The Origin of Species (48 page)

He was beside himself. He tottered up, and for a second stood there looking dazed, at a loss, then he opened the cabin door and stumbled out into the storm.

Santos gave Alex a look.

“You fucking bastard,” they heard him intone, “you motherfucker, you fucking cunt! You should have killed me, you should have killed me.”

Alex heard him thrashing around out there amidst the cargo and wondered if he shouldn’t go after him.
Let him stew a bit
, he thought. It wasn’t as if the world would be a poorer place if he actually fell into the sea. For all the gall of what Santos had done, there was a bracing fitness to it.

More banging and thrashing.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Santos shot Alex another glance.

“
Está loco totalmente
.”

A wave hit the boat and Alex caught a muffled “oomph” from the deck, then silence. So he had finally worn himself out. Any second he would come through the door drenched and defeated, broken maybe. Dealing with a broken Desmond, it occurred to Alex, might be worse than dealing with a whole one.

The seconds piled up and Desmond didn’t appear.

“I should bring him in,” Alex said.

The silence still hung behind the noise of the storm.

“
Como quieras
.”

Alex stepped out to the deck and the rain lashed into him. The only light was the backward wash of the headlight. Alex couldn’t so much as make out the rails or the deck, only looming shapes and then the rain and the sea.

“Desmond!”

No answer. A wave hit the boat and washed over the deck, then another.

“Desmond!” He heard his own voice, full of panic now, as if it were someone else’s. “Desmond, come inside!”

Nothing.

He got down on his knees, fighting the tilt of the boat, and crawled around the deck, grabbing whatever handhold he could find. The rain and the sea made a river of the aisle that circled the hatch. There was so little space to search, for someone to wash up in.

In desperation he jerked open the hatch and shouted into the hold.

“Desmond!”

Silence.

He staggered back into the cabin.

“
No está aquí! No está aquí!
”

Santos caught his tone at once.

“
Qué pasa?
”

“
No está aquí!
”

They both seemed dazed by the shock of seeing what they’d imagined actually come to pass. Alex still hadn’t let the reality enter his head, but his body knew it—his blood was racing, he could hardly form words, he felt ready to retch.

Santos motioned for him to take the tiller.

“
Agárralo!
”

He pulled a flashlight from under the dash and lunged out to the deck. The tiller wrestled against Alex like a raging animal. He felt the same deadness coming over him that he’d felt on the cliffs, the urge to let go.

Santos came back into the cabin.

“
Él se cayó
.”

He has fallen. There was fear in his voice, the first time, it seemed, that he’d shown an open emotion.

“
Regresamos
.”

He had to make a wide circle to get the boat turned, fighting the waves. There was no mistaking what had happened now.

Alex was trembling from head to foot.

“We have to get help,” he said.

“
Dónde?
” Santos snapped, as if speaking to a child.

They made their way back, peering out into the storm. With the rain and the waves they couldn’t see ten feet beyond the bow.

“This can’t be happening,” Alex repeated to himself, then fell into a bated silence. He kept seeing shapes in the water, though each one dissolved into black the second he fixed on it. When they had gone a ways, Santos circled back again, in the same wide arc, but it was impossible to tell if they had even crossed the spot where he’d fallen.

For much of the night, they circled. One spot, then another, in ever-widening turns. In the storm and the dark it was like drawing a map in thin air. With each hour that passed, Alex’s hope drained to what he thought must be the dregs, and yet it was there still, pooling in the bottom of him like a poison, so that the same agony hung in him. Twice he retched, his stomach so empty that all that came up was a blackish bile, awful to taste; every nerve in him ached, as if he had lost the ability to filter out what mattered from the useless barrage of sensation coming at him. What seemed the worst, though, was that morning might come, that the darkness would end: it was something, at least, to circle around and around in the dark as if it wasn’t too late, as if time had stood still.

