by Peter Straub
“You’re pretty weird, too. You’d just had your fifteenth birthday, and there you were, gobsmacked by this old guy in a suit. You even showed me your arms!”
“I could tell what made you salivate.” She gave him a small, lopsided smile. “So why were you there, anyhow?”
“Your father and I were having a private celebration.”
“Of what?”
Every time she asked this question, he gave her a different answer. “I made the fearsome problem of his old library fines disappear. Poof! No more late-night sweats.” Previously, Ballard had told her that he’d gotten her father off jury duty, had canceled his parking tickets, retroactively upgraded his B-minus in Introductory Chemistry to an A.
“Yeah, what a relief. My father never walked into a library his whole life.”
“You can see why the fine was so great.” He blinked. “I just had an idea.” Ballard wished her to cease wondering, to the extent this was possible, about the service he had rendered her father. “How would you like to take a peek at the galley? Forbidden fruit, all that kind of thing. Aren’t you curious?”
“You’re suggesting we go down those stairs? Wasn’t not doing that one of our most sacred rules?”
“I believe we were given those rules in order to make sure we broke them.”
Sandrine considered this proposition for a moment, then nodded her head.
That’s my girl, he thought.
“You may be completely perverted, Ballard, but you’re pretty smart.” A discordant possibility occurred to her. “What if we catch sight of our extremely discreet servants?”
“Then we know for good and all if they’re little tribesmen who chirp like bobolinks or handsome South American yacht bums. But that won’t happen. They may—in fact, they undoubtedly do—see us, but we’ll never catch sight of them. No matter how brilliantly we try to outwit them.”
“You think they watch us?”
“I’m sure that’s one of their main jobs.”
“Even when we’re in bed? Even when we … you know.”
“Especially then,” Ballard said.
“What do we think about that, Ballard? Do we love the whole idea, or does it make us sick? You first.”
“Neither one. We can’t do anything about it, so we might as well forget it. I think being able to watch us is one of the ways they’re paid—these tribes don’t have much use for money. And because they’re always there, they can step in and help us when we need it, at the end.”
“So it’s like love,” said Sandrine.
“Tough love, there at the finish. Let’s go over and try the staircase.”
“Hold on. When we were out on deck, you told me that you felt you were being watched, and that it was the first time you’d ever had that feeling.”
“Yes, that was different—I don’t feel the natives watching me; I just assume they’re doing it. It’s the only way to explain how they can stay out of sight all the time.”
As they moved across the dining room to the inner door, for the first time Sandrine noticed a curtain the color of a dark camel-hair coat hanging up at the front of the room’s oval. Until that moment, she had taken it for a wall too small and oddly shaped to be covered with bookshelves. The curtain shifted a bit, she thought: a tiny ripple occurred in the fabric, as if it had been breathed upon.
There’s one of them now, she thought. I bet they have their own doors and their own staircases.
For a moment, she was disturbed by a vision of the yacht honeycombed with narrow passages and runways down which beetled small red-brown figures with matted black hair and faces like dull, heavy masks. Now and then the little figures paused to peer through chinks in the walls. It made her feel violated, a little, but at the same time immensely proud of the body that the unseen and silent attendants were privileged to gaze at. The thought of these mysterious little people watching what Ballard did to that body, and she to his, caused a thrill of deep feeling to course upward through her body.
“Stop daydreaming, Sandrine, and get over here.” Ballard held the door that led to the gray landing and the metal staircase.
“You go first,” she said, and Ballard moved through the frame while still holding the door. As soon as she was through, he stepped around her to grasp the gray metal rail and begin moving down the stairs.
“What makes you so sure the galley’s downstairs?”
“Galleys are always downstairs.”
“And why do you want to go there, again?”
“One: because they ordered us not to. Two: because I’m curious about what goes on in that kitchen. And three: I also want to get a look at the wine cellar. How can they keep giving us these amazing wines? Remember what we drank with lunch?”
“Some stupid red. It tasted good, though.”
“That stupid red was a ’fifty-five Château Petrus.”
Ballard led her down perhaps another dozen steps, arrived at a landing, and saw one more long staircase leading down to yet another landing.
“How far down can this galley be?” she asked.
“Good question.”
“This boat has a bottom, after all.”
“It has a hull, yes.”
“Shouldn’t we actually have gone past it by now? The bottom of the boat?”
“You’d think so. Okay, maybe this is it.”
The final stair ended at a gray landing that opened out into a narrow gray corridor leading to what appeared to be a large, empty room. Ballard looked down into the big space and experienced a violent reluctance, a mental and physical refusal to go down there and look farther into the room: it was prohibited by an actual taboo. That room was not for him; it was none of his business, period. Chilled, he turned from the corridor and at last saw what was directly before him. What had appeared to be a high gray wall was divided in the middle and bore two brass panels at roughly chest height. The wall was a doorway.
“What do you want to do?” Sandrine asked.
