Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (52 page)

Otherwise, you can probably see how it is from wherever you are. Too many for bridge, too few for football, and not much I care to say about any of them except Ging. Little boy and fat man; Mr. Magoo. The old dame with the empty spaces in her eyes that youth and then morphine once filled in, and a three-toed sloth in search of a mirror. It all got boring pretty fast.

If we were a medieval morality play, our names would be Youth, Clumsiness, Wealth, Cowardice, Hubba-Hubba, and Self-Love. Plus I, Mary-Ann, who am or may be all these things and more and yet am still and forever virgin; and still waiting, in my unfailingly pleasant, polite and cheerful way, to find myself pregnant with Jesus.

As I believe I have noted, current opportunities for this event to get rolling would appear to be nil. But to tell the truth, I’m not even sure we’re alone now, not that the evidence is any great cause for huzzahs and champagne. One day not long ago, under ten years I would guess, I went out walking far from our camp, and saw something I thought was disgusting: a pig’s head on a stick.

I don’t believe that any of the men would have done that, although I can’t be sure and don’t really give a damn that I’m not. Nor do I see how any animals could, not even monkeys with their reversible thumbs and undoubted talent for mimicry. In any case, I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen, even Ginger. To be honest, things are plenty bad enough.

The men, of course, still have their plans and projects, and getting the next one settled can keep them contentedly arguing and bellowing for
hours, down at their end of the camp. Then, with monotonous regularity, as I roll my eyes and she her eyelashes, Ging and I will have to overhear the following conversation, reprised now for decades with only modest variations:

Hitching up his pants and brushing the sand off them, the fat one claps his hands together and says, “Okay, men! Let’s
gol”

“Oh, no—ljust remembered,” the sloth will moan. “We can’t.” “Why on earth not?” says Magoo, in his unfailingly puzzled voice. Pulling off his cap, the fat one dashes it to the ground, or beach. “Because God damn it, as usual, we’re waiting for-”

That’s when he shows up, shuffling hurriedly along the beach toward them in his sneakers and the red sweater that he always wears now, with that hurt and jumpy look in his eyes. Sometimes, as he shambles past our fire, he glances guiltily over at the two of us, as if hoping that he’ll get invited to stop at our end of the camp for once, to settle down among the crabs and listen to my old friend spin her fabulous philosophy and her tales of brave Ulyssia, which is what Ging calls Amelia Earhart—our possible neighbor in this archipelago; or else to wander off hand in hand with I, Mary-Ann, to go look at the mountains for a while. But a yell comes from the men, and he trots on. Without knowing why, although God knows I am used to that by now, I sometimes blink to stop myself from picturing a tiny Stars and Stripes in his fist; and have to blink auditorily as well, since I could swear that I’ve just heard him call, in piping French,
“Oui, Papa, j’arrive.”

When night comes and the sky unveils its stars, and our two campfires wink in the dark like the widely spaced headlights of a gigantic, stationary car, I don’t know or care what the men talk about at their end. But every so often, Ging and I will reminisce about the old days, and try to unriddle the nature of what, taking my cue from her, I have begun to call
our
century—the one whose refuge, incarnation or both my friend believes we were. On occasion, tottering vaguely over to our campfire from the one she normally prefers, either although or because they pay her scant attention there, the old dame with the empty spaces in her eyes that youth and then morphine once filled in will let drop some cryptic,
addled, sad remarks, apparently unsure of what if anything they mean, but always about something she lost; sometimes it’s a manuscript, and sometimes a bouquet.

Once she’s gone away again, and I, Mary-Ann, stare at the embers I’ll have to kick out in a minute, I wonder if any of us—even Ginger—ever understood what it was all about before we washed up here. As I think back on it, what I come back to most is how often we were dimly surrounded by all sorts of people struggling for more of one or another kind of freedom, using strange or nonexistent weapons and sometimes not even able to name a goal that would have frightened them if they had. But even when they couldn’t name it, they insisted on defining its meaning for themselves; and maybe they have named it now, too.

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”