The Dick Gibson Show (19 page)

“Dodos are said to have inhabited the Mauritian forests—this is the style of information, of certain kinds of fact; I find it relaxing—and to have laid a single large white egg which they mounted high in a setting of piled grass. Hogs, brought in by the settlers, fed on the dodo eggs and on the dodo young, and in one or two generations the birds were extinct.

“By now you have the reports, the action paced off in the war room, set pin for pin like surveyor’s stakes in alignment, the lines drawn in a terrible cat’s cradle of possibility. This, what
I
do, is something else.

“The buildup was flawless. Men came from the sea, from the air. They peeled off the landing craft and ran up the beach like barbarians. Paratroopers bloomed in the sky like flowers and grew into the ground. The trade routes are really open. I celebrate the Department of Deployment, reinforcements, fresh troops. (There’s something virginal in the sound: showered, shaved, their fight untapped, blossoming in their pink skins. ‘Fresh troops’: it sounds pasteurized.) And cooks to feed them and clerks to count them. And the Japs the same, as good as you in producing populations out of thin air.

“But you know. And who am
I
, Dick Gibson, to be telling you all this? You know what I think, High Commanders, Chiefs of Staff? This broadcast of mine is a little like prayer. Well, not prayer exactly, but still, there’s a soupçon of reverence and a touch of review. That’s what you want to hear, right? Am I getting warm? That’s why the low band was invented, High Commanders on High.

“I’ll tell you what happened. History is good experience for me, the itinerant radio man.

“Collins is the officer and must command me to rise. Yesterday he came to my room to wake me but I was already up. I’d awakened before dawn. I’d heard some noises and couldn’t fall back to sleep. At first I thought the engagement had begun, but when I went to the window there were just some trucks and black shapes moving in the street. I assumed they were more reinforcements for the garrison. Then it occurred to me that they might be Japanese, but when I called down a British voice yelled up at me, so I went back to bed.

“Then something that has always been undeveloped in me—I mean my sense of place—suddenly surged up and overwhelmed me. Why, here I am, I thought, on Mauritius, one of three or four places on the globe which merely to have seen qualifies a man as a traveler, I mean a wanderer, one of those whose fate it is to be troubled by laundry, mail months old, irregular bowel movements, a certain ignorance about time and a taste gone crotchety through nostalgia for things eaten long before. How did I get this way? I wondered. It can be no accident when one finds himself sizing smooth pebbles on the cold coasts of Tierra del Fuego. To see a desert is to scorn a city, and to lick a finger that has once been in the Weddell Sea is to eschew the ordinary salts forever. What had earned
me
distance? In America I had crisscrossed the country, leaping in and out of landscape, stitching my wild, erratic journey. The mile is a measure of madness too, and a map is hot pursuit. (This is still the war news.) Gradually the room grew light and I could perceive the objects in it—the four-bladed fan that hung from the ceiling like a great spider, the cane furniture like petrified vegetable, the huge wardrobe, big as a piano crate, the white mystery of the mosquito netting. They were the solid evidences of my own strangeness. Why am
I
far afield?

“I rang for my tea and porkchop—think of that, a porkchop for breakfast—and the little half-naked native brought it up on a tray. Still standing beside my bed he kneaded the warm half-baked dough they use here as rolls and pinched the last counter-clockwise swirls into it. How does he live? He is fourteen and already married and a father. My 15 percent service charge which must be divided with the chambermaids and hall porters and laundry people and maintenance men cannot keep them all. This hotel has been practically empty since the war began. What strange arrangement goes on here?

“As I was finishing my breakfast Collins came for me and we drove straight to the garrison. It was deserted. The troops I’d seen were not reinforcements. They’d been pulling
out.

“‘Where could they have gone?’ Collins said.

“I stood with all my weight on one hip, the deferential stance of one waiting for someone else to make a decision for him.

“‘Something may be up,’ Collins said. ‘We ought to find out where they’ve gone. There’s probably someone around.’

“We found a man in the infirmary who told us the garrison had gone off to make contact with the Japanese at the southeastern edge of the island, about a half-day’s trip over rough terrain.

“‘Looks like the real thing,’ Collins said. He did not seem very happy. ‘What the hell is this about anyway, Dick? How’d a couple of old radio men like us get involved in all this?’

“In a way he was thinking the same thoughts I had earlier, but I only shrugged.

