The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  It would have been easier to keep strong against Desmond if Desmond hadn’t actually had his number. Desmond was willing to say anything, to speak his cesspit mind, which meant he often strayed into the truth.

  “In a week,” he said, “you’ll get on a plane and go back to whatever it is you do up there in Canada. But you’ll have this. You’ll thank me for it. A day won’t go by when you don’t remember it, I’ll guarantee that.”

  Desmond didn’t say where he might be in a week—probably winging his way back to England, having somehow wormed his way out of this mess. Alex was surprised at how much he actually took heart from the thought. He’d been hatching his own escape plans, carting around his little survival kit and thinking he might simply hike down to Punta Espinosa one day, where the tourist boats stopped, and head for the nearest police station. But what he really hoped for was a clean escape for the lot of them, Desmond with his mollugo and Santos with his fish, if only because he didn’t want either of them on his conscience, didn’t want to have to think of Desmond stuck in his East London flat teaching English to foreigners all his life or Santos shipped back to some Third World hell on the mainland, sans boat and sans fish and with the woman who laundered his shirts on his case every day and who knew how many hungry niños at his heels.

  Alex had continued scouring the battered suitcase that served as Desmond’s library in search of more reading material. It was crammed with every manner of arcana, thousand-page reference books and hand-bound monographs and photocopied journal articles with titles like “Effects of Seed Dispersal by Animals on the Regeneration of Bursera graveolens” and “Cacti in the Galápagos Islands, with Special Reference to Their Relations with Tortoises.” Most of these were replete with Desmond’s crabbed annotations, as impressively unreadable and obscure as the material itself. But once Alex dug through to a folder buried at the bottom of the suitcase filled with articles by a certain Prof. J. M. Bowinger of Imperial College. Here the annotations were easier to make out. “Bollocks!!” Desmond had scrawled across one of the articles, and “Bloody crap!!!” on another. But try as he might, Alex couldn’t see anything in Bowinger’s leaden prose and ponderous thoughts that made him any worse than the rest. In fact, one of the articles talked about pioneer plants in terms that might have come from Desmond himself. It was almost heartbreaking to see Desmond’s vindictiveness, his sense of injury, exposed so baldly. Some sort of contest had been fought, it was clear, and he had lost. Perhaps there was a sort of dignity in that, in hard-won bitterness. Alex had had his own share of it.

  They gave up their search for mollugo across Fernandina’s slopes and descended for the first time into the island’s crater. This one was of a different order than the one they’d been in on Isabela, almost entirely barren, runneled cliffs of ashy gray stretching down half a mile or more to the lake on the crater floor. They had to test every step, inching their way down along capricious footholds that seemed firm one instant and the next as soft as sand, the crater gaping in front of them at every turn.

  It was a couple of hours of knee-busting work before they got down to the lake, a pocket of life amidst the waste. There were the ducks, entirely ordinary-looking creatures of dullish brown that were boating casually along on their green element as if it were a wetland in Muskoka; there were clouds of insects, gnat-like things that hovered above the surface of the lake like a miasma it gave off. Now the lake’s preternatural green was explained: the water was a thick algal soup, as viscous as creamed broccoli.

  “The thing goes as clear as the Mediterranean when there’s an eruption,” Desmond said. “Then it starts over again. God’s little laboratory.”

  Alex could feel the spectral stillness of the place, the isolation. The only ripples on the lake were the wakes of the ducks, quelled in an instant by the carpet of algae. Maybe this was as close as you got to the beginning of things, a bit of water and dust and then His Big Finger reaching down for the spark.

  Desmond had picked up Alex’s shoulder bag from where he’d dropped it.

  “I’ll take a bit of your water, if you don’t mind. Mine’s out.”

  They found a scattering of stubborn plant life in the nooks and crannies around the lake, grasses and vines and tiny flowering weeds. But no mollugo. Desmond was surprisingly sanguine.

