Galápagos Read online

  And if Wait, who did not even know that there was a financial crisis going on, had carried out his masquerade as a Canadian to the extent of bringing Canadian dollars into Ecuador, he would not have been as well received as he was. Although Canada had not gone bankrupt, people's imaginations in more and more places, including Canada itself, were making them unhappy about trading anything really useful for Canadian dollars anymore.

  A similar decay in imagined value was happening to the British pound and the French and Swiss francs and the West German mark. The Ecuadorian sucre, meanwhile, named in honor of Antonio Jose de Sucre (1795-1830), a national hero, had come to be worth less than a banana peel.

  *

  Up in her room, Mary Hepburn was wondering if she had a brain tumor, and that was why her brain was giving her the worst possible advice all the time. It was a natural thing for her to suspect, since it was a brain tumor which had killed her husband Roy only three months before. It hadn't been enough for the tumor to kill him, either. It had to addle his memory and destroy his judgment first.

  She had to wonder, too, when his tumor had begun to do that to him--whether it wasn't the tumor which had made him sign them up for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" in the promising January of that ultimately horrible year.

  Here was how she found out he had signed them up for the cruise: She came home from work one afternoon, expecting Roy still to be at GEFFCo. He got off work an hour later than she did. But there Roy was, already, home, and it turned out that he had quit at noon. This was a man who adored the work he did with machinery, and who had never taken off so much as an hour from his job during his twenty-nine years with GEFFCo--not for sickness, since he was never sick, not for anything.

  She asked him if he was sick, and he said that he had never felt better in his life. He was proud of himself in what seemed to Mary the manner of an adolescent who was tired of being thought a good boy all the time. This was a man whose words were few and well-chosen, never silly or immature. But now he said incredibly, and with an inane expression to match, as though she were his disapproving mother: "I played hookey."

  It had to have been the tumor that said that, Mary now thought in Guayaquil. And the tumor couldn't have picked a worse day for carefree truancy, for there had been an ice storm the night before, and then wind-driven sleet all day. But Roy had gone up and down Clinton Street, the main street of Ilium, stopping in store after store and telling the salespeople that he was playing hookey.

  So Mary tried to be happy about that, to say and mean that it was time he loosened up and had some fun--although they had always had a lot of fun on weekends and during vacations, and at work, as far as that went. But a miasma overlay this unexpected escapade. And Roy himself, during their early supper, seemed puzzled by the afternoon. So that was that. He didn't think he would do it again, and they could forget the incident, except maybe to laugh about it now and then.

  But then, right before bedtime, while they were staring at the glowing embers in the fieldstone fireplace which Roy had built with his own two horny hands, Roy said, "There's more."

  "There's more of what?" said Mary.

  "About this afternoon," he said. "One of the places I went was the travel agency." There was only one such establishment in Ilium, and not doing well.

  "So?" she said.

  "I signed us up for something," he said. It was as though he were remembering a dream. "It's all paid for. It's all taken care of. It's done. In November, you and I are flying to Ecuador, and we are going to take 'the Nature Cruise of the Century.'"

  Roy and Mary Hepburn were the very first persons to respond to the advertising and publicity program for the maiden voyage of the Bahia de Darwin, which ship was nothing but a keel and a pile of blueprints in Malmo, Sweden, at the time. The Ilium travel agent had just received a poster announcing the cruise. He was just Scotch-taping it to his wall when Roy Hepburn walked in.

  If I may interject a personal note: I myself had been working as a welder in Malmo for about a year, but the Bahia de Darwin had not yet materialized sufficiently so as to require my services. I would literally lose my head to that steel maiden only when springtime came. Question: Who hasn't lost his or her head in the springtime?

  But to continue:

  The travel poster in Ilium depicted a very strange bird standing on the edge of a volcanic island, looking out at a beautiful white motor ship churning by. This bird was black and appeared to be the size of a large duck, but it had a neck as long and supple as a snake. The queerest thing about it, though, was that it seemed to have no wings, which was almost the truth. This sort of bird was endemic to the Galapagos Islands, meaning that it was found there and nowhere else on the planet. Its wings were tiny and folded flat against its body, in order that it might swim as fast and deep as a fish could. This was a much better way to catch fish than, as so many fish-eating birds were required to do, to wait for fish to come to the surface and then crash down on them with beaks agape. This very successful bird was called by human beings a "flightless cormorant." It could go where the fish were. It didn't have to wait for fish to make a fatal error.

  Somewhere along the line of evolution, the ancestors of such a bird must have begun to doubt the value of their wings, just as, in 1986, human beings were beginning to question seriously the desirability of big brains.

  If Darwin was right about the Law of Natural Selection, cormorants with small wings, just shoving off from shore like fishing boats, must have caught more fish than the greatest of their aviators. So they mated with each other, and those children of theirs who had the smallest wings became evern better fisherpeople, and so on.

