e’d gotten the cut seven months after his arrival, he told me; a small but deceptively deep wound. I could tell it had happened in the jungle by the way the edges were rough and the skin clouded with infection, by the way it felt to look at it—like an antelope must feel when a lion gashes her side with his claw as she tries to escape; that heavy feeling of inevitability.

I looked at it for a long time one day while he sat at the edge of a dusk-colored stream cleaning his knife. The skin around it had taken on a calm, tainted sort of transparency that reminded me of stagnant water. That was the day that I first noticed the snake, as he later referred to it; a line that seemed to be an inch or so under the skin that it made translucent as it passed beneath. I was never sure what color the line was, not because it changed colors, but because it wasn’t the sort of color that anyone would have wanted to bother to find a word for. It stretched out a few centimeters from the wound and curved almost gracefully up his calf. He turned his head and noticed me looking.

"Around one centimeter per day. That’s how much it’s supposed to grow."

I’d first understood then that it was the affliction I’d spent most of my childhood in fear of, with every scraped knee and cut finger; a silent infection, painless until the last. It crept into the bloodstream through some particularly bad wound, and slowly etched a line to the heart, which, unless cut out and cleaned before reaching the chest, caused death. I looked at him.

"What happened?" I asked, and he laughed a little.

"I mis-stepped," he said quietly.

"How far are we from a village?"

"Do you need something?"

"I mean for you to get that taken care of," I motioned to his ankle. "You know when it reaches your heart—" he cut in quietly, in that soft but pointed oratorical voice he had that made his interruptions seem as though I’d been the one to interrupt him in some longer speech.

"I know."

We walked for a long time that day. The muscles in my legs began to ache, my steps became stiff and measured, and I almost began to wish to go back to the life I’d come there to avoid. He never walked beside me, not really in front of me either; always somewhere both beside and in front, in a place where I could always see his eyes, and the way his lips would occasionally curve into something more a grimace than a smirk. Sometimes as we walked, the aloofness of his demeanor would shatter into something like insanity, but only for a moment. His strength never faltered long enough for it to be called weakness.

The world seemed very different to me in those days we walked together through the jungle; it was bare and clean, with a refined glow. He lived in a state of clarity that I was drawn into it just like I was drawn into the walking; I walked on and on because I never knew quite what to say to him, but I always felt that if only I could have a little longer to think about it... So I walked until the walking became like a drug, blurring and changing the world, until the only world was the world of my thoughts, my only focus the deep wound on his ankle.

He was usually silent. He seemed to have too much to say, and his quietness had about it a hopeless frustration, and at the same time, a quality that made it seem a parody of itself. I dreamt once that I could see inside of him, and there sat a smaller, removed version of him, laughing as his life passed before him, quietly and with a cruelty that one is only capable of inflicting upon himself. In my dream I was chained to something enormous and immovable, watching him being eaten by an invisible but somehow tangible serpent. I remember that I was laughing as well; but not a real laugh. I laughed because I wanted him to think I could feel it too, the hilarity of his being swallowed, but I didn’t feel that at all; I felt the worst sort of pain I could imagine. When he was gone I laughed in earnest; my bonds had dissipated but I did not move. The whole thing was sordid.

One morning I woke to see him watching me. He was leaning against a tree with the sun striking his face and I thought to myself that he looked iconic.

"You’re a fanatic with nothing to rave about," he told me. I looked down and knew he was right.

"What makes you say that?"

"Most people are."

"What makes you think I’m the same?" I asked. He half looked at me, laughing softly.

"No one wants to think that they are ‘most people.’ But without a group to apply itself to, the term loses its meaning; so, ‘most people’ must refer largely to people who don’t think they’re ‘most people’," he paused. "So what makes you think you’re not?"

