Slipping through the thicket of tall bamboo, pinky Bell was lost in her own thicket of grave thoughts.
'Asano... So that's what this is all about!'
She knew nothing of that war; it was another time, a time that had might as well be prehistoric, with dinosaurs stomping around. Outback's accusations made no sense-His memories were all scarred up, unforgiving, too.
Of course, nothing could be proved, nothing confirmed; wasn't it all cataloged as just some forgotten lore? Besides, there were thousands of Asano's throughout Japan, maybe millions. What was the Japanese spelling of this Colonel's name? Of course, the ignorant Aussie wouldn't even be able to tell her that.
"I look forwards, not backwards," she mumbled in Japanese, watching a plant devour an insect by trapping it, and then dissolving its tissue with acidic fluid in a kind of ritualized slaying.
Yes, her family was in the rubber business, but beyond that she knew precious little. It wasn't like they came home and boasted of their kills like these Western men did. The Japan of seventy years ago never really existed-and even if it had, those times were vulnerable to any sort of distortions, or wrong-headedness. Best just to move on.
Pinky Bell's shoe was flapping again as she entered a shadowed ravine; the glue from the rubber tree had fixed the right sole, but now the left one carped tiredly over the bristly jungle floor. She removed her shoes and socks (even though she knew that putting them on again would be excruciating) and stood in a shallow, gushing stream, letting the cool water mollify her into a tranquil nothingness.
She bent over and looked at her toe in the water as one would some sea anemone at the aquarium-The big toe had turned black; it seemed almost twice its size; septic, no doubt. She'd have to lance it.
Scouring the ground, she came up with one of the culprits that had most likely caused the distended toe in the first place-a rattan thorn. She fingered the thorn and nodded, satisfied it would do the job. Then she inserted the long thorn into the center of her swollen digit, and when she squeezed the toe, the golden pus oozed like the creamy filling from a crushed Éclair and floated down the stream.
Pinky Bell didn't cry out-Instead, she looked up, past the bamboo, at the green kaleidoscope of the canopy. She saw something way up high, an enormous, wedged honeycomb that hung from the underside of a soaring tree. And she envied the elevated lives of bees as she tried to think of anything but the stabbing pain in her toe.
She heard something call her name-It was coming from the hollow of a dead bamboo stalk. She called back but it didn't answer. Then she peered deep into the coppice of bamboo, but saw nothing. It seemed blacker than black ...
But then she saw it all-the mossy-thick plants growing on the branches and trunks of the stalks and trees, curling and weaving in the tussle for sunlight; the lichens, the ferns, even the cacti, all beginning their lives in the canopy as spores, changing course, journeying downwards, where the clashing was not as ruthless.
"If you can't go up, you go down," she whispered in Japanese, "you find a way to survive ... You go back to the prime."
She undressed next to the stream under the stalky culms of bamboo; she wanted to look at herself. The lower half of her naked body was covered in a multitude of small, reddish spots-the leeches relished her sweet lamb blood. Everything had feasted on her, sucking, surviving. She saw it there on her upper thigh, but something told her not to pull the leech out, not to ruin the coexistence-something important she was just beginning to understand...
At fifteen and a half, Pinky Bell felt the lassitude of an ageing grandmother, a filthy old woman. She could smell the damp earth on either side of the stream, and she wanted to bend down, grab a handful of soil, and then throw it at Outback, tell him to stop being so crazy. The dirt, the worms, it would all feel good in her hands, she knew that. And she would squeeze it, pack it, before throwing it as hard as she could. But beneath the anger was the stubborn fear of what might be coming-And that was what she wanted to leave her, to enter the soil so she could toss it away forever.
She frowned down at her little mound of clothes, covered in gory, burgundy stains, and then put them back on, feeling no relief from the throbbing.
"Gotta cover it." Windy was there, nodding at the still-shoeless toe.
She had just buttoned her top, and her look was not a welcome one.
He tried to look affronted; "I missed the good part, if that's what you're thinking." Then he dropped his eyes. "Okay, so I was watching you a little bit."
She knew he had been looking at her butt as she walked, and she wondered why men did that. Pinky Bell had dismissed sex as raw and meaningless, and her mind had not wavered. It was like drinking something strong such as the alcohol back at that longhouse- you did it to either please someone else, or you were simply of a self-destructive nature.
He rummaged through the drug store in his backpack, and then sprayed the toe with spermicide, before tearing the top off a little, square packet. Pinky Bell clicked her tongue at the condom, but as he rolled the latex contraceptive over her toe, her faint protest was that of a little girl.
Windy tried to think of something interesting to say, "Do you think the human head is a love offering? ... Is that whack, or what?"
