1.
When Sandy left me with her personal bible, annotated in the margins with the ways I’m going to hell, I traveled to Tierra del Fuego to ride Tren del Fin del Mundo and camp in the national park there, not as some symbolic gesture, but to take my mind off the depression and madness left in her wake. It took four days to get from the East Coast to the “End of the World” train, a long plane ride to Buenos Aires, waiting out the williwaws over the Andes for a Piper Super Cub to fly me to Ushuaia, minibus ride along the cold green Beagle Channel, and all the while reading Sandy’s notes, one from Revelation 21:8, about being cast into a lake of fire—next to it she wrote, This one’s for you. The train once hauled prisoners into the Pipo River Valley, as far south as you can go, forced to cut the heavy, twisted lenga beech that heated the prison and built the town. Now the prison is deserted, and the train ferries hikers and sightseers, the few brave enough to make it this deep into Patagonia, past the trees blown back by the wind into the hungry mouth of the Fuegian forest. No sooner had I pitched my tent on a knoll of spongy moss than a fly landed on my cheek and bit me. The fly is known locally as Mosquilombre. The last thing Sandy said to me is, “Maybe now you’ll believe in God.”
2.
I dreamt that night of a volcano spewing ash into the sky while Sandy and I made love in our tent. I woke up with worms born from the fly bite crawling across one of my eyes, tiny things that walked through my vision like the fibers you see floating in your room on a sunlit morning. Mosquilombre, the grim reaper of flies. Despite the worms, I hiked to a mountain I’d read about, found a stream, and watched a congregation of multicolor trout swim in place. Sandy would look at all this natural beauty and say a prayer. Me? I felt a burning in my head, like the lining of my brain was on fire, like God was real and angry and inside my skull. I dunked my head in the stream and the trout flashed by like knives. Everything, the trees looking confused on which way to grow, the febrile movements of the trout, spread-winged cormorants conjuring the crucifixion, everything seemed to suggest one thing: there was no way out of this. Tierra del Fuego. Philippians 2:3. The cowardly. Mosquilombre. Ephesians 5:18. The unbeliever.
3.
The worms stopped moving sometime that night as I lay awake, burning from fever. I stumbled outside the tent and the stars were a blur of green and white light. I could hear the train’s whistle blowing softly in the distance, travelling back across the Valley, leaving me for good. I could hear Sandy speaking from Ecclesiastes when the first earthquake happened. Then, when the lava came down, a songbird as alien as the Mosquilombre landed on my shoulder and sang an intricate and mesmerizing tune. The whole of the world was swallowed up, me, the worms, the bird, the trout, and time itself. Sandy wasn’t spared, wherever she was. None of that is the point. I am supposed to tell you I am not a believer, or worse, that Sandy was right about God, but when I was there standing before the pyroclastic dark, the only thing that mattered, the only thing I could think about in that moment of violence, is how much I wanted her back and couldn’t have her.
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Ⓒ Nick Ekkizogloy