They bobbed about in the hot sun. When the breach came it was so sudden they almost missed it. A terrific snort followed by a slapping slurp in the marbled froth. Then another smaller hump just behind, a hillock soon dissolved. The boatman said it was a female, probably with a young one in tow. The Bavarians shared laconic exclamations as they watched the trail of spume unspool. They all waited, scanning the rolling swells intently in the hopes of another salutation. None came. Still. He had seen it. The Leviathan. Her lungs the size of Volkswagens, hot blood coursing through arteries thick as his thorax, perhaps dim awareness of her fingerbones. The biggest mother out there. Concentrating in her body the inspired will to dive, to undertake those long hours of nightwork in the deep trenches, bathed in sound, seeking out that nourishment so needful for ascension. Why should her mere proximity cause such emotion? Was it a sign? A hopeful nod that he was on the right path? Or a signal that he was deceived? In Milton’s poem, mistaking the whale for an island got one dragged down to hell. Was that his trouble? That he could not tell the difference between signs of hope and signs of hopelessness? Or was it that all along he had assumed there was a problem? Believed, even before Phineas had made him self-conscious of a desire to pursue it, that he had some mission to fulfill, some heroic effort to discover, when the truth of his condition was that he was the lucky survivor of a wreck, an Ishmael, whose isolated life was defined by the privilege of floating safely shoreward on the tides, a blessing of the gods, a stroke of dumb luck, a fortune inherited precisely because the defining moments of death and destruction had already taken place. What if there was nothing left to do other than tell the story? Nothing to accomplish other than continued survival and a contemplative retelling of the ruinous past? Had he come to the far end of the world in order to learn something that was the biggest nothing of all? These black thoughts? Convinced he was going one way, was he, all along, going the other? It would be in keeping with everything else. The rotten purposelessness of the age. The mindlessness swallowing everything into itself without any possibility of resistance, only horrific jests. Neither progress, nor regression. Only this holding pattern, this undertow of disorientation. The fear of revisiting the past and the fear of the annihilating future holding everything and everyone in a nihilistic torpor, sending out fluxing lines that sparked all manner of derangement and decadence. Including his own. Yet was this anything the old folks didn’t already know? Wasn’t this what, in their own way, they had always tried to tell him? That it would come down to making a way out of no way, creating a future over and against its absence? Wasn’t it ingrained in his impulses, this reflex to run away in order to live? But the North Star in the age of the satellite is everywhere and nowhere. There would be no outrunning in this brave new world; whatever you had, whatever you could hold onto, you would have to make into a home. And he understood that he was looking at what he could not see before. The circumference of his errant life, his ceaseless fugitivity. A line without relief.
—
At Puerto Madryn, he boarded a bus that cut straight west across the continent to Bariloche. They drove on unpaved roads through the desert. Late in the night, the roar came to a stop in the garish light of a service station outside a Mapuche settlement. The Indians of Argentina. Same story as far as he knew. An ancient people decimated. No one seemed to be present other than a lone attendant at the pumps who laughed with the bus driver as they waited under the glare of the Chevron ensign. In Bariloche the lakes were sparkling. Jonah stayed at a tiny hostel run by a Chilean mother and her daughter who showed up in the evening to help. They insisted he must see their country before he left, and they suggested the island of Chiloé, easily reachable across the border.
The next morning, he was on a bus crossing the Andes along the snow line. On the way down out of the mountains and into Chile, the snow gave way to green pastures, farms, and rows of poplars lining glittering streams. On the outskirts of Puerto Montt new housing developments, still wrapped in Tyvek, were marooned in barren lots. Volcanoes towered in distant otherworldliness. At the ferry dock, he decided to drink to take the edge off. This was a mistake. Later, on the crossing, he thought he saw the Devil or a troll-like person watching him. And he remembered what Orígenes had said, that even the Devil would be saved.
The island of Chiloé was on the Pacific. In Ancud penguin tours were heavily advertised. But when he inquired at the tourist office, Jonah was told the seas were too rough that day to see any penguins unless he were willing to pay a good deal more for a bigger boat. The hills around Ancud were the color of avocados. Large black birds sailed overhead, great black crosses. He was informed that they were condors, a type of vulture. The tourist office turned out to have a selection of books by and about Chileans, their culture and history. He bought a copy of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. He left Ancud penguinless, but on his way found a newly opened sushi restaurant. No one there was Japanese. But they had chopsticks and the fish was fine. Jonah read from Altazor and took comfort in its charm. “I love the night,” sang the poet, “the hat of every day.”
From Chiloé he traveled again, this time straight north up the spine of Chile to Santiago. In