Ballard placed a hand on one of the panels and pushed. The door swung open, revealing a white tile floor, metal racks filled with cast-iron pans, steel bowls, and other cooking implements. The light was a low, diffused dimness. Against the side wall, three sinks of varying sizes bulged downward beneath their faucets. He could see the inner edge of a long, shiny metal counter. Far back, a yellow propane tank clung to a range with six burners, two ovens, and a big griddle. A faint mewing, a tiny skritch, skritch, skritch, came to him from the depths of the kitchen.
“Look, is there any chance…?” Sandrine whispered.
In a normal voice, Ballard said, “No. They’re not in here right now, whoever they are. I don’t think they are, anyhow.”
“So does that mean we’re supposed to go inside?”
“How would I know?” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Maybe we’re not supposed to do anything, and we just decide one way or the other. But here we are anyhow. I say we go in, right? If it feels wrong, smells wrong, whatever, we boogie on out.”
“You first,” she said.
Without opening the door any wider, Ballard slipped into the kitchen. Before he was all the way in, he reached back and grasped Sandrine’s wrist.
“Come along now.”
“You don’t have to drag me; I was right behind you. You bully.”
“I’m not a bully; I just don’t want to be in here by myself.”
“All bullies are cowards, too.”
She edged in behind him and glanced quickly from side to side. “I didn’t think you could have a kitchen like this on a yacht.”
“You can’t,” he said. “Look at that gas range. It must weigh a thousand pounds.”
She yanked her wrist out of his hand. “It’s hard to see in here, though. Why is the light so fucking weird?”
They were edging away from the door, Sandrine so close behind that Ballard could feel her breath on his neck.
“There aren’t any light fixtures, see? No overhead lights, either.”
&nb
sp; He looked up and saw, far above, only a dim white-gray ceiling that stretched away a great distance on either side. Impossibly, the “galley” seemed much wider than the Blinding Light itself.
“I don’t like this,” he said.
“Me, neither.”
“We’re really not supposed to be here,” he said, thinking of that other vast room down at the end of the corridor, and said to himself, That’s what they call the “engine room”; we absolutely can’t even glance that way again, can’t, can’t, can’t; the “engines” would be way too much for us.
The mewing and skritching, which had momentarily fallen silent, started up again, and in the midst of what felt and tasted to him like panic, Ballard had a vision of a kitten trapped behind a piece of kitchen equipment. He stepped forward and leaned over to peer into the region beyond the long counter and beside the enormous range. Two funny striped cabinets about five feet tall stood there side by side.
“Do you hear a cat?” he asked.
“If you think that’s a cat …” Sandrine said, a bit farther behind him than she had been at first.
The cabinets were cages, and what he had seen as stripes were their bars. “Oh,” Ballard said, and sounded as though he had been punched in the stomach.
“Damn you, you’ve started to bleed through your suit jacket,” Sandrine whispered. “We have to get out of here, fast.”
Ballard scarcely heard her. In any case, if he were bleeding, it was of no consequence. They knew what to do about bleeding. Here, on the other hand, perhaps sixty feet away in this preposterous “galley,” was a phenomenon he had never before witnessed. The first cage contained a thrashing beetlelike insect nearly too large for it. This gigantic insect was the source of the mewing and scratching. One of its mandibles rasped at a bar as the creature struggled to roll forward or back, producing noises of insect distress. Long smeary wounds in the wide middle area between its scrabbling legs oozed a yellow ichor.
Horrified, Ballard looked hastily into the second cage, which he had thought empty but for a roll of blankets or towels or the like, and discovered that the blankets or towels were occupied by a small boy from one of the river tribes who was gazing at him through the bars. The boy’s eyes looked hopeless and dead. Half of his shoulder seemed to have been sliced away, and a long, thin strip of bone gleamed white against a great scoop of red. The arm half-extended through the bars concluded in a dark, messy stump.
The boy opened his mouth and released, almost too softly to be heard, a single high-pitched musical note. Pure, accurate, well-defined, clearly a word charged with some deep emotion, the note hung in the air for a brief moment, underwent a briefer half-life, and was gone.
“What’s that?” Sandrine said.
“Let’s get out of here.”
He pushed her through the door, raced around her, and began charging up the stairs. When they reached the top of the steps and threw themselves into the dining room, Ballard collapsed onto the floor, then rolled onto his back, heaving in great quantities of air. His chest rose and fell, and with every exhalation he moaned. A portion of his left side pulsing with pain felt warm and wet. Sandrine leaned against the wall, breathing heavily in a less convulsive way. After perhaps thirty seconds, she managed to say, “I trust that was a bird down there.”
“Um. Yes.” He placed his hand on his chest, then held it up like a stop sign, indicating that he would soon have more to say. After a few more great heaving lungfuls of air, he said, “Toucan. In a big cage.”
“You were that frightened by a kind of parrot?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side on the polished floor. “I didn’t want them to catch us down there. It seemed dangerous, all of a sudden. Sorry.”
“You’re bleeding all over the floor.”
