The Origin of Species (36 page)

Alex winced.

“Isn’t there any other way?”

The man shrugged as if to abjure any responsibility for him.

“There are the fishing boats. But very dangerous.”

Alex returned to his room to brood. He couldn’t believe Anders had left him so woefully underinformed.

“You must visit, of course,” he had said. This was on one of the first clear nights since they had started out, when Anders had made a fire and Alex had had an inkling of how it might feel to be warm and healthy and dry again. “It’s something, I can’t describe it to you. Being there with the animals, with nature, it makes you think, maybe this is the way. Maybe it’s possible on this earth to have paradise. At least you can dream it, when you are there.”

Alex wasn’t sure why this little encomium had so mesmerized him at the time. The lingering delirium of his fever, maybe, or just the altitude. It was the altitude that had first brought him under Anders’s auspices: he had literally passed out at the side of the trail from the rarefied air and had opened his eyes to see this gawky bird of a Swede staring down at him. Lucky for Alex. It might have been days before anyone else had passed. The trail was usually closed that time of the year, because of the rains.

He tried his luck at the wharf. The Americans were there, with a strapping Aussie in tow, already loading their stuff into a sleek-looking motor launch. Alex couldn’t have said what it was that he had found so objectionable in them the day before.

There were a couple of women among them, attractive, earthy types who smiled at Alex when he approached.

“I was on the plane,” he said. “I’m trying to get out to the other islands.”

The know-it-all gave him a look as if he’d never laid eyes on him before.

“Gee, I’d like to help you out, buddy, but we already cut a deal. It’s too bad we didn’t hook up on the plane.”

He made a few half-hearted inquiries amongst the locals, mashing his Italian into bad Spanish. Everyone had a scheme, an uncle who had a fishing boat or a friend who ran private tours on his yacht, but it all sounded too expensive or too dodgy. He checked in at the Angermeyer and found an actual sign-up sheet in the lobby, but there weren’t any names on it.

“It’s bad time,” the woman at the reception desk said, a wattled bleached blonde who looked like she’d descended here from outer space. “Because of the rains.”

The fucking rains.

He was left to his surly keeper at the Black Mangrove. Mara, her name was, he’d got that out of her in the way of making conversation, though afterward, to judge from the new level of contempt he had graduated to, it was as if he had tried to steal her mumbo-jumbo from her or her soul. It was six more days before there was another flight out. Mara would have broken him by then, would have him tied to a post in the yard to do her nails for her and pumice her feet.

From the patio he watched a fisherman gutting fish on the back of his boat and the pelicans flocking around him like bothersome children to get the innards.

Fucking pelicans
, he thought.
Fucking Anders
.

On the Inca Trail, he had barely acclimatized himself to the altitude before he had fallen ill with some bug he had probably caught from the domestic fowl he had shared space with on the train out of Cuzco. The rain had come by then, every possible species of it, cloudbursts and soul-sapping drizzles and torrential downpours that sent muddy rivers gushing down the slopes. Alex had been on the verge of splitting with Anders, who had grown entirely too maddening, smiling away at everything like a simpleton but hoarding his food and his gear with an irritating fastidiousness and carrying on with his own little itineraries as if Alex had hardly registered on him. But now he found himself at Anders’s mercy again.

He had thought of Anders until then as an argument against the virtues of travel. Anders had an arrangement with the high school where he taught in Uppsala to take two-thirds pay so he could get every third year off to travel the world. But Alex felt forced to conclude that the only upshot of all his journeys—he had done China, India, Africa, Eastern Europe—had been to make him entirely unfit for normal human intercourse. He had his smile, which served as a sort of transition point between himself and the world, but beneath it he seemed as insular and unknowable and fixed in his ways as an insect. Back home, he’d told Alex proudly—and there was no mention of anything like children or a wife, though he must have been pushing forty—he got by without so much as a telephone, to save his kronor for his travels. What sort of person didn’t want a telephone? Someone like Anders. Someone who had no one to call.

