On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  Home-schooling Stephan continues to be a handful. His level of intellect oscillates between kindergarten and graduate school. Within a span of minutes I might say, “Stop chewing your eraser,” “Don’t put your finger in that,” “A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-M-O-R-P-H-I-C,” “Seventeen and eleven-sixteenths,” “Get back in here,” “It was a nineteenth-century word for depression,” “Stop blowing in the dog’s nose,” “Water molecules vibrate that way,” “Combustion,” “FeO2,” and “Yes, that’s a big booger.” Sometimes I’m frustrated but usually I am proud. His mind is hungry, and if I am helping to feed that, maybe it’s worth all my complaining.

  DAY 227

  Now it’s just ten degrees and windy, the fire barely warming us. I keep the stove full.

  The following conversation best describes the tension between Wendy and me:

  ME: Honey I want to discuss this. I’ve had to suppress it my whole life and I’m ready to talk: I think the world is going to end next winter, Y2K and all, and I want us to be here, where—

  WENDY: That’s a bunch of bullshit. You’re just trying to get out of having a life, a job, and dealing with reality.

  ME: So you want me to suppress this, stuff it back into the dark and let it slowly manifest itself in pimples, angst, and eventually cancer . . . ?

  WENDY: You’re so full of shit.

  ME: Okay, but can we get ready at least? I’ll need four thousand dollars for two years’ worth of food. Three thousand dollars for lots of bullets and stuff, and I have to smuggle my guns here and—

  WENDY: I am not staying here. Besides, we need money, income, you know?

  ME: Honey, you are too caught up in what passes for life! You have to understand the apocalyptic magnitude of the year 2000, the . . . honey? Hey, Wendy! You’re not listening!

  (She licks Subway coupons and sticks them on the card they give you to fill up so you can get a free sub. I cannot think of anything that so symbolizes faith in the world’s inevitable continuation.)

  ME: Honey, just six thousand dollars . . . well, seven. We need two miles of barbed wire.

  WENDY: Daniel, I’m so done with this conversation.

  ME: Wait, come back! How about just one year’s supply of food!? Honey? . . .Wendy?

  DAY 228

  I drove our boat through a quarter mile of slush ice to get to the mainland this morning. I was sent ashore by Wendy to pick up her just-arrived Tupperware; Junior called us on the radio to give us the news, so now it is public knowledge. Of all the things I wanted to avoid during this lifetime (not to mention this year, isolated in the Atlantic and all), this was one of them. I have failed.

  So now I have Tupperware. At the party she won all these Tupperware prizes; the Tupperware lady shakes a bowl she’s about to demonstrate (definition of culture: demonstrating a bowl), and if it rattles, and if you’re the first woman to say “I love Tupperware!” the shaken item becomes your free gift. Wendy won them all. It is mid-February and I go across seven miles of stormy iceberg-infested Atlantic Ocean and through a quarter mile of slush ice for Wendy. Is this one of those times when she is afraid for my life, imploring me with sweet cries of “Don’t go, honey, it’s too dangerous”? No, this is not such a time.

  I peek inside the package Junior has brought to the dock for me. I think it’s a cheese grater and a serving pitcher. I look at them and I sigh.

  DAY 230

  Big storm last night, winds forty knots from the southeast for twelve hours. Huge seas. I took our movie camera, put it in its waterproof case, and went out on the point to film the fury. I was engulfed by icy water three times, and two times knocked over. I was washed up and sideways along the rocks. I was joined to the whole storm, I was water and air, bubbles and swirling currents, foam and power. I was free of all decision making. I was scared shitless. Luckily I was a little drunk, so I didn’t mind the fear.

  • • •

  DAY 231

  The whole harbor is frozen. Sheets of ice lifted and dropped by the tides are packed together. The wind has blown it all toward the shore, and it is too thick for us to even think of launching the boat. Stephan walks out to the middle—where it is maybe fifteen feet deep at low tide—and I take a picture of him dancing like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

  February drones on, and we continue to bother one another in numerous ways. I’ve been two weeks without Prozac. Waiting to hear if I got the job, if we’ll be moving to New Hampshire or if I’m unemployed. Our savings are running out and I’m being reminded of Y2K on the radio, only ten months away, hearing how all hell will break loose.

