Interior Darkness

by Peter Straub

  “Most victories are hollow, believe me.”

  Ballard wandered over to the brassbound porthole on the deck side of their elaborate, many-roomed suite. Whatever he saw caused him momentarily to stiffen and take an involuntary step backward.

  “What’s the view like?”

  “The so-called view consists of the filthy Amazon and a boring, muddy bank. Sometimes the bank is so far away it’s out of sight.”

  He did not add that a Ballard approximately twenty years younger, the Ballard of, say, 1976, dressed in a handsome dark suit and brilliantly white shirt, was leaning against the deck rail, unaware of being under the eye of his twenty-years-older self. Young Ballard, older Ballard observed, did an excellent job of concealing his dire internal condition beneath a mask of deep, already well-weathered urbanity: the same performance, enacted day after day before an audience unaware of being an audience and never permitted backstage.

  Unlike Sandrine, Ballard had never married. “Poor Ballard, stuck on the Endless Night with a horrible view and only his aging, moody girlfriend for company.”

  Smiling, he returned to the long steel table, ran his mutilated right hand over the curve of her belly, and cupped her navel. “This is exactly what I asked for. You’re wonderful.”

  “But isn’t it funny to think—everything could have been completely different.”

  Ballard slid the remaining fingers of his hand down to palpate, lightly, the springy black shrublike curls of her pubic bush.

  “Everything is completely different right now.”

  “So take off your clothes and fuck me,” Sandrine said. “I can get you hard again in a minute. In thirty seconds.”

  “I’m sure you could. But maybe you should put some clothes on, so we could go in to lunch.”

  “You prefer to have sex in our bed.”

  “I do, yes. I don’t understand why you wanted to get naked and lie down on this thing, anyhow. Now, I mean.”

  “It isn’t cold, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” She wriggled her torso and did a snow-angel movement with her legs.

  “Maybe this time we could catch the waiters.”

  “Because we’d be early?”

  Ballard nodded. “Indulge me. Put on that sleeveless white French thing.”

  “Aye-aye, mon capitain.” She sat up and scooted down the length of the table, pushing herself along on the raised vertical edges. These were of dark green marble, about an inch thick and four inches high. On both sides, round metal drains abutted the inner side of the marble. At the end of the table, Sandrine swung her legs down and straightened her arms, like a girl sitting on the end of a diving board. “I know why, too.”

  “Why I want you to wear that white thing? I love the way it looks on you.”

  “Why you don’t want to have sex on this table.”

  “It’s too narrow.”

  “You’re thinking about what this table is for. Right? And you don’t want to combine sex with that. Only I think that’s exactly why we should have sex here.”

  “Everything we do, remember, is done by mutual consent. Our Golden Rule.”

  “Golden Spoilsport,” she said. “Golden Shower of Shit.”

  “See? Everything’s different already.”

  Sandrine levered herself off the edge of the table and faced him like a strict schoolmistress who happened momentarily to be naked. “I’m all you’ve got, and sometimes even I don’t understand you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She wheeled around and padded into the bedroom, displaying her plush little bottom and sacral dimples with an absolute confidence Ballard could not but admire.

  Although Sandrine and Ballard burst, in utter defiance of a direct order, into the dining room a full nine minutes ahead of schedule, the unseen minions had already done their work and disappeared. On the gleaming rosewood table two formal place settings had been laid, the plates topped with elaborately chased silver covers. Fresh irises brushed blue and yellow filled a tall, sparkling crystal vase.

  “I swear, they must have a greenhouse on this yacht,” Ballard said.

  “Naked men with muddy hair row the flowers out in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t even think irises grow in the Amazon basin.”

  “Little guys who speak bird language can probably grow anything they like.”

  “That’s only one tribe, the Pirahã. And all those bird sounds are actual words. It’s a human language.” Ballard walked around the table and took the seat he had claimed as his. He lifted the intricate silver cover. “Now what is that?” He looked across at Sandrine, who was prodding at the contents of her bowl with a fork.

