Ishmael

by Daniel Quinn

  It took me about ninety seconds to see it. “I assume you mean what’s been happening in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the past few years.”

  “That’s right. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, anyone predicting that Marxism would soon be dismantled from the top would have been labeled a hopeless visionary, an utter fool.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “But once the people of these countries were inspired by the possibility of a new way of life, the dismantling took place almost overnight.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. Five years ago I would have said that no amount of inspiration could accomplish that—or this.”

  “And now?”

  “And now it’s just barely thinkable. Improbable as hell but not unimaginable.”

  9

  “But I do have another question,” I added.

  “Proceed.”

  “Your ad said, ‘Must earnestly desire to save the world.’”

  “Yes?”

  “What do I do if I earnestly desire to save the world?” Ishmael frowned at me through the bars for a long moment. “You want a program?”

  “Of course I want a program.”

  “Then here is a program: The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you’re to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world—not because they’re humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of that forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”

  “Yes, I see all that, but that’s a program for mankind, that’s not a program for me. What do I do?”

  “What you do is to teach a hundred what I’ve taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That’s how it’s always done.”

  “Yes, but … is it enough?”

  Ishmael frowned. “Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all. You can’t say, We’re going to change the way people behave toward the world, but ‘we’re not going to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about divine intentions in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.’ As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they’ve been acting for the past ten thousand years. They’re going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they’re going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can’t change these things with laws. You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they’ve lost—something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn’t serve his needs directly or indirectly.”

  I shook my head. “What you’re saying is that someone has to stand up and become to the world of today what Saint Paul was to the Roman Empire.”

  “Yes, basically. Is that so daunting?”

  I laughed. “Daunting isn’t nearly strong enough. To call it daunting is like calling the Atlantic damp.”

  “Is it really so impossible in an age when a stand-up comic on television reaches more people in ten minutes than Paul did in his entire lifetime?”

  “I’m not a stand-up comic.”

  “But you’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “Not that kind of writer.”

  Ishmael shrugged. “Lucky you. You are absolved of any obligation. Self-absolved.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What were you expecting to learn from me? An incantation? A magic word that would sweep all the nastiness away?”

  “No.”

  “Ultimately, it would seem you’re no different from those you profess to despise: You just wanted something for yourself. Something to make you feel better as you watch the end approach.”

  “No, it isn’t that. You just don’t know me Very well. It’s always this way with me—first I say, ‘No, no, it’s impossible, completely and utterly impossible,’ then I go ahead and do it.”

  Ishmael humphed, barely mollified.

  “One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’”

  “That of course is an inane idea,” Ishmael said. “The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.” He paused and shook his head. “What I’ve been at pains to give you is a new paradigm of human history. The Leaver life is not an antiquated thing that is ‘back there’ somewhere. Your task is not to reach back but to reach forward.”

  “But to what? We can’t just walk away from our civilization the way the Hohokam did.”

  “That’s certainly true. The Hohokam had another way of life waiting for them, but you must be inventive—if it’s worthwhile to you. If you care to survive.” He gave me a dull stare. “You’re an inventive people, aren’t you? You pride yourselves on that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then invent.”

  10

  “I have neglected one small point,” Ishmael said, then gave way to a long, groaning, wheezing sigh, as if he were sorry he’d allowed himself to be reminded of it.

  I waited in silence.

  “One of my students was an ex-convict. An armed robber, as it happened. Have I told you that?”

  I said he hadn’t.

  “I’m afraid our work together was more useful to me than to him. Primarily what I learned from him is that, contrary to the impression one receives from prison movies, the prison population is not at all an undifferentiated mass. As in the outside world, there are the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. And relatively speaking, the rich and the powerful live very well inside the prison—not as well as they do on the outside, of course, but much, much better than the poor and the weak. In fact, they can have very nearly anything they want, in terms of drugs, food, sex, and service.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “You want to know what this has to do with anything,” he said with a nod. “It has this to do with anything: The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leaver people in North America was given a choice: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjusting to prison life.”

  “Yes, that seems to be the case.”

  Ishmael fixed me with a drooping, moist eye. “Naturally a well-run prison must have a prison industry. I’m sure you see why.”

  “Well … it helps to keep the inmates busy, I suppose. Takes their minds off the boredom and futility of their lives.”

  “Yes. Can you name yours?”

