Galapagos Part 12

"Need I tell you that these same wonderful animals, of which you apparently still want to learn more and more, are at this very moment proud as Punch to have weapons in place, all set to go at a moment's notice, guaranteed to kill everything?

"Need I tell you that this once beautiful and nouris.h.i.+ng planet when viewed from the air now resembles the diseased organs of poor Roy Hepburn when exposed at his autopsy, and that the apparent cancers, growing for the sake of growth alone, and consuming all and poisoning all, are the cities of your beloved human beings?

"Need I tell you that these animals have made such a botch of things that they can no longer imagine decent lives for their own grandchildren, even, and will consider it a miracle if there is anything left to eat or enjoy by the year two thousand, now only fourteen years away?

"Like the people on this accursed s.h.i.+p, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compa.s.ses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem."

As in life, he still needed a shave. As in life, he was still pale and haggard. As in life, he was still smoking a cigarette. And one reason, surely, that I found it hard to take another step in his direction was that I did not like him.

I had run away from home when I was sixteen because I was so ashamed of him.

If there had been an angel in the mouth of the blue tunnel, instead of my father, I might have skipped right in.

James Wait ran away from home because people were inflicting physical pain on him all the time. He might as well have gone straight from the delivery room to the Spanish Inquisition, so ingenious were some of the tortures the big brains of foster parents had devised for him. I ran away from a real parent who had never once in anger laid a hand on me.

But when I was too young to know any better, my father had made me his co-conspirator in driving my mother away forever. He had me jeering along with him at Mother for wanting to take a trip somewhere, to make some friends and have them over to dinner, to go to a movie or a restaurant sometime. I agreed with my father. I then believed that he was the greatest writer in the world, since that was all I could think to be proud of. We had no friends, and ours was the shabbiest house in the neighborhood, and we didn't even own a television set or an automobile. So why wouldn't I have defended him against my mother? To his credit, anyway, he never suggested that he might have greatness. When I was green in judgment, though, I found greatness implied in his insistence on doing nothing but writing and smoking all the time-and I mean all the time.

Oh, yes, and there was one other thing I could be proud of, and this really counted for something in Cohoes: My father had been a United States Marine.

When I got to be sixteen, though, I myself had arrived at the conclusion my mother and the neighbors had reached so long ago: that my father was a repellent failure, his work appearing only in the most disreputable publications, which paid him almost nothing. He was an insult to life itself, I thought, when he went on doing nothing with it but writing and smoking all the time-and I mean all the time.

I was then flunking every course but art at school. n.o.body flunked art at Cohoes High School. That was simply impossible. And I ran away to find my mother, which I never did.

Father had published more than a hundred books and a thousand short stories, but in all my travels I met only one person who had ever heard of him. Encountering such a person after so long a search was so confusing to me emotionally, that I think I actually went crazy for a little while.

I never telephoned Father or dropped him so much as a postcard. I did not know he had died until I myself had died, and he appeared to me for the first time at the mouth of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife.

Yet I had honored him for the one thing I thought he had to be proud of still: I, too, had been a United States Marine. It was a family tradition.

And by golly if I haven't now become a writer, too, scribbling away like Father, without the slightest hint that there might actually be a reader somewhere. There isn't one. There can't be one.

So now we have both been like courting blue-footed b.o.o.bies, doing what we had to do, whether there was anybody to notice-or, far more likely, not.

Now Father said to me from the nozzle, "You're just like your mother."

"In what way?" I said.

"You know what her favorite quotation was?" he said.

I certainly did, and so did Mandarax. It is the epigraph of this book.

"You believe that human beings are good animals, who will eventually solve all their problems and make earth into a Garden of Eden again."

"Could I see her, please?" I said. I knew she was somewhere at the other end of the tunnel, that she was dead. That was the first thing I had asked Father after I myself was dead: "Do you know what became of Mother?" I had searched everywhere for her, before joining the United States Marines.

"Is that Mother right behind you?" I said. The blue tunnel was in a restless state of peristalsis. Its squirms often afforded me glimpses deep into its interior. I saw this woman in there, that third time father appeared, and I thought it might be Mother-but no such luck.

