"That's something to smile about?" he said.
"Was I smiling?" she said. "My goodness--it's certainly nothing to smile about."
"A swelling that big--" he said, "it can't be anything minor."
"I couldn't agree with you more," she said. "We will just have to watch and wait. What else can we do?"
"She was so cheerful," he marveled. "She didn't seem to mind at all--that awful swelling."
"As you've said so often," said Mary, "they aren't like us. They're very primitive in their thinking. They try to make the best of whatever happens. They figure they can't do much of anything about anything anyway, so they take life as it comes."
She had Mandarax there in bed with her. She and the furry Akiko, who was then only ten years old, were the only colonists who still found the instrument at all amusing. If it weren't for them, the Captain or Selena or Hisako, feeling mocked by its useless advice or inane wisdom or ponderous efforts to be humorous, would have pitched it into the ocean long ago.
The Captain, in fact, had felt personally insulted by Mandarax since it had come up with the poem about the ridiculous captain of the Walloping Window Blind.
So Mary was able to come up now with a comment concerning the supposed ignorance of the Kanka-bono woman, who was so happy despite the growth in her belly, to wit:
The happiest life consists in ignorance,
Before you learn to grieve and to rejoice.
--SOPHOCLES (496-406 B.C.)
Mary was toying with him in a way which I, as a former fellow male of the Captain, was bound to think smug and mean-spirited. If I had been a woman in life, I might have felt differently. If I had been a woman, perhaps I would have been jubilant over Mary Hepburn's secret jeering at the limited role males played in reproduction back then, and which they still play today. That has not changed. There are still these big lunks who can be counted upon to squirt lively sperm in season.
Mary's secret jeering was about to become overt and nasty, too. After Kamikaze was born, and the Captain learned that this was his own son, he would stammer that he surely should have been consulted.
And Mary would reply: "You didn't have to carry that child for nine months, and then have it fight its way out from between your legs. You can't breast-feed it, even if you'd like to, which I somehow doubt. And nobody expects you to help raise it. The hope is, in fact, that you will have absolutely nothing to do with it!"
"Even so--" he protested.
"Oh, my God--" she said, "if we could have made a baby out of marine-iguana spit, don't you think we would have done that, and not even disturbed Your Majesty?"
12
AFTER SHE SAID THAT to the Captain, there was no way that their relationship could continue as before. A million years ago, there was a great deal of big-brained theorizing about how to keep human couples from breaking up, and there was at least one way Mary could have gone on living with the Captain for a little while longer anyway, if she had really wanted to. She could have told him that the Kanka-bono women had engaged in sexual intercourse with sea lions and fur seals. He would have believed it, not only because he held a low opinion of the women's morals, but because he could never even have suspected that artificial insemination had taken place. He would not have considered it possible, although the procedure, in fact, turned out to be child's play, as easy as pie.
Quoth Mandarax:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
--ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)
To which I add:
Yes, but something there is which adores a mucous membrane.
--LEON TROTSKY TROUT
(1946-1,001,986)
So Mary might have saved the relationship with a lie, although there would still have been Kamikaze's blue eyes to explain. One person in twelve today, incidentally, has the Captain's blue eyes and his curly golden hair. Sometimes I will joke with such a specimen, saying, "Guten morgen, Herr von Kleist," or, "Wie geht's es Ihnen, Fraulein von Kleist?" That's about all the German I have.
It is more than enough today.
Should Mary Hepburn have saved her relationship with a lie? The question remains moot after all this time. They were never an ideal couple. They had been stuck with each other after Selena and Hisako paired off and raised Akiko, and the Kanka-bono women moved to the far side of the crater, preserving the purity of their Kanka-bono beliefs and attitudes and ways.
One of the Kanka-bonos' customs, incidentally, was to keep their names a secret from anyone who wasn't a Kanka-bono. I was privy to their secrets, though, just as I was privy to everybody else's secrets, and there seems no harm in my now revealing that the first to have a baby by the Captain was Sinka, and the second to have a baby was Lor, and the third to have a baby was Lira, and the fourth to have a baby was Dirno, and the fifth to have a baby was Nanno, and the sixth to have a baby was Keel.
After Mary moved out on the Captain, and made a canopy and a feather bed of her own, she would say to Akiko that she was no lonelier then than she had been when she lived with the Captain. She had several specific complaints about the Captain, faults he might easily have remedied, if he himself had been at all interested in making their relationship viable.
"Both people have to work at a relationship," she advised Akiko. "If just one works on it, you might as well forget about it. It's just no good, and whichever one does all the work winds up the way I did, feeling like some kind of fool all the time. I was really happily married one time, Akiko, and would have been really happily married twice, if Willard hadn't died--so I know how it's supposed to work."
She enumerated the four most serious faults which the Captain might have remedied easily, but wouldn't, as follows:
When he spoke of what he would do after they were rescued, he never included her in his plans.
He made fun of Willard Flemming, although he knew how much this hurt her, doubting very much that he had written two symphonies or knew anything about windmills, or that he could even ski.
