by Peter Straub
When they had nearly finished, Sandrine said, “There are so many books on this boat! It’s like a big library. Do you think you’ve ever read one?”
“Do you?”
“I have the feeling…well, of course that’s the reason I’m asking. In a way, I mean in a real way, we’ve never been here before. On the Amazon? Absolutely not. My husband, besides being continuously unfaithful, is a total asshole who never pays me any attention at all unless he’s angry with me, but he’s also tremendously jealous and possessive. For me to get here to be with you required an amazing amount of secret organization. D-Day didn’t take any more planning than this trip. On the other hand, I have the feeling I once read at least one of these books.”
“I have the same feeling.”
“Tell me about it. I want to read it again and see if I remember anything.”
“I can’t. But…well, I think I might have once seen you holding a copy of Little Dorrit. The Dickens novel.”
“I went to Princeton and Cambridge, I know who wrote Little Dorrit,” she said, irritated. “Wait. Did I ever throw a copy of that book overboard?”
“Might’ve.”
“Why would I do that?”
Ballard shrugged. “To see what would happen?”
“Do you remember that?”
“It’s tough to say what I remember. Everything’s always different, but it’s different now. I sort of remember a book, though—a book from this library. Tono Bungay. H. G. Wells. Didn’t like it much.”
“Did you throw it overboard?”
“I might’ve. Yes, I actually might have.” He laughed. “I think I did. I mean, I think I’m throwing it overboard right now, if that makes sense.”
“Because you didn’t—don’t—like it?”
Ballard laughed and put down his knife and fork. Only a few bits of the vegetables and a piece of meat the size of a knuckle sliced in half remained on his plate. “Stop eating and give me your plate.” It was almost exactly as empty as his, though Sandrine’s plate still had two swirls of the yellow sauce.
“Really?”
“I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly, she lowered her utensils and handed him her plate. Ballard scraped the contents of his plate onto hers. He got to his feet and picked up a knife and the plate that had been Sandrine’s. “Come out on deck with me.”
When she stood up, Sandrine glanced at what she had only briefly and partially perceived as a hint of motion at the top of the room, where for the first time she took in a dun-colored curtain hung two or three feet before the end of the oval. What looked to be a brown or suntanned foot, smaller than a normal adult’s and perhaps a bit grubby, was just now vanishing behind the curtain. Before Sandrine had deciphered what she thought she had seen, it was gone.
“Just see a rat?” asked Ballard.
Without intending to assent, Sandrine nodded.
“One was out on deck this morning. Disappeared as soon as I spotted it. Don’t worry about it, though. The crew, whoever they are, will get rid of them. At the start of the cruise, I think there are always a few rats around. By the time we really get in gear, they’re gone.”
“Good,” she said, wondering: If the waiters are these really, really short Indian guys, would they hate us enough to make us eat rats?
She followed him through the door between the two portholes into pitiless sunlight and crushing heat made even less comfortable by the dense, invasive humidity. The invisible water saturating the air pressed against her face like a steaming washcloth, and moisture instantly coated her entire body. Leaning against the rail, Ballard looked cool and completely at ease.
“I forgot we had air conditioning,” she said.
“We don’t. Vents move the air around somehow. Works like magic, even when there’s no breeze at all. Come over here.”
She joined him at the rail. Fifty yards away, what might have been human faces peered at them through a dense screen of jungle—weeds with thick, vegetal leaves of a green so dark it was nearly black. The half-seen faces resembled masks, empty of feeling.
“Remember saying something about being happy to bathe in the Amazon? About washing your clothes in the river?”
She nodded.
“You never want to go into this river. You don’t even want to stick the tip of your finger in that water. Watch what happens, now. Our native friends came out to see this—you should, too.”
“The Indians knew you were going to put on this demonstration? How could they?”
“Don’t ask me, ask them. I don’t know how they do it.”
Ballard leaned over the railing and used his knife to scrape the few things on the plate into the river. Even before the little knuckles of meat and gristle, the shreds of vegetables, and liquid strings of gravy landed in the water, a six-inch circle of turbulence boiled up on the slow-moving surface. When the bits of food hit the water, the boiling circle widened out into a three-foot thrashing chaos of violent little fishtails and violent little green shiny fish backs with violent tiny green fins, all in furious motion. The fury lasted about thirty seconds, then disappeared back under the river’s sluggish brown face.
