There’s a riddle I know about an albatross. Maybe you know it already. It goes like this:
Two men walk into a restaurant where the special of the day is albatross. One man eats it and is fine. The other eats it, steps outside, and immediately kills himself. Why?
It’s not really a riddle. It’s more of a guessing story. A parlor game. One person knows the story and the other has to ask them questions until they’ve worked out what the story is for themselves. Then they speak the answer to the other person—the one who knows the story—and there’s a tumult of nods and knowing yeses and the relief of having worked out something so complex and then you have lunch.
I was thinking about that story on the day Andrei found the dead girl. He was out in the ocean, rummaging through the flotsam in search of new wreckage from the ship in the hopes of something we could eat.
Andrei said it was a good day for foraging. Storms were visible out in the ocean the past few nights. Andrei said the storms would bring us more wreckage from the ship. Maybe something edible. There had been so much food on the ship. Fancy lump crab meat and caviar. Ripe fruits preserved in their own juices. White bean cassoulet with preserved duck and whole legs of Spanish ham ready to be sliced thin tableside with a saber. Enough shrimp cocktail to feed a small pod of whales. All of it locked away in freezers and compartments deep in the ship, dragged to the ocean floor. Andrei said the storms would churn the water, bring us gifts from the sea.
I had followed him, too exhausted to argue, but also too exhausted to do much more than watch him from a rock on the waterline, covered in small, puckered barnacles. I scraped my finger along the rock where I sat, dislodging a few of the barnacles. I gathered them and sucked at the tiny bodies in their shells, took a mouthful of saltwater and shell. There was not enough food in the little barnacles to keep a body going. We ate all of the large barnacles in our second week. All of the shellfish we could find was gone from our shore in next to no time.
There was no feature to the seascape, other than our occasionally reflected faces, not even a line where the water met the sky. Only a steadily darkening gradient of grey leading down to the rocks on which I stood. Even the sun failed to cast much light against the water. The water rose and fell listlessly around my rock, like the storms had dragged all the vitality out of the water. It was flat enough I could see myself clearly for the first time. My sunken cheeks. My eyes bulging. The water colored me over in corpse grey. I grinned at myself. My teeth ran for miles from their gums.
Our island rose behind me, an infertile assemblage of rocks and permafrost, barely a mile across. No trees or shrubs grew that could give us shelter from the wind or wood for a fire. No fish swam in the shallows for us to catch, nor small mammals we might have eaten. There was no water to drink, save the muddy, eternally frozen ice at our feet. The only creature here were seabirds, but they had flown off not long after we arrived, leaving the island’s leeward shore spackled in their liquid white shit.
Andrei told me about them. When we arrived, he’d killed one and we had eaten well for a brief time. It was an albatross, Andrei said, and I had believed him.
***
A shout pulled me from my thoughts. Andrei had his hands down in the water and was tugging something large toward the shore. A sack of potatoes, I thought, that had floated when the ship went down. They would be salty and half rotten, but some food would be better than none.
“Reuben, come help!” Andrei shouted to me.
I stood and lurched toward him to see what he had. I quickly saw it was not potatoes. It was a girl, no older than twelve or thirteen, I guessed. Andrei had his arms looped around her knees, and he was struggling to pull the rest of her from the water. She was a pretty girl. The sea had done well preserving her. How long must she have been in the water, but still her hair drifted around her in a soft halo. Her dress was faded some from the salt working at the fabric, but it was still a vibrant pink that gave life to her pale skin.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Andrei said. “Someone else from the ship. Help me get her to shore.”
“She’s dead,” I said.
“Of course, she’s dead,” Andrei said, increasing his efforts to haul her onto shore, “she’s been in this water for weeks. We’re lucky she’s not half eaten by this point. Come on, now, grab her.”
I knelt to the water and caught her drifting hand around the wrist. The muscles were stiff. Her skin pulled away from my fingers nauseously when I pressed them in. A give to her flesh like raw chicken. I recoiled from it. Andrei flashed a sharp look; there would be violence later if I didn’t do this. I tightened my grip and pulled her from the water, thankful my stomach had been empty too long to heave. I set her on the bank for a moment to catch my breath, and then shifted her weight in my arms so I could hold her by the shoulders.
Weeks in that water and her body was still as fresh as the day the ship sank. No bloating to her face. Frozen solid. Nothing thaws in that water, so nothing rots. She seemed to be grinning. I thought at the time that she had died laughing, ignorant of her fate, but then I ran my tongue along my own protruding teeth and realized how well she was aware of what was coming to her.
