possibility of this made her feel like
weeping.

 I'm
not going to drink the
urine,
she
wanted to
say.
Even
distilled, I'm not going to drink it
.

 Instead,
she lifted her head, sniffed the air. There was the faint, slightly
musky scent of wood burning, a campfire smell, and she felt her stomach
stir in response to it. She was hungry, she realized; they
hadn't eaten since the morning. "Is that
smoke?" she whispered.

 "They've
built fires," Jeff said. He lifted his arm, made a circular
motion, encompassing them within it. "All around the base of
the hill."

 "To
cook with?" she asked

 He
shook his head. "So they can see us. Make sure we
don't try to sneak past in the dark."

 Amy
took this in, along with all its implications, the sense of being under
siege. There were questions she knew she should be asking him, doors
opening off of this particular hallway, leading to rooms that needed to
be explored, but she didn't think she had the courage for his
answers. So she kept silent, her fear chasing off her hunger, her
stomach going tight and fluttery.

 "There'll
be dew in the morning," Jeff said. "We can tie rags
to our ankles, walk through the vines, and the
rags'll
pick up the moisture. We can squeeze it out of them. Not much, but
if—"

 "Stop
it," she said. She couldn't help herself. "Please, Jeff."

 He
fell silent, staring at her through the darkness.

 "You
told us the Greeks will come," she said.

 He
hesitated, as if choosing between different possible responses. Then,
very quietly, he said, "That's right."

 "So
it doesn't matter."

 "I
guess not."

 "And
it'll rain, too. It always rains."

 Jeff
nodded, without saying anything. He was humoring her, Amy knew. And
that was okay; she wanted him to humor her, wanted him to tell her it
was all right, that they'd be rescued tomorrow, that
they'd never have to dig a hole to distill their urine, never
have to tie rags to their ankles and shuffle up and down the hillside
collecting dew. A mouthful of dew, squeezed from dirty
rags—how could they possibly have reached the point where
this was a topic of conversation?

 They
sat in silence, still holding hands, her right clasped in his left. She
remembered walking out of a movie once, their second date, how Jeff had
reached to slide his arm through hers. It had been raining;
they'd shared an umbrella, pressing close together as they
walked. He was shier than she would've guessed; even that
evening, standing so near, the rain spattering against the taut fabric
only inches above their heads, he hadn't dared to kiss her
good night. This was still to come, another week or so in the future,
and it was nice that way; it gave weight to the other things, the
smaller gestures, his arm hooking hers as they stepped out from beneath
the brightly lighted marquee onto the rain-slick streets. She almost
spoke of it now, but then stopped herself, worried he might not have
any memory of the moment, that what had felt so touching to her, so
joyous, had been an idle gesture on his part, a response to the
inclement weather rather than a timid advance toward her heart.

 A
wind came up, briefly, and for a moment Amy felt almost chilly. But
then it stopped, and the heat returned. She was sweating;
she'd been sweating since she'd stepped off the
bus, so many hours ago now, a different epoch altogether. Pablo shifted
his head, muttered something, then fell silent. It took effort not to
look at him; she had to shut her eyes.

 "You
should be sleeping," Jeff said.

 "I
can't."

 "You're
going to need it."

 "I
said I can't." Amy knew she sounded angry,
peevish—she was doing it again, complaining, ruining
everything, spoiling this moment of quiet they'd managed to
forge together, this false sense of peace—and she wished she
could take back the words, soften them somehow, then lie down with her
head in Jeff's lap so that he might soothe her into sleep.
Her left hand was sticky with urine. She lifted it to her nose,
sniffed. Then she opened her eyes and, without meaning to, looked at
Pablo. They'd taken the sleeping bag off him. He was lying on
his back beneath the little lean-to, his arms folded across his chest.
His eyes were
closed.
Sleeping
,
she reassured
herself.
Resting
.
You couldn't see the damage—it was inside him, his
shattered vertebrae, his crushed spinal cord—but it was easy
enough to imagine. He looked shrunken, aged. He looked withered and
diminished. Amy couldn't understand how this transformation
could have happened so rapidly. She remembered him standing beside the
hole, holding that imaginary phone to his ear, waving for them to
approach; it seemed impossible that this ragged figure could belong to
the same person. His pants were gone; he was naked from the waist down,
and his legs looked wrong, askew somehow, as if he'd been
carelessly dropped here. Amy could see his penis, nearly hidden in the
darkly shadowed growth of his pubic hair. She looked away.