  “Our prison industry? Not offhand. I suppose it’s obvious.”

  “Quite obvious, I would say.”

  I gave it some thought. “Consuming the world.”

  Ishmael nodded. “Got it on the first try.”

  11

  “There is one significant difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison has nothing to do with justice.”

  I blinked at him for a while, then asked him to explain.

  “In your cultural prison, which inmates wield the power?”

  “Ah,” I said. “The male inmates. Especially the white male inmates.”

  “Yes, that’s right. But you understand that these white male inmates are indeed inmates and not warders. For all their power and p
rivilege—for all that they lord it over everyone else in the prison—not one of them has a key that will unlock the gate.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can’t, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can. But what does this have to do with justice?”

  “Justice demands that people other than white males have power in the prison.”

  “Yes, I see. But what are you saying? That this isn’t true?”

  “True? Of course it’s true that males—and, as you say, especially white males—have called the shots inside the prison for thousands of years, perhaps even from the beginning. Of course it’s true that this is unjust. And of course it’s true that power and wealth within the prison should be equitably redistributed. But it should be noted that what is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.”

  “Yes, I see that. But I’m not sure many other people would.”

  “No?”

  “No. Among the politically active, the redistribution of wealth and power is … I don’t know what to call it that would be strong enough. An idea whose time has come. The Holy Grail.”

  “Nonetheless, breaking out of the Taker prison is a common cause to which all humanity can subscribe.”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid it’s a cause to which almost none of humanity will subscribe. White or colored, male or female, what the people of this culture want is to have as much wealth and power in the Taker prison as they can get. They don’t give a damn that it’s a prison and they don’t give a damn that it’s destroying the world.”

  Ishmael shrugged. “As always, you’re a pessimist. Perhaps you’re right. I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I hope so too, believe me.”

  12

  Even though we’d only been talking an hour or so, Ishmael seemed limp with exhaustion. I made tentative noises about leaving, but he evidently had something more on his mind.

  At last he looked up and said: “You understand that I’m finished with you.”

  I think it would have felt about the same if he’d plunged a knife into my stomach.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “Pardon me. I’m tired and not expressing myself well. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

  I couldn’t answer him, but I managed a nod.

  “I mean only that I’ve finished what I set out to do. As a teacher, I have nothing more to give you. Even so, I would be pleased to count you as a friend.”

  Again, I couldn’t manage more than a nod.

  Ishmael shrugged and looked around bleary-eyed, as if he’d momentarily forgotten where he was. Then he reared back and exploded in a magnificently juicy sneeze.

  “Look,” I said, getting up, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  He gave me a long, dark stare; he was wondering what the devil more I expected of him but was too weary to ask. He sent me on my way with a grunt and a valedictory nod.

  THIRTEEN

  1

  That night, before falling asleep in my motel bed, I finalized my plan. It was a bad plan and I knew it, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Whether he liked it or not (and I knew he wouldn’t), I had to rescue Ishmael from that goddamned carnival.

  It was a bad plan in another sense, in that it depended entirely on me and my meager resources. I had only one hole-card, and if I had to turn it, I figured it would probably be a deuce.

  At nine the next morning I was in a small town about halfway home, driving around in hopes of finding someplace to have breakfast, when a “too hot” warning lit up on my dashboard, forcing me to pull over. I popped the hood and checked the oil: oil okay. Checked the water reservoir: dry. No problem—a canny traveler, I carry extra water. I topped off the reservoir, got going again, and two minutes later watched the warning light blink back on. I made it to a filling station where the sign said “Mechanic on Duty” but where no mechanic was on duty. Even so, the guy who was on duty knew thirty times as much as I do about cars and was willing to poke around a little.

  “The radiator fan isn’t working,” he told me after about fifteen seconds. He showed it to me and explained that ordinarily it only comes on when start-and-stop city driving makes the engine overheat.

  “Could it be a blown fuse?”

  “Could be,” he said. But he ruled that out by trying a new one, which did no better than the old one. He said, “Hold on,” and fetched a pen-type probe, which he used to test the plug that connected the fan to the electrical system. “You got fire to the fan,” he told me, “so it looks like it’s the fan itself that’s shot.”

  “Where can I get a new one?”

  “Here in town, nowhere,” he told me. “Not on a Saturday.”