  Now the very same sort of thing has happened to people, but not with respect to their wings, of course, since they never had wings--but with respect to their hands and brains instead. And people don't have to wait any more for fish to nibble on baited hooks or blunder into nets or whatever. A person who wants a fish nowadays just goes after one like a shark in the deep blue sea.

  It's so easy now.

  8

  EVEN BACK IN JANUARY, there were any number of reasons Roy Hepburn should not have signed up for that cruise. It wasn't evident then that a world economic crisis was coming, and that the people of Ecuador would be starving when the ship was supposed to sail. But there was the matter of Mary's job. She did not yet know that she was about to be laid off, to be forced into early retirement, so she could not see how she, in good conscience, could take off three weeks in late November and early December, right in the middle of a semester.

  Also, although she had never been there, she had grown very bored with the Galapagos Archipelago. There was such a wealth of films and slides and books and articles about the islands, which she had used over and over in her courses, that she could not imagine any surprise that might await her there. Little did she know.

  She and Roy hadn't been out of the United States during their entire marriage. If they were going to kick up their heels and take a really glamorous trip, she thought, she would much rather go to Africa, where the wildlife was so much more thrilling, and the survival schemes were so much more dangerous. When all was said and done, the creatures of the Galapagos Islands were a pretty listless bunch, when compared with rhinos and hippos and lions and elephants and giraffes and so on.

  The prospect of the voyage, in fact, made her confess to a close friend, "All of a sudden I have this feeling that I never want to see another blue-footed booby as long as I live!"

  Little did she know.

  Mary muted her misgivings about the trip, though, when talking to Roy, confident that he would perceive on his own that he had suffered a mild brain malfunction. But by March, Roy was out of his job, and Mary knew she was going to be let go in June. The timing of the cruise, anyway, became practical. And the cruise loomed huge in Roy's increasingly erratic imagination as "... the only good thing we've got to look forward to."

  Here was what had happened to their jobs: GEFFCo had furloughed almost
its entire work force, blue-collar and white-collar alike, in order to modernize the Ilium operation. A Japanese company, Matsumoto, was doing the job. Matsumoto was also automating the Bahia de Darwin. This was the same company which employed *Zenji Hiroguchi, the young computer genius who would be staying with his wife at the Hotel El Dorado the same time that Mary was there.

  When the Matsumoto Corporation got through installing computers and robots, only twelve human beings would be able to run everything. So people young enough to have children, or at least ambitious dreams for the future, left town in droves. It was, as Mary Hepburn would say on her eighty-first birthday, two weeks before a great white shark ate her, "... as though the Pied Piper had passed through town." Suddenly, there were almost no children to educate, and the city was bankrupt for want of taxpayers. So Ilium High School would graduate its last class in June.

  In April Roy was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. "The Nature Cruise of the Century" thereupon became what he was staying alive for. "I can hang on that long at least, Mary. November--that's not far away, is it?"

  "No," she said.

  "I can hang on that long."

  "You could have years, Roy," she said.

  "Just let me take that cruise," he said. "Let me see penguins on the equator," he said. "That'll be good enough for me."

  While Roy was mistaken about more and more things, he was right about there being penguins on the Galapagos Islands. They were skinny things underneath their headwaiters' costumes. They had to be. If they had been swaddled in fat like their relatives on the ice floes to the south, half a world away, they would have roasted to death when they came ashore on the lava to lay their eggs and tend their young.

  Like those of the flightless cormorants, their ancestors, too, had abandoned the glamor of aviation--electing to catch more fish instead.

  About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?

  9

  WHILE ROY HEPBURN was dying, and while the whole city of Ilium was dying, for that matter, and while both the man and the city were being killed by growths inimical to a healthy and happy humanity, Roy's big brain persuaded him that he had been a sailor at the United States atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, equatorial like Guayaquil, in 1946. He was going to sue his own government for millions, he said, because the radiation he had absorbed there had first prevented his and Mary's having children, and now it had caused his brain cancer.

  Roy had served a hitch in the Navy, but otherwise his case against the United States of America was a weak one, since he was born in 1932, and his country's lawyers would have no trouble proving that. That would make him fourteen years old at the time of his supposed exposure.

  That anachronism did not prevent his having vivid memories of the terrible things his government had made him do to so-called lower animals. As he told it, he worked virtually unassisted, first driving stakes into the ground all over the atoll, and then tying different sorts of animals to the stakes. "I guess they chose me," he said, "because animals have always trusted me."

  This much was true: Animals all trusted Roy. While he had no formal education past high school, except for the apprentice program at GEFFCo, and while Mary had a master's degree in zoology from Indiana University, Roy was much better at actually relating to animals than Mary was. He could talk to birds in their own languages, for example, something she could never have done, since her ancestors were notoriously tone deaf on both sides of her family. There was no dog or farm animal, not even a guard dog at GEFFCo or a sow with piglets, so vicious that Roy couldn't, within five minutes or less, turn it into a friend of his.

