I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (28 page)

Didi was the one person in whom Dad had confided his
other
boyhood dream—that of becoming a song-and-dance man. He used to ride his bike over to Didi’s place to sing and bake cookies. “She was a little weird. A little lonely. I had to take the back way to see her,” he has said, as always talking about or asking after other people’s problems when, really, he means his own.

Papa Lou broke the news this way: “Your brother’s not coming home. He’s dead.” Kent was five. One year younger than Dad. The two of them had shared a bed. “They murdered him,” is how Dad puts it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

DAY 1

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR

And when Dave swung the dinghy wide around the cape, his customer at last caught sight of the island, a shark’s tooth of sand and grass jutting from a small mountain of impenetrable bush.
Heaven!
Dave said to himself.

Heavy seas shouldered the tin boat sideways.
Up front, mate!
Dave shouted over the bee-loud motor. His customer clambered forward and sat himself backward on the bow, twisting at the waist to keep his eyes on the islet. The evening sky behind it was striped orange to purple.

The customer was thinking about how a guy can’t get himself shipwrecked anymore. Can’t one day discover that his storm-tossed ass has been beached upon a refuge, where he’s free to wile away life, alone with the Alone. It’s impossible now. All the deserted but potentially habitable islands are privately owned, or secret naval bases, or satellite tracking stations. Among other reasons.

Head on a swivel! Crocs!
Dave sang out, his hair a white pennant behind him. Soon to be seventy, Dave Glasheen was the
smooth sienna of well-oiled and -kept things. He had been living on this outlying island for more than fifteen years.
We wouldn’t want to swim this at night, no we wouldn’t,
he said. The water leaking into the bow rose above his customer’s ankles.

Hours earlier, Dave had picked him up from a World War II–era airstrip many miles distant in the mainland’s thick jungle. This intra-Australian airfare, as well as all sea transport, had been included in the $3,100 Dave charged for his two-week desert-island experience. The customer had wired the money directly into Dave’s bank account, as instructed. Also as instructed, he’d brought salamis, two loaves of good bread, coffee, and little else.

This was like a vacation but not. The impulse was the same, maybe. Long had the customer been shopping around for a space that was remote from the world. A spot where, he hoped, everything had been got rid of except for whatever couldn’t be done without. What the smart set’s always wanted from their getaways.

The customer had inquired after fire towers and bathyspheres, deep caves and sensory-deprivation chambers. Idaho. The Arctic. He even looked into elective lobotomies and self-trepanation, just to see. Then—of
course.
The desert island came to him one winter Saturday. He had been in the bathtub, apocalyptically hung over. He was paddling warm water against his face and wondering,
Just what the fuck is it I’m doing here?

The question was not new. It was what his mind reset to whenever he stilled himself, stopped diverting. For instance, he would close the browser on other people’s Twitter feeds and Instagrams, finally put down the book, or, yes, wake up cottonmouthed in a spinning chamber of shame—and then it would begin to materialize:
WTF, man?
The question wavered in his mind’s eye before tightening into painful clarity, as vision tends to do after hard blows to the head.

The truth was that most things for him had turned into giant, squawking question marks. He was living far from home in an unfashionable part of New York City, uninsured and friendless (but for the roaches). He was a relatively young man, yet even a young man’s bliss had not been his. He’d loved little but had his fill of a hell of a lot. Had indulged himself, in fact, to the point where he made himself sick. Now he hid from the everyday melee of competing agents and material forces whenever he wasn’t scheduled to work. Should he have to take the subway somewhere, he found himself blinking back tears. What attempts he made at meeting new people were prewritten and floated into online ether, like bottled messages. He almost
wished
he’d knocked somebody up.

Instead, he decided to venture to a desert island off the edge of northeastern Australia. It was at least the first step, he figured. If a boat is foundering, you dry-dock it for repairs. If you suspect your heart has a hole in it—take yourself out of the world.

