Life Among the Terranauts Page 16

  Their mother notices her children glistening. It should be beautiful, and it is, her long-limbed, fuzzy children, but the emotion that lingers longest is sympathy at how many hours of life her daughter is destined to spend shaving or waxing. Aileen would never force her, plans to sit her down when she asks for a razor and say, “You know you’re beautiful just the way you are, honey.” Then she’ll hand over the shaving gel. The world is the way the world is, and there’s no point wishing otherwise.

  The guide—Victor, he said his name was—escorts the family to adjoining rooms, a porter following with the luggage. All the rooms in the lodge are doubles, and of course Aileen reserved two when her husband was scheduled to come. Then he couldn’t get away from work, or, more properly, he didn’t want to. There was no one in the Bogotá office who would brave telling Julian what he should or shouldn’t do.

  Might it be possible to move one of the beds into her children’s room, she asks Victor, and make one triple room? There’d been a last-minute illness, no time to change the booking. Her son’s face furrows. His father is ill? “It’s not about the money,” Aileen says. “I can pay for the original reservation.” She suspects this is the wrong thing to say—the guide seemed to understand the request when he assumed it was about money. But she doesn’t want to try to explain how lonely she’ll feel listening to her children giggle together on the other side of the wall.

  “It is not possible,” Victor says and shows her how the twin beds are built into the walls, how the individual mosquito nets are rigged from the towering ceiling, a cathedral of dark wood and thatch. Anchored to the beams are miles of fishing line, crisscrossing under the eaves. “To keep birds from nesting?” Aileen asks.

  “Bats,” Victor says in a tone that suggests the lodge would prefer guests not notice this particular feature. Better they notice the in-room hammocks, the neat rows of biodegradable soaps and shampoos in the low-flow bathroom. This is a serious lodge, management insists: educational, conservation-minded. No steamy jungle idylls or boozy colonial fantasies.

  If there were jaguars, Victor would be forbidden to take guests anywhere near them. This season the Mammal Walk trail has been rerouted to avoid disturbing a rare nesting pair of harpy eagles. Against orders, Victor sneaks off alone sometimes to see them. Week after week the eaglet is no more than a fuzzy gray lump, a moldy potato, even through his most powerful binoculars. He’s not sure why he keeps visiting. Maybe he is waiting to see something change, although he doesn’t know what.

  Victor leaves Aileen to check on the young couple. The porter has already dumped their luggage, barely inside their bedroom doorway, probably assuming, based on the scruffy backpacks, that they won’t tip. Victor looks at their cheap T-shirts and flip-flops and worries the porter is correct. The girl is already sunburned; she’s red-haired and so pale Victor wonders why she hasn’t learned to be more careful. Her boyfriend is brown-skinned, with lank, shaggy black hair. Their children will look weird, Victor thinks, if these two stay together.

  He takes the young couple on an orientation tour that finishes in the dining room, where there are eggs and fruit salad every morning. Bananas are available all day, suspended in a special cage to keep insects off. Guests usually joke that it looks like the bananas are in jail: “What are they in for? How much time are they serving?”

  “Ha-ha,” Victor always says. “Good one.”

  The young couple say nothing about the bananas, and the porter’s assumption turns out to have been wrong, because as soon as Victor points them back toward their bedroom, the boy tries to give him money. It’s all change, pressed hard into Victor’s palm with a nervous pressure.

  “You don’t have to give this now,” Victor says carefully. “You’ll see a lot more of me over the next few days.”

  “Take it, please.”

  “Shall I give it to the porter?” Victor asks. “For taking your bags to your room?”

  “Uh, sure. Okay?” The boy looks at his girlfriend, who shrugs.

