Ad Infinitm
ad infinitum
She's up, bright and early on a Sunday morning, with red eyes and a seat in coach, sandwiched between the camera-guy to her right, and the translator to her left.
He's just a kid, the translator, babyfaced and fresh out of school. His forehead is pressed against the window and his breath fogs up the plexiglass -- he's asleep. Margaret doesn't know his name yet but it doesn't matter especially because really what he is is Adam's replacement.
(Adam, who was with her in Prague and Germany and France, who spoke six languages, lost his spirit in Shanghai and then found it again on a golf course in Connecticut with a wife and a mortgage and stability. Adam, who left her. He'd sent her an invitation to the wedding, but Margaret made special care to be in Guatemala that month.)
The translator snuffles loudly, waking himself up. He looks around for a moment with infantile, protuberant eyes before slipping back down into an unfinished REM cycle.
The camera man is sitting to her right. His name, which Margaret has learned through strict repetition on the last four trips, is John. A good, strong name, her father would say, but he died while Margaret was in South Africa, and she doesn't like to think about it. As the airplane rounds a turn on the runway, waiting in line to take off, John nudges her with his elbow and asks, "What's a seven-letter word for 'leaves'?" He's caught up in another one of those crosswords; the book never leaves his side.
Margaret thinks for a moment, counting letters in her head. "Abandon," she offers.
John frowns. "No..." he says slowly, "No, it has to start with an 'F.'" He doesn't ask for her help again.
Margaret exhales as the plane speeds up, and falls asleep during takeoff, dozing with her eyes open.
- - -
She comes back to herself with a jolt as the plane wheels touch down. Margaret blinks, rubs her temples, and tries to regain a sense of time and place. Sri Lanka, this is Sri Lanka, she reminds herself. Funny how after six years of world travel, everywhere looks the same.
They stand, and begin trying to push their way off the plane. John pulls her bag out of the overhead for her, and hefts his camera bag up onto his shoulder, muscles straining beneath his shirt. Margaret is wearily entranced for a moment, then has to push her way past him and the other passengers before claustrophobia makes her crazy.
Outside, the sun has set. Margaret is two days older in just eight hours. The idea of it doesn't terrify her as much as it used to; jet lag has become her social norm.
There's a moment of panic in the airport, people moving in and out with an alarming urgency and sense of purpose. Her baby translator looks frightened, frozen in the middle of a tumultuous crowd and for a second Margaret thinks he won't be able to hack it, that she's stuck in Sri Lanka with no language skills and no way home. But then that scrawny kid, her translator, snaps out of his culture shock and gets them a rental car, rupees, and directions to the motel.
John puts his crossword away when it's time to go. He'd been sitting next to her during their brush with cultural immersion, unimpressed and unconcerned. (Margaret hates him for it, or at least she would if she wasn't so terrified still.) He drives them to their hotel for the night, and Margaret is banished to the backseat with the luggage, three duffle bags on the seat next to her and John's camera cradled in her lap.
Margaret collapses face first onto her bed once they arrive. It smells like chlorine and weak disinfectant, which comforts her somehow. A breeze smooths in from the door she left open, blowing her shirt up in the back and playing against her skin.
Something falls with a thud onto the thin carpet on the floor by her head. Margaret is too tired to even look up. "Brought your bag in," John's voice says. From the sound of it, he's standing next to where her shins dangle off the edge of the mattress. "Night, Margaret."
She thinks she feels him brush his fingers over the small of her back, bare skin, but perhaps it was just the wind.
- - -
There's a knock at the door.
Margaret kicks at her blankets and rolls over onto her back with a moan of protest, struggling to hold onto those last shreds of sleep. (She thought she'd been dreaming -- is now not so sure.)
The knock continues.
She groans again, louder, and pushes the comforter roughly off of herself. Crossing the room, Margaret pulls her hair into a tangle tied with a hairband at the back of her head. If it's slightly askew, it's because she's still mostly asleep, a cottony morning-breath taste lingering in her mouth. Margaret opens the door.
Her translator is standing there with his hands in his pockets. He raises his eyebrows in greeting, then nods towards the car running by the curb, John behind the wheel.
"Two seconds," Margaret asks for, "Just two." She kicks the door shut again as her translator opens his mouth to answer, hurried because shit, she overslept.
It’s actually more like two minutes later when she finally gets out. Her hair is still in that same skewed mess, but at least now her clothes are clean and that dry taste has been brushed out of her mouth.
John and the translator have switched spots and that kid is now behind the wheel looking for all his life like a sixteen year old before his driving exam. John is in the front passenger seat (again she’s forced into the back) cleaning the lens to his camera, out of its case for the first time this trip. He clears his throat and looks up. “Thought we’d film some today.” He pulls the video camera up onto his shoulder and turns around in his seat as the translator pulls out onto a road. “Ready?”
Margaret takes a breath and begins.