  “All this is just birdshit, most likely. Brings the seeds over. Ergo, no mollugo. A certain colleague of mine maintains that birds are the major factor, but that’s just nonsense, it has to be wind. It’s a pioneer plant, for Christ’s sake, it’s not going to wait for the bloody birds to show up.”

  “Is that what all this is about?” Alex said. “You and Bowinger?”

  “Bowinger? What the fuck do you know about Bowinger?”

  Alex felt a thrill. He had struck a nerve.

  “I saw his articles. In your things.”

  “You were fucking snooping! I don’t believe it! You went through my things!”

  There was a genuine outrage in this that threw Alex off balance.

  “I was just looking for something to read.”

  “My bloody arse you were! You’re a common sneak! So Mr. Fucking Goody Two-Shoes from Canada finally shows his true colors!”

  Alex felt like he’d blown another crucial advantage.

  “So is that it? This wind thing?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it. The ‘wind thing,’ as you so articulately put it. You can bet it bent his nose out of shape. Though he was smart enough to pick on something else when my dissertation came up. But never you mind. I’ll fix all that, once I get these fuckers home, which I’ll manage even if I have to eat them first and shit them out on the other side. That’d be a fine bloody irony.”

  They crawled their way back to the rim before nightfall, both of them gray as ghosts from the dust. Alex thought he’d never be rid of the taste of it, ferrous and bitter like burnt bone. Clouds had massed over the crater and they had to make their way in the fog a good ways before they got clear of them. But higher up in the sky, another layer of cloud stretched to the horizon.

  They reached the shore just as the first rain began to fall. Santos’s boat was not ten feet from where they’d left it, as if it hadn’t moved. Alex had begun to suspect that their gas had run low.

  “Bloody home sweet home,” Desmond said.

  Santos rigged a canopy over the engine well and cooked up some fish on the brazier. They ate in the cabin, in silence. Alex’s clothes clung to him like mud from the dust and rain. He thought of their first meal together on the beach in Darwin Bay and how different the silence had seemed then.

  The fish was one of Santos’s discards, barely edible. He wasn’t wasting his grouper on them anymore.

  “He might throw on some crab for a fucking change,” Desmond said. “Bloody nigger’ll be feeding us rat shit next.”

  Santos rose and in one movement grabbed Desmond’s dish and hurled the remains of his dinner out the cabin door.

  “Fucking hell! What the fuck did you do that for?”

  Santos sat back down without a word.

  “You fucking bloody oaf! You fucking monkey! I ought to split your skull, you fucking spic!”

  Desmond made a stab for Santos’s plate but Santos lunged at him, lightning quick, and pinned him against the cabin wall, a hand at his throat. Santos looked massive suddenly, murderous, the smallest shiver away from snapping Desmond’s neck.

  “Go on, you fucking animal!” Desmond screamed. “Why don’t you kill me? Go on, or I’ll kill you first!”

  Alex cast an eye around wildly for something to strike Santos with if he needed to.

  “Stop, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “Stop it!”

  A long second passed, but then something seemed to give in Santos and he let Desmond go.

  “You fucking cocksucker! You fucking coward! I hope they lock you away, you bloody pirate, it’s what you deserve!”

  An awful silence followed. Santos hunched over his plate, then finally took it out on deck
and flung the remains of his meal after Desmond’s.

  He set about erecting the tarp outside that he slept under when it rained.

  “Did you see him, that fucking murderer?” Desmond said. “If he touches me again I’ll take a hatchet to him, I swear it!”

  By morning the rain had stopped, and the sun rose blood-red over Isabela against a cloudless sky. Santos set about his fishing as if Alex and Desmond didn’t exist, offering no breakfast and making no move to bring them ashore. Desmond, bloody-minded, unleashed the panga and angled it off the cabin roof on his own. It slipped from his grasp and looked as if it would plunge nose first into the water, but somehow it righted itself and landed, with a thunk, almost perfectly square.

  Santos watched all of this with a steely glare.