"It's Naomi Tharp, Leon," the woman called out to me. She was the neighbor woman who, after my real mother left, did her best to be my mother for a little while. "It's Mrs. Tharp," she called. "You remember me, don't you, Leon? You come in here just like you used to come in through my kitchen door. Be a good boy now. You don't want to be left out there for another million years."

I took another step toward the nozzle. The Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin became a fantasia of cobwebs. The blue tunnel became as substantial and sensible a means of transportation as the Malmo streetcar which used to take me to and from the s.h.i.+pyard every day. became a fantasia of cobwebs. The blue tunnel became as substantial and sensible a means of transportation as the Malmo streetcar which used to take me to and from the s.h.i.+pyard every day.

But then, behind me, from up in the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin's gossamer crow's nest, I heard the dim spook which Mary had become shouting something over and over again. She was in agony of some sort, I thought. I could not make out her words, but her tone would have been appropriate if she had been shot in the stomach.

I had to know what she was saying, and so I took two steps backwards, and then turned and looked up at her. She was sobbing, she was laughing. She was bent over the rim of the steel bucket, so that her head was upside down as she shouted to the Captain on the bridge: "Land ho! Land ho! Praise G.o.d! Dear G.o.d! Land ho! Land ho!"

8.

IT WAS S SANTA R ROSALIA which Mary Hepburn saw. The Captain would of course steer for it at once, hoping to find it inhabited by people-or at least populated by animals he and the others could cook and eat. which Mary Hepburn saw. The Captain would of course steer for it at once, hoping to find it inhabited by people-or at least populated by animals he and the others could cook and eat.

What remained in question was whether I would be along to see what happened next. The price I would have to pay for satisfying my curiosity about the destinies of the people on the s.h.i.+p was unambiguous: to continue to haunt the earth, without a chance of parole, for a million years.

The decision was made for me by Mary Hepburn, by "Mrs. Flemming," whose joy in the crow's nest held my attention so long that when I looked back at the tunnel, the tunnel was gone.

I have now completed that sentence of one thousand millennia. I have paid in full my debt to society or whatever. I can expect to see the blue tunnel again at any time. I will of course skip into its mouth most gladly. Nothing ever happens around here anymore that I haven't seen or heard so many times before. n.o.body, surely, is going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony-or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.

Mother was right: Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind.

On the afternoon of Monday, December 1, 1986, Captain Adolf von Kleist, whose s.h.i.+p was without a utile anchor, intentionally ran the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin aground on a lava shoal which was close to sh.o.r.e. He believed that she could drag herself free, as she had done in Guayaquil, when it was time to sail again. aground on a lava shoal which was close to sh.o.r.e. He believed that she could drag herself free, as she had done in Guayaquil, when it was time to sail again.

When did he plan to sail again? As soon as the larders were stocked with eggs and b.o.o.bies and iguanas and penguins and cormorants and crabs, and anything else that was edible and easy to catch. When he had a food supply to match his stores of fuel and water, he could return at leisure to the mainland, and seek a peaceful port which would take them in. He would rediscover the South American continent.

He switched off his faithful engines. That would be the end of their faithfulness. For reasons he was never able to determine, they would never start again.

This meant that the stoves and ovens and refrigerators would soon be out of business, too-as soon as the batteries ran down.

There were still ten meters of stern line, of white nylon umbilical cord, coiled by a cleat on the main deck. The Captain tied knots in this, and then he and Mary climbed down it to the shoal, and waded ash.o.r.e to gather eggs and kill lower animals who had no fear of them. They would use Mary's blouse and James Wait's new s.h.i.+rt, which still had the price tag on it, for grocery bags.

They wrung the necks of b.o.o.bies. They caught land iguanas by their tails, and beat them to death on black boulders. And it was during this carnage that Mary would scratch herself, and a fearless vampire finch would take its first sip of human blood.

The killers left the marine iguanas alone, believing them to be inedible. Two years would pa.s.s before their discovery that partially digested seaweed in the bellies of these creatures was not only a tasty hot meal, ready cooked, but a cure for vitamin and mineral deficiencies which had troubled them up to then. That would complete their diet. Some people, moreover, could digest this puree better than others, so that they were healthier and nicer looking-more desirable as s.e.xual partners. So the Law of Natural Selection went to work, with the result, a million years later, that human beings can now digest seaweed for themselves, without the intervention of marine iguanas, which they leave alone.