 "You
took off his pants," she said.

 "We
cut them off."

 Amy
pictured the two of them, Jeff and Mathias, leaning over the backboard
with the knife, one of them cutting, the other holding
Pablo's legs still. But no: Pablo's legs
wouldn't have needed to be held still, of
course—that was the whole point. Mathias was like Jeff, Amy
supposed: head down, eyes focused, a survivor. His brother was dead,
but he was far too disciplined to grieve. He would've been
the one to wield the knife, she decided, while Jeff crouched beside
him, setting the strips of denim aside, already imagining how he could
use them, the ones that weren't too soiled, how they could
tie them to their ankles in the morning and gather the dew to drink.
She knew that if she were Mathias, she'd still be at the
bottom of the hill, clutching her brother's rotting body,
sobbing, screaming. And what good would this do any of them?

 "We
have to be able to keep him clean," Jeff said. "That's how it will happen, I think. If it
does."

 There
was that breeze again, chilling her. Amy shivered. She was breathing
through her mouth, trying not to smell the fires burning at the base of
the hill. "If what does?" she asked.

 "If
he dies here. It'll be an infection, I'm guessing.
Septicemia, maybe—something like that. There's
nothing, really, we can do to stop it."

 Amy
shifted slightly, her hand slipping free of Jeff's grasp. You
weren't supposed to speak the words, but he'd gone
and done it anyway, so casually, a man flicking his hand at a
fly.
If
he dies here
. Amy felt the need to say something, to assert
some other reality—more benign, more hopeful. The Greeks were
going to arrive in the morning, she wanted to tell him. By this time
tomorrow, they'd all be saved. No one was going to have to
drink any urine, any dew. And Pablo wasn't going to die. But
she remained silent, and she knew why, too. She was afraid Jeff might
contradict her.

 Jeff
yawned, stretching, his arms rising over his head.

 "Are
you tired?" she asked.

 He
made a vague gesture in the darkness.

 Amy
waved toward the tent. "Why don't you go to sleep?
I can sit with him. I don't mind."

 Jeff
glanced at his watch, pushing a button to make it glow, briefly. Pale
green: if she'd blinked, she would've missed it. He
didn't speak.

 "How
much longer do you have?" she asked.

 "Forty
minutes."

 "I'll
add it to mine. I can't sleep anyway."

 "That's
all right."

 "Seriously,"
she persisted. "Why should we both be up?"

 He
looked at his watch again, that green luminescence; she could almost
see his face in its glow, the jut of his chin. He turned toward her. "I'm thinking of going down the hill," he
said.

 Amy
knew what he was saying, but she didn't allow herself to
admit it. "Why?"

 He
waved beyond her, past the tent. "There's a spot
where the fires are a little farther apart. It might be possible to
sneak by."

 She
pictured Mathias's brother, the arrows in his
body.
No
,
she
thought.
Don't
.
But she didn't speak. She wanted to believe that he could do
it, that he could move, ghostlike, across the clearing, creeping
slowly, silently, invisibly past the Mayans standing guard there. Then
into the jungle, through the trees—running.

 "I
figure they're watching the trails. If I make my way straight
down through the vines…" He fell silent, waiting
for Amy's reaction.

 "You
have to be careful," she said. It was the best she could do.

 "I'm
just
gonna
check it
out. I'll only try it if it seems clear."

 She
nodded, not certain if he could see her. He stood up, then bent to tie
one of his shoelaces.

 "If
I don't come back," he said. "You'll know where I am."

 Running,
he meant. Heading for help. But what she pictured was
Henrich's
corpse
again, the bones showing through on his face. "Okay," she said,
thinking,
No
.
Thinking,
Don't
.
Thinking,
Stop
.

 Then
she sat there, next to Pablo, and watched as he walked away, without
another word, vanishing into the darkness.