Galapagos Part 4

It now appeared certain to King, although he had not been told so yet, that his work had been for nothing, that "the Nature Cruise of the Century" would not take place.

As for the stuffed marine iguana on his desk: He had made that reptile the totemic animal for the cruise-had caused its image to be painted on either side of the Bahia de Darwin's Bahia de Darwin's bow, and to appear as a logo in every ad and at the top of every publicity release. bow, and to appear as a logo in every ad and at the top of every publicity release.

In real life, the creature could be more than a meter long, and look as fearsome as a Chinese dragon. Actually, though, it was no more dangerous to life forms of any sort, with the exception of seaweed, than a liverwurst. Here is what its life is like in the present day, which is exactly what its life was like a million years ago: It has no enemies, so it sits in one place, staring into the middle distance at nothing, wanting nothing, worried about nothing, until it is hungry. It then waddles down to the ocean and swims slowly and not all that ably until it is a few meters from sh.o.r.e. Then it dives like a submarine, and stuffs itself with seaweed, which is at that time indigestible. The seaweed is going to have to be cooked before it is digestible.

So the marine iguana pops to the surface, swims ash.o.r.e, and sits on the lava in the sunshine again. It is using itself for a covered stewpot, getting hotter and hotter while the sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare into the middle distance at nothing, as before, but with this difference: It now spits up increasingly hot salt.w.a.ter from time to time.

During the million years I have spent in these islands, the Law of Natural Selection has found no way to improve, or, for that matter, to worsen this particular survival scheme.

King knew that six persons had actually reached Guayaquil, and were in the Hotel El Dorado at that very moment, still expecting to take "the Nature Cruise of the Century." This was a minor shock to him. He had a.s.sumed that those who had made their own arrangements to get there would surely stay away, since the news from the area was so bad.

He had the names of all six. One was entirely unknown to him, a Canadian named Willard Flemming. That was actually James Wait, of course. King could not imagine how this person had gotten onto the pa.s.senger list, which, with the exception of Mary Hepburn and a j.a.panese veterinarian and his wife, was supposed to be composed of newsmakers and trend-setters of the highest potency.

It puzzled King that Mary Hepburn was down there, but not her husband, Roy. He hadn't heard that Roy was dead. And he knew something about the Hepburns, even though they were complete n.o.bodies on a pa.s.senger list of celebrities, because they were the very first persons to sign up for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was at a time when King had reason to doubt that any really famous person could be induced to make the trip.

When the Hepburns signed on, in fact, King had played with the idea of turning them into mini-celebrities somehow, with appearances on talk shows and newspaper interviews and so on. He would never meet them, but he did talk to Mary on the telephone, hoping against hope that there might be something interesting about the Hepburns, even though they held the most ordinary sorts of jobs in a drab industrial town with the highest unemployment rate in the country. One or the other might have a famous ancestor or relative, or Roy might have been a hero in some war, or they might have won a lottery, or they might have suffered a recent tragedy, or whatever.

And parts of King's conversation with Mary back in January had gone like this: "Well-I am a distant relative of Daniel Boone," she said. "My maiden name was Boone, and I was born in Kentucky."

"That's wonderful!" said King. "You're his great-great-great-granddaughter or what?"

"I don't think it's quite that direct," she said. "It never meant much to me, so I never tried to get it straight."

"But your maiden name was Boone."

"Yes, but that's just a coincidence. My father's name was Boone, but he wasn't any relative of Daniel Boone. I'm related to Daniel Boone on my mother's side."

"If your father's name was Boone, and he was a Kentuckian, then he had to be related to Daniel Boone some way, don't you think?" said King.

"Not necessarily," she said, "because his father was a horse trainer from Hungary named Miklos Gombos, who changed his name to Michael Boone."

On the subject of prizes or honors she or Roy might have won, Mary said that her husband certainly deserved plenty of them for all the good work he had done at GEFFCo, but that that company didn't believe in anything of that sort except for its very top executives.

"No military medals-nothing like that," he said.

"He was in the Navy," she said, "but he didn't fight."

If King had called three months later, of course, and gotten Roy on the phone, he would have received an earful about Roy's tragic exploits during the bomb tests in the Pacific.

"You have children?" said King.