We lugged her as far as the entrance to our shelter, just up the cliff past the tide line. Andrei smiled at me and said that this was a good sign. All this drift from the wreck meant we were on a current. Probably a strong one if it carried the girl here. The rescue ships would know to follow it.
I believe I snorted at him. I set my half of the girl down on the ice and flicked the water from my hands. The day was wasted, my energy spent. I belly crawled through the entrance to our shelter, a shallow ditch Andrei had scraped in the permafrost, over which he turned our life raft. It provided shelter from the wind and some warmth when both of us were inside, stuffing the air with our breath.
I lay in the hut staring upward at the bottom of our raft. The sun shone through the rubber, perpetually lighting the space a dull twilight orange. I rolled over on my side, inhaled the damp musk of frozen earth. From outside came the sound of ripping fabric and Andrei’s huffing breath. I closed my eyes.
***
Nobody ever guesses the albatross riddle in its entirety. It is a story whose purpose is to confound your audience. They will ask questions all around the death, but never quite see the truth.
Did someone else actually kill him?
No, it was by his hand.
Did the man who killed himself know the man who was fine?
They knew each other, yes.
Had the men eaten albatross before?
I can’t answer that question as it is phrased.
If they are persistent, a person might ask these questions for an hour or more. Eventually, they will give up and make up an answer for themselves. No matter how much you protest that they are incorrect, they will go no further.
Even I find the solution shifts for me every time I tell the story, though I know the true answer. Each time I tell myself the story, I feel I am closer, somehow, to discovering a truer solution than the first one I found.
***
When I woke up, the same dull light was glowing through the bottom of the raft. Andrei was next to me, adjusting his great, oily bulk to maximize his contact with me for warmth. Had I slept hours or only a few minutes? Had it been days? The sun did not move in its normal path there, but circled the sky in an endless figure eight that dipped below the horizon for a scarce quarter hour each day. A few pale stars came out in that time, just enough to reconnect us with our position on the rest of the planet.
I felt the push of his belly against my back. He was still, somehow, as fat as when we arrived. At least he is still clothed, I thought.
He wasted no time in raising the subject of the girl.
“This has been a lucky day for us. The girl? I looked her over. That water kept her,” he said. I stayed silent, which he seemed to take as a sign of disagreement. “It may be a while yet before rescue crews find us. Even with a current, they might take some time to find this island. It’s small, likely not on any maps. If they pass us at night, they might have to double back again once or twice before they notice us here. We will starve unless we find a source of food.”
I felt him exhale. I shifted my weight over my arm, but his presence was inescapable.
“We need to consider our options,” Andrei said. “If there is an asset at our disposal, we have to use it. The girl is fresh. She won’t stay that way for more than a day. It won’t be pleasant for either of us, but it would be better than nothing. We need to live. It’s not as though we’ve killed her.”
“Where is Lucy?” I asked.
He sighed hard against the back of my neck. His breath filled the room with the scent of decay and of something else. Something sweet. Outside, the wind howled.
“Reuben—” he began.
“I remember her. She was with me when the ship sank. She helped me into the raft. She tended my fever.”
“Where, then, do you suppose she is? Have I kidnapped her, Reuben? Where on this island do you think I could hide your wife?”
“The birds—” I said.
“Your wife was not with us, Reuben. If she was on the ship, at all, she didn’t make it aboard our raft. I helped you aboard. Me and one of the sailors. You were sick and delirious. I found you wandering the deck like a zombie, and took you with me.”
“And then what?”
“I’ve told you then what. Why won’t you remember this?”
“Tell me again.”
Andrei rolled away from me. Sudden, stiff fingers of cold air ran down my back.
“Tell it to yourself,” he said.
“Two men walk into a restaurant,” I said.
“Tell it silently.”
***
It helps if you know an albatross is a sea bird. Players ignorant of that fact will waste a whole five questions just figuring out what the men ate in the restaurant. If I am feeling generous, I will explain it as I pose the riddle. Two men order albatross, a sea bird, at a restaurant. I worry this is condescending of me, but I have no other choice if I want them to solve it. It helps, also, if you know that albatrosses are large. They are as large as a short woman would be. I do not tell my players that. Not ever. That would practically hand them the answer.
I have never seen an albatross. Andrei told me that when we first came, the whole shore was covered in birds. He said his ears were alive with their conversation each day. If any was an albatross, I don’t know.
