Galapagos Part 11

And the Captain was so uninterested in Mary Hepburn as a person that he did not even know her last name. He thought it was Kaplan, the name over the pocket of her war-surplus fatigue blouse, which *Wait was using for a pillow now.

*Wait believed her last name to be Kaplan, too, no matter how often she corrected him. During the night he had said to her, "You Jews sure are survivors."

She had replied, "You're a survivor, too, Willard."

"Well," he had said, "I used to think I was one, Mrs. Kaplan. Now I'm not so sure. I guess everybody who isn't dead yet is a survivor."

"Now, now," she had said, "let's talk about something pleasant. Let's talk about Baltra."

But the blood supply to his brain must have been momentarily dependable then, because *Wait had continued to follow this line of reasoning. He'd even given a dry little laugh. He'd said, "There are all these people bragging about how they're survivors, as though that's something very special. But the only kind of person who can't say that is a corpse."

"There, there," she'd said.

When the Captain appeared before Mary and *Wait after sunrise, Mary had just consented to marry *Wait. He had worn her down. It was as though he had been begging for water all night, so that finally she was going to give him some. If he wanted betrothal so badly, and betrothal was all she had to give him, then she would give him some.

She did not expect, however, to have to honor that pledge almost immediately, or perhaps ever. She certainly liked all he had told her about himself. During the night, he had discovered that she was a cross-country skiing enthusiast. He had responded warmly that he was never happier than when he was on skis, with the clean snow all around, and the silence of the frozen lakes and forests. He had never been on skis in his life, but had once married and ruined the widow of the owner of a ski lodge in the White Mountains in New Hamps.h.i.+re. He courted her in the springtime, and left her a pauper before the green leaves turned orange and yellow and red and brown.

This wasn't a human being Mary was engaged to. She had a pastiche for a fiance.

Not that it mattered much what she was engaged to, her big brain told her, since they certainly couldn't get married before they got to Baltra, and "Willard Flemming," if he was still alive, would have to go into intensive care immediately. There was plenty of time, she thought, for her to back out of the engagement.

So it did not seem a particularly serious matter when *Wait said to the Captain, "I have the most wonderful news. Mrs. Kaplan is going to marry me. I am the luckiest man in the world."

Fate now played a trick on Mary almost as quick and logical as my decapitation in the s.h.i.+pyard at Malmo. "You are in luck," said the Captain. "As captain of this s.h.i.+p in international waters, I am legally ent.i.tled to marry you. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of G.o.d-" he began, and, two minutes later, he had made "Mary Kaplan" and "Willard Flemming" man and wife.

5.

QUOTH M MANDARAX:.

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.-SAMUEL BUTLER (16121680) And Mary Hepburn on Santa Rosalia would memorize that quotation from Mandarax, and hundreds of others. But as the years went by, she took her marriage to "Willard Flemming" more and more seriously, even though this second husband had died with a smile on his face about two minutes after the Captain p.r.o.nounced them man and wife. She would say to furry Akiko when she was an old, old lady, bent over and toothless, "I thank G.o.d for sending me two good men." She meant Roy and "Willard Flemming." It was her way of saying, too, that she did not think much of the Captain, who was then an old, old man, and the father or grandfather of all the island's young people, save for Akiko.

Akiko was the only young person in the colony eager to hear stories, and particularly love stories, about life on the mainland. So that Mary would apologize to her for having so few first-person love stories to tell. Her parents had certainly been very much in love, she said, and Akiko enjoyed hearing about how they were still kissing and hugging each other right up to the end.

Mary could make Akiko laugh about the ridiculous love affair, if you could call it that, she had had with a widower named Robert Wojciehowitz, who was head of the English Department at Ilium High School before the school closed down. He was the only person besides Roy and "Willard Flemming" who had ever proposed marriage to her.

The story went like this: Robert Wojciehowitz started calling her up and asking her for dates only two weeks after Roy was buried. She turned him down, and let him know that it was certainly too early for her to start dating again.