  “Give me a minute,” Desmond said, conspiratorial. “Then we’ll get the bloody hell out of here.”

  He dragged three of his bags out of the cabin.

  “We don’t need all that stuff,” Alex said.

  “Just keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  There was a beachhead not a few hundred yards from the boat, but Desmond made away from it, rowing around a curve in the shoreline until Santos’s boat had disappeared from view. Alex already felt sick with the thought of what Desmond was up to.

  “We’ve got the panga, don’t you see? If the weather stays clear we can set out tonight and be free of the bastard.”

  “Set out for where, exactly?”

  “I’ll row the thing to the fucking mainland if I have to.”

  Something had to be done, maybe, before they ended up slitting one another’s throats, but sneaking off in this cockleshell was not it. It was madness. It was suicide.

  “I’m not coming. I’m staying behind.”

  Desmond didn’t even trouble himself to take this seriously.

  “With that animal? You’ve got to be joking.”

  He could still make a go at Punta Espinosa. It was half a day’s walk, at most, he’d seen it the previous day from the slopes, an oasis of green and tiny lakelets.

  “I left all my things behind. You didn’t exactly warn me.”

  “Well, we didn’t want to rouse his suspicions, did we?”

  Alex ought to have set out on his own the minute they hit the shore. He had his moneybelt with him and his little survival kit, complete with a cupful or so of leftover rice. Yet he was still clinging to the notion that things would come right in the end, that there was still hope. Hope for what, he couldn’t say, maybe simply that all this was not an unmitigated disaster, was just another lark, something he’d laugh about in the fullness of time and add to his repertoire of travel stories. Hope that, despite the longing he always had to be made over, he’d somehow come through all of this unchanged.

  “Why wait for night? Why not start rowing now?”

  “Don’t be daft. The bastard would just come after us. Anyway, I want to go back into the crater. There’s something there, I’ll bet my mother on it, I can feel it in my bones. Always follow your instincts, my boy.”

  Follow your instincts. What could that mean, coming from Desmond? If Santos had followed his instincts the night before, he would have snapped Desmond’s neck.

  None of Alex’s alternatives seemed things that someone like him would actually do: taking to the ocean with Desmond or setting off on his own with his cup of rice or even returning to Santos, who would probably force some unspeakable act on him the second they were alone and then drop his used corpse into the sea. It was as if he had strayed into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s life. He wasn’t used to facing choices like these, ones that really mattered.

  “We’ll hide the boat up shore a bit,” Desmond said. “In case he comes looking.”

  Desmond dragged the panga up the beach, not even waiting for Alex’s help, and stowed it behind a clump of bush. They left most of Desmond’s things with it, including his water—to save for the trip, he said—though by the time they had struggled up to the rim of the crater, they had polished off most of Alex’s, as much from hunger as thirst.

  Desmond, the whole way up, had gone on about getting their story straight.

  “They’ll believe us before they believe that triceratops, I’ll tell you that. That is, if we’re consistent.”

  “But what about your plants? They’ve already seen them.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to hope we don’t run into the same cunt as before, won’t we?”

  They started down into the crater along the path they had used the previous day, though part way down Desmond veered off into a rift that snaked back upward. It brought them to a narrow shelf, from which Desmond shimmied down along a bank of scree to an even narrower one below, barely a few feet across.

  “Hand down my case, would you?”

  It looked to Alex as if they were painting themselves into a corner. Beneath Desmond the cliff face dropped off almost sheer all the way to the crater floor, with no hint of a navigable trail.

  “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “You can stay behind if you don’t think you can manage it,” Desmond said.

  Alex got onto his belly and snaked his way down the slope to where Desmond waited. He was just filling time now, was just stalling, following Desmond in the hope his mind would clear before he had to make a decision. At the bottom of the slope he leaned his weight cautiously onto the ledge until he was sure it would hold, but felt his head spin when he stood—just a step away was empty space.