I was sick, then. I caught a fever the day after the ship left harbor and was confined to our cabin until I recovered. My wife was with me. She brought me soup each day, helped me change my clothes, ran the shower for me. When the ship went down, I emerged from my cabin to find Lucy; instead I found Andrei. He took me to our life raft, and made sure she was with us, too.
I spent our first week on the island sick and unable to move. The flock of birds was gone when I recovered from my fever, though there are indirect signs of their former residence here. Aside from the rocks, a thick aromatic sludge of their leavings foams in the tidal eddies on the other side of the island. Andrei said he caught one while he still had strength enough to stalk and kill. He fed it to me while I was sick. But I have never seen a bird here with my own eyes, and Andrei says he only managed to catch the one bird. An albatross about as large as a short woman.
***
I had an insane thought when I woke up later in the day. This island was not real. I was not under a life raft on a freezing rock in the middle of the ocean. The sun was not above me, tracing a Möbius strip path through the sky, refusing its duty to rise and set with the motion of the world. I was home, sick and suffering in bed. This perfect hell of desolation was a hallucination caused by the same sickness that had taken me aboard the ship. It would pass soon and then I would see my wife again, standing with me, daubing my head with a cool rag.
When I found Andrei later, searching for puddles of water thawed by the sun, I shared my discovery with him. “What about me?” he asked.
I said he probably didn’t exist, either.
He disabused me of this belief with a swift crosswise motion of his palm against my face. The slap turned me. Without strength in my legs to steady myself, I fell. I sobbed into the permafrost.
“Get up,” Andrei said.
I spat a glob of red spittle into the soil. It spread and froze into a small blister of earth and blood.
Andrei said, “Fine. Stay if you want.”
Andrei marched off toward camp. The hard soil crunched beneath his feet with a sound like glass shattering beneath a boot. I lay with my face against the soil and sucked hard on the bleeding side of my cheek. I savored the taste of my blood. It was the first flavor I had tasted in weeks, other than my rotting teeth.
***
There are numerous tricks a riddle may use to throw the person answering from the trail of the solution. Consider, for example, that the meal of albatross may be a red herring, an exotic bit of furniture set down to distract from the otherwise mundane answer to the man’s suicide. Without the albatross, the story could go:
Two men walk into a restaurant where the special of the day is albatross. The older man is the brother of the younger man’s wife, who has left him recently. The younger has invited the brother to this restaurant under the auspices of friendship to ask if he might arrange a meeting of reconciliation. The older man is an adventurous eater, so the younger orders two plates of the albatross special, in hopes of impressing him.
While they wait for the food, the younger man makes his case with his ex-wife’s brother.
The brother humors the young man. He likes him. The young man is not unlike himself at that age, romantic and overeager to please, but he is not a good match for his sister. He had suspected from the start she would leave. The only surprise was how long she stayed.
Two platefuls of fried, cubed albatross arrive before the young man has finished his spiel. When the young man finishes, he picks one up and, to silence his nervous urge to speak while the brother responds, he pops it into his mouth and chews slowly. The flavor is gamey, but not otherwise unpleasant. It is like goose, he thinks, but with a generous helping of anchovies worked under the skin. He looks out the window at a dock jutting out into the bay. The brother’s response is simple: The young man is a good man, no doubt, but he must support his sister’s wishes not see the younger man. The older man apologizes for this. Were not bound by family loyalty, he would be happy to reunite them.
The young man swallows his mouthful, and delicately excuses himself for the restroom. The brother can see the young man is distraught. The young man leaves the table, exits through the front door and walks to the end of the dock. With his right hand, he thumbs the heavy revolver in his coat pocket. At the end of the dock, he sits and enjoys the sea air for a brief time. The sun is setting. He pulls the revolver from his pocket, presses the hollow end of the barrel against his temple.
He wraps his finger around the trigger, squeezes.
Maybe you guessed this story because you have asked the storyteller, Is the man who kills himself married? The storyteller says, He is not, so you conclude his marriage isn’t important. But the storyteller has misdirected you. The storyteller meant to say the younger man was once married, but isn’t anymore. You should wonder where his wife is. The storyteller can’t explain that, but if you had known, you might have come to the answer sooner.
***
Andrei was not at camp when I returned. There was no sign of him on the horizon. He had his hiding places, even on this spare expanse. The girl lay beside our tent. Her dress, torn along its seam for the length of her body, had pulled away in the wind, exposing her hips and upper thigh.
I’ve looked her over, and she’s intact.
