Chapter 25 and Epilogue

August 13

"Hey--hey you, come back with that," Dana heard from just down the mountainside. "Don't make me come up there after you. And stop laughing at me. You know perfectly well that monkeys can't laugh." It didn't sound like Tommy or Brent, and the Doctor never came up on the mountain, claiming a mortal fear of sharp inclines. "What the hell are you going to do with it anyway? Wait, don't eat it. You're supposed to be an Uncommonly Clever Monkey. Surely you realize that no one eats roses. Wait! Stop! Oh, never mind. No I don't want the stem back. And don't stick your tongue out at me, I know it didn't taste very good. But whose fault is that? In fact, what's your name? You're out of the analyst training program." 
Finally Dana had enough information to place the voice. "Gwaf?"
 "Dana?" I pushed my way though another fifty feet of what passed for a path on the Lesser Merrill Island interior. It was Dana. She was decidedly more sunburned than the last time I'd seen her, and maybe a bit sweatier, but I could live with that. We shared an embrace passionate enough to draw screeches of approval from the local monkey population, which thus far hadn't impressed me as any more clever than your average Jerry Springer audience. "I brought you a single red rose all the way from the mainland, but it was eaten by that monkey back there."
 "Yea, I heard the argument."
 "Shouldn't an uncommonly clever monkey know better than to eat a rose?"
 "He'll know better the next time. But what are you doing here? Are you on vacation?"
 "No, my career has merely taken an unexpected turn. I'm going to be working here from now on."
 "Here? On Lesser Morrell Island?" Dana sounded more concerned than thrilled.
 "I expected you to be slightly more ecstatic about this."
 "I might be ecstatic. Just let me hear the rest of it before I decide."
 "The good news is that I've solved your problem about giving Sarah something to hate. And as a bonus I can guarantee you that no more of the island's monkeys are going to be sold for medical experiments or eaten by the locals."
 "That's wonderful. Now what's the bad news?"
 "Johnston Brothers has hired the monkeys as research analysts and we're going to open a branch office here on the island."
 "No."
 "Yes. I have signed contracts."
 "Signed contracts with the monkeys?"
 "With the chief of the village. Our lawyers are relatively certain that he has power of attorney over the monkeys."
I didn't get a response. "Well? Do you hate me?"
 "I'm thinking about it."
 "It gives Sarah something to protest, it gets money to the village, it gives the monkeys a purpose in life other than swinging about like idiots and eating roses that don't belong to them. It really is a fairly decent plan."
 "I'm still pretty sure I hate it."
 "Even though it means we can be together?" I asked.
Dana put her hands on her hips and gave me her hardest look. She was trying to get tough with me, but I couldn't help but think that she was far too cute to pull it off. "Just one question," she said. "Did you do this despite the fact that it might make things worse for the monkeys, or did you do it because it might make things better for the monkeys." 
"Dana, I didn't do this for money or for monkeys. I did this to be with you. I'd follow you to the ends of the earth."
 "You didn't follow me to Spanish Guyana."
 "Well any place that isn't a festering shit-hole. Don't ruin the moment. The point is I did it all for you. Wait...or would you love me more if I told you I did it for the monkeys? Cause I could go with either." I didn't get an answer. Just a kiss. But it was a hell of a kiss. Just the right amount of tongue. And I decided then and there that it was okay with me if the world didn't want to make sense, so long as every now and then it didn't make sense to my advantage. 



Epilogue

"Another fine day at Bucklin," Kerns thought. Not so long ago, it was exactly the sort of day that would have scared the hell out of him. Aging 1960's radical Bobby Broula was on campus to deliver his usual fiery, rhetoric-laced speech about keeping up the fight and not trusting anyone over thirty. Broula was having something of a renaissance that fall, touring college campuses in celebration of the day years before when he'd burned his draft card on the White House steps, then rolled a joint at the Lincoln Monument because a few cameramen had complained that they'd arrived late and missed the first event. It was the 30th anniversary of the whole thing, and anniversaries ending in 0 always get particular attention, for no particular reason. 
 Today's Bucklin students didn't have draft cards to burn of course. A lot of them probably didn't even know what a draft card was. So they'd burned their student I.D. cards instead, right there in the lecture hall, so that Broula would respect them. That was just fine with Broula. It was fine with Kerns as well. Replacement IDs cost $50, $45 of which was pure profitfor Bucklin. And all of this was fine with the students, since their parents would pick up the tab. The only unfortunate consequence was that the student detailed to drive Broula to the airport after his speech had, in a fit of anti-war fervor, accidentally burnt his driver's license as well, and badly charred his car keys. 
 Kerns volunteered to drive Broula himself. 
 "Nice speech," he said during the ride. "The students really seemed interested."
 "Yea," Broula chuckled, "Us radicals from the '60s are even more popular now than we were then. I feel sorry for all those guys who O.D.ed in the seventies and missed all the fun."
 "I guess it must be gratifying to see your ideals taking hold."
Broula didn't respond.
 "I said…"
 "Yea, I heard you. I just don't know what to say to something like that. I mean, what do these kids have to do with our ideals? All we have in common is drug abuse and self righteousness--and the fact is a lot of us from the sixties cut that out once it became obvious the shit would kill us…I mean the drugs, not the self righteousness."
 "Then what was that speech about?"
 "That speech was about my $3,500 speaker's fee and a chance to sleep with the co-ed of my choice, not necessarily in that order."
 "You don't say."
 "Trouble is, my agent booked me to speak at a school in Oregon tomorrow afternoon. No layover on campus means no lay on campus. There goes half my motivation. Fuckin' redeye flights."
 "Maybe you should explain these things to your agent."
 "I would," Broula said. "But he'd probably expect to get 15% of the pussy for himself."
 "I see your point."
 "Oh well, I guess the money has to come first. Being a sixties radical is a full-time job these days. Who would have guessed that being anti-establishment would make me rich?"
 "You sound pretty cynical about the whole thing."
 "No, not all of it. I'm still proud that I stood up for what I believed in 25 years ago, and I still believe that was a lousy war they wanted me to fight. But what kind of person would I be if I never questioned anything I'd ever believed? And what kind of person would I be if I still thought a bunch of 18-year-olds had all the answers? No one thinks 15-year-olds have all the answers, and you can't learn that much in three years."
 "So what do you think about this generation of college students?"
Broula shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I guess they're no different from any other generation. They're going to do their level best to be against the establishment, even if most of 'em are only doing it to fit in. They'll vote for the candidate who's farthest to the left even if they drove to the polling place in the $40,000 Audi that Daddy bought them. And they'll listen to Woody Guthrie albums because anti-establishment liberals are supposed to listen to Woody Guthrie."
 "Do they?" Kerns asked. "Still listen to Woody Guthrie, I mean."
 "Well, maybe not, but they still listen to Bob Dylan, and Dylan was just trying to be Guthrie, so it's the same damn thing…except that no one can understand what the hell Dylan's saying."
 