“Like Christmas dinner with my husband’s family,” Sandrine said.
“When we were talking about throwing Tono Bungay and Little Dorrit into the river to see what would happen—”
“The fish ate the books?”
“They’ll eat anything that isn’t metal.”
“So our little friends don’t go swimming all that often, do they?”
“They never learn how. Swimming is death, it’s for people like us. Let’s go back in, okay?”
She whirled around and struck his chest, hard, with a pointed fist. “I want to go back to the room with the table in it. Our table. And this time, you can get as hard as you like.”
“Don’t I always?” he asked.
“Oh,” Sandrine said, “I like that ‘always.’ ”
“And yet, it’s always different.”
“I bet I’m always different,” said Sandrine. “You, you’d stay pretty much the same.”
“I’m not as boring as all that, you know,” Ballard said, and went on, over the course of the long afternoon and sultry evening, to prove it.
After breakfast the next morning, Sandrine, hissing with pain, her skin clouded with bruises, turned on him with such fury that he gasped in joy and anticipation.
1976
End of November, hot sticky muggy, a vegetal stink in the air. Motionless tribesmen four feet tall stared out from the overgrown bank over twenty yards of torpid river. They held, seemed to hold, bows without arrows, though the details swam backward into the layers of folded green.
“Look at those little savages,” said Sandrine Loy, twenty-two years old and already contemplating marriage to handsome, absurdly wealthy Antonio Barban, who had proposed to her after a chaotic Christmas dinner at his family’s vulgar pile in Greenwich, Connecticut. That she knew marriage to Antonio would prove to be an error of sublime proportions gave the idea most of its appeal. “We’re putting on a traveling circus for their benefit. Doesn’t that sort of make you detest them?”
“I don’t detest them at all,” Ballard said. “Actually, I have a lot of respect for those people. I think they’re mysterious. So much gravity. So much silence. They understand a million things we don’t, and what we do manage to get they know about in another way, a more profound way.”
“You’re wrong. They’re too stupid to understand anything. They have mud for dinner. They have mud for brains.”
“And yet…” Ballard said, smiling at her.
As if they knew they had been insulted, and seemingly without moving out of position, the river people had begun to fade back into the network of dark, rubbery leaves in which they had for a long moment been framed.
“And yet what?”
“They knew what we were going to do. They wanted to see us throwing those books into the river. So out of the bushe
s they popped, right at the time we walked out on deck.”
Her conspicuous black eyebrows slid nearer each other, creating a furrow. She shook her beautiful head and opened her mouth to disagree.
“Anyway, Sandrine, what did you think of what happened just now? Any responses, reflections?”
“What do I think of what happened to the books? What do I think of the fish?”
“Of course,” Ballard said. “It’s not all about us.”
He leaned back against the rail, communicating utter ease and confidence. He was forty-four, attired daily in dark tailored suits and white shirts that gleamed like a movie star’s smile, the repository of a thousand feral secrets, at home everywhere in the world, the possessor of an understanding it would take him a lifetime to absorb. Sandrine often seemed to him the center of his life. He knew exactly what she was going to say.
“I think the fish are astonishing,” she said. “I mean it. Astonishing. Such concentration, such power, such complete hunger. It was breathtaking. Those books didn’t last more than five or six seconds. All that thrashing! My book lasted longer than yours, but not by much.”
“Little Dorrit is a lot longer than Tono Bungay. More paper, more thread, more glue. I think they’re especially hot for glue.”
“Maybe they’re just hot for Dickens.”
“Maybe they’re speed readers,” said Sandrine. “What do we do now?”
“What we came here to do,” Ballard said, and moved back to swing open the dining room door, then froze in mid-step.
“Forget something?”
“I was having the oddest feeling, and I just now realized what it was. You read about it all the time, so you think it must be pretty common, but until a second ago I don’t think I’d ever before had the feeling that I was being watched. Not really.”
“But now you did.”
“Yes.” He strode up to the door and swung it open. The table was bare, and the room was empty.
