“I think that’s right.” I don’t think I’m as hungry now as I was yesterday.”
“I am,” he said, petulantly, as though it was my fault. “I’m twice as hungry. My stomach is full of cramps. And I’m thirsty.” He stood by a window, looking out. “I’m thirsty,” he said again. “Why don’t I open the window and let some water in?”
“Stay away from there!” I hurried across the room and pulled him away from the window. “Cowley, for God’s sake get hold of yourself! If we’re calm, if we’re patient, if we have the self-reliance and strength to wait, we may yet be saved. Don’t you want to live?”
“Live?” He laughed at me. “I died the day before yesterday.” He flung away from me, hurled himself into his chair. “I’m dead,” he said bitterly, “dead and my stomach doesn’t know it. Oh, damn this pain! Martin, believe me, I could stand anything, I could be as calm and solid as a rock, except for these terrible pains in my stomach. I have to eat, Martin. If I don’t get food soon, I’ll go out of my mind. I know I will.”
I stood watching him, helpless to say or do a thing.
His moods changed abruptly, instantaneously, without rhyme or reason. Now, he suddenly laughed again, that harsh and strident laugh that grated on my spine, that was more terrible to me than the weight of the water outside the windows. He laughed and said, “I have read of men, isolated, without food, who finally turned to the last solution to the problem of hunger.”
I didn’t understand him. I said, “What is that?”
“Each other.”
I stared at him, and a chill breath of terror touched my throat and dried it. I tried to speak, but my voice was hoarse, and I could only whisper, “Cannibalism? Good God, Cowley, you can’t mean—”
Again he laughed. “Don’t worry, Martin. I don’t think I could. If I could cook you, I might consider it. But raw? No I don’t believe I’ll ever get that hungry.” His mood changed again, and he cursed. “I’ll be eating the rug soon, my own clothing, anything!”
He grew silent, and I sat as far from him as I could get. I meant to stay awake now, no matter how long it took, no matter what happened. This man was insane, he was capable of anything. I didn’t dare sleep, and I looked forward with dread to the coming blackness of night.
The silence was broken only by an occasional muttering from Cowley across the room, unintelligible, as he muttered to himself of horrors I tried not to imagine. Blackness came, and I waited, straining to hear a sound, waiting to hear Cowley move, for the attack I knew must come. His breathing was regular and slow, he seemed to be asleep, but I couldn’t trust him. I was imprisoned with a madman, my only hope of survival was in staying awake, watching him every second until the rescuers came. And the rescuers must come. I couldn’t have gone through all this for nothing. They would come, they must come.
My terror and need kept me awake all night long and all through the next day. Cowley slept much of the time, and when he was awake he contented himself with low mumbling or with glowering silence.
But I couldn’t stay awake forever. As darkness returned again, as the third day ended without salvation, a heavy fog seemed to lower around me, and although I fought it, although I could feel the terror in my vitals, the fog closed in and I slept.
I woke suddenly. It was day again, and I couldn’t breathe. Cowley stood over me, his hands around my neck, squeezing, shutting off the air from my lungs, and I felt as though my he’d were about to burst. My eyes bulged, my mouth opened and closed helplessly. Cowley’s face, indistinct above me, gleamed with madness, his eyes bored into me and his mouth hung open in a hideous laugh.
I pulled at his hands, but they held me tight, I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t get air, air, I flailed away at his face, and my heart pounded in fear as I struggled. My fingers touched his face, perspiring face, slid away, I lunged at his eyes. My finger drove into his eye, and he screamed and released me. He fell back, his hands against his face, and I felt the warm jelly of his eye only finger.
I stumbled out of the chair, looking madly for escape, but the room was sealed, we were prisoners together. He came at me again, his clutching hands reaching out for me, his face terrible now with the bloody wound where his left eye had been. I ran, and the breath rattled in my throat as I gulped in air. Choking, sobbing, I ran from him, my arms outstretched in the gloom, and I fell against one of the billiard tables. My hands touched a cuestick, I picked it up, turned, swung at Cowley with it. Cowley fell back, howling like an animal, but then came on again. Screaming, I jabbed the cuestick full into his open mouth.
The stick snapped in two, part of it still in my hands, part jutting out of his mouth, and he started a shriek that ended in a terrible gurgling wail. He toppled face forward to the floor, driving the piece of stick through the back of his head.
I turned away and collapsed over a table. I was violently ill, my stomach jerking spasmodically, my throat heaving and retching. But it had been so long since I had eaten that I could bring nothing up, but could only lie helplessly, coughing and shaking and terribly, terribly sick.
That was three days ago, and still they haven’t come. They must come soon now. The air is growing foul in here, I can hardly breathe any more. And I find that I am talking to myself, and every once in a while I will pick up a billiard ball and look longingly at the window. I am coming to long for death, and I know that that is madness. So they must come soon.
And the worst thing is the hunger. Cowley is gone now, all gone, and I am hungry again.
One on a Desert Island
There is a perennial cartoon idea which begins, “Two men on a desert island. One of them says…” Then there is a funny gag line delivered by one of the men. It can be funny because there are two of them. But what about one man on a desert island?
Jim Kilbride was one man on a desert island. It was one of a group of four islands, alone in the middle of the Pacific, south of the major sea lanes. The island that Jim Kilbride was on was the largest of the four, a mile by a mile and a half. It was mainly unshaded sand, washed by the ocean during high tide, but there were two small hillocks near the center of the island, on which were stunted trees and dark green shrubbery. On the eastern side of the island there was a small, curving indentation in the beach, forming a natural cove in miniature, a pool surrounded by a half-circle of sand and a half-circle of ocean. A few birds soared among the islands, calling to each other in raucous voices. The caws of the birds and the whisper of the surf against the beach were the only sounds in the world.
Jim Kilbride had happened to be on a desert island, alone, through a series of half-understood desires and strange events. He had once been a bookkeeper, snug and safe and land-locked, working for a small textile firm in San Francisco. He had been a bookkeeper, and he had looked like a bookkeeper. Short, under five foot seven. The blossomings of a paunch, although he was only twenty-eight. Hair straight and black and limp, with a round and receding forehead that shone beneath the office lights. Round eyes behind rounder spectacles, steel-framed and sliding down his nose. A tie that hung from his neck like the frayed end of a halter. Suits that had looked fine in the department-store window, on the tall and lean and confident mannequins.
He was James Kilbride then, and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy because he was a cliché and he knew it. He lived with his mother, and he never went out with women, and he rarely drank intoxicants. When he read the sad tales of contemporary realism, about mild and unobtrusive bookkeepers who lived with their mothers and who never went out with women, he felt ashamed and unhappy, because he knew they were talking about him.