To escape the hot city and the people in it, Lisa goes on an ecotourism trek in the mountains of a foreign country. To get there she endures a long airplane ride. There is the usual business of camping equipment and protein bars and local guides in odd headgear carrying packs containing tea and dried meat. One day she becomes separated from her group of Americans, and after trudging half a day on a narrow path that doesn’t look all that well-traveled, she comes to a village.
Lisa is thirsty, and relieved to have stumbled across civilization. She spent the last hour considering the possibility that when night fell the mountain goats could become aggressive. She’d read a novel set in Wyoming in which a wild ram attacks a tourist on a motorcycle.
She is teary and grateful when a woman comes out of a hut and gives her a bowl with water in it. With a great deal of kindness the woman watches her drink, and then takes her by the hand. She brings Lisa into the hut and feeds her a stew of meat and a starchy root vegetable, flavored with sweet spices and featuring a pleasant pungency caused, Lisa guesses, by someone having aged, or possibly smoked, a key ingredient. She thinks of a wedge of stinky cheese dredged in honey and almonds that someone brought to an office party.
Their stools sit six inches off the dirt floor. Lisa smiles and points at the food. She flashes a thumbs-up to the woman, who clearly doesn’t understand. The woman is young, about Lisa’s age, with muscular arms. She has a straight long nose and black eyes and moves with economy around the little hut. The woman points to a mat on the floor and Lisa removes her two-hundred-dollar hiking boots and falls asleep.
When she wakes up it is still dark, and the woman is at the other side of the hut. She is washing herself, sitting cross-legged and shirtless on an animal skin rug with a bowl of water in front of her. A single candle burns, illuminating her brown body. It occurs to Lisa that she woman might know she’s being watched.
In the city where she is from Lisa knew a man named Bennett with full Greek eyelids, a cynical urban grin and an unappeasable curiosity about Lisa’s feelings. Some mornings while she showered they’d pretend she wasn’t aware he was watching her through the vinyl curtain, which was clear but tinted a flattering pink. Her selection of the curtain was deliberate. In the city where she is from, people in love understand the necessity of certain behaviors.
The woman’s name is unpronounceable, but Lisa tries: “Hee-nara,” she says. They laugh at her. Now, in the morning, there is another woman in the hut, someone who appears to have stopped by for the purpose of staring. Her hair is braided and piled on top of her head in a complicated arrangement. She wears a red cowboy shirt and a skirt made of a soft animal skin. She and Heenara sit with thighs touching, talking in low voices and looking at Lisa. They seem to be very close, like sisters. The woman leans over and deposits a long kiss on Heenara’s lips. Lisa realizes she was wrong about the sister thing. They look at Lisa, apparently for a reaction. To put them at ease, she smiles.
Heenara and her girlfriend take Lisa for a walk in the village. People emerge from their huts and look at her. Each hut seems to contain only one person. Everyone is young and robust-looking. All in all, this is a very attractive tribe, or clan, or whatever. In the parlance of the city she is from, Lisa does not “identify” as bisexual. She is a straight girl who on occasion will invite a woman home for the night. After having spent some time in her early twenties thinking about the issue, she settled on the strategy of refusing to adopt a label with regards to her sexuality.
This train of thought does not rumble unprovoked into Lisa's head. Heenara has received another visitor, this time a man, who like the other men of the village, walks around bare-chested and has a shiny mane of black hair. With this guy Heenara repeats the show of kissing. They take a break and regard Lisa, who offers what she believes to be an encouraging expression. Heenara throws back her head and laughs. Her neck is both soft and muscular. The man’s name sounds something like Luck. He smiles brilliantly when she tries to pronounce it. Lisa wonders how he keeps his teeth so white.
The villagers are exceptionally good cooks. Lisa sees no children and no old people. Their language sounds like a stream over stones.