I revulsed. Andrei’s humanity was leaving him, replaced by something feral and hungry. I felt the hole inside my cheek with my tongue. That had not been the first time he attacked me, but it was the first time he drew blood. How long, I wondered, would I be able to reason him away from the girl? How long before he butchered her and force-fed her to me? Or if I would not eat, if I refused, how long before he came after me in my frail condition?
I folded the girl’s dress back under her. The wind would not blow it away again. I combed her dark hair with my fingers, working delicately through the knots so as not to pull the hair out of her scalp. I closed her eyes, pushed her rigid jaw closed and set her mouth as best I could into a peaceful expression. She could have been my daughter. Her hair was the same black my father’s had been, her eyes like Lucy’s, the same watery translucent green.
My thoughts drifted to the far side of the island. Andrei had secrets there. I was certain of this. The sun was nearing the apex of its cycle. If I walked fast, I could likely reach the far side and return without Andrei noticing I was gone. If he did notice, I was sure he would beat me again. He would likely kill me. I was not suicidal.
***
Andrei first told me the albatross riddle, one day, when I was lucid again but not yet strong enough to move. He was feeding me bite-sized lumps of the same kind of meat he had been feeding me for days. It was nearly flavorless in the cold except for a subtle fishy sweetness that spread when I swallowed, and the lump pressed against my soft palate. I asked him what an albatross was, and Andrei replied, “You’re eating it,” though that was not helpful at all.
We passed that afternoon asking far more than my allotted questions. By the end of my feeding, I had run out of questions and Andrei felt compelled to solve the riddle for me. I wished instantly that he hadn’t. I had come so close to guessing at various points in my deduction. I had known the men were on a sea voyage—that much was obvious, given our situation. I had known the suicidal man was married, that his death was related to some trauma with his wife. But the act of cannibalism Andrei laid out in his answer, the extraordinary detail involved seemed to require a leap in the complex structure of the story that could only have been accounted for by the fact that it had truly happened.
Later that night, I asked him for the first time, “Where is Lucy?”
“Who is Lucy?” he replied.
“My wife,” I said, “She was with us on the raft, wasn’t she?
He shook his head and rolled over.
“There was nobody else,” he said. I heard the coldness in his voice for the first time. “We were lucky to survive.”
I let that be the end of it for the night. What else was there for me to ask? His description to me earlier of killing the man’s wife had said it all to me. I knew then I had never eaten albatross in my life.
***
It took me longer than I thought to reach the rocks where Andrei had once shown me the spattered evidence of a thriving bird community. Our island was not a large place, but starvation had transformed walking even that scarce mile into an act of extraordinary exertion. The sun was coming to its temporary rest behind the water by the time I arrived. The ocean’s mirrored surface reflected the sun back, an oily pigment melting into the water. The refuse left by the birds lay in thick milky tendrils across the rocks. In the water, an flotilla of their turds, amalgamated with seafoam and the remains of feathers and dead fish, bobbed in a sheet and lapped against the rocks with the waves.
My resolve was flagging. The heaviness of the air, its smell, made me long in a curious way for our shelter. It was strange, I thought, how quickly I had adapted to thinking of that as home. Strange how a return to it spelled safety to me, despite all evidence to the contrary. I couldn’t even remember why I had trekked all the way to the abandoned perching ground in the first place. Yet if there was something here to do with Lucy, I had to uncover it.
I proceeded down the slick rocks at a careful pace. If I fell, I was not sure I could catch myself against slipping into the ocean where I would surely drown, or freeze, or succumb to death in some other more horrible way. There was something lodged between two rocks at the water’s edge, visible just as a white tip appearing and vanishing with each lap of the waves. I fixated on that point as I descended through the wet crags. Eventually, the going became so tenuous, I had to press myself to the rocks and half-slither on my back the remainder of the way to the shore. My hands were torn and blackened from clinging to the slime-covered rocks. I did not dare think what infections were making ground into my blood through my cracked hands.
When I reached the water’s edge, I plunged one foot down into the cold sludge to balance myself so that I could lean in and see this white protrusion for myself. Clearly, it was a bone. The top knob was smooth from the wear of the ocean and rounded like a shoulder socket. I dislodged the bone from the rocks and drew it from the water. The mat of bird sludge parted in a near perfect circle as the bone broke through it. It was arm arm’s length or so, and thin. My knowledge of anatomy is limited, but even with my novice eyes, I could see it was from someone’s forearm. From its delicate and slight construction, I guessed a woman’s.
