Break in Case of Emergency (16 page)

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.”

“Who—who even set this up?” Jen had asked. “Is he expecting us? Me?”

“Just try to let go,” Travis had said. “Experience the experience.”

But Jen had no clue as to what she was being asked to let go of, given the obscurity of the origins and cause of her appointment with Baz Angler and the ominous haze that hung around Angler himself, an eccentric recluse and certified genius with a stated interest in MDMA-aided time travel and a net worth estimated in the mid-to-high nine figures.

Chewing a thumbnail in the beneficent glow of the iMac G3, Jen skimmed the latest batch of Total Transformation Challenge essay submissions. She considered the instructions for the fourth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 4: EARTH

How can you challenge yourself to strengthen your pact with Mother Earth and commit to leaving the natural world a better place for our children?

Your response here:

I challenge myself to experience the experience of paradise-in-progress.

Jen reckoned that the best way to prepare to experience the experience of her journey to Belize was to look things up about Baz Angler on the Internet, or at least on the past-imperfect tense of the Internet available in the breakfast room of the Garinagu Eco Lodge.

There were numerous undisputed facts about Richard Benedict “Baz” Angler available online. One of three sons of a computer science professor father and a librarian mother, he spent his early childhood outside Sydney and thereafter grew up in Massachusetts. He dropped out of MIT after three semesters, and at age twenty-two founded the video-game developer Gembryo Systems Inc., best known for the late-1980s blockbuster
Furthermost,
a free-roaming fantasy role-play video game set in a mystical dystopia, and its equally successful sequels
Farthermore
and
Everending,
the last of which featured the voice-acting talents of one Leora Infinitas as both the Dawn Queen Angharad, Defender of the Cloak of Athanasia, and the Twilight Queen Blodeuwedd, Protector of the Crown of Impregnability. A decade later, the software behemoth Vidente Corporation acquired Gembryo in a landmark deal in which Angler personally netted at least $100 million. He earned at least that again through savvy early investments in various enterprise software and antivirus software upstarts, as well as in Seagate and Microsoft. Meanwhile, royalties and licensing fees from the various
Furthermore
movie franchises, TV-cartoon franchises, comic books, merchandise, and increasingly degraded and desiccated video-game sequels, prequels, and spinoffs had flowed forth for years after Vidente had swallowed Gembryo whole.

There were equally numerous disputed facts about Baz Angler available online. One rumor was that the financial apocalypse had devastated his investments, forcing him to sell numerous properties around the world—a cattle ranch in Australia's Northern Territory, a horse ranch in Montana, a beachfront estate in Hawaii—and driving him to far more modest quarters in unglamorous Belize. One largely unsourced report, which Jen found on a reputable gaming blog, had him developing antibiotic plants on the New River with a pair of comely Big Pharma refugees; another, almost entirely unsourced report from a different, less reputable gaming blog claimed that the antibiotic-plant project was a front for a drug-smuggling operation. The most stubbornly viral rumor suggested that Angler's longtime immersion in the universe of the
Furthermost
trilogy, paired with his equally longtime immersion in cutting-edge hallucinogens, had severed the line he'd always walked, both in his life and so profitably in his work, between fantasy and reality.

In
Everending,
the raven-haired and brooding wizard-in-training Trahaearn has acquired both the Cloak of Athanasia and the Crown of Impregnability in his questing across the postapocalyptic greenscapes of the once and future kingdom Apologia, where he is accompanied by the loyal druid Maredudd and the wily genetically engineered dragon Wmffre; for his efforts, Trahaearn is honored by his Leora Infinitas–voiced twin warrior queens with the title of Earl of Cockney, which was the nickname bestowed upon the pubescent Baz Angler by his classmates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who mistook his Australian tones for those of East End London. By the time of
Everending IX: The Enlargement,
the Earl of Cockney né Trahaearn's countenance and form had shape-shifted into a hologram of Angler himself: flapping dark tresses now rusty tufts, tanned and buffed hide now all sharp, freckled-pale angles. Baz Angler's own creation had become Baz Angler.

“And thus Trahaearn, Earl of Cockney, becomes himself!” proclaimed the Dawn Queen Angharad and the Twilight Queen Blodeuwedd in unison.

As Jen scribbled down Maredudd's genealogy in her notebook, she knew the exact moment both halves of the Animexa tablet began to take effect, because of the subtlest tremor that stirred her hand as she wrote, and the equally subtle euphoria that animated the tremor—euphoria miniaturized into a pinprick, a coruscating grain of sand, the slenderest threading thrill zigzagging up her throat, clutching her jaw, and starbursting behind her eyes so that her entire field of vision both brightened and narrowed, whiting out any signal or noise outside her skull and screen. It was the same subtle and tightly focused euphoria that had fueled the writing and rewriting of a hundred unread LIFt memos—only stronger now, as Jen's tolerance had slipped during her months of abstinence.

Last, Jen found, there were numerous previously disputed facts about Baz Angler available online—that is, they were disputed until Jen was able to report them firsthand. One of these, given glancing notice in an alt-medicine blogger's mostly amiable post on the antibiotic-plant project, was that Baz Angler was a connoisseur of the sharp arts: a student of knife making, a historian of ironmongery, a somewhat profligate collector of ancient swords.

Jen silently confirmed this later the same morning, as she shut the door of Eva's dented Corolla behind her and moved through the overgrown grass toward Baz Angler's clapboard house-on-stilts, imagining that the roseate apparition at the top of the front steps, who gripped a rocks glass in one hand and a machete in the other, held the machete toward her as a totem not of warning but of welcome, like a plate of fresh-baked brownies, she thought, or a cool glass of lemonade, or a simple outstretched hand.