asmallgrin
We are sitting in a fourth floor hotel room in Bogotá, Colombia, across the hall from room 404. Another cosmic off-by-one bug. Me on my laptop and Keith sitting on his bed, waiting. I’m trying to find the two of us a place to stay tomorrow, losing a battle with the hotel wifi.
Let me see your laptop for a second.
I give Keith the computer. In less than ten minutes he logs onto the router and changes the password — now we’re the only ones with internet access.
It should be faster now…
Don’t worry, I’ll change it back.
I book us an AirBnB in Santa Marta, a small city on the northern coast. It is better known to me as our next destination. We’ve only been in Bogotá for a few days, but it’s a short trip.
He resets the router password.
I met Keith when I was 19, as a summer intern at Los Alamos. He was older, 25, and already working there full-time.
Keith got kicked out of his first high school for changing his friends’ grades. High schoolers don’t keep secrets. He was nearly expelled from the second too, but eventually graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology — the only college that would accept his ignominious record.
Other than during my two summer internships we never lived in the same place. He moved between Los Alamos, Santa Fe, and Birmingham, me between Ann Arbor and New York. We did most of our talking online.
Except for our trips. By my count we visited at least 20 different countries together between 2010 and 2015. Always travelling without an itinerary, usually without a computer, and certainly with no international phone plan.
I became accustomed to arriving in a new place with no idea (or concern) about where to stay. For us, as friends who lived hundreds to thousands of miles away from one another, it was a way to keep in touch, time together with a new backdrop away from everything else.
The morning comes early. There’s half a day to kill before the flight north, and we’re determined to see the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá: an underground church built into the tunnels of an old salt mine. We take a bus out of town, towards the mine. I fall back asleep.
Eventually we get there. Look at that.
We eat fruit popsicles and get back on the bus. Next stop: Bogotá airport.
Working at Los Alamos can be rough. A tiny desert town full of brutally smart academics where the last store closes around 6 p.m. We tried to keep each other sane, but there wasn’t much to work with.
We made friends with Molly, a pedicab driver. We went to an Alpaca farm to help shear and collect their fur for a charity. Keith threw parties for the summer students.
We made up a game. Take a stack of random tourist brochures, then, go downtown and try to get anyone passing by to take them. The person to give away the most brochures wins. This is most fun and uncomfortable if everyone playing is painfully introverted. We pushed each other is strange ways.
The plane lands in Santa Marta and we take a cab downtown. Dinner comes from the first place we can find, some seafood that is served in disposable cartons. It is not delicious.
We are only a few blocks walk away from the AirBnB. Nacho is there to greet us and he gives the grand tour. The place is nice. Nacho is a chef from Brazil and used to own a restaurant in Santa Marta, now he subsists entirely off his AirBnB rental.
When the apartment is booked he stays in another place, in the next town over. His wife is from Iceland, together they have a toddler son: Benji. The kid can speak more languages than I can code in.
Nacho leaves. Keith and I settle in, tired from the day.
I wake up in the middle of the night to loud banging on the front door. Yelling. It sounds like someone is trying to break in. I fall back asleep, scared.
Morning. I get up and go to the living room. Keith is there, pacing, panicked. He couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. I’m not really sure how I did.
We try to figure out what happened. The lock is missing from the front gate. Whoever was trying to get in could have, but nothing seems amiss inside the apartment. Was someone trying to scare us? This isn’t a situation you want to be in anywhere, especially not in Colombia.
Our answers come soon enough.
Nacho. Fucking. Nacho.
He arrives at the apartment to apologize. He got blackout drunk last night. Got mugged coming home from the bar. Got picked up by the police, forgot that we were staying there, drunkenly banged on the door, and took off the lock before realizing that he had guests.
The man drinks like a true chef. He treats us to lunch, and you can see in his glassy eyes that Nacho is not looking forward to facing his wife.
We waste the rest of the day. Keith isn’t feeling well after the excitement, and it's exacerbated by the memory of the bad seafood. We go to the pharmacy and get some medicine for his stomach.
We stay in.
It’s early and we are getting a ride to the Parque Tayrona, a tropical park on the Colombian coast about an hour outside of town. This is a time sensitive operation: the last bus home leaves the park around 5pm, and we don’t want to miss it. We arrive at the park and start down the trail.
You wouldn't believe this place. There are monkeys in the trees, lizards on the ground. There are indigenous children running around, wearing rags, chopping coconuts. After a couple hours walking the trail lets out onto a beach.
We go swimming and eat empanadas. Relax.