She did everything she could to discourage him, but he came to see her one afternoon anyway, even though she had said she very much wished to be alone. He drove up to her house while she was mowing the lawn. He made her shut off the mower, and then he blurted out a marriage proposal.

Mary would describe his car to Akiko, and make Akiko laugh about it, even though Akiko had never seen and never would see any sort of automobile. Robert Wojciehowitz drove a Jaguar which used to be very beautiful, but which was now all scored and dented on the driver's side. The car was a gift from his wife while she was dying. Her name was *Doris, a name Akiko would give to one of her furry daughters, simply because of Mary's story.

*Doris Wojciehowitz had inherited a little money, and she bought the Jaguar for her husband as a way of thanking him for having been such a good husband. They had a grown son named Joseph, and he was a lout, and he wrecked the beautiful Jaguar while his mother was still alive. Joseph was sent to jail for a year-as a punishment for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

There is our brain-shrinking old friend alcohol again.

Robert's marriage proposal took place on the only freshly mowed lawn in the neighborhood. All the other yards were being recaptured by wilderness, since everybody else had moved away. And the whole time Wojciehowitz was proposing, a big golden retriever was barking at them and pretending to be dangerous. This was Donald, the dog who had been such a comfort to Roy during the last months of his life. Even dogs had names back then. Donald was the dog. Robert was the man. And Donald was harmless. He had never bitten anybody. All he wanted was for someone to throw a stick for him, so he could bring it back, so somebody could throw a stick for him, so he could bring it back, and so on. Donald wasn't very smart, to say the least. He certainly wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. When Donald slept, he would often whimper and his hind legs would s.h.i.+ver. He was dreaming of chasing sticks.

Robert was frightened of dogs-because he and his mother had been attacked by a Doberman pinscher when Robert was only five years old. Robert was all right with dogs as long as there was somebody around who knew how to control them. But whenever he was alone with one, no matter what size it was, he sweated and he trembled, and his hair stood on end. So he was extremely careful to avoid such situations.

But his marriage proposal so surprised Mary Hepburn that she burst into tears, something n.o.body does anymore. She was so embarra.s.sed and confused that she apologized to him brokenly, and she ran into the house. She didn't want to be married to anybody but Roy. Even if Roy was dead, she still didn't want to be married to anybody but Roy.

So that left Robert all alone on the front lawn with Donald.

If Robert's big brain had been any good, it would have had him walk deliberately to his car, while telling Donald scornfully to shut up and go home, and so on. But it had him turn and run instead. His brain was so defective that it had him run right past his car, with Donald loping right behind him-and he crossed the street and climbed an apple tree in the front yard of an empty house belonging to a family which had moved to Alaska.

So Donald sat under the tree and barked up at him.

Robert was up there for an hour, afraid to come down, until Mary, wondering why Donald had been barking so monotonously for so long, came out of her house and rescued him.

When Robert came down, he was nauseated by fear and self-loathing. He actually threw up. After that, and he had spattered his own shoes and pants cuffs, he said snarlingly, "I am not a man. I am simply not a man. I will of course never bother you again. I will never bother any woman ever again."

And I retell this story of Mary's at this point because Captain Adolf von Kleist would hold the same low opinion of his worth after churning the ocean to a lather for five nights and days, and failing to find an island of any kind.

He was too far north-much too far north. So we we were all too far north-much too far north. I wasn't hungry, of course, and neither was James Wait, who was frozen solid in the meat locker in the galley below. The galley, although stripped of light bulbs and without portholes, could still be illuminated, albeit h.e.l.lishly, by the heating elements of its electric ovens and stoves. were all too far north-much too far north. I wasn't hungry, of course, and neither was James Wait, who was frozen solid in the meat locker in the galley below. The galley, although stripped of light bulbs and without portholes, could still be illuminated, albeit h.e.l.lishly, by the heating elements of its electric ovens and stoves.

Yes, and the plumbing was still working, too. There was plenty of water on tap everywhere, both hot and cold.