There was nothing I could say in response, so I just walked behind him, looking at his footprints. The walking just before we found the abandoned hut was the worst. I was too much of a coward to tell him that I was desperately tired when he’d ask every five miles or so. I would often picture him as I’d first seen him, standing alone and very straight on a great boulder protruding from the water. I’d been sitting alone—I remembered looking out into that sky that was a reflection of pure black projected out infinitely without ever hitting a surface. I’d felt the hollowness of it in the bones of my chest. He looked out over what must have seemed such a barren world with a resoluteness that I could see even from where I stood, an intentness of purpose that said he was either going to die that very moment or live forever. Later, I tried to remember him only in that moment; I tried to remember the way it had felt to believe he was immortal.

I waited hours for him to move to the land. He barely moved in those hours, and when he did, it was only to walk back in. I watched him go to some little bar by the harbor, and watched him there too for a while. When it became dark, I watched his shadow move against the opening in the wall that I supposed served as a window. When it became that time that can neither be called morning nor night and I saw him sitting awake and alone, I went to the bar. I stood in the doorway until he chose to look up—‘chose,’ I’d said to myself, because it was not happenstance—he’d seen me as soon as I’d come, I was sure of it—he looked up when he chose to.

When we left, when we began the walking, I told him things only half-realizing it: childhood stories, past wrong-doings, strange notions. I knew he listened, because he spoke back to me, not with his lips, but with his eyes...he could form words with those pupils. He’d throw in a comment here and there; and once, in the midst of a particularly long silence, he began to speak.

"I used to run marathons...fifteen miles or more. I would try make myself jog the entire time, even if the jog were slower than a brisk walk. Sometimes I would tell myself that I couldn’t bear it, and I would fall into a walk...whenever I did, I would laugh, loathe myself for it...because I knew that I could have borne it forever if I’d had to." And then he chuckled; a velvety, rolling sound that had a hidden sharpness to it, like a flower I’d tried to pick, the one that had looked so soft, but had cut my hand and spilled blood on its petals.

We happened to pass a large village one day. Under the pretense of having worn out my shoes and needing a new pair, I convinced him to stop.

"We shouldn’t stay in the village. The lodges there are worse than any other camp we might choose," he told me. I said nothing and followed as he walked a few miles out looking for some sort of shelter. We eventually came across an abandoned hut. He turned and nodded to me, and we entered.

He unpacked silently. He took the backpack from my shoulders without a word, not even to ask permission. He made beds for us both at either end of the hut by gathering dried leaves and grass from the surrounding jungle and covering them with the blankets we carried with us. A small tape measure fell from his pack, and in the same moment that I remarked to myself that it was of the same sort women measured their waists with, I turned sick with realization. He continued to unpack.

I sat outside in a shaded area, leaning against the side of the hut. I remained motionless until the sky began to turn a shade of red-purple that gave an impression of being diluted, and then he came outside and sat a few feet from me.

"I decided that if you were still there by the time the sun met the tip of the pier, I’d let you come with me," he said passively in the midst of a long silence. "I knew you wouldn’t stop me."

Later that night he went into the village, and didn’t return until very late, in that same stage of morning-night in which I’d first spoken to him. I was still awake, but I closed my eyes and feigned sleep when he entered. I kept my eyes slightly open and watched him at the other end of the room as he filled the glass enclosure with something—I didn’t yet know it was opium—and lit it.