He complained constantly about the beeping sounds Mandarax made when she pressed the different buttons, although they could hardly be heard, and although he knew how rewarding it was for her to improve her mind, to memorize famous quotations and to learn new languages and so on.
He would rather choke to death than ever say, "I love you."
"And those are just the four big ones," she said. So there was a great deal of pent-up resentment coming out when Mary spoke to the Captain as she did about marine-iguana spit.
I can't see that the breakup was tragic, since there were no dependent children involved, and neither party found living alone absolutely unendurable. Both were visited regularly by Akiko, and then, after Kamikaze sprouted a beard, Akiko had furry children of her own to bring along.
Mary was accorded no special status by the Kanka-bono women, although she had made it possible for them to have babies. They and then their children feared her as much as they feared the Captain, believing her capable of doing great evil as well as good.
And twenty years went by. Hisako and Selena had committed suicide by drowning eight years before. Akiko was now a matronly thirty-nine years old, the mother of seven furry children by Kamikaze--two boys and five girls. She was fluent in three languages without the help of Mandarax: English, Japanese, and Kanka-bono. Her children spoke only Kanka-bono, except for two English words: Grandpa and Grandma. That was what she had them call the Captain and Mary Hepburn. That was what she herself called them.
One morning, at seven-thirty A.M. on May 9, 2016, according to Mandarax, Akiko woke Mary, and told her that she should go make her peace with the *Captain, who was so sick that he would probably not last out the day. Akiko had visited him the previous evening, and had sent her children home and stayed and nursed him through the night, although there was very little she could do for him.
So *Mary went, although she was no longer any spring chicken herself. She was eighty--and toothless. Her spine was shaped like a question mark, thanks, according to
Mandarax, to the ravages of osteoporosis. She didn't need Mandarax to tell her it was osteoporosis. Her mother and grandmother's bones were made as weak as reeds by osteoporosis before they died. There is another hereditary defect unknown in the present day.
As for what was wrong with the *Captain, Mandarax made the educated guess that he had Alzheimer's disease. The old poop couldn't look after himself anymore, and hardly knew where he was. He would have starved to death if Akiko hadn't brought him food every day and, one way or another, made sure he swallowed at least some of it. He was eight-six.
Quoth *Mandarax:
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
So Mary, all stooped over, shuffled under the Captain's feather canopy, which used to be her own as well. She had not been there for twenty years. The canopy had been renewed many times since her departure, and so, of course, had been the mangrove poles and stakes which held it up, and the feather bed. But the architecture was the same, with a view cut through living mangroves right down to the water, and framing the shoal on which the Walloping Window Blind had been run aground so long ago.
What had finally dragged that ship off the shoal, by the way, was an accumulation of rainwater and seawater in her stern. The seawater leaked in around the drive shaft of one of her mighty screws. She slid under during the night. Nobody actually saw her begin that last leg of "the Nature Cruise of the Century," three kilometers straight down to the locker of Davy Jones.
13
THAT WAS SURE some lugubriously historic shoal outside the Captain's home! I was surprised that he wanted to look at it every day. It was down that same half-drowned hump that Hisako Hiroguchi and the blind Selena MacIntosh had waded hand in hand, seeking and finding together the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. Selena was then forty-eight and still fertile. *Hisako was fifty-six, and had not ovulated for quite some time.
Akiko was still upset every time she saw the shoal. She couldn't help feeling responsible for the suicides of the two women who had raised her--even though *Mandarax had said it surely *Hisako's intractable, monopolar, and probably inherited depression which had killed them both.
But there was the fact, inescapable for Akiko, that *Hisako and *Selena had killed themselves soon after Akiko set up housekeeping on her own.
She was then twenty-two. Kamikaze hadn't reached puberty yet, so he had nothing to do with it. She was simply living alone, and enjoying it quite a bit. She was well past the age when most people flew the nest, and I was all for her doing it. I had seen how much pain it caused her when *Hisako and *Selena continued to speak to her in baby talk long after she had become such a robust and capable woman. And yet she had put up with it for an awfully long time--because she was so grateful for all they had done for her when she was genuinely helpless.
On the day she left, they were still cutting up her booby meat for her, if you can believe it.
For a month after that, they still set a place for her at every meal, with the meat already all cut up, and they cooed at her and teased her gently even though she wasn't there anymore.
And then, one day, life just wasn't worth living anymore.
*Mary Hepburn, for all her ailments, was still self-sufficient when she went to see the Captain on his deathbed. She still gathered and prepared her own food, and kept her home as neat as a pin. She was proud of this, and should have been. The Captain was a burden on the community, which was to say a burden on Akiko. *Mary was surely not. She had often said that, if ever she felt that she was about to become a burden to anybody, she would follow Hisako and Selena down the shoal, and join her second husband on the ocean floor.
The contrast between her feet and those of the pampered *Captain were striking. Their feet certainly had very different stories to tell. His were white and soft. Hers were tough and brown as the rock-climbing boots she had brought with her to Guayaquil so long ago.
So she said to this man to whom she hadn't spoken for twenty years, "They tell me you're very sick."
