McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [117]
They talk very little. She knows he is a telephone-systems programmer of some kind, connects “groups of users” somehow. She knows he comes from Montana, and knows his voice is like an older man’s, weaker than it should be, wheezy and prone to cracking. He is not handsome; his nose is almost piggish and his teeth are chipped in front, leaving a triangular gap, as if he’d tried to bite a tiny pyramid. He’s not attractive in any kind of way she would call sexual, but she still wants to be with him and not the others.
The rain forest is dense and twisted and drenched. Mist obviates vision past twenty yards in any given direction. The rain comes down steadily, but the forest canopy slows and a hundred times redirects the water before it comes to Rita.
She is warmer now, sweating under her poncho and fleece, and she likes sweating and feels strong. Her pants, plastic pants she bought for nothing and used twice before while skiing, are loud, the legs scraping against each other with a constant, violent swipping sound. She wishes she were wearing shorts, like Grant. She wants to ask him to stop, so she can remove her pants, but worries he won’t want to stop, and that anyway if he does and they do, the other hikers will catch up, and she and Grant will no longer be alone, ahead of the others, making good time. She says nothing.
There are no animals. Rita has not heard a bird, or a monkey, or seen even a frog. There had been geckos in her hut, and larger lizards scurrying outside the hotel, but on this mountain there is nothing. Her guidebook had promised blue monkeys, colobus monkeys, galagos, olive baboons, bushbacks, duikers, hornbills, turacos. But the forest is quiet and empty.
Now a porter is walking down the path, in jeans, a sweater, and tennis shoes. Rita and Grant stop and step to one side to allow him to pass.
“Jambo,” Grant says.
“Jambo,” the man says, and continues down the trail.
The exchange was quick but extraordinary. Grant had lowered his voice to a basso profundo, stretching the second syllable for a few seconds in an almost musical way. The porter had said the word back with identical inflection. It was like a greeting between teammates, doubles partners—simple, warm, understated but understood.
“What does that mean?” Rita asks. “Is that Swahili?”
“It is,” Grant says, leaping over a puddle. “It’s . . . well, it means ‘Hello.’ ”
He says this in a polite way that nevertheless betrays his concern. Rita’s face burns. She’s traveled to Tanzania without learning any Swahili; she didn’t even learn “hello.” She knows that Grant considers her a slothful and timid tourist. She wants Grant to like her, and to feel that she is more like him—quick, learned, seasoned—at least more so than the others, who are all so delicate, needy, and slow.
They walk upward in silence for an hour. The walking is meditative to an extent she thought impossible. Rita had worried that she would either have to talk to the same few people—people she did not know and might not like—for hundreds of hours, or that, if the hikers were not so closely grouped, that she would be alone, with no one to talk to, alone with her thoughts. But already she knows that this will not be a problem. They have been hiking for two hours and she has not thought of anything. Too much of her faculties have been devoted to deciding where to step, where to place her left foot, then her right, and her hands, which sometimes grip trees for balance, sometimes touch the wet earth when a fall is likely. The calculations necessary make unlikely almost any other thinking—certainly nothing of any depth or complexity. And for this she is grateful. It is expansive and well fenced, her landscape, the quiet acres of her mind, and with