by Nino Ricci
He kept seeing the mollugo he and Desmond had left behind, like the last thing you remembered after an accident or a blow to the head. Half a dozen plants, maybe, not more. Little homesteaders. How had they come there, how had they made themselves over from what they’d been? He couldn’t remember how it was exactly that new things appeared out of nothing, as big as houses or tiny as dust motes, living on for hundreds of millions of years or dying out in a heartbeat. On the farm they had waged a constant chemical war against the bugs that had afflicted them and yet the bugs had persisted, getting wilier year after year, growing new armor. They developed resistance, people said, as if they were Nietzschean überbugs. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Was that actually true? How could you know? The question went around and around in his head, how things lived, how they died, how they grew stronger. He pictured his father walking up and down the rows of their greenhouses in the tropical heat, his forehead beaded with sweat, checking the undersides of leaves: little white dots, little black ones, little red spiders. One year a whole crop had been wiped out. The insects had been stronger than his family was—his family didn’t change, had always the same arguments, the same fears, while the insects, from one year to the next, managed to shift their very DNA.
Those fucking mollugo. The first, maybe last, of their kind. A butterfly flapped its wings, and the whole world shifted. In a matter of years those plants might have overrun the place, might have changed every smallest relation of insect and weed and rock, the dates of eruptions, the drift of continents. It was beyond fathoming, that sort of randomness, of cosmic whimsy. A head could not hold it, all of space could not. If everything made such a difference, then nothing did.
The bites from the fish flies itched like acid now. Alex scratched at them until they festered, until his body was covered in open sores like a scurvied sailor’s.
Fleas, he thought. Adam had ’em.
He had kept up his watch. The occasional bird went by, including a flock of high-flyers who began to circle the boat way up in the ether and then suddenly swooped down to it like falling stars, maybe spotting the bloated fish. Massive things, at least ten feet across. Albatrosses. They circled the boat like gunships, riding the air, then seemed to think better of alighting and rose up again without once having flapped their wings. They might have been the angels God had chased from heaven, seeking allies: not these, they’d decided, not so low have we sunk. The blue of the sea reflected off their bellies as they rose. For a long while afterward the air seemed bruised by them, by their unflapping weight, the whispering crush of their descent and then their silent retreat.
It was Alex who spotted the boat. It was dawn and overcast and his sightlines were fogged with El Niño haze, and yet it was there, to the west, the smallest dot but growing larger. His first urge was to say nothing. He wanted to turn the matter over in his head, understand what it meant, if it could be real. To savor it, maybe, or turn away.
“Un barco,” he said. “Veo un barco.”
Santos was there in an instant.
“Dónde?”
“Allí,” he said, pointing.
It came right at them. Santos didn’t have so much as a pair of binoculars; Alex might have rummaged for the ones he knew were in one of the bags under Desmond’s bunk, but didn’t. Santos stuck one of his shirts, a dulled crimson, at the end of an oar and waved it incessantly, fixated now. His whole manner had changed: he’d become more himself.
“No digas nada,” he said. “Hablo yo.”
Don’t say anything. Alex didn’t know what he would have said in any case. There was nothing to say.
The boat was a tanker, massive. It might have been a ghost ship, for all they knew, might simply have kept churning unstoppably forward until they were crushed underneath it.
Santos continued waving his flag.
“Socorro!” he yelled, long before there was the least chance of anyone hearing. “Socorro!”
Somehow the ship managed to slow, gliding over the water like a great seabird. Alex could make out movement on the long highway of deck, tiny specks of men who shifted this way or that or stood at the rail.
A shout in a language Alex couldn’t decipher, then, “Qué pasa?” strange to his ears, like someone calling out to a friend across a street.
From the moment they boarded, hauled up a hullside ladder by a flurry of arms, Alex felt as if they had left the real world for some weird simulacrum. The boat had been real; but here, people spoke, moved their lips, seemed flesh and bone; yet it was all a charade, a horrible caricature.
Santos, grotesque, bowed and scraped before the crewmen with a manner Alex had never seen in him.
“Mi barco,” he said. “Aseguren mi barco, por favor.”
Secure my boat. Still watching his interests. The crewmen, small and dark like Polynesian tribesmen, seemed amused to have found them here, lost at sea.
“Sí, sí, amigo!” they said. “No se preocupe! Tranquilo!”
They were taken down through a warren of passages and companionways to a sort of mess room, windowless and tiny. A small television in a cupboard was playing a grainy kung fu film.
Some sort of officer had come, Japanese, from the look of him, but it seemed he spoke neither English nor Spanish.
“Horrible, horrible,” Santos was saying to one of the crew. “Él se cayó. Fue cosa malísima.”
He was shaking his head like someone traumatized. So this was the line, then.
“You look for him? Usted lo buscó?”
“Sí, sí! Toda la noche! Pero al fin, el gas se acabó.”
It was all simply the truth. Alex, as he’d been ordered, said not a word, though the crewmen, Filipino, they must have been, spoke a passable English.
