Wayward

You’re in the jungle looking for your brother. At night, you sleep in a hammock hung between two trees. You use a machete to clear all the plants low enough so that they don’t poke into your back or tear the mosquito netting you pull around the hammock like a cocoon.

The first night, you stand on shaky legs, exhausted from the day’s trek, as your guide shows you how to string the nylon tarp overhead tightly enough so you don’t get drenched by rain. Then, how to hang your backpack under the hammock so snakes don’t crawl into it at night. Then he walks farther away from you than you expected, hangs his own hammock, and turns off his light. So on your first night in the jungle you feel very alone, and you swing, nervously, in pitch black space. Then there’s the noise.

There are whistles and hums of birds and insects, louder than a city street. As you find fitful sleep a sound comes from a long distance and enters your dreams as maybe a train coming towards you, then something huge and dark holding you and opening its enormous mouth to swallow you in, and you wake up. You realize it’s the calls of monkeys as they swing by overhead. You remember you’re in the jungle looking for your brother.

You remember him pacing your apartment excitedly as he told you about his trip. That he’d saved up some money. That he could finally quit his job, and was going to “really see the world”. He talked a lot about what he was going to see, letting a half-drunk beer go warm in his hand, and it annoyed you to see him waste it.

Then, for months, there had been the blogs, and the social media posts. Your brother on a motorcycle beside a cartoonishly huge cactus. Selfies with strangers, smiling despite their sunburns. In one of his last photos, he’s sleeping on top of his backpack at a crowded bus stop. He was on his way to a remote village, then into the jungle to see some ruins. It would be a “real adventure.” Then he had stopped posting.

Then he was missing. Then, disappeared. After a month people start to use the word “disappeared”. For the first week or so, when he was just plain “missing”, you didn’t even take off work. Maybe it was something as simple as losing his phone, or something as familiar as a car accident. But after a month his status as a person went from the uncertain and unsettling “missing” to the exotic but grave “disappeared.”

When you received the check from his life insurance company, you realized that “disappeared” really meant “dead.”

It was $20,000. Once in your life, there had been a girl and maybe kids, and you might have used it as a down payment on a house in the suburbs. But not now. So for a long, quiet weekend, the money sat in your account asking you “what will you do now?”.

That question led you on a long walk through the grey city, until a window display led you into a bookstore where you bought a little black notebook. In the notebook, you wrote “$20,000”, and beneath it, “Airfare - $750”. That had led you here. To the jungle. Looking for him.

In the morning, the guide wakes you up by crashing around and singing to himself. You stumble out of the mosquito net, put on your glasses, take your boots out of their bag, check them for snakes, scorpions, spiders, and, rubbing your eyes, gratefully drink the coffee the guide brings you.

“We keep going west today,” he says, snaking his hand in the air, “following the river, then tomorrow, the same”.

He looks at you and there’s a silence.

“Ok,” you say, “ok,”.

You walk quietly behind him for hours. In the afternoon, it rains. You put on rubbery ponchos and sink up to your shins in mud. You try to walk on the roots of trees, slip, bang your knee, and the guide keeps glancing back at you.

Your legs burn from the effort of sucking them out of the mud. The unfamiliar weight of the backpack is making you stiff. Back at the hotel, you had put all of your fresh, carefully chosen items in the pack after spreading them out on the bed. There was a moment when you thought maybe this was possible. Maybe you could at least find his body. Maybe just by setting out so bravely, life owed it to you. Maybe.

All those things are filthy now. Smeared with mud, or so soaked that you could wring what looks like chocolate milk out of them. In the heat, under your poncho, you are just as soaked through with sweat as rain. Your shirt is pocked with bright red where you’d smacked mosquitos— your own blood. You’re chafing in your armpits, and other places, which is a new kind of discomfort.

You imagine your brother walking this trail. On social media, and his blogs, and in real life, he had some kind of visible buoyancy even with a backpack on. Once, on a hiking trip, he said you should put your things in his bag, which was irritating. He was younger than you, but not by that much.

After the second day of walking in mud, you stop to set up camp early.

“You need to rest,” the guide says, “I can see it.”

So the next day, while the guide naps, you pace around the camp. When you’re bored enough, you decide to lay out and rearrange all the things in your pack. An orange whistle. A grey headlamp. A little black notebook. You open the notebook for the first time since the hotel. On the first few pages are your flight itinerary, and numbers to reference in case you can’t charge your phone. The name of the investigator in charge of your brother’s case, and how to get in touch with her. There’s the address of your hotel, and the number for the manager of the guide service. When you had called him, he knew who you were.

