The Origin of Species Read online

  “Patience, my boy,” Desmond said, gently bedding the roots in his dirt. “All things will be revealed.”

  “Isn’t this dangerous or something? I mean, doesn’t it mess up the ecosystem or whatever?”

  “Not if you know what you’re doing.”

  When Desmond had settled the plant he pulled a plastic spritzer bottle from his satchel and sprayed a fine mist over it, as frugally as if he were applying an expensive perfume.

  “I thought there wasn’t any water.”

  “Not for drinking, I’m afraid. Strictly reserved for the plants.”

  They proceeded along like that, Desmond limping across the terrain to smash up bits of rock at intervals and set out his plants. There were two types, the spindly vine and then some kind of succulent whose foliage ranged from yellowy green to brilliant red. These he planted near the cliffs, at a spot where a sucking hollow in the rocks below acted like a kind of geyser, sending wafts of sea spray to the clifftop whenever a big wave broke over it.

  “Also called carpetweed,” Desmond said of these, doling out his bits of information. “Entirely different plant, of course, though the same order, believe it or not. Theoretically, they could interbreed. What you would call a wide cross. This one likes salt, hence the sea spray. So you see nature looks after its own.”

  He was almost bearable when he was like this, in his element, seemed almost legitimate, even if it was all madness—his precious transplants would surely be dead by tomorrow. Alex knew from the farm how finicky plants got when you messed with them this way. And then in this sun: it wasn’t especially hot, but they were on the equator. Even up in the Andes, a few hours of this sun had been enough to fry him like bacon.

  He hadn’t thought to wear a hat.

  “Shouldn’t we get back soon?”

  “Just a few for insurance. The second egg.”

  He had no idea what Desmond was expecting, maybe to come back one day and find that his plants had taken the place over the way rabbits had done in Australia. If Alex had thought there was any chance of this he might have been more concerned, but as it was he ended up on his knees next to Desmond, pounding along with him to help make his dirt. It was bone-rattling work but there was a kind of satisfaction in it, as if they were taming the hinterland.

  Desmond kept about half of his specimens back, some of each type.

  “Best return before our Virgil decides to ditch us.”

  Walking back past the nests, Alex found the trail blocked by two boobies facing each other at a distance, one clearly intent on getting the other’s attention, prancing and flexing its wings while the other stared off with a kind of put-on indifference. The first pointed its beak skyward and let out a piercing lament until the other came forward to peck at its beak. The first plucked up a twig to set before the other, then a stone.

  Desmond came limping up from behind.

  “Get on with it, you two,” he said irritably, shooing the birds from the path and clomping over their gifts.

  The sun had started to drop. As they approached the bush again a honking rose up from the nesting ground and one by one boobies began to wheel in from over the sea to descend tottering amidst the nests. All across the plain a great shift change was occurring, the new arrivals patiently circling their nests, waiting to take over, while their partners honked at them and ruffled their feathers and flapped their wings before giving way, parading their martyrdom.

  “Like bloody humans, you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Desmond said, though he had hardly seemed to be attending to any of this. “Except that it’s the other way around. The bogeyman of anthropomorphism, my colleagues would tell you. As if there’s any difference between us and them, except that we shit a bit further from the nest.”

  Alex didn’t like to admit it but he was starting to feel a sort of grudging respect for the universality of Desmond’s disdain. Probably his tooth-and-claw routine was just a way of justifying what a bastard he was, but at least he was consistent. If Alex wasn’t careful out here, far from more-edifying influences, he was going to start thinking like the man. He remembered those films he’d seen back in Intro Psych where people were ready to zap test subjects with near-fatal shocks just because somebody told them to. They giggled, maybe, they squirmed, but then they cranked up the voltage. Here was Alex, meanwhile, messing with the very machinery of evolution at Desmond’s say-so, with no idea to what end.

