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  Larry had no choice but to nod in agreement. He could feel the paper snag against the inside fabric of his shirt as he breathed. Whatever was on it, it was, at the least, an obscure but irrefutable reminder that the tense intimacy between James and Silvio somehow included him as well.

  As James and Silvio resumed their shouted conversation, Larry sat forward again, fixing the entire scene in a heroic tableau—two men, each holding the other by the shoulders, suddenly silent as their eyes met. For a moment, in the night sky, the clouds parted to reveal the infinite darkness beyond the city lights. The leaves stilled, the street noise blurred and slowed, and the air became strangely heavy. Then, just as quickly, the sky snapped shut again and everything flew back into its place. The momentary silence was absorbed into the walls, and the music of distant radios, eager as the tide, rushed in to fill the space. The leaves reassembled themselves in their proper positions, and were graceful on the vines. Silvio and James, who seemed to have been frozen in mid-sentence, as though under a spell, suddenly came alive and began shouting again, alternately chastising and punching each other.

  Larry jumped to his feet, standing awkwardly. At last, James noticed him and came up, drawing him into the house and up the stairs. As Larry looked back over his shoulder, he saw Silvio turn to follow them with a tense, barely suppressed smile.

  IV

  JORGE WAS SHAVING when the phone rang. That was the joke between them, that Silvio always knew from two thousand kilometers away to catch him when his face was covered with foam. He picked up the receiver in one hand and held it away from his face while he continued with the razor with the other.

  “So guess who’s been found?” Silvio’s voice boomed through the space between the receiver and Jorge’s ear.

  Jorge dropped the razor, which nicked his cheek as it fell. He looked down at the two rivulets, of clear and bloody water, which merged as they approached the drain.

  “You there?”

  “I’m here,” said Jorge, steadying his voice and reaching for a towel. “What’s the story?”

  “Do you think he’d tell me the story? Does James L. Ardmore ever tell me the story?” Jorge knew Silvio well enough to visualize his gestures, and Silvio knew Jorge well enough to know what his silences meant. “He’s with Larry; you should see the kid! Tall, with the sideburns and everything.”

  “Should I fly down?”

  “No, no, that’s the thing; I’m going to put them on a plane tomorrow. I told him when I saw him that I’d already talked to you and worked it all out. I’m sending them commercial until they get to you.”

  “And then what?” asked Jorge, walking to the window as though to scan the sky for their arrival.

  “And then it’s up to you, to refuse to take them where they want to go!”

  “Me? How’s that my job?” Jorge turned from the window and walked back to the bathroom, laying the receiver down in the sink so the cord couldn’t pull it away. He could hear Silvio swearing at him as he finished shaving and wiped his face on a towel. He could imagine him pacing, waving his free hand wildly, like a conductor at the climax of a symphony.

  At last, he picked up the receiver again.

  Silvio stopped swearing and was silent for a minute. “We both know he has no intention whatever of following through with any assignment I give him, and we both know where he’s going to ask you to take him. So I’m saying, don’t do it.” A crackling sound competed with his voice, but Silvio simply turned up the volume. “I’m not saying don’t do it for me because you love me,” he shouted. “I’m saying don’t do it for James because you love James. You’ll see,” Silvio went on, “he’s much changed.”

  “Ate. Ciao,” said Jorge, and replaced the receiver on the cradle with a sigh, but gently, as though it were as fragile as he knew himself to be.

  V

  LARRY’S SURROUNDINGS WERE gradually becoming more manageable, as though drawn to an increasingly commensurate scale. Each plane, airport, and city had been smaller than the last, giving him the sense of looking at a map being magnified again and again, on which the small red dot marking “You are here” was slowly becoming visible. In the airport in Rio, everything had been in motion—people, planes, luggage, seemingly the walls themselves. On the plane, he and James were barely settled in their seats before James slid a manila folder out of the side pocket of his travel bag and began ripping its contents into pieces smaller than words.

