Galapagos

Selena hears her father walking outside with Zenji. She remains in the hotel room. The narrative reveals that her blindness is “caused by a defective gene inherited on the female side” (85). Outside, the Ecuadorian Army guards the hotel against the increasingly restless and hungry crowds. Private Geraldo Delgado is with the Army but is a paranoid schizophrenic. Under the mistaken impression that he is, among other outlandish claims, “the greatest dancer in the world” (86), Delgado burgles a small, defunct souvenir shop. He believes that he’s breaking into the headquarters of the Ecuadorian ballet society. In an aside, the narrator sympathizes with Delgado. He remembers how, when he was a Marine in Vietnam, he committed far worse acts that anything Delgado does. By breaking into the store, Delgado creates a breach in the militarized perimeter around the hotel. He spots Andrew and Zenji. Delgado mistakes Mandarax for “a little radio which could scramble his brains” (87), and he shoots both men in the head. He flees past a group of starving Kanka-bono orphans and escapes, vanishing into the crowd. Later, these orphans will escape to Santa Rosalia. First, however, they enter the hotel through the door in the souvenir shop that Delgado opened.

The group of orphaned Kanka-bono girls was rescued from a rural part of Ecuador when their community was sprayed with a modern pesticide. Most of the Kanka-bonos were killed, and the girls were saved by a Catholic missionary named Father Fitzgerald, who attracted the attention of a pilot named Ximenez. Ximenez then flew the girls to Guayaquil. In the city, the orphaned girls fell under the influence of a disreputable man named Quezeda, who planned to turn them into a gang of thieves and prostitutes for his own enrichment. The girls ran away from him but, not speaking Spanish, struggled for food as the economy collapsed. Then, “attracted by the sounds of the crowds” (91) around the hotel, they found the door opened by Delgado and entered the hotel through the souvenir shop. In the hotel, they found James Wait in the cocktail lounge and pleaded for his help.

Mary tries to die by suicide in her room. As she lays with a plastic sheet wrapped around her head, she thinks about the near extinction of the giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands. Unknown to Mary, a disease is beginning to spread through humans that likewise will cause near extinction. The disease makes women infertile, and it will soon spread “practically everywhere” (92). As she’s about to die, Mary changes her mind. She leaves her room and finds Wait in the bar, feeding “peanuts and olives and maraschino cherries and cocktail onions” (93) to the orphans. In this moment, she’s convinced that he is a good, compassionate man. Wait is really a murderer. While working as a prostitute, he was hired by a European aristocrat named Prince Richard. Prince Richard asked Wait to strangle him with a silk sash until he was near death, as he derived sexual pleasure from this autoerotic asphyxiation, which he described as a “spiritual experience” (94). Wait complied but left the sash around Richard’s neck too long, and Richard died.

Wait is surprised how much he enjoys being charitable to the orphaned Kanka-bono girls. Mary is taken by his apparent act of kindness. They begin talking, and he invents a story about a deceased wife—and then probes Mary for information about her life and finances.

The narrator discusses his childhood, when his mother abandoned him. He was raised by his father, who spent each night saying “blah-blah-blah” (99) to himself. The narrator continued this habit into his own adulthood. When he was in the military, his fellow soldiers were annoyed by his tendency to talk in his sleep. In the hotel bar, Wait continues lying to Mary. Siegfried enters the bar. He has just seen Zenji and Andrew shot by Delgado, and he knows that the crowd outside the hotel won’t be held back for much longer. Nevertheless, he remains calm so as not to cause a panic. He asks Wait to fetch Selena and Hisako from their hotel rooms. He takes the guests and the orphans on a bus to the airport, hoping that they’ll be able to escape.