That is such a much nicer arrangement for everyone.

People still kill fish, though, and, in times of fish shortages, they will still eat b.o.o.bies, who still aren't afraid of them.

I could stay here another million years, and that still wouldn't be time enough, I'm sure, for the b.o.o.bies to realize that people are dangerous. Yes, and as I've already said, they still dance and dance at mating time.

The people had quite a feast on the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin that night. They ate on the sun deck, and the deck itself was the serving platter, and the Captain was the chef. There were roasted land iguanas stuffed with crabmeat and minced finches. There were roasted b.o.o.bies stuffed with their own eggs and basted with melted penguin fat. It was perfectly delicious. Everybody was happy again. that night. They ate on the sun deck, and the deck itself was the serving platter, and the Captain was the chef. There were roasted land iguanas stuffed with crabmeat and minced finches. There were roasted b.o.o.bies stuffed with their own eggs and basted with melted penguin fat. It was perfectly delicious. Everybody was happy again.

And at first light the next morning, the Captain and Mary went ash.o.r.e again, and took the Kanka-bono girls along. The girls could finally understand something which was going on. They all killed and killed, and hauled corpses and hauled corpses, until the s.h.i.+p's freezer contained, in addition to James Wait, enough birds and iguanas and eggs to last for a month, if necessary. Now they had not only plenty of fuel and water, but no end of food, and good food, too, as well.

Next the Captain would start the engines. He would head the s.h.i.+p due east at maximum velocity. There was no way he could miss South America or Central America or North America, the Captain told Mary, his sense of humor returning, "... unless we are unlucky enough to pa.s.s through the Panama Ca.n.a.l. But if we do go through the ca.n.a.l, I can virtually guarantee you that we will be in Europe or Africa by and by."

So he laughed, and she laughed. Everything was going to be all right after all. But then the engines wouldn't start.

9.

BY THE TIME the the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin slid beneath the dead calm ocean, which was in September of 1996, everybody but the Captain was calling her by a nickname given to her by Mary, which was "the slid beneath the dead calm ocean, which was in September of 1996, everybody but the Captain was calling her by a nickname given to her by Mary, which was "the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind."

This disparaging t.i.tle was taken from a song Mary learned from Mandarax, which went like this: A capital s.h.i.+p for an ocean trip Was the Walloping Window Blind. Walloping Window Blind.

No gale that blew dismayed her crew Or troubled the captain's mind.

The man at the wheel was taught to feel Contempt for the wildest blow, And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared That he'd been in his bunk below.-CHARLES CARRYL (18421920) Hisako Hiroguchi and her furry daughter Akiko and Selena MacIntosh all called her "the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind," and so did the Kanka-bono women, who loved the sound of the words without understanding them. And when the Kanka-bono women bore children, which they hadn't done yet, they would teach their young that they themselves had come from the mainland on a magic s.h.i.+p, since vanished, called "the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind."

Akiko, who was fluent in Kanka-bono as well as English and j.a.panese, and who was the only non-Kanka-bono who could converse with the Kanka-bonos, would never find a satisfactory way to translate this into Kanka-bono: "the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind."

The Kanka-bonos could no more understand it and its comical intent than could a modern person, if I were to whisper in his or her ear as he or she basked on a white sandy beach by a blue lagoon: "the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind."

It was soon after the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind went to the bottom that Mary began her artificial insemination program. She was then sixty-one. She was the sole s.e.xual partner of the Captain, who was sixty-six, and whose s.e.xual drive was no longer all that compelling. And he was determined not to reproduce, since he felt that there was still a good chance that he could pa.s.s on Huntington's ch.o.r.ea. Also, he was a racist, and so not at all drawn to Hisako or her furry daughter, and least of all to the Indian women who would ultimately bear his children. went to the bottom that Mary began her artificial insemination program. She was then sixty-one. She was the sole s.e.xual partner of the Captain, who was sixty-six, and whose s.e.xual drive was no longer all that compelling. And he was determined not to reproduce, since he felt that there was still a good chance that he could pa.s.s on Huntington's ch.o.r.ea. Also, he was a racist, and so not at all drawn to Hisako or her furry daughter, and least of all to the Indian women who would ultimately bear his children.