  “Bogus. It’s bogus,” he said, keeping to the task. When he finished, he took the airsickness bag out of his seat pocket and held it open. Larry thought for a minute that James meant it to be for him, but then saw that he was to pour the scraps into it. When the stewardess came by with the drinks, James tossed the bag on top of her cart.

  “What was that all about?” asked Larry.

  “That,” said James, “was our alleged assignment from Silvio. He’s trying to distract us, hoping we’ll give up on Pahquel. But I called Maria in Rio yesterday, just to be sure. Like I thought, she said there’s no reason at all to follow through on that old chestnut. It’s something Silvio dug out of the back of a drawer just for us.”

  “Silvio’s taking care of you,” said Larry.

  “We can take care of ourselves,” said James.

  Larry was always secretly relieved to hear how automatically James included him. Like most people who recede from conversations, he was unusually sensitive to signs of having been forgotten, and was more dependent than he knew, or could admit, upon reassurances that his place on the sidelines was secure. At the airport in Belem, while they waited for their plane to Santarem, he was content to retrieve their bags and watch over them for what turned out to be hours, his passivity thereby imbued with purpose, while James held court with various old friends he had called to meet him at the airport bar. The sun was setting by the time Larry looked up from his book to see James walking towards him with a dark-skinned older man.

  “This is Joaquim, my friend for thirty-five years. Thirty-five years!” James said, shaking his head and putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “You met him last time, but maybe you don’t remember him. You know, my chefe in the Indian Protection Service, Rondon’s right-hand. He made all the contacts. He was Silvio’s boss! And most important for you, he’s the one who gave you your compass.”

  Larry reached into his pocket and held out the compass, which he had treasured for reasons that had lost none of their power for his having forgotten them.

  “A grown man!” said Joaquim, embracing him and then pulling on his sideburn, rubbing his cheek with the back of his hand, admiring the stubble.

  “You may not owe it to Silvio to change your plans, but you do to me,” Joaquim said to James over his shoulder with his hand still on Larry’s face, “and to him. And, you need to talk to him.” He nodded in Larry’s direction.

  “I owe you? Okay, okay! What’ll it cost me?” asked James in a mocking voice, reaching for his wallet in a last, doomed attempt at humor.

  Larry imagined for a minute that Joaquim was James’s father, before he remembered that James’s father would have been his grandfather, dead long before he was born, and of course, light-skinned.

  “You know,” said Joaquim.

  “What do you want me to tell him?” asked James after a long silence, in a soft, compliant voice that was unfamiliar to Larry.

  “About your dying,” said Joachim.

  “Not yet,” said James, turning to Larry without looking at him. “There’s still plenty of time.”

  “No, now,” said Joaquim, placing a hand on Larry’s shoulder to lower him into a seat and keep him there. He and James sat down on either side of him.

  “How long do you expect to live?”

  “Plenty of time. More than a month. Long enough.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “I take an extra one of these when I need one,” said James, pointing towards his stomach and administering an imaginary injection. “I have enough to last three months a
t least.”

  “Does Larry know how to give a shot?”

  James hesitated and then took a breath. “Do you?” he asked in his expressionless new voice.

  Larry sat silently, with tears rolling down his cheeks, crying not from sadness, he told himself, since sadness was an emotion that could only be felt from a great distance, but rather from a fear he would explode.

  “Show him,” said Joaquim, and James obeyed, reaching into his bag and pulling out a small bottle of alcohol and another vial and a syringe with shaking hands while strangers stopped to watch. To see James taking orders was, to Larry, to bear witness to an event more painful than his death. His hatred of Joaquim sparked into flame, and the flame, at that instant, illuminated his memory of a story in which Joaquim, guided by the compass, had once saved James’s life. All the more unjust for him to take it now.

  “And how will I find you?” asked Joaquim when James had put away his bandages and needles.

  “Now, you know better than to ask me that!” said James, in a voice more like his familiar one.

  “But what will we do if Larry’s stranded without you? How will we know how to reach him?”

