Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (36 page)

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.

Alarmed at the prospect of continuing alone, I offered to teach him to belch fire more expressively, so as to win friends and influence people; but he declined. Although he’d taken pleasure in my company, he told me in embers and charcoal, he had a living to make; wanted all his daughters to get an education and better themselves. Belching fire to the effect that I too had enjoyed our ride along the river, I tore his arm off and got out.

That was six years ago. I have been wandering along this river ever since. I am homeless. I am eighty-two years old.

It seems to be Sunday. In my present condition, however, every day might as well be—ironically enough, as the last one to which I paid any attention fell on December 7, 1941. Since then, I’d never seen the need for days of rest.

Now that my teeth have fallen out, I live on the mud at the river’s bottom. Whatever else happens, I am pleased to report that there is no immediate danger of starving. The only potential problem I can envision on that score is that I might forget how to eat. Given my circumstances, this is a distinct possibility.

Ten minutes ago, realizing that I ought to at least be able to describe my own current appearance, I emerged from the river and wandered up to a parked van, hoping to see my face in its rear window. I seemed to recall once taking pleasure in observing my reflection, and the river was much too muddy to serve. Across the top of the van’s window, above the grime that spoiled my plan—I had a feeling I used to be better at concocting those, but wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by this—was a bumper sticker that puzzled me.

GOD, GUTS, AND GUNS MADE AMERICA GREAT, it Said. WE’RE DAMNED IF WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
.

Under that, in the thick grime, someone had written this: “Do yow?”

And under that, in another hand—or finger, I suppose—was written this: “Wash Me.”

At that point, the van’s lights came on, and it began to back over me. So I had to interrupt my reading, if there was any more to read. The next time I tried, approaching the van of my choice from an indirect angle, I found that I could no longer decipher the strange markings on its stickers.

Now I no longer recall why it was I wished to sneak up on vans. While clearly an element of surprise is involved, I am unable to determine on whose part with enough certainty to feel good about doing it, or indeed anything else. In any case, whether it was my hobby or my profession, this activity now strikes me as both dangerous and surprisingly pointless.

I can’t remember my own name. Come to think of it, I’m not positive I ever had one—or if there was one or more of me, whoever I or we were. I have no information as to which town I’m in, or even if this is a town.

I believe that a van is about to back over me. As I don’t have a clue what they are either, the whole situation has me at a loss. I’m trying to collect something, but I forget what. Garbage, perhaps.

In any case, I am almost certainly in this section of the country, in one town or another.

VII

Yesterday Never Knows

As I
LOOK BACK ON MY LIFE,
I
SEE
I
NEVER REALLY KNEW JUST WHAT
the hell was going on—even though, to set the record straight about my being as corny as Kansas in August and so forth, I did study philosophy briefly at the Sorbonne in Paris, as taught by a man whose only book was called
Viel Je te haïs!
I’ve forgotten his name, so he may have been right to feel that way I also know Kansas in August, and believe me I don’t compete. No human being ever could or has, which is why to stand up under its sky, as I used to, always awed me.

I grew up there. After not too long a walk in any direction, Russell just stops, like an island in a sea of growing gold. When I was a little girl, I had a tendency to disbelieve that people of any sort lived past our town’s perfectly circular horizon. After the first sets appeared and we got one, television made this seem more possible, but not much more likely. My theory of it was that everybody on TV might be hidden in a basement somewhere right in Russell, pretending.

Dawson’s Drug and both our movie theaters and both our right and left banks were all on Main Street, along with a couple of cafes and some feed and clothing stores. The county courthouse was set back from the street, our high school was a block behind it, and our American Legion post was a full half mile off, in a more open area where the houses had become sporadic. Our sixteen churches were distributed variously. Except for their steeples and the grain elevator, nothing was all that high; or could be, given the nature of the sky.

Aside from the obvious one, our town had only a single distinctive feature, or rather many repetitions of the same distinctive feature. These were the posts hewn from our amber-colored local variety of limestone, which was also the same stuff that the courthouse was built of. They were described as fence posts but often lacked railings, and also stood in places where there was no observable use for them, such as along Main Street or solitarily in front yards. It was never made clear to us when the people who put them there had started doing this, or why they had stopped. The lesser of Russell’s two major secrets was that the posts were our form of paganism, argued with the churches, and had something
stubborn and unspoken to do with the sky. But nobody ever admitted this, as it would have been difficult to bring up, particularly to a minister, while remaining laconic and easygoing, and all five thousand of us attended religious services regularly and with no sense of hypocrisy, primarily on foot except for the people from outlying farms.

My mother was the librarian of Russell. In a precocious moment, I once called her place of work our town’s seventeenth church, at which point she looked at me. Her expression ended that conversation, which had not been atypically brief. Once I learned to read, it was easier for me to believe that people with whom I’d had no personal contact lived in other places, as it was evident the books weren’t original to Russell. It was from several of these that I first learned of Paris and soon afterwards the Sorbonne, which my heart grew set on attending for reasons whose antagonism to easy articulability would have made local analysis of the fence posts seem voluble by comparison. But I knew the reasons to be of the ocean, rather than the sky, and this meant they were all hooked up, like wires strung from a telephone pole, to my daddy, Eddie Kilroy.

On weekend nights when I was small, I used to lie in bed and listen to all the daddies who had come back from the war going past my window, which was in one of the sporadic houses near the Legion post. They would be talking quietly when they went to it, and singing noisily when they came from it. I had very little notion of what went on in between, except that they drank beer and this was necessary. When it was late and their voices were moving from left to right outside my window, rather than from right to left, the song I heard most often, along with scuffling and laughter, was “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” This always made me upset and confused, as to my understanding they were back there already.

My daddy wasn’t. He was in a Marine cemetery on Iwo Jima, of which I had only seen a picture. The picture showed white crosses and a flag. Once I was old enough to grasp what this meant, it hurt me to discover that it had been the next-to-last battle, six months before Hiroshima. But I knew there was no common sense in singling this out as grief’s focal point, as he would be just as dead if it had happened at Pearl Harbor. My mother, the librarian of Russell, would be just as melancholy, and the other daddies would still be singing “Show Me the
Way to Go Home” as their voices moved from left to right outside my window. When I was practicing common sense, the only significant difference I could see was that in that case I wouldn’t exist.