While Dave anchored his dinghy in the wave wash, the customer waded ashore, where he was immediately leapt upon by two dogs, Quasimodo and Locky. Quassi was caramel-colored and hulking, part dingo but mostly pit bull. Down his trunkish right foreleg was a rune of a scar tissue like lightning along an elm—at night, Quassi guarded the island against saltwater crocodiles. Locky was a spry dun mutt, three months new to the place. He had belonged to Dave’s youngest daughter, but he wound up here after she killed herself.

Clouds had gathered, and all four walked the path to Dave’s shanty manor as hot rain began to fall. His place was just as the
customer had imagined: tentatively walled, cantilevered under scabby sheet metal, and cozy with things scavenged. There were glass jars of all hues; rough furniture and rusted pots; canned goods, batteries, and salt-curled paperbacks; skeletons and snakeskins in overhanging netting; buckets under every leak; and blades, nippers, pliers, tweezers, scrapers, wrenches, wedges—too many tools to name. The lot of it reminded the customer of how a nonnative speaker will hoard nouns while trying to recall the verb that animates them.

He had dreamed of such a place since early childhood, when he devoured any and all books about a man improvising survival from the limited resources at hand:
Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Cay, Lord of the Flies, The Mysterious Island, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet. The Boxcar Children,
even. He’d take them to the end of his street, where he had cleared his own hutch in a dark thicket of needle palms. When things went on at home that he didn’t want to be around, he crawled into this sanctuary and read, the wind fanning him with fronds.

Dave’s own clean-swept main area included a gas-powered freezer, an antenna for solar-powered phone and Internet, and an L-shaped desk, at the front of which sat an eyeless woman, unpolitely, her sundress canopied by her knees.
My girlfriend, Miranda,
Dave said, winking, patting the mannequin’s red hair. He showed off the adjoining patio, which sheltered a full-size mattress looking out on the sea. He made it abundantly clear that as near a man could find himself to self-sufficiency, to a world of his own making—here he was.

This thrilled his customer. This was what he came for. He felt in his bones that there was such a thing as Real Life; it was just—not only could he not get to its entrance, he couldn’t even
see
it, on account of the ocean of assholes thronging the door.

Thus did he not think twice when Dave offered him several already opened bottles of home-brewed beer. He accepted them
and joined his host at a driftwood table in the outdoor kitchen, intent on what he had to tell him.

Dave first set foot on the island in November 1993, having been wrecked financially six years earlier by the Australian securities crash. A marketer by trade, he’d tried to dabble in mineral exploration in Papua New Guinea. He lost all of his wealth, about ten million dollars, when his private venture went tits up. He thought the episode absurd—on paper he’s worth big bickies, then suddenly he’s not. But getting whacked was also the best thing that ever happened to him. A great release, it was.

He’d been a corporate bloke. He’d consulted on marketing strategies for British Tobacco, for the sport of cricket and the drink of milk. He’d been in the ice-cream game; he sold Drumsticks to Australia but failed to get TCBY into Asia. He foresaw the bottled-water craze and helped reinvent the juice box. Packaging was a very real concern for him.

Until his house was foreclosed upon, he’d lived in the most exclusive beachside neighborhood in Sydney. He’d owned two yachts,
Black Erik
and
Erik the Red,
the latter the namesake of his newly late daughter, poor ginger Erika. He adored everything about skiing, especially the exclusive lodges at his favorite American slopes. (He expected to need his skis again soon and so kept them on the island.) He came to despise banks, big financial institutions—any of the parties he deemed responsible for making him feel right minuscule and tossed about for the first time. Wasn’t his fault the market crashed, he knew. Prior to the money poofing, he and his family had never rented a thing in their lives.

Naturally, the crash led to their having some pretty heavy ding-dongs, but Dave and his wife never formally divorced. Rather, he took up with a new woman, a white Zimbabwean named Denise. Dave talked her into changing her name to Denika—she ran a small business that sold jerky made from
African game, and Dave explained to her that no one wanted to buy
Denise
’s African jerky. After that, he helped her manage a spa—managed the bloody thing himself—until one day she decided she wanted to get away. An
island,
she told him in bed, in a fit of postcoital quixotism.
Our own.
So, Dave called up a friend in real estate and said,
I got this new bird, and I need an island.

