The Origin of Species (49 page)

Another shark started to circle, a big one, but nosing toward them timidly, as if it had been forewarned. Santos took up a vigil. The shark seemed enfeebled or old, drifting around half-heartedly in the open water like a great ambling mutt, but then suddenly it reared up into the fish open-jawed to take in a huge mouthful of them. Santos was ready for it: he heaved out another of the empty canisters and hit it squarely on the snout. The shark buckled and thrashed in the water before disappearing back into the depths.

“
Diablo!
” Santos shouted after it. “
Salga, diablo!
”

Santos had to climb down into the hold now to get at the rest of the fish, dumping slithering armfuls of them onto the deck, one after another, then coming up at intervals to pitch them into the sea after the rest. He carried on without stint until he had cleared the hold down to its last rotting
codling. There were maggots everywhere, on the deck, on the fishing lines, in the foul soup still sloshing around at the bottom of the hold.

Santos reeked. He stripped off his shirt and threw it into the sea.

“
Dios me ha jodido
,” he said. God has fucked me.

The fish spread out around the boat like a sinister island they’d run aground on, sending up their acrid stench. The sun beat down; sometimes a lucky breeze would bring a pocket of bearable air, but then the smell would be there again. Then, just as the others had done, the fish began to sink down. A few through the afternoon and into the evening, but then all through the night they must have kept dropping away because by morning the sea had returned to its inscrutable blankness, every one of them gone. To where, Alex wondered, what hand of nature or God had dragged them down? Somewhere, now, they were resuming their place in the food chain, being broken down by microbes, who would be eaten by plankton, who would be eaten by minnows, who would be eaten, in turn, by grouper. What could it mean, this stupid cycle? What comfort or purpose was in it?

It wasn’t until sometime the following day that the fish began to resurface, carcasses so bloated they were hard to recognize at first, and giving off such a sulfurous smell now that they seemed to have come back from the very bowels of hell. They rose up randomly and widely scattered but then somehow converged on the boat like entranced acolytes, with their slit bellies and clouded eyes.

“
Ándale, ándale!
” Santos shouted, trying to push them back with his oar, but still they continued to gather. Then in the night came another plague, out of the same nowhere as the worms, some invisible pest that took bites out of Alex while he slept and left him covered in welts the size of silver dollars. At dawn he saw that the archipelago of putrid fish they floated in was haloed now by great clouds of tiny insects. A swarm of them surrounded him at once on the deck and he tried to swat them away, but might as well have swatted the air.

It seemed truly possible that they wouldn’t survive, that the line between their lives and their death had grown hopelessly thin. Alex was aware of his body and of how it grew hungry then balked at food, but none of this seemed any more real than the strange twilight place he’d retreated to in his brain. What was it to be dead if not that, to step outside of your body? It seemed months, years, since he’d walked on the earth in any normal way.

He lost track of the days. Santos dangled a single hook into the sea from time to time, pulling up fantastical fish with a dozen fins that yielded only the barest mouthfuls of meat, or tiny herring-like things that they ate whole, not even bothering to skin them. Their water ran low, then ran out, and they drank briny cupfuls from Santos’s still; their charcoal dwindled and Santos tore strips of wood up from the boat, from the tackle boxes, the cabin wall, to make their cooking fires. They shat in a bucket, still with an odd regard for propriety; they exchanged, in the course of a day, maybe half a dozen words. A wind came up and blew off the fish and the flies, but then another day—the next one? several later?—they found themselves in the midst of them again. Finally another cycle of rain started up, a soulless drizzle that went on and on and wore at them like the churr of an insect. Alex couldn’t have said how he spent the days: they were a wash, a blur, as blank and as featureless and without hope as the sea.

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
über
bugs.
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 watching 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
.”