Tilly did not follow. Tilly had the sense to be terrified. She was ready to run, had a clear path to the river, hardly stopped to notice that flight would have meant abandoning Alice. But there were more and more of them. She never had the chance. On the way into the tent one veered toward Tilly. She ducked away, but the arm was longer than she expected; the hand landed on her shoulder. There was an extra flexibility in the fingers, an additional joint, but Tilly didn’t notice it then. The hand was cooler than her own skin. She could feel it through her cotton shirt and it pulsed, or else that was her own heartbeat she felt. She was so frightened she fainted. It was a decision she made; she remembered this later. A blackening void behind her eyes and her own voice warning her that she was going to faint. Shall we stop? the voice asked, and Tilly said, No, no, let’s do it, let’s get out of here.
The clasps of the tent door clicked together like rosary beads as it was brushed to one side. Breakfast had arrived. The dishes were from Tilly’s and Alice’s own kits. Tilly’s was handed to her. Alice’s was set on the floor by the door. One of them stayed to watch as Alice and Tilly ate.
Tilly’s plate had a tiny orange on it, porridge made of their own farinha, and a small cooked fish. There were crackers from their own store. Alice was given only the crackers and fewer of them. From the very first there had been this difference in their treatment. Of course, Tilly shared her food with Alice. Tilly had to move onto Alice’s pad to do this; Alice would never come to Tilly. She made Tilly beg her to eat some of Tilly’s breakfast, because there was never enough food for two people. “What kind of fish do you think this is?” Tilly asked Alice, taking a bit of it and making Alice take a bite.
“It’s a dead fish,” Alice answered. Her voice was stone.
Tilly was very hungry afterward. Alice was hungry, too, had to be, but she didn’t say so. “Thank you, Tilly,” Alice would say. And then two more would come, and the three of them would take Alice.
Tilly was always afraid they would not bring her back. It was a selfish thing to feel, but Tilly could not help it. Tilly cared about Alice, and Alice should belong to the set of things inside the tent. Everything else Tilly cared about did not. Like Steven. She missed Steven. He was so nice. That’s what everyone said about Steven. Alice was always pointing this out to Tilly. The thing about Steven, Alice was always saying, was that he was just so nice. Alice didn’t quite believe in him. “And women don’t want nice men anyway,” said Alice. “Let’s be honest.”
“I do,” said Tilly.
“Then why aren’t you married to Steven?” Alice asked. “Why are you here in the rain forest instead of home married to your nice man? Because there’s no adventure with Steven. No intensity. The great thing about men, the really appealing thing, is that you can’t believe a word they say. They fascinate. They compel.” Alice knew a variety of men. Some of them had appeared to be nice men initially. Alice always found them out, though. Occasionally they turned out to be married men. “I don’t know why so many women complain that they can’t find men willing to commit,” Alice said. “Mine are always overcommitted.”
Steven must be just starting to wonder if everything was all right. A small worry at first, but it would grow. No sight of them in Óbidos, he would hear. Where they were expected four weeks ago. Perhaps the boat would be found, covered by then in the same purple vines that choked the rest of the riverbank. Would Steven come himself to look for her? Steven had taken her to the plane, and at just the last minute, with his arms around her, he had asked her not to go. Tilly could feel his arms around her arms if she tried very hard. He could have asked earlier. He could have held her more tightly. He had been so nice about the trip. Tilly thought of him all day long, and it made her lonely. She never dreamed of him at night, though; her dreams had shadows with elongated arms and subtly distorted shapes. Steven had no place in that world. And even without him, even with the dreams, night was better.
A storm of huge green dragonflies battered themselves against the walls of the tent, but they couldn’t get in. It sounded like rain. All around her, outside, her jailers grunted as they drove the insects away with their hands. They were in front of the tent and they were behind the tent; there would be no more escape attempts. Alice was no longer even planning any. Alice was no longer planning anything. To convince herself that Alice would be coming back, Tilly played Alice’s game. She sat still with her legs crossed, combing out her hair with her fingers, and tried to think of another prisoner for their list. Her last suggestion had come from a story she suddenly remembered her father telling her. It was about a mathematician who’d been sentenced to death for a crime Tilly didn’t recall. On the night before his execution he’d tried to write several proofs out, but very quickly. The proofs were hard to read and sometimes incomplete. Generations of mathematicians had struggled with them. Some of these problems were still unsolved. Tilly’s father had been a mathematician. Steven was an industrial artist.
Alice had told Tilly she had the story wrong. “He wasn’t a prisoner and he wasn’t sentenced to death,” Alice said. “He was going to fight a duel and he was very myopic so he knew he’d lose.” She wouldn’t count Tilly’s mathematician. The last prisoner of Tilly’s whom Alice had been willing to count was Mary, Queen of Scots. This was way back when they were first detained. Tilly was just the tiniest bit irritated by this.
The river drummed, birds cried, and far away Tilly heard the roaring of the male howler monkeys, like rushing water or wind at this distance. Bugs rattled and clicked. Each ordinary sound was a betrayal. How quickly the forest accepted an alien presence. It was like plunging a knife into water; the water re-formed instantly about the blade, the break was an illusion. Of course, the forest had responded to Tilly and Alice in much the same way. And now they were natives, local fauna to an expedition from the stars. Or so Tilly guessed. “Our only revenge,” she had told Alice, “is that they’re bound to think we’re indigenous. We’re going to wreak havoc with their data. Centuries from now a full-scale invasion will fail because all calculations will have been based on this tiny error.”
Alice had offered two alternative theories. Like Tilly’s, they were straight from the tabloids. The first was that their captors were the descendants of space aliens. Marooned in the forest here, they had devolved into their current primitive state. The second was that Tilly and Alice had stumbled into some Darwinian detour on the evolutionary ladder. Something about this particular environment favored embedded eyes and corkscrew fingers. It was a closed gene pool. “And let’s keep it closed,” Alice had added. She smiled and shook her head at Tilly. Her braids flew. “South American Headshrinking Space Aliens Forced Me to Have Elvis’s Baby,” Alice said.
At first Alice had kept diary entries of their captivity. She did a series of sketches, being very careful with the proportions. She told Tilly to take pictures but Tilly was afraid, so Alice took them herself with Tilly’s cameras. The film sat curled tightly in small dark tubes, waiting to make Alice and Tilly’s fortunes when they escaped or were let go or were rescued. Alice had tallied the days in the tent on her graphs and talked as if they would be released soon. There was no way to guess how soon because there was no way to guess why they were being held. Alice fantasized ways to escape. Tilly would have liked to ink the days off on the wall of the tent; this would have been so much more in the classical tradition. Four straight lines and then a slash. A hieroglyphic of the human hand. A celebration of the opposable thumb. Anne Boleyn had six fingers. Tilly wondered how she had marked the walls of her cell.