Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
"Do you recognize it?" Tristan asks.
"No. Who wrote it?"
"Edgar Allan Poe. It's from ‘A Dream Within a Dream.’ I like his work."
"It's kind of a pessimistic poem."
"That's not the point. You said you wanted to read something new, so…"
"Thanks. Do you remember more of the poem?"
Tristan grins. "Right now, I'm too hungry to remember anything other than how to eat this." He glances sideways at the slices of grapefruit.
It takes almost two weeks for Tristan's back to heal completely. During that time he moves carefully, helping me wash clothes, and occasionally bringing me flowers, but unable to do much more. We eat meat once, when a bird lands on Tristan's shoulder. We live off the eggs and fruit I collect, and we both drop weight. After testing a few roots that fail the edibility test, we find an assortment of four carrot-looking roots we can eat. They taste like nothing, but they fill our stomach. He insists I train with the bow, but I'm not making much progress. It doesn't help that he can’t show me how to shoot. He does try to show me once, but the simple movement of arching his back must strain some nerves, because it has him stuttering with pain and has him unable to move for the rest of the day. Still, I'm not bad with a spear, and that gives me some confidence.
Tristan sleeps in the cockpit again. Despite feeling his presence in the cabin was an intrusion the night the fever overtook him, the place feels empty without him. Falling asleep becomes harder than before, and I find myself staring at the ceiling for hours at a time. My thoughts don't fly to Chris often, like in the beginning. Perhaps my self-imposed ban on thinking about him is turning into something that comes naturally. Or perhaps my mind knows that the way to make living in this place bearable is not envisioning what the alternative would be: Chris's ability to make me laugh, and a life in which my biggest worry would be losing a case; not starving or succumbing to disease or walking into a nest of vipers—which I almost did. Twice.
And because my mind apparently needs something to obsess over, once I stop obsessing over how my life would be if I weren't stuck here, I start obsessing over something else.
Tristan's nightmares.
I hear him thrashing in his sleep every night, even though he closes the door to the cockpit. I wonder why I never heard him before. I suppose I was too busy with my own thoughts.
Now that I know about the nightmares, I can't help hearing them. They happen every single night. No exceptions. A few times I find myself hovering in front of his door, wondering if I should go in and wake him up, try and soothe him. But I don't. He wouldn’t appreciate it; he's adamant to keep to himself. And I’m not sure that would help him at all. But I'd like to try to help him, like he helped me the day we talked about my parents. I carry his words with me all the time—they’re like a talisman, those words—they work even when I am not actively thinking of them. From time to time, I revisit my old inner cracks, carved by guilt and loss. I find the cracks are less painful with each visit.
Now, if only I could do something so the cracks carved into him, by whatever happened in his past and causes him nightmares, wouldn’t hurt so much. He’s become important to me in a profound, almost vital way. Listening to him cry out is unbearable. And if it's unbearable for me, I don't want to know what it feels like for him.
One morning we find paw prints just outside the fence. Huge ones. Tristan says they must belong to a feline of some kind. A cougar, or maybe even a jaguar. After the discovery, we're more alert than ever when we venture outside the fence. One more threat looming over us in the months we still have to wait before we can start our journey back.
"I know this one. It's nice," Tristan says on the day that marks two months since we crashed and almost two weeks since the spiders bit us. His eyes light up as he reads the snippet of the poem I scratched in the mud again. This has become an almost daily thing—like an unspoken agreement. When we sit to eat dinner, or sometimes—like now—breakfast, we write a few lines in the mud.
I don't recognize any of the poems he writes down, which is a bit embarrassing since he quotes authors that anyone who was a top student (which I was) should know. At any rate, it feeds my need for reading new things. It's like a small escape every day. It breaks the repetitiveness of our survival tasks; it's something new to look forward to—something new that doesn't revolve around the act of procuring food.
It's a luxury, and we both indulge in it.
His poems intrigue me. Edgar Allan Poe isn't the only writer he likes. Thomas Hardy is one of his favorites among many, many others. But no matter which poet he quotes, all the verses have something in common: they speak of pain, darkness, and acts that are beyond forgiving.
I don't understand why he's into this kind of literature. There is beauty in it, sure. It's just a bit depressing. In the beginning I thought it was just his taste, but now I suspect it might be something else.
In our question rounds during chores, he's careful to stay away from unpleasant topics, and I've learned not to push him. But when he scratches words in the mud, things change. His eyes have that same tide of emotion they have when I accidentally slip into topics he doesn’t wa
nt to discuss. That's why I suspect his refuge in depressing poetry is related to those less joyous experiences he keeps from me. With every poem he shares, that inexplicable urge to hug him—or find a way, any way, to comfort him—grows. I want to make his dark cloud disappear. I need it to disappear, because I can’t stand to see him tormented.
I'm learning almost as much about him from the few lines he writes in the mud every day as I do from our questioning when we do chores. I counter with poems that couldn't be more different. They're cheerful and light. It's not that I was ever into cheerful poetry; I was never into poetry at all. I like novels. I'm surprised I remember any poems at all. The last time I read poetry, I was a high school senior. For some reason the sunny, bubbly poems stuck. At any rate, Tristan seems to show as much interest in my poems as I do in his.
When we finish with the poetry session, I hand Tristan the bow and arrow. "This is your chance to impress me." He claims he feels well enough to teach me how to shoot.
He frowns, positions the arrow, and pulls the string of the bow. I try to memorize every action, every movement of his muscles, hoping to be able to reproduce them when my turn comes. His wide shoulders hunch forward, his strong arms gripping the bow and the arrow. The muscles on his arms and shoulder blades are flexed; I can see their sharp contour beneath his shirt. The muscles on his stomach are tightened, too. The defined packs on his abdomen are visible through his damp, clinging shirt. He told me time and again that in order to hit the target it is most important to find my balance and keep myself centered. He claimed I could achieve that if I contract my abdominal muscles. I’ve tried, but I see now that I haven't done it properly.
Tristan aims at our makeshift target. And misses it by two feet. I start laughing. "I'm not impressed."