"They asked about your brother,” the manager said, “the police say he wanted to see the ruins, but my guys, they didn’t take him there. We did not find him on the trail,” and then, after a pause, “It would have been very stupid to go without a guide.”

In your notebook, you’d written “Guide service and tip for guide - $800”

Over the next few pages, you’d written a list of all the gear you needed. Quick-dry pants. A whistle. A headlamp. The rest of the notebook is blank. So on the afternoon of the third day, you open to a fresh page and begin to draw.

The guide is still napping in his hammock, so you sketch the shape of him lying there—the impossibly thick trees which flank him, the drooping vines which mimic the swoop of the hammock. You haven’t drawn since maybe high school, but things are falling onto the paper in the right place. A long time passes like that before you notice. After a while you finish the drawing and fall asleep, too.

Some kind of sound wakes you up. It’s a far off chirping, no, a ringing. The sound gets closer and the guide is beside your hammock saying, “It’s for you,” and hands you the orange plastic satellite phone.

It’s your brother.

You’re saying his name, but he doesn’t respond. There’s a static hiss, like a rustling, and a feeling that something is wrong.

The static grows and becomes rhythmic, like someone shaking a rattle. It grows louder and louder and louder.

You open your eyes. Darkness. Your hammock shakes a little as the monkeys pass overhead.

You are in the jungle, looking for your brother. Your brother’s body. Which professionals weren’t able to find. You are not an explorer. You’re just some guy on some kind of messed up vacation. Tomorrow is the last day of trekking. The guide will have other, happier tourists to take to places that make sense. You think of your brother walking into this jungle on his own, if he even made it to the jungle. The police didn’t think he even made it to the town.

“Unfortunately, I think at this time we have to face what’s the most likely scenario,” the investigator had told you, “Your brother was a tourist who went to the wrong place. Maybe he took the wrong bus, got into the wrong car, met the wrong person, or saw the wrong thing, and he was simply killed, and his body was disposed of.”

“Simply killed,” she’d said. Like it was the most boring, typical thing to happen to someone.

But now, in the dark, you feel that it’s true. He wasn’t killed by a jaguar. He wasn’t mummified by a curse. He never made it to the jungle. He never even heard these stupid monkeys, you think, which for some reason, is the thought that makes you cry the hardest.

“Today, we see the ruins,” the guide tells you in the morning.

“Ok,” you say as he hands you your coffee.

You arrive at the ruins at noon. The guide has to use the machete to clear some space around them.

“No guides or tourists for a long time,” he says, tapping his machete, “not as popular, these ruins.”

At the center of the site is a small, unremarkable hill.The guide tells you it was made by hand a long time ago to bury someone in. There are a few stones on the ground. This is the place your brother wanted to see, his “real adventure”. An unpopular, but ancient grave. Your footsteps leave imprints in the fresh mud. You inhale through your nose. There’s the smell of dirt and green things, and nothing like a body or a campfire or anything human and living.

Your brother is not here. His body is not here. He was never here. The only body here is a set of thousand-year old bones in that mound of hand-scooped dirt. You try to imagine this place hundreds of years ago, but can’t see anything but what’s in front of you, so after a while you tell the guide, “ok,” and put on your pack again.

You hike east, and, within a day, reach another river. You hear the sound of an engine and the lapping of the water before the guide’s friend appears. The friend looks at you as if measuring your height and says “You did good! That-,” and he points to the dark green tunnel behind you, “not for tourists,” and he gives you a wry smile.

This river is very wide here, and you take off your hat to feel the sun on your face. The cool wind feels good and flaps your shirt open. You look back a final time to the western bank, and are surprised that already you can’t find the spot you left from. Somewhere in there are the ruins. Somewhere in there you slept, and walked, and ate and drank for a while.

Your notebook still has a big number written in it. There’s more than $15,000 left. What will you do now, you wonder again, and turn your face back into the wind.

After a while, you see a town of slanting little houses, where just beside the dock, a few men are drinking beer at a plastic table. Maybe you’ll buy a beer. Maybe you’ll buy one for the guide and his friend. Maybe you’ll sit for a while. Sit and look at the river, drink your beer, and look at the boats and the trees and the dock. Maybe you’ll take out that little black book and draw for a while. Yeah, that’s what you’ll do. You can see it now.