l a p s e

the crossing

I rose in the morning with that lead feeling still in my skin. We checked again, but neither suitcase contained any food, save for two packets of salted peanuts in the red one, which the botanist suggested we leave for emergencies.

I was not sure what an emergency entailed. Were we not already in the midst of one? Or would we be faced with another, one far more debilitating, one that would cause us to hide forever in some small rabbit-hole with only the salted peanuts for company? What a revolting thought.

We walked in a kind of single file. The botanist took the lead, followed by the lawyer, who seemed eager to pretend that she held the helm. The professor was next and I came fourth, but this was where the line skewed, as you and I walked side by side.

You were undoubtedly an interesting character; you managed to keep a smooth conversation going with me, even though I, sullen and still so, so, tired, did not uphold my side of the discussion very well. You were studying to become a doctor, you said. You'd graduated early from college and gotten a job in Vancouver, which was where you had been going when the plane crashed.

I didn't realize until you were making me laugh, but I found you quite charming.

Our line wound through what felt like an eternity. I could not hope to even guess where in the country we had crashed – it was so silent that it felt like another planet. So foreign, different from the city blocks and organized vegetation that I knew, that for every hundred things I found to admire, I found another hundred to be bewildered by.

We had started out moving east but the botanist enjoyed changing direction at his fancy, and our path wound in loops and snake-like curves. I asked him why, when our single-file changed so that the lawyer was the caboose.

"To cover more ground," he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Not even meeting my eyes, keeping his trained on his compass, where the needle twitched gleefully. I did not ask him anything else for a while.

In some time we arrived upon a stream. It wasn't wide but I still hesitated to cross, even though the lawyer in her high heels, and the professor, who was arguably the oldest of the group, leapt across with no problem whatsoever.

Everybody made it across the stream. I lingered on the bank, watching the two-foot deep, crystal clear water run over the river rocks, testing myself. The rest of the group waited patiently on the opposite bank as if they understood my difficulty.

When I was five and a half, my mother first allowed me to bathe in a full tub by myself. Twenty minutes had passed and I did not emerge, and she had thrown open the door to find me sunk to the bottom, cold, blue and silent.

I had watched the goings-on from some place near the ceiling of the bathroom, like some type of eidolon. I floated in the same spot as my mother, in a calm panic, dragged my silent form from the soapy water and carried it to the kitchen, set it down gently, and picked up the phone to call an ambulance.

I had then been jolted back into my body; whatever had held me in that in-between state had decided to let me go. I hadn't taken long to recover, but ever since then being submerged has terrified me.

When I looked down at the stream, all I could think of was my body at the bottom, pale and empty, my eyes open and unblinking. I tested the waters by putting my toe into it – the current split and rejoined on the other side of my foot as if it were going through skin and bone and nail.

You returned to the edge of the water on the opposite side, so I could see you and you could see the panic on my face.

'Hold my shoulders," you said gently, and I did, drawing in a deep breath and leaning over the water. You picked me up by the waist, but the second your fingers brushed my left side there came a searing pain that blazed through my muscles, my ribs, my entire body. I was on fire.

I screamed and you dropped me in surprise – no fault of yours – thankfully not into the river but onto the ground on the other side. My feet landed in the water with a splash and I screamed again, but I was not sure if it was from the pain or the startling feeling of the chill water soaking my jeans.

Somehow I pulled myself to my feet. When I gingerly lifted the shirt up my side, I saw a giant gash the size of my hand and a fingertip deep. It was pinkish and swollen and inside it I could see little red dots and lines where the blood had collected, and a yellowish-white layer tinged pink.

I refused to believe it was there. It was a figment of my imagination, I decided, and I was seeing it as some kind of physical representation of my shock. But when I brought my fingers to the edge to probe it the inferno flared up again.

How could I have missed it? I hadn't felt it when I was changing, nor when I had been walking. There was no bloodstain on my clothes. For all I knew it could have magically appeared when you'd touched me.

But we didn't have time to stop, the botanist said. You examined the wound and pronounced it okay for the time being, so I steeled myself and we set off east, again.