Survival mode

The place where they brought him back to life was worse than the place where he almost died. 

At first, the hospital seemed safe and clean. Everything in it was made of rounded pastel plastic, like a kindergarten scaled up to adult size. But David’s perceptions had sharpened in the jungle, and he could smell hidden decay. Bodies. Drifting wafts of stale food. His sheets were changed every day. They had a decent thread count. But when he pulled them to his face at night, he could smell the sharp tang of piss under the scent of fabric softener as if the previous patient had marked their territory. 

Picture by Nicolas Picard

He remembered mosquitoes screaming in the night. The ant bites, tiny fires. All the agonies that meant you still existed. He eyed the lukewarm apple juice on his tray and remembered sucking water from cupped leaves at dawn. 

The doctors and nurses told him he was lucky to be safe and back in Australia. 

He was worried if he said too much, he’d start spewing all the truths he’d learned, so he answered their questions as briefly as he could. ‘David Merchant. Forty-four. Married. Marketing consultant. No, not yet today.’ 

The doctor scrutinised him and pinched the skin on his forearm. 

‘The nurses say you’re having trouble eating.’ 

‘It’s difficult.’ A pit of hunger yawned inside him, but he felt sick at the thought of filling it with any of their food. ‘I don’t have much appetite.’ 

‘You’ve had an ordeal. Your body doesn’t know the difference between safety and danger anymore. Rest. Eat what you can.’ 

After a few days – days and nights smudged together in the hospital – he heard an argument outside his room and knew that it was Chelsea, her influencer treble rising above the stern undertone of the nurse. 

‘It’s alright. She’s my wife,’ David called out, his voice cracking. ‘Let her through.’ 

He’d wondered what it would be like to see her again – so many things had been a disappointment – but she looked perfect as always. She still had a tan from the resort. Around her throat she wore a silver chain he’d forgotten giving her. Above it, devotion and anger battled for possession of her face. 

‘Why did you go off like that?’ she demanded. 

David looked at his hands, filigreed with bright scratches. One finger was still capped with a blood blister earned from mashing a spider with a rock. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. 

It had just been a bad day. David had paid for Palm Villa’s penthouse suite, and at five o’clock the sun stabbed into the room like a searchlight while they winced and struggled in the bed. Still hungover, he tried to work the blinds, and Chelsea moaned into the pillow wrapped around her face. 

‘You could help instead of complaining,’ he muttered, and their moods clashed for the rest of the day. 

At breakfast, she chattered about their plans while David watched withered tourists drift past and wished he had a decent cup of coffee. Chelsea piled fruit on her plate and recited their names like a nursery rhyme. Lychees, she said. Rambutans. She spooned something called custard apple into his mouth and the sickly mass of it almost made him choke. It didn’t help when the unctuous waiter stopped at their table to make sure he and his daughter were enjoying their stay. 

Their travel planner had said the resort was bordered by endless rainforest on one side and pristine ocean on the other. The rainforest part was true. On the ocean side, a band of desperate humanity jostled between Palm Villa and the waves: bars, stalls, people rinsing down the street with bright blue buckets. 

Chelsea wanted to explore. She wanted to see the real country. David pretended he’d prefer that to lying comatose by the pool. A hundred metres from Palm Villa’s gates, a wiry revenant with one red eye harangued them while they stood waiting for the lights to change. David smiled and patted all his pockets to show he couldn’t help, and the man shook his greasy curls and started barking in their faces. They escaped to the nearby market, but Chelsea couldn’t get it out of her head. 

‘It just feels wrong,’ she said, spooning pork mince into a lettuce cup. ‘We’re on holiday, sleeping under the air conditioner, paying by credit card and people like that are just surviving. Not even surviving.’ 

WE aren’t paying for anything, David thought. ‘I wanted to give him something.’ 

‘I know. I’m just saying. How are we supposed to enjoy ourselves?’ 

He said they had to try, and Chelsea looked at him. They studied each other, remembering the months before the holiday, and considering what would happen if they tried and failed. 

Chelsea pressed her mouth into a line as thin and flat as a scar. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll try.’ 

For the rest of the day, they tried. They tried holding hands in the heat. They paid twenty dollars to go in a gloomy tent and tried not to notice the poking ribs and desperate eyes of the floating crocodile inside. Over dinner, they tried laughing at their scalding soup and dubious shellfish. David had a beer everywhere they stopped, and Chelsea tried not to say anything about it. 

By sunset, they were tired and irritable. They’d been talking, but David couldn’t remember the last time they’d looked at each other. A headache from the sun and beer lodged over his left eye. Bars opened. People Chelsea’s age were laughing in the street and she watched them, looking defeated. David decided what they needed was a quiet place to sit and have a drink. To be alone and talk. 

He pulled her into a dark, air-conditioned bar and bought them drinks. One cocktail was listed separately, in a multicoloured chalk square wreathed with Christmas lights. ‘A Xanadu?’ David asked. ‘What’s one of those?’ 

