by Nino Ricci
“Hello?”
There was a sound at the other end that he couldn’t make sense of, heavy breathing, maybe, or someone underwater.
“Who is it?”
Someone was crying.
“It’s me. It’s Katherine.”
His heart sank. He realized at once who he’d hoped it was, who could have called him in tears at two in the morning without having stepped from the realm of the expected.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
It was an eerie sort of crying, breathless and reedy.
“My God, Alex. My God.”
At every instant, some theory went, every timeline divided into an infinite number of other possible ones, each one infinitesimally different from the next. Which one would he end up in?
“Katherine, where are you? Tell me where you are.”
But he knew.
“It’s Amanda,” she said. “I’m at Amanda’s.”
He had imagined this moment a dozen times, but in imagining it had somehow believed he had headed it off.
“Just stay there. I’ll come. Just stay.”
He had to scrounge for quarters, dimes, whatever, to gather up cab fare. Somehow he got to the street and managed to flag one down.
He gave the address.
“Cold night,” the cabby said, in unaccented English.
Everything felt very small suddenly, a pinprick, as if the universe was shrinking back to the sucking black hole it had been at the start, the nothing in nothing.
“You wanna take Sherbrooke?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Out of the black beyond the windows another whirl of snowflakes descended and speckled the windshield of the cab with drops of wet.
“Winter, eh? I couldn’t believe it. Next week all the Frenchies’ll be heading to Florida.”
Alex hunkered down into his seat and tried to will his mind into blankness, feeling the cold coming off the window as the bits of snow wheeled out of the dark and back into it.
three: galápagos
— January 1980 —
Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle
By the time Alex boarded the weekly flight out of Quito for the Galápagos—a place he’d never had any intention of going to, that he couldn’t afford, that he wouldn’t even have been able to place on a map before he’d met Anders on the Inca Trail—it seemed that everything that could possibly have gone wrong since he’d left Ingrid had. It started on the connecting flight through London, where the woman sitting next to him, a high-strung American somewhere near the detonation point of her biological clock, talked him into sharing a hotel room with her that set him back some fifty dollars out of the paltry few hundred he had left. In Rio he spent New Year’s Eve in a hostel in the Catete district listening to the reveling outside with a strange dread, the whooping and the shouts and the endless salvoes receding into the distance that might have been fireworks or submachine-gun fire, for all he knew, the rat-a-tat of swaths of street children being mown down in honor of the coming year. In the morning he walked out through neighborhoods that looked as if a marauding army had passed through them until he got to the beach at Ipanema, where he stared out at the apartment blocks and hotels that circled around to Dois Irmãos and thought, What am I doing here?
Their plane was a noisy sixteen-seater that rode the air pockets out of Quito rising and dipping like a leaf, so that Alex envisioned ending up in one of those tabloid stories where people were wrecked in the remotest mountains and ended up resorting to cannibalism. At Guayaquil, on the coast, they stopped to pick up a handful of locals, flying in low over a muddy delta that was spilling every manner of flotsam into the Pacific, car parts and bits of building and whole palm trees with clumps of earth still clinging to them as if they were little islands putting out to colonize the seas. After that there was nothing but the roar of the engines, which at least drowned out the Americans at the back of the plane, and then miles and miles of empty ocean that stretched to the very curve of the earth.
At some point Alex slumped into sleep like a dead man, his body worn out from a week of illness on the Inca Trail. In his dreams he tried to work out quadratic equations that looped through a dozen variables he had to pound one by one into place, only to have them revert at once to chaos. He woke just as they were making their final descent, though what he saw beneath them was not the Edenic world of white sands and blue lagoons that Anders’s descriptions had led him to expect but an island that looked like a lesion on the skin of the sea, a patch of rock and scabrous earth completely barren except for the occasional cactus.
Taxiing into the terminal, they passed an area of sunburnt streets laid out amidst the waste in a tidy purposeless grid, empty squares of concrete coming off them as if a pleasant suburb had once stood here that had been vaporized by some nuclear blitz.
“It’s the old GI base,” he heard one of the Americans say, the know-it-all, a real collegiate type. “I guess the locals picked it apart after we pulled out.”
We. As if he’d been here in the flesh, fighting at Iwo Jima or whatever.
The only sign Alex saw of the wildlife the place was supposed to be famous for was a lone bird that looked like the commonest sort of sparrow, standing vulturish and bored on a post near the entrance to the terminal building. Inside, they had to pay what they were told was a park fee, something Anders had failed to mention. A WANTED poster depicting a mustached man who looked like the archetypal bandito hung on the wall behind the ticket counter with the warning PELIGROSO PARA LA SOCIEDAD.
They were ferried across a channel to a second, much larger island. An old army bus sat waiting for them at the dock. The land rose up with a monotonous regularity to a single peak that disappeared into cloud, the sole mark of human incursion the road that cut up the slope as straight as a seam. The landscape was freakish, barren near the shore but slowly giving way to gray half-soil studded with gray scrub, the vegetation spaced out so evenly it looked sinister, crisscrossing the slopes with the same eerie symmetry as the abandoned streetscape they had passed near the airport. As the bus rose higher, the scrub turned to bush and the bush to spindly forest, row on row of desolate telephone-pole trees that stood completely naked except for their bits of crown.
