They sat there sweating. After a while they started down again. The concrete covering came to an end, and they found themselves on crumbling rock and scree and sand and dirt, quite a bit more slippery than the concrete had been, but also affording some places they could dig in with their shoes, also some knobs of hard rock to hold on to. Then this unclad slope got steeper, scaring Fred; but after a while it laid back a little, reassuring him. That repeated a few times. They took rests every fifteen or twenty minutes.
A couple of hours passed like that. Then, legs shaking, palms bleeding, sweating so profusely their shirts were soaked, they saw through the trees a paved road crossing the slope below them. One moment they were looking down on broad green leaves as always, then there was a road. It traversed the slope almost horizontally, as far as they could tell from above.
The final drop to it, though short, was almost vertical. Fred turned into the slope and climbed down about halfway, then held on to rock knobs and had Qi put her shoes right on his head and shoulders. Then she stepped down onto his thigh, which he had propped up by sticking his foot into a crevice. His brother had done this for him during their one try at climbing, coaxing him down the entire descent, as Fred had often frozen in place. His brother had been really worried.
Qi never froze. When she was down at his level, and had moved her feet and hands onto rocks in a way she said made her secure, he climbed down again, kicking for footholds on knobs in looser rock, until he was standing in the culvert next to the road. She climbed down him again, and he provided her last foothold with his linked hands. Finally she hopped down beside him.
They stood there and briefly exchanged a look, both flushed, soaked with sweat, streaked with blood. Quivering. Fred felt sick again, either with relief or because of a return of his nighttime nausea, he couldn’t tell. He tried to quell the feeling, not wanting a repetition of the vomiting. He put his hands on his knees and let his head hang. Slowly the nausea passed. It was a wretched feeling. After a while they clambered up onto the asphalt road.
“Which way?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She gave him one of her looks. Possibly it had been a rhetorical question.
To the west the road was slightly uphill. Presumably that way would lead them around the island’s west side, where they had seen residential towers during the previous night’s ferry ride from Lamma Island. To the east it was slightly downhill, which was attractive, but they didn’t have any idea what lay that way, or how far away it might be.
They chose west without even discussing it, and started to walk. From time to time they came on benches set on the downhill side of the road overlooking the sea, and they sat on each of these and rested. When they passed creeks clattering down the hillside near waterfalls, Fred stuck his face in the water and drank, and suggested that Qi do the same.
“What if it’s contaminated?” she asked anxiously.
“Let’s worry about that later. You need to stay hydrated.” He drank again to show her. “Usually water in the hills is cleaner than you think.”
She stared at him as if he were crazy. “Not in China!”
“Well, but this is Hong Kong. And this little creek must be spring-fed, or recent rainwater. And you need to stay hydrated. So try just a little. We can eat some antibiotics later.”
She drank. Fred felt hungry as well as weak, and assumed she must too. He was worried about her pregnancy. If it weren’t for that, they would be okay; but that had to be a worry for her, and so it was for him too. What could pregnant women withstand? He had no idea. Probably a lot. He recalled reading stories in his childhood of peasant women harvesting crops right up to their due dates, giving birth in the fields and going back to work the very next hour, and so on. Those could have been stupid stories, he had no idea. An example of this Orientalism Qi had mentioned, attributing to peasants the toughness of animals because they were not quite human. Well, humans were animals. He recalled the brief period he had tried swimming with an adult swim group, another experiment suggested by his brother, and watching a woman eight months pregnant fly by him for lap after lap, complaining during their rests that the kid was kicking her after her flip turns. People were animals, sure, and strong as such; or could be strong. As for this particular woman, he didn’t know. She was tough, he knew that. But strong? Well, she had held on to that slope and made her way down as capably as him. But now he was wasted, and she could be too.
There was nothing to do but walk on.
After an hour or so they came to a little knot of buildings lining the road, and fortunately, at least in some senses, these were tourist establishments, meaning outdoor restaurants and cheap gift shops, overlooking what was apparently the reservoir Qi had remembered hearing about; in any case, a big lake. There were very few people or cars around, but the shops were open, and Qi had some paper money in her pockets to give to the workers at a food stand window. They ate and drank like starving people. Fred worried about the sesame chicken and ate mostly rice, gagging a little as he did. The previous night’s ordeal was still vivid to him, a body memory, but also he was starving.
They both noticed at the same time the other one scarfing down food, and they shared a glance, almost smiling; but they weren’t yet there. After that Qi made a long trip to the bathroom, and when she returned she looked more normal. Fred tried to clean up in a similar way in the men’s room. The food and soda felt okay in his stomach, not great but not sickening. He wondered how Qi had felt during that last long walk along the road. She hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t complained, hadn’t wondered aloud how much longer it would be, nothing. Not a word. He came back out to where she was sitting and leaned over and kissed the top of her head, surprising them both. She knew by now it wasn’t like him.
“You’re tough,” he explained, looking up the road.
She ducked her head, dodging the compliment. Such a round face, such a sultry face. She looked like a prima donna. Looks were so often deceptive, he wondered why anyone ever tried to take anything from them. She was glowing in the midday air. They were both still sweating.
“This is no time to get a case of yellow fever,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know—white male tech nerd falls for mysterious Chinese female? Yellow fever, they call it. A total cliché.”
Fred felt his face burning. He blinked hard, tried to think.
She looked up at him and said, “Hey! Joke! I was joking!”
“Oh.”
She tugged on his arm and got him to sit down on the bench beside her. He stared at the asphalt of the road, which had little lines of grass growing through it this way and that. After a while he cooled down a little, but it was too humid for sweat to help much by way of evaporative cooling. Certainly his face was still hot.
After a while they got up and walked west again. Fred felt a pinching on the back of his right heel, sign that a blister was on its way. The food he had eaten was lumping in his belly, and he was afraid he might get sick again.
The road curved north and became a street, and farther on they came to a bus stop. They plopped onto the bus bench under its rain roof, wordlessly enjoying the shade. When a bus came, headed north toward the city proper, they got on it and Qi paid again. The bus hummed into the westernmost end of Hong Kong, which was mostly residential, with skyscraper apartment buildings lining the road on both sides. It was amazing how many skyscrapers there were, even out here on the edge of the city.
Fred said something to this effect, and after a while Qi replied. “Someone told me that all of Australia has six hundred buildings that are taller than thirty stories, and Hong Kong has eight thousand.”