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 shirt 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 ship 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 drunk
Among whispers ...
--T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
7
THE CAPTAIN AND 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.
So the Captain called again, "Mayday! Mayday! This is the Bahia de Darwin 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 (1859-1936)
So then it was evident that the word 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."
And Mandarax replied:
June is bustin' out all over.
--OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II
(1895-1960)
"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 (1809-1849)
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 ship, 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, 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 was this: "Had enough of the ship 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 God--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 booby at the start of a courtship dance. As in a courtship 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'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 god 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 accumulated 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!
"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 nourishing 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 ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, 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. Nobody 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 boobies, 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 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 shipyard every day.
But then, behind me, from up in the 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 God! Dear God! Land ho! Land ho!"
8
IT WAS SANTA 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.
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 ship 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 bl
ue 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. Nobody, 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 ship was without a utile anchor, intentionally ran the Bahia de Darwin aground on a lava shoal which was close to shore. 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 boobies 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 ashore to gather eggs and kill lower animals who had no fear of them. They would use Mary's blouse and James Wait's new shirt, which still had the price tag on it, for grocery bags.
They wrung the necks of boobies. 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 pass 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 sexual 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.