At the crest of the slope, in the space of a dozen yards, they passed from brilliant sun into impenetrable fog. For half a mile or so it went on, until they came out at the other end of it into what seemed a different country. The landscape was within the realm of the familiar now, messy and dense and multispecied and soon enough dotted with signs of civilization, roadside shanties and smoking fires and little half-plots of field carved out of the bush. It was as if they had passed to the normal world by way of its underside, its infernal blueprint.
Alex felt exhaustion clotting his brain again by the time they reached Puerto Ayora. He had to walk the length of the town to get to the hotel Anders had recommended, the Black Mangrove, past the string of gloomy restaurants and shops that lined the harborside like a false front. Ahead of him, the Americans had all turned in at the Angermeyer, a two-story place with a gallery up top like a frontier saloon’s and a rubbly courtyard where people had pitched tents and stretched out sleeping bags as if the place was a free-for-all. This was clearly the favored establishment for travelers of his ilk, though the thought of having to face the whole Byzantine world of backpacker culture right then made him shudder.
The Black Mangrove, set back in foliage amidst a snarl of unprepossessing outbuildings, had the air of something out of a Graham Greene novel. The lobby was deserted except for a great lizard who sat sunning himself on the patio, which gave onto a scraggly backwater of overgrown cove. Alex rang a bell, and by and by a young black woman with hips like bludgeons and a look of ancient affront shuffled out from a back room.
“I didn’t think I’d need one.”
She leafed through the register with an air of impatience.
“Come.”
Though the place looked empty, she skipped all the oceanfront rooms to give him one with just the barest sliver of a view onto the harbor. Now that he was settled, Alex had nothing to distract him from the folly of his having come here. Fucking Anders. Alex still wasn’t sure if he had been some kind of saint or just a head case. He had saved Alex’s life, it was true, but the more Alex thought of him the more his memory of him seemed to skew.
He stretched out on his bed and fell asleep at once. Night had fallen by the time he awoke, but instead of grabbing something to eat, he went out to the bathroom to take a leak and fell right back into bed. This time he didn’t wake until morning. When he opened his eyes he felt the fear go through him that he was still on the trail, in the rain and the cold. He had been so horribly ill. His body felt like an engine that had been run without oil or coolant: too late to do any servicing, the damage was done.
He had breakfast on the patio. His lizard was there again, a demonish, black-skinned creature, along with his black warden, who took his order and then brought out items that seemed to bear little relationship to it. Afterward he set off into town. What one did here in the Galápagos was charter a boat: that was how you got to the interesting game, or whatever it was that was out there. He had picked this up not from Anders but by eavesdropping on the know-it-all from the plane. It would have made sense to have cozied up to the Americans so that he might have joined them and split his costs, but the prospect of spending days and days on the high seas with them like some sort of Canadian pet was too depressing for words.
He stopped in at a cruise office he had passed the day before, a tiny hole-in-the-wall, frigid with air conditioning. The agent, a young man immaculately dressed in pleated trousers and a pressed shirt, looked him up and down.
“You are alone?” he said, frowning.
“Well, right now I am, yes.”
He spread a map of the islands in front of Alex. It was the first time Alex had really looked at one. He was surprised at the distances involved, hundreds of miles.
“You see? Many islands. Many days. You pay the food, the boat, the guide, is very expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“Five hundred. Six hundred. Eight hundred. Like that.”
Alex winced.
“Isn’t there any other way?”
The man shrugged as if to abjure any responsibility for him.
“There are the fishing boats. But very dangerous.”
Alex returned to his room to brood. He couldn’t believe Anders had left him so woefully underinformed.
“You must visit, of course,” he had said. This was on one of the first clear nights since they had started out, when Anders had made a fire and Alex had had an inkling of how it might feel to be warm and healthy and dry again. “It’s something, I can’t describe it to you. Being there with the animals, with nature, it makes you think, maybe this is the way. Maybe it’s possible on this earth to have paradise. At least you can dream it, when you are there.”
Alex wasn’t sure why this little encomium had so mesmerized him at the time. The lingering delirium of his fever, maybe, or just the altitude. It was the altitude that had first brought him under Anders’s auspices: he had literally passed out at the side of the trail from the rarefied air and had opened his eyes to see this gawky bird of a Swede staring down at him. Lucky for Alex. It might have been days before anyone else had passed. The trail was usually closed that time of the year, because of the rains.
He tried his luck at the wharf. The Americans were there, with a strapping Aussie in tow, already loading their stuff into a sleek-looking motor launch. Alex couldn’t have said what it was that he had found so objectionable in them the day before.
There were a couple of women among them, attractive, earthy types who smiled at Alex when he approached.
“I was on the plane,” he said. “I’m trying to get out to the other islands.”
The know-it-all gave him a look as if he’d never laid eyes on him before.
“Gee, I’d like to help you out, buddy, but we already cut a deal. It’s too bad we didn’t hook up on the plane.”
