The disaster anticipated by Snow did not occur, at least not within the time frame he expected, and when nothing had happened after a month he was tempted to revisit the clearing, but shame and fear combined to negate this impulse. For a time he moved back in with Ex, yet it quickly became evident that the relationship had gone sour, as had his relationship with Temalagua, and he returned home to Concrete, Idaho, where he lived for free in an apartment owned by his father and landed a job in a local bookstore. He had intended to regroup there, to earn a little money and go off again, perhaps to Thailand, but was seduced by the lazy, listless patterns of existence in Concrete and stayed for the next ten years, maintaining a desultory lifestyle dominated by affairs with unattainable women, either married or disinterested in him as other than a pastime. The one noteworthy achievement of those years was the publication of his partial memoir, which remains unfinished to this day. (This may not be ascribed to a lack of effort, to youthful lassitude, but to the fact that it is an immature work to which he had only a passing attachment.) His infatuation with Yara developed into a full-blown obsession and, though when called upon to do so he would describe love in terms that accorded with his previous statements on the subject, he grew to think of Yara in terms more consistent with a romantic ideal. He searched the Internet for news of her and, finding none, he scribbled in his notebooks, dredging up memories, striving to piece together a coherent narrative of his four months in the jungle. He had done nude studies of Yara, but in them her face was either turned away or partly hidden by her hair – he could not recall why he had posed her this way, if it had been her idea or his, but the sketches seemed emblematic of their inadequate commitment to the relationship. He tried drawing her face from memory and was able to create accurate renderings of her features, but they were devoid of vitality and character, like better-than-average police sketches. He perceived this to be emblematic of what they had lost – an opportunity for emotional brilliance, for the transcendence of the ordinary. The conflation of time and an erratic memory presented him with the certainty of what he had heretofore merely imagined – that he had been in love with Yara and she with him, but they had not taken the final, necessary step to confirm those feelings.
One evening while netsurfing he chanced upon an article dated two years earlier about unexplained Central American mysteries that devoted a few sentences to a Temalaguan religious cult whose membership, some eight hundred strong, had recently vanished along with their object of veneration, a skull belonging to an immense specimen of the genus Megalania (this last assertion was without scholarly basis). The leader of the cult had been, the story said, ‘a charismatic young woman.’ And that was all. There was no mention whatsoever of the incident in the Temalaguan press at the time of the disappearance, a fact Snow found disturbing, and he could find no other online stories that referenced the event. Based on this sliver of information, however untrustworthy, he chucked his job, bought an airline ticket, and a week later arrived in Temalagua.
