Chapter 14

Dana's days were busier than ever. In between her other vital commitments, she now had to find time for a scientific survey. Jeff Tabac had received word that the environmental group Planet First was in need of a part-time project manager on Lesser Morrell Island. The Planet First folks were engaged in the laudable mission of cataloging the world's fauna and, time permitting, its flora. Now and then, they'd use their data to prove that one species or another was headed towards extinction, or at very least lower turnout at its annual convention. But for the most part they just liked to keep an accurate count of animals. If they didn't, who would?
When Jeff begged off, Dana agreed to take the job--even though One Planet and Planet First didn't exactly get along, owing to their rather one-sided history in the inter-office environmental softball league. Dana had to do something with her time: she still hadn't received any instructions from One Planet.
Animal counting is not an easy job under the best of circumstances. For one thing, science is yet to devise a way to convince a colony of pygmy marmosets to stand in orderly rows for any extended period of time. And there's an unfortunate tendency among many wild animals to respond to surveys by goring their questioners. Dana caught a break on that score, since Lesser Morrell Island lacked any creatures large enough to seriously consider mauling an environmentalist, even if deep in their animal souls, that's what they'd have liked to do. But the island did have its share of animal-counting challenges, most of them related to fruit bats.
Fruit bats are tricky to count; don't believe anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. For starters, studies have found that all fruit bats tend to look pretty much the same, even to other fruit bats. And they seem to have an inherent aversion to the counting process. Perhaps the bats are concerned that any human attention will lead to their being cooked and eaten. Such a thing must be a worry to a fruit bat, whose only natural defense against predators is its unappetizing ugliness, and we all know how little that's helped the lobsters. Or maybe the bats fear the counting will start them down a slippery slope towards the sort of onerous income tax rates that your typical fruit bat would just as soon avoid.
Whatever their reasons, it's a well-known fact that whenever a fruit bat sees a human, it becomes all panicky and flustered and, as a species that doesn't handle pressure particularly well, winds up tangled in the human's hair. Certainly this was Dana's experience with the creature. Time and again, she would locate a cave just brimming with napping fruit bats and begin her count. She would get up to about 10, or perhaps 20 if the bats were particularly tired after a long night of terrorizing the local fruit population. But inevitably the fruit bats would wake up, spot Dana, then get all flustered and fly about shrieking and getting tangled in her hair, which is enough to distract even the best of fruit-bat counters.
Dana spent weeks counting and recounting the same swirling fruit bats until she figured she must have counted every one in a given cave at least two or three times just to be safe. Then she'd move on to the next cave.
In the end, under "fruit bats" in her report, she simply wrote "Plenty."
Fortunately, the job wasn't all fruit bats. There also were plenty of parrots, lizards, and of course those Uncommonly Clever Monkeys, who wouldn't have been so bad to count except that Dana had become certain that they were laughing at her each time she miscounted. There also were some migratory birds, and a truly astounding array of insects, but Dana wasn't sure that these fell under her purview.
All in all, the creatures that made Lesser Morrell Island their home didn't have it too bad. What with the cornucopia of bananas, mangoes, coconut, yams, breadfruit, hibiscus, and something called a betelnut that was more appetizing than it sounded, there was plenty of food that was pretty much willing to sit still and be eaten without a lot of running and catching. There wasn't much need for running in fear, either. If you were bigger than a beetle, no one was going to try to eat you, except maybe the natives, and there weren't too many of those. And even if you were unlucky enough to be smaller than a beetle, usually all you had to do was outwit a few lizards to stay alive.
Fruit bats aside, Dana liked the animal-counting assignment. It gave her an opportunity to explore the interior of the island, including the remains of a volcano that she very much hoped was extinct. It also gave her some time away from her fellow activists, whom she liked and respected--but only because Dana tended to like everyone, and she had to respect them, on account of their politics. Had Dana freed herself from these quirks of her personality, she no doubt would have been sick of the lot of them.

After months of disuse, my brain once again had a reason to wake up in the morning right along with the rest of me. Trouble was, I couldn't be entirely sure the damn thing was still up and running. When someone goes crazy, they always seem to be the last to know. Would I be able to tell if I'd gone stupid? Do people even go stupid? Was the fact that I couldn't remember if people 'went stupid' a sign that I had gone stupid? These were matters that concerned me very deeply at the time. I peppered myself with questions I was likely to hear on my interview to test my brain's response: Why do you want to work for us? Why should we hire you? What are you doing here? Who told you to come? But I honestly couldn't tell if I'd gone stupid.
For the purposes of analysis, I asked myself some baseball trivia questions that I knew I'd been able to answer just a few months before. I was pleased to note that I still remembered that Bill Wambsganss had turned the only unassisted triple play in World Series history...though for the life of me, I couldn't remember why this fact is considered important by anyone other than Mr. Wambsganss and perhaps his family.