Once Alex had fallen sick, however, with a violence that made his altitude sickness feel like a mild head cold, the whole dynamic between
him and Anders began to shift. Bit by bit Anders’s finicky self-sufficiency ceded to Alex’s helplessness, until he was giving his tent up for him, his food, was practically carrying him on his back to make headway along the trail, up rain-slicked switchbacks and through nightmarish passes and along narrow cliff edges that gave way to nothing. The landscape passed by like images from a dream, jungled valleys rife with flowers, ruined cities that floated in the clouds or clung to the slopes in impossible terraces. Anders tended to him as if he were a child, feeding him bits of food that he retched up almost at once, wiping the sweat from him when the fever came on, which it did in staggering waves. At night he built fires whenever the rain allowed, and sometimes, uncharacteristically, he talked. That had been Alex’s undoing. The fire, the Incan dark, and Anders waxing poetic about paradise on earth.

By the time they had reached the Gate of the Sun to gaze down on Machu Picchu, Alex felt as if he had been torn apart by wild animals and stitched randomly back together again. But if Anders had never happened along, he might not have been stitched at all. At the height of his illness he had begun to take Anders for Ingrid, to turn himself over to him as he might to a parent, with that same feeling of being safe, of being looked after. An image had kept coming back to him then that he could never place, that had felt like a home he was moving toward but not his own, maybe Anders’s or Ingrid’s: there was a lake and a road, snowy or wet and with a smell of mountains, none of this like anywhere he had been to or that even existed but that had a particular reality in the mind, itself and not itself, the meeting point of some inexpressible skein of emotions, but also just a lake, a road, a smell of mountains.

They had walked down into the ruins. The sun had refused to show itself and the place was shrouded in fog, bits of cloud, really, so that they had to make their way almost by touch, not knowing if three feet ahead of them the path they were on would give way to empty space. At one point they climbed up the steps of a sort of pyramid and came to a massive slab of stone with a rough pillar rising up in the middle of it. The Hitching Post of the Sun. Around them the fog stretched, so that they seemed to be floating in it.

“You must put your face to the stone,” Anders said. “Or so they say. To see the spirit world.”

“Will you?”

Anders grew sheepish.

“No, no, I mustn’t, I think. They say you only see what’s inside you. Perhaps I shouldn’t like that.”

As if to make light of the matter, Alex put his cheek to the stone. It was damp from the fog, and surprisingly cold. The cold seemed to cut into him like a brain freeze.

He came away a bit too quickly, perhaps.

“The spirit world seems pretty cold and wet,” he said. “A lot like here.”

But it had stayed with him, that instant. What had he seen? The way he remembered it afterward, only the blank wet face of the stone staring back at him.

Alex emerged from his room the next morning girding himself to wrestle Mara for his breakfast only to find her busy at the front desk with a new arrival. Someone from the research center, Alex figured, because he was wearing a rumpled blazer and had actual luggage, a duffel bag, a battered valise, a funny black case that was almost a perfect square. A local boy trailed him hauling more luggage still.

“Careful with those!”

A fucking Brit. Alex knew the type. Probably some low-level bureaucrat back home but the last bastion against the wogs in the colonies.

He handed the boy a coin.

“Go on, then.”

He must have come in on a cargo ship, to judge from the look of him. His hair had the matted sheen of having gone unwashed for many days; the tail of his shirt was poking out beneath his blazer. There was a general air of unwholesomeness to him that made Alex think of damp, chilly rooms and of fish and chips that tasted like they’d been cooked in petroleum.

He was relishing the thought of how Mara would deal with this man.

“One night,” he said loudly, and then added, in an execrable accent, “
Una noche
.”

“
Sí, sí
,” Mara said irritably, but turning from him as if not to look him in the eye.

She picked out a key and started toward the rooms.

“You can bring the bags in after,” the man said, taking only his valise and the funny black case.

Alex had already vowed to himself to have nothing to do with this ass, though he sat waiting there on the patio taken with the spectacle of those abandoned bags, which Mara proceeded to collect one by one and carry off in the direction of the rooms. Then before Alex had even had a chance to order his breakfast the Brit had come out and plopped himself at his table, still in his blazer and untucked shirt.