In the end he grew groggy and feverish, and could no longer tell the projections of his mind, the faces staring up, the bits of flotsam that appeared and then vanished, from what was actually before him. Gradually the storm died away, and the sea went flat like something erased and the rain settled into a sluggish drizzle. The sudden calm felt like a mockery, a little pocket of hell they’d slipped into where there was only their crime to think of.

Santos kept circling in the dark, then finally pushed back on the throttle.

“
Es inútil
,” he said, and killed the engine.

They ought to have eaten, but instead they just sat in the cabin like dead men, waiting for light. When it came, it grew clear they had gone off course. There was no sign of land in any direction, only sea and more sea, leaden beneath the overcast. Santos made a show of checking his map and set off to the east, toward the islands or Tierra del Fuego, for all they knew, but it didn’t matter: not twenty minutes later, the engine went dead. Santos rattled around among the canisters again, sullenly at first, then with growing rage.

“
Mierda!
” In a fit he heaved one of the canisters into sea. “
Mierda! Cristo cabrón!
”

It didn’t matter. Alex wished some cataclysm would come, some whirlpool, some monster, and suck them into the deep.

Santos was sitting hunched in the engine well in the drizzle, head in his hands.

“
Vida de mierda
,” he said.

For the longest time they sat like that, Santos on the deck and Alex in the cabin. The drizzle stopped; the sky cleared. The sun shone down on the water, glaring, and still not a speck showed on the horizon, neither land nor ship, not so much as a gull.

We have to eat
, Alex thought.
Eat or die
.

He had left the lid of the hatch askew when he’d checked the hold in the storm. Santos, stone-faced, burrowed down through the fish to reveal them practically steeped in the bilge that had collected there from the rain and sea. They did relays with a bucket to try to get some of it cleared, but short of emptying the entire hold they couldn’t make much headway. They both stank of fish now. Water had got into the charcoal as well, and Santos had to pick out the drier bits piece by piece to get a fire going on the brazier.

Whatever little Spanish Alex had managed until then had completely left him.

“What do we do?” he said.

“
Nada
.” Then in English, “We wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“
Un barco
. We wait for boat.”

The sky remained clear through the rest of the day and then all through the next. The wind had died to nothing; the sun flamed off the sea like a nuclear blast. Without landmarks, it was impossible to say if they were drifting or sitting still. They were becalmed: the word, with its deceptive allure, came to him out of childhood adventure stories trailing images of wasted corpses, of men driven mad. Periodically he scanned the horizon, saving the task like a bit of food he’d hoarded, standing on the hatch and turning inch by inch through the whole of the compass, dreading and hoping for rescue. Each time it was the same, nothing but sea, but it comforted him in some way to know that he’d made the effort, that he couldn’t be faulted.

He and Santos fell into a wordless rhythm that seemed at once evasive and complicit. All Alex’s old animosity had fallen away. Because his
mind turned sometimes to the thought of blame, because he saw how easy it would be for him to twist the matter to his own advantage, he felt a perverse sense of obligation toward Santos, of humility. The second night, Santos pulled a rumpled pack of cigarettes from under the dash—it had been in plain view, practically, Alex couldn’t see how he’d missed it—and offered one to him.

It had been days since his last cigarette.

“
Gracias
.”

They were a local brand, acrid and sharp. Santos drew his rum out from the engine well, down to its last couple of fingers, and they finished it off.

“
Te gusta?
” Santos said.

“
Sí, sí. Bueno
.”

On the third day, Santos set a line, using grouper for bait because his bait bag had gone missing in the storm. He pulled in a shark, a stubby, vicious thing that reared suddenly as he drew in the line, seeming about to leap up onto the deck. Instead of cutting it loose Santos scrambled to fix the line and grabbed a machete, hacking wildly at it as it tried to twist free. The shark lunged and writhed, refusing to die, going at the blade again and again as if it were some baffling new sort of enemy. Then finally it went limp and dull-eyed against the line.

The water around it was clouded with blood.

“
Carajo malnacido!
” It had a death grin on it, its teeth bared three rows deep. “
Vaya al diablo!
”

Santos sat down heavily on the hatch. His shirt was speckled red.