I had another momentary bout of panic when I realized I couldn't recall anything I had learned in college, although this passed when it occurred to me that I hadn't learned anything worth remembering in the first place. In the end, I concluded that I probably hadn't gone stupid, so if I was stupid it was probably a condition I'd been able to successfully overcome in the past.
Sanity was a different matter. I had been living alone for some time, and "he'd been unemployed and living alone in a deserted observatory," was one of those phrases that sounded as if it was likely to come before "said acquaintances of the deranged, carrot-peeler wielding man believed responsible for the bizzare attempt on Ted Koppel's life."
To avoid any possibility that my well-reasoned answers to interview questions would come out as paranoid theories about the Freemasons, I decided I'd better check with an objective observer. I tracked down Curt Nissent, a former classmate who had flunked a pair of Psychology courses the year before, possibly in a well-thought-out effort to remain a student for another semester and thereby qualify for a campus job this summer. I hadn't contacted Curt since graduation, even though we had been pretty good friends. I'd been too embarrassed about the whole total-failure-of-my-life thing. He hadn't contacted me either, mostly since he was feeling embarrassed about the failing-two-classes thing. For my current purpose, this lack of contact was a plus, since it would aid Curt in comparing my current level of sanity against my pre-unemployment state of mental health.
"Curt, this is Bob Gwafin," I said when I reached him at the fraternity house that was renting him a room for the summer. "I need your help. I've been living alone in the observatory pretending to be an Indian this summer, but now I have a top-secret interview with an investment bank in New York and I have to get the job or the alumni department might have me killed. I need you to help me figure out if I've gone insane."
"No problem, Gwaf," Curt said. "Based on what you've just told me, you're definitely insane."
"Damn, I was afraid of that. Do you think it's possible I could hide it from the interviewers long enough to get the job."
"Yea, maybe. But as a psychology major I don't know if it would be ethical for me to help a paranoid schizophrenic such as yourself hide from his mental problems."
"Was it ethical for you to intentionally fail two classes to avoid graduation?"
"Who says I failed them intentionally?"
"Come on, Curt, you're way too smart to fail a Bucklin class. Your dog is way too smart to fail a Bucklin class."
"My dog is dead, Gwaf."
"I stand by my statement."
"So I had a bad semester."
"Come on, it's next to impossible to fail at Bucklin. You must have had to sit next to the dumbest person in the room and copy off his exams to manage an F."
"Okay, I give up. I'll help you pretend to be sane. Just don't tell anyone I cheated on exams. I could get thrown out of school."
"Deal. Why don't you come over to the observatory so we can talk in person. I think the alumni department has this line bugged."
Curt knocked on my door fifteen minutes later. "Okay, you're not insane," he said.
"See how easy it is to compromise your ethics?"
"No, no, I really think you might really be sane."
"Is this some sort of positive reinforcement technique?"
"Nope. As soon as I hung up from our call--before I could even contact my psychology department advisor to ask him if I could study your delusions for my senior thesis--an alumni-department rep knocked on my door and threatened to have me thrown out of Bucklin for copying off the exam of a stupid person if I didn't promise to tithe them 10% of my income for the rest of my life. When I denied it, they played me a tape of our conversation. So someone really is tapping your line, and now I see that you really are living in an observatory. I guess that means there's a chance you're not delusional."
"Well, that's a relief."
"But that's not to say you struck me as a beacon of stability before this summer."
"Hey, I don't need perfection, I just need enough sanity to get me through a job interview."
"Then I think you'll be fine. Just try not to mention the secret plots to kill you during the interview."
"Check. Thanks for stopping by."
"Wait a minute," Curt said. "What about me. It just cost me 10% of my lifetime earnings to find out you might be sane. To be honest, I'd rather have kept the money and had you locked away where you wouldn't have been a danger to yourself or others."
"Oh, don't worry about the alumni department, they're probably bluffing. Think about it; if they get you kicked out, then you're not an alumnus and they'll never get dollar one out of you. I'll bet you can talk them down to 5%."
"Still…"
"Tell you what, Curt, I'll make it up to you. If I get this job, you can live in the observatory for free until September."
"That only saves me $200 in rent."
"Hey, every penny counts when you're being blackmailed. Do you want the observatory or not?"
"Yea, I guess so."
"Great. There are only a few conditions. You have to keep an eye on the place so everything's in good shape when Tony Pasqualli comes back in September."
"What does Tony have to do with…"
"And you have to act like you have profound guidance for a man who might or might not be accompanied by a small dog named Roger," I continued.
"What was that again?"
"And, of course, you have to pretend to be a Native American, should the need arise."
"There is still a chance that you're insane, you know."
