On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  We heard Stephan late last night wearing headphones and singing painfully off-key along with an old Bread CD. He does not shut up. “Mom, did you know I can’t shuffle as well with gloves on . . . look. Mom! Look, I have a tail. Where’s Abby? Mom! These batteries are lasting forever. . . . What time is it? Oh, I have a watch. . . . Mom, I have a watch on and I just asked you what time it is. . . . Mom, Mom!

  I wish some days were only thirty seconds long.

  DAY 208

  Wendy can’t help it. When she looks at furniture catalogs her eyes mist over. She utters meaningless phrases about soapstone counters, saffron arrangements, and cream-colored cabinets. I go to my catalog and dream of a three-year food supply.

  Speaking of nesting, Stephan is having his first date. Her name is Erica, and she is the daughter Peter most wanted to be a boy. (It’s her never-used BB gun that Peter gave to Stephan.) She and Stephan wander about the island nervously together. There is a lot of card playing, and then a big Monopoly game the four of us play together. It’s nice because Stephan hasn’t become embarrassed about Wendy and me yet. (We still have that phase of child rearing to look forward to.)

  I poured a quarter cup of rainwater out of the laptop computer. After two hours on the woodstove it’s working fine. Macintosh rocks!

  I have a job interview next week at my old boarding school. I’m trying not to think about it.

  Stephan

  It was extremely foggy today. Daniel is on edge. I read all day long, and Mom made cinnamon rolls. I am reading Animal Farm. I miss Erica. I want to go back to Idaho.

  DAY 209

  Wendy and Erica ashore in the morning, Wendy to an overnight Tupperware party! We’re at the eastern edge of the continent, and Tupperware has found her . . . I’m thinking maybe I should change my name and move.

  When it is fully dark we sometimes light fifty candles and place them on the windowsills. The effect is magical. At eye level there is only one small area with a non-glass wall, so the windows are everywhere. They reflect the candles, and then one another, so we feel like we are looking out from the inside of a lighted Christmas tree. Our one radio station is playing Micmac (Native American) chanting, an hourlong droning drumbeat with one-syllable words, on and on, the drums going at around one beat per second, like a heart.

  Today Stephan goes twice around the island, with breaks for push-ups and sit-ups! Perhaps he has a crush on Erica?

  As Stephan’s teacher, I often have an image of myself as the father bird happily vomiting knowledge directly into his upturned gullet. I recite some Kafka: “You cast about too much for outside help, especially from women. Don’t you see that it isn’t the right kind of help?”

  This elicits absolutely no reaction.

  He’s acting very grown-up, as if we couldn’t possibly understand the ordeals of living, and he’s right, in a way. We are limited by the beast of having already gone through that, of thinking we know all about it. Sometimes I feel like one of the grown-ups in The Little Prince who can see the drawing shown them only as a hat, unable to notice that it is really an elephant inside of a boa constrictor.

  11. Ashore

  I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 214—FEBRUARY

  My job interview is in New Hampshire, a two-day drive. The position is for an English teacher and dorm head. Stephan has an all-day interview at the local fancy day school, and Wendy is house shopping. I think both of them would love the East, but I am afraid of what ghosts might awake to haunt me.

  The dogs can sense something bad. Perhaps the word kennel is not in their vocabulary, but the feeling of strangeness is already upon them.

  After falling our way over the icy trail to the motor-boat, we’re a pretty wounded and bruised-up bunch as we leave the island. Last night’s icy rain seems to be saying, “Don’t go!” The ride in is wet, and the spray forms into ice on our float suits. We haul the boat way up the ramp by Junior’s dock, the car starts, and we’re off.

  I should have been paying attention to the early indications that we were all a bit island spaced. Without social interaction one tends to become awkward. I’ve often been cut off from others. I have been forty-two days alone at sea. But Wendy and Stephan seem confused and a little in shock.

