Some nerve returns to me, some guts. I’ve progressed from boot to trouser to tunic, I’ve braved the skeletal phalanges without a quiver. There’s nothing left to do now but see its face. That is to say, its skull.

His skull.

I move the beam, and it’s not the grinning jaw that does it, or the tufts of hair still attached to the bone, or the cap that hangs over what once was an ear. It’s the sockets of the eyes. They’re black and empty, staring into nothing. I sink to my knees and gasp for enough air to cry with.

After I bury him in the soil next to the airplane, and mark the spot with a cross made out of some broken propeller blades—it’s a shallow grave, because that’s all I can do with my two hands and a makeshift spade, so someone must return with men and tools to bury him properly—I enter the cabin to sweep the interior a final time with the beam of my flashlight.

In the corner where the body lay, there sits a small leather book.

Because it’s been sheltered all this time, and because the climate’s so dry, this book is in perfect condition. Unlike everything else, it’s not coated in dust. The leather is clean and unstained, and when I lift it and open the pages, I find that it’s not a printed book but a journal of some kind, in which someone has written in a firm black hand, notes and sketches and scrappy thoughts, until he stopped, about two-thirds of the way through.

Even with the help of the flashlight, I can’t read it well, and anyway it’s awkward to hold flashlight and book at the same time. I move outside and stand near the turned earth, the crude metal cross, and open the book again.

Against the cold afternoon light, the words jump from the page in a hand so familiar, it’s as if I wrote it myself. But I did not. This is a story I never knew, a man I never knew. The mule brays at me; I don’t have time to sit and read this through. I’ll slip it in my pocket and read it when I return to my room in the primitive pension in Pamplona.

But I won’t wait that long to find out how the story ends. Of course not. No one alive has that kind of patience, and certainly not me. I turn to the final entry, 5/15/37 in black numbers. His last thoughts, this lone, forgotten man; the last words his fingers would form before annihilation. A single line that wobbles and slants across the page, so you must squint your eyes and pick out the letters and put them together again in your head.

GM to rescue at last thank God She will live