"Christ, we're not back on that, are we? Listen, I also need some advice on packing. If you were going to New York for a job interview but you might stay forever, would you bring an overnight bag or everything you owned?"
"Huh?"
"I might be back here in a day, I might never be back--well, at least not until my ten-year class reunion, and then only if I'm successful enough to rub it in everyone's else's face, yet not so successful that I have better things to do."
"Are you confident you'll get the job?"
"I'm not even confident that there is a job. But either way, a case could be made for never returning. I figure I'm at least a shade more likely to find employment in a part of the country that contains employers."
"Do you have enough luggage to pack everything you own?"
"Actually, I don't have any luggage--well, I have one piece of luggage, but based on what I've been told, it no longer is within the gravitational well of planet Earth."
"Once again?"
"Let's just say I've found a way to make a suitcase disappear that doesn't involve a transfer at O'Hare and leave it at that. It's been a baffling couple of months. I'm going to go out to get some luggage. You wait here."
I returned a few minutes later with a garbage bag I'd liberated from one of the campus trashcans.
"Luggage," I explained.
"You're going to pack your things in a trash bag? Are you traveling by plane or garbage truck?"
"Yes, yes, you're very funny for a man who just lost between 5 and 10% of all the money he'll ever make. This is the best luggage option in my price range. It's a durable, three-ply bag, and it's hardly been used."
"Hardly?"
"Nothing sticky, anyway. It's a first-class bag. And I've decided to pack all the clothes I can fit in this luggage, and abandon the rest of my stuff here. I might call you later and have you mail it down to me."
"Is this your stuff, the pile of moldy clothes and bongs?"
"No, that's Dave Orr's stuff, which you can have, since he's disappeared along with my suitcase. My stuff is in the other room. It's the pile of moldy clothes and record albums."
"You're leaving your albums?"
"I really haven't enjoyed them very much recently."
"Changing tastes?"
"Pawned the stereo."
"Ah."
"I might want the albums back at some point," I said. "You are, however, welcome to my old textbooks and class notes."
"That's big of you."
"Now I've got to go collect cans for their deposits so I can afford to get from the airport to Wall Street. I could be wrong, but I suspect there's not much hitchhiking in New York City. Care to join me? It's five cents a can."
"No, I'd just have to give 10% of my take to the alumni department, and it's sort of a low-profit business to begin with."
"Sorry to rush out on you like this, but my flight leaves Wednesday morning, and that could be any day now."
"It's the day after tomorrow."
"That's handy information, thanks. Apparently I lost a day at some point, which sucks, because it's not like I can appeal to a referee and have the day I lost added to the end of my life."
"You didn't know what day it was today?"
"Well, I knew it was today. It's not like I was walking around thinking it was tomorrow or yesterday."
"But you didn't know what day of the week?"
"I thought I did. I thought it was Sunday. Of course I realized it couldn't be Sunday when the Johnston Brothers executive was in his office. Plus, there was a Hound-of-the-Baskervilles-like lack of church bells this morning."
"So many clues…"
"There's a lesson here," I continued. "If you're ever someplace with no newspapers and you're going to mistakenly think a day is another day, it pays to mistakenly think it's a Sunday, since that's the easiest day to differentiate from the others. In the future, when I'm not certain what day it is, I'm going to assume it's Sunday. You know, for safety sake. "
"Gwaf, about this job interview," Curt said. "If you don't want to appear insane, you might want to say as little as possible."
"Am I really that bad? Shit. And I've gone out of my way not to mention the Freemasons."
"I appreciate that."
"They do rule the world, you know, Curt."
"Just go collect your goddamn cans."
I couldn't hope to collect enough cans to pay for a New York hotel room--at a nickel a can, that would take well into four-figure cans, more than a small New England town could possibly abandon on its median strips in a given week. So I decided to take it for granted that Johnston Brothers would cover such things. If they didn't, no one figured to notice one more loser living on the streets. But as this was apparently Monday, there was a good chance that enough discarded cans remained in the Bridgeton town park from the weekend to keep me in subway tokens and bus fare. I took my new luggage and walked to the park to collect cans, without the least bit self-consciousness.
"I'm going to be an investment banker," I explained to a woman who gave me an odd look when I rooted through a trash bin.

June 29

"The odd thing about these Lesser Morrell Islanders is how little they seem to like living on Lesser Morrell Island," Dana commented over dinner. It had been her turn to cook for the group. She'd put together a meal of coconuts, mangoes and boiled kelp. All of the group's meals featured some combination of coconuts, mangoes and boiled kelp. Each one of them was a vegetarian, so fish was simply not an option. And no one could agree how to prepare a betelnut.
"Life on a small, isolated island isn't for everyone," said Doctor Mudgett, digging into a mango.