"Not in the usual sense," said Mary. "But I consider every student a child of mine, and Roy is active in scouting, and he considers every member of his troop to be a son of his."

"That's a wonderful att.i.tude," said King, "and it has been awfully nice to talk to you, and I hope you and your husband enjoy the trip."

"I'm sure we will," she said, "but I still have to get up enough nerve to tell the princ.i.p.al that I want three weeks off right in the middle of a semester."

"You'll have so many wonderful things to tell your students when you get back," said King, "that he'll be glad to let you go." King, incidentally, had never seen the Galapagos Islands firsthand, and never would. Like Mary Hepburn, he had certainly seen plenty of pictures of them.

"Oh-" said Mary as he was about to hang up, "you were asking about honors and prizes and medals and all that ..."

"Yes?" said King.

"I'm just about to get a kind of prize, or what feels like a prize to me. I'm not supposed to know about it, so I probably shouldn't tell you about it."

"My lips are sealed," said King.

"I just happened to find out about it by accident," said Mary. "But this year's senior cla.s.s is going to dedicate its yearbook to me. They give me a nickname in the dedication, which I just happened to see in a printshop where I was picking up some birth announcements for a friend. She had twins-a boy and a girl."

"Aha!" said King.

"Do you know the nickname those nice young people are giving me?" said Mary.

"No," said King.

"'Mother Nature Personified,'" said Mary.

And there are no tombs in the Galapagos Islands. The ocean gets all the bodies to use as it will. But if there were a tombstone for Mary Hepburn, no other inscription would do but this one: "Mother Nature Personified." In what way was she so like Mother Nature? In the face of utter hopelessness on Santa Rosalia, she still wanted human babies to be born there. Nothing could keep her from doing all she could to keep life going on and on and on.

18.

WHEN B BOBBY K KING heard that Mary Hepburn was one of the six unfortunate enough to have reached Guayaquil, he thought about her for the first time in months. He thought that perhaps Roy was with her, since they had sounded like such an inseparable couple, and that his name had been omitted accidentally by the Hotel El Dorado's manager, whose teletyped communications were becoming more hectic by the hour. heard that Mary Hepburn was one of the six unfortunate enough to have reached Guayaquil, he thought about her for the first time in months. He thought that perhaps Roy was with her, since they had sounded like such an inseparable couple, and that his name had been omitted accidentally by the Hotel El Dorado's manager, whose teletyped communications were becoming more hectic by the hour.

King knew about me, by the way, although not by name.

He knew a workman had been killed during the building of the ship.

But he no more wanted to publicize this piece of information, which might imply to the superst.i.tious that the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin had a ghost, than the von Kleist family wished it known that one of its members was hospitalized with Huntington's ch.o.r.ea, and that two more of its members had a fifty-fifty chance of being carriers of that disease. had a ghost, than the von Kleist family wished it known that one of its members was hospitalized with Huntington's ch.o.r.ea, and that two more of its members had a fifty-fifty chance of being carriers of that disease.

Did the Captain ever tell Mary Hepburn during their years together on Santa Rosalia that he might be a carrier of Huntington's ch.o.r.ea? He revealed that terrible secret only after they had been marooned ten years, and he realized that she had been playing fast and loose with his sperm.

Of the six guests at the El Dorado, King was acquainted with only two: *Andrew MacIntosh and his blind daughter Selena-and, of course, Kazakh, Selena's dog. Anybody who knew the MacIntoshes also knew the dog, although Kazakh, thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality. The MacIntoshes were frequenters of several restaurants which were King's clients, and *MacIntosh, but not the dog and the daughter, had been on talk shows with some of his clients. King had watched the shows with Selena and the dog on a backstage monitor. It was his impression that the daughter had little more personality than the dog when she wasn't right next to her father. And her father was all she could talk about.

*Andrew MacIntosh certainly enjoyed his exposure on talk shows. He was a welcome guest on them because he was so outrageous. He held forth about what fun life was if you had unlimited money to spend. He pitied and scorned people who weren't rich, and so on.

Thanks to the rigors of Santa Rosalia, Selena would develop a personality very distinct from her father's before she went down the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. She would also be fluent in j.a.panese. In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way.

Look at mine.

After Roy and Mary Hepburn, the MacIntoshes and the Hiroguchis were the next people to join the pa.s.senger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was in February. The Hiroguchis were to be *MacIntosh's guests, and they would travel under false names, so that *Zenji Hiroguchi's employers would not discover that he was negotiating a business deal with *MacIntosh.

As far as King and *Siegfried von Kleist and anybody else connected with the cruise knew, the Hiroguchis were the Kenzaburos, and *Zenji was a veterinarian.

That meant that fully half of the guests at the El Dorado weren't who they were supposed to be. As a fillip to all this big-brained deceiving going on, Mary Hepburn's war-surplus combat fatigues still bore the embroidered last name of their previous owner over the left breast pocket, which was Kaplan. And when she and James Wait finally met in the c.o.c.ktail lounge, he would tell her his false name and she would tell him her true name, but he would keep calling her "Mrs. Kaplan" anyway, and extol the Jewish people and so on.

And they would later be married by the Captain on the sundeck of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, and as far as she knew, she had become the wife of Willard Flemming, and as far as he knew, he had become the husband of Mary Kaplan.

This sort of confusion would be impossible in the present day, since n.o.body has a name anymore-or a profession, or a life story to tell. All that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be.

When *Andrew MacIntosh signed up for three staterooms on the Bahia de Darwin's Bahia de Darwin's maiden voyage, Bobby King had reason to be mystified. *MacIntosh had a private yacht, the maiden voyage, Bobby King had reason to be mystified. *MacIntosh had a private yacht, the Omoo Omoo, which was nearly as large as the cruise ship, and so could have gone to the Galapagos Islands on his own-without submitting to the close contacts with strangers and the disciplines which would be imposed by "the Nature Cruise of the Century." The cruise pa.s.sengers, for example, would not be able to go ash.o.r.e whenever they pleased, and to behave there however they pleased. They were to be escorted and supervised at all times by guides, all of them trained by scientists at the Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, and all of them holding graduate degrees in one of the natural sciences.

So when King, making his rounds of restaurants and clubs one night, saw *MacIntosh and his daughter and her dog and two other people having a late supper in a celebrity hangout called Elaine's, he stopped by their table to say how pleased he was that they were taking the cruise. He wanted very much to hear why they were taking it-so that he might use their reasons as inducements for other newsmakers to come along.

Only after greeting the MacIntoshes did King realize who the other two people at the table were. He knew them both to speak to, and he did so now. The woman was the most admired female on the planet, Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Ona.s.sis, and her escort that evening was the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

Nureyev, incidentally, was a former citizen of the Soviet Union, who had been granted political asylum in Great Britain. And I was still alive then, and I was a United States citizen who had been granted political asylum in Sweden.

Yes, and we both liked to dance.

At the risk of reminding *MacIntosh that he owned an oceangoing yacht, King asked him what he had found so attractive about the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin. *MacIntosh, who was highly intelligent and well read, thereupon delivered a speech on the damage selfish and ignorant persons had done to the Galapagos Islands while going ash.o.r.e un-supervised. This material was all lifted from an article in the National Geographic National Geographic magazine, which he read from cover to cover every month. The magazine's point was that Ecuador would require a navy the size of the combined fleets of the world to keep persons from going ash.o.r.e on the islands and doing as they pleased, so that the fragile habitats could be preserved only if individuals were educated to exercise self-restraint. "No good citizen of the planet," said the article, "should ever go ash.o.r.e unless escorted by a well-trained guide." magazine, which he read from cover to cover every month. The magazine's point was that Ecuador would require a navy the size of the combined fleets of the world to keep persons from going ash.o.r.e on the islands and doing as they pleased, so that the fragile habitats could be preserved only if individuals were educated to exercise self-restraint. "No good citizen of the planet," said the article, "should ever go ash.o.r.e unless escorted by a well-trained guide."

When Mary Hepburn and the Captain and Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIntosh and the rest of them were marooned on Santa Rosalia, they would not have a trained guide along. And, for their first few years there, they would raise perfect h.e.l.l with the fragile habitat.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking-that they weren't merely visitors.

There in Elaine's Restaurant, *MacIntosh angered his spellbound audience with tales of boots crushing the camouflaged nests of iguanas, of greedy fingers stealing the eggs of b.o.o.bies, and on and on. His most moving atrocity story by far, though, again lifted from the National Geographic National Geographic, was of persons cradling fur seal pups in their arms as though they were human infants-for the sake of photographs. When the pup was returned to its mother, he said bitterly, she would no longer nurse it because its smell had been changed.

"So what happens to that darling pup, which has just had the great honor of being cuddled by a bighearted nature lover?" asked *MacIntosh. "It starves to death-all for the sake of a photograph."

So his answer to Bobby King's question was that he was setting a good example he hoped others would follow by taking "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist, since so many of the companies he served as a director or in which he was a major stockholder were notorious damagers of the water or the soil or the atmosphere. But it wasn't a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So, in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared pa.s.sionately about all sorts of things.

With the same degree of conviction, he had earlier given his daughter an entirely different explanation of why they were going to the islands on the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin instead of the instead of the Omoo Omoo. The Hiroguchis might feel trapped on the Omoo Omoo, with n.o.body but the MacIntoshes to talk to. They might panic under such circ.u.mstances, and *Zenji might refuse to negotiate anymore, and ask to be put ash.o.r.e at the nearest port so that he and his wife could fly back home.

Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.

And let that sort of behavior back in the era of the big brains be taken as a capsule history of the war I had the honor to fight in, which was the Vietnam War.

19.

LIKE MOST PATHOLOGICAL PERSONALITIES, *Andrew MacIntosh never cared much whether what he said was true or not-and so he was tremendously persuasive. And he so moved the widow Ona.s.sis and Rudolf Nureyev that they asked Bobby King for more information about "the Nature Cruise of the Century," which he sent to them on the following morning by special messenger.

As luck would have it, there was going to be a doc.u.mentary about the lives of blue-footed b.o.o.bies on the islands shown on educational television that evening, so King enclosed notes saying that they might want to watch it. These birds would later become crucial to the survival of the little human colony on Santa Rosalia. If those birds hadn't been so stupid, so incapable of learning that human beings were dangerous, the first settlers would almost certainly have starved to death.

The high point of that program, like the high point of Mary Hepburn's lectures on the islands at Ilium High School, was film footage of the courtship dance of the blue-footed b.o.o.bies. The dance went like this: There were these two fairly large sea birds standing around on the lava. They were about the size of flightless cormorants, and had the same long, snaky necks and fish-spear beaks. But they had not given up on aviation, and so had big, strong wings. Their legs and webbed feet were bright, rubbery blue. They caught fish by crashing down on them from the sky.

Fish! Fish! Fish!

They looked alike, although one was a male and the other was a female. They seemed to be on separate errands, and not interested in each other in the least-although there wasn't much business for either one of them to do on the lava, since they didn't eat bugs or seeds. They weren't looking for nesting materials, since it was much too early in the game for that.

The male stopped doing what he was so busy doing, which was nothing. He caught sight of the female. He looked away from her, and then back again, standing still and making no sound. They both had voices, but at no point in the dance would either make a sound.

She looked this way and that, and then her gaze met his accidentally. They were then five meters apart or more.

When Mary showed the film of the dance at the high school, she used to say at this point, as though she were speaking for the female: "What on Earth could this strange person want with me? Really! How bizarre!"

The male raised one bright blue foot. He spread it in air like a paper fan.

Mary Hepburn, again in the persona of the female, used to say, "What is that supposed to be? A Wonder of the World? Does he think that's the only blue foot in the islands?"

The male put that foot down and raised the other one, bringing himself one pace closer to the female. Then he showed her the first one again, and then the second one again, looking her straight in the eye.

Mary would say for her, "I'm getting out of here." But the female didn't get out of there. She seemed glued to the lava as the male showed her one foot and then the other one, coming closer all the time.

And then the female raised one of her blue feet, and Mary used to say, "You think you've got such beautiful feet? Take a look at this, if you want to see a beautiful foot. Yes, and I've got another one, too."

The female put down one foot and raised the other one, bringing herself one pace closer to the male.

Mary used to shut up then. There would be no more anthropomorphic jokes. It was up to the birds now to carry the show. Advancing toward each other in the same grave and stately manner, neither bird speeding up or slowing down, they were at last breast to breast and toe to toe.

At Ilium High School, the students did not expect to see the birds copulate. The film was so famous, since Mary had shown it in the auditorium in early May, as an educational celebration of springtime, for years and years, that everybody knew that they would not get to see the birds copulate.

What those birds did on camera, though, was supremely erotic all the same. Already breast to breast and toe to toe, they made their sinuous necks as erect as flagpoles. They tilted their heads back as far as they would go. They pressed their long throats and the undersides of their jaws together. They formed a tower, the two of them-a single structure, pointed on top and resting on four blue feet.

Thus was a marriage solemnized.

There were no witnesses, no other b.o.o.bies to celebrate what a nice couple they were or how well they had danced. In the film Mary Hepburn used to show at the high school, which was the same film Bobby King thought Mrs. Ona.s.sis and Rudolf Nureyev might enjoy watching on educational television, the only witnesses were the big-brained members of the camera crew.

The name of the film was Sky-Pointing Sky-Pointing, the same name big-brained scientists gave to the moment when the beaks of both birds were pointed in the direction exactly opposite to the pull of gravity.

And Mrs. Ona.s.sis was so moved by this film that she had her secretary call Bobby King the next morning, to inquire if it was too late to reserve two outside staterooms on the main deck of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." for "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

20.

MARY H HEPBURN used to give her students extra credit if they would write a little poem or essay about the courtship dance. Something like half of them would turn something in, and about half who did thought the dance was proof that animals worshiped G.o.d. The rest of the responses were all over the place. One student turned in a poem which Mary would remember to her dying day, and which she taught to Mandarax. The student was named n.o.ble Claggett, and he would be killed in the war in Vietnam-but there his poem would be inside of Mandarax, along with bits by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. It went like this: used to give her students extra credit if they would write a little poem or essay about the courtship dance. Something like half of them would turn something in, and about half who did thought the dance was proof that animals worshiped G.o.d. The rest of the responses were all over the place. One student turned in a poem which Mary would remember to her dying day, and which she taught to Mandarax. The student was named n.o.ble Claggett, and he would be killed in the war in Vietnam-but there his poem would be inside of Mandarax, along with bits by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. It went like this: Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did; "Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did; 'Of course I love you 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did-'"

Et cetera.n.o.bLE CLAGGETT (19471966) Some students would ask permission to write about some other Galapagos Islands creature, and Mary, being such a good teacher, would of course answer, "Yes." And the favorite alternates were those teasers and robbers of the b.o.o.bies, the great frigate birds. These James Waits of the bird world survived on fish which b.o.o.bies caught, and got their nesting materials from nests which b.o.o.bies built. A certain sort of student found this hilarious, and such a student was almost invariably male.

And a unique physical feature of male great frigate birds was also bound to attract the attention of immature human males concerned with erectile performances of their own s.e.x organs. Each male great frigate bird at mating time tried to attract the attention of females by inflating a bright red balloon at the base of his throat. At mating time, a typical rookery when viewed from the air resembled an enormous party for human children, at which every child had received a red balloon. The island would in fact be paved with male great frigate birds with their heads tilted back, their qualifications as husbands inflated by their lungs to the bursting point-while, overhead, the females wheeled.

One by one the females would drop from the sky, having chosen this or that red balloon.

After Mary Hepburn showed her film about the great frigate birds, and the windowshades in the cla.s.sroom were raised and the lights turned back on, some student, again almost invariably a male, was sure to ask, sometimes clinically, sometimes as a comedian, sometimes bitterly, hating and fearing women: "Do the females always try to pick the biggest ones?"

So Mary was ready with a reply as consistent, word by word, as any quotation known by Mandarax: "To answer that, we would have to interview female great frigate birds, and no one has done that yet, so far as I know. Some people have devoted their lives to studying them, though, and it is their opinion that the females are in fact choosing the red balloons which mark the best nesting sites. That makes sense in terms of survival, you see.

"And that brings us back to the really deep mystery of the blue-footed b.o.o.bies' courtship dance, which seems to have absolutely no connection with the elements of b.o.o.by survival, with nesting or fish. What does it have to do with, then? Dare we call it 'religion'? Or, if we lack that sort of courage, might we at least call it 'art'?

"Your comments, please."