I could imagine no light quite like the light from that glowing opium…no sort of illumination with the same sort of illicit redness about it, the same dangerous rouge glow. It was not red like the sun at any time, or even the innermost parts of a red rose—burning opium is red like night in the jungle is black. I listened to his inhalation, deep and empty, and felt that this was beautiful in the same way the atomic bombs must have been as they obliterated two of the great cities of Japan. I sat up in my bed and he turned to me. I took the pipe from his hands and breathed the poison in as deeply as I could, feeling as I knew he must have when he’d stopped to walk in the midst of marathons. He laughed as I inhaled, and it chilled me…I heard that laugh that I heard for years afterward; it echoed with a staggering emptiness that made me draw back with something like horror. But then he smiled at me, and I felt ashamed of my fear—it was the only time he’d ever smiled. We passed it back and forth between us for a long time, and I thought for a while that I was thinking in his voice, but then I realized he really was speaking to me. When I realized I hadn’t been listening to his words, I was seized with sudden despair; ‘He’ll be gone and I’ll never know…’ I mumbled to myself, and I was then possessed by the notion that if I could only get far enough away from it all, what was happening wouldn’t matter anymore. I bolted from the hut, clutching the pipe to me and burning my arm. I heard him follow me, and knew in a removed way that he could certainly catch me, very soon. But I ran feverishly, colliding viciously with the sharp underbrush with the vague impression that if I could only lunge a few steps further... And suddenly I realized that I no longer heard him behind me and knew that I hadn’t ever wanted to leave. I looked back and saw him nowhere; I tried to retrace my steps, crawling over the ground, trying to feel the imprints in the mud, and at length my foot bumped against a softness that I did not mistake even in the first instant for earth. He lifted his eyes to me.

"Where are we?" he asked.

I looked away from him, with a sensation of intense solitude. He looked back at me for a moment with a violent longing that I could feel radiating from him; he looked back as though he thought I were a solution...as though I knew somehow where we were.

I saw this in his eyes and began to cry silently—for I knew that just as easily, I could have been the one to ask him whether we were lost, and that just as easily, I could have been the one to feel that he could lead me back.

I fumbled for a few minutes, trying to help him from the ground, but he reached out his hand and turned my face to look at him.

"Do you know how I know?" he asked me in his delirium.

"Know what?"

"Know what you are."

"How?"

"Because I…" he trailed off. I turned my head and tried to pull him up. "Just stay here..." he said, pulling me down with him. I sat at his side until morning.

When I woke I was in the hut. The day was sluggish, and smoke still hung in the air. It was raining for the first time since we’d been there, large drops that promised a storm; I could already the hear the thunder far off. He was sitting at the makeshift table at the midpoint of the shanty, cutting open some foreign looking fruit with his knife. I stood and walked to the table. He looked away when I knelt at his side.

"You know, I think maybe people live toward a single effect, like Poe said about the short story...maybe everyone lives in order that he may die in a certain way," I tried to say impassively.

"Everyone dies like a child, scared and huddled in a corner," he said. He looked at me steadily. There was nothing on his face, and he was silent for a few instants. A tear fell over my cheek as I felt a sense of aching degradation as I realized my position. I sat on the table in front of him, nearly level with his stool, and looked equivocally at him as I began to unbutton my shirt and slip it from my shoulders. I stood up and walked closer to him and moved my hand to his face, poised to touch him but knowing I wouldn’t. With shallow breaths I tilted my face towards him until my lips grazed his, just barely. I felt an pain grow in my chest, sitting there, not moving forward or away, knowing he wouldn’t either.

He sat very still for a while, then reached around me to cut off a piece of the foreign looking fruit and placed it in my mouth.

"We should go to the village for your shoes tonight," he said calmly as he pulled out his stool and walked out into the thick drops of rain with his hands in his pockets. His hand had brushed against me on its way to my mouth, I thought, feeling it again. Only as I swallowed that strange, foreign looking, foreign tasting fruit did I realize that he had gone, and only after that foreign taste was entirely gone from my mouth did I see the measuring tape unrolled on the table just beside me.

He came back a few hours later. I never knew where he’d been. We looked at one another wordlessly, and then I rose to go with him to the village.

I found shoes almost immediately, but when I looked up from my purchase, I couldn’t find him. I wandered through the town with a heavy anxiety, and hours later, entered a small and ill-kept cafe. I sat alone at one of the rough wooden tables, and a man sat down next to me. He seemed decent enough, slightly older than me, smelling oddly of geraniums. He smoothed his shirt as he spoke to me in a low, deliberate tone. The man told me his name—something ordinary that reminded me of libraries—and when he asked me whether I’d like to take a walk with him, I smiled unresponsively and rose from my stool. I barely remembered what the man spoke of; I kept thinking of the geraniums that used to grow outside my grade school, and how, when I stood close to the man, I could breathe deeply and become drunk with the memory of my youth.