“We call the shore,” one of them said. “Las autoridades. To look for him.”
“Sí, sí.”
It couldn’t have been more than an hour before the islands came into view. They had been that close. Alex had gone back up to the deck—no one seemed interested in him, this silent white man, not the crew nor the officers, who seemed to have bothered to assure themselves only that he and Santos weren’t pirates or drug runners. Santos’s boat bobbed along from a hawser at the stern of the tanker entirely dwarfed by it, a toy, not at all the life-and-death amphitheatre it had seemed all these weeks.
A patrol boat was waiting for them just beyond the Puerto Ayora harbor. They were being handed over like criminals, Alex thought, but then they climbed down into the boat and one of the men there, not in a Park Service uniform but in standard police garb and cap, put a hand on Santos’s shoulder as if he were an old and trusted retainer.
“Un asunto desagradable,” he said. A bad business. “Haré todo lo que pueda para ayudar.”
He was offering help. So Santos was known here.
Santos gave a deferential bow.
“Gracias, señor. Muchas gracias.”
Things went as they had on the tanker. Santos talked, with the same air of innocent affliction; Alex kept silent. The policeman asked Santos about him, if he was the lost man’s amigo, but Santos quickly put him off.
“No, no, señor. Es canadiense.”
“Ah,” the man said, as if that explained things.
They towed Santos’s boat into the harbor and were taken to a grubby police station well off the sea, along a market street. The policeman offered Santos a cigarette, then put questions to him in a gentle, leading tone while a younger policeman scratched notes on a pad.
“Un accidente,” the older one said. He had the smiling, open face of someone used to having things go his way. “Fue solo un accidente.”
The question of blame seemed to hover in the air, a threat, and yet never arise. Alex recognized the play of forces, patron and client. There would surely be a tribute to pay, not now, maybe, but soon enough.
“Sí, sí.”
Santos covered it all, from what Alex could tell, even the contraband plants, his papers, their flight, the whole time wa
tching the younger officer’s pencil scratch on its notepad as if for his cues and changing the facts of things so minutely that it would have been difficult to say he wasn’t telling the truth. By the end, though, everything looked different from how it had felt: they had only acted as anyone might have. Even their flight seemed excusable, on account of the storm.
The older policeman seemed to know the ranger who had stopped them off Isabela.
“Es un verdadero pendejo, aquél,” he said. “No le caemos bien.”
He doesn’t like us. Us mainlanders, he probably meant.
Santos bobbed his head warily.
“Sí, señor. Es posible.”
The policeman had the younger one take them to a hole-in-the-wall up the street for a meal. They were served a stew with big chunks of meat in it, most likely goat. Alex had dreamed of this, his first meal ashore, but now he could barely keep it down.
The young policeman made some sort of joke about life at sea and Santos forced a laugh.
“Siempre bacalao. Día tras día, bacalao.”
“Sí, sí,” Santos said quickly. He seemed resentful that the man had assumed the same familiar tone with him as his superior had. “Siempre bacalao.”
Someone had typed up a report by the time they got back to the station. It was the merest paragraph, a jumble, from what Alex could see, words crossed out and written over in pen and barely a capital or period in the lot. Desmond’s name had been spelled Desman, with a blank left for the surname.
Alex’s name didn’t appear.
“You must sign,” the older man said. “I can translate.”
It was just a heap of words.
“That’s fine,” Alex said, and signed.
They had to bring up Desmond’s bags from the boat. The policemen went through them, lingering over items of particular interest, the binoculars, the battered camera. It seemed unlikely that any of the stuff would ever leave this place.
“Do I need to stay here?” Alex said. “On the islands, I mean.”
The man smiled as if at some needless courtesy.
“Is not necessary,” he said.
A boy came into the station, barefoot, not more than ten, and handed the policeman a manila envelope wrapped in elastic bands. The policeman handed it to Santos.
“Sus documentos,” he said.
There was that casual flourish in his gesture of someone conscious of having done, generously but without breaking a sweat, the remarkable.
“Muchas gracias, señor,” Santos said, with his deferential bow, deeper this time and maybe more heartfelt. “Muchas gracias.”
They walked back to the boat in silence. Alex grabbed his pack. Desmond’s The Voyage of the Beagle was sticking out from one of the pockets.
Santos had already set about putting his goods in order.
“Vaya,” he said, as if to be rid of him. “Vaya con Dios.”
Alex couldn’t bear the thought of facing Mara again and took a bed in a fleabag place in the upper town, his window hard up against the street. There was a plane the next day. He awoke early to catch the bus out to Baltra, expecting the whole time he was waiting for it that someone would come to tap his shoulder. I’m sorry. There are still questions. They hadn’t even taken his address, if family wanted to reach him.
Neither had he offered it.
Santos’s boat was still in the harbor but he turned away from it and never looked back.