Well, I guess that's pretty much the story.
In the years since, Dean Kerns has established himself as one of the top college administrators on the East Coast, thanks to his deft handling of the student-center affair and his uncanny ability to attract Pacific Island students to the school. Even his marriage seems stable, despite the fact that his wife once caught him helping a coed named Shauna out of her sweater. 
 Kerns also has benefited from the loss of his assistant. Thomas Prester Smith made it to Tierra del Fuego; that much has been confirmed through Argentinean travel records. Once there, he rented a row boat and, apparently, set off to the south in search of his destiny. The Drake Passage that separates South America from Antarctica is not an easy stretch of water to row under the best of circumstances, certainly not for a non-profit administrator with little experience in seamanship, even less upper-body strength, and certainly no understanding that the month of August falls in the middle of the winter in the Southern Hemisphere. It's unclear what happened next. An explorer did find some footprints once, just simple snowshoe tracks preserved in the ice, heading south towards the pole. They could have belonged to anyone, I suppose. Well, anyone walking alone without dogs, sleds, or supplies across Antarctica. So maybe Smith did reach Antarctica in his little boat. And maybe he found that it was the administrative homeland he'd always wanted, and decided to stay. On the other hand, maybe Smith met his end there on the barren Antarctic ice sheet, his carcass picked clean by hungry penguins. We might never know for sure. Whatever happened, the rented rowboat was never returned, and in the years that have passed Smith has racked up a rather hefty late fee. 
In the meantime, Kerns named Roger his new Interim Associate Dean, and put him in charge the Dodge Aries owner / Plymouth Reliant owner parking lot dispute. Roger promptly bit them both. 

Thanks to the influx of Johnston Brothers dollars, the Lesser Merrill Islanders now live like they're something other than extras from Clan of the Cave Bear, which is just as well, because that really was a terrible movie. A few of them even took me up on my offer to help them get into a top-flight American college. The very first graduate came back to Lesser Morrell Island and opened a resort. The resort's a bit tricky to get to, but it offers one perk that you can't find at any other vacation spot in the world. If you have a poorly thought out romantic encounter and wake up regretting it, all you need to do is walk over the international dateline to the other side of the island, where it's yesterday again and you haven't even considered it yet…Or so the resort's advertising claims. 
 Business is booming.
Sarah and the other environmentalists aren't too fond of the resort, but they have come to love Johnston Brothers' presence on the island, in as much as they hate it with a passion. They have something to be against, and that's all they ever wanted. 

Timmy, as you might recall, made a fortune from his lawsuit against Shiveler's Supermarkets, then invested it with Johnston Brothers. I'm proud to say that Timmy's savvy investments in the market have made him a millionaire. Of course, he'd started out a multi-millionaire. But for Timmy, that's not so bad.
 Life on Wall Street for Andy Keller and the rest is as it's always been: either monumentally great or suicidally awful, depending on when you call--although more often the former than the latter. Andy's personal portfolio now reaches well into seven figures, which he thinks should be enough to pay for his retirement, especially since most Wall Street salesmen keel over before they hit sixty.
 Mr. Gwafinn eventually did get that exceedingly generous severance package he'd long wanted. Some time after my departure, he was able to convince the board that there were other non-Johnstons in the firm who could better manage the company. The board picked a relative newcomer to Wall Street to be the new CEO. Gwafinn bought himself a beach house in Florida and intends to spend his remaining years baking himself in the sun and attempting to catch fish.
 As for my former roommate Dave Orr, my memories of him grow dimmer with each passing day. I can't seem to remember anything he ever did, or a single cause that aroused his passion. I phoned down Dave's parents once to see if they knew what had become of him. They claimed not to know who I was talking about.

I guess that just leaves Dana and I. We're still on Lesser Merrill Island, and we're still together. I run the Johnston Brothers office, Dana protests against the Johnston Brothers office. It's a simple life. But we're happy.
 

Years Later

An 800-pound silverback gorilla leaned back in its $2,000 antique leather desk chair and surveyed the scene outside its corner office. It was the last trading day before the Christmas holiday, and a light snow was falling on Wall Street. For the gorilla, this was the culmination of a hectic decade. It had scrapped its way up through the Johnston Brothers executive hierarchy in record time, and that morning had been named CEO. 
 The gorilla turned back towards its desk, and pressed the intercom button for its secretary. "Get a message off to Bob Gwafinn in our Lesser Merrill Island office," it grunted. "Tell him 'Nice work, but you're fired.' My kids need jobs, you know."