Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Pablo turned the picture face down. The room smelled of saffron.

The Callahans would have to go with Negus now.

Tabor hobbled up on deck, bringing two stationary flashlights with him. Scanning the night horizon, he saw no lights in view; he would have to risk some light of his own to get the thing done. But to bring the bodies up from the lazaret by main force was more than he could manage. He switched the flashlights on — one beside the hatchway to light the compartment, the other beside an after hatch to light his work space. Then he engaged the tri-net motor and swung the bar amidships; the chain line, coils and chafing gear spread out around him like a collapsed circus tent. From among the heap, he seized an end of chain line and, grasping it under his arm, eased himself painfully down the ladder, pulling a web of coils behind him.

He came to Callahan first and linked two sections of chain line under the dead man’s fleshy shoulders. When he thought the links were secured, he went topside and set the tri-net bar to hauling upright. The coils and chain with their burden rattled up the hatchway like a receding tide; Pablo stationed himself at the top of the ladder to ease the corpse through. With Callahan netted and swinging above the deck, Pablo loosened the chain from under his shoulders, swung the bar outboard and lowered away.

It went easily. Pablo had been standing by with a gaff in case the netting or the body fouled the overworked engines. But the chain settled, the net spread out without bird’s-nesting and Mr. Callahan rolled off into the quiet ocean and disappeared.

Pablo rested then, nursing his throbbing leg, looking around for lights, for aircraft, for a wall of mountains against the sky northward. When he felt up to it, he went up to the cockpit to check the speed, the bearings and Fathometer. The speed was steady, the Fathometer read over eight fathoms and unchanging, the compass needle was fast on triple zero and the null as constant as Polaris.

Topside, he started up the Lister again to bring back the net to center line. A second time, like a diver, Pablo descended into the lazaret compartment, dragging chain line behind him. He found her easily enough and pulled her into the coils. Her death’s darkness smelled of suntan oil. The net hauling, he guided her up the ladder and out of the hatchway.

When the tri-net boom was lowered and the web offered her out she did not go readily as her husband had. The colorless hair, almost phosphorescent over the water, spread itself among the coils, her down vest was caught on a cross wire, her legs, akimbo, were wrapped in the chains. In the end, he had to bring his light to the rail and cut her free from the webbing. The chains snapped loose, and then upright, her hair held on its ends by the coils that enshrouded her like a veil, she fell. Wide-eyed, as though eight fathoms held some new curiosity — like a figurehead, dolorous, an image of destiny — feet first into the water.

So Pablo had done with his dead and he switched off the lights. The null tone and the engines went on throbbing and the pointers held their places. He smoked and took another pill. He felt that his unseen presence on the ocean was ceremony enough for them.

“The answer”—Father Egan was saying—“I think they have it on the prayer wheels. Do you know what it says on the prayer wheels?”

Most of them had gone to sleep. From among the group only the girl with the bandaged arm, the feverish girl and her boyfriend, the dark-bearded young man and the blond giant remained to listen. A few others had gathered around a fire at the base of the overgrown pyramid and were smoking marijuana and passing a bottle of colorless rum. Their laughter sounded a muffled echo off the ancient stone.

“On the prayer wheels it says, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ They turn the wheels round hundreds of times a day. The little flags flutter so the wind says it. The Jewel is in the Lotus.”

The feverish girl moaned and stirred in her lover’s arms. Egan stopped speaking and looked at her and saw that she had the dengue. He had had it himself several times. He would have to get her some medicine, he thought, and for a moment he forgot what it was he had been preaching to them. Then it came back to him. The girl, he thought, was like a lotus and the pain in her overbright eyes a jewel.

“The lotus,” he told her, “is sweet and fragrant, beautiful in life. But it’s fallible and it’s born for death. It’s sown in corruption. But the jewel—” He felt his arm go numb and when he tried to raise it he could not. “The jewel is undying and beyond time. Beyond measure. The jewel is the meaning, you see.”

A high-pitched cry sounded from somewhere in the deeper jungle, a cry that might have been human. Something surprised in the dark.

“You’re the lotus. Your dear bodies that you’re so fond of. You’re the lotus. The jewel is in you.” Egan laughed and brushed his sleeve across his mouth again. “The jewel’s in hock to you. And the whole world of mortality is the lotus. And the Living is the jewel in it. That’s the bright side.”

He looked for the drunken man who had heckled him, but the man had gone away.

“It is sown in corruption,” Egan declaimed, “it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power! On the bright side — everything’s fine. You’d think they’d have no business here whose place is on the bright side. Here — it’s whirl.” He put out his hand and described a spiral with three fingers. “Whirl is King and it’s lonely and in shadow, but over there — well, that’s life over there, that’s where the Living belongs. But,” he said, and tapped his palm with his forefinger as though citing some father of doctrine, “the Jewel is in the Lotus! Why?”

He looked at them each in turn.

“Why, children?”

They were all still, watching.

“Because,” Egan thundered, “they’re as lonely as we are! The Living is lonely for itself. For the shard of itself that’s lost in us, the jewel in the lotus.” He paused to draw breath.

“Isn’t it wonderful after all? That we’re secret lovers? Because why else would the Living be concealed within this meat, in all these fears and sweats, the Holy One among the dead? Why would he hide himself in Whirl to give meaning to a pile of corpses? Why isn’t a campesino just an animal with a name? Why not? Why is there any meaning in a heap of dead? Or a lost kiddie. A sick little girl, a drowned …” A shudder ran through him and he paused again. “Because the Jewel is in the Lotus out of loneliness and secret love. He doesn’t have any choice.”

Exhausted, he leaned on the stone. Then he thought of something that he had once read. Or perhaps he had written it himself.

“It’s hard to see,” he told the young people. “You never know when you see the Living. The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you.”

The girl with dengue put her hands on her companion’s shoulders and pulled herself upright.

“The bands broke,” she said, half singing. “The bands broke on Faithful John’s heart.” The boy who was with her tried to ease her back down; she fought him. “The bands broke on the heart of Faithful John,” she screamed.

Egan had sunk to the ground and lay resting against the stela. It seemed to him that he had made it come out all right. His hand was on his briefcase, over the bulge of his bottle of Flor de Cana.

“No, no,” he told the girl kindly. “That’s not the same at all. That’s a fairy tale.”

Justin had spent the morning making inventory and talking to a man from the shipper’s office in town. They had told her that it would be easier and more economical to load the mission’s promptuary equipment on shipboard at Puerto Alvarado than to ship it by way of the capital. He would have a ship with available holding space quite soon.