I doze off briefly and wake up to her poking my ribs.

La tua ragazza?she says. She has found the picture of Thalia on the beach, the one I had taken years before with our homemade pinhole camera. Your girlfriend?

No, I say.

Your sister?

No.

La tua cugina? Your cousin, si?

I shake my head.

She studies the photo some more, taking quick drags off her cigarette. No, she says sharply, to my surprise, even angrily. Questa è la tua ragazza! Your girlfriend. I think yes, you are liar!And then, to my disbelief, she flicks her lighter and sets the picture on fire.

Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen … seventeen…

About midway through our trek back to the bus stop, I realize I’ve lost the photo. I tell them I need to go back. There is no choice, I have to go back. Alfonso, a wiry, tight-lipped huasowho is tagging along as our informal Chilean guide, looks questioningly at Gary. Gary is an American. He is the alpha male in our trio. He has dirty-blond hair and acne pits on his cheeks. It’s a face that hints at habitual hard living. Gary is in a foul mood, made worse by hunger, the absence of alcohol, and the nasty rash on his right calf, which he contracted brushing up against a litreshrub the day before. I’d met them both at a crowded bar in Santiago, where, after half a dozen rounds of piscolas, Alfonso had suggested a hike to the waterfall at Salto del Apoquindo, where his father used to take him when he was a boy. We’d made the hike the next day and had camped out at the waterfall for the night. We’d smoked dope, the water roaring in our ears, a wide-open sky crammed with stars above us. We were trudging back now toward San Carlos de Apoquindo to catch the bus.

Gary pushes back the wide rim of his Cordoban hat and wipes his brow with a handkerchief. It’s a three-hour walk back, Markos, he says.

¿Tres horas, hágale comprende?Alfonso echoes.

I know.

And you’re still going?

Yes.

¿Para una foto?Alfonso says.

I nod. I keep quiet because they would not understand. I am not sure I understand it myself.

You know you’re going to get lost, Gary says.

Probably.

Then good luck, amigo, Gary says, offering his hand.

Es un griego loco, Alfonso says.

I laugh. It is not the first time I have been called a crazy Greek. We shake hands. Gary adjusts the straps of his knapsack, and the two of them head back up the trail along the folds of the mountain, Gary waving once without looking as they take a hairpin turn. I walk back the way we had come. It takes me four hours, actually, because I do get lost as Gary had predicted. I am exhausted by the time I reach the campsite. I search all over, kicking bushes, looking between rocks, dread building as I rummage in vain. Then, just as I try to resign myself to the worst, I spot a flash of white in a batch of shrubs up a shallow slope. I find the photo wedged between a tangle of brambles. I pluck it free, beat dust from it, my eyes brimming with tears of relief.

Twenty-three … twenty-four … twenty-five…

In Caracas I sleep under a bridge. A youth hostel in Brussels. Sometimes I splurge and rent a room in a nice hotel, take long hot showers, shave, eat meals in a bathrobe. I watch color TV. The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet—they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

Thirty-four … thirty-five … thirty-six…

My fourth day in India. I totter down a dirt road among stray cattle, the world tilting under my feet. I have been vomiting all day. My skin is the yellow of a sari, and it feels like invisible hands are peeling it raw. When I can’t walk anymore, I lie down on the side of the road. An old man across the road stirs something in a big steel pot. Beside him is a cage, inside the cage a blue-and-red parrot. A dark-skinned vendor pushing a cartful of empty green bottles passes me by. That’s the last thing I remember.

Forty-one … forty-two…

I wake up in a big room. The air is thick with heat and something like rotting cantaloupe. I am lying on a twin-sized steel-frame bed, cushioned from the hard, springless platform by a mattress no thicker than a paperback book. The room is filled with beds like mine. I see emaciated arms dangling over the sides, dark matchstick legs protruding from stained sheets, scant-toothed mouths open. Idle ceiling fans. Walls marked by patches of mold. The window beside me lets in hot, sticky air and sunlight that stabs the eyeballs. The nurse—a burly, glowering Muslim man named Gul—tells me I may die of hepatitis.

Fifty-five … fifty-six … fifty-seven…

I ask for my backpack. What backpack? Gul says with indifference. All my things are gone—my clothes, my cash, my books, my camera. That’s all the thief left you, Gul says in his rolling English, pointing to the windowsill beside me. It’s the picture. I pick it up. Thalia, her hair flapping in the breeze, the water bubbling with froth around her, her bare feet on the rocks, the leaping Aegean flung out before her. A lump rises to my throat. I don’t want to die here, among these strangers, so far away from her. I tuck the photo in the wedge between the glass and the window frame.

Sixty-six … sixty-seven … sixty-eight…

The boy in the bed next to mine has an old man’s face, haggard, sunken, carved. His lower belly is swollen with a tumor the size of a bowling ball. Whenever a nurse touches him there, his eyes squeeze shut and his mouth springs open in a silent, agonized wail. This morning, one of the nurses, not Gul, is trying to feed him pills, but the boy turns his head side to side, his throat making a sound like a scraping against wood. Finally, the nurse pries his mouth open, forces the pills inside. When he leaves, the boy rolls his head slowly toward me. We eye each other across the space between our beds. A small tear squeezes out and rolls down his cheek.

Seventy-five … seventy-six … seventy-seven…

The suffering, the despair in this place, is like a wave. It rolls out from every bed, smashes against the moldy walls, and swoops back toward you. You can drown in it. I sleep a lot. When I don’t, I itch. I take the pills they give me and the pills make me sleep again. Otherwise, I look down at the bustling street outside the dormitory, at the sunlight skidding over tent bazaars and back-alley tea shops. I watch the kids shooting marbles on sidewalks that melt into muddy gutters, the old women sitting in doorways, the street vendors in dhotis squatting on their mats, scraping coconuts, hawking marigold garlands. Someone lets out an earsplitting shriek from across the room. I doze off.

Eighty-three … eighty-four … eighty-five…

I learn that the boy’s name is Manaar. It means “guiding light.” His mother was a prostitute, his father a thief. He lived with his aunt and uncle, who beat him. No one knows exactly what is killing him, only that it is. No one visits him, and when he dies, a week from now—a month, two at the outside—no one will come to claim him. No one will grieve. No one will remember. He will die where he lived, in the cracks. When he sleeps, I find myself looking at him, at his cratered temples, the head that’s too big for his shoulders, the pigmented scar on his lower lip where, Gul informed me, his mother’s pimp had the habit of putting out his cigarette. I try speaking to him in English, then in the few Urdu words I know, but he only blinks tiredly. Sometimes I put my hands together and make shadow animals on the wall to win a smile from him.