  There was no sign of Santos when they got back to the steps. The yacht had gone, but another boat was coming toward them across the bay, a small, robust-looking cruiser painted military green.

  “Damn it!” Desmond said. “It’s the fucking Park Patrol.”

  He grabbed the bags and frantically dragged them behind a clump of bushes.

  “Get down, for Christ’s sake! Don’t let them see you!”

  It was too late. A small figure was already hailing them from the prow of the boat.

  “Fuck,” Desmond said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  They waited on the clifftop while the boat made a beeline to them and pulled up at the landing. It looked a bit sorrier from up close, just a sort of fortified speedboat with a little doorless cabin, the hull spotted with rust. Two men in fatigues and caps were aboard, small and earnest-looking, one mustachioed and seeming the senior, though neither of them was much more than a boy.

  They were both sporting revolvers at their hips that looked like remnants of the Wild West.

  “Buenas tardes, señores!” the mustachioed one shouted up.

  Desmond smiled broadly and waved.

  “Yes, yes, hello, you bastards.”

  “Dónde está su barco?”

  Desmond put a hand to his ear and shook his head.

  “What was that? Sorry! No Spanish! No comprenday!”

  The two men exchanged a look.

  “You boat!” the younger one called out. “Where is you boat?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up!”

  “Boat! Barco! You ship!”

  On cue, a boat suddenly rounded the line of cliffs at the mouth of the bay, a speck of blue and white. It was Santos.

  “Our boat! Yes, of course! Here it is now!”

  Santos slowed as he entered the bay and began the long journey across it. Desmond, meanwhile, retreated to the shade of a nearby tree as if the matter was out of his hands now, so that the wardens had no choice but to idle there until Santos’s boat drew near. Santos maneuvered casually up to the landing without the least regard for the patrol boat, though he was practically knocking against it.

  “Señor! Podemos hablar, por favor?”

  There was an exchange across the sterns, the wardens growing more and more animated and red-faced as Santos, nearly twice their size and surely more than twice their age, grew more taciturn. Finally Santos put his back to them with an air of having done with them and began to pull his boat into the landing with his hook. The ploy seemed to work—the mustachioed one grimaced, then tilted his head at the other in a signal to go. The boat eased away from the rocks and sped off in a wash of spray.

  “What was all that about?” Alex said.

  “Just the usual nonsense. They try to fine you if you haven’t filed an itinerary. It’s just their way of getting bribes.”

  But their manner hadn’t quite jibed with the language of bribery.

  “Won’t they just come after us again?”

  “They’ve got thousands of miles of ocean out there to look after. It’d be like finding a needle in a fucking haycock.”

  They waited until the wardens had cleared the bay, then reloaded Desmond’s gear. Santos pulled the boat away from the landing and headed toward the beach they had eaten at that morning. His fishing lines were wet now, and an odor of sea was emanating from the hold. Above them a frenzy of birds had filled the sky as thick as a horde of insects.

  Alex looked at the huge ring of cliffs that formed the bay and it suddenly struck him what they were.

  “It’s a volcano.”
r />   “Of course it’s a fucking volcano,” Desmond said. “They’re all volcanoes. That’s the point.”

  Alex felt himself color. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

  “Tell me this, I’m curious,” Desmond said. He had that self-satisfied look again, now that his day’s work was done. “Why do you lot come out here exactly, you rucksackers? It’s not as if you have the least idea about the place. From a tourist’s point of view it’s about the last destination I’d pick.”

  Desmond was right. Alex ought to have stuck to the beach at Ipanema like everyone else.

  “If it’s any consolation, Darwin didn’t think much of the place either,” Desmond said. “Here, why don’t you read up on it.”

  He rummaged in one of his bags and pulled out a battered hardcover.

  “Voyage of the Beagle. Best travelogue you’ll ever read. And don’t just skip ahead to the Galápagos like everyone does, you’ll miss the effect.”

  The gesture was so out of character for Desmond that Alex was at a loss.