  I lock myself into my writing shed. It contains my short list of essentials: namely, a bottle of rum, pen, paper, and a sleeping bag.

  I riffle through stacks of surplus and G.I. Joe wanna-be catalogs. A good catalog presents you with things you did not know you couldn’t live without. (Good marketing strategy: elicit the lowest common denominator of all angst.) Thumbing through one, I come across an ad to buy gold coins, “The Final Protection.” (A misprint in the ad claims, “god is trading just above its eighteen-year low, buy now.”) In the classifieds, I find I can receive “free booklets: Life, Death, Soul, Resurrection, Pollution, Crises, Hell, Judgment Day, Restitution, Bible Standard . . .” What an offer, all for free. I could be normal and still become upset reading that ad.

  Here is my favorite:

  POLAR SHIFTS / ADJUSTMENTS HAVE

  brought Tremendous changes To earth in

  past ages. Imminent polar shift due To

  Usher in Positive way of life for Positive survivors.

  Prepare To Evacuate. For Special Report,

  send Three first-class stamps To . . .

  What the hell? It makes me even more afraid, ‘cause I thought I knew what I was scared of and now I see there are fears I’m ignorant about! This adds a new depth to my paranoia. Perhaps I should start taking my Prozac again.

  Or I could just buy this preassembled bomb shelter. The deluxe comes with a year’s food, air, and water-purification equipment.

  DAY 233

  Half the firewood is used up, so we’re letting the fire go out at night. Heavy fog all day, outside and in. Wendy is desperate for shore but it is way too rough, and a lot of ice is about. Hoping for calmer seas in the morning.

  The best meal I’ve invented this year is burnt spaghetti. It is a leftover restorative that is unequaled. The only problem is that it is not so easy to make. Every instinctual cooking gene is personally violated, and one’s common sense assaulted.

  The thing is, it just cannot be done intentionally. You take leftover spaghetti and put it in a pan, over high heat, and then you need a distraction. The urge to stir is tremendous. A good thing might be to go prod the fire along, glue something, go search for a lost item behind a really big object—but even then when you return, it is too soon. Find another distraction. When you’ve done that, come back, flip the whole mess over like a pancake, and do all this again. And then, when you return, it’s done, and good to feed to kids and dogs, although Wendy coincidentally begins a diet each time I make it.

  Stephan seems at a critical developmental stage, the purpose of which is to convince us that we are doing pretty much everything wrong. Any requests from us either are met with a cry of incredulity or are endured with loud sighs. (“What?! I brushed them last night!) When he storms off to sulk he emits subsonic tones that seem to move inanimate objects like a cup toward the edge of a table, where it plummets to the floor. These objects are his allies. They give him evidence of a cruel world.

  There are other stages of his growth that bewilder me. Recently he has begun using risky words out loud. Words that incite a sort of maniacal giggle. Topping this list is fart. We don’t just get it a few times a day; when he is possessed by this demon we get it purely, barely connected to other words, as in, “Oh farted, I farted, fart fart farty fart.” He calls Abby “Fart,” so a monologue may sound like “Oh Fart, there you are, Fart, Farty, oh Fart Fart.”

 
; The kid is an infinitely deep well of enthusiasm. When I think of Joy, it is his beaming face I see.

  DAY 236

  Now Wendy is reading The Three Musketeers and I am told just what a lump of egg white I am compared to the Duke of Buckingham. “He risked his life just to pronounce his love for the queen.” Screw him—I’d prefer risking my life to having to pay phone bills and cut firewood and say “Yes, dear” thirty times a day. Not letting the dogs lick all the dishes clean because “it’s disgusting”—that’s real love, damnit. Anyway, I did risk my life for her Tupperware.