We pack up our things and get ready for the second half of the hike. The plan is to go through to the other side of the park. The trail will go up through some ruins and back down to the exit.
It’s a hot day so we refill our water bottles one last time and head out. We should be on the bus home in about three hours.
Keith is starting to get winded going up the incline, both of our shirts are drenched in sweat. We are taking frequent breaks for Keith. More frequent than seems normal.
We finally make it up to the ruins that serve as a halfway point. Each of us purchases a Gatorade from a small stand. We drink them immediately. More refilling of the water bottles.
As we begin hiking down, it is becoming clear that something is very wrong with Keith. He is tired and needs to take a break every 100 yards or so.
We walk. The breaks increase in frequency.
I don’t know what to do. This place is remote. The only option is to get to the exit. He is having trouble walking. I put my arm around him and we walk that way until he can’t go any farther.
He starts to stumble. I am trying to talk to him but he is unresponsive.
I’m not going to leave you in this park. I know it sucks, but we have to walk out of here.
Keith starts to stumble. He isn’t responding to me anymore. We stop, standing in the middle of the trail, nobody around. He is starting to hallucinate.
Do you see them? he asks me.
What are you talking about?
In the trees! There are dead things in the trees. He seems scared.
I sit him down, my feeling of desperation mounting, trying to figure out what to do. I run down the trail to see ahead. There is nothing. There is no one.
I get back to him and he tries to stand up, but almost immediately falls over. I catch him and help him regain balance. He looks me in the eyes, still not lucid.
Well, I guess this is it. It’s been really nice knowing you.
He tries to shake my hand, stumbles.
No way. This has got to be his twisted sense of humor shining through. I sit him down again. He starts to vomit. His skin is ghostly, pure white, and covered in a film of sweat. I turn him onto his side so he won’t choke.
Again, I am running down the trail, looking for help -- this time yelling.
There is an elderly couple walking. I take them back to him and send the old man to find more water. The woman stays by Keith, fanning him. I am holding his head up. He isn’t conscious but is continuing to dry heave. A man passes on horseback. Nobody speaks English.
I discuss the situation with the man on the horse in broken Spanish. We consider using the horse to get him to the exit but the trail is too rough and there is no saddle or other means to keep him from falling off.
The man rides off to find the Colombian equivalent of park rangers. I wait thirty minutes for him to come back. The old couple stays. We take turns fanning Keith, wiping him with a wet towel, holding his head.
The rangers finally arrive. There is still no way to get him down quickly. We decide to chop down a tree and fashion a makeshift stretcher. Two people will carry the log over their shoulders and Keith would be lying in a cloth attached at each end.
It works at first. We walk down towards the exit at a good clip. I can’t wait to tell Keith what I went through for him this time. There is an ambulance waiting.
Someone is periodically checking his pulse.
It isn’t there.
Crying next to the ambulance, I barely remember getting there. I can’t see anything. In this tiny roadside town with one bus stop, every local is out to see the commotion.
His body is laying on the dirt road, covered in a tarp. Police come to examine it. Somebody gives me sweet tea.
I am making phone calls to his Mom, Dad, siblings, girlfriend. A phone call to my own parents. I’m there for several hours before we finally ride in the ambulance back to Santa Marta, Keith’s body in the back.
I go to the police station to give an official report. It starts with me being searched for drugs. Still no English. I give the report by passing an iPhone back and forth, my very own 21st century translator.
The cops are fat, making jokes, corrupt. They search all of my things.
We have to go back to the apartment because Keith left his passport there. While there we continue playing pass the phone.
This is a nice phone, the officer writes.
Thanks.
Can I have it?
No.
He shows his buddies the message and laughs. Give me your phone, he writes, handing it back to me.
fuck you my best friend just died
The officer is nicer to me after that.
They take me back to the station. The officer who wanted my phone now wants to be friendly, so he gives me a tour. He shows me all of the contraband that they’ve collected. Big bags of cocaine, more marijuana than I’ve ever seen, knives you wouldn’t want to meet in an alley.
He gives me a joint, a peace offering, tells me not to let anyone see me with it in public.
I go back to the apartment where Nacho is waiting. We go to the bar and get drunk. Shots. He commiserates with me, talking about a friend that he lost. We go home, smoke, and pass out in the living room.
I spend the rest of the week with Nacho’s family, alternating between acting as babysitter for Benji, and going into town, stumbling through the necessary task to get Keith’s body back to the United States. Trying to get a dead body out of Colombia isn’t fun or easy, let me tell you.
At some point I come home. It takes months for an autopsy to be completed. The report comes by mail, all in Spanish. Heart attack. Age 31.