Orbit 2

John hurried back to the hotel, to be near Anne if she needed him. But he hoped she would leave him alone. His fingers shook as he turned on his screen; suddenly he had a clear memory of the child who had wept, and he hoped Stuart would hurt Anne just a little. The tremor in his fingers increased; Stuart was on from six until twelve, and he already had missed almost an hour of the show. He adjusted the helmet and sank back into a deep chair. He left the audio off, letting his own words form, letting his own thoughts fill in the spaces.

Anne was leaning toward him, sparkling champagne raised to her lips, her eyes large and soft. She was speaking, talking to him, John, calling him by name. He felt a tingle start somewhere deep inside him, and his glance was lowered to rest on her tanned hand in his, sending electricity through him. Her hand trembled when he ran his fingers up her palm, to her wrist where a blue vein throbbed. The slight throb became a pounding that grew, and when he looked again into her eyes, they were dark and very deep. They danced and he felt her body against his, yielding, pleading. The room darkened and she was an outline against the window, her gown floating down about her. The darkness grew denser, or he closed his eyes, and this time when her body pressed against his, there was nothing between them, and the pounding was everywhere.

In the deep chair, with the helmet on his head, John’s hands clenched, opened, clenched, again and again.

Here is one more of the handful of unpublished stories Richard McKenna left behind when he died in 1964. Like his “The Secret Place,” in a way, it is about the longing that most of us have felt for Somewhere Else — some other world, better, simpler and more private than this one.

Many writers have dealt with the theme since H.G. Wells wrote “The Door in the Wall” before the turn of the century; but rarely has it been developed with such persuasiveness and power as McKenna gives it here.

If indeed there is another place beyond this too-so lid reality — call it Avalon, Cockaigne, Fiddler's Green — then eight desperate men, dying of thirst in an open boat, might find a way to enter it: for “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east”

On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.

All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959. Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.

Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the others and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.

Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give.

Little Fay, of the rat face and bulging forehead, had begun it yesterday. Human flesh boiled in seawater, he had said, took up most of the salt and left a nourishing broth fresh enough to drink. Kinross remembered that false bit of sea lore being whispered among the apprentices on his first cruise long years ago, but now it was no tidbit for the morbid curiosity of youth. It shouldered into the boat like a ninth passenger sitting between him and all the others.

“No leedle sticks, Fay,” the giant Swede Kerbeck had growled. “If we haf to eat somebody we yoost eat you.”

Kinross looked at Kerbeck now, sitting just to the left on the stern grating with one huge, bronzed arm draped over the useless tiller. He wore a white singlet and khaki pants and Kinross wondered if he was awake. There was no telling about Kruger just across from him either. The radioman had slept that way, with puffy, hairless hands clasped across the ample stomach under the white sweatshirt, for most of the four days. He had not joined in the restless moving about and talking of the others, stirring only to remoisten the handkerchief he kept on top of his almost hairless head.

“You won’t eat me!” Fay had squalled. “Nor draw lots, neither. Let’s have a volunteer, somebody that’s to blame for this fix.”

Fay had blamed Kerbeck because the boat was not provisioned. The Swede retorted angrily that he knew it had been so when they had left Mossamedes. Fay blamed Kinross because the launch engine was disabled. Kinross, skin crawling, pointed out mildly enough that the battery had been up and the diesel okay two days before the sinking. Then Fay turned on Kruger for failing to send out a distress signal. Kruger had insisted that the blast had cut him off from the radio shack and that if he had not started at once to swing out the launch possibly none of them would have survived.

Kinross looked forward now at Fay sleeping beside the engine. On the opposite side, also asleep, was Bo Bo, the huge Senegalese stoker, clad only in dungaree shorts. It had seemed to Kinross yesterday that Fay had some sort of understanding with the powerful Negro. Bo Bo had rumbled assent to Fay’s accusations and so had the three men in the forward compartment.

Kruger, surprisingly, had resolved the threat. Speaking without heat in his high-pitched, penetrating voice, he told them: touch one of us aft here and all three will fight. Kerbeck had nodded and unshipped the heavy brass tiller.

While they wavered, Kruger went over to the attack. “Single out one only man, why don’t you, Fay? Who’s had the most life already? Take the oldest.”

Silva, the wizened, popeyed Portygee in the bow, creaked an outraged protest. Beside him the thick-set Mexican Garcia laughed harshly.

“Okay, then who’s going to die soonest? Take the weakest,” said Kruger. “Take Whelan.”

The kid Whelan, also in the bow, found strength to whimper an agonized plea. Kinross, remembering yesterday, looked at the two men sprawled in the bow. He half thought the Mexican was looking back at him. His stocky, dungaree-clad body seemed braced against the pitch of the boat as it rode, the swells, unlike the flaccidity of the old Portygee.

It was Garcia who had said finally, “You lose, Fay. You’ll have to take your chance on drawing lots with the rest of us. I’ll line up with Kruger.”

The three men aft had voted against drawing lots but agreed to go along with the majority. Then Kruger found fault with every method suggested, pointing out how fraud could enter. The day wore out in wrangling. Kinross thought back to the curiously unstrained, liquid quality of Kruger’s light voice as contrasted with the harsh croaking of the others. He had seemed in better shape than the rest and somehow in control of things.

Just before sunset, when they had put it off until next day and while Silva was fingering his rosary and praying for rain, the kid Whelan had seen green fields off to port. He shouted his discovery, flailed his body across the gunwale and sank like a stone.