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pushed their way aboard. The vessel swayed and trembled. Victor sat on his bag and put his head between his knees. There was so much noise: the captain barking out prices, the passengers shouting back. A few people got off, cursing the captain: “Abuse!” a woman yelled. She had a baby in her arms. Then the engine came to life, and everyone pressed together tightly. Victor stayed low while the rest stood; he looked out between legs and baggage at the surface of the black river and the mass of vegetation that curled over the water’s edge. The launch pushed upstream. Victor felt Manau rub his head, but he didn’t look up.
    The provincial capital was called 1791. It was an inelegant town of wooden houses clustered around a clapboard church. The bus, they were told, would come that evening or perhaps the next morning. No one could say for sure. “Where can we eat?” Manau asked, and the bespectacled man who sold tickets nodded in the direction of the market.
    Victor and Manau wandered among the stalls where the old women were closing up and putting away their wares for the day. They shared a plate of cold noodles and soup. Manau ordered a beer and drank from the bottle. Patriotic songs played over the loudspeaker. “Your mother told me to take care of you,” Manau said. The skin around his eyes was puffy and red.
    Victor nodded but said nothing. It seemed for a moment that his teacher was trying to make a joke.
    â€œBut who’s going to take care of me?” Manau asked, his voice cracking.
    They successfully wasted the day, playing marbles in the plaza, visiting the church to light a candle for his mother. Manau read a newspaper he found beneath a bench. It was damp and yellowed, but only two weeks old. In the late afternoon, they slept a few hours with their backs againstthe town’s only lamppost, then the bus appeared just before midnight, and 1791 came to life. Women rose to sell silver fish and cornmeal, cigarettes and clear liquor in plastic bags. Small, wiry men carried packages twice their size to and from the bus. The driver and his passengers ate hurriedly, plates of rice steaming in the nighttime chill. Young men smoked and spat, raised their hats at the girls selling tomato sandwiches. Dozens of people gravitated to the bus, were pulled into its orbit. It was loaded in the yellow-tinged darkness, by a group of boys Victor’s age, who clambered atop the roof, tying packages to the rack in an impossible bundle. And then, as soon as it began, it was over: now they were leaving, the doors closing, the bus pulling away with a grunt of the motor. Victor had never seen so much movement. The district capital disappeared, spent by its burst of energy; the women went back to sleep, the men to drinking. In a few moments, the single streetlight had faded, and there was only the heat of the crowded bus and the complaint of the engine.
    The road was bumpy, and Victor hardly slept, his head knocking against the window a dozen times in the night. Manau gave up his seat to an old man, sat stolidly on an overstuffed suitcase in the aisle, eventually sleeping with his head cradled in his hands. Victor was alone, and he’d never left the village before. Outside, there was only darkness, the blue-black sky indistinguishable from the earth. Just before morning, a thin line of red appeared at the horizon. He was in the mountains now. In the dim violet light, the ridges seemed like the ruddy spine of an alligator. Beside him, the old man slept, snoring fiercely, his head back and mouth agape, a stack of shiny plastic sheets in his lap. They looked like giant photographs. Victor had seen something like this in school. In a book. He thought he could recognize in them bones and the shape of a human chest. The old man’s white hair was thin, his lips parched. Victor looked down again at the photographs: there were ribs! He touched his own, felt his skin slide over the bones. He felt his own