“‘You believe all that shit about the dodo bird?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Bird extinct two hundred and fifty years suddenly shows up. Damned island extinct for about the same length of time, and all of a sudden it’s a major theater of operations. It must have something to do with that bird. That’s what the talk is, but no one knows. What do
you
make of it?’

“‘I don’t know, Lieutenant.’

“‘You said they’ve got some stuffed dodos at the museum.’

“‘Representations, cunning dolls.’

“‘Let’s take a look at them, see what all the fuss is about.’

“We went to the museum. Collins treated. I knew the collection pretty well by now and I started to take him through. He wasn’t really paying much attention; he barely glanced at the glass cases. ‘We could still be in London, you know that? You had to go haywire.’

“‘No excuse, sir.’

“‘No, hell, water under the bridge. Boy, it sure spooked me when I learned you were so highly connected. What did you have on that general, anyway?’

“‘I once took a burr out of his paw.’

“‘Yeah. Ha ha. You know something? I don’t think this war can last much longer. You going back into radio when it’s over?’

“‘Yes sir.’

“‘Not me.’

“‘No sir?’

“‘Television.’

“Oh.’

“‘That’s where the money will be. Radio’s had it.’

“‘I’ll stick to radio.’

“‘Will you?’

“‘Yes sir.’

“‘Well, it’s all a matter of what you’re comfortable doing, I guess.’

“‘It’s been pretty good to me,’ I said.

“Soldiers had been talking this way for hundreds of years in the respites before big battles. I don’t think Collins saw me, but I began to cry. A chill went through me. Something about our voices, the sound of our dropped-guard friendship, told me that something terrible was going to happen. As he spoke hopefully and confidently about the future, I expected to see Collins die, to be hit by a grenade, his head torn off. Before long, I thought, he’ll be dead at my feet, his neck broken. I wanted to tell him to hush, but of course I couldn’t.

“Then something odd
did
happen. We were in the picture gallery. All about us were the dark oils of the early settlers—pictures of dodo hunts, the excited Dutchmen ruddy and breathless from the chase, the dodo cornered, maddened perhaps by its ordeal; other paintings, still lifes of Mauritian feasts, tables spread with the island’s fruits, halved cuchacha melons white as moonlight, tangled wreaths of the fruit vines that trellis the cones of the volcanoes, the dodo birds prepared for cooking, split, the guts, like long, partially inflated balloons, tossed into a slopbucket, their long necks limp, the beaks open in death and their bare, old men’s cheeks flecked with blood. I had thought we were alone, but suddenly I heard a low bark of heartbreak. We both turned. It was the captured Japanese civilian, sitting on one of those benches that they put in the middle of picture galleries. There was a strange rapt expression on his face, and he was weeping. Probably he didn’t see us.

“‘How did he get loose?’ the lieutenant whispered. I shook my head. Collins drew his service revolver—since that time in Broadcasting House when he’d placed me under arrest he always wore one— and pointed it at the man. ‘Hands up,’ he commanded. The scientist appeared not to have heard and Collins walked closer. ‘I said hands up.’ Still the fellow did not acknowledge us. ‘Hands up and stop crying.’ At last the Japanese turned to Collins. He seemed very tired. He raised his arms wearily.

“‘What are you doing here?’ Collins demanded. The Japanese just stared at him. He looked like someone in touch with something really important who was suddenly forced to deal with the ordinary. I was glad I wasn’t the lieutenant and didn’t have to ask the questions. ‘Come on, fellow. You don’t have to speak our language to get our meaning,’ Collins said. He waved the pistol at him. He shook it in his face. ‘Move out smartly … I said
move!’
The man merely looked away from Collins again and stared across the room at a large painting of a dodo bird. He rubbed his eyes. ‘And you can cut out that sniffling,’ Collins said firmly. ‘We’re not barbarians. We’re American soldiers and you’re a prisoner of war, subject to rights granted you under the Geneva conventions. You’re our first prisoner and we aren’t exactly sure of what those rights include. We’ll have to look them up, but anyway we’re not going to hurt you. You have to come along with us, though.’

“‘I am not afraid,’ the Japanese said calmly. ‘And I will go with you. But first, can you please give me one moment alone in here? As you can see, this is the last gallery. Obviously I have no means of escape.’

“I must confess something. I was very excited at the prospect of taking a prisoner. ‘Don’t do it, Lieutenant—it’s a trick,’ I said.