  James looked at Larry, into his face this time, and said quietly, “It’s up to you.”

  The voice with which Larry answered was as unfamiliar as James’s had been, louder and coarser than his old one. “We’ll leave the coordinates sealed up somewhere. But not with Silvio. With Jorge. James told me about Jorge. He trusts him.”

  Joaquim shook his head and gave James a pat on the knee. “He’s your man,” he said, leaning his head towards Larry. “Now what do you need us to do for you? Anything you want us to take care of?”

  “The rest of Larry’s papers; his visas and permits and things,” said James. “I can give you some money if you need it, since it’s all going to be off assignment.”

  “For how long?”

  James paused and looked again at Larry.

  “A year,” said Larry.

  “Anything else?” said Joaquim, turning now to Larry. “Say what you have to say—don’t leave any ghosts.”

  Larry looked up from his haunted, unspoken world and thought for a minute that he might, despite himself, pour something out. He might cling to James’s ankle, or even express a sentiment like love. At the very least, he might have said that in this dense network of people whose lives had been saved by one another, he was certainly one. But he couldn’t push aside the sense that words only ruined thoughts like those, rather than lend them dignity. As though to protect them all from witnessing such ruin, the words he did choke out sounded almost reproachful.

  “I thought you said they’d be able to cure you in Pahquel,” he finally said, as quietly as he could.

  “Maybe they will,” said James.

  VI

  IN PAHQUEL, IT was called Xenge tunge, grabbing the mosquito, the act of catching an insult in flight, holding it tightly by the stinger and watching it flail like a fish on a spear. When Anok overheard Sunap refer to her as rajora, as the end of a line, and called back, “Your line will end when you eat your children, old boar!” that was Xenge tunge, and when PaXaj called Asator “Jitana tarara,” one who shirks his duty to a child, and Asator retorted, “You always think I’m the reason you can’t get in!” that was Xenge tunge too. But when Irini said to James, “Pora Amat pi namama,” that boy hunts fish in the garden, and James replied quietly, “Namama ni,” he hunts dreams, that was not Xenge tunge, but Xenge hetera, grasping in vain at the air.

  VII

  THERE WERE ENTIRE weeks when the telephone clinging to the wall in the kitchen like a lizard, its black tail dangling, was as sinister, in Jorge’s view, as the lizards that scurried across the walls of every hangar he ever flew from. Jorge had always hated lizards, an odd preoccupation for someone who was nearly native-born and almost always in the field besides. Even now, he could summon up memories clear as photographs, of an anole on a Kapok, the flash of a gecko, a mottled skink, rustling the leaves as it fled, which he had observed as a child with his father on their forest walks. Most disturbing, and hence fascinating, had been the ability of those creatures—which in their strangeness blurred the boundary between what was inert and what was living—to disappear completely into their surroundings, an ability which, in humans, always proved tragic in the end.

  But during the weeks when he was on assignment, Jorge couldn’t afford not to answer the phone.

  “I have news!” Joaquim began when Jorge picked up, preempting the formality of a greeting.

  “I already know.”

  “Silvio told you?”

  “Yep.”

  “And I suppose he told you not to take him.”

  “Yep,” said Jorge.

  “He’s with Larry,” Joaquim added tentatively, as though he were sounding Jorge out. Jorge pushed the hair from his forehead and began to pace from one end of his tether to the other. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to,” Joaquim went on, “even aside from the issue of using an IPS plane off orders.”

  “Yeah, and why not?” Jorge asked suspiciously. Joaquim had the ability to get under his skin in a way that, otherwise, only James could.

  “I can’t imagine you’ve forgiven him yet for disappearing on you,” Joaquim said softly, anticipating the click of the phone as though the space between them, extending as it did five hundred kilometers from west to east, were as thin and clear as glass. In the kitchen, Jorge’s pacing slowed like a pendulum resigned to gravity. At last, he picked up the phone again and dialed.

  “Alo alo!” said Joaquim on the other end.

