Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut

  As far as humanity was concerned, all wounds were about to become very permanent. And high explosives weren't going to be a branch of show business anymore.

  Yes, and if humanity had continued to heal its self-inflicted wounds by means of copulation, then the tale I have to tell about the Santa Rosalia Colony would be a tragicomedy starring the vain and incompetent Captain Adolf von Kleist. It would have spanned months rather than a million years, since the colonists would never have become colonists. They would have been marooned persons who were noticed and rescued in a little while.

  Among them would have been a shamefaced Captain, solely responsible for their travail.

  After only one night at sea, though, the Captain was still able to believe that all was well. It would soon be time for Mary Hepburn to relieve him at the wheel, at which time he would give her these instructions: "Keep the sun over the stern all morning, and over the bow all afternoon." And the Captain saw as his most pressing task the earning of his passengers' respect. They had seen him at his very worst. By the time they docked at Baltra, he hoped, they would have forgotten his drunkenness, and would be telling one and all that he had saved their lives.

  That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and which might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.

  Quoth Mandarax:

  Imagination is as good as many voyages--and how much cheaper!

  --GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892)

  So there the Captain was, half naked on the bridge of the Bahia de Darwin, but in his head he was on the island of Manhattan, where most of his money and so many of his friends were anyway. He was going to get there somehow from Baltra, and buy himself a nice apartment on Park Avenue, and the hell with Ecuador.

  Reality intruded now. A very real sun was coming up. There was one small trouble with the sun. The Captain had imagined all night that he was sailing due west, which meant that the sun would be rising squarely astern. This particular sun, however, was astern, all right, but also very much to starboard. So he turned the ship to port until the sun was where it was supposed to be. His big brain, which was responsible for the error he corrected, assured his soul that its mistake was minor and very recent, and had happened because the stars were dimmed by dawn. His big brain wanted the respect of his soul as much as he wanted the respect of his passengers. His brain had a life of its own, and the time would come when he would actually try to fire it for having misled him.

  But that time was still five days away.

  He still trusted it when he went aft to learn how "Willard Flemming" was, and to help Mary, according to plan, move him into the shade of the gangway between the officers' cabins. I do not put a star before the name of Willard Flemming, since there wasn't really such an individual--so he couldn't die.

  And the Captain was so uninterested in Mary Hepburn as a person that he did not even know her last name. He thought it was Kaplan, the name over the pocket of her war-surplus fatigue blouse, which *Wait was using for a pillow now.

  *Wait believed her last name to be Kaplan, too, no matter how often she corrected him. During the night he had said to her, "You Jews sure are survivors."

  She had replied, "You're a survivor, too, Willard."

  "Well," he had said, "I used to think I was one, Mrs. Kaplan. Now I'm not so sure. I guess everybody who isn't dead yet is a survivor."

  "Now, now," she had said, "let's talk about something pleasant. Let's talk about Baltra."

  But the blood supply to his brain must have been momentarily dependable then, because *Wait had continued to follow this line of reasoning. He'd even given a dry little laugh. He'd said, "There are all these people bragging about how they're survivors, as though that's something very special. But the only kind of person who can't say that is a corpse."

  "There, there," she'd said.

  When the Captain appeared before Mary and *Wait after sunrise, Mary had just consented to marry *Wait. He had worn her down. It was as though he had been begging for water all night, so that finally she was going to give him some. If he wanted betrothal so badly, and betrothal was all she had to give him, then she would give him some.

  She did not expect, however, to have to honor that pledge almost immediately, or perhaps ever. She certainly liked all he had told her about himself. During the night, he had discovered that she was a cross-country skiing enthusiast. He had responded warmly that he was never happier than when he was on skis, with the clean snow all around, and the silence of the frozen lakes and forests. He had never been on skis in his life, but had once married and ruined the widow of the owner of a ski lodge in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He courted her in the springtime, and left her a pauper before the green leaves turned orange and yellow and red and brown.

  This wasn't a human being Mary was engaged to. She had a pastiche for a fiance.

  Not that it mattered much what she was engaged to, her big brain told her, since they certainly couldn't get married before they got to Baltra, and "Willard Flemming," if he was still alive, would have to go into intensive care immediately. There was plenty of time, she thought, for her to back out of the engagement.

  So it did not seem a particularly serious matter when *Wait said to the Captain, "I have the most wonderful news. Mrs. Kaplan is going to marry me. I am the luckiest man in the world."

  Fate now played a trick on Mary almost as quick and logical as my decapitation in the shipyard at Malmo. "You are in luck," said the Captain. "As captain of this ship in international waters, I am legally entitled to marry you. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God--" he began, and, two minutes later, he had made "Mary Kaplan" and "Willard Flemming" man and wife.

