Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Mm-hm,” Jen said.

“Have you heard of a friend of Leora’s named Baz Angler?”

“Let me think,” Jen said. “Software fortune? Video games?”

“See, Jen,” Karina said, “you’re always one step ahead of me.”

A half-hour later, Travis was steering onto a narrow, winding path that seemed to vanish ahead beneath a thickening canopy of dark trees, as the road shifted and sifted under the tires. After a half-mile of snaking and weaving, the terrain flattened into a crackle of graveled lot, and the wooden gates of the Garinagu Eco Lodge sidled into Jen’s frame of vision. As the three of them exited the truck into surprisingly bright sunlight — the Garinagu Eco Lodge, Jen immediately intuited, occupied an independent ecosystem unto itself, with its own flora, fauna, and climate patterns — a slight, shyly smiling young woman, clad in a flight attendant’s ensemble of close-fitting white blouse, gray pencil skirt, and blue-and-white paisley cravat, wordlessly handed Jen a snifter glass of mango juice festooned with a matching paisley parasol, while a corresponding pair of slight, shyly smiling young men in their corresponding white-gray paisley uniforms began wordlessly removing the luggage from the back of the SUV.

“The luggage is — separate—” Karina called out over the hood. “Labeled.” Without another word, she and Travis started slowly on one of the cobbled walkways that crisscrossed the grassy main grounds of the lodge, each path shaded by palm fronds and dotted with citronella lanterns, and leading to an evenly spaced line of thatched-roof cabanas.

The young woman, whose name, Eva, was embossed on a dainty brass brooch pinned to her lapel, administered pleasantries confirming the adequacy of each leg of Jen’s journey and outlining the overall geography, amenities, and administrative formalities native to the Garinagu Eco Lodge, then handed Jen her key, attached to a leather-stitched emblem of a coatimundi. Jen thanked Eva profusely, then rummaged around in her handbag pointlessly for a few minutes in order to put more space between her movements and those of Karina and Travis, who appeared to share an appointed destination.

Jen’s luggage awaited her just inside the door to her bungalow, which was roughly the size of her apartment, a breezy, pine-scented embrace of mahogany and cherry-stained cedar swathed in nubby multicolored textiles, bright reds and greens and yellows. Next to an enormous canopy bed, a wood-carved humanoid dragon grinned gummily up at Jen from the indigo-wood bedside table, his lower back doubling as a compartment of ginger mints and a complimentary bottle of champagne between his paws. Jen walked out to the porch, where wooden stairs led to an orchid trail and then a narrower, steeper pathway through crowded assemblies of cedars, palms, and flowering plants down to the stone shores of a sapphire stream. Jen could just glimpse a waterfall. She looked at the deck chairs and the swaying hammock and stood swaying in time with the trees.

Jen placed her palm on the handrail to the stairs, one foot poised over the top step. The breeze caressed her face, and the shadows on the orchid trail seemed to lengthen in real time.

She drew back her foot, turned, and hurried out of the bungalow, shoved onward by the same feeling that had punched and jabbed at her daily for as long as she could remember — the feeling that she had squandered time, so much time, obscenities of time, and yet some finite amount of time still miraculously remained, still within her reach, if only she could ever be clever and resourceful enough to know in which direction to sprint for it.

Standing at the palm-fronded front desk, Jen scanned the day’s itinerary. The Garinagu Eco Lodge offered a full range of scheduled activities, itemized on a four-page letterpress menu, including late-afternoon canoeing and horseback riding, twilight birding expeditions, moonlight jaguar-spotting missions, semi-hourly cooking demos, and walk-in spa experiences. Jen smiled wistfully at Eva.

“I’m going to need your help,” Jen said, setting the itinerary aside. “I need to book a car rental for early tomorrow morning. I’ll need some maps, and I’ll need to talk to someone who has driven around Belize a lot. And then I’m going to need a computer with an Internet connection.”

“So a working vacation, then?” Eva asked.

Jen stared over Eva’s shoulder. You could see the waterfall from the front desk, too. “Looks like it.”

That night, Jen dreamed that she was a tiny person living alone in a tiny square room, surrounded on all sides by identical tiny square rooms, in a giant matrix of tiny square rooms, each of them occupied by pairs of tiny people. Her room was large enough for a bed, a sink, and a toilet. She knew in the dream that all of her earthly possessions were stored under the bed. She also knew that she was the only single-occupancy tenant in the entire giant matrix of tiny square rooms. She lay flat on her back on her bed and listened to a polyphonic surge of vocalizations, so dense and varied that they took on gaseous weight, like a rapidly moving storm front, heaving at the walls, unfurling over her tiny ceiling, bumping against the tiny square window above the tiny sink. Layer upon skein of moaning, cooing, sighing, grunting, slurping. It was the sound of a thousand tangled limbs and arching backs and scrunching faces. An irregular thomp and wümp punched the tiny ceiling directly above Jen’s head and the tiny floor beneath Jen’s bed amid the muffled cacophony, again and again, until she woke up.

She sat up in the enormous canopy bed and looked out the screened porch to the first purplish light winking through the trees. Somewhere a giant coffee machine, vast enough to stir and hydrate every eco-tourist in Central America, was moaning and cooing and sighing. Jen padded to the porch to see if she could make out the waterfall yet. She could hear the coffee machines in a terrifying mechanized chorus, grinding and harrumphing from all the surrounding bungalows, ehhrrrrr ing and uhhuugghh ing in service of an invisible army of caffeine-starved predawn risers. She inhaled and smelled only pine.

What she’d been hearing all the time were the howler monkeys, high in the treetops. No one was awake but her and them.

Jen showered and dressed and — just to help wake up, she told herself, just for that extra oomph she needed to navigate a unique and unexpected situation — she broke off half an Animexa tablet, palming it into her mouth with tap water from the sink after brushing her teeth. She slipped the other half into her wallet for later, just in case. As she was putting on her shoes, she fished the other half of the Animexa out of her wallet and swallowed it dry. She walked into the ehhrrrrr ing and uhhuugghh ing predawn mist and up the citronella-lit path to the Garinagu Eco Lodge main house, which housed a dusty tangerine-colored iMac G3 with a dial-up modem connection.

First, Jen scrolled her email to make sure that one of the Judys hadn’t had any urgent late-night brainstorms on one of the trickier transitional sentences in her essay on the question of whether Restylane injections were a symptom of self-love or self-loathing. Then, Jen would squeeze in another hour or two of research on her mysterious quarry, Baz Angler, whose Internet footprint Jen had attempted to trace the previous day.

“So I’m super-excited to meet this guy,” Jen had said from the backseat of Travis Paddock’s SUV. “But what do we want from Mr. Angler, exactly?”

“You know — and don’t take this the wrong way — but I wonder if you’ll do yourself and this experience a disservice by approaching it from, well, from a transactional place,” Karina had said. “If you focus too much of what you’re getting from him and what he’s getting from you, you miss out on — well, you won’t even know what you’re missing out on. In terms of the experience, I mean.”