by Ellen Datlow
“Let’s have sex on this table. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.”
“Kind of defeats the fucking purpose, wouldn’t you say? Comfort’s hardly the point.”
“Might as well be as comfy as we can, I say.” He raised his arms to let his hands drape from the four-inch marble edging on the long steel table. “There’s plenty of space on this thing, you know. More than in your bed at Clare.”
“Maybe you’re not as porky as I thought you were.”
“Careful, careful. If you insult me, I’ll make you pay for it.”
At fifty Ballard had put on some extra weight, but it suited him. His shoulders were still wider far than his hips, and his belly more nascent than actual. His hair, longer than that of most men his age and just beginning to show threads of gray within the luxuriant brown, framed his wide brow and executive face. He looked like an actor who had made a career of playing senators, doctors, and bankers. Ballard’s real profession was that of fixer to an oversized law firm in New York with a satellite office in Hong Kong, where he had grown up. The weight of muscle in his arms, shoulders, and legs reinforced the hint of stubborn determination, even perhaps brutality in his face: the suggestion that if necessary he would go a great distance and perform any number of grim deeds to do what was needed. Scars both long and short, scars like snakes, zippers, and tattoos bloomed here and there on his body.
“Promises, promises,” she said. “But just for now, get up and get dressed, please. The sight of you admiring your own dick doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, I do like the way you can still stick straight up into the air like a happy little soldier—at your age! But men are so soppy about their penises. You’re all queer for yourselves. You more so than most, Ballard.”
“Ouch,” he said, and sat up. “I believe I’ll put my clothes on now, Sandrine.”
“Don’t take forever, all right? I know it’s only the second day, but I’d like to get a look at them while they’re setting the table. Because someone, maybe even two someones, does set that table.”
Ballard was already in the bedroom, pulling from their hangers a pair of white linen slacks and a thick, long-sleeved white cotton T-shirt. In seconds, he had slipped into these garments and was sliding his sun-tanned feet into rope-soled clogs.
“So let’s move,” he said, coming out of the bedroom with a long stride, his elbows bent, his forearms raised.
From the dining room came the sharp, distinctive chirping of a bird. Two notes, the second one higher, both clear and as insistent as the call of a bell. Ballard glanced at Sandrine, who seemed momentarily shaken.
“I’m not going in there if one of those awful jungle birds got in. They have to get rid of it. We’re paying them, aren’t we?”
“You have no idea,” Ballard said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him. “But that’s no bird, it’s them. The waiters. The staff.”
Sandrine’s elegant face shone with both disbelief and disgust.
“Those chirps and whistles are how they talk. Didn’t you hear them last night and this morning?”
When he pulled again at her arm, she followed along, reluctance visible in her stance, her gait, the tilt of her head.
“I’m talking about birds, and they weren’t even on the yacht. They were on shore. They were up in the air.”
“Let’s see what’s in here.” Six or seven minutes remained until the official start of dinner time, and they had been requested never to enter the dining room until the exact time of the meal.
Ballard threw the door open and pulled her into the room with him. Silver covers rested on the Royal Doulton china, and an uncorked bottle of a distinguished Bordeaux stood precisely at the mid-point between the two place settings. Three inches to its right, a navy-blue-and-royal-purple orchid thick enough to eat leaned, as if languishing, against the side of a small square crystal vase. The air seemed absolutely unmoving. Through the thumb holes at the tops of the plate covers rose a dense, oddly meaty odor of some unidentifiable food.
“Missed ’em again, damn it.” Sandrine pulled her arm from Ballard’s grasp and moved a few steps away.
“But you have noticed that there’s no bird in here. Not so much as a feather.”
“So it got out—I know it was here, Ballard.”
She spun on her four-inch heels, giving the room a fast 360-degree inspection. Their dining room, roughly oval in shape, was lined with glassed-in bookshelves of dark-stained oak containing perhaps five hundred books, most of them mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels ranked alphabetically by author, regardless of genre. The jackets had been removed, which Ballard minded, a bit. Three feet in front of the bookshelves on the deck side, which yielded space to two portholes and a door, stood a long wooden table with a delicately inlaid top—a real table, unlike the one in the room they had just left, which was more like a work station in a laboratory. The real one was presumably for setting out buffets.
The first door opened out onto the deck; another at the top of the oval led to their large and handsomely-furnished sitting room, with reading chairs and lamps, two sofas paired with low tables, a bar with a great many bottles of liquor, two red lacquered cabinets they had as yet not explored, and an air of many small precious things set out to gleam under the parlor’s low lighting. The two remaining doors in the dining room were on the interior side. One opened into the spacious corridor that ran the entire length of their suite and gave access to the deck on both ends; the other revealed a gray passageway and a metal staircase that led up to the Captain’s deck and cabin and down into the engine room, galley, and quarters for the yacht’s small, unseen crew.