  5

  QUOTH MANDARAX:

  Oaths are but words, and words but wind.

  --SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680)

  And Mary Hepburn on Santa Rosalia would memorize that quotation from Mandarax, and hundreds of others. But as the years went by, she took her marriage to "Willard Flemming" more and more seriously, even though this second husband had died with a smile on his face about two minutes after the Captain pronounced them man and wife. She would say to furry Akiko when she was an old, old lady, bent over and toothless, "I thank God for sending me two good men." She meant Roy and "Willard Flemming." It was her way of saying, too, that she did not think much of the Captain, who was then an old, old man, and the father or grandfather of all the island's young people, save for Akiko.

  Akiko was the only young person in the colony eager to hear stories, and particularly love stories, about life on the mainland. So that Mary would apologize to her for having so few first-person love stories to tell. Her parents had certainly been very much in love, she said, and Akiko enjoyed hearing about how they were still kissing and hugging each other right up to the end.

  Mary could make Akiko laugh about the ridiculous love affair, if you could call it that, she had had with a widower named Robert Wojciehowitz, who was head of the English Department at Ilium High School before the school closed down. He was the only person besides Roy and "Willard Flemming" who had ever proposed marriage to her.

  The story went like this:

  Robert Wojciehowitz started calling her up and asking her for dates only two weeks after Roy was buried. She turned him down, and let him know that it was certainly too early for her to start dating again.

  She did everything she could to discourage him, but he came to see her one afternoon anyway, even though she had said she very much wished to be alone. He drove up to her house while she was mowing the lawn. He made her shut off the mower, and then he blurted out a marriage proposal.

  Mary would describe his car
to Akiko, and make Akiko laugh about it, even though Akiko had never seen and never would see any sort of automobile. Robert Wojciehowitz drove a Jaguar which used to be very beautiful, but which was now all scored and dented on the driver's side. The car was a gift from his wife while she was dying. Her name was *Doris, a name Akiko would give to one of her furry daughters, simply because of Mary's story.

  *Doris Wojciehowitz had inherited a little money, and she bought the Jaguar for her husband as a way of thanking him for having been such a good husband. They had a grown son named Joseph, and he was a lout, and he wrecked the beautiful Jaguar while his mother was still alive. Joseph was sent to jail for a year--as a punishment for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

  There is our brain-shrinking old friend alcohol again.

  Robert's marriage proposal took place on the only freshly mowed lawn in the neighborhood. All the other yards were being recaptured by wilderness, since everybody else had moved away. And the whole time Wojciehowitz was proposing, a big golden retriever was barking at them and pretending to be dangerous. This was Donald, the dog who had been such a comfort to Roy during the last months of his life. Even dogs had names back then. Donald was the dog. Robert was the man. And Donald was harmless. He had never bitten anybody. All he wanted was for someone to throw a stick for him, so he could bring it back, so somebody could throw a stick for him, so he could bring it back, and so on. Donald wasn't very smart, to say the least. He certainly wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. When Donald slept, he would often whimper and his hind legs would shiver. He was dreaming of chasing sticks.

  Robert was frightened of dogs--because he and his mother had been attacked by a Doberman pinscher when Robert was only five years old. Robert was all right with dogs as long as there was somebody around who knew how to control them. But whenever he was alone with one, no matter what size it was, he sweated and he trembled, and his hair stood on end. So he was extremely careful to avoid such situations.

  But his marriage proposal so surprised Mary Hepburn that she burst into tears, something nobody does anymore. She was so embarrassed and confused that she apologized to him brokenly, and she ran into the house. She didn't want to be married to anybody but Roy. Even if Roy was dead, she still didn't want to be married to anybody but Roy.

  So that left Robert all alone on the front lawn with Donald.

  If Robert's big brain had been any good, it would have had him walk deliberately to his car, while telling Donald scornfully to shut up and go home, and so on. But it had him turn and run instead. His brain was so defective that it had him run right past his car, with Donald loping right behind him--and he crossed the street and climbed an apple tree in the front yard of an empty house belonging to a family which had moved to Alaska.

  So Donald sat under the tree and barked up at him.

  Robert was up there for an hour, afraid to come down, until Mary, wondering why Donald had been barking so monotonously for so long, came out of her house and rescued him.

  When Robert came down, he was nauseated by fear and self-loathing. He actually threw up. After that, and he had spattered his own shoes and pants cuffs, he said snarlingly, "I am not a man. I am simply not a man. I will of course never bother you again. I will never bother any woman ever again."

  And I retell this story of Mary's at this point because Captain Adolf von Kleist would hold the same low opinion of his worth after churning the ocean to a lather for five nights and days, and failing to find an island of any kind.