Pinky Bell, too, had been thinking about Outback's words a few nights back.
Windy smiled, as if sensing her thoughts, "If I chop off Outback's head and give it to you, would you like that?"
"Outback would not."
"No, he wouldn't." Windy fell into reflection.
The boy was starting to come on kind of strong-if offering someone's head as a token of love could be considered strong in a jungle. But Pinky Bell smiled back at Windy, because she had seen it in the hollow of the bamboo stalk-or sensed it, anyway-the end, how things would go from here on out...
In a weird way, she felt something had passed her the game plans.
On the way back to the clearing, she tried more of the pronunciation that vexed her, "I am a gya-ru of the wa-rrd."
Windy, attuned to her speech, nodded. "You are a girl of the world-yes you are... But you still gotta work on the R and L."
English pronunciation-It was an intimidating mountain. Could she, some day, climb it? Could she, some day, overcome it all? ...
Pinky Bell had always felt herself to be rather pluckless, like a sock puppet, a person of no substantial worth. She knew she was pretty, by Japanese standards, but she felt unanchored by any real worldly beliefs or opinions. 'I have knowledge, yes, but do I have any real principles?' - In the company of Westerners, it was like she would vanish, like she occupied no real space of her own. Even in Japan she knew she would freeze up under the severe interview questions from the manager of the Babaloo convenience store...
The problem was that she didn't know herself-she didn't even know if she was religious or just superstitious.
But things were changing. They were changing for Outback, and they were changing for her.
Now, the dense canopy above that she had found so menacing just a few days back didn't frighten her. As for reaching the summit of the mountain-whether it was pronunciation, or something far more frightening, Pinky Bell felt herself to be, if anything, one game climber.
***
The night would be the most difficult so far. They hadn't ventured from where Outback had left them, and they had nothing to eat.
Windy got a fire going with his lighter, and Pinky Bell scoured the area for plants, bringing back several candidates for dinner. They nibbled the pulpy insides of the plants in silence, though that did nothing to satiate the hunger.
They tried to sleep around the fire. In his hurry to escape the village, Outback had left the hammock behind, and the open exposure to the jungle would be brutal.
Had the old Aussie deserted them? She didn't think so. Pinky Bell imagined him lurking in the trees, watching her, preparing for something...
Whatever darkness had invaded the man-this new jungle devil she could only think of as Hulu-it was wooing him, coaching him, into some kind of confrontation with Japan, and with her.
It was a particularly bad night of itching for Windy inside his sniper suit. His infected bites had become sensitive to the touch of any clothing at all. Even worse, the satisfaction of scratching seemed to vanish, though he would often bolt upright, waking Pinky Bell nearby as he commenced with the feverish fingernails on flesh, again, and again, and again.
"It won't stop!"
His nighttime itch seemed unconquerable. It always came in the hours of darkness, and it always came in cycles. He would raise his trouser cuffs to his knees and lightly scratch with his fingernails. But this, inevitably, only made the itching worse. Then he would slowly rub at the bites with his fingers and palms to try to satisfy the maddening urge to scratch at them like some insane cat.
"How are snipers supposed to sleep? - I've got powders, balms, tablets, creams, lotions, sprays for everything from amoebic dysentery to yellow fever, and I can't stop a stupid itch!"
She watched the disturbing cycle over and over, and she advised against the scratching, but he seemed unable to not scratch; it was like his calves were aflame and his fingernails were the only extinguishers. It always led to bleeding, which seemed to excite the insects in the air, which then buzzed and bit at them with a frenzy.
"You never once think that maybe your itching, it is an allergy, it is not insects. Maybe you have an allergy from the latex in that jungle suit."
"Latex allergy - That's ridiculous," Windy sniffed, "What do you know about latex?"
She put her head back down on her pillow-the pink fanny pack she had stuffed with bamboo leaves, and she had just closed her eyes ...
"PFFFFFFFFFFFF!"
... Personal Growth, the strange camel (that didn't really look like a camel, but that was the animal it seemed closest to resembling) from Cuckoo Camp, swaggered up to the fire and then cocked a back leg as if to brag that it was the best jungle trekker, bar none.
Both teens leapt up and raced to the saddlebag, though Windy got there first and thrust an arm into the deep, dark pocket, while Pinky Bell's stomach screamed: 'Please, please, some nuts, a bunch of over-ripe bananas, anything!'
"Snake!"
Windy's hand shot out of the saddlebag with a twisting, green rope, which he drop-tossed next to the fire, and then staggered backwards, falling on his backside.
The snake lay next to the fire, motionless, and Personal Growth exhaled languidly, like the animal had simply extended its stay in that mysterious village of smugglers and lepers to attend to private business, and now it had returned to accompany them into Hulu.