  Tipping is the first obvious clue to our incompetence; Wendy and I are perplexed. Is it 7 percent? Is that the tax? Or is it 4 percent in Idaho and 17 percent in Nova Scotia? Sales tax, income tax at 30 percent . . . ? We just can’t come up with a figure at the restaurant. There is also the issue of converting value, as Canadian and U.S. currency are both in dollars. It is funny and nerve-racking. I end up asking the waitress, “Would four dollars be a good tip?”

  We drive for hours, and then U.S. customs looms ahead. I know that when my passport is handed over and scanned the computer will show a warning. The agent will press a button, or nod at someone, or something secret, and another agent will show up and ask me to follow them and sit here and wait. Then in five minutes a third agent will appear with a printout and say, “Mr. Hays, are you in possession of any restricted animal products?” and I’ll explain no, two sperm whales washed up on my beach eight years ago and I got mounds of bones and once when I was coming through customs with a rib to give a friend, an agent got all upset since sperm whales are endangered and I said, “Hey, I ain’t no Ahab, do you think I kill whales?” and it wasn’t funny, and he got more upset, and he took my bone and made an entry in the computer’s International Poacher and Dealer of Endangered Species list, and me with a master’s degree in environmental science from a total tree-hugging save-the-whales kind of school. So now I get to tell the whole story each time I come into the States. It takes an extra fifteen minutes and I plan on it. Sigh.

  Another eight hours of driving and we arrive in New Hampshire. We sleep in the same hotel—the same room—that I used to sneak off campus to with my girlfriend. The ceiling once again swirls in LSD patterns, my first decent flashback in years.

  In the morning Wendy dresses us. Stephan is nervous and changes four times. I’m in denial about being nervous and change five times. At eight o’clock Wendy drives us up the big hill (Stephan changes once more in the car) and drops her two men off for a day of terror while she shops.

  My interview goes well except for when I casually mention how New Hampshire has no concealed-weapons permits, how anyone can carry a gun without any sort of background check. Why I would bring this up with the three liberal women interviewing me is yet another issue I will avoid going into therapy for. It just sort of lies on the table like a nude hippo until I brilliantly try to extricate the foot from my mouth with a sentence containing the word acrost, a word popular in trailer parks but not at a New England prep school English-teacher interview. I suppose I am moved by the spirit of my “got kicked out of this school twenty years ago” ghost past, because the next thing I hear myself saying is “Fuck, I can’t hardly believe I just said that!” On an apparent roll, I go on with “Sorry, my English wavers.” Then I just shut up, me and my herd of hippos, until Wendy comes to get me.

  Wendy excitedly tells me about her day looking at houses. She found six we cannot afford. She also filled out lots of Stephan’s paperwork, and left them a $9,500 deposit. After a very short pause I do the male version of a scream. It seems only thirty dollars was required as an application fee but she got “confused” and accidentally paid a year’s tuition.

  We pick up Stephan. He’s red faced. After much coaxing he tells us how shortly after a trip to the bathroom a girl screamed at him and he found his penis was sort of showing, which happens on the island sometimes, but out there, so what?

  We drive back to our island, our heads hung in social disgrace.

  Ever since being arrested and deported at the Canadian border I continue to tense up when I get close. It’s like buying beer and alcohol; to t
his day, as I approach the counter I begin to sweat. Pretty soon we are all tense. While we’re in line with two cars ahead of us Stephan asks to play one of his CDs. We groan but comply. Suddenly Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” fills the car. I crank it up. The tension breaks and we all begin banging our heads with the beat. The customs man eyes us as we pull a car closer—I swear his eyes rotate so that one is on us, one on the car before him. When it’s our turn I roll down the window and we just look at him, a bit bleary but bright-eyed. He waves us through. It is my easiest border crossing ever.

  Wendy

  I was very excited about Daniel’s interview and also lots nervous. I wanted him to be perfect and say all the right things. I set up an interview with the local private junior high and it went off great. I was sitting in with the head of admissions and Stephan was checking out the library. Pretty soon the woman from the library passed by the door and peeked in to say what a wonderful polite kid Stephan was—boy, was I beaming.

