The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

When you reached the edge of the Nazca Plate there were flames licking up from the abyss. The sea boiling. In my dream it seemed to me you’d stumbled upon the mouth of hell and I thought that you would lower a rope to those of your friends who’d gone before. You didnt.

There were guys that just simply walked out of the war. You never hear about them. I dont know how many of them made it. Some guys walked out through Laos to Thailand. I know one guy walked to Germany. To Germany? Yeah. A buddy of mine got a letter from him. He’s still there. As far as I know.

people. And if I dont get to kill people I’m going to be a hard motherfucker to live with. And if you’re not here to kill people you need to let me know. Because I dont want to work for you. And then he hung the phone up. And I knew that he was my kind of guy. He was a warmongering motherfucker. And I was there to inflict painful death myself and that’s the only reason I was there. And you wont like this either.

When they left Mexico City the plane lifted up through the blue dusk into sunlight again and banked over the city and the moon dropped down the glass of the cabin like a coin falling through the sea. The summit of Popocatépetl broke through the clouds. Sunlight on the snow. The long blue shadows. The plane swung slowly north. Far below the shape of the city in its deep mauve grids like a vast motherboard. The lights had begun to come on. An edge to the dusk. Ixtaccihuatl. Dropping away. The coming darkness. The plane leveled off at twenty-seven thousand feet and headed north through the Mexican night with the stars milling in the sternway.

In the dying light a river like a frayed silver rope. Lakes deep in the stone coulees white with ice. The western mountains burning. The portside navigation lights came on. The starboard lights were green. As on a ship. The pilot would turn them off in the clouds because of the reflection. When he woke later far to the north a desert city was passing under the wing and sliding off into the darkness like the Crab Nebula. A cast of stones upon a jeweler’s blackcloth. Her hair was like gossamer. He wasnt sure what gossamer was. Her hair was like gossamer.

Well I’ve heard that fruit business before. Which you couldnt prove it by me. Or the berry thing for that matter. You believe that? It’s a member of the nightshade family. Which includes belladonna. The Spanish brought it back from Mexico. From Mexico. Yes. Royal stopped chewing and sat looking at his plate. What you’re sayin is that they wasnt no tomatoes till Columbus come over here and got em. Yes. Or potatoes or corn or about half the other things we eat. Potatoes. Yes. Let me ask you this. All right. What do you think the Italians made sauce out of if they wasnt no tomatoes? I dont know. What do you think the Irish ate if they didnt have no potatoes? You know what it is you’re thinkin of? What is it that I’m thinking of? Tobacco.

and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his. When it was over he stood and clapped. The flat dead echo halting off the quarry walls. She curtseyed twice and then she was gone, striding off into the dark, the shadows of the trees bowing to her in the light from her lantern where it swung by the bail.

He ate breakfast at a truckstop. Eggs and grits. Sausage and biscuits and coffee. He paid and left. Outside in the parkinglot a man was standing with his arm across the stainless steel roof of the Maserati while his girlfriend took his picture.

And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

I dont know. I dont know what I would do about it if I were. The underwater plane. You went back out to look for it. Yes. I’m pretty sure the buoy was gone. I dont know. I could have missed it. The water was pretty rough. Do you really think that there was somebody on the oil rig? I did. Now I’m not so sure. The racing plane in the woods in the snow. You went back to see it too. Yes. The next day? Two days later. Did you take your dog? No. Why not? Because it seemed to make him nervous. Do you think he knew there was a dead man in the plane?

He drank the last of his coffee and stood. The lamps had come on down Bourbon Street. It had rained earlier and the moon lay in the wet street like a platinum manhole cover. Take care, John.

In the coming night he thought that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.