So n.o.body was thirsty, but everybody was surely ravenous. Kazakh, Selena's dog, was missing, and I put no star before her name, for Kazakh was dead. The Kanka-bono girls had stolen her while Selena slept, and choked her with their bare hands, and skinned and gutted her with no other tools than their teeth and fingernails. They had roasted her in an oven. n.o.body else knew that they had done that yet.

She had been consuming her own substance anyway. By the time they killed her, she was skin and bones.

If she had made it to Santa Rosalia, she wouldn't have had much of a future-even in the unlikely event that there had been a male dog there. She had been neutered, after all. All she could have accomplished which might have outlasted her own lifetime would have been to give the furry Akiko, soon to be born, infantile memories of a dog. Under the best of circ.u.mstances, Kazakh would not have lived long enough for the other children born on the island to pet her, and to see her wag her tail and so on. They wouldn't have had her bark to remember, since Kazakh never barked.

6.

I SAY NOW SAY NOW of Kazakh's untimely death, lest anyone should be moved to tears, "Oh, well-she wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway." of Kazakh's untimely death, lest anyone should be moved to tears, "Oh, well-she wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well-he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention. I first heard it spoken in Swedish at a funeral while I was still alive. The corpse at that particular rite of pa.s.sage was an obtuse and unpopular s.h.i.+pyard foreman named Per Olaf Rosenquist. He had died young, or what was thought to be young in those days, because he, like James Wait, had inherited a defective heart. I went to the funeral with a fellow welder named Hjalmar Arvid Bostrom, not that it can matter much what anybody's name was a million years ago. As we left the church, Bostrom said to me: "Oh, well-he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I asked him if this black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn't died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: "Don't worry about it. He wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

After I myself was buried young in Malmo, only six meters from Per Olaf Rosenquist, Hjalmar Arvid Bostrom said that about me, as he left the cemetery: "Oh, well-Leon wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

Yes, and I was reminded of that comment when Captain von Kleist chided Mary for weeping about the death of the man they believed to be Willard Flemming. They had been out to sea for only twelve hours then, and the Captain still felt easily superior to her, and, for that matter, to practically everyone.

He said to her, while he told her how to hold the s.h.i.+p on its western course, "What a waste of time to cry about a total stranger. From what you tell me, he had no relatives and was no longer engaged in any useful work, so what is there to cry about?"

That might have been a good time for me to say as a disembodied voice, "He certainly wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

He made a sort of a joke now, but it didn't really sound like much of a joke. "As captain of this s.h.i.+p," he said, "I order you to cry only when there is something to cry about. There's nothing to cry about now."

"He was my husband," she said. "I choose to take that ceremony you performed very seriously. You can laugh if you want." Wait was right out back on the subject still. He hadn't been put in the freezer yet. "He gave a lot to this world, and he had a lot still to give, if only we could have saved him."

"What did this man give the world that was so wonderful?" asked the Captain.

"He knew more about windmills than anybody alive," she said. "He said we could close down the coal mines and the uranium mines-that windmills alone could make the coldest parts of the world as warm as Miami, Florida. He was also a composer."

"Really?" said the Captain.

"Yes," she said, "he wrote two symphonies." I found that piquant, in view of what I have just been saying, that Wait during his last night on earth should have claimed to have written two symphonies. Mary went on to say that when she got back home, she was going to go to Moose Jaw and find those symphonies, which had never been performed, and try to get an orchestra to give them a premiere.

"Willard was such a modest man," she said.

"So it would seem," said the Captain.

One hundred and eight hours later, the Captain would find himself in direct compet.i.tion with the reputation of this modest paragon. "If only Willard were still alive," she said, "he would know exactly what to do."

The Captain had wholly lost his self-respect, and, although he had thirty more years to live, he would never get it back again. How is that for a real tragedy? He was abject in the face of Mary's mockery. "I am certainly open to suggestions," he said. "You have only to tell me what the wonderful Willard would have done, and that is what I will most gladly do."

He had by then fired his brain, and was navigating on the advice of his soul alone, turning the s.h.i.+p this way and then that way. An island the size of a handkerchief would have inspired the Captain to sob in grat.i.tude. And, yes, yet again the sun, now dead ahead, now to port, now astern, now to starboard, was going down.