  “And I’ll thank you not to drop the thing in the fucking ocean. It’s my study copy.”

  It was nearly dark by the time they got to the beach. Desmond made Santos take down the dinghy this time—the panga, he called it—to save them wading through the shallows. Alex helped with the fire again, and with the still. Desmond, meanwhile, sat jotting notes in his journal, pulling up to the fire as if it had been made for his express benefit. For supper there was fish again, though this time a big bulldog-faced one, speckled brown, that Santos had pulled up from the hold. While it cooked, Santos brought over more of them in the panga, spreading them out on a tarp near the fire and beginning to gut them.

  “Quiere saber qué tipo, no?” he said to Alex, with his grunting laugh.

  The last thing Alex needed was Santos taking the piss out of him.

  “Es bacalao,” Santos said, with emphasis. “Bacalao.”

  Baccalà. What they had back home every Christmas Eve.

  “Cod?”

  “Not cod,” Desmond said. “Grouper. They only call it that. Generic for poor man’s fish. Whatever there’s lots of.”

  Santos threw out some guts and something swooped out of the dark to take them up the second they’d left his hand.

  “Fucking frigates,” Desmond said. “Bloody pirates. They’ll knock a fish right out of your gullet.”

  They had their supper. Alex’s face burned from the day’s sun, his shoulders ached, his throat itched from the briny water. Yet already his body seemed to be adjusting itself to the different order of things out here, lowering its expectations.

  Desmond had spread out his maps and Alex made out what island they were on from the shape of it. “Tower,” the map read, but then beneath this, in brackets, as if to make the place seem one you might actually want to visit, “Genovesa.”

  “You’re probably wondering what it is I’m doing out there,” Desmond said.

  Alex did indeed wonder, though mostly because he didn’t want to end up in an Ecuadorean jail.

  “It’s not really any of my business.”

  “But you must be curious. It would only be natural.”

  He was going to make Alex pay now for the book he’d lent him by forcing him to put up with his talk.

  “I suppose.”

  “Not that I should say. For all I know you’re some Canadian do-gooder who’ll turn me in the first chance he gets.”

  Alex thought he should probably just let him believe that.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Hmm. Yes.” He grew coy. “It’s a little complicated, really. As I was saying. About the wide cross.”

  “You want the plants to interbreed or something?”

  “Oh, they won’t do that here. Or they might, in a million years, but I don’t have that sort of time. I’ll do it myself, back home. I just need it to look like it happened here.”

  The scheme was starting to sound crazy on levels Alex hadn’t even imagined.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It would be a new species, don’t you see? Unrecorded. Mine. It would shift the whole landscape. I get my doctorate and a certain professor who shall go nameless, and who claims, for instance, that there is no sesuvium on Tower, sees his life’s work go down the pan.”

  “Your doctorate? I thought you were a professor already.”

  “I never said that.”

  “But you go around telling everyone you’re from the University of London.”

  “Imperial College, to be exact. And so I am.”

  “But you don’t teach there?”

  “Not at the moment, no. But soon enough.”

  Alex regretted that he hadn’t gone off with the Germans when he’d had the chance.

  “Why are you doing all this, exactly?”

  “Why? For science, my boy! For science!”

  Alex saw from the maps that they had crossed the equator the previous night. They ought to have keelhauled Desmond then, or whatever it was that sailors did to each other to mark the passage.

  Tower was miles to the north of the central cluster, virtually off in its own hemisphere.

  “Bindloe next,” Desmond said, “due west. All part of the plan. The winds always reverse themselves, you see, whenever El Niño comes along, which by my calculations should be any day now. Hence the eastward dispersal. It all makes sense.”

  It makes sense. It was the sort of thing madmen said.

  Santos was rowing back from the boat, a black shape against the black of the night. This was Alex’s only surety against Desmond, this leviathan. He emerged out of the dark carrying a big plastic sack of what turned out to be salt, which he started packing in handfuls into the gutted insides of his fish.