"True, but seeing as it's their island, you'd think it would be for them," said Dana. "Yet all they can talk about is how great it would be to have the things that people on Greater Morrell Island have. And from what I've seen, all the Greater Morrell Islanders want are the things people in America have. You'd think that electric lights was the greatest thing since sliced bread."
"Personally, I think I'd rather have electric lights than sliced bread," said the doctor. "And in fairness, the people of Lesser Morrell Island don't have either."
"Well, the greatest thing since grilled fish, then," Dana said. "They have plenty of those."
"And some of them might be quite tasty between a couple slices of rye with a cold beer straight from the fridge."
"Whose side are you on, doctor?" asked Sarah, who was always willing to jump into a conversation when someone threatened to deviate from the party line.
"I don't mean to argue with you. I would hate to see this beautiful island turn into a Club Med where beautiful young women wearing next to nothing frolic in the surf…"
"Doctor!"
"Sorry, sorry…The mind's starting to get away from me. I've been away from civilization too long. Anyway, all I'm saying is that deep down, as a man of science, I don't believe that a few touches of modernity are necessarily a bad thing. Medicine, for example. I'm in favor of it. And sliced bread, since the subject's been raised. There's a place in San Francisco that makes a sourdough so delicious that it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it."
"And I suppose you never bother to think about the innocent yeast that's slaughtered to make bread?" asked Sarah. "Oh that's right, someone's just a vegetarian, not a vegan."
"So we're back to that are we. For the last time, I'm not anti-vegan. I just happen to believe that drinking milk doesn't make life worse for cows. It's my understanding that most cows are pretty much okay with it."
"I can't listen to this, I can't," said Sarah, dropping her boiled kelp and heading back to her tent.
"In the future, it might be wise not to bring up the vegetarian/vegan debate," the doctor advised Dana. "It's something of a sore point around here."
"Me? I didn't say anything about it," said Dana. "At least I didn't mean to. I was pointing out that the Lesser Morrell Islanders all seem to dream about leaving Lesser Morrell Island."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I mean, where are they going to go? These people couldn't survive anywhere else. They'd be eaten alive on Greater Morrell Island, for God's sake…I mean that figuratively, mind you, those other rumors haven't been true for decades now. Lesser Morrell Islanders can't even fathom what it would mean to live in the real world. They just like to talk big."
"I'm not so sure."
"Dana, let me tell you a story. About ten years ago, a young Lesser Morrell Islander did make it further than Greater Morrell Island. He hadn't meant to, you understand, he'd just meant to sail to Greater Morrell Island for supplies. But he got on the wrong ferry for the return trip and wound up in Maui. This man didn't have enough money for the return passage to Lesser Morrell Island, but he wasn't short of courage. He decided to find work in Hawaii, save carefully, and one day return home to Lesser Morrell Island a success. When the police found him he had been robbed, beaten, and driven nearly insane. The authorities sent him back home and he hasn't left since."
"It isn't easy to adjust to a new culture."
"Did I mention he'd only lasted fifteen minutes? The man barely survived a quarter hour in a vacation paradise. No one from this island has gone any further than Greater Morrell Island since then, and no one is going to. They don't have it in them."
"Well, even if they don't leave the island, there's another way for them to ruin this society; they could bring modern technology here. There's nothing keeping them from doing that."
"Sure there is. Money. They don't have any. The official currency of the island is the puffer fish. Sony isn't going to sell you a television no matter how many puffer fish you've got."
"So poverty is necessary for the survival of this culture?"
"Can you think of any rich people who'd willingly bake themselves under a hot sun 365 days a year trying desperately to catch fish?"
"You just described most of Florida."
"That's not a fair comparison. Those are old people. Decision making skills start to falter at a certain age. But everyone on Lesser Morrell Island is younger than 50."
"Speaking of which, doctor, why is it that these people all die so young?" Dana asked. "They eat fish and fruit all their lives, and get plenty of exercise. Yet some of the wizened village elders are aren't so much older than me."
"It's genetic."
"Really?"
"That and they keep falling out of their boats. Anyway, you can't blame poor medical care."
"I can't?"
"Nope. It's in my contract. If anyone blames poor medical care, I get to inject them with whatever I like."
"That's in your contract?"
"Maybe not officially in the contract. But it's something you might want to keep in mind before you start asking about why all the natives die so young."
"Doctor!"
"Sorry, that just slipped out. You know, I'm starting to think I might have spent too much time living on islands. Sooner or later being stuck on a tiny patch of land in the middle of the ocean gets to you, you know. And I've been living on islands ever since I went to that Caribbean medical school."
"I think I understand."
"It's the waves that do it."
"The waves?"
"The waves never stop coming. You try to run away, but there are waves all around you. Wave after wave after wave."
"Doctor?"
"I'm okay. I'm okay. Really I am. Are you going to finish your kelp?"
Dana handed over her kelp.