On the deck below, Selena MacIntosh was calling for her dog: "Kaaaaaaaa-zakh. Kaaaaaaa-zakh. Has anybody seen my dog?"

Mary yelled back, "She's not up here." And then, trying to imagine what Willard would have done, she came up with the idea that Mandarax, along with being a clock and translator and so on, might also be a radio. She told the Captain to try to call for help with it.

The Captain didn't know the instrument was a Mandarax. He thought it was a Gokubi, and he had a Gokubi in his handkerchief drawer, along with some cuff links and s.h.i.+rt studs and watches, in his house back in Quito. His brother had given it to him the previous Christmas, but he hadn't found it useful. To him, it was just another toy, and he knew this much about it: that it was certainly not a radio.

Now he weighed what he thought was a Gokubi in his hand, and he said to Mary, "I would give my right arm to have this piece of junk be a radio. I promise you, though, not even the saintly Willard Flemming could send or receive a message with a Gokubi."

"Maybe it's time you stopped being so absolutely certain about so much!" said Mary.

"That thought has occurred to me," he said.

"Then send an SOS," said Mary. "What harm can it do?"

"No harm, surely," said the Captain: "Mrs. Flemming, you are absolutely right. It can surely do no harm." He spoke into the tiny microphone of Mandarax, saying the international word for a s.h.i.+p in distress a million years ago: "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," he intoned.

He then held the screen of Mandarax so that he and Mary might both read any reply which might appear there. As it happened, they had tapped into that part of the instrument's intellect, lacking in Gokubi, which knew so many quotations on every conceivable subject, including the month of May. On the little screen these utterly mystifying words appeared: In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunkAmong whispers ...

-T. S. ELIOT (18881965)

7.

THE C CAPTAIN AND M MARY were able to believe for a moment that they had made contact with the outside world, although no response to an SOS could have come that fast and been so literary. were able to believe for a moment that they had made contact with the outside world, although no response to an SOS could have come that fast and been so literary.

So the Captain called again, "Mayday! Mayday! This is the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin calling, position unknown. Do you read me?" calling, position unknown. Do you read me?"

To which Mandarax replied: May will be fine next year as like as not: Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.-A. E. HOUSMAN (18591936) So then it was evident that the word May May was triggering quotations from the instrument itself. The Captain puzzled over this. He still believed he had a Gokubi, but that it might be slightly more sophisticated than the one he had at home. Little did he know! He caught on that he was getting responses to the word "May." So then he tried "June." was triggering quotations from the instrument itself. The Captain puzzled over this. He still believed he had a Gokubi, but that it might be slightly more sophisticated than the one he had at home. Little did he know! He caught on that he was getting responses to the word "May." So then he tried "June."

And Mandarax replied: June is bustin' out all over.-OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II (18951960) "October! October!" cried the Captain.

And Mandarax replied: The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere- The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year.-EDGAR ALLAN POE (18091849) So that was that for Mandarax, which the Captain still believed to be a Gokubi. And Mary said that she might as well go back up into the crow's nest, to see what she could see.

Before she went up there, though, she had one more barb for the Captain. She asked him to name the island she might expect to see very soon. This was something he had done all through the third day at sea, naming islands which were just below the horizon and dead ahead, supposedly. "Keep your eyes peeled for San Cristobal, or maybe Genovesa-depending on how far south we are," he had said, or, later in the day, "Ah! I know where we are now. At any moment we will be seeing Hood Island-the only nesting place in the world for the waved albatross, the largest bird in the archipelago." And so on.

Those albatrosses, incidentally, are still around today and still nesting on Hood. They have wingspreads as great as two meters, and remain as committed as ever to the future of aviation. They still think it's the coming thing.

As the fifth day drew to a close, though, the Captain remained silent when Mary asked him to name any island he believed to be nearby.

So she asked him again, and he told her this: "Mount Ararat."

