“Well. Either way, there are reasons to be concerned. The standard for medical training isn’t the same in other countries as it is in America. And there’s no one on this half of the equator policing it. There are countless horror stories, deaths under anesthesia, inadequate follow-up.” Her eyes glitter. I’ve given Paula her next story: mothers who schedule unnecessary plastic surgery for their sixteen-year-old daughters in foreign countries.
I’ve made my promise, my bargain. Now she gets two stories for the price of one.
The flag at the top of the tower waves to me. I step inside, met by the rank smell of piss, and climb. I hit the second landing before Paula’s weight on the stairs joins mine. When I reach the top, I press my back against the wall and slip down to the floor. Paula’s face appears, but it doesn’t awaken me. Too late, I’m already gone. My ears seal over.
*
The watchtower is a green-gray cylinder framed in morning light. Patches of moss climb its sides. A wrought-iron staircase spirals upward, visible through long windows. On a pole at the top is a weather-beaten American flag, its tatters undulating in the wind. The tower means I am heading in the direction of the parking lot, where kids used to leave their cars and hike up to the tower to drink and get laid before it became too overgrown to pass. It’s twenty feet away. I can do this. I hobble toward it, dragging my leg behind, using my knuckles to propel me like an ape. Cranking my neck, I fix my eyes on my goal. I think of a famous painting I once saw in New York of a crippled woman dragging her body toward a farmhouse. Christina. I fall to my hip like Christina, dragging myself with my arms, which aren’t yet ruined. This is somehow faster. I am moving now, really moving, dragging my body across roots and rocks, falling and rising up again, digging in with my elbows, scuttling across the ground like a crab. The tower is closer, twelve more feet to go.
My hand falls through the earth. I freeze.
Pebbles spray from under my hand and are swallowed by darkness. I kneel at the edge of a hand-dug hole in the ground. An inch more, a shift forward of my weight, and I would have thrown myself into the hole behind the pebbles. It is six feet across. The smell of overturned earth lingers, and it terrifies me. I scurry backward, folding my ankle back underneath myself. Pain lances through swollen tissue. I can’t go much farther on this thing, not firmly attached.
I turn to the side and vomit.
Time passes. Behind me, the sun rises. My bile sparkles like diamonds on briar leaves. A vine grows over the pit’s edge and inside. I swipe my sleeve across my mouth and follow the vine, crawling back to the lip and peering over. Rocks poke from the sides like blisters in a throat, and there are holes where rocks might have been but are missing, as though they were knocked out by someone trying to gain a foothold. I shift to let sunlight past me into the hole. From top to bottom, it’s the height of two men, maybe less. Wedges of pale green and orange—cantaloupe rinds?—cut into quarters by a human hand. Silver wrappers. Plastic water bottles. Something was fed and watered down there. The electric buzzing of flies. I lean closer. Two mud-covered hot-pink sneakers splayed at a terrible angle. And something else, covered in black leaves. A dark lump curled in the shape of a shrimp.
A twig snaps. I hunch my back and peer over my shoulder, feral and alert.
RUN.
I clamber up and rise, but my ankle caves instantly, soft white static filling my eyes. I drop back to my shredded knees and crawl, around the hole, over rocks and brush, bleeding from so many places. The tower is farther than it looks. I scuttle on, leaving a trail of blood. When I reach the base of the tower I pray the door is unlocked, rising and swaying on my knees like a prairie dog. I throw my weight against the door and fall in on my hands. The smell of ancient piss rises beneath me, but I am past things like hygiene and disgust. Beer cans litter the floor. I look over my shoulder at the vegetation I’ve beaten down with my hands and knees. My blood trail will lead him to me, and I will be trapped. I know what I must do. The railing, a skeletal helix, rises from the floor. I use it to pull myself up, and it squeals under my weight. I hop to the first step on my good foot, then two, then ten. I take breaks every three steps. At eighteen I stop counting. At thirty-two, I reach the top. Someone spray-painted PURGATORY on the wall in front of me. I laugh, but the laugh loses to my breath that explodes like firecrackers in the trapped tower air. I swallow my noise, because it interferes with my hearing, and hearing is what’s kept me alive in the woods until now. The first day, I listened to the man’s tone, to see if he would grow affectionate toward me the longer we were together. Later, I listened as his random mutterings become more distant, as he began to regard me as less than human: something he caught, but did not want. That first night, I listened for the man’s heavy footfalls in the mud, as he searched for his escapee, in the dark and through the rain. On this day, I listen for the swish and switch of a hunter cutting through brush that stands between him and his prey.