Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) Read Free Page A

Or say you and I are having a discussion at a party and I have to go to the bathroom. I excuse myself. I don’t simply turn around and run like a startled horse. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to, say, pull over unannounced and go on a search for pot for 30 minutes in a random village while an overly inquisitive but otherwise tolerable American tourist waits in my car.
    I have no idea what this little pit stop has to do with getting to Cotopaxi. Victor popped out of the vehicle almost as fast as Edgardo, so he’s not even here to give me inscrutable Oakley-blocked looks. The gas tank is full. Maybe Edgardo has to pick up a quilt his grandmother made him or something? The landscape outside features chickens, torn advertisements for soda and shirtless children. There’s also a soldier with a gun so large strapped to his back, if he were a drunk girl and this were Halloween and the gun was angel wings, we’d be in for a lot of silly doorframe antics.
    I push down on the door lock. Then I pull it up again.
    I shut my eyes. When I was 4 years old I came down with pneumonia and I hallucinated that the air in my room was packed with bees. To avoid getting stung, I took refuge in the safest place in the world: under the covers. But of course there were bees there as well. Being either inside or outside of this Jeep feels like the same kind of choice.
    I open the glove compartment to find a series of unmarked CDs, ratty gloves, antacid and some travel-sized spray cologne. I pick up the cologne. It has the silhouette of a boob on it and rust on the bottom and I am not even tempted to remove the cap. I get out of the car and lean on it, which makes me feel like a prostitute but I don’t mind. I reason that prostitutes seem more fearless and harder to kill than already-kidnapped women locked in a car. A chicken runs by with a couple of kids following behind. Easily distracted from her own survival, the chicken stops to peck at a half-eaten paper plate of food.
    When Edgardo finally returns, he barks at me to get back in the car and tosses a large bottle of water on my lap. Quito is not Tokyo, no, but it is not Khartoum, either . There is absolutely no way it takes this long to locate bottled water. I raise one eyebrow at him. If drugs have been introduced to this vehicle, I think I’ve earned some.
    “Drink,” he says, adding, as I open the bottle, “you will need it on the mountain.”
    I pull the bottle from my lips like it’s poison.
    “Do I drink the water now or do I not drink the water now?”
    “Now drink,” he says, starting the car.
    I unscrew the cap again.
    “Drink it on the mountain.”
    I have seen many films with scenes like this. I don’t need to be part of one myself. If Cast Away , 127 Hours , Alive , Touching the Void and Panic Room have taught me anything, it’s that you should never leave home without a lighter, a bottle of Gatorade and a Swiss army knife. At this point, the abandonment/confinement genre of film is so established in our culture that people who do leave the house without an EpiPen basically deserve what’s coming to them. But the survival stuff is never the worst part. The worst part is those innocuous scenes, before the epic journey, the ones that appear to have nothing to do with anything. Chop off my arm, feed me butt cheek, lock me in a room with Jodi Foster — these will never be the moments that move me as a viewer. It’s when the trapped hero or heroine thinks longingly of some basic household staple or some nonsensical conversation that my stomach lurches. Nothing is so gruesome to the human imagination as regret.
    I am careful to drain the bottle down to the plastic rib equidistant between the top and the bottom.
    Soon there are no more shady towns to be found and no more donkeys to be avoided. The landscape becomes drearily flat as we drive over miles of open lava-worn ground. Wild dogs appear from nowhere and run after the car, barking. It starts to rain harder.