by Aaron Thier
As for me, this talk of extinct animals filled me with a sunset longing for vanished times, and I spent interminable hours in the library scanning for information about olyphants and the rest. There were only casual references. I tried to ask Daniel Defoe about it, but he couldn’t remember which animals were real and which were only mythological. The distinction was actually unimportant to him, which threw me into a daydream of perplexity. What is left when you cease to distinguish truths from fictions? I longed for one true unequivocal image of a moose, but there was nothing. This was the ineffable sorrow of living as an intellectual in a time of radical simplification: We had the words for things, but not the things themselves. Olyphant, mermaid, giraffe. Dead language shimmered through our minds. There were passages in Edward Halloween’s alphabetic novel that were just lists of defunct words. Toaster oven. Whack-a-Mole. Boeing 747. Asphalt. Gluon. Sometimes we could envision these things and other times, as with Gluon, we could not even grasp what category of thing it had been.
“At least we have the words,” said Edward Halloween, “even if we can’t make a Gluon anymore.”
One night, in a bid to offer encouragement and explain how we should not be too quick to lament the poverty of our times, Daniel Defoe told a confoundingly fictive story about the decline and fall of the empire.
“It wasn’t all sunshine and gravy during the United States,” he said. “The empire overextended itself and also became extremely decadent. They tried to invade Kuwait, because of the fossil oils. Then they lost a lot of money in the guano trade. They also invested heavily in Andean silver mines, but everyone knew they should have been investing in domestic industry. Then they dropped nucleotide bombs on the islands of Hiroshiva and Namasaki! It was decadence and bad decisions. And meanwhile there was so much overpopulation that you couldn’t get a word in or find a cup of noodles to eat.”
My father paced rapidly to and fro, but I myself just gazed up into the empty air of the dining room and wondered at the uses of falsity. I no longer believed that Daniel Defoe told his stories as an exclusive entertainment for my father, for he told the same kinds of stories when my father was not present.
He continued, “The symbolic eclipse of American hegemony came one morning when a group of Comanche terrorists hijacked a spaceship and flew it into the Sears Tower. They hijacked it with nothing more than an eight ounce tube of toothpaste, which is why it was subsequently illegal to bring toothpaste on interstellar flights.”
“Take a note,” my father said to Edward Halloween, who nodded and took a scrap of brown paper out of his pocket. “Start toothpaste factory. Start inquiry into use of toothpaste as a weapon of war.”
Daniel Defoe was still ensconced in the camel pen, having refused more gracious accommodations, and because we were unable to prosecute our nighttime forays into the city, we began to visit him instead. This was a break from the helter-skeeter life of the palace proper, and my father did not object. He believed we could all learn something from Daniel Defoe.
It was on one of these nights, a breezy night of late November, that we met the sorcerer Quaco, whom we had previously considered another of Daniel Defoe’s fictions. He came gusting up the river out of the wilds of the blue yonder. He was dark like a shadow, and he wore a broken plastic bucket around his neck, and no clothes except for a skirt of plastic strips hung from a ribbon at his waist. He was here to transact a mysterious business with Daniel Defoe. It seems that he was very old also, older than Daniel Defoe, and he spoke Modern English in a beautiful euphonious accent.
“I’ll tell you about Quaco,” Daniel Defoe said. “At one time I made my living in the passenger pigeon business. I sold the meat, which was tough and cheap and easy to get because there were so many birds. There were at least a hundred trillion of them. They’d blot out the sun. Their feces fell like melting snow. Then Quaco made a magic to destroy them. He had his own reasons, so I didn’t hold it against him.”
It was yet another wild story, but I wished I could believe in it. My wedding loomed closer every day and I could only hope for some variety of magical intervention. We had now entered the three week countdown: The elite cashew wine had arrived from across the river, a garden pavilion was being erected, and the peacocks had already been corralled so that they wouldn’t alarm guests with the clamor of their irksome screaming and the obscenity of their tail feathers.
“Please, Quaco,” I said. “Could you make a magic for me too? Could you extract me from my engagement to Anthony Fucking Corvette?”
Edward Halloween laughed. Daniel Defoe laughed. Quaco closed his eyes in the breeze and quiet and hay-fever darkness of the camel pen, and I didn’t expect he was listening, but then he said, “Anthony Fucking Corvette.”
“He is a monster of atavism. He parades his hookers in front of me. He allowed his friends to beat one of them bloody for an amusement. I also think he raped his cook.”
Daniel Defoe said, “I’m sure Quaco can poison him, if worst comes to worse.”
“But it’s not only Senator Corvette,” said Edward Halloween. “It is the whole system and edifice of our paternalist government. Quaco would have to poison the whole country.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” said Daniel Defoe, laughing and riffling through the cupboard where he kept his few possessions. Now he fished forth a small purse full of coins and he said, “Okay, Quaco, I’ve owed you these for a long time. It took a while but I found them after all.”
Quaco weighed the purse in his hand.
“You keep them,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
Quaco nodded. “What will I do with them now?”
Daniel Defoe looked doubtfully at the purse. “They’re no good to me either.”