- - -
Sometimes Margaret thinks she should have been an actress.
She’s good at it, faking. Yes, she’s thrilled to be here, yes, the entire place is just like those brochures your travel agency sends, no, she loves being on public access television, yes, the people here are friendly, yes, she really will wear that purple-printed sari everywhere she goes, no, that snake meat doesn’t taste at all disgusting, yes, she just loves this cultural music, no, it’s completely different from anywhere else, yes, she loves her job, yes, she loves her job, yes, she loves her job.
(Adam always told her actors were liars. She believed him until she realized translators were liars too.)
- - -
“Great,” John says, putting the lens cap back on his camera. “Think we’ll have to edit out the part about the snake meat, but everything else was great.” Margaret slumps, it wears her out to have to speak so animatedly into the camera. “We’ll get some shots today of you shopping and eating and stuff. Ready for some culture?”
She looks at him wearily. “Always.”
- - -
At night she crashes into her bed like the waves on the beach in Costa Rica, the ones that she saw with Adam, a hundred years ago when once she was happy.
- - -
- - -
The rope is ancient, and Margaret thinks it might break at any moment as she lowers herself into the mine. Not that it would matter, really, considering the tunnel is so narrow that she could stop her free fall at any time simply by arching her back and pressing against the muddy wall. The rope makes an aching, stretching noise and Margaret yelps, frightened.
"Alright there?" John calls up, already down in the mine. He'd gone down first with his camera and a lantern. He is braver than she is.
Margaret takes a breath and calms down. "I'm fine," she answers, feeling betrayed by the shake in her voice. She starts to ease herself down again.
She finds herself waist deep in muddy water once she reaches the bottom. It's sweltering hot, and Margaret pushes her sweat-soaked hair out of her face. Every part of her trembles visibly. She breathes a little faster, a little deeper than normal.
John frowns a little. "You okay to film?"
She's not. She knows she's not. But Margaret nods anyway.
He looks at her skeptically, but counts her off and starts rolling
- - -
It all goes terrifically wrong. One minute she's there, narrating about Sri Lankan mining, and then the next there's a tremor, ground shaking and forcing Margaret to clutch at the wall or be knocked off balance. The lamp rattles off the peg it was hung on and falls into the water, hissing out and sinking to the murky depths. Something brushes against Margaret's inner thigh. She screams as the cavern shakes and shakes and shakes.
By the one piece of light falling in from where they entered, Margaret sees John stumble and sway, trying to keep standing. He wades across the passage to her as she yells, wrapping one strong arm around her waist and pressing her close to the wall. "You need to stop," John tells her, muttering against her ear as the ground slows and finally stops. Margaret is still yelling, and from the opening above they can hear voices in panicked discussion, but neither can distinguish which is their translator. Her screams turn into dry, pained sobs. "Margaret, you're fine," John continues, not moving away. "You're just fine, Margaret. Meg. Okay? Everything's alright. They're going to get us out of here, but right now you need to calm down. Can you do that for me, Meg?"
She hiccups painfully when he calls her that, no one has called her Meg since her father died. Margaret pushes her face against his shoulder, panting and gasping for breath or self-control. As the panic subsides, she becomes aware of how close he is in the darkness. Her hair is thick with mud that had fallen, but one of his hands, previously on her waist, slips up to tangle in it. The other hand is on the opposite side by her head, bracing the camera against the mud on the mine wall. Their chests move in canon, flush against each other. "Meg," John says once more, his lips on her ear.
- - -
When they emerge fifteen minutes later, hauled out by the local men who ran the mine, the translator looks at them curiously, wanting to know what happened down there. They insist there's nothing to tell.
- - -
It's been raining all evening.
Margaret stands on the hotel balcony and looks down, a cup of the tea she bought at the plantation growing cold in her hand. The ground is two stories below her. These people built this hotel up a tree. It's the first time Margaret has ever seen something like this, and she thought she'd seen everything.
They'd decided to take the evening off. The mud from the mine has washed out of her hair, although it took a long shower and an hour of standing here on the hotel balcony, letting the rain stream over her, unprotesting. She'll be a mess tomorrow morning if she goes to sleep with wet hair, but for now Margaret doesn't mind the way it's vining together in the back, forming into a determined knot, curly and swollen and wet.
She sips her tea. The rain has fallen into it, diluting the flavor into a faint grassy aftertaste. Margaret wrinkles her nose and tips her mug over the edge of the balcony. Her rained-out tea falls, indistinguishable from the rest of the downpour.
A sudden chill comes over her out. Goosebumps rise over Margaret's skin, and the small hairs on her arms and the back of her neck shiver to standing. Someone, somewhere, has just walked over her grave. Margaret shudders and enters the small sitting room inside, forgetting her cup behind her.
John is there, sitting at the table and cleaning the lens of his camera again with a soft felt square. He looks up as she enters. "Not sleeping?"
Margaret shrugs.