Journal of the Dead (11 page)

Dave had been getting weak in the legs, having difficulty bracing himself against the downhill slope, so he told Raffi to go on ahead for the water, he’d catch up. Kodikian was drained himself, but he
worked his way through the scratchy maze of brush near the bottom without stopping. When he finally emerged into the open space of the riverbed, he made a beeline straight for the foundation.

The water was not there.

It had to be a trick, Raffi thought. He looked around, expecting to see someone. A twisted hiker, or a ranger with a seriously sick sense of humor who’d suddenly jump out from behind a bush and shout, “Gotcha!” Even when he realized he was alone he didn’t quite believe the bottles hadn’t been there.

He sat down on the wall and waited for Dave. He could hear him snapping through the brush, knocking rocks around. He didn’t have the heart to yell to him that it was yet another false lead. Better that he had something to look forward to.

When Dave finally staggered over and saw that there was no water he barely had the energy to damn the mirage. His legs were seizing up on him, and he immediately collapsed against the old stone wall.

I feel dizzy, he said. Faint.

They sat awhile on the foundation’s ledge, waiting for Dave to catch his breath. Two years earlier, his father had had a heart attack, and seeing his dad’s brush with death had made him wonder if he’d suffer the same fate when he hit sixty; now he was worried his weakened condition might somehow speed up the genetic fuse.

There was no question where they’d go now. Back to camp was their only option, at least until they got some rest. Dave rose to his legs, which shook like a newborn fawn’s. Raffi gave him a shoulder to steady himself on. They crept back toward the tent like that, limping along like the wounded comrades in arms they were. It was about a quarter mile but it seemed to take an hour. The last
Stretch over the wide, stony flood wash was the worst; slow, aimed steps to make sure Dave didn’t step on the wrong rock and bring them both down.

This new development with Dave’s legs was a bad turn, Raffi knew. If they didn’t thaw out, there was no way they’d walk out of there together. How long would it be, he wondered, before his own legs gave out? He tried not to think about it, and instead focused on the ground in front of him, the swinging and planting of each step, watching Dave’s feet, bracing himself for each slip. It was almost a relief that somebody required his strength. He barely looked up until they neared the campsite. When he did, wouldn’t you know it, he saw a cairn that he hadn’t seen before.

You remember that one? he asked Dave.

Coughlin studied it. No, that wasn’t there, he said.

It was near the flood wash, the same area they had passed through half a dozen times the day before. How could they have missed it?

Like it had been with the phantom water bottles, they found themselves wondering irrationally if the rangers had placed it there while they were off hiking—a strategy to cover their fault for marking the trail so poorly to begin with. They could almost hear them snickering just out of sight, shadows in wide brimmed hats that melted into the cactus whenever they turned their heads to see them. They knew it was crazy, but if the camping permit had only been for one day, why hadn’t the rangers come? What had been the whole point of filling out the piece of paper and paying their $7 to begin with? Was it just to identify their bodies?

The scene with the young ranger at the desk played through their heads again and again, his arms fumbling in the shelves, his
confused eyes on the paperwork, his casual apology for ignorance. Now they saw that it was true, he really
hadn’t
known what he was doing, and they had been foolish to trust him. The copy of their camping permit—the very receipt for their lives—was now buried beneath a stack of National Park Service paperwork. The no-show rangers. They hated them, yet there was no one they more wanted to see.

Despite their cynicism, the new cairn gave them hope. After all the false leads they’d followed, it was finally time for something to work. They made a new plan to rest that evening, then get out in the morning. If Dave couldn’t make it, Raffi would go by himself. They were grateful to be off the sizzling plateau, back on the relative comfort of their sleeping pads and tent. They jazzed themselves up for the next day’s escape; how good that bottle of Gatorade would taste! They saw it clearly sitting in the backseat of their car, an ambrosia, the calming, electric green distillation of their hope. If there were a Gatorade God, they would have promised him that if they could just get to the bottle, they’d drink the stuff religiously for the rest of their lives.

R
affi had a vision that night, an “awake dream” he would later call it. As he lay in the tent, his eyes opening and closing restlessly, he saw people in the canyon. They were out there in the grayness of the riverbed, busily constructing machines, devices that would transport them out of the canyon. Anxiety swept over him as he realized that he and Dave didn’t have the proper tools to build their own machine. They would be left behind, like men on a sinking ship after all the lifeboats were filled.

