Inside the hut was a plank floor, a thin mattress on a low platform under mosquito netting, and nothing else. I wondered why no one was living there, but couldn’t bring myself to ask; I didn’t know where to begin. This is the life I chose, I thought—so far, Omar had described it perfectly. Already I missed Britta’s sarcasm, Molly’s big laugh, the bustle of the markets at Cochabamba, the purr of the motorcycles thumping over cobblestones, even our hideous bunk room at the Versailles. Had that been my real home and I was too stupid to know it? Here were jaguars that slaughtered children, snakes so poisonous you could die in minutes. Where am I? And how in fuck could I get out of here if I decided to?

Through the window—just a square cut out of the bamboo, no screen or glass—I watched the plane stutter to life on the river, its engine catching and grinding as it scuttled a tight U-turn and raced across the water, lifting up to the waiting sky. The silence afterward roared into my skull, louder than any motor, as I wondered when or if I would ever see a plane again.

EIGHT

We made love right away in the little hut, just dropped right down on that filthy mattress and fell into each other; his hands and mouth loving me as if after some tortured absence, like he was sealing me to this new place, wedding me to it. Even as I felt myself swell and open as we kissed, my thoughts raced: There is nothing safe about this place. But for those few moments I tamped down my terror and confusion, ignored the raucous chorus of frogs outside, the memory of the plane disappearing into low-hanging clouds. I abandoned myself to pleasure, felt him chemically change me into someone else, someone who would do anything to be near him, someone who would follow him into any jungle on earth. Afterward, staring up at the square of pulsating green outside the window—my own heavenly jail—I wondered, What have I done?

Hours later, we lay in spectral darkness as cicadas ground away at time, like metal scraping across stone, endlessly. Omar wrapped himself around me, his hand cupping my breast, listening to the blood rush through the chambers of my heart. I faced away from him, night blind. All I could see in my mind’s eye was him holding the knife to the pilot’s throat.

“Have you ever killed anyone, Omar?”

He rearranged himself, took his hand off me. I shuddered with its absence. “Where did that come from?”

“The pilot, you almost—”

“I wasn’t going to hurt him.”

“It sure looked that way.”

He sat up, pulled the stub of a cigarette from his shorts and lit it, its sizzling glow the only light in the hut. Then he slipped on his glasses, though there was nothing to see.

“He was going to take us back to Cocha. That or crash the plane.”