The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Now they were in the Galapagos National Park, staying on a one-hundred-passenger cruise ship that traveled slowly through the islands just south of the equator. The Floreana resembled a floating hotel, dazzling-white in sunshine, large enough not to roll with the waves, or anyway not to roll very much; the wife had taken seasickness pills, and so far she had not been ill—a relief! In fact, the wife was usually in a very good mood, thinking of how she’d escaped Quito.

  “Never again! Never nine thousand feet.”

  It had been nine thousand feet that was the evil, that had made her sick.

  What had happened at nine thousand feet had been her fault almost entirely, she thought. She’d been naïve about altitude sickness, thinking it much less severe than it was, hardly more than shortness of breath and fatigue, a little nausea. Henry had warned her—had tried to warn her—and she hadn’t understood. So badly had she wanted to come with her husband on this romantic voyage to Ecuador . . .

  When we are alone, it will be a second honeymoon.

  Maybe there is no other woman . . .

  In the bright, intense equatorial sunshine, the wife was beginning to feel a new enthusiasm. Her strength had returned, or nearly. Her hope for her marriage. Back home in New Jersey it was winter, and very cold. She was determined to survive!

  From the Floreana twice a day small groups of passengers were taken in dinghies to the islands. They were divided into groups, as in summer camp: Boobies, Dolphins, Cormorants, Penguins, Frigates, Albatrosses. Most of the passengers were Americans, and Caucasians; those in the Wheelings’ group (Albatrosses) included doctors, a dental surgeon, university professors (geology, psychology), a high school principal and her businessman-husband, and several young somber-browed children. All were equipped for hiking on the islands with proper shoes, sun hats and clothing. Sometimes they were able to step off the dinghy onto the rocky shore, and sometimes they had to make “wet landings,” disembarking into the rocky surf, for which a kind of rubberized hiking sandal was required. The guide and his young native assistant, who operated the outboard motor, helped passengers into and out of the boat with practiced ease; the hope was to avert both panic and actual falls. The wife was grateful for such help though the husband irritably indicated that he didn’t require it—“Gracias! But I’m perfectly capable of stepping out of a dinghy by myself.”

  Still, it was something of a feat, to step from the metal stairs of the cruise ship and into the bobbing dinghy, without falling into the sea.

  The husband who was in excellent physical condition with strong, muscled legs and a lean, lanky body didn’t see himself as an older man, the wife knew. But he was silvery-haired, and his handsome face finely wrinkled, and so surely he appeared older in the eyes of others in the boat, younger than himself.

  The wife was determined to enjoy the Galapagos. She wouldn’t be able to keep pace with the husband who hiked ahead, conversing with the guide, much of the time.

  The first island they visited had been formed out of molten lava millennia ago. Virtually no vegetation, only a few primitive animal species. It was a volcanic landscape of astonishing fissures and shapes, like a great head of Medusa. And near-invisible in the island’s cooled lava dreadlocks, hundreds—thousands?—of marine iguanas.

  So closely did the iguanas mimic the hue and texture of the lava rocks, they were virtually indistinguishable from the rocks—primitive ugly creatures like basilisks come to life. Yet they were barely living, sensate—the wife shuddered, observing them. So many! So ugly! They appeared to be warming themselves on rocks unmindful that other, smaller lizards and crabs scuttled over them without their noticing.

  It was the beginning of mating season, Eduardo explained. That was why some of the (male) iguanas were shaking their dragonlike heads and making a chuffing sound. The (smaller, female) iguanas scarcely seemed to notice. (This was amusing. Eduardo’s listeners laughed.) “The female can exercise some choice of a mate, but she can’t not choose to mate.”

  Some choice. But no choice.

  Dutifully, the wife took pictures on her iPhone, like the others. She would delete most of the pictures afterward, for one iguana looks very much like another iguana; and a hillside of iguanas is too many iguanas.

  Care had to be taken not to twist an ankle, walking on the lava coils, that resembled large, stony intestines. And care had to be taken not to step on an iguana.

  When the strangely bright sun emerged, the wife’s eyes throbbed; when the sun disappeared behind clouds the air was wetly cool. Where was this place? Why was she here, where no one had asked her to come?

  Also, eerily, large spiderlike crabs of the color of boiled crabs scuttled about the lava formations, over the impassive hides of the iguanas, constantly in motion. There was something particularly repulsive about these.

  By this time the husband had climbed to the highest peak of the trail, with several of the younger hikers. These were the “adventurers” among the Albatrosses—their physical stamina and agility set them off from the others.

  The wife squinted at the husband, at a little distance from her. He and the other hikers were nearly out of earshot, if the guide were to call to them.

  If he lost his footing? If—something happened?

  “Here. Observe.”

  Visitors were not to approach the animals of course. But to demonstrate the iguanas’ indifference to human life, Eduardo squatted beside one of the large males and very gently moved its tail along the ground; almost comically, the iguana did not seem to see or smell him, and did not shift its tail back into its original position. The stark staring eyes remained unblinking, unaware as if the creature were blind.

  “The animals seem ‘tame’ to us, but that’s a misconception. They are not ‘tame.’ They just have no genetic memory of human beings as predators.”