  So Roy's tears were understandable when he remembered tying animals to all those stakes. Such a cruel experiment had been performed on animals, of course, on sheep and pigs and cattle and horses and monkeys and ducks and chickens and geese, but surely not on a zoo such as Roy described. To hear him tell it, he had tethered peacocks and snow leopards and gorillas and crocodiles and albatrosses to the stakes. In his big brain, Bikini became the exact reverse of Noah's ark. Two of every sort of animal had been brought there in order to be atom-bombed.

  The craziest detail in his story, which did not seem at all crazy to him, of course, was this one: "Donald was there." Donald was a golden retriever male who was roaming the neighborhood there in Ilium at that very moment, probably, maybe right outside the Hepburns' house, and was only four years old.

  "It was all very hard," Roy would say, "but the hardest part was tying Donald to one of those stakes. I kept putting it off until I couldn't put it off any longer. Tying Donald to a stake was the last thing I had to do. He let me do it, and after I did it he licked my hand and wagged that tail of his. And I said to him, and I'm not ashamed to say I cried: 'So long, old pal. You're going to a different world now. It's sure to be a better one, since no other world could be as bad as this one is.'"

  While Roy began putting on such performances, Mary was still teaching every weekday, still assuring the few students she had left that they should thank God for their great big brains. "Would you rather have the neck of a giraffe or the camouflage of a chameleon or the hide of a rhinoceros or the antlers of an Irish elk?" she would ask, and so on.

  She was still spouting the same old malarkey.

  Yes, and then she would go home to Roy, and his demonstrations of how misleading a brain could be. He was never hospitalized, except briefly for tests. And he was docile. He wasn't to drive a car anymore, but he understood that, and did not seem to resent it when Mary hid the keys to his Jeep station wagon. He even said that maybe they should sell it, since it didn't look like they were going to do much camping anymore. So Mary didn't have to hire a nurse to watch over Roy while she worked. Retired people in the neighborhood were glad to pick up a few dollars, keeping him company and making sure he didn't hurt himself in some way.

  He was certainly no trouble to them. He watched a lot of television and enjoyed playing for hours, never leaving the yard, with Donald, the golden retriever who had died, supposedly, on Bikini Atoll.

  As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, though, she would be stopped in mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who has wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these young people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."

  She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.

  10

  HOW MANY GALAPAGOS ISLANDS were there a million years ago? There were thirteen big ones, seventeen small ones, and three hundred and eighteen tiny ones, some nothing more than rocks rising only a meter or two above the surface of the ocean.

  There are now fourteen big ones, seven small ones, and three hundred and twenty-six tiny ones. Quite a lot of volcanic activity still goes on. I make a joke: The gods are still angry.

  And the northernmost of the islands, so all alone, so far from the rest, is still Santa Rosalia.

  Yes, and a million years ago, on August 3, 1986, a man named *Roy Hepburn was on his deathbed in his right little, tight little home in Ilium, New York. There at the very end, what he lamented most was that he and his wife Mary had never had children. He could not urge his wife to try to have children by someone else after he was gone, since she had ceased to ovulate.

  "We Hepburns are extinct as the dodoes now," he said, and he rambled on with the names of many other creatures which had become fruitless, leafless twigs on the tree of evolution. "The Irish elk," he said. "The ivory-billed woodpecker," he said. "Tyrannosaurus rex," he said, and on and on. Right up to the end, though, his dry sense o
f humor would pop up unexpectedly. He made two jocular additions to the lugubrious roll call, both of which were indeed without progeny. "Smallpox," he said, and then, "George Washington."

  Right to the end, he believed with all his heart that his own government had done him in with radiation. He said to Mary, and to the doctor and the nurse who were there because the end could surely come at any moment now: "If only it had been just God Almighty who was mad at me!"

  Mary took that to be his curtain line. He certainly looked dead after that.

  But then, after ten seconds, his blue lips moved again. Mary leaned close to hear his words. She would be glad for the rest of her life that she had not missed them.

  "I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary," he whispered, his eyes closed. "Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew."

  And then he scared the wits out of Mary and everybody in the room by sitting up straight, his eyes open wide and fiery. "Get the Bible!" he commanded, in a voice which could be heard throughout the house.

  This was the only time anything to do with formal religion was mentioned during the whole of his illness. He and Mary were no churchgoers; or prayers in even dire circumstances, but they did have a Bible somewhere. Mary wasn't quite sure where.

  "Get the Bible!" he said again. "Woman, get the Bible!" He had never called her "woman" before.

  So Mary went to look for it. She found it in the spare bedroom, along with Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.

  *Roy sat up, and he called Mary "woman" again. "Woman--" he commanded, "put your hand on the Bible and repeat after me: 'I, Mary Hepburn, hereby make two solemn promises to my beloved husband on his deathbed.'"