Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  On the ground again in what my watch claimed was still yesterday and the calendar called tomorrow, having collected my ruggage amid bright flash floods of exotic noise and the next millennium’s amoebal designs, I hailed another taxi. Rising skyward again from the bustling lobby of my elegant hotel, I showered, shaved, and donned fresh linen, wanting to put my best foot forward. Then, summoned at last by the telephone call I had been waiting for from first hasty toweling to last pat of my tousled hair, I sank once more, in a majestic silence, to the lobby, where I was expected at the bar.

  Only the most compelling sense of duty had brought me to Tokyo, for the expense of setting all this up had been fantastic. Scarred by the blast and poisoned by radiation sickness, the last survivors were dying off like brown grass in a drought. Soon there would be none left, and I would have no one on whom to discharge my obligation. Still, one would be enough; would serve. Gordy N. Notcutter or no, I was only a single individual, and could not hope to sacrifice the remnants of my health on every last one of them.

  Then or later, it never occurred to me to inquire this one’s name. All I’d been told was her gender, which pleased me obscurely despite a lifetime of making no distinctions on that count, and that it was the Nagasaki bomb she had survived, which pleased me for reasons not obscure at all. Mind, if I’d been so obliged by either time or pocketbook, I’d have settled for Hiroshima. At times, beggars aren’t the only ones who can’t be choosers. But while Hiroshima would have been good, it wouldn’t have been as good; so I had thought on the plane, paraphrasing a smiling man whose name I no longer recalled, although I was fairly sure that he’d been one of the only two friends I’d ever had. In any case, throughout the complicated business of arranging the affair, my one unalterable stipulation—which complicated matters a good deal, as so many of them had had their eyeballs melted at the instant that the century’s new God had said “Let there be white light"—had been that she couldn’t be blind. How could I look into her eyes for confirmation that my quest had succeeded, if there was nothing to look back?

  As I crossed the lobby, I saw a cordon of Tokyo policemen in dress uniform beyond the hotel door, clearly on hand for the visit of some foreign potentate or other. An ambulance was pulling away. In the bar, a young doctor in a white coat waited, a bottle of Suntory whiskey before him. His face peculiarly strained, he cut short my attempts at quasi-collegial small talk.

  “We have put her in a room upstairs,” he told me. “We believe no one knows it was her in the ambulance, or why we brought her here. But if you are going to do this at all, you must do it quickly. She is sinking fast.”

  “How old is she?” I asked, somewhat idly. After all, it didn’t make that much difference, and she would have to be fifty at least.

  “Her age? Fourteen.” Seeing my startled glance, he shook his head before my surprise could yield to the natural indignation of any man who has spent an exorbitant sum of money to do good and been cheated anyway. With crimped lips and averted eyes, he explained his mistake: “She was fourteen. She is sixty-four.”

  “Shall we go?” I said.

  Now it was the turn of the doctor’s eyes to widen somewhat. “If you feel ready. Forgive me—I thought perhaps you would want a restorative first.”

  “I think that showing up with alcohol on my breath would be disrespectful of the occasion, don’t you?” I said brusquely, not troubling to explain that I never touched spirits and had always found others’ need for artificial stimulation a mystery. “The sooner the better, and the best is right now.”

  Swooshing me back up to a floor higher than my own, the doctor led me to a door that he then opened, indicating that he would wait outside. With a nod, feeling every last one of my seventy-six years, I stepped over the transom.

  It was August 9,1995. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the forgotten second bomb, whose target had been chosen when I pushed a blindfolded man toward a wall map with a bit of chalk in his hand. From a bed across the room, two dark eyes stared at me like beads from a necklace long since scattered. Despite an opened window and the strong smell of saline and newly sprayed antiseptic that hung in the air like a cloud, the smell of suppuration was stronger.

  Bringing my hands together, I inclined my tousled head slightly. “Hajimemashita” I said,beaming. “Dozo yoroshiku.”