The asking price for Restoration Island was $1.2 million. Unable to buy it outright, Dave and two partners subleased the habitable third of the island from a company that owned its rights until 2039. The agreement was contingent upon Dave and his partners developing an eco-resort worth at least two hundred thousand dollars, and doing so within five years. They got the requisite permits; they drew up plans for a boutique hotel. Then the KuukuYa’u people of nearby Lockhart River, rights holders of the other two-thirds of the island, launched a title claim against them.

Though nothing came of the aboriginals’ claim, Dave learned that he couldn’t just waltz into blackfella country and have the run of the place. The KuukuYa’u hated him, fiercely, but still he moved onto Restoration and began readying it for development. Once he’d gotten set up, Denika visited for a rip-roaring couple of weeks. Certainly no family planning going on then! They conceived a son, Kye, who would spend six of his earliest months on the island. Talk about a Garden of Eden. It was a fantastic time. But Denika quickly tired of island life. Couldn’t hack it, if Dave was being perfectly honest. It got rather nasty. She demanded Dave drive her off the island but never asked him to join her. She and Kye just piked out of his world.

Alone thereafter, Dave’s days turned into weeks into years into decades. Occasionally, he left the island to visit Lockhart River; once a year, he went to buy supplies in faraway Cairns.
Development never progressed, and the KuukuYa’u came to accept the presence of this strange white man.

The lease-holding company wanted him gone, however; they had buyers lined up but couldn’t sell their third until Restoration was uninhabited. The police wouldn’t intervene because Dave’s breach of contract was a civil matter. The resultant litigation went all the way to the Supreme Court of Queensland, where Dave, virtually penniless, represented himself. He spun a one-day hearing into six by presenting strange and grammatically incorrect evidence to a justice who ultimately ruled that he had “wrongly deprived the plaintiff of its asset for over a decade” while having “enjoyed its benefits.”

Dave could be put off the island with five minutes’ notice. He was at the enforced end of his marooning.

I need a white knight to kick in, you see,
he told his customer as they sat under an LED lantern.
Just a little seed money. Five hundred thousand. What’s that, relatively? Bugger-all. A very small amount of help, so I can buy out the majority shareholder.

Dave got up and put a pot of fresh crabs on the boil. The customer had known Dave was in some legal trouble, but to hear that the man who had finally found a place worth mooring after floating through limitless possibility—to hear that he was getting
evicted
—this disheartened him to no end. Where did a guy go if mooks in suits could reach you here?

After dinner, Dave escorted his customer a few hundred yards into the blackness, to a vaulted fiberglass hut. Inside was an undulating tile floor, two rusted bed frames topped with foam rubber, and a plastic toilet that flushed rainwater. Green lizards scampered along all surfaces, scooping mouthfuls of translucent ants as if playing jacks with their tongues. The structure was wide open at its front; from the outside, it resembled nothing so much as a shell abandoned by a giant hermit crab.

Got nothing poisonous, mate, don’t worry,
Dave lied, at this time
choosing not to mention his first dog, Kato, whom he found dead from a spider bite one morning at the foot of his mattress.

Dave
did
warn about Boxhead, however, a crocodile the size of a Buick Skylark that haunted the island. He warned that Boxhead had been stabbed once by a KuukuYa’u hunter and so hated mankind with the intensity of a thousand suns. Then he said,
G’night!

The wind had picked up by several dozen knots, occasionally lashing rain. It seized trees with ecstatic fury and lifted boards away from their nails, honkingly. The customer sought out Quassi and insisted he join him in the twin bed. His heart fluttered so fast that, like a propeller up to speed, it seemed to be going in two directions at once.

Dawn broke, and the customer reached for his glasses, which were gone. He bungled out onto what appeared to be a large clearing sandwiched between beach and mountainous jungle. It was covered in itchy grass and cocos palms.

Restoration Island is a speck, a seventh of a square mile sitting only a few hundred yards offshore of Cape York Peninsula. But the island is far removed, closer to Papua New Guinea than it is to any Australian city.