  “Bacalao,” he said again, with his unpleasant smile. “Qué tipo, muchacho? Le gusta?”

  Alex had lost all his reading material to the rain on the Inca Trail, which left him to Darwin’s Beagle. He didn’t hold out much hope for it, but he pulled up next to the fire as far from Desmond as he could manage and started in. Darwin, it turned out, hadn’t had it much better than Alex did—his own captain was not only a tyrant but a depressive to boot, and had apparently brought Darwin along, at Darwin’s expense, just to keep from slitting his own throat.

  A couple of lumps dragged themselves onto the beach and plopped themselves down, followed by a bigger one, the bull, who took up a position peering out to sea against the threat of rivals.

  “Looks like we’re sharing,” Desmond said.

  Alex stretched out his sleeping bag for the night, trying to avoid the booby nests, the guano pads in the bushes, the ubiquitous gulls with the red circles around their eyes who ambled about the beach hunched up like old men. He was getting value out here, at least, he’d have to grant that; he was pushing the boundaries. In Africa he’d taken trips through the bush where the wild had seemed to loom on every side ready to swallow him, but here it felt as if they’d already crossed over, as if there was no us and them anymore, no certain distinction. He would awake one morning to find he’d sprouted flippers and fins and would take to the oceans his forebears had abandoned a billion years earlier, eating bacalao until the sea cows came home. Out on the beach, meanwhile, the bull was still at his vigil, while his brood lay around him dreaming, for all Alex knew, of becoming human. It was getting hard to say anymore, out here with the likes of Desmond and Santos, in which direction progress lay, or whose fate seemed the better.

  They awoke to a haze that had blocked the sun, not so much cloud as a thickening of the air, and to a sticky breeze that revealed itself, the instant they’d cleared the bay, to be a stiffish wind.

  “Right on time,” Desmond said. “The trade winds fail, and all that hot water that’s been pushing up against Asia comes sloshing back.”

  The wind wasn’t especially strong but was insistent—it didn’t gust or blow about but came on straight and warm like a wall. Alex and
Desmond took refuge in the cabin with Santos, who had the throttle down full, though still the boat seemed to be inching forward at a crawl. Alex felt concerned, all of a sudden, at what passed for the boat’s navigation system, now that navigation might actually be called for. Apart from the throttle and the tiller, the one bolted to an old two-by-four that served as the dashboard and the other consisting of a wooden pole sticking through a hole in the floor, the only instrumentation was a cracked compass on the dash, the face of it so clouded that it might just as well have been a Magic 8-Ball.

  Alex tried to read his Darwin, but Desmond couldn’t stay put, poring over his maps, making notations, peering out through the guano-caked windshield into the haze.

  “Where the fuck is it? We should be seeing it by now.” He was crowding up into the little space that formed Santos’s command post. “Bindloe, for Christ’s sake. Isla Marchena. Dónde?”

  Santos kept his eyes on the ocean.

  “Sí, sí. El viento.”

  “The wind, my arse. You’ve probably passed the thing. You just want to get out to your bloody fishing fields.”

  A smudge finally appeared in the distance, a patch of darker gray against the gray of the sea and the sky.

  Alex saw Santos’s eye slip to the compass.

  “It’s about bloody time,” Desmond said.

  He got out a pair of binoculars, puny things that looked like a lady’s opera glasses.

  “Fucking haze,” he said, fiddling with the focus wheel.

  There was a tension in the air, but Alex couldn’t read it. Santos glanced down at the compass again. Desmond had squeezed in past him with the binoculars to get up close to the windshield, practically edging him away from the tiller.

  “I don’t get it. There’s a cinder cone out there.”

  All Alex could make out was the barest streak of land, beneath a streak of cloud that hung over it separate and low like its own private weather system.

  “It’s not right. It’s not fucking right.”