  “We need to make that ridge,” Desmond said, nodding to an outcrop that rose up just beyond where their ledge tapered away to nothing beneath a hill of scree.

  The only way over to the ridge was across the scree. For perhaps two lethal yards it sloped out uninterrupted over the cliff edge—one false move then, and they would go sluicing down to the crater floor.

  “This is crazy,” Alex said. “We should go back.”

  But Desmond had already started out.

  “Just dig in your heels. Something to tell the folks back home.”

  Somehow Desmond managed to slither across. At the ridge, he reached out to the rock and a piece of it broke away in his hand. Alex was sure he was about to lose his traction, but he managed to inch himself upward and get a solid hold. He swung his case up onto the ridge, then pulled himself up after it.

  “Piece of cake,” he said breezily. “Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”

  For one awful instant when Alex was hanging on the slope all his volition failed him, and a tickle ran up his spine like the scratch of death’s very fingernail. But then he had somehow grabbed hold of the ridge. Desmond’s arm failed to appear, and he had to heave himself up on his own. Behind him he caught a glimpse of a cloud of debris spraying out into the crater.

  Desmond was standing well back from the edge.

  “Didn’t want to risk the extra weight.”

  They were on a wide shelf jutting out from the crater wall, uncommonly lush with growth.

  “Saw the place with my bins,” Desmond said. “Looks like it must have escaped the last eruption.”

  It was a strange spot, only a few hundred feet from the rim but not accessible from it, the crater wall towering over it so forbidding and sheer it seemed about to topple onto it. The only access to it seemed to be the way they’d come by, the rest of it cut off by the cliffs. The dusting of green that covered it was mostly grasses, though here and there were patches of leafy trailers and of tiny plantlings as pale and insubstantial as cloud.

  In front of them the crater yawned and yet the place had an air of separateness and seclusion like a cavern.

  Desmond was already on his haunches scrabbling amidst the growth.

  “More fucking ash,” he said, sour-faced. “I feel like a bloody chimney sweep.”

  Despite himself, Alex felt something droop in him on Desmond’s behalf. It would all come to nothing, all his busy chasing across the islands and ferreting out.

  He wandered off on his own, doing his ow
n little half-hearted investigations.

  “Careful!” Desmond snapped. “Don’t muck up the waters.”

  Toward the crater wall the rock dipped away into an old satellite cone, maybe a dozen feet across, the floor of it a lifeless bed of rippled lava. But in the scree along one of its slopes, Alex spied a little field of spindly growth, spread as even and thin as a mesh.

  He felt a flutter.

  “There’s something here,” he said.

  “Eh? What is it?”

  Something in him wanted to keep the find from Desmond, for a moment at least.

  “Some plants. Maybe you should look at them.”

  Desmond rose up irritably. “Don’t touch them! Give me a minute! They’re probably nothing, mind you, it’s too shady over there for anything good.”

  He climbed to the edge of the crater and stood next to Alex, looking down at his find.

  “Jesus bloody Christ.” It seemed the first time he had ever been this still, that he hadn’t seemed to hum with noxious energy. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  There was such a tone of reprieve in his voice, of thankfulness almost, that Alex actually felt a twinge of embarrassment for him. He became all business now—he brought his case over and in a matter of minutes had sorted through his plants and tossed out a good half of them, as if all the attentions he had lavished on them for days and weeks had been nothing.

  “Wish I’d brought some of my fucking tools.” He’d started brushing away scree around the edges of the plants. “We’ll just have to manage by hand.”

  He worked with the painstaking carefulness of an archeologist. He had his toothbrush with him in his satchel and he used it to sweep away at the base of the stems, uncovering twisted taproots with the slenderest filaments branching away from them like the translucent cilia of tiny sea creatures. He took up two, three, half a dozen of them, making a place for them in his case. They were already in flower, tiny white-petaled blooms radiating out from the little stemlets like constellations. When Alex had come upon them they had seemed such scrawny things, but under Desmond’s ministrations they grew weirdly intricate and substantial.