I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (31 page)

But he certainly was no recluse. The road from Concord to Lincoln was a field away from him. He could hear the Fitchburg Railroad when it steamed on by. Almost every day, he went into town. On weekends, the children of Concord picnicked around his pond. Sundays, his mom dropped off goodie baskets.

And after two years in the woods, Thoreau wrote a really strange book about it.
Walden
is many things: diary, sermon, nature travelogue, proto-boho fantasy about dropping out. But what ties it all together is the man himself. Thoreau is the book’s true subject. If
Robinson Crusoe
is the manual of rugged individualism,
Walden
then is the apotheosis of the wannabe rugged individual.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau wrote at his book’s beginning. He would know—he was having a midlife crisis 125 years before the Baby Boomers made it a thing. Via
Walden,
he became the early popularizer of that most American of notions, the one which proclaims that, to be happy, we need to be someplace other than where we are. A place more substantial, where we’ll finally be free to turn into ourselves, use our innate powers to create. Create not a new Eden, mind you, but a new and better Adam.

“Let him step to the music which he hears,” Thoreau wrote, “however measured or far away.” This isn’t an advocacy for solitude. More like the warm dream of a private religion.

The customer left the red cave of his closed eyes, reluctantly. It was morning, and he had yet to sleep well. Each night, the wind played the island like a bad one-man band. Every few hours Quassi went tear-assing into the darkness, barking like mad.

He could not wait to wake up in a place that was not this place. Which was exactly how he wound up here.

Dave was seated at his desk, Miranda splayed in front of it. He was calling friends and business partners, former and potential, talking up the BBC program, among other things. His customer sat apart and watched Dave work. He saw that, whether in person or on the phone, Dave’s aspect never changed. His eyes locked on, but to some middle distance, neither here nor there. He seemed to be projecting something, like a camera obscura.

Mate, I’m telling you,
he said into the receiver,
you can’t rob from the rich to pay for the poor. All that does is make more poor!… Well, the potential is in the untapped market of Chinese WWOOFers.… No, America loves to help people. But they’re not helping themselves.

Each call restarted his spiel, Dave like a human infomercial on the hour. When he got good and humming, he had the cadence and sly humor of a carnival barker–cum–revivalist.
Our utter financial collapse is like the pregnant schoolgirl,
he said.
Eventually that baby’s gonna come!
After a few hours of such inveigling, he grabbed his iPad and joined his customer at the driftwood table.

What’s my current password? Dave asked, poking at a commodities report he’d ordered online. You know, precious-metal market psychology has been absolutely smashed by the banks.…

The customer heard a crunching noise. He looked to Quassi, who was lying at his feet. Quassi was eyeing Locky, who was sprawled a ways off. Between his paws writhed a blue and yellow songbird. He nosed it once, twice, and then bit off its broken right wing. The good left one flapped erratically, to the rhythm of the bird’s heartbeat.

… 
The smart corporates recognize the value of that,
Dave was saying. Something about optimism and Google. I don’t know. I was through the looking glass here.

This time, when I came to, I made some snide comments about data mining and the NSA. I made up even more egregious privacy breaches for Google to perpetrate, just to shake Dave’s faith in corporate futurism. I was done with biding my time, with hoping—like some son at the home with his demented father—for a flicker of cognizance.

But, anyway, do you think they’d like to come here? The Google blokes?
he asked, exaggeratedly flipping between financial forecasts on his iPad.
Do you think they’d come to an island to get restored?
Onto the table in front of my folded hands dropped two mosquitoes, flushed and coupling.
Well, of course, they would have to do the restoring themselves,
Dave added.

Here’s one way I often find myself passing the time in my apartment: I turn on the Home Shopping Network, I lie supine on the carpet, and I listen as people try to sell me on stuff. It’s like my everyday, only a screen removed. I close my eyes and let the song and dance wash over me. I feel tickled; feel this wriggling, duodenal bliss that’s kin to having unscratched bug bites all over. The pleasure is anticipatory. I know that, when I’m good and ready, I can do here what I cannot outside—I can shut it all off.

