by Carson, Tom
Even back before we washed up here, people always said our century had packed in more horrors than any other. That’s probably true, even though I didn’t live in any previous one and have no conception of the new one that we all, despite our lack of calendars, strongly suspect is underway. In our century, the country that all seven of us came from—and which I, Mary-Ann, still personify, even or especially here—fought some horrors and inflicted others, while being spared most of the worst. All that is beyond doubt, to my way of thinking. But I can’t shake a hunch it wasn’t the whole story, which means that there’s another one we could tell; one you may know without our help, but then again may not.
That’s when, leaving Ginger talking to the crabs, I walk alone to the far side of the island, where no one else has gone for decades. I head for a spot a few hundred yards below the tumbling, rocky jut that we once named the Mane, and easily twice that distance above the floury tongue of white sand to which Ging and I have often talked about moving our campfire once the day finally comes that we decide to retire from it all. Directly ahead of me is a sliver of sandbar that points straight out to sea, like a miniature long island.
Undoing my checked top and tossing it aside, I use a borrowed tube of my friend’s undiminished supply of bright red lipstick to write the word Rescue above my right nipple, and the word Us above my left. And as I’ve been advised, via the private note Gil Egan stuck in the coffee jar and Ginger deftly slipped to me before the others came trotting up, that this moment imposes certain obligations—obligations that I, Mary-Ann, was raised to be much too unfailingly pleasant, polite and cheerful to even think of evading—they are brown and pointy, and somewhat small in relation to the overall size. Long ago, when they were finally unveiled to him—for what could have been much longer than twenty-four hours, and to my eternity-long regret was less—my old boyfriend in Paris couldn’t get enough of them.
Even so, I always keep my short-shorts on, and my shoes in case I need to run. I’ve never dared to go all-the-way naked, much as I might like to. I wish I could climb up into the mountains, there I’d feel free.
Although I know it won’t be seen from such a small island—not on such a hot, bright, enormous day—I light the bundled twigs I’ve brought with me. Blinking back my special astigmatism, and lifting breasts heavy as Lourdes with milk fit for a messiah and now bearing the message Rescue Us, I raise my torch to all comers.
There are no comers—only parrots, chimps, and unseen snakes behind me. I know there never will be.
I guess that’s about it. Still, if you’ll bear with me a moment longer, I’ll make you my life’s bequest; the only thing I’ve ever learned for sure, if you will only understand it.
At least for I, Mary-Ann, it was better to reign in Kansas than it has been to serve in Oz. Still, if Oz is all that’s left you—that is, if our Oz has become your Kansas, as it must have by now—then get to it. Reign if you can. Even without calendars, we know our century has vanished. Yours has unveiled itself.
But wherever you go and whatever you do, just in case you need one—and you might, for whatever reason—carry along a map of where you started from. For better or worse, it was us.
Obviously, we’ll never know; here on the island. As I can’t seem to stop saying, yesterday never knows. But with any luck, before we washed up here—and along with everything else—we glimpsed the birth of your saviors.
which is
the end of
GILLIGAN’S WAKE
Afterword
A PASTICHE LIKE THIS OBVIOUSLY DRAWS ON MANY SOURCES, AND I want to identify at least some. For instance, Chapter One probably reads like a hodgepodge of everything but the kitchen sink, but in fact the kitchen sink is in there—in an echo of the mental-hospital scenes in Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes that I can detect but not isolate. Here as elsewhere, my premise was that poor Gil had read it too, just as, like his fellow but less sympathetic embroiderer Mark David Chapman, he plainly had The Catcher in the Rye.
And yes, I know the “moose-and-squirrel hash” Chapter Three makes of the Alger Hiss case cheerfully garbles what it doesn’t omit. A soberer account, sans Thurston, is Allen Weinstein’s Perjury; which convinced me that, as I have “Sukey Santoit” say, anyone who thinks the son of a bitch was innocent is barking up the wrong crucifix.
While I deplore the future “Lovey” ‘s atrocious selfishness and cowardice, her slapstick in Chapter Four is by way of tribute to the most likable of all movie actresses—“the divine Carole Lombard,” mentioned in Chapter Five as having recently passed through. The reason Calder Willingham is the patron saint of Chapter Five, the job of God being taken, is that only a nitwit would try one-upping America’s greatest master of carnal comedy. Knowing my place, I aimed for the sincerest form of flattery instead. And so on.
Like Roy Cohn’s, Henry Kissinger’s role in Chapter Six is pure fantasy, as is the whole chapter. Even modern-day residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would no doubt agree that we are a benign and wonderful democracy, not Godzilla—unless, of course, it’s possible to be both. Indeed, only one claim in the entire book states a fact: there is no monument to the heroic women of Occoquan. I think it’s a shame.
I also hope the people of Russell, Kansas, will forgive me for turning their town into Brigadoon. I had no choice, since I was only there for twenty-four hours. My thanks to the Village Voice s then editor, Karen Durbin, for sending me to write about their former County Attorney, to my eyes a more moving figure than he or most Americans will ever know. Like Amelia Earhart—but unlike Britney Spears, with whom he once shared a Pepsi commercial—he’s one of Gilligan’s Wakes secret heroes.
Let me, too, express my gratitude to the cast members of Gilligan’s Island, living and gone, for providing such vivid mannequins to populate Gil’s hallucinations: Bob Denver, Alan Hale, Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson, and especially Dawn Wells. And to series creator Sherwood Schwartz, whom I now find myself blessing, not without surprise, as il miglior fabbro.
Among my more witting helpmates, I want to thank my agent, Gary Morris of the David Black agency; my editor, Josh Kendall; and Glenn Kenny, Adrienne Miller, John Powers, Kit Rachlis, and Wendy Yoder. Along with the second of my dedicatees, without whom.
We numbered many in the ship.
—Alexander Pushkin, “Arion”