“You listened to my lecture?”
“The end of it.”
“I’ll give it to you.”
“Don’t worry, your copyright is guaranteed.”
“Copyright? What are you talking about? There’s no copyright here in Terra Nullius.”
“I’m planning to quote you on the rest of the planet.”
El Albatros puts down his soup, and I feel something welling up inside me that I would have earlier called brotherhood. The ornithologist owes his nickname to Jeremy, who can devour untold quantities of salad and who spends the rest of the year in San Diego outfitting hiking expeditions with ultralight backpacks and tents.
“Have you ever just missed a plane and then felt this kind of existential urge to feel like you’ve been chosen somehow and wished that the plane would crash?”
Jeremy has finished his salad, which gives him the opportunity to record our reactions with his video camera. He besieges us with questions for his visual logbook, which he has christened Daily Turbulences but no one says anything. Beate comes back from the buffet and looks at the group in amazement.
“Keeping silent behind my back, eh?”
“We were just listening to Jeremy complain about not being God.”
“God?” Jeremy jumps back in. “That role’s already taken, what’s more it’s badly cast, and all the reruns in the world won’t help.”
“I’m much more interested,” says Beate, “in hearing who would rather be reborn as an animal and who would prefer coming back as a robot.”
El Albatros is the first to respond. “I’m exempt from that one,” he says, “since you made me a bird in this life.”
The nickname just happened to slip out of Jeremy’s mouth one day after hearing yet another panegyric on the magnificent white creature with the greatest wingspan of all. He gave it an odd pronunciation, saying the “El” like a Chicano, and extending the “Albatros” just like the bird extends its wings. As soon as they’ve finished lunch, El Albatros rounds up all the birders like a guru gathering his sect. They are immediately recognizable from the powerful binoculars they carry around their necks, they crowd together on the open afterdeck and stare out intently, propping their elbows on the rail to steady their scopes, collecting sighting after sighting as they get soaked by the spray. One of them has taken his post behind a spotting glass, hoping to add a “lifer” to his list, a first look at a south polar skua, easily mistaken for a brown skua but a lot more rare. There’s a clear sense of competition (supposedly they are inclined to compare their eyesight as they twitch away), and it’s easy to get knocked off course when there’s so much ambition-fueled headwind, even El Albatros has been convicted of an overly hasty misidentification. Later they huddle over an open copy of Birds of the Antarctic, fingers glide over feathers, shadings trigger arguments as to which jaeger has been spotted, a mistaken attribution spoils the joy of the sighting. Once on a previous trip I positioned myself within hearing distance of the bird lovers and waited a bit before giving an excited shout:
“There, over there, sooty albatross!” (I had picked out this particular rare bird earlier in the library.)
“Where, where?”
I poked my finger in the air:
“Over there”—their torsos leaned forward—“oh, now it’s dived”—and they peered into the waves—“now I don’t see it anymore”—and they let their gaze glide over the water—“now it’s gone”—they didn’t give up easily and kept scanning sea and sky with dogged tenacity—“what a shame, what a real shame.”
El Albatros inquired with genuine interest about the head plumage and whether the primary feathers showed any darkened patches, I played the unsure witness until a twinkle in my eye gave me away and El Albatros forced me to confess: I can declare with absolute certainty that I have seen a striated tabular iceberg but I couldn’t say for sure that I had just sighted that rare bird. El Albatros wasn’t really mad at me, in fact he shares my antipathy for those passengers more interested in their checklists than in the wonder of a single bird, the miracle of its capacity to glide for hours, the marvel of its nasal salt glands, its astounding ability to dive and its mastery of navigation. Instead they fuss over recording every sighting, the place the time the witnesses, so that historians may one day draw on their extensive documentation to reconstruct the former distribution of diverse bird species on the planet. No, it won’t come to that, the historians will die out before the last bird does.
Do our nightmares change — our collective nightmares? The distillate of our drunken disputes? Are nightmares the most honest expression of any given era? During his sleep my father used to lose his way in a snowstorm (as he confessed to me one day as proof of his affection), he would stumble blindly across a house that had no doors or windows or chimney but which was inhabited, the house smelled of life (stuffed cabbage rolls — that’s how culinarily precise my father’s nightmares were). The building gave off warmth that thawed his frozen hands, and when he put his ear to the wooden outer wall he could hear muffled voices. But no matter how loud he cried out or even if he drummed on the wall until his hands bled, the people inside didn’t hear him, or else they heard him and ignored him. His instinct for self-preservation woke him up before he perished outside that pitiless place. If only I were granted a nightmare like that, I would shout with joy, I would fling my cap into a flurry of snow, anything would be better than sitting on a cliff with a clump of ice melting in my hands, leaking water that trickles down my arms and into my shirt and over my thighs, dripping and dripping into a puddle between my legs. No matter how carefully I cradle the ice in my hands it continues to melt. I try to stash it somewhere, set it on a cliff, but the ice stays glued to my hands until in the end all I’m holding is a sopping relic, a souvenir. What a disgustingly sentimental dream, I can imagine my colleagues’ blank reaction, Hölbl would give me a lambasting, they’ve really gone and dumped some shit in your subconscious, he would say. There are some nightmares you cannot entrust to anyone.