  In attempted response, her lipless mouth may have trembled, though so slightly I had the illusion that its rims had merely been stirred by a faint breeze from the window. But her facial muscles were clearly too weak to form words—or, for that matter, close her mouth, which gaped like one more of her wounds. That suited my purposes, but I was saving her mouth for last.

  Stripping off my recently donned clothes and joining her on the bed, I straight-fucked her first, her jellylike flesh ebbing and then liquefying under me until good Priap reported a strong chance that he was bestowing his favors on the rubber sheet below. Snorting and turning her over with a quick jerk of one hand, I parted the bronze, green, and blackened remnants of her buttocks, and Priapized her wasted anus—or so I can only hope. For all I know, my good king’s first thrust might well have made literal a vulgarism I deplore, and simply torn her a new one; ha, ha.

  Yet by now the thing below me might as well have been a puppet with sawdust and goo leaking out of it, and I knew time was running short. Scrambling from the bed and hauling her off it too, I dropped her on the floor on what were probably her knees. As I yanked her head back, we stared at each other, and I saw what I needed to see. To the screams of an exalted populace, my good Priap proclaimed himself the Emperor Priapus I; a moment later, a small bag of rot and broken chalk fell dead at my feet. Turning to my clothes, I reached for my vial of Laggilin.

  It was empty.

  Behind me, the door opened. Perhaps because my breathing had grown noisy at the sight of the Laggilin-less vial, the Japanese doctor’s voice sounded inhumanly quiet.

  “Are you finished with her, X-San?” he asked.

  “Finished?” I said indignantly, turning six-foot-plus of leonine, still demi-royal Anglo-Saxon nudity to face his puny form. “Of course I’m finished, man! The woman’s dead. What on earth would I do now? Why, she wouldn’t even have been able to-”

  “You are an American, X-San. Under the circumstances, given her native city and your track record, I thought it unwise to jump to conclusions.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said, starting to get dressed. Clearly, this fellow didn’t understand at all; East is East and so on, I suppose. Thrusting the empty Laggilin vial into my trousers pocket, I glanced around for my shoes. “I need to find a drugstore quickly, quickly;” I told him. “Is there one in the hotel?”

  Apparently he didn’t hear me; he was looking down at the body. Now he said an odd thing: “She waited for you, you know. Or perhaps I should say watched for you.”

  “For me? That’s preposterous,” I told him, for I was not so vain as to believe that Good King Priap’s fame had ever penetrated so far as Japan. “How would she even know of me?”

  “She did not know it would be you. She didn’t know that you had been at Los Alamos—that you had helped to build the bomb. Still less did she know that it was you who pinned Little Boy’s tail on the city where she was a schoolgirl.”

  “Oppenheimer did that,” I grunted, feeling the lack of Laggilin begin to tell. “All I did was blindfold him with a lab coat and spin him around three times first.”

  “I stand corrected, X-San. But be that as it may, she always believed that an American would come. She assumed that it would be a man. She hoped he would feel shame.”

  “Shame?” I was puzzled. “Do you mean before, or—after? Because I saw her eyes, and-”

  “It made no difference,” he interrupted me. “She knew that she’d be dead in moments. In any case, with her injuries, she should have died thirty years ago. And in fact, so far as we can tell"—he was looking at me steadily now-”she did die thirty years ago. All except her eyes.”

  “Wh
at?” I roared, as my spine rose beneath my shirt.

  “By every medical indication,” he said, “she was a corpse. We have not fed her since 1965. But something kept that corpse’s eyes alive, in defiance of every law of nature. We believe that they were waiting to see you.”

  “And you call yourself a doctor?” I bellowed. “That’s ridiculous nonsense! Either she was dead or she was alive. It’s not possible to be both!”

  “I didn’t call myself a doctor, X-San. You did. But you are better proof than this woman that it is possible to be both. After all, she,” with a nod at the thing on the floor, “and thousands like her, kept death alive in you for half a century. And here you stand.”