Remember: These people were expecting to be rescued at any time, and had no way of knowing that they were the last hope for the human race. So that they engaged in s.e.xual activities simply to pa.s.s some of the time pleasantly, to relieve an itch, or to make themselves sleepy, or what you will. So far as anybody knew, reproducing would actually be irresponsible, since Santa Rosalia was no place to raise children, and children would also place strains on the food supply.

Mary felt this as strongly as anyone before the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind joined the Ecuadorian fleet of submarines: that it would be a tragedy if a child were born. joined the Ecuadorian fleet of submarines: that it would be a tragedy if a child were born.

Her soul continued to feel that, but her big brain began to wonder, idly, so as not to spook her, if the sperm which the Captain squirted into her about twice a month could be transferred to a fertile woman somehow-with, hey presto, a resulting pregnancy. Akiko, who was only ten then, wasn't yet ovulating. But the Kanka-bono women, who ranged in age from fifteen to nineteen, surely were.

Mary's big brain told her what she had so often told her students: that there was no harm, and possibly a lot of good, in people's playing with all sorts of ideas in their heads, no matter how supposedly impossible or impractical or downright crazy they seemed to be. She rea.s.sured herself there on Santa Rosalia, as she had rea.s.sured the adolescents of Ilium, that mental games played with even the tras.h.i.+est ideas had led to many of the most significant scientific insights of what she, a million years ago, called "modern times."

She consulted Mandarax about curiosity.

Quoth Mandarax: Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.-SAMUEL JOHNSON (17091784) What Mandarax didn't tell her, and what her big brain certainly wasn't going to tell her, was that, if she came up with an idea for a novel experiment which had a chance of working, her big brain would make her life a h.e.l.l until she had actually performed that experiment.

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, "Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about."

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quant.i.ties, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.

Somewhere in Mandarax there should have been, but was not, a warning to this effect: "In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done-so hunker down."

The closest Mandarax came to saying anything like that was a quotation from Thomas Carlyle (17951881): Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended in Action alone.

Mary's doubts about whether a woman could be impregnated by another one on a desert island without any technical a.s.sistance led to her taking action. In a trancelike state, she found herself visiting the camp of the Kanka-bono women on the other side of the crater, having brought Akiko along as an interpreter.

And now I catch myself remembering my father when he was still alive, when he was still an ink-stained wretch in Cohoes. He was always hoping to sell something to the movies, so that he wouldn't have to take odd jobs, and we could get a cook and cleaning lady.

But no matter how much he might yearn for a movie sale, the crucial scenes in every one of his stories and books were events which n.o.body in his right mind would ever want to put into a movie-not if he wanted the movie to be popular.

So now I myself am telling a story whose crucial scene could never have been included in a popular movie of a million years ago. In it Mary Hepburn, as though hypnotized, dips her right index finger into herself and then into an eighteen-year-old Kanka-bono woman, making her pregnant.

Mary would later think of a joke she might make about the rash, inexplicable, irresponsible, plain crazy liberties she had taken with the bodies of not just one but all of the Kanka-bono teenagers. She was no longer on speaking terms, though, with the colonist who would have understood the joke, who was the Captain, so she had to keep it to herself. The joke, if articulated, would have gone like this: "If only I had thought of doing this when I was still teaching at Ilium High School, I would be in a cozy New York State prison for women instead of on G.o.dforsaken Santa Rosalia now."

10.

WHEN THE s.h.i.+P WENT DOWN, it took the bones of James Wait with it, all mixed up on the floor of the meat locker with the bones of reptiles and birds of a sort which are still around today. Only bones like Wait's are unclothed with flesh today.

He was some kind of male ape, evidently-who walked upright, and had an extraordinarily big brain whose purpose, one can guess, was to control his hands, which were cunningly articulated. He may have domesticated fire. He may have used tools.

He may have had a vocabulary of a dozen words or more.

When the s.h.i.+p went down, the Captain had the only beard on the island. One year after that, his son Kamikaze would be born. Thirteen years after that, the island would have its second beard, the beard of Kamikaze.