  Someone asked if human beings were to settle on the island, would the iguanas begin to fear them instinctively, and Eduardo said, “Eventually, yes. But not for a very long time, by which time the iguanas might have outlived the Homo sapiens intruders.”

  How interesting this was, to the wife! She wondered if there are human beings born fatally lacking a “genetic memory” for predators; if they inevitably pass away, and fail to reproduce themselves.

  Eduardo added that the only predators the Galapagos animals instinctively feared were hawks, that swooped down to devour their babies.

  The wife recalled a ghastly PBS documentary of baby sea turtles hatching out of eggs in a place like the Galapagos, desperately trying to make their way into the water on their short, stiff legs as predator birds rushed upon them. How cruel it had seemed, like a brutal game devised by sadistic young boys. She’d had to stop watching.

  It was something of a ridiculous notion—survival of the fittest. Maybe it was a rule of thumb for vast numbers of creatures but not for individuals. You could be very fit but trapped behind a multitude rushing to escape a burning building. You could be very fit but stricken by a virulent disease you could not afford to have treated because you were poor and uninsured. And of course, you could die sheerly by accident—through another’s carelessness.

  Yet, if you perished, it was because you were unfit. History would not care for you in the slightest—history would not even record you.

  They were left to explore on their own, though cautioned not to step off the clearly designated trails. The husband strode ahead with the most energetic of the others, climbing rocks like a man half his age.

  How resilient Henry was! He had scarcely been slowed down by the virulent altitude sickness, that had left the wife weak as if anemic.

  The wife tried not to feel lonely. She hated to be alone with her thoughts, that assailed her with the rapacity of piranha fish. She was trying not to think of the husband’s new woman, if there was a new woman and not rather a woman he’d been seeing for some time, though certainly a young and be
autiful woman, a stranger to the wife. An intellectual, probably—beautiful, young, and brainy.

  She supposed that Henry had been discreet enough to have made sure that the new, young woman, if traveling with them in the Galapagos, would never encounter the wife. Henry would have made certain that the woman wasn’t assigned to his table on the Floreana, or in the dinghy.

  This primitive, bleak island! Though lush with its own sort of minimal life, it was very depressing. A place to contemplate suicide except—In such a place, isn’t suicide redundant?

  The wife laughed. The wife wiped at her eyes, inside the dark-tinted lenses of her glasses.

  After what seemed like a long time but was probably no more than an hour, Eduardo summoned them all back to the dinghy. What relief! The wife was one of the first to come aboard, along with the youngest children; the husband was one of the last.

  He doesn’t even know if I’m in the boat. He has not noticed.

  This was unfair of course: Henry had seen her. He’d even smiled at her, with the gallantry with which he’d smiled at strangers. But he’d made no effort to sit beside her as the little boat filled up.

  One of the remarks Eduardo had made on the lava island made a powerful impression on the wife: the rigors of survival in this place were such that but a single species, on the average of each 26,000 years, could manage to “establish” itself and live.

  “It’s hopeless, then!”—one of the group had said, meaning to be witty. “Might as well give up.”

  And all of the Albatrosses had laughed, secure in the knowledge that, as affluent white-skinned American tourists, they had managed very well to survive until now, against enormous odds.

  On a circuitous route back to the cruise ship the dinghy stopped at a second island, larger and more habitable than the lava island. Here was a more familiar fecundity, less the stark brute brainless reptilian life that set the human soul to shivering: penguins, pelicans, blue-footed boobies, frigates and cormorants whose wings could no longer lift their bodies into the air.

  So many wild shorebirds! Suddenly, much beauty.

  Everyone was eager to take pictures of the penguins. The human eye perceives uncanny something in the penguin that resembles the human, and so is drawn to it.

  After some minutes amid the so-strangely “tame” birds, Eduardo led the Albatrosses along a strenuous rocky trail to an inlet of sea lions, many with babies. Here were hundreds of the sleek, glistening, strangely stunted creatures with large moistly winking dark eyes and brittle whiskers. Many were braying, moaning. Except those who lay sprawled asleep in the coarse sand as if comatose, the sea lions were in constant, antic motion, as if they were performing for the visitors; nor did they register alarm at the human visitors within a dozen or so feet of their babies.

  There was a subtle rapport of some kind between the ­species—sea lions, human beings. The wife thought so. Though no human beings ever fed the sea lions, as they did in other parts of the world, yet these sea lions seemed quite “friendly”—you would have that impression.

  “Mammals have personalities. Reptiles don’t. Is that so?”—the wife attempted her idea of an intelligent question, to which the Ecuadoran guide responded politely:

  “All the animals have ‘personalities.’ They are distinctive to one another, and can be recognized by one another, in ways we don’t always understand.”

  Earlier, the husband had engaged the guide in an exchange about the youthful Charles Darwin’s visit to the island when the Beagle had first anchored here in 1835; it was clear to the guide that the husband knew a good deal about Darwin, Darwin in the Galapagos, and evolutionary theory, and so he spoke to Henry with particular respect. But the husband was drifting off now, with his camera.