He made a few half-hearted inquiries amongst the locals, mashing his Italian into bad Spanish. Everyone had a scheme, an uncle who had a fishing boat or a friend who ran private tours on his yacht, but it all sounded too expensive or too dodgy. He checked in at the Angermeyer and found an actual sign-up sheet in the lobby, but there weren’t any names on it.
“It’s bad time,” the woman at the reception desk said, a wattled bleached blonde who looked like she’d descended here from outer space. “Because of the rains.”
The fucking rains.
He was left to his surly keeper at the Black Mangrove. Mara, her name was, he’d got that out of her in the way of making conversation, though afterward, to judge from the new level of contempt he had graduated to, it was as if he had tried to steal her mumbo-jumbo from her or her soul. It was six more days before there was another flight out. Mara would have broken him by then, would have him tied to a post in the yard to do her nails for her and pumice her feet.
From the patio he watched a fisherman gutting fish on the back of his boat and the pelicans flocking around him like bothersome children to get the innards.
Fucking pelicans, he thought. Fucking Anders.
On the Inca Trail, he had barely acclimatized himself to the altitude before he had fallen ill with some bug he had probably caught from the domestic fowl he had shared space with on the train out of Cuzco. The rain had come by then, every possible species of it, cloudbursts and soul-sapping drizzles and torrential downpours that sent muddy rivers gushing down the slopes. Alex had been on the verge of splitting with Anders, who had grown entirely too maddening, smiling away at everything like a simpleton but hoarding his food and his gear with an irritating fastidiousness and carrying on with his own little itineraries as if Alex had hardly registered on him. But now he found himself at Anders’s mercy again.
He had thought of Anders until then as an argument against the virtues of travel. Anders had an arrangement with the high school where he taught in Uppsala to take two-thirds pay so he could get every third year off to travel the world. But Alex felt forced to conclude that the only upshot of all his journeys—he had done China, India, Africa, Eastern Europe—had been to make him entirely unfit for normal human intercourse. He had his smile, which served as a sort of transition point between himself and the world, but beneath it he seemed as insular and unknowable and fixed in his ways as an insect. Back home, he’d told Alex proudly—and there was no mention of anything like children or a wife, though he must have been pushing forty—he got by without so much as a telephone, to save his kronor for his travels. What sort of person didn’t want a telephone? Someone like Anders. Someone who had no one to call.
Once Alex had fallen sick, however, with a violence that made his altitude sickness feel like a mild head cold, the whole dynamic between him and Anders began to shift. Bit by bit Anders’s finicky self-sufficiency ceded to Alex’s helplessness, until he was giving his tent up for him, his food, was practically carrying him on his back to make headway along the trail, up rain-slicked switchbacks and through nightmarish passes and along narrow cliff edges that gave way to nothing. The landscape passed by like images from a dream, jungled valleys rife with flowers, ruined cities that floated in the clouds or clung to the slopes in impossible terraces. Anders tended to him as if he were a child, feeding him bits of food that he retched up almost at once, wiping the sweat from him when the fever came on, which it did in staggering waves. At night he built fires whenever the rain allowed, and sometimes, uncharacteristically, he talked. That had been Alex’s undoing. The fire, the Incan dark, and Anders waxing poetic about paradise on earth.
By the time they had
reached the Gate of the Sun to gaze down on Machu Picchu, Alex felt as if he had been torn apart by wild animals and stitched randomly back together again. But if Anders had never happened along, he might not have been stitched at all. At the height of his illness he had begun to take Anders for Ingrid, to turn himself over to him as he might to a parent, with that same feeling of being safe, of being looked after. An image had kept coming back to him then that he could never place, that had felt like a home he was moving toward but not his own, maybe Anders’s or Ingrid’s: there was a lake and a road, snowy or wet and with a smell of mountains, none of this like anywhere he had been to or that even existed but that had a particular reality in the mind, itself and not itself, the meeting point of some inexpressible skein of emotions, but also just a lake, a road, a smell of mountains.
They had walked down into the ruins. The sun had refused to show itself and the place was shrouded in fog, bits of cloud, really, so that they had to make their way almost by touch, not knowing if three feet ahead of them the path they were on would give way to empty space. At one point they climbed up the steps of a sort of pyramid and came to a massive slab of stone with a rough pillar rising up in the middle of it. The Hitching Post of the Sun. Around them the fog stretched, so that they seemed to be floating in it.
“You must put your face to the stone,” Anders said. “Or so they say. To see the spirit world.”
“Will you?”
Anders grew sheepish.
“No, no, I mustn’t, I think. They say you only see what’s inside you. Perhaps I shouldn’t like that.”
As if to make light of the matter, Alex put his cheek to the stone. It was damp from the fog, and surprisingly cold. The cold seemed to cut into him like a brain freeze.
He came away a bit too quickly, perhaps.
“The spirit world seems pretty cold and wet,” he said. “A lot like here.”
But it had stayed with him, that instant. What had he seen? The way he remembered it afterward, only the blank wet face of the stone staring back at him.