Through it all, I saw the face of the great man who was being devoured before my eyes; I remembered the way his face could look sometimes—that expression, that tilting of his lips and slitting of his eyes which conveyed an unbearable and tragic absurdity, an intense perception of a profound, uncontrolled madness. I saw his countenance again and again, until it came to seem that he existed within me. It seemed to me that night that I was irretrievably lost in an immense, perilous, yet somehow trivial maze. I felt something within me in its death throes, unnamable and so deep I felt I must be collapsing inward. And I wasn’t afraid of collapse—not really. My unease was not born of the fear of internal death, but rather of a perverse desire for it, a morbid excitement, and at the same time, a sickening knowledge of the abhorrence of this desire. I walked with the unknown man in a state that cannot truly be described; I was not sure whether I was more or less myself than ever that night. After talking nervously for three quarters of an hour, the man brought me to his door.

"You’re beautiful," he told me, but I knew he said it only because he did not know what beauty was.

I drifted through the door with him that night, and crept out the next morning before the man woke.

As I entered our hut, I could feel in the air that he knew. When he raised his eyes, I saw no shock or reproach. A sharpness shot through me, and he gave me a peculiar look; I saw for a moment something in his eyes akin to empathy.

"Don’t..." I whispered across the room.

He exhaled, a caricature of a laugh.

For weeks I did all I could not to think about the poison working its way through his blood, like my mother used to clean out the closets whenever there was some emergency. I was able to do it too, keep up the delusion in myself that he was as immortal as the boulder he’d stood on, as long as I didn’t look too closely at the way the life was slowly fading from his lips. I almost talked myself out of the serpent’s existence.

Then one night as he undressed for bed, I caught sight of it, just level with his navel. I ran at him, snatching his knife up from the table. He didn’t raise a hand against me, just looked at me with an expression of finality in his eyes, reminding me of who I was, what I was doing. I thought I was going to stop for a few seconds—I even started to lower the knife. I looked at him again, into him, and lunged. He caught my wrists, but the knife cut his forearm. I fought to free myself, to cut out the snake, but he held my wrists firmly, not letting go, but not trying to pull me down. I fought until all the fight had gone out of me, and then I fell to the ground, my blood aching, decaying in my veins. I cried until there was no more fluid left inside me, and as I watched him calmly bandage the wound on his arm, I was filled with another kind of agony, worse than the first because it had no outlet. With his eyes narrowed and his lips drawn thin he knelt beside me.

"Even if I cut it out...there would be a different sort of disease…" he said.

I crept into his bed that night, the hundred-and-eighteenth night, that last night, and lay quietly beside him, trying to retain the feeling of that memory and moment, and the choice I knew I would not make. He didn’t move, but I could feel that his eyes were open. It was like this for a while, him lying so still, and after an hour or so, he turned on his back and put his hands behind his head, looking up at the roof.

"I’m nothing to rave about, you know," he told me quietly, and I made the same sound as he had before, that parody of laughter. His tone no longer had the restraint in it; it was so bare I thought something inside me would shatter. I looked at him and he looked back at me in the same way, deep like the wound, maybe even more fatal; and I felt I was drinking the life from his eloquent eyes, greedily, recklessly...and after a while, it wasn’t life that I was drinking, but rather that eloquent silence, and an understanding of him so deep that I understood, for a moment, the very sum and substance of his refusal to fight. I wanted to save him… But when I looked at his face, I could see that he was saying the same thing he’d said minutes ago, telling me without making a sound, repeating it both to me and to himself. And, as ever, there was nothing I could have said that would’ve changed a thing.