  The existential implications of this are too much for me. I start taking my Prozac again.

  DAY 238

  When the rain barrels are full and the voltage is over 12.8, I am so happy.

  DAY 240—MARCH

  Big blowup in school; this kid can throw a fit. Later Stephan wrote a cool paper on it called:

  MY FITS

  by Stephan H.

  What triggers my fits is when I get a question wrong on a test or I lose a game. It can also happen when somebody makes a correction about something I’m doing. This then makes me think I am stupid. Then my anger starts to boil. My brain is saying, “You’re not stupid. He must be stupid. You’re supposed to be perfect.”

  When I start to have a fit I go into “repel mode.” I won’t let anybody touch me. I make sudden jerky movements when anybody tries to touch me. I won’t answer any questions and if I have to, it’s in a monotone. I act like there is no one around me.

  When I am at the peak of a fit I start yelling at people or things. Then when I’m told to leave I storm away. This makes it their fault. Before I leave I’ll do something physical, like upset a table or hit a wall.

  When I cool down, after a little while I’ll feel like I still want to destroy something, even though I’ve hit things. So when I am outside I’ll break sticks against things and I’ll tear off branches on trees. I try to stay away from people for a little while.

  The benefit of having my fits is that I get to be right. When somebody else wins a game, they don’t really get the satisfaction of winning. When I have a fit I get a lot of negative attention. Another benefit is that although I secretly “believe” that I’m stupid, I try really hard to prove to other people that I am not stupid. That is why I am an A student. (That’s all pretty stupid, isn’t it?)

  The cost of having fits is people getting mad at me. I don’t get the satisfaction of playing with somebody. If I had a girlfriend and I had a fit she would probably leave me for some other guy.

  I think I learned this from my father [He means the ex, not me.—D.H.] because our fits are about the same. He has his because he thinks he is a bad person. I have mine because I think I’m stupid.

  It’s kind of how people believed the world was flat. The world was flat. I’m stupid only because I say so.

  Well, so much for trying to outsmart the kid with all my fancy psychology! He is a smart rat, and truthfully, I feel a sense of pride. I like to think that I taught him some of that, gave him enough permission to look and laugh at how absurdly we construct our reality.

  13. Angst

  Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 241

  I hated the idea of living on the East Coast. While waiting to find out about the prep school job, I had dozens of turmoil-ridden dreams, the sort that Freud would be eager to laugh at. So I am relieved at the rejection letter, but Wendy is heartbroken not to have a house in New Hampshire. I say, “Relax, babe, I’ll get us a trailer,” and I try to comfort her by saying it would be “a trailer parked by a silo with a big pipe connecting them—some corrugated iron pipe like they put under roads. Then we could have a cool spiraling stairway in either the center or along the silo walls, windows, . . . and bale of straw for the floor and rug! We can change it each week, and . . .” But she’s not listening anymore.

  Actually, our next house has to be hers. She’s had to put up with nearly a year’s worth of things like asking for a bureau, then me finally dragging in a piece of driftwood and screwing it into the wall and saying, “Anything else?” She’s had to put up with a whalebone-jaw sink, swimming creatures in our drinking water, a toilet that sometimes says no. So the next house will be hers. I would like to have just one room, my own war room. There I will be king, and I’ll have a no married girls allowed sign on the door.

  Sometimes I feel pretty hopeless about this, our two living styles. What follows is an example of a real conversation.

  WENDY: Honey, we have to buy a new bed for next year.

  DAN: No, we don’t. What’s wrong with the old one in storage?

  WENDY: You sold it with the house—a “bonus,” you said.

  DAN: No, I didn’t.

  WENDY: Yes, you did.

  DAN: I don’t remember that.

  WENDY: You don’t remember a lot.

  DAN: Oh? Like what?

  WENDY: Honey, we need a new bed.

  DAN: No, we don’t. What’s wrong with the old one?

  WENDY: . . . I’m buying a Hollywood frame for Stephan’s mattress.