The bartender giggled. ‘Try it. Hella tasty. Gets you lit.’ He pronounced the last phrase with singsong intonation, and David wondered if he was being mocked, or it was just a cross-cultural mix-up. 

What the hell. He was on holiday. Even Chelsea was drinking. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘And a mojito. Not too strong.’ 

The bartender grinned, dumped a blender on the bench and started pulling bottles from the shelf. 

Chelsea smiled warily when he returned with the drinks. The Xanadu was a mound of shaved ice served in a toppling goblet. It was the colour of spite and pierced with a paper umbrella that looked like a biohazard warning. Chelsea’s mojito sat toylike beside it. 

‘Wanted to try something new,’ said David. ‘We have a lot to celebrate, the two of us.’ 

Chelsea took a prim sip from her straw. 

He slid into his chair, wondering what to talk about. Nothing about the day, nothing too serious. They could always plan tomorrow, but sometimes making plans turned nasty. He licked his lips and took a beer-sized pull from his goblet of booze. 

It wasn’t beer. It was a psychoactive gut-punch in a syrupy glove. His head rocked on his shoulders like the dolls that bobbed maniacally on taxi dashboards. He carefully lowered the glass to the table. Even the fumes were intoxicating. ‘Not bad,’ he managed. ‘It’s a little sweet.’ 

Chelsea started planning the next day. A museum. Traditional handicrafts. Her voice sounded like it was being piped through a faraway speaker. They could take a cruise into the jungle. 

The cocktail was making everything better. He took another sip. A bloody hard-earned holiday with his beautiful, young wife. What else was there to worry about? They’d just needed a change of location. 

‘Well?’ Chelsea asked, eyebrows raised, lips agape. It was what TikTokers did to convey annoyance, and for a moment she looked about fifteen. 

He leant forward and gently covered her hand with his – she was always telling him not to be so rough. ‘We can do whatever you want. This is your holiday too.’ 

She turned her head towards the beach. 

The music was louder now. A few couples in the bar had started dancing, and their tanned limbs were like a mass of worms. Ground control, he thought, I may have had too much to drink. Time for fresh air and a walk. He stood, mumbling something about stretching his legs, and took another swig from the goblet before they left the table. The bloody thing had cost forty dollars. 

Chelsea followed him along the beach. He stopped to watch the moon and she bumped into his back. She looked towards the water. He looked back at the town. 

The sun was down, and the lights were on, making the promised paradise look sticky and cheap. A scrum of young men passed, and David was terrified they’d spot him and Chelsea and yell out something cruel. Laughing couples took pictures of each other – only doing it for likes, he thought. He swayed and Chelsea’s warm body crushed against his arm. The band of jungle at the end of the moonlit beach looked like mould on an old slice of bread. It’s not so bad, he thought, and turned towards her for a kiss. 

She pulled away. ‘What are you doing? Really? After today?’ She coughed up an angry laugh. 

‘Well, it’s never the time is it, with you?’ He heard that he was slurring and spat out the next words as precisely as he could. ‘Not all bloody year.’ 

Chelsea blanched, as angry as he’d ever seen her. ‘There are two of us in this, you know. You sit around and act like everything is disappointing.’ She stabbed her finger in his chest. ‘But you don’t do anything about it. You just...rot.’ 

David sneered. ‘And all I get from you is fucking complaining and’ – he tried to remember every inane thing she’d ever said, the times he’d wondered if there was a person at all behind her face – ‘rambutans.’ 

Chelsea’s voice dropped. ‘You think you’re so much better than me.’ She turned back towards the ocean. ‘Sometimes I really hate you.’ 

David stared at his wife’s stony profile, considering the worst things he could say to her, but she’d already said, ‘I hate you.’ He wanted to demand a divorce, but images of lawyers and mounds of paper flooded his head. The worst words he knew for women felt like feeble playground taunts. His fists tightened until he felt the bones would rip his skin. ‘Fine,’ he croaked, turned and stomped away from her. 

He lurched for the black rim of the jungle, the night rushing by like he was driving in a tunnel. His wife dwindled to nothing behind him, the image of her alone on the beach like a still from an unmemorable film. At the edge of the jungle, the beach was covered in creeper – it crunched like glass under his boots. Looking back, he could just make out the pale smear of Chelsea’s limbs and face in the dark. That bitch, he thought. She hasn’t even turned around. Fucking fine with me. 

The jungle swaddled him in the trapped heat of the day, rank and sweet. He swayed inside, and the sounds of traffic faded until they were muffled by the surf. In a blind rhythm, he hacked into the jungle's heart, bashing vines out of his face, kicking roots away and singing that the tide was high until, nauseous and exhausted, he collapsed against the bole of a tree, closed his eyes and dropped his head. 

He woke to stagnant water pooling under his cheek, the rattle and whine of a thousand stirring animals and wondered where the hell he was. 

Chelsea was looking at the swollen saline bag beside his bed. The heart monitor beeped, making her flinch. Her parents were still alive, David remembered, and she hadn’t been in many hospitals. 