  “Looks like a cut-up sausage. At least I hope it’s a sausage. And something like broccoli. And a lot of orangey-yellowy goo.” She raised her fork and licked the tines. “Um. Tastes pretty good, actually. But…”

  For a moment, she appeared to be lost in time’s great forest.

  “I know this doesn’t make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn’t the food even better, I mean a lot better?”

  “I can’t say anything about that,” Ballard said. “I really can’t. There’s just this vague…” The vagueness disturbed him far more than seemed quite rational. “Let’s drop that subject and talk about bird language. Yes, let’s. And the wine.” He picked up the bottle. “Yet again a very nice Bordeaux,” Ballard said, and poured for both of them. “However. What you’ve been hearing are real birds, not the Pirahã.”

  “But they’re talking, not just chirping. There’s a difference. These guys are saying things to each other.”

  “Birds talk to one another. I mean, they sing.”

  She was right about one thing, though: in a funky, down-home way, the stewlike dish was delicious. He thrust away the feeling that it should have been a hundred, a thousand times more delicious: that once it, or something rather like it, had been paradisal.

  “Birds don’t sing in sentences. Or in paragraphs, like these guys do.”

  “They still can’t be the Pirahã. The Pirahã live about five hundred miles away, on the Peruvian border.”

  “Your ears aren’t as good as mine. You don’t really hear them.”

  “Oh, I hear plenty of birds. They’re all over the place.”

  “Only we’re not talking about birds,” Sandrine said.

  1982

  On the last day of November, Sandrine Loy, who was twenty-eight, constitutionally ill-tempered, and startlingly good-looking (wide eyes, long mouth, black widow’s peak, columnar legs), formerly of Princeton and Clare College, Cambridge, glanced over her shoulder and said, “Please tell me you’re kidding. I just showered. I put on this nice white frock you bought me in Paris. And I’m hungry.” Relenting a bit, she let a playful smile warm her face for nearly a second. “Besides that, I want to catch sight of our invisible servants.”

  “I’m hungry, too.”

  “Not for food, unfortunately.” She spun from the porthole and its ugly view—a mile of brown rolling river and low muddy banks where squat, sullen natives tended to melt back into the bushes when the Sweet Delight went by—to indicate the evidence of Ballard’s arousal, which stood up, darker than the rest of him, as straight as a flagpole.

  “Let’s have sex on this table. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.”

  “Kind of defeats the fucking purpose, wouldn’t you say? Comfort’s hardly the point.”

  “Might as well be as comfy as we can, I say.” He raised his arms to let his hands drape from the four-inch marble edging on the long steel table. “There’s plenty of space on this thing, you know. More than in your bed at Clare.”

  “Maybe you’re not as porky as I thought you were.”

  “Careful, careful. If you insult me, I’ll make you pay for it.”

  At fifty Ballard had put on some extra weight, but it suited him. His shoulders were still wider far than his hips
, and his belly more nascent than actual. His hair, longer than that of most men his age and just beginning to show threads of gray within the luxuriant brown, framed his wide brow and executive face. He looked like an actor who had made a career of playing senators, doctors, and bankers. Ballard’s real profession was that of fixer to an oversized law firm in New York with a satellite office in Hong Kong, where he had grown up. The weight of muscle in his arms, shoulders, and legs reinforced the hint of stubborn determination, even perhaps brutality, in his face: the suggestion that if necessary he would go a great distance and perform any number of grim deeds to do what was needed. Scars both long and short, scars like snakes, zippers, and tattoos bloomed here and there on his body.

  “Promises, promises,” she said. “But just for now, get up and get dressed, please. The sight of you admiring your own dick doesn’t do anything for me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, I do like the way you can still stick straight up into the air like a happy little soldier—at your age! But men are so soppy about their penises. You’re all queer for yourselves. You more so than most, Ballard.”