  Victor likes that she is not going to bother pretending to know things she doesn’t. He explains the usual tipping protocol. He doesn’t even inflate the numbers. He is a professional. The guestbook is full of compliments about him personally, as if he were an amenity like the all-day bananas. Impressive vegetarian options. Victor spoke perfect English! And Very homey decor. Victor is like a Wikipedia of the jungle! The less popular guides make fun of him, call him Wiki. At night, in the staff dorm, they tease him about the eagle nest, how he spends his rare free hours in the jungle or studying on his bunk, poring over wildlife guides borrowed from the lodge library. Between guest changeovers in Puerto Maldonado, his girlfriend, Ana, tries to replace the books in his backpack with guides to Incan terracing or the Nazca lines, the corners of their country they’ve never had the chance to see. The lodge’s parent company owns other properties—mountain aeries near Machu Picchu, seaside resorts near Lima. On his one weekly night in town, they whisper in the bedroom she shares with her sister in her parents’ apartment. Victor always feels tense and hurried, anxious about her parents knocking or her sister coming home early from her late shift at the family store downstairs. But before they undress, Ana insists on quizzing him: the dates of the last Incan emperor’s reign or what to do in case of altitude sickness or angry llamas. She quizzes him on when, exactly, he’ll demand a transfer. He asks her what is so very awful about the place they live.

  “You don’t even live here,” she says. “You live in the jungle six days a week. You live like an animal.”

  Maybe, Victor thinks, he admires the eagles’ silence. They sleep and hunt and vomit food into their baby’s mouth. If that were all that was required of him, he could be a good husband. A good father to the baby Ana has told him is coming.

  After he left her apartment last night, he stopped at the family store and pulled an Inca Kola from the cooler. Ana’s sister usually charged him full price, but that night she pushed both the bottle and his money back across the counter toward him. “She finally told you?” she said.

  “Finally?” Victor said, and he wondered how long Ana’s sister had known.

  She added a Cua Cua bar from the display near the register, then a lotto ticket.

  “Because I’m on such a good run tonight,” Victor tried to joke. “Lucky me.”

  “You are lucky. You know you are.”

  This was true, although she didn’t mean the baby. She didn’t mean Ana either, although her sister was one of the prettiest girls in Puerto Maldonado. The sister meant that Victor was himself a winning lotto ticket, albeit for one of the cheap games—El Reventón, not La Tinka. No millionaire, but he’s got his English, his memory for facts, his bright, reassuring smile, even the way the indignities of tourist work slide right off him. Being angry at the wealth of strangers was like being angry at the rain, his first supervisor told him. It came whether you liked it or not, and it made things grow. It grew the jungle, grew the lodge, grew the jobs. Better it flow than stop.

  Ana’s sister broke the chocolate bar in half, took a bite, and spoke with her mouth full. “If the lodge were as good as you could do, fine. But it’s not.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Don’t settle. That’s all she wants for the two of you. The three of you.”

  “Why am I having this conversation with you instead of her?” Victor still held his half of the candy bar, the waxy coating already melting onto his fingers.

  “Because she’s scared to push you any harder. She’s scared you’ll meet some rich gringa and fuck your way to a green card.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” He stuffed the Cua Cua bar in his mouth and scratched at the lotto card with his short nails, grubby with chocolate. “See? Nothing. Not as lucky as you think.”

  In their room before dinner, Lizzie tests the hammock. She insists there’s space for Walt, but he doesn’t see how, not without the fabric pushing them together like two rocks at the bottom of a bag.

  “Do y
ou think he means ten per person per day,” Lizzie asks, “or ten for the two of us?”

  Walt has no idea, but since it’s the difference between a hundred dollars he doesn’t have and fifty he still doesn’t have, he supposes they should try to find out. But he doesn’t know how to ask. He never has the right words. He didn’t know how to convince Lizzie not to come on this trip in the first place or what to tell her father when he steamrolled Walt’s original itinerary, insisting on hotels with private rooms over co-ed hostel dorms. He canceled their bus tickets to Puerto Maldonado and booked flights, replaced their chosen lodge with this one. He wanted to feel like Lizzie was safe, he told her—as if all the airplanes in the world could ensure that. He put some money toward the trip, even wanted to be thanked for his largesse, but it didn’t cover all the charges he’d cowed them into accepting.