“So it kept all its feathers,” said Sandrine. “If you don’t think that’s possible, you don’t know doodly-squat about birds.”
“What isn’t possible,” said Ballard, “is that some giant parrot got out of here without opening a door or a porthole.”
“One of the waiters let it out, dummy. One of those handsome Spanish-speaking waiters.”
They sat on opposite sides of the stately table. Ballard smiled at Sandrine, and she smiled back in rage and distrust. Suddenly and without warning, he remembered the girl she had been on Park Avenue at the end of the sixties, gawky-graceful, brilliantly surly, her hair and wardrobe goofy, claiming him as he had claimed her, with a glance. He had rescued her father from ruinous shame and a long jail term, but as soon as he had seen her he understood that his work had just begun, and that it would demand restraint, sacrifice, patience, and adamantine caution.
“A three-count?” he asked.
She nodded.
“One,” he said. “Two.” They put their thumbs into the round holes at the tops of the covers. “Three.” They raised their covers, releasing steam and smoke and a more concentrated, powerful form of the meaty odor.
“Wow. What is that?”
Yellow-brown sauce or gravy covered a long, curved strip of foreign matter. Exhausted vegetables that looked a little like okra and string beans but were other things altogether lay strewn in limp surrender beneath the gravy.
“All of a sudden I’m really hungry,” said Sandrine. “You can’t tell what it is, either?”
Ballard moved the strip of unknown meat back and forth with his knife. Then he jabbed his fork into it. A watery yellow fluid oozed from the punctures.
“God knows what this is.”
He pictured some big reptilian creature sliding down the riverbank into the meshes of a native net, then being hauled back up to be pierced with poison-tipped wooden spears. Chirping like birds, the diminutive men rioted in celebration around the corpse, which was now that of a hideous insect the size of a pony, its shell a poisonous green.
“I’m not even sure it’s a mammal,” he said. “Might even be some organ. Anaconda liver. Crocodile lung. Tarantula heart.”
“You first.”
Ballard sliced a tiny section from the curv
ed meat before him. He half-expected to see valves and tubes, but the slice was a dense light brown all the way through. Ballard inserted the morsel into his mouth, and his taste buds began to sing.
“My god. Amazing.”
“It’s good?”
“Oh, this is way beyond ‘good.’”
Ballard cut a larger piece off the whole and quickly bit into it. Yes, there it was again, but more sumptuous, almost floral in its delicacy and grounded in some profoundly satisfactory flavor, like that of a great single-barrel bourbon laced with a dark, subversive French chocolate. Subtlety, strength, sweetness. He watched Sandrine lift a section of the substance on her fork and slip it into her mouth. Her face went utterly still, and her eyes narrowed. With luxuriant slowness, she began to chew. After perhaps a second, Sandrine closed her eyes. Eventually, she swallowed.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “My, my. Yes. Why can’t we eat like this at home?”
“Whatever kind of animal this is, it’s probably unknown everywhere but here. People like J. Paul Getty might get to eat it once a year, at some secret location.”
“I don’t care what it is, I’m just extraordinarily happy that we get to have it today. It’s even a little bit sweet, isn’t it?”
A short time later, Sandrine said, “Amazing. Even these horrible-looking vegetables spill out amazing flavors. If I could eat like this every day, I’d be perfectly happy to live in a hut, walk around barefoot, bathe in the Amazon, and wash my rags on the rocks.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Ballard. “It’s like a drug. Maybe it is a drug.”
“Do the natives really eat this way? Whatever this animal was, before they serve it to us, they have to hunt it down and kill it. Wouldn’t they keep half of it for themselves?”
“Be a temptation,” Ballard said. “Maybe they lick our plates, too.”
“Tell me the truth now, Ballard. If you know it. Okay?”
Chewing, he looked up into her eyes. Some of the bliss faded from his face. “Sure. Ask away.”
“Did we ever eat this stuff before?”
Ballard did not answer. He sliced a quarter sized piece off the meat and began to chew, his eyes on his plate.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask.”
He kept chewing and chewing until he swallowed. He sipped his wine. “No. Isn’t that strange? How we know we’re not supposed to do certain things?”
“Like see the waiters. Or the maids, or the Captain.”
“Especially the Captain, I think.”
“Let’s not talk anymore, let’s just eat for a little while.”
Sandrine and Ballard returned to their plates and glasses, and for a time made no noise other than soft moans of satisfaction.
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 fish tails 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, nineteen 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.”