The Dark Backward Read online

  Clark bit her lip, and then, turning to the jury so Pierce could not see, raised her eyes in the common gesture of those who have to deal with errant children or hopeless fools. An instant later she was looking straight at the witness, asking the next question.

  “Now, Mr. Johansen – or rather Captain Johansen – you sail all around the Pacific, when you have the chance. Would you tell us in your own words what happened a year or so ago when you came across an island, one you didn’t know about?”

  “A year ago last September. I had a lot of leave time coming – vacation days I had accumulated, nearly three months. And so I set out in the Solitude, with no destination in mind, just to go where the wind might take me. I’d left Tahiti the end of July, and as I say, there was no particular place I wanted to go, except that I wanted to get as far away as possible from the routes the cruise ships follow. I’d seen all they had to offer, visited those same famous islands so many times that in the last few years I would sometimes forget which one we had just been to and which one we were going to stop at next.” He looked at the jury with a half-embarrassed expression. “It’s a little like a bus driver who takes a vacation. He loves to drive, but not along those same city streets. He gets in his car and explores the country, any place he can find a new road.”

  He seemed to like the analogy but to have some doubt whether it adequately explained how he felt. He would have thought about it, tried to find a closer parallel, but Hillary Clark urged him on.

  “Yes, we understand, Captain Johansen. You wanted to explore the Pacific, parts of it you hadn’t seen, and that’s how you happened to discover -?”

  “The early part of September; the morning of the sixth, to be precise.”

  “And where exactly were you?”

  “Well, there’s a question, I must tell you,” he said, scratching his head. “Where exactly was I? Not where I thought I was, that’s for sure. Or rather, I was, but that island wasn’t.”

  Perplexed, Hillary Clark took a step forward.

  “This is all a little confusing. You were where you thought you were, but the island wasn’t? Perhaps you could explain what you mean by that.”

  Johansen flushed with embarrassment. He was a modest, unpretentious man who preferred his own company. What made perfect sense inside his own mind sometimes came out all twisted up and garbled when he tried to put things into words. He felt safe with the brief commands he had to give on ship, and the occasional short comments he made with passengers, but whenever he started to describe something that had happened to him, or what he had been thinking about, every sentence was like a dead end road on which he always had to turn around and start off on another one. Human society was a thicket full of mystery and the words that held it together a hopeless tangle.

  “What I mean? I see. The coordinates – the longitude and latitude – seemed to be accurate. It’s just that there wasn’t supposed to be anything there, nothing but open water, and yet there it was.”

  “The island?”

  Johansen stared straight ahead, a look of wonder in his eyes, as he ran his long, bent fingers through his thick gray hair.

  “It shouldn’t have been there.” As soon as he said it, he changed his mind. “I’m not sure why I say that. My own arrogance, I imagine; the belief that we know everything that’s out there, that there’s nothing more to discover. And after all, it isn’t a part of the Pacific that is ever traveled much.”

  This seemed to satisfy him, this belief that for all the movement of ships upon the sea, the sea still had secrets, more of them than anyone could guess.

  “And if you would, Captain Johansen, just what part of the Pacific is that? Where were you when you found the island?”

  The question brought him back to himself. This was something he could answer without any danger of losing his way.

  “My exact location was longitude -”

  “I’m afraid we don’t need anything as exact as all that. I don’t know about the members of the jury,” she said with a glance toward the jury box that bragged about the things that like any normal person she could not be expected to know, “but I can never keep straight which way either longitude or latitude runs, only that they go in opposite directions. Perhaps you could just tell us how far you were from land, some place all of us have heard of.”

  “You don’t want to know where I was, where the island was? You just want to know how far it was from land?”

  He thought he must have misunderstood. What was the point of saying where you were if you couldn’t be exact? But as he searched her blank, impatient eyes he realized that like too many of the tourists on their first and only cruise, she could only grasp a distance if it was measured from the certainty of a place she knew.

  “Quite a ways from here,” he said with a droll expression.

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “I tried, but you wouldn’t let me.”

  She gave him a look to remind him where he was. He remembered why he had never married.

  “All I want to know, Captain Johansen – all the jury wants to know -”

  “Objection!” Darnell jumped up with an agility that caught everyone by surprise. “The prosecution doesn’t speak for the jury. If she did, she might credit them with enough intelligence to want to know the exact location – longitude and latitude – of this island we all want to know more about!”

  “I’ll ask my own questions in my own way, if you don’t mind. I don’t need -”

  “Enough!” Judge Pierce glared at both of them. “No more. Rephrase the question, counselor. Ask the witness where he was, where the island is, and let him answer.”

  The eyes of Hillary Clark grew cold and intense. She spun on her heel, ready to lash out at the witness. She caught herself just in time, wiped the anger from her face and tried to laugh away her own mistake.

  “I’m sorry, Captain Johansen; my question wasn’t very good. I wasn’t very clear. All I wanted to find out was where the island is in relation to some place those of us who don’t sail the seas might know.”

