Much later that night, Janna’s eyebrows flicked up and down in her sleep. I was rotting away with ache, red lines of infection roping up my legs, and in the dark I was convinced touching the bone of her hip would cure me. I could fold my lips over her earlobe, gum at the small hole there that had once probably held glass earrings. I wanted to consume her without really being able to want her—my body wasn’t strong enough to want her the carnal way my mind pictured—so I wanted her in a more intimate way, some sort of cannibal love that could give me my strength back, or at least comfort me with human closeness.
Pushing my blanket off, I moved closer to her, belly crawling over the space between us. Her eyes played games against her closed eyelids. My hand reached out for her face. My splayed fingers rose over her chin as close as they could without touching her and lingered in the space over her mouth. Her warm breath passed through my fingers. I held my hand like that for minutes, communicating the underlanguage of want. The miracle of her breathing calmed me—the desperate part of me. Then I rolled back to my blanket, and felt sleepy and depressed, pulled it over my head, and held that same hand in front of my mouth and breathed into it, pretending it was still her life touching mine.
How could I have felt lust at that moment? What a sad sack the body is. What a sad sack it was always going to be. I imagined what my inner desires would look like if they took some form outside my body, and the image of such a creature streaked across my mind and began haunting around there. There he was, the foul knot of want and loathing and hate and need, his body hunched over, in an impossible curl with his lips sealed shut around his own phallus. His hairy shoulders and arms waved around out to its side, trying to gather flesh with its wanting hands. It emitted a horrible, whimpering cry between breaths. This subhuman, bare-assed, hairy-balled monstrosity streaked past, full of raw want and shame and hunger and inertia. The image was so horrifying I wanted to find it in the scope of a rifle and riddle it with bullets, fell it, and then unload round after round into its curved spine, zip up the legs with bullet holes, and blow out the back of its skull. I wanted to dismember that part of me. Take off the wanting fingers at the knuckle. Anything to no longer associate this thing with myself. I was afraid if there ever was a judgment upon our lives in this world, I would be judged by this creature, this parasitic want dragging me down.
When the snow stopped in the morning, it gave way to heavy rain. The stream at the base of the ravine reddened and swelled over the top of its banks, and where I’d been melting snow for water, I now had only to walk to the stream and dip my cup where it eddied over unfamiliar ground.
Mevi and Janna drank from my full canteens. That day was almost the last of my food supplies. What was left after that was only energy pills. So we each took the Benzedrines and shared two cans of sausage and gravy heated on the lip of the fire. When the sun was up, I went back down to the water. Mevi tried to follow me and fell. She hurt her elbow, and I scooped her up and dusted her off. Tears welled in her eyes but she didn’t make a sound. I wanted to do something to comfort her, so I tapped the tip of her nose and aimed her back to the mouth of the cave with a pat on the head.
I’d become infested with lice since Janna and Mevi arrived in the cave. The little white specks clumped up on my arm hair and all over my body. They jumped in quick, perfect arcs across my forearm. I tried to ignore them until they got so bad I had to try something. On the banks I stripped off all my clothes and ran my hands over my oily skin. My blackened toes, now dried dates, penis slack and shriveled. I lowered my feet into the water and dipped my body under the flowing surface. There was some unworldly and astonishing feeling buzzing around me as I submerged in the frozen water.
The cold made my body shrink in on itself, but I held on to two rocks under the surface and let my body and legs shimmy back and forth behind me. The dull clanking of stones pushed over one another by the current filled my ears. If I let go, I’d at least momentarily enter the world Edwin had gone to. When I jumped up, the air bit my skin. I put on my underwear and carried the rest of my clothes up the hill to sit and get warm by the fire.
Halfway up the hill I saw Janna upstream. She squatted near the water. Her back to me. Her open jacket hung down her sides and brushed the ground. Spandrels of light wound through her black curls. I could not see what she was doing and kept walking up the path. When I passed a thick-trunked willow tree, I saw her wipe a sheath of dry leaves between her legs, then place the bloodied leaves into the water, a crimson raft that spun circles in an eddy before pushing downstream. Mesmerized for a moment, I turned and walked back to the cave as quietly as I could so she wouldn’t see me.
“I’ll have to go find food tonight,” I told Janna and Mevi when we were all in the cave. “You’ll stay here. We need to get those yellow stars off of your jackets. You’ll have to lie about who you are from now on. You were too trusting with me, but now be sure to lie to everyone else.”
Janna looked at me and nodded. Mevi said nothing. She never said a word while awake. With my Nazi dagger’s tip, I cut the stitching of their yellow stars free and pulled the loose yellow threads out of the cloth. We watched the stars darken and burn in the fire.
I dressed and waited until the downing sun cast a layer of pink behind the ridgeline. Then I packed my backpack and checked each pocket with my various ID cards. The weight of the pack dug low into my back.
“Is this good-bye?” Janna asked.
“Almost,” I said.
I climbed up to the train tracks and started moving west, taking each fearful step trying to will myself back into the nightmare, doing everything to convince myself this was a better alternative to starving to death. My blackened toes threw off my balance and each foot protested in pain.