That and a drink in the tub are my consolations. But they’re also symptomatic of a larger issue: after four hours anywhere, with anyone, I get mortified. I become obsessed with a perpetual
elsewhere. If I can’t duck out—I dissociate. Not like a guy with a mental disorder. I know I’m in here. But the persona doing the shit-eating is just that, a front. A decoy. The real me is watching from without. Gauging. The me who thinks and feels and
is
remains elsewhere.

Of course, to my mind, this decoy’s doing a bang-up job of advertising how I wish I felt. Mr. Golem B. Kool, all revivifying smiles and conspiratorial winks. But the reality of it, I’m sure, is different. To others, I must appear as frightened, condemnatory, and doomed as a plague nurse in one of those birdy masks.

… 
A classic give-and-take,
Dave was saying, rain plunking into overflowing jugs.
I’m in a situation where I need the media to help me. It’s a fair trade: I give you a story, you give me publicity. At this point, I wouldn’t even mind a reality TV show if they brought some nice girls with them.

I will admit I hadn’t counted on Dave being such a dratted social butterfly. Alone on an island was where I figured a man would have found peace. Meaning, he’d be happy, but he’d never have a good time. That, or he’d be a crazy person anxious to brain me with a conch in the night. But Dave’s guestbook offered proof to the contrary in both cases. It was fat with the signatures of hundreds of visitors. And not just the WWOOFers or the KuukuYa’u, but French luxury yachters, recreational divers, sport fishermen—Russell goddamn Crowe stopped by on his honeymoon, apparently. Almost every one of their entries reads the same, something like: “Utopia at last!” “A piece of heaven.” “NO REASON FOR THE STRESS!!” “It was the perfect remedy to life!”

Was it, though? You might not be able to be a castaway in the original sense anymore, but neither can you half-ass the experience. You don’t just buy a round-trip ticket to peace of mind and post pictures to Facebook later, another consumptive merit badge. If only.

I returned my attention to Dave. He was saying:
I feel safe
here on the island if it all goes down. Which I think it will. It’s that I’m off the drug of money. Some blokes think gold’s the answer, but gold … it’s as safe as houses. Whereas silver, old sixpences and shit
—
it’s a byproduct. Useful in electronics. Sometimes, you know, there’s more value in the byproduct than the product. The sheilas understand it, silver.
I nodded as absently as the palms in the gale.
Who runs the family budget? The sheilas. And they hide silver around the house, don’t they? I knew this one old bird who filled half a dozen forty-four-gallon drums with the stuff and buried them in the yard. I admire her immensely, I do.

Ain’t a damned thing therapeutic about this place. Womb-like it was not—far more purgatorial than that. And Dave, bless him, the more he droned on and on about the enlightened man’s need for a spot to sit still and wand a metal detector over his soul, the more certain I became that no matter where I go to find myself—be it a South Pacific hovel isle; a teak-floored villa with curtains a-billow; or the stained carpet in my uptown cesshole—I’ll keep unearthing this gem: I am shipwrecked with a self I both fear for and loathe.

So. How did those guys escape Alcatraz, again?

Is it that I say nuts to the faux-biblical jargon of authenticity, with its consumerist undertow and accessorized cant of separation and lost harmony? Instead I should just try to wrap my head around the infinite extent of my relations and thank God I am like other men? Then I could allow myself to be swallowed by this seemingly commonplace epiphany, so much so that I become borderless, like a fish swimming at night?

Seriously. I’m asking. Which, Jesus, do you know how hard that is?

Is it that I’m not allowed off this rock until
something
has died?

Nobody’s gonna restore themselves,
I told Dave.
But I doubt they had it in them in the first place.

During the darkest hour before sunrise, the customer turned on his flashlight and left his bed, having yet to explore the island at night. Quassi took up after him with the weary compassion of all bedside attendants. The wind sounded like fire, like
whoosh,
flames chasing oxygen.

Mosquitoes were landing on his bare arms and legs, but the customer waited a couple of beats before waving them off. He considered how the life span of a bug bite is exactly like that of a star: first they’re big, warm, and nebulous; then they collapse into hot little pinpricks. He swept his path to the beach with the beam of his flashlight.