  He was too far north--much too far north. So we were all too far north--much too far north. I wasn't hungry, of course, and neither was James Wait, who was frozen solid in the meat locker in the galley below. The galley, although stripped of light bulbs and without portholes, could still be illuminated, albeit hellishly, by the heating elements of its electric ovens and stoves.

  Yes, and the plumbing was still working, too. There was plenty of water on tap everywhere, both hot and cold.

  So nobody was thirsty, but everybody was surely ravenous. Kazakh, Selena's dog, was missing, and I put no star before her name, for Kazakh was dead. The Kanka-bono girls had stolen her while Selena slept, and choked her with their bare hands, and skinned and gutted her with no other tools than their teeth and fingernails. They had roasted her in an oven. Nobody else knew that they had done that yet.

  She had been consuming her own substance anyway. By the time they killed her, she was skin and bones.

  If she had made it to Santa Rosalia, she wouldn't have had much of a future--even in the unlikely event that there had been a male dog there. She had been neutered, after all. All she could have accomplished which might have outlasted her own lifetime would have been to give the furry Akiko, soon to be born, infantile memories of a dog. Under the best of circumstances, Kazakh would not have lived long enough for the other children born on the island to pet her, and to see her wag her tail and so on. They wouldn't have had her bark to remember, since Kazakh never barked.

  6

  I SAY NOW of Kazakh's untimely death, lest anyone should be moved to tears, "Oh, well--she wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

  I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well--he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

  This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention. I first heard it spoken in Swedish at a funeral while I was still alive. The corpse at that particular rite of passage was an obtuse and unpopular shipyard foreman named Per Olaf Rosenquist. He had died young, or what was thought to be young in those days, because he, like James Wait, had inherited a defective heart. I went to the funeral with a fellow welder named Hjalmar Arvid Bostrom, not that it can matter much what anybody's name was a million years ago. As we left the church, Bostrom said to me: "Oh, well--he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

  I asked him if this black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn't died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: "Don't worry about it. He wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

  After I myself was buried young in Malmo, only six meters from Per Olaf Rosenquist, Hjalmar Arvid Bostrom said that about me, as he left the cemetery: "Oh, well--Leon wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

  Yes, and I was reminded of that comment when Captain von Kleist chided Mary for weeping about the death of the man they believed to be Willard Flemming. They had been out to sea for only twelve hours then, and the Captain still felt easily superior to her, and, for that matter, to practically everyone.

  He said to her, while he told her how to hold the ship on its western course, "What a waste of time to cry about a total stranger. From what you tell me, he had no relatives and was no longer engaged in any useful work, so what is there to cry about?"

  That might have been a good time for me to say as a disembodied voice, "He certainly wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

  He made a sort of a joke now, but it didn't really sound like much of a joke. "As captain of this ship," he said, "I order you to cry only when there is something to cry about. There's nothing to cry about now."

  "He was my husband," she said. "I choose to take that ceremony you performed very seriously. You can laugh if you want." Wait was right out back on the subject still. He hadn't been put in the freezer yet. "He gave a lot to this world, and he had a lot still to give, if only we could have saved him."

  "What did this man give the world that was so wonderful?" asked the Captain.

  "He kne
w more about windmills than anybody alive," she said. "He said we could close down the coal mines and the uranium mines--that windmills alone could make the coldest parts of the world as warm as Miami, Florida. He was also a composer."

  "Really?" said the Captain.

  "Yes," she said, "he wrote two symphonies." I found that piquant, in view of what I have just been saying, that Wait during his last night on earth should have claimed to have written two symphonies. Mary went on to say that when she got back home, she was going to go to Moose Jaw and find those symphonies, which had never been performed, and try to get an orchestra to give them a premiere.

  "Willard was such a modest man," she said.

  "So it would seem," said the Captain.

  One hundred and eight hours later, the Captain would find himself in direct competition with the reputation of this modest paragon. "If only Willard were still alive," she said, "he would know exactly what to do."

  The Captain had wholly lost his self-respect, and, although he had thirty more years to live, he would never get it back again. How is that for a real tragedy? He was abject in the face of Mary's mockery. "I am certainly open to suggestions," he said. "You have only to tell me what the wonderful Willard would have done, and that is what I will most gladly do."

  He had by then fired his brain, and was navigating on the advice of his soul alone, turning the ship this way and then that way. An island the size of a handkerchief would have inspired the Captain to sob in gratitude. And, yes, yet again the sun, now dead ahead, now to port, now astern, now to starboard, was going down.

  On the deck below, Selena MacIntosh was calling for her dog: "Kaaaaaaaa-zakh. Kaaaaaaa-zakh. Has anybody seen my dog?"

  Mary yelled back, "She's not up here." And then, trying to imagine what Willard would have done, she came up with the idea that Mandarax, along with being a clock and translator and so on, might also be a radio. She told the Captain to try to call for help with it.