‘Were you trying to...?’ She gnawed her lower lip. ‘I mean, did you wanna get lost? Not come back?’ 

‘No. Christ, no. Of course I tried.’ 

The first morning in the jungle, he’d blurrily found a gap in the trees and walked through it, sure it was the way he’d come in. He put his thumping head down and walked, scripting his apology to Chelsea and fantasising about a cold shower. The sun climbed. The jungle steamed. His shirt clung to his back like a wrinkled second skin. It hadn’t taken this long, had it, the night before? He’d been pissed, but surely he hadn’t walked for half an hour. 

Resting against a fat tree, he remembered an ex-SAS psycho on the television, drinking his own urine and talking wilderness survival. You were supposed to find higher ground. You were supposed to find water. David had always had a good memory. People like him didn’t get lost and die in the jungle. 

He climbed an incline. He found a pool of water topped with silvery scum. He turned and walked in the direction of the beach, but only sank into a gully. He walked for hours before he remembered that if you were lost, you were supposed to stay in one place and wait for rescue. 

‘Nineteen days,’ Chelsea said. ‘It’s a long time.’ 

‘It felt longer.’ 

She sat down and pulled the chair close to his bed. His story had impressed her, and she was looking at him like he could reveal some vital secret. Like she had when they first met. ‘How did you survive? What did you eat?’ 

‘Did they say when I could get out of here?’ David asked, too hungry to talk about food. 

They made a silent pact not to talk until after he’d recovered. 

Coming home, David felt as dislocated as he had during his feverish last days in the jungle. His mind kept going back. He was staggering along a dirt road. He was lying in the tray of a bouncing ute. He was strapped down in a plane. He was looking at their two-storey neo-Georgian like it was the embassy for an alien civilisation. 

 ‘Oops,’ Chelsea said when the wheelchair bumped over the threshold. He’d told them he could walk, but he’d been sympathetically ignored. She crouched in front of him and squeezed his hand. ‘How does it feel to be home?’ she asked. 

Chelsea made an elaborate welcome-home meal that David couldn’t eat. Vegetables tasted like mud. Meat was an ordeal. He pared tiny slivers from his chicken breast, put them in his mouth and tried to smile. Afterwards, they went to bed. While Chelsea lay beside him – her breathing sounded like distant waves hitting a beach – he thought about his last days in the jungle. 

He’d been starving, light-headed, halfway between full awareness and hallucination. He stood for what felt like an eternity, wondering if a flower could really be that bright. If he could really see faces in the leaves. He heard a helicopter overhead and chased it, arms windmilling. He screamed himself hoarse before he realised it was just a cloud passing over the canopy, the coming storm clapping palm fronds to make the sound of chopper blades. His arms dropped to his sides. His whole head was on fire. He swayed and crumbled to the dirt, and the jungle opened its jaws and swallowed him. 

In the dark he saw a light. In the light there was a figure – slender limbs, a halo of platinum hair. Her black minidress wasn’t enough for the jungle. Maybe it’s a funeral, he thought. 

Debbie Harry walked towards him, and the jungle parted for her like it was the crowd in Studio 54. She leant down: the scent of Chanel and Marlboro Lights embroidered the jungle’s fecund rot. She was offering him something. Her burgundy-tipped fingers opened for him like the clasps of an elaborate jewellery box. In her palm, a fat black spider squatted, a sickly gleam under the hair of its swollen abdomen. 

He looked up at her. She nodded, and he lunged to crush the spider in his mouth. The bitter, vital meat of it soaked into him. It was a revelation after two weeks of chewing roots and nibbling at moss. If he ate another, he could fly out of the jungle. One leg twitched against his lip, tickling deliciously. 

Debbie raised a slender finger to her lips. Sssh. 

The memory of food made his stomach churn so loudly that Chelsea shifted next to him. David groped for his phone and padded to the kitchen. 

Bananas. Apples. A freezer choked with rubbish. The doctor had said to eat whatever he could manage, but the kitchen sickened him. 

Tarantulas were easy to catch when you knew where to look. They froze under the shadow of a reaching hand. On a stick, they crisped quickly over a fire. When he ate, every milligram of them became him. Because he’d earned it. Because he was surviving. Now he was expected to sit on his arse all day, then happily chew a cow. 

He poured himself a glass of water. Clean. Safe to drink. 

A tiny daddy-long-legs curled in the kitchen window, its filament legs gathered against the cold. David set his glass on the counter and leant close to admire it. The dusty white abdomen. The pinprick head. How could something so delicate even survive? The cold made it sluggish, and it barely shifted when he closed his hand around it. He pressed his palm against his mouth, felt a scurry against his tongue, and then it disappeared in him, like a strand of bitter grey fairy floss. He swallowed, and goodness suffused him. The spider’s energy coursed through him like rivulets of rain across the forest floor, and he stood, solitary and alive, as dawn seeped across the garden and blushed behind his eyelids. Safety. Nourishment. 

He sang to himself that accidents never happened. 

He decided to go back to bed. He wouldn’t wake her.