As I watched him depart, hallucinations swirling through my brain like
furious fireworks, I had a bizarre thought. In an ancient rainforest
all things are still possible. The old fairy tales we grew up with
mostly took place in a deep wood where evil could lurk unfettered.
Today, though, the earth's forests no longer symbolize the unknowable
dark within us. Nowadays, the ogres of our nightmares descend from
outer space or even from our inner selves, places we can't physically
know or subdue. Here, though, at this very moment, Steve and Sarah and
I were marooned in a thousand-year-old forest where horror still lived.
I got off the bed and steadied myself, breathing deeply, forcing my
brain to clear. Steve was wearing a shift, but his clothes were hanging
from a hook on the door. For a long moment I just stared at the bruises
on his face.
"God, baby, what did he do to you?"
No answer.
"Come on, love. Please wake up."
He didn't move, but his breathing was normal, not labored. I
immediately decided I'd slap him around if I had to, anything to get
him going and able to walk.
"Honey, wake up. Please." I pulled his feet out of the bed and slid
them around and onto the linoleum floor. I didn't know what kind of
sedative he'd been injected with, but if I had to shake him out of it,
fine. This was no time for half measures. "Come _on_."
I pulled him to his feet and dragged him across the floor to the
slatted window at the rear of the room, where the predawn sounds of the
forest beyond filled the air, mingled with the rain. What I needed was
a gallon of black coffee, but the wet breeze would have to do.
It took ten minutes of working on him, with me barely able to hold a
grasp on my own reality, but then his eyelids began to flutter. I kept
talking to him, pleading and badgering, and when he finally started
coming around, I began to walk him back and forth in front of the
window.
Steve, I thought, I'm so sorry, so terribly sorry I dragged you into
this.
"Can I please lie down?" His timorous voice startled me, but it gave me
a burst of hope. Come _on_.
"Baby, just walk a little more. Try to get the blood flowing and flush
the damned chemicals out of your brain."
"Morgy, are you okay?" His eyes had finally started to focus. And the
first thing he asked about was _me_. I impulsively hugged him.
"I'm going to be." I pulled back and examined him. "You know where you
are?"
He grinned with only half his face, and I could tell even that hurt.
Then he stared around the room.
"Tell you one thing," he said, "this ain't Kansas anymore. Last thing I
remember is, Alan and I were setting down. Then out of nowhere, your
Colonel Ramos and about twenty kid soldiers with AK-47's were all over
us." He groaned. "They took me and then he told Dupre to get back in
the chopper and disappear. I think that son of a bitch tipped Ramos off
we were coming. Then Ramos worked me over and gave me an injection.
About five minutes later I passed out. It's the last thing I remember."
Ramos. Was he going to kill us both, now that Alex Goddard had gotten
everything he wanted? I thought about it and decided this was not the
moment to share that possibility with Steve. Instead I turned him
around and lifted up his head.
"Are you really awake?" I loved this poor, beat-up man. More than
anything, I just wanted to hold him.
"I'm not . . . but I'd damned well better be." He tried unsteadily, to
straighten up. "Morgy, before he put me away, that Ramos bastard was
talking about me, and you, in the past tense. Like we'd already been
'disappeared.' He didn't know I speak Spanish. What the hell's going
on?"
I wasn't sure how to tell him. But I was getting that super energy God
gives you when you realize life is no longer a game. We had to get
focused.
"Baby, where's your passport?" I asked.
He looked around then pointed to his battered camera bag in the corner.
"It's in there. Or was. Central America. Never leave home without it."
He grimaced then lightly pushed me away and stood by himself. "Jesus,
do you know what they're doing? You were right all along. They're
selling kids in the States. That Ramos prick is running the operation,
not to mention Alex Goddard's slice of the action. And somebody at the
American embassy here is handling all the paperwork, so they can grease
everything through the INS. But I still don't understand how it is
we're--"
"Honey, I know exactly what's happening." I'd long since figured out
that Alex Goddard and Colonel Ramos were working hand in glove. But I
still couldn't bring myself to tell him how he and I were going to be
used. It was just too sick. "Listen, not long from now I think I'm
supposed to be taken down there to the village for some kind of rite,
as part of this whole disgusting operation, and then after that he's
going to use . . . You don't want to hear. We've--"
"You know, Ramos and a bunch of G-2 thugs are here to take away a batch
of little kids," he rambled on, not seeming to hear anything I was
saying. He was off in his own world, trying to sort out things in his
head. "But what I can't figure is, how can they just take children from
here and nobody tries to stop them? Are these _indigena_ so
terrified--?"
"Listen, please." Now my hallucinations were returning in spite of all
I could do, trails of light that glimmered off all the objects in the
room, and I didn't know how much longer I'd be coherent. I'd have to
talk fast. "We've got to get Sarah before daylight. She's down in the
village. I tried to get her out of there yesterday, but--"
"Is she okay?" He stared at me and his eyes cleared for a moment. "I
mean, is she able to--?"
"No, she's not okay. She's hallucinating worse than ever. I'm sure he's
giving her more drugs. Really heavy stuff."
"So how--?"
"Hopefully, we're going right this minute. There's a river. But if that
doesn't work out, there's something I can do to buy us a month's time.
Alex Goddard's got a laboratory here, just down the hall, in back of
his office. It's the evil center of this place. So if I can get in
there and dump all his petri dishes, his in-vitro culture mediums . . .
Baby, it's all so disgusting. But I'm going to take care of it."
I was starting to have real trouble just stringing words together into
sentences. My hallucinations were still growing, the loud whispers of
light, but I did manage to tell him how I thought we could get Sarah
and elude the Army, if we did it before sunup, though my plan probably
came out pretty jumbled. Yet I felt that if we did it together, we
could take care of each other. . . .
Then, with my remaining strength, I launched into action.
"Let me check the hall. I just want to shut down his lab. Call it . . .
call it insurance. Five minutes, and then we'll be out of here."
It also would be a kind of justice, to even the score for what he'd
done to Sarah and to me.
I leaned Steve back against the wall, then walked slowly across the
tile floor to the door and tested it. Surprise, surprise, it was
locked. I again tried the knob, an old one, then again, but it wouldn't
budge, just wiggled slightly. He'd locked us in.
Now what?
Then I remembered the time Steve and I were in a similar situation.
When we got locked in my room at the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, he'd
just taken his Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the knob, then clicked it
open. He'd made it look like a piece of cake, but he had a way of doing
that.
He was barely conscious, so this time I'd have to do it myself. I
glanced around at his bag.
"Is your Swiss still in there?"
"I think . . ." His mind seemed to be wandering. Then he gave a weak
thumbs-up.
I went over and zipped it open. Be there, I prayed. We really could use
a break.
I rummaged through telephoto lenses and film canisters and underwear.
Then I found it, zipped inside a water-repellent baggie and stuck in a
side pouch.
I snapped it open and went to work, him watching me, his head nodding
as he struggled to stay conscious.
The main difference between this time and Haiti was, here I didn't know
what was on the other side and I was having hallucinations of
multicolored snakes.
"You're doing great," he said finally, seeming to come a bit more alive.
And I was. Out with the screws, off with the knob, in with the small
blade, and click. Maybe we just think men's mechanical skills are
genetically hard-wired. Maybe it's all a secret plot to elicit awe.