  Walt’s original plan had been several weeks of scrappy solo adventures before his study-abroad program started in Lima. He’d wanted a chance to test his courage, his Spanish, to see whether and how well he could convince people that he truly belonged. There weren’t many international adoptions out of Peru even today, much less when he’d been adopted; someone at his parents’ church had gone to college with someone who managed an NGO in Lima, and somehow he’d ended up in western Michigan. The picture books his parents read to him—God Found Us You; I Don’t Have Your Eyes; I Like Myself!—always claimed happy endings all around. But even as a child, he’d felt the displacement, the misdirection of an author urging his attention toward the grassy lawn and the fridge full of milk and Coca-Cola, away from wherever he’d come from, whoever had once cared for him. Like a magician performing a card trick, his parents waved their love in front of him, trying to make it all he could see. It was a sincere love, fierce and depthless as any parents’. But it didn’t make him look any more like the other kids in town, the strapping blond descendants of Dutch immigrants. The high-school marching band, where Walt and Lizzie had trooped beside each other in the clarinet section, performed in wooden shoes.

  In Cuzco, Walt kept staring at the faces on the street, daydreams pouring out of him. He stared too much, which made him more likely to get mugged than discover a long-lost sibling, but he couldn’t stop. He’d never been anywhere with so many faces looking something, anything, like his own. And then there was Lizzie, trotting along beside him, her frizzy red hair waving like a flag, like a fistful of money.

  “You want me to wear a hat the whole trip?” she said, after his unease became obvious. “How about a burka?”

  “Wrong country,” Walt said. “Wrong continent.”

  “I was making a joke.”

  “Were you?”

  “Why are you being so mean to me? You’ve been mean since the airport.”

  She’d written off the entire semester at Grand Rapids Community College to take this trip, which she spoke of as if it were an act of God rather than tickets she’d purchased in full possession of a calendar. Lizzie and Walt had started at Grand Valley State University together; Walt was still on track to graduate next year, but Lizzie had dropped out after one semester. There was an assortment of colleges within an hour’s drive of their hometown, and Lizzie had sampled several, driving back to Walt’s dorm or apartment on the weekends and collecting transcripts that were an expensive bouquet of Fs and Ds. Whether she fails on purpose or because she can’t do any better, Walt isn’t sure. Is she that lazy or that stupid, or both, or neither? Walt doesn’t consider himself an ambitious person, but he’s got more ambition than Lizzie. A rock has more ambition than Lizzie.

  After dinner, Aileen’s son conks out immediately, exhausted from the long travel day, but her daughter insists she wants to read, charmed by the novelty of the bedside candle. Aileen waits ten minutes, then creeps back in to blow out the candle, slide the book out from under her daughter’s slack hand.

  In her own room, she finishes unpacking by lantern light, trying not to creak the floorboards. Her children wake easily. They’ve always lived in compounds, houses with walled gardens, in luxury apartments so far above the street they contain a plush, impervious silence, whatever language spoken in that year’s city dissipating in the air below before it could reach them. It was often unclear when Julian announced a new move whether it was forced or requested, lateral or vertical, good professional strategy or restlessness. But as Julian pointed out—sometimes subtly, sometimes not—the money kept coming. A creek, a river, a flood.

  In her suitcase Aileen finds a folded piece of notebook paper with his handwriting. She assumes it will be a love note or an apology note or at least a thinking-of-you-and-the-kids-sorry-I’m-not-coming note. Instead it’s a barely legible sentence about socks and being prepared for anything. It makes no sense until she unpacks her socks and feels how crackling and heavy they are, how Julian has stuffed them with an insane, anxiety-producing amount of cash. She knows he’s trying to be helpful, probably trying to apologize, but she’s always been a cautious packer, overprepared with currencies and cards. Now she’s a walking jungle ATM. A piñata. She stuffs folded bills around the room, hoping that the hiding places that seem convincing in the dark won’t look ridiculous by daylight.

  The first day of wildlife excursions involves very little wildlife. The lodge front-loads more dependable attractions like the ethnobotany trail, the decommissioned Brazil-nut farm, the farmer across the river, toothless and tobacco-stained. As the guides usher their small groups into motorized canoes, Victor rings a bell on the lodge dock, a signal to the old man to rouse himself, put out his cigarette, and creep from under his rusted metal roof. The farm tour is purely horticultural, but the Q&A gets personal. “He lives here alone?” the guests want to know. Yes; his wife ran off after the last of the twelve children left the jungle. “Twelve!” the guests invariably exclaim. The old man grins, gestures to the scraggly fruit trees and the slow brown river, says, “Not much else to do.” Some of the guests have enough Spanish to understand this without Victor’s translation, and the laughter comes in two waves. Victor feels like he and the farmer have a comedy act together, an over-rehearsed skit that’s bound to go stale. He realizes that no one, himself included, has ever inquired where exactly the children went, so he asks.

