Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

The lower hemisphere of the sun was almost touching the line when Tabor roused himself again.

“You said you betrayed her.”

For a moment, Holliwell had no idea what he was speaking of.

“You said to her: ‘I betrayed you.’ What’d you mean?”

“Nothing serious,” Holliwell told him. “It was a bet we had.”

Pablo’s eyes were vacant and confused.

“You know,” he said, “I’m part of the process and you ain’t.”

“That’s my loss I’m sure,” Holliwell said.

“I thought I was just anybody.” Pablo spoke in a febrile whisper. “I thought I was this loser.”

“But instead you’re part of the process.”

“Everything,” Pablo insisted, “everything that happened, man, happened for a purpose. To teach me. So I could learn. Everything that happened. Everybody I met.”

“Except me,” Holliwell said.

“I ain’t saying that, Holliwell. I ain’t sure of that. Maybe you too. You know, he told me — that old man told me — the eye you look at it with, well, that’s the eye it sees you with. That’s what he told me.”

Holliwell was moved to recall an experiment he had once read about; he had clipped the report of it for his class. An experimenter endeavoring to observe chimpanzee behavior had fashioned a spy hole in the door of the animals’ chamber through which he might watch them unobserved. Putting his eye to it, he had seen nothing more than what he finally identified as the eye of a chimpanzee on the other side of the door. Ape stuff. Another spasm of trembling overcame him; his teeth chattered.

“I think I might be part of the process too,” he said, when he had recovered. “I learned a few things down here.”

Wrapping his shirt around his blistered body, he turned back toward the coast of Tecan, little more than a green line now on the misty horizon. He had learned what empty places were in him. He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither good nor fight was left to him. Instead of quitting while he was ahead, he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.

He turned away from Tecan and faced his fellow traveler.

The prospect was death now, after all, sudden or slow, neither earned nor undeserved. And he would have to face it listening to the voice of this pill-brained jackdaw, this jabbering shitbird with his pig sticker and his foul little eyes.

“Me, I was so turned around,” Pablo was saying. “I was so fucked up. I mean I’m sick now but I’m a lot better off than I was.” He looked over his shoulder and then back to Holliwell. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he said. “Things gonna be a lot different for me.”

Holliwell, shivering in a burst of spray, only nodded.

“I don’t know what you’re gonna do, Holliwell, but I’m goin’ home, goddamn right. I’m goin’ home and it’s gonna be all different. Because I scored, you know what I mean?” He grinned; his teeth were white and regular, the only healthy part of his face, Holliwell thought. “I got regular material things to take back with me. Plenty, Holliwell — never mind asking. And I got spiritual things.” Holliwell watched him repeat the words “spiritual things” under his breath. “And I got a little lady up there, yes sir. And I got a boy and he’s a good boy, too.”

Then a look of alarm came over his face and he touched the breast pocket of his shirt. Whatever he was feeling for was in its place.

“You just keep looking for that island, Holliwell. You’re gonna see it!”

Holliwell again studied the mean contours of his companion’s face and found himself beset by scruple. From sentiment, conscience, a debilitated failure of will, he suddenly recoiled from the thing he had intended. The hope flared up in him that they might survive together. He was thinking now that the boy on the boat with him was no more than a crazy kid, than whom he was older, harder, tougher, that for all Pablo’s bloody prattle he did not really seem bent on murder, that he might even be seen as well-intentioned in his foolish paranoid way. Then too, she had trusted Pablo and taken him in, had given him into Holliwell’s care. Perhaps, Holliwell thought, he owed her. He had an impulse to turn again toward the distant green coast but he did not. Everything there was lost now.

The act itself, the doing of it, repelled him. There might be a ship. Or even, absurdity of absurdities, an island. He decided he would keep his head and a close watch on Pablo and endure the oncoming night.

The colors of dusk shaded the sky. The sun was tame again, fixed to the textured horizon. Steady, Holliwell thought. Live in hope.

“You hear them?” Pablo Tabor asked him.

“Hear what?”

Holliwell listened hard. There were the waves, flumes of spray striking the fiber-glass. Nothing else.

“Sure you do,” Pablo insisted. “The hell you don’t.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s for me,” Pablo said. “They belong to me now.” He forced himself up again. “That’s just the same as me you’re hearing.”

“What are you hearing, Pablo?” He himself listened again, half hoping that there would be something to hear. “Are they … voices?”

“You’re a card,” Pablo said. “You’re a shrewd son of a bitch.” He grinned. Holliwell’s heart sank.

“They’re nothing but beautiful,” Pablo said. “Beautiful is what they are.”

Holliwell, nodding, despaired and agreed.

“We’re buddies now,” Pablo declared. “We’re brothers.”

“Absolutely,” Holliwell said. He was trying to convince himself that the wound and infection had rendered Pablo too weak to be threatening. But as he looked at Pablo sitting upright across from him, charged with deluded passion, he knew that he himself was the weaker, with his chill, his burn, his sentimentality.

“I was gonna kill you, Holliwell. No shit.”

“Now, now,” Holliwell said. “Aren’t you sorry?”

“I ain’t ever sorry,” Pablo told him. “You know why?”

“No,” Holliwell said.

Pablo laughed. “Because I got nothing to be sorry about.”

“Aha,” Holliwell said.

Pablo’s lean brown face was all youth and strength and chemical good nature. In time, Holliwell knew, the chemistry would turn, the creature in there would turn on him and require, as such creatures always required, an external victim. Then it would be his role to speak softly, to mouth little smiles in solicitation of pity which would not be forthcoming. With all the goodwill in the world, Holliwell thought, he was not up to it.

“I killed people,” Pablo declared. “I don’t give a shit. They were turning me around. They asked for it.”

“I’m not turning you around.”

“No,” Pablo said. “And I been looking for it. Don’t think I ain’t been.”

Evening brought forth the wind without remission. The power of Pablo’s madness and the chill on his braised body laid Holliwell low. He steadied himself on the side of the boat; he could not stop shaking.

I know you now, he thought, watching Pablo. Should have known you. Know you of old.

He felt the force he had encountered over the reef.

The stuff was aqueous, waterborne like cholera or schistosomiasis. He had been around; he had seen it many times before. Among swarms of quivering fish, in rice paddies, shining in gutters. It was as strong as anything in the world. Stronger perhaps, when the illusions were stripped away. It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes. Comforting to think of it as some aberration, a perversion of nature. But it was the real thing, he thought. The thing itself.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pablo asked.

“I guess it’s the sunburn,” Holliwell said. “The chill.”