  “They’re going to be staying for a while with Marco, since for some reason, James doesn’t want Larry to know about my mother, but they’re all coming to dinner here tomorrow night,” Jorge offered by way of reconciliation.

  “Enjoy,” said Joaquim. “Ate. Ciao.”

  “Joa?” said Jorge, tentatively, catching Joaquim before he hung up.

  “Eh?”

  “You know you still owe me that stop in Lamurii?”

  “I’ll let my good credit speak for itself,” said Joaquim. “How about if we talk about it when I get there?”

  Jorge placed the receiver back on the cradle and walked to the door, turning briefly, before he went out, to the now lifeless black form on the wall, which betrayed itself as he regarded it, only by its twitching tail.

  VIII

  IN THE FOREST, there are trees whose trunks are made of wood so soft they crumble like dirt, and others that, once fallen, slowly break apart over two hands of cycles of heat and rain, their crowns combing the rivers, sheltering the beavers and the moles. Then there are the narrow tiXaja, which take a hand of men a hand of days to fell, and that never dissolve into the earth. These stand forever where they are placed, at the thresholds of huts and of Pahquel itself, marking the edges of the world. Stripped of their bark, they are not referred to as wood like the trunks of the other trees. Everyone, alive or dead, only calls them bone.

  IX

  JORGE LEANED BACK in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and studied Martina in profile. That was how he knew her best, never head-on. She was sipping an acerola juice, and he could see the muscles working under her chin as she swallowed.

  “You’re much too quiet today,” she said in her heavy accent between sips. “Even for you. It’s making me nervous.” That was her mark, that pervasive accent, and the fact that, constant foreigner that she was, there was no language in which she spoke without it.

  “You? Nervous?” said Jorge, smoothing her hair. He knew that he was like a spider that ventured out when he felt movement on his web, but otherwise drew back behind the eaves of the house. “I do have something to tell you though, that you’re not going to like,” he added, studying her reaction. “I think I’m going to have to ask you to wait a little longer for the Marajo weekend.”

  “Why?” she said, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Silvio’s throwing you another job on top o
f everything else?”

  “Nope,” said Jorge, pulling his hand away. “This one’s mine, a personal jaunt.”

  “Oh,” she said, and fell into silence.

  “How long?” she said finally.

  “I don’t know,” said Jorge. “But maybe longer than shorter.” She turned away, revealing to Jorge the curve of her hairline, which ran like the path of a new river from the obscurity behind her ear.

  “I do want to tell you about it,” he said, removing his glasses and wiping them on his shirt. “I mean, the part I can.”

  Martina turned back until she was almost facing him and began to jab at her glass with the straw.

  “It’s to Lamurii,” he said, waiting for her to land the first blow.

  The paper straw against the bottom of the empty glass made a sound like the muffled ticking of a clock.

  “I guess I can’t really explain it after all,” Jorge went on, pausing between words. “All I can say is, I don’t have a choice. I know that doesn’t make sense. But you have to believe me.”

  They both looked off in the same direction, as though they were watching a play. In it, Jorge would be standing in an opulent parlor, wearing a satin smoking jacket and explaining with exaggerated mock stoicism to the woman in the bobbed wig that he need only avenge his father’s death to be free at last to propose. Or else the woman would be screaming at him, chasing him around and around the upholstered settee, throwing her high heels at his head. Either way, the audience would laugh at the absurd caricature of domesticity, at how hard the two lead characters had to work just to misunderstand each other.

  The worst of it was, he didn’t disagree with what he imagined her to think. He knew that trying to sit down with a group of people who still believed that his father had betrayed them, who still hated his father even after they had killed him, must seem like an act of the most indulgent self-destructiveness, a pitiful betrayal of a father by a son. But in his mind, the difference between the absurdly puffed-up heroism of the buffoon in the serie he imagined Martina to be absorbed in and himself was dependent upon the intervention of Joaquim, to whom he was indebted and hated being so.