“
Llévatelo
,” he said to Alex. Take it.

Alex made the mistake of grabbing the shark by the flank as he pulled it in, and its scales cut into him like broken glass.

“
Cuidado!
”

Santos didn’t fish again after that. They ate the shark bit by bit, like a kind of penance, letting it lie there on the deck packed in salt and cutting slabs of it away with the machete. The flesh had a dense, meaty taste, strange and off-putting, like something too close to their own species. The sun continued hot and blinding, and they spent entire days holed up in the cabin; the nights, when they tossed and paced, one keeping watch and the other stretched out on a bunk or just sitting sleepless, seemed to go on without end. They were down to their last
few jugs of rainwater, with no more in the offing: they had Santos’s still, they weren’t facing death, not yet, though Alex wondered if they had the will to avert it.

One evening the sun grew strangely flat as it dropped behind the line of the sea and a lozenge of bluish green appeared above it that almost instantly shattered and shot skyward. The green flash: he had read about it in one of Desmond’s books. It was like a portal to the beyond, with just that one second to slip through; or like the light of miracles, perhaps, of Saul on the road to Damascus. Except that it was just a matter of physics, no more something to make into a traveler’s tale or a moment of truth than the rest of it. None of this would be something to tell: already he could feel himself building containment cells to shut it away, drilling mine shafts into the deepest cortices of his brain to bury it.

At some point a smell started coming up from the hold, faint enough to ignore at first but turning rapidly pungent. The fish had begun to go off, from the heat, maybe, or the rain that had got in, or just whatever curse it was that hung over them. Santos did a culling, tossing a few dozen of them over the rail and massing the rest on the deck in great heaps to give the hold a proper bailing. Afterward, he went through the remaining fish one by one, packing more salt into them. The salt had gone hard from the storm and he had to spread chunks of it beneath a plank to crush it with his boots. Alex watched him and then did as he did, smashing salt beneath his feet till his soles ached. The work filled the day and then much of the night, but they went at it unstintingly, hardly bothering to keep a watch out for ships. Then they reloaded the hold by the light of Santos’s hurricane lamp, layer by layer until it was full once more nearly to the brim.

By morning, the smell had returned. Santos flung open the hatch and began tossing more fish out, erratically, as if he’d given up on any system. The castoffs floated around the boat, staring at them one-eyed like pleading beggars before finally turning belly up; a couple of sharks circled around at the smell of them, but Santos hit out at them so furiously with an oar that they shied away. Then, after a time, following some unknown chemical law, the fish began one by one to sink below the surface.

All day, in the blistering sun, Alex could feel the warmth radiating up from the hold as if something were cooking there. Santos laced buckets of seawater with salt and poured them down the hatch, but still the
smell kept building, a tangy, layered scent like the smell of garbage left out too long in the heat. With no wind to disperse it, it hung over the boat like a fog. There were hundreds of fish in that pit, thousands of pounds of them. The more they rotted, the more they seemed to grow diabolic and weighty.

Santos stayed out on deck well into the night, untying hooks from his lines, stringing his jugs together, checking his ropes, with the obsessive methodicalness of someone about to murder his family with a hatchet or put a gun to his head. Alex tried to sleep but the smell of the fish had got into his pores. Then he nodded off and fell into a dream of being stranded at sea, with someone dead, and awoke with a start.

Santos was already banging around on the deck, though it was barely light. Alex went out to find him tossing fish from the hold again.

“
Qué pasa?
”

But Santos kept at his work.

The stench now was like a separate atmosphere they were in. Beyond the rails the fish lay practically heaped on the surface of the water, spread out in a skin that seemed to shimmer and move like something alive. An optical illusion, Alex thought, then he realized they were crawling with vermin: maggots. The fish were covered in them, teeming mats that seethed like a single organism. They were on Santos’s hands, they were crawling up his arms. Alex thought of the dead goats on Marchena, so free of pestilence, and wondered how out in this nowhere, this end of the earth, these worms had managed to infiltrate.