Today three guests arrived from the sea. I had neither expected nor wished to see another soul for as long as I lived. Yet I made them welcome.
I had been sitting above the waterfall, gazing into one of the pools beside the rapids where the waters gather strength for their shouting suicidal plunge. I was watching a crayfish catch a minnow, which thrashed for a while and then was still. The crayfish tore the thing apart, and almost I could not watch for sorrow and disgust and pity.
But as the crustacean began to tear the flesh, a little yellow thing wriggled out and flashed like a sunbeam through the water before disappearing into the rocky border of the pool. Some parasitic worm, I suppose, whose whole bright existence was predicated on the violent death of its host. So God orders all things to the good, even when our understanding fails.
These were my thoughts as I glanced over the waterfall and saw the boat approaching my island. It was an ugly thing, one of those black and yellow inflatables, with three figures inside, and I felt uneasy as I have not felt for a long time. I told myself that there was no reason to expect evil from their coming, that they deserved refuge even as I had found it. But the mind may be convinced, the gut never. I picked up my staff, prayed for calm, and began my descent.
They were pulling the boat out of the turquoise waters of the bay and onto the sand when I emerged from the pine woods above. There were two men and a woman, all badly sunburned, and one of the men had apparently been injured in the leg. He remained in the boat as the others, struggling, dragged it out of reach of the gently lapping waves.
I set down my staff and raised my hands in greeting. “Welcome!” I called, in English. There was an instant’s pause as three heads turned to me, and the first words uttered by a stranger on my island were, alas, “Holy shit.” Then: “Oh, God. Please, help us.”
I went down and assisted in the securing of their craft. I deflected their questions, telling them only and repeatedly that they were safe. The injured man, Daniel, had what they told me was a broken leg, but Claire (a nurse, I gathered) was troubled by the swelling. I suspect osteomyelitis. I called a sled from the house, and, when it arrived, I asked their help to lay the injured man on it. Then I led them up the path to my dwelling.
They were of course too stunned and weary to notice much, not the gentle wild pigs in the clearing or even the violet-throated finch I pointed out on one of the pines. To my disappointment, they were more curious by far about the sled floating gently beside us with their injured friend, and about me, and when we came to it, about the house. I must remind myself: they come from a dying, poisoned world, and it will take time for the poison to leave their minds.
Now I watch the shadows gather over the darkling sea and am ill at ease. I am reminded of the times in the old world when I had believed myself finally master of myself, finally at peace, and then some human intrusion ruined everything.
The injured man’s name is Daniel; the others are Paul and Claire, Daniel’s wife. I brought the sled to the infirmary and set the Doctor to treating Daniel. They were, predictably, amazed by the Doctor. I told them that I had not had much need of him in recent times, not since a snakebite brought on by my own naivete long ago. Indeed, he has been almost idle, atop stores of medicine nearly overflowing, and if I could attribute feeling to the device, I would say that he was glad for the work. Daniel was sedated and administered saline, and I took Paul and Claire to the kitchen where I gave them some of my restorative, and then bread and salt and fish. I think the time the bread was baking was agony to them, and when the food was laid, I felt a little like a patient dog trainer administering morsels to keep them from gobbling and getting sick. After we had shared our bread and salt and their thirst had been quenched, they tried again to question me, to tell me things, but I was firm that they should rest. Indeed, when at last they were persuaded to lie down, they were immediately asleep.
Now I sit on the veranda, listening to the evening wind, the wild pigs rooting in the yard, the nightbirds calling and answering, the soft waves, and the distant murmur of the falls: the peace of the evening in a place the world had not reached. Above it all I hear one of my guests snoring like a train.
I slept little last night. Daniel has indeed an infection of the bone, and I have directed the Doctor to perform the necessary surgery as soon as the patient is sufficiently rested. Once as I sat by him last night, he bolted upright and shrieked. My limbs are still shaking in tune with that yell: an echo of all I left behind.
Claire and Paul woke late, after I had returned from my walk with fresh fruits and nuts and baked two more loaves. They were eager to talk, bubbling over with questions about me, the island, how I had made it all work. I have read in books how men long alone are desperate to at last have conversation and yet find they are far out of practice. The first part was not at all true of me, but the second surely so.
Paul asked, “How long have you been here?”
“Eight years, I think, by the old reckoning. Eight spawnings of the grunion, seven rainy seasons, nineteen sightings of the whale from shore, one hurricane, as I reckon things here.”
Paul looked at me like one looks at crazy people in the old world. He said, “Well, you missed it. It got bad. Real bad.”
I did not invite him to continue, but took a deep breath, bracing for the world to come crashing in.