He didn’t tell Dave about the dream when they got up Saturday morning. Coughlin was feeling better. He stood up outside the tent, stretched his legs tentatively, and told Raffi he thought he still had enough strength for another try. He didn’t want to be left there alone, and Raffi was grateful that he wouldn’t have to face the hike back to the car by himself.

They didn’t bother bringing anything with them this time. Carrying their own bodies out of the canyon would be work enough.

It took them a while to find the cairn they’d seen on Friday. They walked right past it, then had to double back before Coughlin finally spotted it again. Standing next to the marker, they took a deep breath and tried to focus on the task at hand.

If they were going to make it, everything depended on their being able to spot another cairn they hadn’t seen before, then maybe one or two more. The trail would be easier to see once they were certain they were finally on it, and it would also be angled upward instead of hiding somewhere in the brush and stone-ridden flats of the canyon floor.

Slowly they turned their heads in a circle, their dehydrated brains attempting to parse the visual information, separating cactus from rock, rock from rock pile, and dirt from trail like they were staring at some gigantic stereogram. Other cairns—the same old islands that had already failed to point the way out—were nearby. Somehow they had to fit them into a pattern, a line, and they strained to integrate them into a big picture. Minutes passed. They were boys in a geometry class, staring at their final exam problem without lifting a pencil, willing it to make sense, their isolation and anger mounting as the period ticked away.

I’m going back to camp, Coughlin finally groaned. He turned and marched toward the one thing he knew he could find.

I’m gonna keep looking for a little while, Raffi told Dave. He could tell by his friend’s voice that he had given up, and he, too, was beginning to feel the futility. He climbed a small rise to the right of the cairn, and looked across the canyon toward the opposite slope. They’d had a strong suspicion the trail was in that direction, but he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He’d walked many trails in Pennsylvania; they were always soft, definable tracks of
brown through green. Here, where there was only a uniform melange of rock, dirt, and cacti, he could be looking directly at the trail and not even see it.

He heard Dave yelling for him. His friend was worried that he would get lost or injure himself. Kodikian returned to the campsite, where he found Coughlin struggling to arrange some of the larger nearby stones into a pattern. He weaved drunkenly beneath their weight, dropping them down angrily, and nudging them into position with his feet. He was attempting to spell “SOS.”

Let me do that, Raffi said. You can work on a signal fire.

While Raffi finished with the stones, Dave collected anything nearby that would burn and threw it into a pile. They poured what was left of their cooking fuel over it, ignited it, and as the smoke drifted away they were not impressed. It barely even rose, just lingered in a sticky haze on the canyon floor. Growing desperate, they threw in Raffi’s sleeping bag, hoping it would generate better smoke. It seemed promising for a moment, as white, bilious plumes spewed from the fire, but it still wouldn’t rise above the walls. It trailed off down the canyon like a word trapped in a throat.

The one thing they didn’t burn was the journal. Sometime later that day, Coughlin made his first entry, to Sonnet Frost:

After their Hail Mary signals for help, they sought shade in the tent. It was the hottest day yet. By midday, according to estimates, the temperature in the canyon was nearing 110 degrees. Fighting the heat, they cut the bottom out of their tent to circulate air upward and to get access to the stones below, which they noticed were cooler than the tent’s nylon lining. All day long they shifted the rocks, exchanging them for new ones as soon as they warmed, also pulling up handfuls of pebbles and running them down their backs, imagining that it was water.

Clouds finally started coming in during the late afternoon. They crawled out of the tent and took turns writing in the journal:

From Coughlin:

After Dave was done writing, he handed the notebook to Raffi.

Do me a favor and read this, he said. I can’t tell if it’s coherent. Raffi looked it over, then made an entry himself:

Kodikian wrote additional good-byes to his friends and family—even his old high-school journalism teacher, Kathy Nelson. There were no more words from Coughlin, but Raffi wrote for him: “Dave has asked that his remains be cremated & thrown over
the edge of the Grand Canyon. I leave the handling of my remains to my family.”

Coughlin was in serious pain, according to Kodikian, and they decided to end their lives together.

Raffi pulled out his Gerber folding knife, and as it gleamed in the light of the ineffectual signal fire, both he and Dave stretched out their arms and tried to slice into their veins. But out of either exhaustion or fear, they both failed to execute a fatal slice.

They realized that they were going to have to go through whatever death the desert had in store for them. How painful it would be and how long it would take was a process as darkly mysterious to them as the night beyond their fire, but they did not doubt that it was coming.

According to Kodikian, as the night wore on Coughlin’s pain and resolution to die increased. Sometime near dawn, he made a request that Raffi would honor, and then document in the journal: