Galápagos Read online

  At least the girls had each other. And during their early years on Santa Rosalia, until Mary Hepburn made them the gift of babies, that was what they were most grateful for: At least they had each other--and their own language and their own religious beliefs and jokes and songs and so on.

  And that was what they would leave to their children on Santa Rosalia when they entered, one by one, the blue tunnel into the Afterlife: the comforts of at least having each other, and the Kanka-bono language, and the Kanka-bono religion, and the Kanka-bono jokes and songs.

  During their bad old days in Guayaquil, old Quezeda offered his stinking body for their experimentation as he taught them, as little as they were, the fundamental skills and attitudes of prostitutes.

  They were certainly in need of rescue, long before the economic crisis. Yes, and one dusty window of the shed which was their gruesome schoolhouse framed the stern of the Bahia de Darwin right outside. Little did they know that that beautiful white ship would soon be their Noah's ark.

  The girls finally ran away from the old man. They began to live in the streets, still begging and stealing. But, for reasons they could not understand, tourists became harder and harder to find, and, at last, there didn't seem to be anything to eat anywhere. They were truly hungry now, as they approached simply anyone, opening their mouths wide and rolling their eyes and pointing down their little throats to show how long it had been since they had eaten.

  And late one afternoon, they were attracted by the sounds of the crowd around the El Dorado. They found that the back door of a shuttered shop was open, and out came Geraldo Delgado, who had just shot Andrew MacIntosh and Zenji Hiroguchi. So they went into the shop and out of the front door. They were inside the barrier set up by the soldiers, so there was nobody to stop them from entering the El Dorado, where they would throw themselves on the mercy of James Wait in the cocktail lounge.

  29

  MARY HEPBURN was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" wrapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a land tortoise on its back would have done.

  As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the Pacific used to stop off in the Galapagos Islands to capture defenseless tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months. They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. Sailors would capsize them without fear of being bitten or clawed. Then they would drag them down to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits of armor for sleds.

  They would store them on their backs in the dark, paying no further attention to them until it was time for them to be eaten. The beauty of the tortoises to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be refrigerated or eaten right away.

  Every school year back in Ilium, Mary could count on some student's being outraged that human beings should have treated such trusting creatures so cruelly. This gave her the opportunity to say that the natural order had dealt harshly with such tortoises long before there was such an animal as man.

  There used to be millions of them, lumbering over every temperate land mass of any size, she would say.

  But then some tiny animals evolved into rodents. These easily found and ate the eggs of the tortoises--all of the eggs.

  So, very quickly, that was that for the tortoises everywhere, except for those on a few islands which remained rodent free.

  It was prophetic that Mary should imagine herself to be a land tortoise as she suffocated, since something very much like what had happened to most of the land tortoises so long ago was then beginning to happen to most of humankind.

  Some new creature, invisible to the naked eye, was eating up all the eggs in human ovaries, starting at the annual Book Fair at Frankfurt, Germany. Women at the fair were experiencing a slight fever, which came and went in a day or two, and sometimes blurry vision. After that, they would be just like Mary Hepburn: They couldn't have babies anymore. Nor would any way be discovered for stopping this disease. It would spread practically everywhere.

  The near extinction of mighty land tortoises by little rodents was certainly a David-and-Goliath story. Now here was another one.

  Yes, and Mary came close enough to death to see the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. At that point, she rebelled against her big brain, which had brought her that far. She unwrapped the garment bag from her head, and, instead of dying, she went downstairs, where she found James Wait feeding peanuts and olives and maraschino cherries and cocktail onions from behind the bar to the six Kanka-bono girls.

  This tableau of clumsy charity would remain imprinted in her brain for the rest of her life. She would believe ever after that he was an unselfish, compassionate, lovable human being. He was about to suffer a fatal heart attack, so nothing would ever happen to revise her high opinion of this loathsome man.

  On top of everything else, this man was a murderer.

  His murder had gone like this:

  He was a homosexual prostitute on the island of Manhattan, and a bloated plutocrat picked him up in a bar, asking him if he realized that the price tag was still on the hem of his lovely new blue velour shirt. This man had royal blood in his veins! This was Prince Richard of Croatia-Slavonia, a direct descendant of James the First of England and Emperor Frederick the Third of Germany and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and King Louis the Fifteenth of France. He ran an antique shop on upper Madison Avenue, and he wasn't homosexual. He wanted young Wait to strangle him with a silken sash from his dressing gown, and then to loosen the sash after having brought him as close as possible to death.

  Prince Richard had a wife and two children, who were on a skiing vacation in Switzerland, and his wife was young enough to be ovulating still, so young Wait may have prevented yet another carrier of those noble genes from being born.

  There was this, too: If Prince Richard hadn't been murdered, he and his wife might have been invited by Bobby King to take part in "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  His widow would become a very successful designer of neckties, calling herself "Princess Charlotte," although she was a commoner, the daughter of a Staten Island roofer, and not entitled to that rank, or the use of his coat of arms. That crest nonetheless appeared on every tie she designed.

  The late Andrew MacIntosh owned several Princess Charlotte ties.

  Wait spread-eagled this porky, chinless blue-blood face up on a four-poster bed which the Prince said had belonged to Eleonore of Palatinate-Neuburg, the mother of King Joseph the First of Hungary. Wait tied him to the thick posts with nylon ropes already cut to length. These had been stored in a secret drawer under the flounce at the foot of the bed. This was an old drawer, and had one time concealed secrets of the sex life of Eleonore of Palatinate-Neuburg.

  "Tie me nice and tight, so I can't get away," Prince Richard told young Wait, "but don't cut off the circulation. I would hate to get gangrene."

  His big brain had had him doing this at least once a month for the past three years: hiring strangers to tie him up and strangle him just a little bit. What a survival scheme!

  Prince Richard of Croatia-Slavonia, possibly with the ghosts of his progenitors looking on, instructed young James Wait to strangle him to the point where he lost consciousness. Then Wait, whom he knew only as "Jimmy," was to count slowly to twenty in this manner: "One thousand and one, one thousand and two ..." and so on.

  Possibly with King James and Emperor Frederick and Emperor Franz Joseph and King Louis looking on, the Prince, one of several claimants to the throne of Yugoslavia, warned "Jimmy" not to touch any part of his body or clothing, save for the sash around his neck. He would experience orgasm, but "Jimmy" was not to attempt to enhance that event with his mouth or hands. "I am not a homosexual," he said, "and I've hired you as a sort of valet--
not as a prostitute.

  "This may be hard for you to believe, Jimmy," he went on, "if you lead the kind of life I think you lead, but this is a spiritual experience for me, so keep it spiritual. Otherwise: no hundred-dollar tip. Do I make myself clear? I am an unusual man."

  He didn't tell Wait about it, but his big brain put on quite a movie for him while he was unconscious. It showed him one end of a writhing piece of blue tubing, about five meters in diameter, big enough to drive a truck through, and lit up inside like the funnel of a tornado. It did not roar like a tornado, however. Instead, unearthly music, as though from a glass harmonica, came from the far end, which appeared to be about fifty meters away. Depending on how the tube twisted, Prince Richard could catch glimpses of the opening in the far end, a golden dot and hints of greenery.

  This, of course, was the tunnel into the Afterlife.

  So Wait put a small rubber ball into the mouth of this would-be liberator of the Yugoslavs, as he had been told to do, and sealed the mouth with a precut piece of adhesive tape which had been stuck to a bedpost.

  Then he strangled the Prince, cutting off the blood supply to his big brain and the air supply to his lungs. Instead of counting slowly to twenty after the Prince lost consciousness and had his orgasm and saw the writhing tube, he counted slowly to three hundred instead. That was five minutes.

  It was Wait's big brain's idea. It wasn't anything he himself had particularly wanted to do.

  If he had ever been brought to trial for the murder, or the manslaughter, or whatever the government chose to call his crime, he would probably have pleaded temporary insanity. He would have claimed that his big brain simply wasn't working right at the time. There wasn't a person alive a million years ago who didn't know what that was like.

  Apologies for momentary brain failures were the staple of everybody's conversations: "Whoops," "Excuse me," "I hope you're not hurt," "I can't believe I did that," "It happened so fast I didn't have time to think," "I have insurance against this kind of a thing," and "How can I ever forgive myself?" and "I didn't know it was loaded," and on and on.

  There were beads and dollops of human sperm on the Prince's crested satin sheets, full of royal tadpoles racing each other to nowhere, as young Wait let himself out of the triple apartment on Sutton Place. He hadn't stolen anything, and he hadn't left any fingerprints. The doorman of the building, who had seen him coming and going, was able to tell the police very little about his appearance, save that he was young and white and slender, and wore a blue velour shirt from which the price tag had not been removed.

  And there was something prophetic, too, in those millions of royal tadpoles on a satin sheet, with no place meaningful to go. The whole world, as far as human sperm was concerned, with the exception of the Galapagos Islands, was about to become like that satin sheet.

  Dare I add this: "In the nick of time"?

  30

  I WILL NOW PUT A STAR in front of the name of James Wait, indicating that, after Siegfried von Kleist, he will be the next to die. Siegfried would go into the blue tunnel first, in about an hour and a half, and Wait would follow in about fourteen hours, having first married Mary Hepburn on the sun deck of the Bahia de Darwin when it was well at sea.

  Quoth Mandarax so long ago:

  All is well that ends well.

  --JOHN HEYWOOD (1497?-1580?)

  This was surely the case with the life of *James Wait. He had come into this world as a child of the devil, supposedly, and beatings had begun almost immediately. But here he was so close to the end now, astonished by the joy of feeding the Kanka-bono girls. They were so grateful, and helping them was such an easy thing to do, since the bar was stocked with snacks and garnishes and condiments. The opportunity to be charitable had simply never presented itself before, but here it was now, and he was loving it. To these children, Wait was life itself.

  And then the widow Hepburn appeared, as he had been hoping she would all afternoon. Nor did he have to win her trust. She liked him immediately because he was feeding the children, and she said to him, because she had seen so many hungry children on her way to the hotel from Guayaquil International Airport the previous afternoon: "Oh, good for you! Good for you!" She assumed then, and would never believe differently, that this man had seen the children outside, and had invited them in so he could feed them.

  "Why can't I be like you?" Mary went on. "Here I've been upstairs, doing nothing but feel sorry for myself, when I should have been down here like you--sharing whatever we have with all those poor children out there. You make me so ashamed--but my brains just haven't been working right lately. Sometimes I could just kill my brains."

  She spoke to the children in English, a language they would never understand. "Does that taste good?" she said, and "Where are your mommies and daddies?" and that sort of thing.

  The little girls would never learn English, since Kanka-bono would from the first be the language of the majority on Santa Rosalia. In a century and a half, it would be the language of the majority of humankind. Forty-two years after that, Kanka-bono would be the only language of humankind.

  There was no urgency about Mary's getting the girls better things to eat. A diet of peanuts and oranges, of which there were plenty behind the bar, was ideal. The girls spit out whatever wasn't good for them--the cherries and the green olives and the little onions. They needed no help with eating.

  So Mary and *Wait were free to simply watch and chat, and get to know each other.

  *Wait said that he thought people were put on earth to help each other, and that was why he was feeding the children. He said that children were the future of the world, and so the planet's greatest natural resource.

  "Permit me to introduce myself," he said. "I am Willard Flemming of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan."

  Mary said who and what she was, an ex-teacher and a widow.

  He said how much he admired teachers, and how important they had been to him when he was young. "If it hadn't been for my teachers in high school," he said, "I never would have gone to MIT. I probably wouldn't have gone to college at all--probably would have been an automobile mechanic like my father."

  "So what did you become?" she said.

  "Less than nothing, since my wife died of cancer," he said.

  "Oh!" she said. "I'm so sorry!"

  "Well--it's not your fault, is it," he said.

  "No," she said.

  "Before that," he said, "I was a windmill engineer. I had this crazy idea that there was all this clean, free energy around. Does that sound crazy to you?"

  "It's a beautiful idea," she said. "It was something my husband and I talked about."

  "The power and light companies hated me," he said, "and the oil barons and the coal barons and the atomic energy trust."

  "I should think they would!" she said.

  "They can stop worrying about me now," he said. "I closed up shop after my wife died, and I've been roaming the world ever since. I don't even know what I'm looking for. I very much doubt if there's anything worth finding. I'm just sure of one thing: I can never love again."

  "You have so much to give the world!" she said.

  "If I ever did love again," he said, "it wouldn't be with the sort of silly, pretty little ball of fluff so many men seem to want today. I couldn't stand it."

  "I wouldn't think so," she said.

  "I've been spoiled," he said.

  "I expect you deserved it," she said.

  "And I ask myself, 'What good is money now?'" he said. "I'm sure your husband was as good a husband as my wife was a wife--"

  "He really was a very good man," she said, "a perfectly wonderful man."

  "So you're certainly asking the same question: 'What good is money to a person all alone?'" he said. "Suppose you have a million dollars ..."

  "Oh, Lord!" she said. "I don't have anything like that."

  "All right--a hundred thousand, then ..."

  "That's a little more like it," she said.

  "It's just trash
now, right?" he said. "What happiness can it buy?"

  "A certain amount of creature comfort, anyway," she said.

  "You've got a nice house, I imagine," he said.

  "Quite nice," she said.

  "And a car, or maybe two or three cars, and all that," he said.

  "One car," she said.

  "A Mercedes, I'll bet," he said.

  "A Jeep," she said.

  "And you've probably got stocks and bonds, just like I do," he said.

  "Roy's company had a stock bonus plan," she said.

  "Oh, sure," he said. "And an insurance plan, and a retirement plan--and all the rest of the middle-class dream of security."

  "We both worked," she said. "We both contributed."

  "I wouldn't have a wife who didn't work," he said. "My wife worked for the phone company. After she died, the death benefits, after they were all added up, turned out to be quite a bit. But they just wanted to make me cry. They were just more reminders of how empty my life had become. And her little jewel box, with all the rings and pins and necklaces I'd given her over the years, and no children to pass it on to."

  "We didn't have children, either," she said.

  "It seems we have a lot in common," he said. "So who will you leave your jewelry to?"

  "Oh--there isn't much," she said. "I guess the only valuable piece is a string of pearls Roy's mother left me. It has a diamond clasp. There are so few times I wear jewelry, I'd almost forgotten those pearls until this very moment."

  "I certainly hope they're insured," he said.

  31

  HOW PEOPLE used to talk and talk back then! Everybody was going, "Blah-blah-blah," all day long. Some of them would even do it in their sleep. My father used to blather in his sleep a lot--especially after Mother walked out on us. I would be sleeping on the couch, and it would be in the middle of the night, and there wouldn't be anybody else in the house but us--and I would hear him going, "Blah-blah-blah," in the bedroom. He would be quiet for a little while, and then he would go, "Blah-blah-blah," again.