“Let’s see,” said Paul. “Eight years, so you didn’t miss it totally. You must have seen the start of it. You know the militias, from that Sanctuary app? They really took off. Pretty soon it was like living in a war zone. I mean, really rotten.”
I was looking out the window at the pigs laying quiet and calm in the morning sun, peaceful as nothing in the old world is. “Rotten to the core, yes,” I said.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit these people were doing. They had these things, like armbands or something, tracked your dopamine or whatever, dosed you . . . I mean, like weaponized emotion, man.”
“Yes, I know,” I replied, hoping to finish this line of conversation.
“How?” asked Claire, a little too abruptly. “Do you get news here?”
I smiled carefully. “No. I have cut all connections with that place. From what you have said, I hope you will agree that is for the best.”
I saw Claire’s hand go instinctively for a phone pocket. That little tic of the old world. She found nothing, of course. She looked at me curiously, put her hand back on the table, and began to talk, staring into the distance. “It was all-out war. It was awful. By the time we left we . . . the hospitals . . . were turning away anyone who was still walking. There was this poison . . . ” And on they went. Militias, guns, gas, curfews. Apps, wearables, dopamine, adrenaline, testosterone. Everything I had left behind. I practiced breathing techniques I had not had occasion to require for many years.
Paul said, “Are you listening, man?”
I had, in fact, been listening to the birds, as best I could, over their horrible talk.
Paul said, “Blackouts. People starving. Literally, starving. Have you ever seen something like that? There was a nuclear war, you know that, between Saudi Arabia and Iran? Just a little nuclear war, you understand? Just enough to make sure we were cutting each other’s throats for gas. But they kept the networks up to the bitter end. Kept that damned app running.”
Claire said, “We’d have been dead. I . . . I really think this is the end.” She put her head in her hands and said, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Paul put her hand on her shoulder. When she had collected herself, she said, “If it weren’t for Paul . . . ” she squeezed his arm.
Paul said, “I had a lead on a boat. A lot of people were trying to get to Cuba.” He laughed. “Can you believe it? Trying to get to Cuba.”
The bird had stopped singing, and I had to prevent myself from rolling my eyes at Paul’s ridiculous prejudices. Rolling my eyes, as if I were still the self-important and prideful man I had been in the old world. Moreover, I considered just what these people had done to get the boat, under such circumstances. I had seen Daniel’s leg and the Doctor’s X-rays. Entirely consistent with impact from a blunt weapon. Have I indeed opened my gates to the barbarians?
“So we thought we’d try,” said Claire. “We’d been friends a while, I mean, he and Daniel really had been friends and he . . . well, he saved us. We got the boat. We got what we could together and we headed for Cuba. But . . . ” she laughed. “Turns out you have to know what you’re doing.”
Paul looked annoyed. “I knew what I was doing. We just got off course overnight. Daniel was supposed . . . ”
I thought about my island covered in bickering like this for the rest of our lives and said my prayers to myself. Christ with me, Christ before me.
“Hey,” Paul interrupted.
I shook myself away.
“Look, I know you’ve got a pretty sweet setup here, but do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? I’m telling you that the world is ending.”
“Maybe what is ending was not such a good thing.”
“Are you insane?” cried Paul.
I felt myself gripped by the old white rage. That same furnace blast that had ended my marriage, my career, destroyed my old life again and again. Then I breathed deeply, listened to the wind in the trees, and prayed patience.
“No, I am not. Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “I want to show you this place.”
We took a short walk around the island. We came to the old fishing hut, still standing though its planks had turned the color of peat, so that it looks like something that had grown out of the deep forest behind. With a sudden drumming the bright pigeonlike birds who had taken up residence inside exited a window.
“This isn’t yours, is it? Were there people here before?” asked Claire. Then: “Where even are we?”
I shook my head and laughed. “I have devoted myself to three things since I arrived here: Cultivating virtue, training my eyes to see again, and forgetting as completely as possible where this island stands in relation to the lost world.”
“But you’re American, right? Obviously.”
“Why ‘obviously’?” I said, attempting to crush my annoyance. “Please do not carry these foolish old concepts to my island. Nationality.”
She said, “OK, so what’s this about virtue?” And with that simple question I felt a bit of hope that maybe this would not be the disaster I had feared.
“Ever since I was little,” I said. “I wanted to be good. It’s all I wanted. I prayed it, you know, as a child. I said, Dear God, let me good. I kept that simple prayer straight thought everything. No matter how educated I got, how successful. Maybe that’s what saved me, in the end. I don’t know if you pray.”