  I also went around with a realtor to look at some houses in the area, to get a feel for the market. I was very excited about the idea of moving. One of the houses I saw was 150 years old. It was a farmhouse, and there was a big old barn next to it. But the day was very nerve-racking, and by the time we had to go back out to the hotel and into traffic Daniel was ready to get the hell away from the East Coast.

  DAY 218

  All our hearts speed up as we drive the final miles to our bliss. We rescue the hounds from their purgatory. We visit Junior and Becky and are told not to go out. Sea ice is floating around Junior’s dock, big sofa-sized chunks. It will be dark in under an hour and it is at least twenty degrees colder than I’ve ever experienced here. Even though I’m thinking “Hell, I’m thirty-nine, I’ll do whatever I want,” I recognize something in their weathered faces, something beyond having lived within fifty feet of these tides for over seventy years and knowing when to stay on dry land. My family has just been adopted.

  In the past I’ve tried to impress Junior with stories of sailing around Cape Horn in a twenty-five-foot engineless sailboat (“Yeh? Where the hell’s that?”), biting the head off a live rattlesnake (“That was stupid”), and even leaving his dock in a fog so thick that the moment I could see anything was the moment I had to swerve to avoid it (“It was nice knowing ya,” he said, waving, as I left his dock). Maybe it’s trying for a new dad’s approval—Junior and my father were born the same year, and Peter and I were born the same year too. Maybe some psychological thing is going on, or maybe I just think too much. But even I can sense when to shut up, and we drive back many miles to an icebound hotel, appropriately named the Last Dive.

  The next morning we bundle up with everything we have—we’re even wearing heavy neoprene gloves. With nothing but nostrils showing, we push off the boat and head home. The strong north winds shove us along. As is our custom when returning after more than a day or two, we circle our small kingdom before landing. Blocks of ice are washed up, and because the last snowstorm came with a strong north wind, the snow has been packed onto the north side of everything. It is magical. From the south the island seems snowless—just spruce green everywhere. A quarter of a circle later, all seems in shadow like that feature available on most computer style menus. From the north we see only snow, a single bright-white shoreline pushing skyward past the trees.

  Even Wendy breaks the eggs as we slither along our icy trail. The dogs romp in insatiable ecstasy, sometimes sliding ass first down hills, exhilarated by facing the wrong way and watching things get smaller as they accelerate.

  The house is encased in ice and looks like the Winter Palace in Doctor Zhivago. With a log from our woodpile Stephan gently taps away at the ice until the door can move. We huddle around the stove as I light the pyramid of wood that I’d already prepared. (I always assume I will be returning near dead of cold, and rather than have to cut open a dog, wife, or child to crawl into for warmth, I leave the stove just a single match away from heating a whole family.)

  Three bottles of Wendy’s high-class drinking water have exploded from the cold. Two fifty-five-gallon blocks of ice hint at no running water for a while. The olive oil will not pour. But we’re home and it’s beautiful to our bones.

  12. The Insanity of an Anatomy

  Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

  —BLAKE

  DAY 224

  I’ve been taking Prozac since I was thirty-five or so. I’ve had numerous discussions with the parents of the kids I’ve worked with: medicate or be natural? Or deal with the issues when medicated and then be natural? The bottom line for me is that taking Prozac allows me to focus on one thing at a time. I spent twenty years roving the planet for the perfect woman, the perfect drug, the perfect moment. My restlessness was insatiable. I was repeating the same behaviors again and again with little internal growth, automatically having to “change the channel” on life every few years. It was great for working with kids—I immediately had a rapport with them. But enough was enough.

  Out here though, on this island, I’ve been weaning myself off the Prozac lately. It seems a safe place to experiment. I would like to not depend on a drug company. And the first quality of my old self to rear its head is constant horniness. This serves Wendy right, because she’s been able to complain for two years about needing more sex and now I’m starting to hear “Oh no, not again,” and it’s music to my ears. I’m back in the saddle—no, I am the saddle, and it’s a Western saddle, yahooey!!!