  “Don’t talk rot to me!” I roared. “I’ve got a heart condition. It’s quite dangerous. The truth is, I should probably never have come here at all! Now call me a cab and get me to a drugstore where they speak English and stock Laggilin right away, do you hear me? Or do you want a dead American scientist on your conscience?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. In the course of my career, I’ve often found it interesting to watch Asians cry. One never knows what will provoke their tears, or precisely when they’ll stop. He had been gazing down at the body as he wept, but now he looked up again.

  “Are there really no lengths to which Americans will not go,” he asked, “to prove that they cannot be damned—not by their own God, and not by anyone else’s, either?”

  I was stunned. “Damned? Have you gone mad?” I shouted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. For Christ’s sake” letting a profanity escape my lips for the first time in my life, “you don’t understand at all. Why do you think I came here? Look into her eyes! Thanks to me, she died happy”

  As the true extent of Priap’s final act of generosity overcame his mind’s lack of familiarity with our Western concept of benevolence, he was briefly speechless. Finally, he spoke:

  “As she lived, X-San! As indeed she lived. Oh, it was a great privilege to be a bomb survivor, believe me! To us, they were like thousands of Beatles who did not need to make music—you had provided that. Their mere existence wiped out any possibility of war guilt on our part, for all that you will still find the thoughtful words ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ inscribed by some of your compatriots in the visitors’ book at the Hiroshima memorial itself. Then again, we should not complain: at least they care enough to visit! Indeed, her one regret, in the days before all of her died but her eyes, was that she had not been a Hiroshima victim. Oh, don’t misunderstand—Nagasaki was good,” he assured me. “It just wasn’t as good.”

  Laggilin deprivation had begun to make it difficult for me to speak. “If you aren’t a doctor,” I gasped, feeling something red scorch my nostrils, “who do you work for?”

  He looked nonplussed. “The same people you do, X-San. You must know we’ve gone global.”

  “But if you—don’t approve of American tourists,” I said, still bewildered by his previous speech and sweeping my paw around the room in increasingly violent arcs, “then why did you arrange this?”

  “X-San, you will forgive me—and many others—for hoping this is not permanent,” he said. “But for fifty years and three days now, and into the foreseeable future, yours has been the country that the planet is for.”

  “Why, you ungrateful-”

  At that point, though, the Laggilin wore off, as I had known it WOuld. First, I belched fire.

  Seizing him around the waist with a paw grown large enough to easily encircle it, I ate him in one gulp.

  Then I belched fire again.

  The rest, as they say, was flattish and faded.

  Having exited my hotel by destroying it, I stomped toward the waterfront through a Tokyo that my size had re-spelled Toy-ko, destroying buildings so shoddy that they seemed made of papier-mâché with mighty smacks of the tail I’d acquired and emptying entire busloads of terrified, tiny passengers into my vast maw. As fires began to spring up everywhere I’d breathed, I plunged into the Pacific in a huge hiss of steam, starting the long swim to California.

  I still had hopes of making my fiftieth reunion at Stanford. While I’m no blubbering sentimentalist—except, perhaps, where Priap’s good works are concerned—depriving my classmates of the presence of the single greatest success story and philanthropist among them would have been not only a slight but an actual throwing down of the gauntlet to the alumni association. Yet as I came ashore at Palo Alto, after a three-day swim whose one memorable meal was the white whale I briskly strangled off Hawaii, picking my teeth afterward with an old harpoon I had found embedded in his hump, I experienced the first of several shocks.

  First, although my new size was unaltered, I found that the United States was built to scale for it—and possibly always had been. Secondly, it needed to be, for everyone else’s appearance resembled my own—the only exceptions being recent immigrants unable or unwilling to adapt, who in the meantime did our scut-work and drove everyone around.

  As we native-borns now conversed by means of belching fire, the new arrivals’ frequent refusal to learn even the rudiments of our language was a handicap if we weren’t hungry at the moment. Indeed, one of my fellow Stanford alums planned to remedy this by placing a proposition on that year’s ballot known as the “Belching Fire Only Initiative,” which would make anyone attempting to use any other tongue in our presence—and possibly even among themselves, a question that my old acquaintance Norman Lincoln Rockwell hadn’t decided yet for sure—an instant candidate for assimilation via gobbling. Or so he told me as we strolled among striped tents, surrounded by our classmates’ nostalgic flames and sulphur and idly tearing the arms off waiters when the urge for an hors d’oeuvre hit.