  “Ouch,” he said, and sat up. “I believe I’ll put my clothes on now, Sandrine.”

  “Don’t take forever, all right? I know it’s only the second day, but I’d like to get a look at them while they’re setting the table. Because someone, maybe even two someones, does set that table.”

  Ballard was already in the bedroom, pulling from their hangers a pair of white linen slacks and a thick, long-sleeved white cotton T-shirt. In seconds, he had slipped into these garments and was sliding his suntanned feet into rope-soled clogs.

  “So let’s move,” he said, coming out of the bedroom with a long stride, his elbows bent, his forearms raised.

  From the dining room came the sharp, distinctive chirping of a bird. Two notes, the second one higher, both clear and as insistent as the call of a bell. Ballard glanced at Sandrine, who seemed momentarily shaken.

  “I’m not going in there if one of those awful jungle birds got in. They have to get rid of it. We’re paying them, aren’t we?”

  “You have no idea,” Ballard said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him. “But that’s no bird, it’s them. The waiters. The staff.”

  Sandrine’s elegant face shone with both disbelief and disgust.

  “Those chirps and whistles are how they talk. Didn’t you hear them last night and this morning?”

  When he pulled again at her arm, she followed along, reluctance visible in her stance, her gait, the tilt of her head.

  “I’m talking about birds, and they weren’t even on the yacht. They were on shore. They were up in the air.”

  “Let’s see what’s in here.” Six or seven minutes remained until the official start of dinnertime, and they had been requested never to enter the dining room until the exact time of the meal.

  Ballard threw the door open and pulled her into the room with him. Silver covers rested on the Royal Doulton china, and an uncorked bottle of a distinguished Bordeaux stood precisely at the midpoint between the two place settings. Three inches to its right, a navy-blue-and-royal-purple orchid thick enough to eat leaned, as if languishing, against the side of a small square crystal vase. The air seemed absolutely unmoving. Through the thumb holes at the tops of the plate covers rose a dense, oddly meaty odor of some unidentifiable food.

  “Missed ’em again, damn it.” Sandrine pulled her arm from Ballard’s grasp and moved a few steps away.

  “But you have noticed that there’s no bird in here. Not so much as a feather.”

  “So it got out—I know it was here, Ballard.”

  She spun on her four-inch heels, giving the room a fast 360-degree inspection. Their dining room, roughly oval in shape, was lined with glassed-in bookshelves of dark-stained oak containing perhaps five hundred books, most of them mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels ranked alphabetically by author, regardless of genre. The jackets had been removed, which Ballard minded, a bit. Three feet in front of the bookshelves on the deck side, which yielded space to two portholes and a door, stood a long wooden table with a delicately inlaid top—a real table, unlike the one in the room they had just left, which was more like a workstation in a laboratory. The real one was presumably for setting out buffets.

  The first door opened out onto the deck; another at the top of the oval led to their large and handsomely furnished sitting room, with reading chairs and lamps, two sofas paired with low tables, a bar with a great many bottles of liquor, two red-lacquered cabinets they had as yet not explored, and an air of many small precious things set out to gleam under the parlor’s low lighting. The two remaining doors in the dining room were on the interior side. One opened into the spacious corridor that ran the entire length of their suite and gave access to the deck on both ends; the other revealed a gray passageway and a metal staircase that led up to the Captain’s deck and cabin and down into the engine room, galley, and quarters for the yacht’s small, unseen crew.

  “So it kept all its feathers,” said Sandrine. “If you don’t think that’s possible, you don’t know doodley-squat about birds.”

  “What isn’t possible,” said Ballard, “is that some giant parrot got out of here without opening a door or a porthole.”

  “One of the waiters let it out, dummy. One of those handsome Spanish-speaking waiters.”