Neither Claire nor Paul answered. Of course they do not. No one with any education does, back there.
“As I lived longer, I found it impossible to be good back there, surrounded by evil and provocation. I saw where things were going, of course. I have eyes. I was there. To me the old world was already a lost cause. It kept wrecking me, making me do things. Terrible things. So I came here, to give God a chance to answer my prayers. Make me good.”
“Nice gig if you can get it,” Claire said. Then, sharply: “What did you do that was so bad?”
Paul, who clearly dislikes me, had walked off toward the hut as we talked. I saw what he did not. I ran forward and with a sharp downward thrust of my staff I crushed the head of an adder emerging from the scrub. It thrashed once only.
“Thanks,” gasped Paul, staring at the dead snake.
“I have tried,” I said, “to live in peace with the denizens of this island. Even with these snakes, but while most serpents are peaceful unless disturbed, these are aggressive without fail, and very deadly.” I flipped the staff in my hand and showed the pointed tip. I smiled sadly. “I was beginning to tell Claire that I have become a better man here, but alas, even here I cannot be wholly free from the destruction we all must do.”
Paul and Claire laughed together at dinner. To me their closeness is unseemly, with Daniel recovering in the other room, but I must make allowances for the strain of their ordeal. They are beginning to make themselves at home, and I suppose that this is right and good. Still, the presumption!
Paul said, “Bet you have a great wine cellar.”
“I do not. I live simply here.”
He laughed. “Guess simple’s all relative. Well, you’ve got that barley out back. I bet I can make up some good homebrew.”
This man, coming here, with his survivalist fantasies! Though I held my tongue, I could not suppress my frown, and Claire saw it. She felt she must play peacemaker, and I hated Paul for that.
“What do you eat here, besides this?” She waved her hands at the remnants of bread, fruit, and fish.
I smiled. “Little else. The wild herbs I have been learning by trial and error, and I have a secret spot for honey.”
“Secret?” said Paul. “From who? It’s your goddamn private island.”
I ignored him. “Then there’s a native tuber a little like a sweet potato . . . ”
“What about those pigs?” said Paul. “Ever catch one of those?”
“No,” I said, horrified, thinking of long days spent watching the swine nosing at tree roots and sleeping in the sun until I myself fell asleep, at peace with everything. The pigs were introduced, I suppose, by the previous inhabitants. They are small and gentle, quite unlike the feral hogs of the dying world.
“Used to do these Hawaiian barbecues back home sometimes,” Paul continued.
I stood abruptly, and said to Claire, “I should check on your husband,”
Daniel’s wound was healing nicely. I emptied his pan and turned him gently in bed, though it was evident that he had been walking against the doctor’s orders.
“You should rest,” I said. “You’ll be out soon enough. Doctor says the surgery was a success.”
“Thank you,” he said earnestly. “We’d have been dead if not for you.”
I like Daniel more than the other two. He is easier for me to talk to. “I think it’s good for me, that you are here.”
“Must have been tough, being alone all this time.”
“No,” I answered. “Not at all. Much harder to have guests, in fact. But,” I hurried on, seeing his look, “good for me, I believe. A test, maybe.”
“What’s that?” asked Daniel, pointing to a frame on the wall. I had forgotten. A vanity of my early days. To hang a diploma! I wondered if he had been able to read it. The lights had been kept dim, and it was far from the bed, and even if he had my name, who would recognize it? But still!
That night I took it down and destroyed it. That life is dead. The one who came here eight years ago . . . eight rainy seasons ago, I should say . . . is dead.
I am truly happy for the first time since my guests arrived. Daniel is up and about at last! He came along for his first short walk this afternoon, and I believe that he sees. It is marvelous. In his company, Claire, too, seems to be recovering something of her prelapsarian vision. My heart sings as we walk these paths I love and they begin themselves to learn something of this place. Daniel asks questions, is silent when silence is called for. At first, in the infirmary, he would talk about the old world, but he realized quickly that it is not a pleasant subject for me, and has ceased to mention it entirely. This Claire will not do. She is unable to let go. Maybe, with time. She is brighter now, with Daniel beside her.
Paul, though, is a shadow, malcontent, suspicious, drawing the others off to murmur, making rude observations and asking stupid questions. I wonder that the other two did not toss him overboard.
But I don’t dwell on him, for when I do I feel the old bitterness and frustration welling up, and then I enter the old cycle of self-criticism and doubt. Better to sit with Daniel in the sunlight.
I asked him this afternoon if he knew the children’s book, about the bull who doesn’t want to fight.
“Ferdinand, right?”