  DAN: What’s a Hollywood frame?

  WENDY: A bed thing, it holds the mattress.

  DAN: I’ll make one—a piece of plywood, cinder blocks—

  WENDY: No, I’m buying one. This will be my house!

  DAN: Look, how about I nail the mattress onto the wall and we train Stephan to sleep leaning against it?

  WENDY: Go to your garage and be quiet.

  Wendy

  When Daniel read me the letter I got very depressed. All I could think of was, Where is Daniel going to get a job, where are we going to get money, and where am I going to live?

  DAY 242

  It is still wintry, even more so because of the rain and storms. The wetness penetrates our clothes. We hide inside.

  I watch ducks in a storm. They float maybe a hundred together—“rafting,” it’s called. They face into the wind and tread water just where the sea breaks onto the rocks. On the south side of the island, where the big seas come from, there are usually one or two of these rafts. This one is right in front of our house.

  Storm-tossed is the phrase to best describe the scene. Each duck kicks into the wind, bobbing high sometimes just an inch from where the rolling wave begins its break. Every five minutes or so several bigger waves come together and this delicate surf line is moved into their midst. The ducks north of the surf line vanish, diving down and leaving a circular ripple, which is immediately devoured by a surge of foam. When the wave passes, heads followed by bodies cork to the surface. The water immediately rolls off them, and they appear quite unruffled.

  They do this without pause. This storm blows from the south for eighteen hours. The seas grow to over ten feet where they pile up and fall over onto the rocks. The ducks keep going, hour after hour, hovering inches from the breaking point.

  DAY 243

  It has been gray and stormy all week and it’s only faith that lets me know there is a sun, a moon, and a mainland nearby. The radio tells me there is a Canada—well, a Nova Scotia anyway—but overall, with the fog outside and inside our windows, the world is quite small and entertainment is scarce.

  Yesterday occurred the three most amazing sneezes of the year. I was walking past Bear and I noticed one of his eyes closed, and the other trembling as if he were a drunk trying to recover from a fall. His head was tilted at an odd angle and I was alarmed. Suddenly a sneeze erupted. The sneeze’s intensity arose not so much from its volume as from its shortness—a perhaps full second’s worth of a hurricane’s fury condensed into a frightful fraction of a moment. It was spectacular.

  Bear repeated this twice more. His expression between was one of an exasperated drunk during an epileptic fit. We all clapped as the final cloud of mist settled on the nearby alarmed Abby. When he was through we gave him many pats of
approval. Entertainment is valued on Whale Island.

  The second amazing event of the day was Stephan’s first hands-on experience with what lies at the bottom of the toilet’s drainpipe. Just as darkness was falling the child crept upstairs and confessed to having lost control of the shit poker, a three-foot-long dowel. When not poking poop down the pipe, the bottom end of the poker lives in a bottle with an inch of Clorox. Armed with a flashlight we crawled under the toilet room and peered down the mysterious tunnel, and sure enough, there it was. “Don’t worry, Stephan,” I said, “the rescue is easy. All I have to do is aim the flashlight and give you orders!” He was initially horrified. What better time, he asked, for a dad to be a dad than when reaching into a septic tank?

  “This will be a great learning experience, for you,” I replied sternly.

  This turned out to be one of my proudest moments. With only a small sigh, Stephan dove into the job, both hands deep, and performed a flawless extraction. More than anything, being a man is doing what must be done, and doing it with some dignity. Stephan may have sensed the importance of this bar mitzvah–esque moment. He even asked for a hug, which I declined, pointing him toward the shower.

  DAY 245

  I dreamed I met God last night. I stepped from the stoop of my childhood archenemy’s brownstone on the West Side into purgatory. It was a TV version of an Old West mining town, and there was no escape. When I tried to retrace my steps, the way was blocked by a river, or a stampede, or a bunch of old men in rocking chairs. I had friends there, and we were all looking to escape, but we knew it was a personal thing that would let you out, not a hidden door we could share with one another.