The Ruins - Страница 26

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, shewanted 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?