I felt nauseous. I crumpled down to the rock, my right hand gripping the bone at its wrist while my left held my balance, and heaved a thin stream of black fluid into the already polluted sea. This bone had been my wife. It proved she had been with us on the island, that Andrei had killed her for what reason I did not know, and then he had disposed of her corpse in the vile sludge of bird shit where I now found it. Worse, there were marks on the bone, like teeth scraped across it.
When I recovered myself, I ascended, still clinging to my wife’s arm. I would return to camp with it and present the evidence to Andrei of his own treachery. Then what, I did not know. I was in no position to hold him to justice. Yet I wanted to force him once and for all to acknowledge my lucidity. After weeks of claims that she was absent, that I was insane, he would have to admit his misdeed.
At the top of my climb, I found Andrei waiting some feet off, his face made radiant by the setting sun. His expression was harsh, but the deep circles under his eyes betrayed the frailty that worked underneath his severity. He was breathing heavily, his breath fuming out of his mouth in thick clouds of steam. I realized how weak he must have been that just coming here winded him so. He and I were brothers in our starvation.
“Reuben! Good lord, look at you,” he called. “I thought you’d died, and here I find you making mud pies. Well, if you want to spend your days wallowing in albatross shit, you’re welcome to do so. And if you slip and drown in the ocean, you’re welcome to that, too.”
“Albatross!” I convulsed involuntarily with laughter at the sound of it. I marched toward Andrei, holding my wife’s arm before me like a sword. “What’s this? What is this I’ve found?”
“How should I know what you’ve pulled from the water? What is it, a bone? I should expect there are plenty here. The birds live their lives—“
“The birds?” I laughed. It was a pointed laugh. “What did you do to her, Andrei? This is not a bird. Look at the size, the shape. Do you agree this is too large for any bird? But not too large for a woman. Not if she were of modest size, don’t you agree?”
“What’s in your head, Reuben?”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he lied. Then, smirking, “I killed an albatross.”
I swiped the bone hard across his face. Andrei’s mouth opened in a silent stunned yell. Then his muscles snapped to motion. He made to grab me by my shirt, a position he’d taken up many times just before a beating. I was ready for it this time. Just as he reached, I ducked and tripped him. He fell forward hard, twisting around in the air, his head colliding with the rock with a sharp crack.
The fall didn’t kill him, of course. He lay there on the frozen ground, his breath puffing delicately from his mouth, but otherwise unmoving. I lunged to position myself over him. My palm found the weight of a loose stone and drew it upward above his face. Gravity did all the rest of the work of bringing it down on him. He did not cry out in alarm. He did not make a sound until the rock met his head. When it was finished, I could no longer move. I lay with my head on his chest, taking in his stillness. His body lightly steamed as it cooled. The sky over the water was pale magenta.
***
In the few cases where people have discovered the ending, they do so only through profound leaps in their own understanding of the world. To reach the answer has required that they grasp at what seem like inconceivable straws to pull themselves into an uncomfortable conclusion. That is their perception, that they have found a conclusion that, at best, makes them uneasy.
I concede to these people that there are holes in the story. Why should the flavor of one albatross set this man off? Why would he eat albatross at all in his life, knowing what he may have eaten on the island—but of course, no story true or false is without holes. The truth is a spongy thing, after all. Any account, sufficiently dissected, will reveal gaps where reason should be. The hope of the storyteller is always that whoever hears the story will fill these in on their own, caulk them with their own logic.
That is my hope, at any rate.
***
When I recovered my strength it was our dawn again. The quarter-hour night was done. I returned to camp and rested. The next day, I made use of Andrei in my survival; only a little bit and only enough that I could go on another day. It is strange to me, thinking on it now, that I should have readily made use of Andrei when I objected so strongly to his suggestion we do the same with the girl. In response, I can only point to her eyes, so very much like Lucy’s. The dead girl, it turned out was the daughter of one of the ship’s mates, along on the voyage to meet her mother on the American side. Her name was Cecily. Cecily. A name with the same texture in the mouth, at least, as Lucy.
When the ship appeared a week later, I was still fairly delirious from hunger. That has never entirely left me since the island. Often I wake in the dark with my stomach churning, and though I have eaten well already that night, I’ll need a light snack before I can sleep again. I never seem to gain weight, regardless. But I was not sure the ship would see me. We had no signal fire, as I have mentioned. It was only through some miracle that my shouts caught their attention. They sent a boat ashore where the hands found me and the girl waiting. I told them she was my daughter, that we had survived a shipwreck some weeks past but she succumbed to fever. To survive, we caught an albatross.