I remember begging my nanny for it over and over. “He goes off to the arena and hates the fighting, so he comes back to his field and is just content. I used to love that story. I begged my nanny for it over and over. I used to very much feel for the bull.”
“I don’t think the bull actually fights,” said Daniel.
“I think he does. But then . . . Well, it was a long time ago. Anyway, the point is that he’s forced by the world to act against his nature, and then he finally gets back to the field and is content.”
Daniel looked out at the endless ocean, inscrutable.
My joy at Daniel’s recovery has been cut short. The damned old world these people have brought with them! Crushing every bit of hope before it can grow.
I heard the report of the gun from the woods where I had gone to watch the birds, and I heard a horrible squeal, and then two more shots.
“Thought we’d celebrate!” said Paul, as I arrived breathless. A pig lay dead and grinning on the ground. He had a pistol in hand, the first firearm to have been used on this island since my arrival. Of course they would have weapons. I should have checked the boat more closely.
“Can you help me?” he asked.
I stared at him, and at the pig, and then I turned to be sick and fled back to the house.
Paul, who claimed to have gone deer hunting once or twice, did not know the first thing about butchery, which led to a pathetic mangling of the creature. Claire laughed at him (laughed!) and—her nurse’s training—took matters into her own hands. I could only watch so long.
I have fled the smell of smoke and cooking flesh, so I write this from the fishing hut. The fishing hut, I say, but I have been put off even my fish. Henceforth I will eat only plants, and one day I will eat only those things that the plants shed without hurt to themselves, like a Jain monk.
They say that pigs are among the most human of animals. I remember watching them rooting gently in the black earth under the heavy morning air. Sitting amongst them from my earliest days here as my heart expanded and healed. I remember how a piglet kicked away from the litter of its mother was taken in by another who had lost one of its own. I would call such a thing humane, but today it is hard to think of such unselfishness,, gentleness, as human. I would rather throw in my lot with the pigs.
A week away. I returned to the house last night as they slept. Clearly these people are not in the habit of housekeeping: the place looks like it has been ransacked. Paul avoids my eyes (that I have removed his gun I am sure he has noticed), but Claire has been apologetic.
She said, “Hey. I’m sorry. That was stupid of him. You have to understand. He just wanted to do something special for Daniel. It’s hard for him, you know, not to be in charge. He wants to take care of us.”
“You’re not children. You don’t need taking care of.”
“You don’t seem to mind doing it.”
“I do not wish another fight,” I said. “I forgive him.”
Meanwhile, I have noticed Daniel’s countenance. There is something there I cannot read, some question he wishes to ask, or perhaps some sin to confess.
Again something terrible has happened. Daniel came to me on the veranda this evening as I sat working through the Spiritual Exercises in my mind. I was considering the sin of wrath, and attempting to order my spirit away from sin, and toward righteous anger, properly directed.
He sat down next to me.
I said, “I used to lose my temper. It . . . it cost me dearly.”
“That why you left Sanctuary?”
My breath went out of me.
“I know who you are,” said Daniel quietly.
“What do you mean?” I asked calmly, though my heart was pounding.
“Look, we’re really grateful. I know it doesn’t seem like that sometimes. I know we haven’t figured out all your rules. I know we’re going a little crazy here. What do you expect? We lost everything. Maybe it’s all gone. It was really bad. Paul’s right when he talks about the end of the world.”
“What do you mean,” I pressed, “when you say you know who I am?”
Daniel said, “I found these.” He held out a small collection of scraps, scraps of my life discarded: a Sanctuary ID badge, a credit card. Notes from supporters when I was forced out. A photo of my family in happier times. Of course I should have destroyed them, but I had never imagined I would have guests. That I would have to justify myself. My mouth felt dry. I felt sick. But why? What did it matter who I had been? What I had done before? That world was gone, that life was gone. I extend the same courtesy to Paul and all the rest. I do not care who they were, only what they do now.
“I wasn’t trying to snoop,” said Daniel. “We just didn’t know where you were, if you’d come back. So we just started looking around. Anyway, it’s not like it was too hard to figure the basics out. What kind of person is rich enough to buy . . . all this? This island, if you bought it, and this house and your robot doctor and whatever else? This is billionaire stuff. We’re not stupid.”
I smiled. “You’re not stupid, at least.”
He did not smile back. “Paul and Claire aren’t either. I don’t know what you thought we’d think, but we had you pretty much pegged from the start. Tech guy, obviously. Sanctuary: the ID cards show that. And not just some investor. You’d really have to know your stuff to keep all this machinery up and running—the house, the sleds, Doctor Robot. Then the way you talked about medicine. So you’re probably one of the brains behind the whole damn thing. Maybe you helped think up those hormone bands. I remember something about someone being kicked out. Lot of bad press just before it all went out of control.”
