Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  “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.”

  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 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 beetle-like 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 capitain.” 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, expert 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 woul
dn’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.”

  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 god-damned 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 rooms.

  “Not at all. Your father would try to kill me if he knew what I was going to do to you. And you to me, when it’s your turn.”

  “So if I can’t cut myself, what exactly happens instead?”

  “I cut you,” Ballard said. “And I do it a thousand times better than you ever did. I’ll cut you so well no one will ever be able to tell it happened, unless they’re right on top of you.”

  “You think I’ll be satisfied with some wimpy little cuts no one can even see? Fuck you all over again.”

  “Those cuts no one can see will be incredibly painful. And then I’ll take the pain away, so you can experience it all over again.”

  Sandrine found herself abruptly caught up by a rush of feelings that seemed to originate in a deep region located just below her ribcage. At least for the moment, this flood of unnamable emotions blotted out her endless grudges and frustrations, also the chronic bad temper they engendered.

  “And during this process, Sandrine, I will become deeply familiar, profoundly familiar with your body, so that when at last we are able to enjoy sex with each other, I will know how to give you the most amazing pleasure. I’ll know every inch of you, I’ll have your whole gorgeous map in my head. And you will do the same with me.”

  Sandrine had astonished herself by agreeing to this program on the spot, even to abstain from sex until she turned eighteen. Denial, too, was a pain she could learn to savor. At that point Ballard had taken her upstairs to the guest suite, and soon after down the hallway to what he called his “workroom.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, taking it in, “I can’t believe it. This is real. And you, you’re real, too.”

  “During the next three years, whenever you start hating everything around you and feel as though you’d like to cut yourself again, remember that I’m here. Remember that this room exists. There’ll be many days and nights when we can be here together.”

  In this fashion had Sandrine endured the purgatorial remainder of her days at Dalton. And when she and Ballard at last made love, pleasure and pain had become presences nearly visible in the room at the moment she screamed in the ecstasy of release.

  “You dirty, dirty, dirty old man,” she said, laughing.

  A few years after that, Ballard overheard some Chinese bankers, clients of his firm for whom he had several times rendered his services, speaking in soft Mandarin about a yacht anchored in the Amazon basin; he needed no more.

  “I want to go off the boat for a couple of hours when we get to Manaus,” Sandrine said. “I feel like getting back in the world again, at least for a little while. This little private bubble of ours is completely cut off from everything else.”

  “Which is why— ”

  “Which is why it works, and why we like it, I understand, but half the time I can’t stand it, either. I don’t live the way you do, always flying off to interesting places to perform miracles…”

  “Try spending a rainy afternoon in Zurich holding some terminally anxious banker’s hand.”

  “Not that it matters, especially, but you don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not. I need some recuperation time, anyhow. This was a little severe.” He held up one thickly bandaged hand. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “You’d better not!”

  “I’ll only complain if you stay out too late—or spend too much of your father’s money!”

  “What could I buy in Manaus? And I’ll make sure to be back before dinner. Have you noticed? The food on this weird boat is getting better and better every day?”

  “I know, yes, but for now I seem to have lost my appetite,” Ballard said. He had a quick mental vision of a metal cage from which something hideous was struggling to escape. It struck an oddly familiar note, as of something half-remembered, but Ballard was made so uncomfortable by the image in his head that he refused to look at it any longer.

  “Will they just know that I want to dock at Manaus?”

  “Probably, but you could write them a note. Leave it on the bed. Or on the dining room table.”

  “I have a pen in my bag, but where can I find some paper?”

  “I’d say, look in any drawer. You’ll probably find all the paper you might need.”

  Sandrine went to the little table beside him, pulled open its one drawer and found a single sheet of thick, cream-colored stationery headed Sweet Delight. An Omas roller-ball pen, much nicer than the Pilot she had liberated from their hotel in Rio, lay angled atop the sheet of stationery. In her formal, almost italic handwriting, Sandrine wrote Please dock at Manaus. I would like to spend two or three hours ashore.

  “Should I sign it?”

  Ballard shrugged. “There’s just the two of us. Initial it.”

  She drew a graceful, looping S under her note and went into the dining room, where she squared it off in the middle of the table. When she returned to the sitting room, she asked, “And now I just wait? Is that how it works? Just because I found a piece of paper and a pen, I’m supposed to trust this crazy system?”

  “You know as much as I do, Sandrine. But I’d say, yes, just wait a little while, yes, that’s how it works, and yes, you might as well trust it. There’s no reason to be bitchy.”

  “I have to stay in practice,” she said, and lurched sideways as the yacht bumped against something hard and came to an abrupt halt.

  “See what I mean?”

  When he put the book down
in his lap, Sandrine saw that it was Tono Bungay. She felt a hot, rapid flare of irritation that the book was not something like The Women’s Room, which could teach him things he needed to know: and hadn’t he already read Tono Bungay?

  “Look outside, try to catch them tying us up and getting out that walkway thing.”

  “You think we’re in Manaus already?”

  “I’m sure we are.”

  “That’s ridiculous. We scraped against a barge or something.”

  “Nonetheless, we have come to a complete halt.”

  Sandrine strode briskly to the on-deck door, threw it open, gasped, then stepped outside. The yacht had already been tied up at a long yellow dock at which two yachts smaller than theirs rocked in a desultory brown tide. No crewmen were in sight. The dock led to a wide concrete apron across which men of European descent and a few natives pushed wheelbarrows and consulted clipboards and pulled on cigars while pointing out distant things to other men. It looked false and stagy, like the first scene in a bad musical about New Orleans. An avenue began in front of a row of warehouses, the first of which was painted with the slogan MANAUS AMAZONA. The board walkway with rope handrails had been set in place.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said. “We really do seem to be docked at Manaus.”

  “Don’t stay away too long.”

  “I’ll stay as long as I like,” she said.

  The avenue leading past the façades of the warehouses seemed to run directly into the center of the city, visible now to Sandrine as a gathering of tall office buildings and apartment blocks that thrust upward from the jumble of their surroundings like an outcropping of mountains. The skyscrapers were blue-gray in color, the lower surrounding buildings a scumble of brown, red, and yellow that made Sandrine think of Cézanne, even of Seurat: dots of color that suggested walls and roofs. She thought she could walk to the center of the city in no more than forty-five minutes, which left her about two hours to do some exploring and have lunch.

  Nearly an hour later, Sandrine trudged past the crumbling buildings and broken windows on crazed, tilting sidewalks under a domineering sun. Sweat ran down her forehead and cheeks and plastered her dress to her body. The air seemed half water, and her lungs strained to draw in oxygen. The office buildings did not seem any nearer than at the start of her walk. If she had seen a taxi, she would have taken it back to the port, but only a few cars and pickups rolled along the broad avenue. The dark, half-visible men driving these vehicles generally leaned over their steering wheels and stared at her, as if women were rare in Manaus. She wished she had thought to cover her hair, and was sorry she had left her sunglasses behind.