When he reached the top of a dune leading down to the water, he heard Quassi’s growl go gnarly. The dog shot past him, running for the surf. The customer scribbled his mote of light over fizzy spume, trying frantically to locate what had spooked them both.

Two eyes shined greenly. Then they extinguished themselves. Next there came a snort, and some thing sliding sliding sliding into the breakers. At this point, I think, I began to appreciate that whatever it is I would like to find, it lies beyond or under all my attempts to find it. I said,
Holy shit.

Forty-five minutes before our blowup, Dad was paring every last marbled ounce of fat from a roast. Now, I’ve taped him the cooking shows. I’ve tried to get Paula Deen to learn him. “The fat’s what gives it flavor!” I’ve implored, gaveling an empty saucepan on the kitchen island. Never have I myself offered to cook, of course. Which is why he’s kept on with his excision, cutting away what he thinks we might choke on.

The meat prepped, he began to dice carrots, cucumbers, and avocados, painstakingly tessellating them atop a bed of romaine. This has been his afternoon rite ever since his experiments in small-cap stock trading flamed out rather spectacularly in the late ’90s. He used to record and then pore over the day’s CNBC broadcasts with Talmudic scrutiny. At one point, our house held more tapes of Maria Bartiromo than any one of us babes. He’d often ask my take on, say, Electronic Arts video games, squintily parsing my response just the same as when listening to what I thought of
these
numbers, which were sometimes jotted down, sometimes not, en route to the Circle K.

Then, regrettably, he one day dumped a truckload of money into that outfit that sold those healthful potato crisps, the ones that caused “anal leakage,” doubling down after that on the
deadly weight-loss supplement fen-phen. I think they’re almost done paying out that class-action.

“A salad, you understand, is by definition tossed,” I said. “Heterogeneous. You’re doing your own make-work.”

Mom surfaced from the back room, done for the day with her freelance real-estate work. “Let’s make hamburger helper!” she said, meaning not the boxed kind, with its sinister glove-homunculus.
Her
version, which is just mac and cheese, taco meat, and tomato sauce mixed up in a bowl. Those early years spent in a breeze-blocked central Florida trailer—they granted her many a culinary knack.

“We don’t have ground beef,” Dad said.

“I’ll go get some,” Mom said.

“Oh
shit,
Janice, don’t go to Woodlands. They charge an arm and a fucking leg! Six bucks per!”

“I don’t care.”

“
I
care! You want to help? Help me make a roast beef hash. He didn’t come all the way out here to eat hamburger helper.”

From the other side of the wall, I said: “I want hamburger helper.” No I didn’t. Not really.

Mom left to go get the fixings. Dad remained in the kitchen. Snorting, slamming things, hocking loogies into the sink.

The man’s made a good 90 percent of all the home-cooked meals I’ve ever had, but has himself eaten none of them. He’s never tasted what he’s prepared. (He might take a bite or two of the main protein, so that he can declaim it
the worst goddamn thing I’ve ever cooked.
)

Instead, he feeds himself this way: He opens the fridge and sticks both arms deep into its bottom shelf. He hugs rank condiments and bearded leftovers to his chest, rakes them in like a botulistic jackpot. With these he concocts a true ghoulash, hot brown wallow, which he eats over the sink. He neither sits nor protests. He devours this slop with the ritual gusto of a sin eater.

Suddenly, Dad was emergent, his little fists like claw-feet at the end of his forearms. Now he was pointing: “Fuck you. You want to go to Ohio? I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Dad stomping around. The upstairs neighbors stomping back. Dad eyeing my hands on the keyboard.

“If I read one fucking word about this, this or anything I’ve said in the past eight days—that’s it. Don’t bother coming back home. You really will shut me up.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. Who the fuck would want to read about this?”

“Who wants to read about your dumb ass trying to get killed on an island?” His voice was getting progressively louder, as though straining to be heard over steam picking up belowdecks. “Or trying to get bit by a goddamn mamba? Or beat to death by grease-painted human garbage?”

“That’s
my
prerogative.”

“That’s some
Jackass
shit, is what it is.”