Pinky Bell gave the snake a gentle kick ... Dinner had arrived.
Windy grabbed his Swiss Knife and eagerly sawed at the snake carcass, and the blood spurt out as if from a fire hose. Pinky Bell jumped in front of the gushing fountain of blood, opened her mouth wide, swallowed the liquid, and it tasted like warm, sweet syrup.
Roasted on sticks over the fire, Pinky Bell thought the snake was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten. Both teens ate the skin and all, and she wondered how in the world she had never tried this lip-smacking cuisine back in Japan.
Personal Growth watched them eat, sometimes exhaling with a loud PFFFFFFFFFFFF! -As if in relief at a delicate operation that had been successful, it's lips flapping like a small motor.
Exhaustion finally overcame them, and an unseen moon would shift a little in the night sky, allowing them both a couple hours of sporadic sleep, while Pinky Bell's thoughts lingered on who their benefactor could have been-who had placed the dead snake in the saddlebag...
"RAWRGWAWGGR-RRWWWGG!" Personal Growth roared in its sleep like someone opening a giant steel door on rusty hinges.
Then Windy's gruesome itching and scratching cycle would begin afresh, and Pinky Bell melted into a soft dream of bouncy pink rabbits on green grass.
Then she floated up and away in a little bubble, a bubble of timelessness, the timelessness of the jungle. And she welcomed it-she felt she had the temperament, and the patience, for it. All she had to do was forget her sores and her pain, forget her emaciated body, forget time; don't hope, as others surely did, for the quick passage of time-Pinky Bell thought that would be her doom. Just let the jungle be... Bide the time.
"There is no known elevation." The bawdy voice of Mae West crooned from the GPS above them. Windy grumbled, but he had given up trying to retrieve the errant device. Then Mae West said, "Reliable information is unavailable."
"PFFFFFFFFFFFF!" Personal Growth said before lapsing into a long period of silence...
And that was when the strangest event-in a series of extraordinary events-of Pinky Bell's day took place ... A whispering, someone speaking, a voice came from within the camel as it slept upright on the other side of the small fire: "What's the cure for selfishness? We do what we have to do, to survive ... Extreme situations call for extreme actions."
She got up and stepped softly toward the animal as it dozed, its head lowered...
"Narcissistic sociopaths ... hurtful consequences ... only think about yourselves ... Central Kalimantan is the 3rd largest Indonesian province by area with a size of 153,800 km2, about 1.5 times the size of the island of Java. The Schwaner Mountains stretch from the north-east of the province to the south-west, 80% of which is covered in dense forest, peatland swamps, mangroves, rivers, and traditional agriculture land. Highland areas in the north-east are remote and not easily accessible. Non-volcanic mounts are scattered in this area including Kengkabang, Samiajang, Liang Pahang and Ulu Gedang-Primary country code should be selected before first-order administrative division code, feature classification minus latitude in decimal degrees-unbiased hotel reviews are available..."
It didn't make any sense. Had the creature swallowed a small radio? The single male voice was a faint, metallic monotone, like in an I-phone, as it droned on with geographical statistics, then map coordinates, and then hotel reviews?
Suddenly, the voice said: "You do what you have to do to survive ... Kiss me where I am from..."
Was she hallucinating? Pinky Bell looked over at Windy, sleeping and scratching, oblivious to the flat oration coming from the belly of the camel...
"...Joint operations should involve military grid reference system coordinates in modifications reset ... Precipitation is 2,776 to 3,393 millimeters per year with an average of 145 rainy days annually ... Get a leg up, Lassie, when in the prime..."
The voice stopped. Pinky Bell waited, but it did not resume, and she returned to her pink pillow.
What was a 'leg up'? Was that supposed to be some kind of guidance-for her? What the heck was the thing-beast or machine? And did it matter?
In the dark, morning hours of New Year's Day, she slipped into the familiar nightmare for the final time...
In the stink-hole again, alone, except for the rot and the death.
Neither Outback nor the dwarf appeared in this dream, and she preferred this; she liked the privacy. Fate was a gaping hole in the ground, and you were fated to step into one of these holes. You tried to step over or around the hole, but it adjusted, it moved, shuffled, so that it was in your path once more.
And you did this ominous dance over and over again, whether in your dreams, asleep or awake. Because the pit had come much closer... It was now inside of her.
There was no sunshine, no moonshine, no wind; just the rank, heavy, smoky air that reached for your throat and pressed on you. And then it squeezed.
"Go ahead, I don't care," she defied, "I'm not afraid."
She had new knowledge that she would be able to leave the pit of her own will-and that hour was near.
She would never be the same person who had walked into the stink-hole again.
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