  Gradually, the truth grew clear, which was that we had all been on Laggilin since 1945—and in some cases earlier than that. Now, too, the Gillies had finally caught up with us sub-aquatics, removing any need for concealment. Or else, unbeknownst to ourselves, perhaps we too had been Gillies all along. In any case, we’d all been re-created equal—belching fire, eating recent immigrants, and submitting camcorder tapes of our more amusing experiences while doing so to America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  After the reunion, I flew back into Dulles, diverting myself as did the others by obliging the immigrant stewards to hop over our flapping tails in the aisles as we belched fiery demands at them. On landing, I climbed into a cab, since that was what everyone else was doing. Feeling tired but elated after my long journey to wherever it was I’d gone, I gazed out the window, enjoying the view of the non-passing landscape.

  While I had no complaints, some pleasant minutes later I noticed that the driver was still badgering me, in a recent immigrant’s awkward charcoal and embers, for our destination. I took a few moments to collect my thoughts.

  Or to attempt it. “I have no idea,” I finally told him. “Isn’t that your job now, my good man?”

  After a indeterminate interlude of pure mutual confusion, I belched fire at him to just start driving, and perhaps something would come back to me. Yet the Virginia landscape remained obstinately unfamiliar. I found that I had no idea where I lived, if indeed I lived anywhere; and no idea where I worked, if I had a job.

  I knew there was an island involved. It had some sort of underwater exit, and a white boat with a hole in the bow stranded on a beach. Beyond that, no matter how long I took to collect my thoughts, I drew a blank.

  As I had done this on the nearest available writing surface, which was a brochure handed out at the Dulles Airport taxi stand advising all passengers of the local cab regulations and giving typical fares to various buildings and statues in and around Washington, D.C., I showed the blank to the driver. He nodded in an interested way, but had no other reaction. After a while, he turned on the radio, which was playing a type of music I had never heard before.

  “Bhangra/’ he told me, turning around with a huge smile. I nodded in an interested way, not sure what type of information this was or whether a question
of mine had elicited it.

  Luckily, I still had plenty of money, so we were able to ride around for a while. Once I got him to understand the fire for “water,” Bhangra took me to a river, and started driving alongside it. As it slid namelessly by, its surface of glassy tarmac providing my questing eyes with not a single clue to my origins or prospects, he told me something of himself—a conversation that left me at an unsettling disadvantage about responding in kind.

  If Bhangra noticed this, however, he didn’t appear perturbed. Perhaps he was used to alternations of random fire-belching and clumsy silence from his fares. In any case, he mostly spoke, with a paternal pride that managed to glow brightly despite his poor command of our flaming native tongue, of the eldest of his daughters, now in college. Despite having been confined since childhood to a wheelchair—a detail that caused my tail to thump feebly in the back seat, although I had no idea why—she hoped to enter politics. In his former country, Bhangra said, despite the example of Mrs. Gundy (a personage unknown to me; from Bhangra’s tone, I took her for some sort of nanny gone bad), this would have been by and large impossible, for reasons of caste as much as gender.

  Eventually, some ten miles downstream from what I was reasonably sure had been a city, we came to a decrepit plantation house. Pulling over, Bhangra glanced at me inquisitively; with his chin, he indicated a sign. As I had not the slightest clue what the words “Mount Vernon” ought to mean to me, and was indeed at a loss to know if they ever had meant anything to me, I shook my head. So he turned the cab around, and soon we were proceeding back the way we’d come. Some ten miles up the river, to my perfect astonishment, we came upon a city.

  By the time we reached it, I had given him every penny I had, along with my Rolex and a matchbook bearing the cryptic legend “Hot Times at the Old Smithsonian Nightclub” that I had discovered on my person. Stopping the car near the riverbank, Bhangra indicated that our time together was rapidly reaching its end.