He actually snapped his fingers to get Mara’s attention.

“Would you get me some eggs or something? And coffee. And don’t break the yolks.”

In a matter of minutes he’d got more service from Mara than Alex had managed since he’d arrived.

“I suppose you’re going out to the islands,” the Brit said grudgingly, as if this were a question Alex had forced him into.

“I dunno.” He ought at least to be civil. “I was going to. I can’t afford a boat.”

“You should come out with me.”

He threw this out with such an obvious absence of anything like real intent that it was clear he was merely trying to switch the topic of conversation to himself.

“You’ve got a boat?”

“I’ll get one. Soon enough.”

“Oh.”

“Research trip. A little project I’m working on.”

So Alex had been right. And yet he didn’t want to satisfy the man by pursuing the matter.

“American?”

For some reason Alex flushed. “Canadian, actually.”

“Ah. The last dominion.”

Their breakfasts arrived. Mara set the Brit’s eggs before him, perfect, intact, then lingered beside him an instant as if for further instruction. He ignored her.

“It’s Desmond, by the way. Desmond Clarke. University of London.”

“Oh.” Alex wasn’t sure how impressed he was supposed to be by this. “I’m Alex.”

“So I guess they didn’t warn you,” the Brit said, between mouthfuls of egg. “Everyone tries to gouge you here now, not like the old days.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Mmm. Once or twice.” He mopped up a bit of yolk. “Out of money, is that it?”

“Not exactly. A little low is all.”

The Brit gave him a quick once-over.

“I could use an assistant,” he said cagily. “Carrying equipment and so on. If you’re up for it.”

Alex’s resolve to avoid the man weakened before the prospect of passage.

“How long are you going out for?”

“How long have you got?”

This wasn’t a question Alex had an answer to.

“A couple of weeks, I guess.”

“That sounds about right. Three at the most. You’d go batty out there, any longer than that.”

The guy probably had some whopping research grant. He might even be meaning to pay him, though Alex couldn’t bring himself to ask.

It was either this or five more days with Mara.

“It’s not as if I’m doing anything else,” he said.

The Brit wiped up his last bits of egg. Now that Alex had more or less turned himself over to him, the man seemed to have grown weary of him.

“Just show up here tomorrow morning,” he said. “Crack of dawn.”

Alex changed his mind about the matter a dozen times over the course of the day. He was exhausted, worn out, he ought to go home; except that he couldn’t, not until the next plane. Then he had spent all that cash to get out here. His mind was always doing the accounts, the profit and loss: he hadn’t
learned
anything here yet, hadn’t so much as an anecdote to take away to show he’d got value. But then he wondered if the guy had even been serious. There was something odd about him, with that funny black case of his. He might be a terrorist or spy, who knew in this place?
Desmond Clarke
. It had the sound of a code name.

Alex showed up in the lobby the next morning just after dawn, still hedging his bets. There was no sign of Desmond yet. Alex checked out, had breakfast, a second coffee, then another.

He wasn’t sure of it, but Mara seemed a bit less glacial this morning.

“Have you seen that man who came yesterday? Mr. Clarke?”

“He go this morning.”

“He checked out?”

“He pay,” she said, looking almost displeased at this, “then he go.”

So the creep had left him in the lurch.

“He didn’t leave any message?”

She shrugged an African shrug.

“He leave some bag. Take only one.”

Maybe all was not lost. Now that Alex had experienced the letdown of thinking he’d been left behind, there seemed no question of his not wanting to go. He set out for the wharf in a huff, determined to track Desmond down and give him a piece of his mind. He spotted him near one of the boats and hurried over, but Desmond gave such a cursory nod at the sight of him that he was pulled up short.

“So it’s our Canadian,” he said, hardly glancing at him.

“I thought we were going.”

“Right.” As if they’d never agreed to anything. “Just finessing the price.”

The boat was an ancient fishing trawler in blue and white, of the sort that crowded the harbor, with the look of something that had been cobbled together from the discarded lumber of some other, realer construction. There was a cabin up front of warped plywood, and plywood patches spotting the hull.