PRESENT
Johanna made a stop gesture to me and turned off the recorder. She had tears in her eyes.
“So, how long was it?” she asked me in a whisper.
“Judging by the date when I left Alaska and the date when I woke up in your house, thirteen days. I don’t remember even half of it. Andre insisted that many things happened, that we were this close to being seen by a farmer and that I scared away several bobcats that were prowling around us, that he himself had a cold for a few days and I took care of him, but I don’t know. It’s lost. I spent so much time alienated by the fever and fighting the infections, desperate to get out of there, that maybe I did things by instinct and wasn’t even conscious of my actions.”
“You were thinking about dying. I mean, part of you had already given up every
