In the shrunken air of Falcon’s cabin there were secrets too scandalous for me to share with the ship’s company. This was not a knowledge I wanted, but it waited to ambush me, like the Old Man himself, amidst sacks of drachmas, nuggets and bars of gold, and church boxes from sacked coastal towns, strewn along the floor. Anything not destroyed by the explosion, Atufal and Diamelo smashed because it windowed onto the savage world of their enslavers. Where-soever my eyes ranged, aft toward the enormous upended bed, forward to his broken inventions by the larboard wall, his lodgings recalled abandoned manor houses raped and harried by brigands, and thus for a brief moment nothing here was familiar to me. A post-Christian roomscape, it struck me — me whose head was half full of Allmuseri words. The room swirled so for a second I had to plop my hands on my knees, put my head down, and wait until the ship’s hull stabilized. But even then I felt culturally dizzy, so displaced by this decentered interior and the Africans’ takeover, that when I lifted a whale-oil lamp at my heels it might as well have been a Phoenician artifact for all the sense it made to me. Yet in the smoking debris there was movement, a feeble stirring of Icarian man, the creator of cogs and cotton gins, beneath contraptions that pinched him to the splintery floor.
I found his legs trapped under timber. Therewith, I gripped wood with one hand, pushed aside with my other his torn sea charts, lire, egg-sized rings, almanacs, and his log, which he often sat upon to reach his table, then tried raising the beams off him without wrenching my own back. Falcon gave a gruntlike oof. Alow and aloft he was scuppered. When he crawled a few inches by grabbing the base of a bookcase and dragging himself forward, cartilage in his shoulder crackled like worm-addled wood — or, on deeper planes, the unhinging of his atoms. I saw half the ribs on his right side were broken, that he strained not only to deny a physical pain involuted and prismatic but deeper wounds as well. What were these? I could see that all he valued would perish from the indifference of Allmuseri who would no more appreciate the limits and premises of his life than he would theirs, whereby I mean his belief that one must conquer death through some great deed or original discovery, his need to soar above contingency, accident, and, yes, other pirates like John Silver and Captain Teach, his pseudo-genius — to judge it justly — which could invent gadgets but lacked genuine insight, which rained information down on you like buckshot, but in the disconnected manner of the autodidact, which showed all the surface sparks of brilliance — isolation, vanity, idealism — but was adrift from the laws and logic of the heart. All at once I found that I was still ensorcelled by a leader who lived by the principle of Never Explain and Never Apologize. But I pitied him too, for his incompleteness. I pitied him, as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously for the better and worse, made himself the silent prayer in all their projects to come. A cruel kind of connectedness, this. In a sense we all were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock. Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like an ex-lover, a despised husband, a rapist who, though destroyed by a mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams: a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did.
“Cap’n, this is Rutherford. Do you know me?”
“The galley swab?” His mouth opened horribly in a face as flat and foul-looking as a sea boot.
The skipper’s nervous system, that deep structural mechanism none of us can reason with or talk to, was so damaged from the percussion of falling beams he could not control his bowels or the spastically dancing muscles of his face. Thus, smiles followed morose expressions. These were replaced by petulance, surprise, delight, then grief, as if behind the tarp of his skin several men and women were struggling to break free. I suffer you, then, to consider my shock at seeing him this way, fighting to the end to appear singular and self-reliant when, inly, all Nature in him was seditious. Although dazed by this reel of involuntary emotional masks, I’d seen enough of shipboard surgery to know his only hope was a stiff shot of rum, a sterilized knife to hack off everything below his knees, and henceforth precisely the sort of dependency on others a swashbuckling sea rover — a man so fixed and inflexible in his being — would find intolerable. “Aye, I know you. Is it the end of the world, Mr. Calhoun?”
“Sir?”
“It came to me as I lay here, a nightmare that this was the last hour of history. Nothing else explains it. The break-down. I mean, how thorough it is, from top to bottom, like everything from ancient times to now, the civilized values and visions of high culture, have all gone to hell in fine old hamlets filled high with garbage, overrun with Mudmen and Jews, riddled with viral infections and venereal complaints that boggle the mind and cripple whole generations of white children who’ll be strangers, if not slaves, in their own country. I saw families killing each other. People were living in alleyways. Sexes and races were blurred. I saw riots in cities and on clippers. Then: the rise of Aztec religion and voodoo as credible spiritual practices for some, but people were still worshiping stage personalities too. On and on it came to me. Crazy as it seems, I saw a ship with a whole crew of women. Yellow men were buying up half of America. Hegel was spewing from the mouths of Hottentots. Gawd!” His whole body shuddered from stem to stern. “I was dreaming, wasn’t I?”
“Maybe, Cap’n. Things’ll never be that way.”
One or two moments went by as he creased on his left side, still as the ship’s figurehead, his skin paggly and scabbed, one of his sock suspenders broken (he had invented, I should record for this record, suspenders that ran from your shirttail to your socks so you never had to pull them up and always had a shirt that looked crisp, smartly starched, and capable of passing military inspection, including after a battle), his face relaxed and voice low, calm as island currents.
“You’re uncommonly quiet ’n’ calculating tonight. Is it ’cause you betrayed me, Mr. Calhoun—”
“Nossir. I did exactly as you asked.”
“True?”
“Your plans, and those of the mutineers, got on the wrong side of the buoy and beached. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Then we underestimated the blacks? They’re smarter than I thought?”
“They’d have to be.”
He nodded, wrinkling his nose at, I presumed, his own fierce odors. “Mr. Calhoun?”
“Here, sir.”
“What’s not changed is that I still need you to be my eyes and ears. I cannot write, so you must keep the log. No matter what becomes of me, I want others to know the truth of what happened on this voyage. Will you do that?”
“Cap’n, I’m no writer. I don’t know how a ship’s log is done.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re a bright lad. Do your best. Include everything you can remember, and what I told you, from the time you came on board. Not just Mr. Cringle’s side, I’m saying, or the story the mutineers will spin, but things I told you when we met alone in secret.”
To this I reluctantly agreed. I took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I’d tell the story (I knew he wanted to be remembered), it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it since my escape from New Orleans.
“Now, then,” he said, satisfied that I would be his biographer, “can you tell me how the situation stands?”
“The Africans have the ship. We’re steamin’ blind. They want us to lay a course for Senegambia, whereupon the remaining crew will be released, if you can guide us there.”