  Eduardo was a handsome, compact man of about the wife’s height of five foot seven with a shaved head, a thin mustache and a resolutely calm demeanor—his background wasn’t only Indian but Hispanic, German, and Norwegian. Of the half-dozen Galapagos Park guides assigned to the Floreana, Eduardo appeared to be the leader.

  The wife worried that the husband was taking too strenuous a trail, up from the shore. He was keeping up with two of the younger men—maybe that was it. Those who stayed close to the guide were the less physically fit or adventurous of the men, and most of the women and children.

  If the husband’s new, younger woman were with him here—how would she behave? No doubt she was an accomplished hiker who’d have followed the husband up into the rocks . . .

  No doubt, she was physically dexterous, as the wife had never quite been. Sexually daring, adventurous . . .

  “Too close! Get back, please.”

  The guide was reprimanding one of the children who’d pushed too close to a mother sea lion and her cub. Rebuked, the boy returned quickly to his mother’s side.

  With sympathetic eyes the wife watched mother and son: the way the mother consoled the son, without allowing him to think that he’d been mistreated by the guide. It was subtle, and it was good mothering.

  The wife wondered what kind of mother she’d have been. It seemed wrong, “unnatural”—she had lost her husband before they’d had time to have a child.

  And she’d remarried too late. She’d been in mourning for most of her adult life. As if premature death were not commonplace in nature!—this was the lesson of the Galapagos, unmistakably.

  She had always believed that her young husband would have wanted her to remarry, even if she couldn’t have fallen in love with another man as she’d fallen in love with him, yet she’d kept herself at a distance from the life of the emotions. She’d hidden away in her work, and in the shackles of family responsibilities. Like an animal grown defenseless for lack of predators she’d been very easily approached by a skilled predator.

  Her family had thought that that was what Henry Wheeling was—a predator. And she, the too-willing heiress-victim.

  But I love him. That is a fact I can’t alter.

  The wife glanced about seeking the husband—where? He’d managed to climb to the top of a rocky trail, and was almost out of sight.

  It was a windy, sun-jangling day. A day of great joy—the wife was so very happy not to be trapped inside her raging head in Quito.

  The husband had been very sympathetic with the wife, in Quito. He had not been able to change their plane tickets to bring them to the coast earlier (he had explained), but he’d been attentive to his sick wife, and brought her medications to help her sleep, and bottles of water to prevent dehydration.

  As nearby sea lions slept, brayed, frolicked and cavorted and slid into the water like animated figures in a film, the guide continued to lecture to his circle of faithful and attentive listeners. His subject was the necessity for the Galapagos National Park to control—“that is, eradicate”—those “introduced” species that had overbred on certain of the islands, and had threatened the original species with extinction by devouring their food supply. These were goats, cats, and rats brought by sailors as early as the seventeenth century and left behind on the islands to flourish in the absence of predators. Sea turtles, giant tortoises, and many bird species had come near to extinction, as a result.

  Over a period of approximately a decade the Galapagos Park rangers had slaughtered the “unwanted” species almost entirely. Hunters, snipers, and carefully administered poisons had devastated goats, cats, rats in great numbers—as many as five hundred thousand goats, for instance, at a cost of—had it been $50 million?

  Eduardo spoke with particular zeal of how ingeniously the eradication team had conscripted “Judas goats” to help them with the project—these were goats selected out from the original slaughter, marked with yellow crosses and “freed” into the wilderness so that, unwittingly, wanting only to rejoin their own kind, they led the death team back into the hills to find those goats that had escaped the general slaughter. “After the Judas goats fulfilled their
purpose, they too were killed.”

  There was a moment’s silence. The several children, who ordinarily listened to the guide with respectful interest, had disengaged from this account; unmistakably, they did not want to hear Eduardo speak of slaughtering goats or other animals.

  The wife said she’d thought it was their policy not to “help” animals—“Not to feed them, or to protect them. Didn’t you tell us that?”

  “Yes. But in this case, we are not ‘helping’ the animals directly. We are restoring the environment to its original state, before human beings interfered with introduced species.”

  “Couldn’t you have sterilized the goats, for instance? Or moved them somewhere else?”

  “The project was a very careful one, over a period of years. Sterilization was not practical, and moving the goats to a sanctuary would have cost more than sixty million.”

  These answers had the air of being well rehearsed. The wife understood that Eduardo was accustomed to being questioned, and knew exactly how to reply.

  The guide could sense, however, that his American tourist visitors were not so comfortable, hearing of the slaughter of animals, even in the service of maintaining a pristine environment.

  “You see, the original species could not compete. The introduced species had no natural predators, and were overrunning the islands.”

  “But I don’t understand—why are ‘introduced’ species of less value than ‘original’ species? Aren’t all species ‘introduced’ —originally?”

  Stiffly the guide said, as if reciting prepared words, “The Galapagos Park is mandated to preserve species natural to the region, before human beings arrived.”

  “But human beings are animals, too! If they have introduced new species to the islands, isn’t that part of evolution? The way birds bring in seeds from outside, or animals . . .”

  Politely the guide said, “Of course, señora. What you say is correct. But human beings are not natural to the islands.”