Sandrine approached and peeked over his shoulder. He had both amused and dismayed her. “The great Ballard exhibits a moment of paranoia. I think I’ve been wrong about you all this time. You’re just another boring old creep who wants to fuck me.”
“I’d admit to being a lot of things, but paranoid isn’t one of them.” He gestured her back through the door. That Sandrine obeyed him seemed to take both of them by surprise.
“How about being a boring old creep? I’m not really so sure I want to stay here with you. For one thing, and I know this is not related, the birds keep waking me up. If they are birds.”
He cocked his head, interested. “What else could they be? Please tell me. Indulge a boring old creep.”
“The maids and the waiters and the sailor guys. The cook. The woman who arranges the flowers.”
“You think they belong to that tribe that speaks in birdcalls? Actually, how did you ever hear about them?”
“My anthropology professor was one of the people who first discovered that tribe. The Piranhas. Know what they call themselves? ‘The tall people.’ Not very observant, are they? According to the professor, they worshipped a much older tribe that had disappeared many generations back—miracle people, healers, shamans, warriors. The Old Ones, they called them, but the Old Ones called themselves ‘WE,’ you always have to put it in boldface. My professor couldn’t stop talking about these tribes—he was so full of himself. Sooo vain. Kept staring at me. Vain, ugly, and lecherous, my favorite trifecta!”
The memory of her anthropology professor, with whom she had clearly gone through the customary adoration-boredom-disgust cycle of student-teacher love affairs, had put Sandrine in a sulky, dissatisfied mood. “You made a lovely little error about thirty seconds ago. The tribe is called the Pirahã, not the Piranhas. Piranhas are the fish you fell in love with.”
“Ooh,” she said, brightening up. “So the Pirahã eat piranhas?”
“Other way around, more likely. But the other people on the Blinding Light can’t be Pirahã, we’re hundreds of miles from their territory.”
“You are tedious. Why did I ever let myself get talked into coming here, anyhow?”
“You fell in love with me the first time you saw me—in your father’s living room, remember? And although it was tremendously naughty of me, in fact completely wrong and immoral, I took one look at your stupid sweatshirt and your stupid pigtails and fell in love with you on the spot. You were perfect—you took my breath away. It was like being struck by lightning.”
He inhaled, hugely.
“And here I am, forty-four years of age, height of my powers, capable of performing miracles on behalf of our clients, exactly as I pulled off, not to say any more about this, a considerable miracle for your father, plus I am a fabulously eligible man, a tremendous catch, but what do you know, still unmarried. Instead of a wife or even a steady girlfriend, there’s this succession of inane young women from twenty-five to thirty, these Heathers and Ashleys, these Morgans and Emilys, who much to their dismay grow less and less infatuated with me the more time we spend together. ‘You’re always so distant,’ one of them said, ‘you’re never really with me.’ And she was right, I couldn’t really be with her. Because I wanted to be with you. I wanted us to be here.”
Deeply pleased, Sandrine said, “You’re such a pervert.”
Yet something in what Ballard had evoked was making the handsome dining room awkward and dark. She wished he wouldn’t stand still; there was no reason why he couldn’t go into the living room, or the other way, into the room where terror and fascination beckoned. She wondered why she was waiting for Ballard to decide where to go, and as he spoke of seeing her for the first time, was assailed by an uncomfortably precise echo from the day in question.
Then, as now, she had been rooted to the floor: in her family’s living room, beyond the windows familiar Park Avenue humming with the traffic she only in that moment became aware she heard, Sandrine had been paralyzed. Every inch of her face had turned hot and red. She felt intimate with Ballard before she had even begun to learn what intimacy meant. Before she had left the room, she waited for him to move between herself and her father, then pushed up the sleeves of the baggy sweatshirt and revealed the inscriptions of self-loathing, self-love, desire, and despair upon her pale forearms.
“You’re pretty weird too. You’d just had your fifteenth birthday, and here 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– 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 for 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 Americ
an 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 top 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 at which the unseen and silent attendants were privileged to gaze. The thought of these mysterious little people watching what Ballard did to that body, and she to his, caused a thrill to course upward through her body.