The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [54]
You turn back.
Water’s over here. Where. Is. The. Water.
Here?
You circle.
Oh, well. To hell with the water. I’ll find water. Water. Water.
You think you’re back on track. Where were you going? Follow the leader. You step behind a bush and urinate. Precious fluid and salt quite literally pissing away.
Your heart beats as though you’ve been running.
You think you’d better take a break.
Where’s my water?
Syncope is a noun that denotes contraction: in a literary sense, you shorten a word by chopping out letters. Never = ne’er. Ever = e’er. Desolation has begun to edit you. Erase you.
Heat Cramps.
Now you’re officially in trouble. Your body has been dumping salts. Without salts, your muscles can’t function. That’s why people drink Gatorade.
Muscle cramps kick in. Your legs suddenly ache. You get clumsy. You tumble. When you fall, you hit rocks, cactus, gravel. Your hands are skinned, your knees abraded. A little blood steams away. If you cry, you make an infinitesimal investment in your own death.
Your arms hurt, your calves hurt. Your hands hurt. Your heart can hurt. Your throat clicks when you try to swallow.
Your abdomen clenches on you. You think you have to get to a toilet. If you’re a woman, you’re having contractions; you think you’re going into labor. It’s the men’s first menstrual cramp. You can’t pass that gas. You double over.
Eighty percent of lost walkers can still be saved if the Migra spots them. You can recover with water and an IV. Even the Migra’s famous air conditioning could save your life. You could be slumped in the seat with the blower going in your face, a canteen in your lap, and “Highway to Hell” on the FM. But if the Migra doesn’t find you, you’ve stepped onto the lip of the death spiral. Your options for salvation wisp away like steam.
Heat Exhaustion.
Your fever is spiking now, and as with the flu, you have gotten more and more ill. Headaches. You get nauseous, you want to vomit. If you vomit, you lose more fluids. You are not only clumsy, but enervated. Your body is weak, and your will is slipping. Your tongue is wood. You could give a damn. Your heart pounds, loud in your ears. Your breathing is shallow and fast, and each breath dries you further. Eyelids scrape across eyeballs dry as pebbles.
Your skin is icy; you might shiver.
This is a good place for the infirm among you to have their heart attacks. Your fluid level has dropped—there’s not enough fluid to fill the container of your body. Your heart beats faster, trying to suck up some blood from the internal drought. Cardiac arrest hits when the pump overstrains itself and blows up.
Those in good shape will, sooner or later, faint. This is the brain’s way of stopping the machine, like hitting the brakes when you realize you’re speeding toward a cliff. The body knows. If the brain can stop the body, put it in a little coma for a moment, it can slow the whole process down and regulate organs and try to tend to damage control. Take inventory: Hmm, a little blood in the pancreas, let’s move it over to the heart and shoot it up here to me! The brain is all about keeping itself alive. You could go blind and live, have a heart attack and live, lose a kidney and live. But if your brain rots, there’s no coming back. It sucks up all the blood and all the oxygen it can get. But it still can’t get enough, and it misfires like a dying engine.
First, you get tunnel vision. You might hear echoes. Your body falls on burning ground. You stare through a little hole at the fading world.
You can get second-degree burns from lying too long on the ground. And you sweat, especially where your body forms a seal with the earth. And you breathe. You get up worse than you fell, then you fall again.
And still, you might be saved. But you are now