When she got up into the crow's nest, though, I was surprised that she did not cry out in wonderment at what I mistook for a very queer weather phenomenon taking place right over the stern of the s.h.i.+p, and then trailing aft-over the wake. It seemed electrical in nature, although very silent, a close relative of ball lightning, maybe, or Saint Elmo's fire.

That former high school teacher looked right at it, but gave no sign that she found it at all out of the ordinary. And then I understood that only I could see it, and so knew it for what it was: the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. It had come after me again.

I had seen it three times before: at the moment of my decapitation, and then at the cemetery in Malmo, when Swedish clay was thumping wetly on the lid of my coffin and Hjalmar Arvid Bostrom, who certainly was never going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, said of me, "Oh, well-he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway." Its third appearance was when I myself was up in the crow's nest-during a storm in the North Atlantic, in the sleet and spray, holding my severed head on high as though it were a basketball.

The question the blue tunnel implies by appearing is one only I can answer: Have I at last exhausted my curiosity as to what life is all about? If so, I need only step inside what I liken to a vacuum cleaner. If there is indeed suction within the blue tunnel, which is filled with a light much like that cast off by the electric stoves and ovens of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, it does not seem to trouble my late father, the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who can stand right in the nozzle and chat with me.

The first thing Father said to me from above the stern of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was this: "Had enough of the s.h.i.+p of fools, my boy? You come to Papa right now. Turn me down this time, and you won't see me again for a million years." was this: "Had enough of the s.h.i.+p of fools, my boy? You come to Papa right now. Turn me down this time, and you won't see me again for a million years."

A million years! My G.o.d-a million years! He wasn't fooling. As bad a father as he had been, he had always kept his promises, and he had never knowingly lied to me.

So I took one step in his direction, but not a second one. I was like a female blue-footed b.o.o.by at the start of a courts.h.i.+p dance. As in a courts.h.i.+p dance, that uncertain first step was the first tick of a clock, which would become irresistible. Already I was changed, although I was still a long way from the nozzle. The throbbing of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin's engines became fainter and the steel sun deck became transparent, so that I could see into the main saloon below, where the Kanka-bono girls were gnawing the bones of their innocent sister Kazakh.

That first step toward my father made me think this about the Indian girls and Mary up in the crow's nest to my back, and Hisako Hiroguchi and her fetus in the lavatory and the demoralized Captain and the blind Selena on the bridge, and the corpse in the walk-in freezer: "Why should I ever have cared about these strangers, these slaves of fear and hunger? What do they have to do with me?"

When I failed to take a second step in his direction, my father said, "Keep moving, Leon. No time to be coy."

"But I haven't completed my research," I protested. I had chosen to be a ghost because the job carried with it, as a fringe benefit, license to read minds, to learn the truth of people's pasts, to see through walls, to be many places all at once, to learn in depth how this or that situation had come to be structured as it was, and to have access to all human knowledge. "Father-" I said, "give me five more years."

"Five years!" he exclaimed. He mocked me with the three previous bargains I had made with him: "'Just one more day, Dad.' 'Just one more month, Daddy.' 'Just six more months, Pop.'"

"But I'm learning so much about what life is really like, how it really works, what it's really all about!" I said.

"Don't lie to me," he said. "Did I ever lie to you?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Then don't lie to me," he said.

"Are you a G.o.d now?" I said.

"No," he said. "I am still nothing but your father, Leon-but don't lie to me. For all your eavesdropping, you've acc.u.mulated nothing but information. You might as well be a collector of baseball cards or bottlecaps. For the sense you can make of all the information you have now, you might as well be Mandarax."

"Just five more years, Daddy, Dad, Father, Pa," I said.

"Not nearly enough time for you to learn what you hope to learn," he said. "And that, my boy, is why I give you my word of honor: If you send me away now, I won't be back for a million years.

"Leon! Leon! Leon!" he implored. "The more you learn about people, the more disgusted you'll become. I would have thought that your being sent by the wisest men in your country, supposedly, to fight a nearly endless, thankless, horrifying, and, finally, pointless war, would have given you sufficient insight into the nature of humanity to last you throughout all eternity!