  “To the city,” the farmer says, clearly startled by Victor’s change in routine.

  “To Puerto Maldonado? Or farther?”

  “Both,” the farmer says, an expression flickering across his weathered face that Victor’s never seen before or hasn’t wanted to notice. “Looking for jobs.”

  “Did they find them?”

  Now the other guides are uncomfortable, and so are a few of the guests. The Wikipedia of the jungle is off his game.

  “Not here,” the farmer says, forcing a laugh, gesturing at the endless brown and green around them. The horizon is broken only by a small smudge of smoke, a distant logging operation. “The younger ones said they might come back when the road is finished.” He means the Interoceánico Highway, which is supposed to skim across South America like a pizza cutter, bringing trucks in from Brazil. People have been waiting for it since Victor was a boy. It’s projected to cross the Madre de Dios River at Puerto Maldonado. The bridge site is currently nothing more than a pile of dirt, concrete, and orange plastic construction mesh.

  Victor gives him cigarettes at the end of every visit. Usually the farmer palms them so gracefully the guests never even notice. Today he grabs Victor’s wrist and twists his hand open. “You want to ask so many questions, you bring a second pack.”

  Walt and Lizzie notice and ask on the way back to the canoes if they should tip the farmer. Victor tells them no.

  Aileen’s heart breaks a little for the crusty old man. She thinks of her bedroom full of money. Should she try to give it to him? How would she even offer? I’m sorry about your children, she might say. I worry about mine leaving. I worry about my life being too small without them. Maudlin—she shakes herself; she’s being maudlin. What is the farmer supposed to say to her pi
ty, her desire to pretend their lives are anything alike?

  Dinner is a hill of purple potatoes served with steaks brought in from who knows how far away or, maybe worse, how near. Which acres of rain forest were torched for pasture? Lizzie pays attention—see? She does!—to the environmental articles Walt posts online. At dinner she can feel his anger at the white-haired retirees in khaki vests, at the families with binoculars and wildlife guides, at the posh, pretty mother and children they’re sharing every meal with. She feels as out of place as he does, but that’s no reason to stew about money, about her father, about the stupid twin beds when he won’t even get in the same hammock with her. At least his anger is better than his endless, pointless, self-lacerating guilt. He thinks he hides it from Lizzie and his parents, but she sees it in every link he posts online, in the way he pretends he picked Peru purely for the course offerings.

  “Maybe you should go with him,” his parents suggested, having contacted her without telling their son. “He won’t talk to us, and he certainly won’t want us to come, but we worry about him going there alone.” He doesn’t talk to me either, Lizzie tried to tell them. Not anymore. Dropping hints about accompanying him hadn’t worked. She had to elbow her way into this trip, and she’s pretty sure now it was a mistake.

  “This is not the real Peru,” Walt said as they were heading toward the dining room along the romantically lantern-lit elevated wooden walkway. But how would he know what was the real Peru and what wasn’t? This was the problem, the whole reason for his trip, and to say it straight out seemed cruel.

  Lizzie tries hard never to say anything cruel. Flow like water, her yoga teacher tells her, and after every class Lizzie contemplates asking the sinewy instructor how she should respond to her boyfriend who says she’s flowed all the way to corpse pose. Maybe she should ask the instructor what it means that yoga is the only class she’s attended in three years that interests her in any way. The first few weeks of every semester, she wrestles herself into the little chairs with attached desks, pinches herself awake, scrawls some notes. Then she can’t bear it anymore, feels like she’s earned a few days off, stays home and gets high and binge-watches an entire TV series, and by the time she returns to class, the professor says she’s burned through her allowable absences. This is so obviously unreasonable to Lizzie that she finds it infuriating. How can she predict the future? How can she promise to be in the exact same place at the exact same time for weeks, vow that Early Modern Europe 1450–1789 will be her absolute highest priority? She can’t tell if the professors are presenting her with a challenge she is supposed to rise to meet or if they’re trying to get rid of her.