As the group sits on the bus, a radio broadcast announces that the Nature Cruise of the Century has been cancelled. To the people of Guayaquil, this means that “the food in the hotel now belonged to everyone” (101). The angry crowd gathering around the bus frightens the passengers. Hisako helps Selena, the “first intimate act” (101) of many between them. Wait puts himself protectively in front of the orphans. Mary joins him. Unknown to Wait, a hereditary heart condition begins to affect him. As one crowd surrounds the bus, another goes to the Bahia de Darwin to steal the food and equipment from the ship. Adolf hides in the crow’s nest. At the hotel, the crowd rushes past the bus to loot the El Dorado. At the same time, Peru launches its military attack on Ecuador. As Siegfried plans to drive the bus to the local airport, two Peruvian fighter planes target the airport and the naval harbor where the Bahia de Darwin is docked.

The narrator speculates how the world might have been different—a million years in the future—if the original passenger list of the Nature Cruise of the Century had survived on Santa Rosalia. He decides that “humanity would still be pretty much what it is today” (103). He also speculates about what might have changed if lobsters had survived to become the dominant species on Earth. Regardless, humans in the future are aquatic, fur covered creatures that have smaller brains and flippers. According to the narrator, “all the people are so innocent and relaxed now, all because evolution took their hands away” (105).

A young Peruvian pilot named Colonel Reyes flies his fighter jet toward Ecuador. He fires a rocket at the Guayaquil International Airport, a “legitimate military target” (106). In his mind, he compares the act of firing the rocket to sexual intercourse. The narrator reflects on the machines and technology that humanity invents to wage war. He compares Reyes’s rocket to his own experiences in Vietnam and describes the rocket hitting the radar station as “a key event” (107).

Adolf inspects the Bahia de Darwin. The ship has been stripped of all its food and navigational equipment as well as any comforts or luxuries. Adolf searches his cabin. His clothes have been taken, but he finds a solitary bottle of cognac and proceeds to get drunk. He hears the last of the crew stealing the ship’s lifeboats and leaving the Bahia de Darwin, which is moored to the harbor by only one towline. Adolf discovers that the engines still function. He sees a “shooting star” (111)—really Reyes’s rocket on the way to the airport—and remembers how meteorites killed the dinosaurs. He hears the explosion at the airport. On the bus, Wait passes out, as he’s having a heart attack. Siegfried pauses the trip to the airport and, in doing so, avoids Reyes’s rocket. The explosion rocks the bus and leaves the passengers alive but partially deaf, a condition from which (the narrative reveals) they’ll never recover. Siegfried drives to the harbor where the looted Bahia de Darwin seems like “a peaceful stopping place in the chaos” (112). As Huntington’s disease begins to affect him, Siegfried sees a shadowy figure emerging from the boat. He doesn’t recognize his brother. Instead, he believes the boat is haunted and thinks he sees a ghost. The narrator, who actually is the ghost who haunts the ship, identifies himself as Leon Trout.

Adolf recognizes Siegfried and drunkenly calls down to him, welcoming him to the Nature Cruise of the Century. Siegfried, still partially deaf, talks with his brother in German. Adolf is “terribly self-centered” (114) and complains that one of the crew called him a clown while stealing the ship’s compass.

Adolf explains his theory about meteorites destroying the city. Siegfried explains that they need to help the people from the bus onto the ship. He says that he’s no longer “in control of [his] own actions” (116) due to the disease he inherited from their father. The people on the bus are now Adolf’s responsibility, Siegfried says. The group manages to get Wait on to the ship as he struggles with the aftermath of his heart attack. Once all the passengers are aboard the ship, Siegfried returns to the bus. Feeling his body being taken over by his disease, he plans to drive back into the city and “kill himself by smashing into something” (118). Before he can start the engine of the bus, however, he feels the shock wave form another explosion.

The explosion is another Peruvian rocket hitting a Columbian freighter, which the pilot mistook for the Bahia de Darwin. Onboard the freighter, Columbians, who are eating beef from a cow they took from Ecuador, are “blown to bits” (120). A tidal wave from the explosion sweeps the bus from the wharf, drowns Siegfried, and snaps the towline mooring the Bahia de Darwin to the dock, pushing the ship upstream to be “left gently aground on a mudbank in the shallows” (121). In the distance, Guayaquil burns. Adolf starts the engines, frees the ship from the mudbank, and steers the ship toward the open ocean.