  They sat on opposite sides of the stately table. Ballard smiled at Sandrine, and she smiled back in rage and distrust. Suddenly and without warning, he remembered the girl she had been on Park Avenue at the end of the sixties, gawky-graceful, brilliantly surly, her hair and wardrobe goofy, claiming him as he had claimed her, with a glance. He had rescued her father from ruinous shame and a long jail term, but as soon as he had seen her he understood that his work had just begun, and that it would demand restraint, sacrifice, patience, and adamantine caution.

  “A three-count?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “One,” he said. “Two.” They put their thumbs into the round holes at the tops of the covers. “Three.” They raised their covers, releasing steam and smoke and a more concentrated, powerful form of the meaty odor.

  “Wow. What is that?”

  Yellow-brown sauce or gravy covered a long, curved strip of foreign matter. Exhausted vegetables that looked a little like okra and string beans but were other things altogether lay strewn in limp surrender beneath the gravy.

  “All of a sudden I’m really hungry,” said Sandrine. “You can’t tell what it is either?”

  Ballard moved the strip of unknown meat back and forth with his knife. Then he jabbed his fork into it. A watery yellow fluid oozed from the punctures.

  “God knows what this is.”

  He pictured some big reptilian creature sliding down the riverbank into the meshes of a native net, then being hauled back up to be pierced with poison-tipped wooden spears. Chirping like birds, the diminutive men rioted in celebration around the corpse, which was now that of a hideous insect the size of a pony, its shell a poisonous green.

  “I’m not even sure it’s a mammal,” he said. “Might even be some organ. Anaconda liver. Crocodile lung. Tarantula heart.”

  “You first.”

  Ballard sliced a tiny section from the curved meat before him. He half-expected to see valves and tubes, but the slice was a dense light brown all the way through. Ballard inserted the morsel into his mouth, and his taste buds began to sing.

  “My god. Amazing.”

  “It’s good?”

  “Oh, this is way beyond ‘good.’ ”

  Ballard cut a larger piece off the whole and quickly bit into it. Yes, there it was again, but more sumptuously, almost floral in its delicacy and grounded in some profoundly satisfactory flavor, like that of a great single-barrel bourbon laced with a dark, subversive French chocolate. Subtlety, strength, sweetness. He watched Sandrine lift a section of the substance on her fork and slip it into her mouth. Her
face went utterly still, and her eyes narrowed. With luxuriant slowness, she began to chew. After perhaps a second, Sandrine closed her eyes. Eventually, she swallowed.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “My, my. Yes. Why can’t we eat like this at home?”

  “Whatever kind of animal this is, it’s probably unknown everywhere but here. People like J. Paul Getty might get to eat it once a year, at some secret location.”

  “I don’t care what it is, I’m just extraordinarily happy that we get to have it today. It’s even a little bit sweet, isn’t it?”

  A short time later, Sandrine said, “Amazing. Even these horrible-looking vegetables spill out amazing flavors. If I could eat like this every day, I’d be perfectly happy to live in a hut, walk around barefoot, bathe in the Amazon, and wash my rags on the rocks.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Ballard. “It’s like a drug. Maybe it is a drug.”

  “Do the natives really eat this way? Whatever this animal was, before they serve it to us, they have to hunt it down and kill it. Wouldn’t they keep half of it for themselves?”

  “Be a temptation,” Ballard said. “Maybe they lick our plates, too.”

  “Tell me the truth now, Ballard. If you know it. Okay?”

  Chewing, he looked up into her eyes. Some of the bliss faded from his face. “Sure. Ask away.”

  “Did we ever eat this stuff before?”

  Ballard did not answer. He sliced a quarter-sized piece off the meat and began to chew, his eyes on his plate.

  “I know I’m not supposed to ask.”

  He kept chewing and chewing until he swallowed. He sipped his wine. “No. Isn’t that strange? How we know we’re not supposed to do certain things?”

  “Like see the waiters. Or the maids, or the Captain.”

  “Especially the Captain, I think.”

  “Let’s not talk anymore, let’s just eat for a little while.”

  Sandrine and Ballard returned to their plates and glasses, and for a time made no noise other than soft moans of satisfaction.