We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [78]
"The free men were just like Jim here."
"So they were a commodity?"
"Yes," Jack Lewis said, and his eyes took on a remote expression, as though the conversation didn't interest him and his journey into the unknown had already started. I was going to have to hurry.
"But what was the deal about?"
"Grains of sand," he whispered. "Pebbles. Toys for children."
His head slumped to one side and his eyes closed, as if he was falling asleep. For a moment I feared that he had died. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.
"We despise the natives because they allow themselves to be mesmerized by glass baubles. I don't know what they must think of us. We'll kill over a grain of sand covered in oyster scum."
"What did you give them in return for the pearls?"
"I paid with the free men."
"So they weren't free. They were your prisoners."
"No," Jack Lewis said and shook his head; again his shattered chest gurgled. "You still haven't got it. They weren't my prisoners. They were my students."
"You're right. I still haven't got it. I think you've been telling me a pack of lies."
"Listen to me." Jack Lewis was still lying with one cheek against the deck. When he glanced up at me again, it was with a teasing look that was hard to associate with a dying man. "The savages have no concept of freedom. They're free, but they don't know it. So before they can learn to value their freedom, they must first lose it."
"And so you trapped them in the hold?"
Jack Lewis grimaced, but whether it was in response to my slow wits or because he was trying to smile again, I couldn't decide.
"No, I didn't trap them in the hold. I merely left them to their own fear. I made sure they never saw the light of day, and in the dark they conjured up all sorts of ideas about the terrible fate that was waiting for them. When I opened the hatch and allowed the daylight in, their education was complete. They understood instantly what freedom was, and they grabbed it."
"What's that got to do with the pearls?"
"The answer lies with the Morning Star," Jack Lewis said. "She was a blackbirder, a slave ship. She foundered and the slaves in the hold rebelled, killed the crew, and took over the island, which was uninhabited. There were women and children among them, so as far as they were concerned they weren't stranded on a desert island. They'd been given a whole new world, where they could start over. Their paradise was only missing one thing, and that's where I entered the scene."
His face lit up in triumph, and it suddenly dawned on me why he was confiding all this to me. He was so proud of his cruelty that he couldn't bear the thought of dying with it unwitnessed. He'd turned his entire life into a mystery, but now he needed someone to know the full extent of a crime that he personally regarded as final proof—not of his cunning so much as his own unique insight into the human mind.
He turned ugly in his triumph, and I let my eyes slide toward James Cook, with his flared nostrils and stitched-up eyelids. In that moment, I preferred his horribly distorted face to Jack Lewis's. Yet I had to continue with my questioning. Even if I feared that by listening I might end up complicit in his crimes, I couldn't stop myself. I had to know the secret of the free men.
"So what were the savages missing in their paradise?" I asked.
"A change of diet," Jack Lewis replied, and his face contorted in a terrible grimace, which I took to be the dying man's attempt at laughter. The sound quickly curdled into a hollow, gurgling cough. He seemed to be choking, and blood leaked from his cracked, narrow lips. Slowly I realized what he'd said. My disgust must have been obvious.
"They're cannibals, you see," he explained, as though to a child.
"So you sell human flesh," I said. Again I was looking at Jim.
"The world isn't a straightforward place," Jack Lewis said. "I don't sell human flesh. I sell the opportunity for victory. That's what's lacking in paradise, you understand. In every paradise. That's the flaw in its construction. The serpent isn't the enemy; he's just the