I did my best to speak calmly. “Have you spoken to Claire and Paul about this?”
“No,” he said firmly. “That’s in the past. You . . . ” his hands clenched and unclenched. “Whatever you’re responsible for, you’ve been so good to us. Really. Little heavy-handed sometimes. But . . . anyway, this is it. I think we’re here for . . . as long as we live. We don’t know where we are. There’s no way of communicating. Not that our phones would work, but you must have taken them that first night.”
I opened my mouth.
“It’s alright. I understand. If I were you, I wouldn’t want anyone to find this place. So we’re stuck here. And we’re going to have to live together. I don’t think it will help if they know that you’re basically one of the people that caused the whole thing.”
“I never meant . . . ”
“You say you’ve been here eight years. That means you were around long enough to see what Sanctuary was doing to us. Don’t act like you didn’t know. You said yourself you could see where it was going. Don’t you feel any responsibility?”
I felt like shouting, but I controlled myself. “I told you once that I never figured out how to live with other people. When I’m alone, I can be good, but . . . ”
He shook his head. “There’s no being good on your own. Good’s what you do with other people.”
Daniel has quite suddenly suffered a relapse. Perhaps the antibiotics lost effectiveness, or maybe Daniel neglected to take his medication and is himself to blame. Perhaps there was even some issue with the Doctor’s treatment. In any case, the infection has reappeared, and Daniel is confined for surgery again. I have, upon reflection, made the difficult decision to ration the pain medication—if there will be three . . . four of us here, we cannot afford any waste. Who knows what accidents might happen? So I listen to him scream, deliriously, and all the animals have fled the sound.
Daniel has died. Claire is distraught. Paul does not seem to manifest genuine emotion, but rather to express smooth coworkerly condolences. I notice him watching me, and quickly looking away.
I feel the long arm of the old world coming after me. The same creeping despair I felt when I noticed the slow erosion of the coastline here. The feeling that there is nothing I can do, that evil will find me wherever I go. I have lost Daniel, the one person who I felt might truly have seen me. And now there are these two, who I wish with all my heart would be gone.
I do not want Daniel’s corpse on this island, haunting it. I suggested that we send him to the sea in the boat. Paul immediately said, “Fuck that.”
I responded, “Maybe we should bury him in the yard then, next to your pig.”
I thought he might try to hit me, but then he turned and walked away.
I tried to embrace Claire, but she deflected and followed Paul.
They did not join me to bid Daniel farewell, so alone I pushed him out into the rainy sea. The boat kept returning on the strong waves, and it took several tries before the ocean finally took him. There was no sign of the others when I came home, and the storm was in full fury when they finally came downstairs.
“We can’t stay here,” said Claire.
“You’re upset,” I said. “I understand. He was my friend, too.”
She screamed: “He was my husband! You barely knew him.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “Whatever I can do . . . ”
“Just don’t,” she said.
“We’re going to the hut,” said Paul.
“Oh?” I asked. “Should we make that the designated shelter when we can’t stand each other?”
“Just do us a favor, ok?” he said. “Steer clear for a while. We’ll work this out, but we need a little time.”
“It is a small island,” I said. “We will be seeing each other.”
Claire then turned her red and grief-pouched eyes to me. “You,” she said venomously. “You think you’re some kind of god here, and we’re just ruining your little paradise. I know exactly what kind of person you are.”
I wondered, for a cold instant, whether Daniel had lied to me. Whether he had told her.
She half- sneered, as if guessing my thought. “I don’t know you’re name, but I know what you are,” she said. “You’re everything that was wrong with the world.”
They went out into the wind and blowing rain.
I spent the afternoon writhing in torment, almost in physical pain. That these wicked emissaries from a wicked world should come to terrorize me like demons. I who gave up all for the sake of the good! I dropped to my knees and offered my prayer.
Prayer clarifies, as it always does. That evening I would go to them, and make all right. A restoration. The word was very clear in my mind. I considered this paradise around me, the chance I was given to begin again, and these last two castaways from a dead world. The last. There will be no more. Only these two, the last test of my virtue, my last chance.
I took up my staff, and when I reached the little hut, I saw them out front. The storm had blown through and abated. They had made a fire and were roasting something—another animal that they had killed somehow, or maybe just some of the wild potatoes. Two small creatures against the great backdrop of the ocean, the falls, the island.
I laid my staff across my knees and watched and waited for the right moment to come out of the darkness and go to them, to make things right and good again on this, my island.