Actually, he was still quite handsome and well fleshed out. He was nice and clean, since Akiko bathed him every day, and shampooed and combed his beard and hair. The soap she used, which was made by the Kanka-bono women, was composed of ground-up bones and penguin fat.
One of the exasperating things about the Captain's disease was that his body was still perfectly capable of taking care of itself. It was a lot stronger than Mary's. It was his deteriorating big brain which was having him spend so much time in bed, and allowing him to soil himself and refuse to eat and so on.
Again: His condition wasn't peculiar to Santa Rosalia. Back on the mainland, millions of old people were as helpless as babies, and compassionate young adults like Akiko had to look after them. Thanks to sharks and killer whales, problems connected with aging are unimaginable in the present day.
"Who is this hag?" the *Captain asked Akiko. "I hate ugly women. This is the ugliest woman I ever saw."
"It's *Mary Hepburn--it's Mrs. Flemming, Grandpa," said Akiko. A tear skittered down her furry cheek. "It's Grandma," she said.
"Never saw her before in my life," he said. "Please get her out of here. I will close my eyes. When I open them again, I want her gone." He closed his eyes, and began counting out loud under his breath.
Akiko came over to *Mary and gripped her frail right arm. "Oh, Grandma--" she said, "I had no idea he would be like this."
And *Mary said to her loudly, "He's no worse than he ever was."
The *Captain went on counting.
From the neighborhood of the spring, half a kilometer distant, came a male cry of triumph and peals of female laughter. The male cry was a familiar one on the island. It was Kamikaze's customary announcement to one and all that he had caught a female of some sort, and that they were about to copulate. He was nineteen then, barely past his sexual prime, and, as the only virile male then on the island, was likely to copulate with anybody or anything at any time. This was another sorrow Akiko had to bear--the blatant infidelities of her mate. This was a truly saintly woman.
The female Kamikaze had caught by the spring was his own aunt Dirno, who was then beyond childbearing age. He didn't care. They were going to copulate anyway. He had even copulated with sea lions and fur seals when he was younger, until Akiko had persuaded him that, for her sake, if not his own, he could at least stop doing that.
No sea lion or fur seal got pregnant by Kamikaze, which in a way is a pity. If he had succeeded in impregnating one, the evolution of modern humankind might have taken a good deal less than a million years.
Then again: What was the hurry, after all?
The *Captain opened his eyes, and he said to *Mary, "Why aren't you gone?"
She said, "Oh, don't mind me. I'm just a woman you lived with for ten years."
At that moment, Lira, another of the Kanka-bono women, called to Akiko in Kanka-bono that Orlon, Akiko's four-year-old son, had broken his arm, and that Akiko was needed at home immediately. Lira wouldn't come any closer than that to the *Captain's home, which she believed to be infected with very bad magic.
So Akiko asked Mary to keep watch over the Captain while she went home. She promised to come back as soon as possible. "You be a good boy now," she said to the *Captain. "You promise?"
He promised grumpily.
*Mary had brought along Mandarax at the request of Akiko, in the hopes of using it to diagnose what had caused the Captain to lapse into several deathlike comas during the past day and night.
But when she showed him the instrument, and before she could ask him the first question, he did a perfectly astonishing thing: He snatched it away from her, and he stood up as though there were nothing wrong with him. "I hate this little son of a bitch more than anything in the whole world," he said, and then he went tottering down to the shore and lurching o
ut onto the shoal, up to his knees in water.
Poor Mary pursued him, but she was certainly in no condition to restrain a man that big. She watched helplessly as he threw Mandarax into what turned out to be about three meters of water on the slope of the shoal. The shoal sloped steeply, like the back of a marine iguana.
She could see where it was. There it was--the priceless heirloom she had promised to leave to Akiko when she died. So that game old lady went right in after it. She got one hand on it, too, but then a great white shark ate both her and Mandarax.
The *Captain had a lapse of memory, and so did not know what to make of the bloody water. He didn't even know what part of the world he was in. The most alarming thing to him was that he was being attacked by birds. These were harmless vampire finches going after his bedsores, some of the commonest birds on the island. But to him they were new and terrifying.
He slapped at them, and cried out for help. More and more finches kept coming, and he was so convinced that they meant to kill him that he jumped into the water, where he was eaten by a hammerhead shark. This animal had its eyes on the ends of stalks, a design perfected by the Law of Natural Selection many, many millions of years ago. It was a flawless part in the clockwork of the universe. There was no defect in it which might yet be modified. One thing it surely did not need was a bigger brain.
What was it going to do with a bigger brain? Compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?
Or perhaps write these lines:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts ... ?
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
14
I HAVE WRITTEN THESE WORDS in air--with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air. My mother was left-handed, and so am I. There are no left-handed human beings anymore. People exercise their flippers with perfect symmetry. Mother was a redhead, and so was Andrew MacIntosh, although their respective children, I and Selena, did not inherit their rusty tresses--nor has any humankind, nor could humankind. There aren't any redheads anymore. I never knew an albino personally, but there aren't albinos anymore, either. Among the fur seals, albinos do still turn up from time to time. Their pelts would have been much prized for ladies' fur coats a million years ago, to be worn to the opera and charity balls.