Quoth Mandarax: There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said: "It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen Two owls and a hen, Four larks and a wren Have all built their nests in my beard."-EDWARD LEAR (18121888) By the time the s.h.i.+p went down, when the colony was ten years old, the Captain had become a very boring person, without enough to think about, without enough to do. He spent much of his time in the neighborhood of the island's only water supply, which was a spring at the base of the crater. When people came to get water, he would receive them as though he were the kindly and knowledgeable master of the spring, its a.s.sistant and conservator. He would tell even the Kanka-bonos, who never understood a word he said, how the spring was that day-characterizing its dribbling from a crack in a rock as being "... very nervous today," or "... very cheerful today," or "... very lazy today," or whatever.

The dribbling was in fact quite steady, and had been for thousands of years before the colonists got there, and remains so, although people no longer have to depend on it, to the present day. Here was how it worked, and it didn't take a graduate of the United States Naval Academy to understand its mysteries: The crater was an enormous bowl which caught rainwater, which it hid from the suns.h.i.+ne beneath a very thick layer of volcanic debris. There was a slow leak in the bowl, which was the spring.

There was no way in which the Captain, with so much time on his hands, might have improved the spring. The water already dribbled most satisfactorily from a crack in a lava boulder, and was already caught in a natural basin ten centimeters below. That basin was and still is about the size of the washbasin in the lavatory off the main saloon of the Walloping Window Blind Walloping Window Blind. If emptied, that basin, with or without encouragement from the Captain, would in twenty-three minutes and eleven seconds, as timed by Mandarax, be br.i.m.m.i.n.g full again.

How would I describe the declining years of the Captain? I would have to say that he felt quietly desperate. But he surely needn't have been marooned on Santa Rosalia in order to feel that way.

Quoth Mandarax: The ma.s.s of men lead lives of quiet desperation.-HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU (18171862) And why was quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.

n.o.body leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The ma.s.s of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skulls were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide.

I have now described almost all of the events and circ.u.mstances crucial, in my opinion, to the miraculous survival of humankind to the present day. I remember them as though they were queerly shaped keys to many locked doors, the final door opening on perfect happiness.

One of those keys, surely, was the absence of tools on Santa Rosalia, save for feeble combinations of bones and twigs and rocks and fish guts-and bird guts.

If the Captain had had any decent tools, crowbars and picks and shovels and so on, he surely would have found a way, in the name of science and progress, to clog the spring, or to cause it to vomit the entire contents of the crater in only a week or two.

As for the balance the colonists established between themselves and their food supply: I have to say that that, too, was based on luck rather than intelligence.

Nature chose to be generous, so there was enough to eat. The birds on the other islands were having good years, and so sent emigrants from overpopulated rookeries to Santa Rosalia to take over the nests of those eaten by the people. There was no such natural replacement scheme for the marine iguanas, who were not long-distance swimmers. But the repulsiveness of those scrofulous reptiles and the contents of their intestines inspired people to use them for nourishment only during dire shortages of almost any other sort of food.

The most satisfactory food, everybody agreed, was an egg cooked for hours on a nice flat rock in the suns.h.i.+ne. There was no fire on Santa Rosalia. After that came a fish stolen from a bird. After that came a bird itself. After that came the green pulp from inside a marine iguana.

Nature, in fact, was so bountiful that there was a reserve supply of food, of which the colonists were aware, but to which they never had to turn. There were seals and sea lions of all ages, none of them suspicious or ferocious, save for the males at mating time, lolling everywhere, making goo-goo eyes at pa.s.sing human beings. They were edible as h.e.l.l.

It just might have been fatal that the colonists killed off all the land iguanas almost immediately-but it turned out not to have been a disaster. It could have mattered a lot. It just happened that it didn't matter much at all. There have never been great land tortoises on Santa Rosalia, or the colonists probably would have exterminated them as well. But that wouldn't have mattered either.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa, people were dying by the millions because they were unlucky. It hadn't rained for years and years. It used to rain a lot there, but now it looked as though it might never rain again.

At least the Africans had stopped reproducing. That much was good. That was some help. That meant that there was that much more of nothing to be spread around.

The Captain did not realize that any of the Kanka-bono women were pregnant until a month before the first one of them gave birth-gave birth, as it happened, to the first human male native to the island, who came to be known by the nickname the furry Akiko gave him, expressing her delight in his maleness, which was "Kamikaze," j.a.panese for "sacred wind."