“You could pay your way across the river,” said Edward Halloween. “You could escape the sinking ship of state. What do you mean they’re no good to you?”
“I have only just arrived,” he said, making a gesture of dismissiveness but also, simultaneously, casting me a glance of unknown significance. “I think I would like to stay a while longer.”
It was the cool season, and in the early dark the clouds were picked out against the hard moon. Soon we were inspired by this lyrical vision to descend to the river and stare into the black water. Daniel Defoe took my arm. Quaco sang a melancholic tune. I had a camel cloth sweatshirt to keep me warm, for it was far superior to cotton and I didn’t give a date pit for the worry that it was a poor person’s cloth. I reflected how we were almost like four standard people out for a stroll, but of course we were not, for one of us was the president’s daughter, and another was a eunuch and clown and poet, and the others were millennial wanderers of the earth.
Down below, in the turbid waters of this ancient grand river, we saw torn tattered nylon and other plastic waste. This was a frequent sight. We had lost the ability to create plastic, so we understood that this garbage was very old, unless they’d discovered plastic again in the north. We watched it as it waved in the current, and it was a spur to wondering and contemplation. In the light of dockside torches, with the breeze turning over the little waves, there was even something beautiful in this emblem of a ruined magnificence.
“All this old trash,” said Edward Halloween. “It is like being shit on by history.”
Daniel Defoe laughed like a hyeno, and I laughed, and even Quaco smiled, although not very much, and not for long.
2016
* * *
The ancient mariner wanted to take a nap. He told us to wake him up at five o’clock, and then, to remind us, he pinned a note to his pants: WAKE ME AT 5 PM. His handwriting was astonishing. Large capital letters with heavy serifs.
It was just after two o’clock, so we went down to Smathers Beach. On the way there we saw a man selling coconuts out of his truck. I bought one because I wanted to see him shave it open with a machete, the way I’d seen it done in movies. Instead he drilled two holes in the husk with a dirty quarter-inch bit and handed me a straw.
It was delicious.
Azar was trying to cheer me up. “We can do whatever you like,” he said. “Is there something else you want to do?”
“The beach is good.”
“You know that I don’t ever mean to trivialize your worries.”
“I know. You’re a good guy. I should tell you sometime how much you mean to me.”
“You should. But anyway, I was proud of you when you were one of those clipboard guys! I was proud you forced yourself to do it, even though you were so poorly suited to the job.”
I laughed. He laughed. I felt very tired.
“And, of course, it was absolutely the right choice to quit. Otherwise you’d have gone bananas.”
The beach was beautiful, but for now I could only enjoy it in principle. I sat underneath a palm tree because I was afraid of the life-giving sun and I didn’t have reef-safe sunblock and anyway, anyway, I was convinced that sunblock was carcinogenic. I was trying not to take my anxiety pills, but it had been a few days already and I could feel the creeping strangeness of withdrawal.
Azar lay down to nap in the sand. I tried to breathe deeply. A sweating smoking tattooed walrus of a man went by with his kid. He was giving the boy a lecture.
“Sea water not only cures you,” he said, “it gives you all the nutrients you need to survive.”
Another idiot, I thought, but when I saw them coming back a few minutes later, the man was holding the boy’s hand. There was a lesson to be learned here about affection and kindness, prejudice and ignorance, whatever, and I tried hard to learn it.
“False memories?” said Azar, snapping awake and giving voice to some internal dialogue about the ancient mariner. “Or else, let’s think about this, selective memories?”
“You remember what you need to remember.”
“Or even better,” he said, “elective memories. You remember what you want to remember.”
There were more frigate birds hanging around up there in the sky. I’d read somewhere that frigate birds were able to sleep in flight by shutting down one half of their brain at a time.
“When I think of one particular fall a few years ago,” Azar said, “I think of reggae and muscadine grapes. Is that a true memory? Did I listen to a lot of reggae and eat a lot of muscadine grapes? Or did I eat muscadine grapes and listen to reggae one time, and then it came to stand for that whole period in my life?”
He didn’t last long at the beach. He was excited about the movie and he wanted to do something. He went to the bookstore to read about Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook.
When he was gone, I sat crunched like a broken umbrella in the shade of my coconut palm. It was very hot and I wanted badly to go for a swim, but I’d gotten stuck to my ego somehow and I couldn’t bear to walk across the sand and make myself into an object of scrutiny for the people around me. I kept promising myself I’d move as soon as this couple went by, or this couple, or as soon as those people over there were distracted. It took me twenty minutes to get down to the water, and then I squatted there like an alligator, just my eyes above water, and told myself I wasn’t feeling so bad after all. I was not a starving pauper in Nairobi. I was not a garment worker in Central America.
Two girls settled in near my palm tree while I was in the water. I reflected on this word, “girls.” They were my age, and in a different era they would have been called young women, or even just women. In a yet more remote era I suppose they’d have been getting on toward spinsterhood. Today they were still girls. One of them was dark, Hispanic maybe, and the other was a small redhead with skin like a snowfield. She looked like she was getting burned even underneath her enormous straw hat.
I could not stay in the water forever, and eventually I went back to my towel and introduced myself. I forced myself to do it, even though my natural mode was shyness disguised as aloof self-absorption.