The same WANTED poster hung in the airport, staring out. The same moonscape waited outside. Alex tried to feel some relief when the plane left the tarmac, but relief was for children, it seemed now, for innocents.
In Quito, for the first time, he had a problem with his ticket.
“Es inválido,” the woman kept saying. “El boleto es inválido.”
He lost his temper and began to shout, in a bastard mix of Italian and Spanish and French.
“Qué pasa?”
A soldier was suddenly standing beside him, a submachine gun draped over his shoulder. Now they’d arrest him, he thought. Now they would shoot him.
“Tranquilo, señor,” the soldier said. “Tranquilo.”
Some sort of supervisor came out and puzzled over the ticket.
“Very sorry, sir. Is no problem.”
Three hours later he was on a plane heading home. He had enough money for a bus from Toronto, for a decent meal. Everything had worked out. The plane rose over the mountains and came out to the sea, which stretched out like a maw to the end of the earth.
four
— April 1987 —
… it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of road maps is not at the same time access to writing.
JACQUES DERRIDA
Of Grammatology
– 1 –
Stephen’s son was playing down by the water. Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here, to the lake—with Liz, maybe, in their first days, back when they’d made a point of walking on the mountain.
“You have to look at what the place would have been like without him,” Stephen was saying. “More like Haiti than Florida.”
Alex had learned by now that it was usually best to cut his losses early in these arguments with Stephen, who had the disconcerting habit of bringing actual facts to bear on them.
“Don’t you think Ariel’s a little too close to the water?”
“He’s fine. The water’s barely a foot deep. And he can swim.” But then he called out, “Ariel, careful by the water please!”
Ariel didn’t so much as twitch to show he’d heard or in any way alter the frog squat in which he was hunched, rather precariously, Alex thought, over the curb that encircled the lake. He was an elfin child, as ethereal and pale as a changeling, polite enough, in that adult way of children, and yet never quite present, as if following some train of thought only his own five-year-old brain could know the mysteries of. Alex couldn’t figure how Stephen, man of reason and order, had given life to this fairy creature.
“I just don’t think he’s some kind of hero, that’s all,” Alex finished up lamely. “Even with all the health care and stuff.”
He had seen quite a bit of Stephen since the fall. Despite the history with Katherine, he’d found himself warming to him more and more—he’d thought him a prig, with his lofty manner and his fussy little finger movements, but instead had discovered in him an unexpected humanity. His mind seemed to Alex like some pleasant city in Northern Europe, pristine and well aired and well swept but full of promising turnings and cobbled alleys. Then there was something else that drew them together: they’d both slept with Amanda.
From health care, they had somehow veered off into nationalism.
“We’re the big success story, not them,” Stephen said. “They’ve never gotten over the Big Lie. You can’t be a slave state and say you’re founded on freedom.”
The topic depressed Alex—it made him feel unpatriotic, deficient, clichéd, because he felt, like most everyone else, that his country was boring.
“If we’re so great, why isn’t everyone flocking to come here?” he said, thinking of all the people he’d met traveling who’d treated him like a quaint halfwit the instant they’d found out where he was from.
Stephen paused, warming to the kill.
“If you mean the five percent of the world with disposable incomes who’d rather go to Paris for their holidays than Regina,” he said, “then I suppose you’re right. About the only thing keeping out the other ninety-five percent is Customs and Immigration.”
That Stephen had slept with Amanda had only come out through Katherine, to whom he’d confessed. Alex doubted if, in the awful aftermath of things, he himself would ever have done anything more with the information than let it fester. But a few weeks after the event, Stephen had phoned him.
“I think it might be good if we talked.”
Amanda had taken an overdose of Tylenol. It had seemed just the sort of thing Amanda would do, Tylenol, of all things, so scattershot and
prosaic, though the method turned out to be a lot more common than Alex would have suspected. Just a few extra pills of the stuff with a bit of alcohol, apparently, and you sent your liver into toxic shock. All over North America, people with a bit of medical expertise but no access to handguns were reaching for their headache pills and a bottle of Scotch when the black dogs circled. What troubled Alex was whether Amanda had known that. Maybe the whole thing had just been a stupid mistake.
Though Amanda had drawn him and Stephen together, it was rare that she actually came up between them.
“Sometimes I think people should just stay in their own countries,” Alex said. “At least they’d be warmer.”
It was warm today, though. The sun was out, the snow had melted, and some of the flowers around the lake were poking out their timid heads. A young woman went by in a skimpy sweater and Alex found himself staring after her, before the thought police intervened.
Stephen was looking too.
“Like the man said.” He pulled his cigarettes out of his blazer. “April is the cruelest month.”
It was Katherine who had found her, that night she had called. They’d had a date for drinks, and Amanda hadn’t shown up. After waiting for her and trying again and again to get her on the phone, Katherine had gone by her place. She’d had to get the super out of bed to open Amanda’s door. There was already a smell by then, though no one in the building, a run-down low-rise on one of the seedier stretches of St. Denis, appeared to have noticed.