  I asked him if I could get home with it as it was.

  “I think so,” he said, “if you don’t have to do a lot of city driving to get there. Or if you stop and let it cool down whenever it starts to overheat.”

  I made it back and got the car into a dealership service garage well before noon and left it there, even though they assured me that nothing at all would happen to it before Monday morning. I had only one errand to run, and that was to visit one of those dear little money machines, where I proceeded to plunder all my cash resources—checking, savings, credit cards. When I walked into my apartment, I was carrying twenty-four hundred dollars—and was otherwise a pauper.

  I didn’t intend to think about the problems ahead, because they were just too tough. How do you get a half-ton gorilla out of a cage that he doesn’t care to vacate? How do you get a half-ton gorilla into the back seat of a car that he doesn’t care to ride in? Would a car with a half-ton gorilla in the back seat even function?

  As this indicates, I’m a one-step-at-a-time kind of guy. An improvisor. Somehow or another, I would get Ishmael stashed in the back seat of my car, then I’d figure out what to do next. Presumably I’d bring him back to my apartment—and then again figure out what to do next. In my experience, you never really know how you’re going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

  2

  They called at nine on Monday morning to tell me what was what with the car. The fan had gone out because it had been overtaxed; it had been overtaxed because the whole damn cooling system was shot. A lot of work was needed, about six hundred dollars’ worth. I groaned and told them to carry on. They said it’d probably be ready around two o’clock, they’d call. I said, skip the call, I’d pick the car up when I could; the fact is, I’d already abandoned the car. I couldn’t afford the repairs, and the damn thing probably wouldn’t be up to carrying Ishmael anyway.

  I rented a van.

  You will doubtless wonder why in hell I didn’t do that in the first place. The answer is, I just didn’t think of it. I’m limited, okay? I get used to doing things in a certain way, and that doesn’t include taking trips in rented vans.

  Two hours later I pulled up at the carnival lot and said, “Damn.”

  The carnival had moved on.

  Something—maybe a premonition—prompted me to get out and poke around. The lot seemed much too small to have held nineteen rides, twenty-four games, and a sideshow. I wondered if I could find the site of Ishmael’s cage without any landmarks to guide me. My feet remembered enough to get me to the vicinity, and my eyes did the rest, for there was a visible trace: the blankets I’d bought for him had been left behind, had been dumped in a messy pile along with other things I recognized: a few of his books, a pad of drawing paper, still showing the maps and diagrams he’d made to illustrate the stories of Cain and Abel, Leavers and Takers, and the poster from his office, now rolled up and secured by a rubber band.

  I was stirring it up and sorting it out in a bewildered way when my aged bribee turned up. He grinned and held up a big black plastic bag to show me what he was doing there: clearing away some of the hundreds of pounds of trash that had been left behind. Then, when he saw the pile of stuff at m
y feet, he looked up at me and said, “It was the pneumonia.”

  “What?”

  “It was the pneumonia that got him—your friend the ape.”

  I stood there blinking at him, unable to fathom what he was getting at.

  “Vet came Saturday night and shot him full of stuff, but it was too late. Passed off this morning around seven or eight, I guess.”

  “Are you telling me that he’s … dead?”

  “Dead is what he is, pardner.”

  And I, the total egotist, had only vaguely registered the fact that he seemed a bit wan.

  I looked around the vast gray lot, where here and there the wind raised clumps of paper trash and sometimes sent them tumbling, and felt one with it—empty, useless, choked with dust, a wasteland.

  My ancient pardner waited, plainly interested to see what this friend of apes would do or say next.

  “What did they do with him?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “What did they do with the body?”

  “Oh. Called the county, I guess. Took him off to where they cremate the roadkills. You know.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “No sweat.”

  “All right if I take this stuff?”

  From the look he gave me I could see I’d presented him with a new high-water mark in human lunacy, but all he said was, “Sure, why not? Just get dumped otherwise.”

  I left the blankets, of course, but the rest all fit easily under one arm.

  3

  What was to be done? Stand for a moment with lowered gaze outside the county furnace where they cremate the roadkills? Someone else would have handled it differently, probably better, revealing a greater heart, a finer sensibility. Myself, I drove home.

  Drove home, turned in the van, picked up my car, and went back to the apartment. It was empty in a new way, with a new degree of emptiness.