“People call me Bee,” said the Hispanic girl.
“What’s your real name?”
She looked troubled. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Am I making fun of you?”
“My name’s Bee.”
“Sorry.”
“Lena,” said the other girl. “Elena, but people call me Lena.”
They had a bottle of vodka and four cans of sugar-free Red Bull, which they’d carried here in a pink Victoria’s Secret bag. They were mixing the Red Bull and vodka in jelly jars.
“You want some?” said Bee.
“I’m trying to sort of live more cleanly these days.”
Bee could appreciate the benefits of clean living. With the dispassionate air of a woman discussing the features of her new cell phone, she explained that her father was a drug addict. Lena’s brother was too, she said, though Lena herself did not look happy to have this fact disclosed. She did not look happy about anything. She drew her legs up underneath her and pulled her dress down over her knees. She was trying to fold her whole body into the disk of shade under her hat. I suggested that she move to the shade of my palm tree, but she pointed to the coconuts. Yet another danger. She was afraid they would fall on her.
“What are you reading?” I said.
She held the book out so I could see. It was a battered Signet Classic.
“Tristram Shandy on the beach!” I said.
She looked embarrassed. “I always thought I should read it.”
“It’s great. It’s all of modernism two hundred years beforehand. The black page.”
Bee squinted slightly and looked away. Lena nodded and blushed. I knew I was misreading the situation somehow.
“Are you just on vacation?” said Bee.
“My friend and I are here making a documentary.”
“A movie?”
An egret floated out of the sky like a plastic bag. I was conscious of Lena watching me from beneath her vast shady hat. I did not want to seem like a pretentious jerk, but isn’t that what I was?
“We don’t know anything about filmmaking,” I said. “I don’t know how we got the idea we could do it. It’s about an old man who lives in a boat over on Mango Lane.”
“Old Dan,” said Bee. “Daniel Defoe.”
“You know him?”
“Of course we know him.”
They knew him because they lived on Key West. They had grown up here, which seemed extraordinary to me, like growing up in Las Vegas or Disney World.
“What’s the idea with this guy?” I said. “He told us he was five hundred years old. Six hundred maybe.”
“Yeah,” said Bee. “He’s pretty old.”
“There’s a photo of him at John Baxter’s maritime museum,” said Lena. “You should go look at it. It’s from just after the Civil War, I think. So says John Baxter. Obviously it’s a fake.”
“John Baxter’s maritime museum?”
“He runs it out of his house. The John Baxter Maritime Museum.”
They went for a swim. Lena was skinny and pale and beautiful. They were both beautiful. Girls in their bathing suits! Girls or women or spinsters. No matter. It was a reason to go on living. It was a vision of life itself.
But then they had to go. Bee had to get to work. She was a housekeeper at Tradewinds Cottage. Lena had to get to work too, though she wouldn’t say where. They had this little break each afternoon and that was all. I didn’t know what to do. Bee said maybe they’d see me tomorrow, if I was still around. Lena smiled and made a show of getting her stuff together. I waited until they’d disappeared around the corner and then I left as well.
I met Azar at the bookstore. We had coffee and then walked back to the ancient mariner’s house, or his boat, or whatever it was proper to call it. Tom Rath was loitering outside the gate once again, peering in. Later we learned that he was staying across the street at Pelican Court.
I said, “We’re not in the mood, Tom. We’re serious people and we’re having a serious conversation about the environment.”
“My toupee is made from recycled water bottles. It’s hot as the dickens.”
; “Hold on,” said Azar. “How do you know Tom Rath?”
“How do you?”
Tom Rath said, “Everyone knows everyone.”
“He bet me he could stand on his head for ten seconds,” said Azar.
“Once I was standing on my head so good,” said Tom Rath, “so still, like a statue, that a dog peed on me.”
“Not this morning, though.”
“Hey, Tom,” I said, “we’ve got some things to do. We’ll check back with you later.”
“You think I’m a scumbag, is it? You think I’m out here and I like lying to my wife? She’s not even my wife! She’s my husband. His name is William. I love him but sometimes a person needs to flap free in the wind a little bit.”
It took a while to rouse the ancient mariner, but when we’d gotten him upright again he was very cheerful. He told us to set up our camera. He was going to tell us a story about mermaids, to take our minds off garbage.
“The first time I saw one was in 1575,” he said, “off the coast of Ceylon. We caught her in a net while we were fishing for our supper. She had a small flat nose and round gray eyes and hair like seaweed. Actually she was very ugly, but I was haunted for weeks by her perfect breasts. This mermaid also had gray skin and a powerful fluke, like a porpoise. That’s why we didn’t eat her. It wasn’t because she looked so much like a young girl. Monkeys look very much like human children, after all, and in port we ate monkeys often enough. It was just that we thought her flesh was likely to be too oily, because of this additional or secondary resemblance to a porpoise, or a grampus.”
“A grampus?” said Azar.
“Or a porpoise. But today’s story takes place on a fishing boat off the Faroe Islands. It must have been around 1770. That’s where I had an almost fatal encounter with a mermaid. We caught her when we were fishing for cod, which was an important commodity in those days.”