“Can you get me a new bandage pad?”
Sandrine pushed herself off the wall and stepped toward him. From his perspective, she was as tall as a statue. Her eyes glittered. “Screw you, Ballard. I’m not your servant. You can come with me. It’s where we’re going anyhow.”
He pushed himself upright and peeled off his suit jacket before standing up. The jacket fell to the floor with a squishy thump. With blood-dappled fingers, he unbuttoned his shirt and let that, too, fall to the floor.
“Just leave those things there,” Sandrine said. “The invisible crew will take care of them.”
“I imagine you’re right.” Ballard managed to get to his feet without staggering. Slow-moving blood continued to ooze down his left side.
“We have to get you on the table,” Sandrine said. “Hold this over the wound for right now, okay?”
She handed him a folded white napkin, and he clamped it over his side. “Sorry. I’m not as good at stitches as you are.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ballard said, and began moving, a bit haltingly, toward the next room.
“Oh, sure. You always are. But you know what I like about what we just did?”
For once he had no idea what she might say. He waited for it.
“That amazing food we loved so much was toucan! Who would’ve guessed? You’d think toucan would taste sort of like chicken, only a lot worse.”
“Life is full of surprises.”
In the bedroom, Ballard kicked off his shoes, pulled his trousers down over his hips, and stepped out of them.
“You can leave your socks on,” said Sandrine, “but let’s get your undies off, all right?”
“I need your help.”
Sandrine grasped the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down, but they snagged on his penis. “Ballard is aroused, surprise number two.” She unhooked his shorts, let them drop to the floor, batted his erection down, and watched it bounce back up. “Barkis is willin’, all right.”
“Let’s get into the workroom,” he said.
“Aye, aye, mon capitaine.” Sandrine closed her hand on his erection and said, “Want to go there on deck, give the natives a look at your magnificent manliness? Shall we increase the index of penis envy among the river tribes by a really big factor?”
“Let’s just get in there, okay?”
She pulled him into the workroom and only then released his erection.
A wheeled aluminum tray had been rolled up beside the worktable. Sometimes it was not given to them, and they were forced to do their work with their hands and whatever implements they had brought with them. Today, next to the array of knives of many kinds and sizes, cleavers, wrenches, and hammers, lay a pack of surgical thread and a stainless-steel needle still warm from the autoclave.
Ballard sat down on the worktable, pushed himself along until his heels had cleared the edge, and lay back. Sandrine threaded the needle and, bending over to get close to the wound, began to do her patient stitching.
1982
“Oh, here you are,” said Sandrine, walking into the sitting room of their suite to find Ballard lying on one of the sofas, reading a book whose title she could not quite make out. Because both of his hands were heavily bandaged, he was having some difficulty turning the pages. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
He glanced up, frowning. “All over? Does that mean you went down the stairs?”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything like that alone, anyhow.”
“And just to make sure … You didn’t go up the stairs, either, did you?”
Sandrine came toward him, shaking her head. “No, I’d never do that, either. But I want to tell you something. I thought you might have decided to take a look upstairs. By yourself, to sort of protect me in a way I never want to be protected.”
“Of course,” Ballard said, closing his book on an index finger that protruded from the bulky white swath of bandage. “You’d hate me if I ever tried to protect you, especially by doing something sneaky. I knew that about you when you were fifteen years old.”
“When I was fifteen, you did protect me.”
He smiled at her. “I exercised an atypical amount of restraint.”
&n
bsp; His troublesome client, Sandrine’s father, had told him one summer day that a business venture required him to spend a week in Mexico City. Could he think of anything acceptable that might occupy his daughter during that time, she being a teenager a bit too prone to independence and exploration? Let her stay with me, Ballard had said. The guest room has its own bathroom and a TV. I’ll take her out to theaters at night, and to the Met and MoMA during the day, when I’m not doing my job. When I am doing my job, she can bat around the city by herself the way she does now. Extraordinary man you are, the client had said, and allow me to reinforce that by letting you know that about a month ago my daughter just amazed me one morning by telling me that she liked you. You have no idea how goddamned fucking unusual that is. That she talked to me at all is staggering, and that she actually announced that she liked one of my friends is stupefying. So yes, please, thank you, take Sandrine home with you, please do, escort her hither and yon.
When the time came, he drove a compliant Sandrine to his house in Harrison, where he explained that although he would not have sex with her until she was at least eighteen, there were many other ways they could express themselves. And although it would be years before they could be naked together, for the present they would each be able to be naked before the other. Fifteen-year-old Sandrine, who had been expecting to use all her arts of bad temper, insult, duplicity, and evasiveness to escape ravishment by this actually pretty interesting old guy, responded to these conditions with avid interest. Ballard announced another prohibition no less serious, but even more personal.
“I can’t cut myself anymore?” she asked. “Fuck you, Ballard; you loved it when I showed you my arm. Did my father put you up to this?” She began looking frantically for her bag, which Ballard’s valet had already removed to the guest room.