  “About fifteen hundred miles off the coast of Peru, give or take.”

  “And you came upon this island the morning of…?”

  “The sixth of September. I hadn’t seen land in weeks, and I wasn’t expecting to see any. But there it was, and much bigger than it should have been.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” Hillary Clark stood next to the jury box, drumming on the railing with the fingers of her right hand. It was a gesture of impatience, one she was not conscious of. “If you didn’t expect to see land that morning, how could you have had any expectation with respect to how big it was?”

  “You’re right of course; I didn’t.” He shifted position, leaning now on his right elbow as he stroked his chin with his left hand. He liked things to be exact but the words were still the problem. “It wasn’t supposed to be there, nothing was. But, as I tried to say before, not everything has been discovered. Still, it seemed strange that an island this large – a good twelve miles in length and part of it rising up as high as that, I….”

  “Yes, we understand,” said Hillary Clark. She was still beating her fingers on the jury box railing. Suddenly, she stopped, and, as if to keep herself from doing it again, clutched her arm across her chest and stepped away. “Tell us what you did next, after you sighted the island in the distance the morning of the sixth?”

  “I went ashore. There was a long, sandy beach. There were no reefs or other obstacles.”

  “And what did you do when you got there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I thought it was deserted. What else should I have thought, an island no one had ever heard of in a place there should not have been one? It had to be deserted. It was quite beautiful, that island: tall palm trees lined the beach and, farther on, thick foliage and tropical flowers, and the only sound the gentle pounding of the surf. The last thing I expected to find was another human
being.” Johansen sat forward, a look of eager nostalgia shining in his eyes. “I didn’t find one either; he found me. A young boy tumbled out through the undergrowth, chasing a wild pig. I was standing maybe thirty yards away when he broke into a clearing near where a creek emptied into the sea. He didn’t see me; he was too intent on the pursuit. It was only after he killed that pig in its tracks that he noticed I was there. Strange thing, he didn’t seem at all afraid. He was maybe twelve or thirteen – fourteen at the outside – but you would have thought I’d been living there for years and that he had seen me every day. He smiled, shyly, the way you would expect a boy to do with a man my age, but a man, mind you, that he knew and didn’t fear. Then he went about his business.”

  “Went about his business, Captain Johansen? What do you mean?”

  “He went about his business, did what he would have done if I hadn’t been standing there, by this time not more than a dozen steps from where he worked, gutting the pig, getting it ready to take back to where he lived.”

  She waited, expecting Johansen to tell the jury what had happened next. There was a long silence. She was having trouble getting him into a rhythm in which his testimony would become a flowing narrative. Either he went on too long, drifting off into pointless digressions, or his answers were too short, ending abruptly somewhere in the middle. She forced herself to take a deep breath.

  “What happened next, Captain Johansen? You followed this boy and you discovered there were other people living there, didn’t you? Tell us about that, if you would.”

  Johansen nodded earnestly.

  “I followed him, yes; but it was not like I was following him. I mean, he told me to. He didn’t say that – I wouldn’t have understood if he had. Their language is different from my own, different from any language I’ve heard. He told me with his eyes. When he was finished, when he had slung the pig over his shoulder, he looked at me and I knew what he expected. That’s the only way I can explain it: He looked at me and I followed him. It was not far, a quarter mile down the beach, then another quarter mile or so inland, in a clearing behind that first layer of foliage and just this side of the river.”

  “Good. Now, what I want to get to, Captain Johansen – what’s important for this case – is what you can tell us about the people who lived there. What were they like? Were they savages who preyed on each other?” she asked, casting a harsh glance at the defendant. “Did they spend their time murdering each other and raping the women?”

  Johansen seemed more offended than shocked at the suggestion.

  “To the contrary, they were as decent and orderly as any group of people I’ve ever seen. There must have been two or three hundred of them; men, women, and children all living together in a well-kept village. Each family had a house of its own; everyone seemed perfectly content with what they had.” He rubbed his chin with the back of two fingers, a puzzled look in his eyes. “No, it was more than that. Grateful, is what I’d call it. Yes, that’s right: grateful for what they had; not the things they had, but for life itself. Yes, that’s right: they were grateful for the gift of existence. Grateful. That’s what drew me to them, what made me like them all so much, though the only way I could decipher anything they said was through the gestures they used to make me understand.”

  “Would it be fair to say, then, that these people you found there, on that island in the middle of the Pacific, were peaceful, and not at all inclined to violence?”

  “As peaceful as any I’ve ever seen. More peaceful than most of those I’ve known, if you want to get right down to it.”

  “So if someone committed rape or murder there it wouldn’t be because everyone did that sort of thing? It wouldn’t be because that was simply the custom, the way they lived their lives?”

  For the first time, Johansen looked directly at the defendant. Perhaps he saw something that reminded him of what he had seen that day when he stepped on shore and read in that other, younger, boy’s eyes all he needed to know. He turned back to the prosecutor.