  When I was twenty-six I went back to college to take pre–medical school classes and I was in the library a lot. I’d stolen a key to the airtight windows and so could sneak in (I had great sex one night on the main reference desk). Anyway, I would go so berserk hour after hour, leaving love letters to freshmen in their books when they weren’t looking, drinking dozens of coffees a day, streaking, sneaking into the chapel at three a.m. and playing the really cool pipe organ, breaking into the power-plant building and turning off the entire campus’s electricity . . .

  Those were truly manic times. I went to a shrink who tried me on lithium, but that was plain old boring and I couldn’t drink enough coffee to get manic again, so I stopped taking it. Then she shook her head in judgment at me one session as I raved over some sexual fantasy. So I quit. I hadn’t even gotten to talking about what I wanted to do with her and a bucket of warm soapy water on the wing of a 747. Ten years later I saw her being interviewed on TV. I happened to be on a 747 and I gazed longingly out the window for the remainder of the flight—with the tray table down.

  DAY 225

  Last night I had a real hissy fit, and I’m thinking maybe I should take the Prozac again. There is an edge I experience in life, like a crick in my neck, that drives me into retreat, as if I’m better off all alone.

  I’m thirty-nine. I’ve been in therapy. I’ve seen all the Woody Allen movies. I figure this must just be how I’m wired. I’m teeming with rebellious neurotransmitters. And sadly, I seem to be unbearable to my family without my Prozac. Especially at night, when I must turn on the radio so my thoughts can unfocus; otherwise they chug on and on, leaving fractal trails in multiple shades of black.

  I am seeing the world as if looking through foggy goggles of despair. Reality is completely subjective. For people with big chemical imbalances, the world really is all screwed up. No wonder they are so unhappy. It amazes me that brain chemicals can shift all this, how perceptions of reality can be altered.

  All week I’ve just floated in gloom and tension. The daily events in my life align with it—they actually seem to have a negative purpose, to be a breathing beast. I fight with Stephan; I back the boat into a rock, denting the prop; the toilet’s holding tank is full; the weather gets foggy, stormy; the woodpile falls over; Wendy has vicious PMS. It’s a laundry list of woes, and I created it all.

  I’ve always been an enthusiastic participant in self-medication programs. I am a firm believer in Garrison Keillor’s comment, “You can learn more abo
ut life by drinking gin straight from the bottle than you can by watching TV.”

  I had a great nostalgic episode a few days ago. I was in the fishing shed listening to “Spirit in the Sky,” “Magic Bus,” and “Bad to the Bone.” I had shots of tequila lined up, a loaded shotgun to make hell with, and I was young again, gonna stay up all night and bark, break stuff, spray-paint graffiti, the whole thing. So I gulped down four shots, one, two, three, and four, and then fell over and lay on the ground dry retching. My eyes were all teary, and the gun fell over and went off, and I crawled back to the house and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning no smarter and with a bad hangover. “If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you’ll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.”—Thomas Berger

  DAY 226

  We woke to another half-inch ice sheet covering everything. The trees are beautiful, each outlined in pure sparkle. I stepped outside, just one step, and I slid thirty feet, till a tree stopped me with absolutely no grace. Stephan threw me the end of a rope and pulled me back. I really love it when something happens and I need him like that. It’s good for me because I have trouble allowing him to help when I’m vulnerable, and it’s good for him because I make a big deal of thanking him, letting him know that he’s a good person, and that I love him. I wish didn’t, but I seem to need excuses to do this.

  It is twenty degrees and windy, one of those “tingling nose-hair cold days.” Dangerous, it occurs to me. Maybe we should stay in for a few days? Strange squeaks and crackles fill the air as the house moves within its shell. Great Cream of Wheat and coffee.