“The man looked at me contemptuously. ‘Please, Lieutenant,’ the Japanese said, ‘you can see that there is no escape.’ He patted his pockets and opened his palms. ‘I am unarmed.’

“‘How come you talk such good English?’ I asked threateningly. He seemed disappointed in me. I didn’t blame him; I felt my sergeant’s stripes sear themselves into my arm.

“‘I am a scientist,’ he explained coolly, looking at the lieutenant. ‘English is the official language of ornithology.’

“‘Hmph.’

“‘Please, Lieutenant, I will go with you now. My meditations’—he looked at me—‘are over.’

“He rose, his eyes downcast, his body just visibly stiffening as we went by each of the paintings. In the gallery showing the environments of the dodo birds he would not look up, and once, when his hand accidentally brushed against one of the glass cases, he jumped back as if flung. ‘Pretty odd behavior for a so-called
scientist,
wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?’ I whispered in Collins’s ear, regretting my style even as I spoke. My stripes lashed me, driving me to feats of clown and squire.

“Once outside the museum the Japanese seemed more comfortable. We took him back to the garrison and let ourselves into the guardhouse.

“‘How did you escape?’ the lieutenant asked our prisoner.

“‘I didn’t. I was abandoned. They forgot about me.’

“‘What were you doing at the museum?’

“‘I’m an ornithologist.’

“‘You’re the one who discovered the dodo.’

“‘No. I identified him.’

“I was still smarting from all the things I’d said up to now. ‘Listen, Lieutenant,’ I whispered, ‘I think there’s more going on here than we appreciate yet. Give me a few minutes alone with him.’

“‘Why? What good would that do?’

“‘I think I know some ways of getting him to talk.’

“‘He’s a prisoner of war, Sergeant.’

“‘Yes sir, but our buddies are out there. I think this gook knows more than he lets on.’ The scientist rolled his eyes.

“‘Many hundreds of years ago—’ he said.

“’
Talk,’
I hissed.

“‘Many hundreds of years ago, during the dynasty of the Emperor Shobuta—’ the man said.

“‘That’s it,’ I said lamely, ‘keep talking.’

“‘ … there suddenly appeared in Japan, on the island of Shikoku—your Indian word “Chicago” derives from this—a single specimen of the genus Raphidae Didus, what you call
dodos.
How it got there is unknown, for Japan—this was in the thirteenth century, three centuries before the discovery of Mauritius—was an insular nation which had no dealings with the rest of the world. The bird was flightless. Ceramics from the era show that its wing development was even less than the Mauritian representations. Naturally, the bird was a curiosity. The curator of the Shikoku Zoo—we are not barbarians either, Lieutenant; Shikoku had a zoo long before one was ever dreamed of in Europe—did not know how to classify it and was inclined to put it with the animals rather than in the aviary.

“‘Now at this time Japan was plagued by warlords. One in particular, Zamue, a Shikokuan, was a threat to the emperor himself, a man of mild manners and ways whose paths were peace. Zamue, in contrast, was a fierce samurai who, in the course of events, had left a trail of bloody victories from the island of Yezo in the north to Kyushu in the south.

“‘Now it came to pass—you have this idiom in your country?—it came to pass that a court counselor, one Ryusho Mali, recognized the need to instill courage in our emperor, and when he heard about the strange wingless bird that had alighted in Shikoku he sent for it in order to examine it for its qualities as an omen. He had expected something like a peacock, perhaps, or a cassowary—both rare in Japan but not unheard of—or even a parrot, but when he saw the specimen he was extremely disappointed. How could so foolish-looking a bird bode well for the state? Nevertheless, setting aside his prejudices, he proceeded to examine it closely. Perhaps it enjoyed some of the properties of the parrot and could be made to mimic human speech. Ryusho Mali recalled how a predecessor of his had once done something notable for his country through an ordinary crow, and so he closeted himself with the bird and examined it. He tried to train it to say “courage,” thinking that perhaps the hard
k
sound might be natural to it, but, alas, he quickly discovered that the bird had no voice at all. It was mute as a turtle. He wondered if something cheering might not be done with the feathers, but there was little inspiration to be had from the lusterless black and dingy yellow with which the bird was covered. In the end, Ryusho Mali put the bird away from him, commanding that it be sent back to the zoo in Shikoku to be stared at by the multitudes for the pointless novelty it was.