  “I can’t imagine anyone there ever doing anything they shouldn’t do.”

  It was not the answer she had expected, but she pretended that it was.

  “Which would make it all the more inexcusable, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Darnell was on his feet, waiting, as Hillary Clark glanced one last time at the jury and with a knowing smile announced that she was finished with the witness.

  “Captain Johansen, I have only a few questions. First, and just to get this out of the way, you have no knowledge of anything the defendant in this case may, or may not, have done, do you?”

  Johansen appeared to relax, to be more at ease, less self-conscious. He seemed fascinated by Darnell. Hillary Clark had drawn every eye to her when she was questioning him, but everyone started to listen more closely the moment Darnell took over.

  “No, I know nothing about it.”

  “And that’s because you weren’t there when any of these supposed crimes took place, were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You were there, on this island you discovered, for less than a week, if I recall correctly.”

  “Five days.”

  “You’ve never gone back?”

  “No. I’d like to sometime; but no, I haven’t been back.”

  Darnell had pushed his chair up against the table. He rested his hand on the top of it.

  “You didn’t get close to it on the cruise ship, and, as I believe you testified, no one sails that part of the Pacific. During the time you were there were you able to determine how long these people had been on the island or where they might have come from?”

  “No, but I had only a limited ability to communicate and….Well, that was part of it, you see: the language they spoke was so unusual, if I can say a thing like that about something I didn’t understand, that there were times I thought they hadn’t come from anywhere.”

  Darnell nodded as if he understood completely, not that he agreed with that possibility, but that it would have been easy to have had that thought.

  “Language changes over time. Compare Chaucer with the way we speak English today. Were there any artifacts, any books or other objects that might have been brought by the people who first came there?”

  “Nothing that I saw.” He seemed to hesitate, as if there were something he wanted to say but was not sure he should.

  “Please, go on. Anything you can tell us about the people who live on that island, the better.”

  “In a way, it didn’t make sense. There weren’t the kind of things you asked about, but you’d think there would have had to have been.”

  Darnell gave him a look of encouragement.

  “Had to have been – yes, go on.”

  “There were no books, no papers, nothing like that; but more than that, there were no signs of how they made the things they had -the spear, for one.”

  “The spear? The one the boy had, the boy who killed the pig?”

  “Yes, exactly: It wasn’t some wooden stick sharpened to a point, the kind used by natives on some jungle island like New Guinea. The shaft was wood, a fine, polished hardwood like oak or ash, but the point was metal, smooth and sharpened with machine-like precision; and it was not simply stuck on at the end: it was fastened with a metal screw or rivet. And the clothes they wore, they weren’t like anything I’ve seen on any other islands. The men wore leather sandals, laced like leggings from the ankle to the knee, and short white skirts with leather belts and sleeveless blouses. The women wore longer, ankle-length gowns. But the fabric – and this is just one of the mysteries I never solved – was of such high quality, a silken linen finely spun, that it did not seem possible they could weave it there.”

  Darnell moved around the counsel table and came close to the witness stand.

  “What else, Captain Johansen? What else did you think was odd?”

  “Nothing, really: a thought, a feeling - nothing tangible.”

  Darnell did not say a word. He
stood there, waiting until Johansen was ready.

  “Yes, well, all right. It was a feeling, nothing more; but it was a feeling I had from the moment that boy looked at me, a feeling that never left me, a feeling that they had been expecting me, that my coming was not a surprise. I don’t mean me, personally; but that they had been expecting someone to come.”

  Lowering his eyes, Darnell began to pace slowly in front of the jury box. He did not know what he wanted to ask, only that he wanted to know more. He did not have a defense. That was the truth of it. His only chance was to stumble upon something – anything - that might help. He stopped suddenly.

  “You testified that this island was as much as twelve miles long, isn’t that what you said? How much of it did you see?”

  “All of the part that’s inhabited, not very much of the rest.”

  “Why not, why didn’t you explore the rest?”

  “It’s almost impossible. I mentioned that the settlement was bounded on one side by a river. The river runs along the base of a cliff, a sheer drop of perhaps a thousand feet. That’s where it starts as well, a waterfall three miles upstream. The other side of the river is virtually impassable.”

  “In other words, they live on a few square miles, but with tools and clothing they couldn’t have made on their own?”

  “I didn’t say couldn’t; only that I didn’t know how they did it.”

  “Just one or two more questions, if you don’t mind.” But instead of asking them, Darnell went back to his place at the counsel table and sat down. Judge Pierce was just about to ask if he was finished with cross-examination when he bent forward.

  “You were there, on the island, for five full days – isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And you estimate there were anywhere between two and three hundred people living there?”

  “Correct.”

  “And during your time there do you think you saw them all?”

  “I don’t know why I wouldn’t have. They all live pretty much out in the open, and they were certainly quite friendly.”

  Darnell looked at Johansen and then looked at Adam.