I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (29 page)

It got its name from William Bligh, the commanding lieutenant of the HMS
Bounty.
In 1789, Bligh’s crew mutinied after he refused to grant them a return to Tahiti, to the idyllic life (and easy natives) they imagined to be waiting for them there. The mutineers set him adrift in an open boat with a handful of loyal men. Left for dead, Bligh nonetheless managed to navigate
to this island, where he and his crew scrounged food and recuperation. “Restoration Island,” they called it. They found a couple of huts, but no people.

The customer made for the northern tip of its habitable third, where the clearing, beach, and jungle met. Immediately, he tripped over something. He picked himself up and bent near the impediment and realized with a start that it was a goddamned
gravestone,
forty years old and belonging to no one Dave knew. “The Sea is so vast and my ship is so small,” it read. The customer found his glasses nearby, partially eaten, in a roped-off square of scrubgrass that was, he’d learn, an aboriginal mass grave. Such had been Restoration’s local
raison:
The KuukuYa’u and passing sailors considered it a dump.

Now the customer could see that the island was littered with detritus. Lengths of rope, chunks of rotted wood, cashed canisters of natural gas, dead engines and fridges. He kicked aside the rinds of the salamis he’d brought—ravaged in the night—as he walked through the shadow of a derelict sailboat keeled to port. Altogether, there were a dozen boats and skiffs abandoned above the tideline. Out past the breakers: a couple of scuttled trawlers, now artificial reefs. It took the customer a moment to realize what it was that was off—
no seagulls.

A decade ago, this island was kempt, civilized. The grass was mown and the buildings had doors. But now it abided nothing man-made. This disrepair embarrassed Dave. It made it seem as though he, too, was deteriorating. Past retirement age he might be, but he was just
starting
his life. He saw it all so much clearer now.

The tiki bar on the south shore, for instance. Now it had crumbled into the surf. But in 2003, he had used that tiki bar to entertain Fred Turner. Fred
Turner,
the McDonald’s chairman. In the midst of a fishing trip, Fred flew in on a helicopter to see the island and have a beer—and he had such a lovely time that
he came back to camp on Resto with his executives and their families. Fred sat Dave at his right hand during dinners; once, he asked him to give a speech.
Fred’s a hero,
Dave made sure to mention in his address. Fred’s the college dropout who put the Golden Arches in 118 countries, the visionary who thought up the Chicken McNugget and the drive-thru and the whole standardized dining experience.

Oh, Dave hated the product, dearly. But no great man was more forward-thinking than Fred. He got his millions, and then what did he do? He founded the Ronald McDonald House charity. Dave admired Fred’s class of corporate don best of all, the altruistic blokes who make it their business to help even after they’ve gathered their brass. He bet most of them were good people. How else could they have become so successful?

He explained this to his customer as they breakfasted on Cheerios and kiwis. Then Dave took him on a tour of the bush.
Do you know the Google guys?
he asked as they entered the jungle behind the clearing.
What kind of blokes do you reckon they are?

They stopped in Dave’s garden, which stank of wild rosemary. Quassi and Locky rollicked through a sinkhole where yams, gooseberries, and bananas once grew.
I hear their cafeteria gives them the healthy food for free, but you have to pay for the burgers,
he said.
This is the new wave of people, the I.T. blokes. They recognize that we should be better than we are.

Dave did not cultivate this garden. Normally, about a dozen backpackers would arrive throughout the year as part of the Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) program. They’d care for the vegetables, landscape the island, repair Dave’s buildings, cook his meals—all in exchange for room and board on Resto. A fair trade, Dave thought, his only rule being: no camping on the beach, because of Boxhead. Some stayed a week; others, more than a year. Dave fell in love with practically every female WWOOFer who shot through. Some of those
birds were bloody mature! They’d go around topless, they’d gussy up for dinner. But none had come in the last six months.

He led his customer farther up the sloping interior. He scrambled over fallen trees, naked except for board shorts, his wild white hair and cloudy beard jouncing with the effort.
You can massage your internal organs through your feet,
Dave advised.
Tremendously important.
His was a vigorous physicality, the kind often found in sinewy men of a certain age and outlook.

Dave had learned the out-of-doors from his father. Before sending him off to elite boarding schools, Dave’s old man was always taking him camping, fishing, even though he was an esteemed attorney with his own busy firm in Sydney. Dave cherished the stories he heard family friends tell about how his father steered clients away from the courts, tried to get them to settle things bloke to bloke. Saved them a load of codswallop, he did.

He’d been this big bloody Irishman, his old man. A stereotypical one of theirs, you might say—touchy paterfamilias who was keen on things like driving the family to Sunday Mass while full as a boot. Dave took up the practice himself when in his teens; the whole clan’d have a laugh when he hiccupped while breaking a pound note in the collection plate.

He hadn’t been able to share those kinds of moments with his own son.
You know, my Kye, he’s in his Jesus phase now,
Dave said, pulling aside creeping vines.
He was an OK bloke, that Jesus. Also a healer.
A teen now, Kye rarely visited the island. But he’ll be back in his twenties, Dave thought. When he wants to bring out his own sheila.

Otherwise, Dave would never force the island on him. That’d push Kye away, just as
his
father had pushed him away from law school. Lately, Dave had begun to see just how profoundly disappointing that must’ve been for his dad, to have neither Dave nor his rellies take up the firm. It was like him
here. If your children don’t come to your island, you start to wonder: What’s this for, then? His eldest, Sam, turned down his offer to have her wedding out here. She had never even come for a lob. If Kye said no, well, he reckoned he’d just have to find someone outside the company, as it were.

Erika wasn’t an option, of course, which was a shame because she was the one who visited most. Dave bloody fucking missed her. He figured that she killed herself because she had all these complications in her life. It right pissed him off. First of all, she was a gay lady. And trying to live as a gay lady even today in this society ain’t no picture painting. Second, she could drink too much. Third, she had some psychological problems, the kind you need lithium for and never used to hear about.

Dave blamed the culture. We’ve been mollycoddled. Bit by bit, we’ve become marshmallows. But he also blamed himself. At least a little. Because of the separation and all that.

I’m from the wrong country, mate,
Dave said, looking over his shoulder as his customer minced over a crevice.
Australians don’t take risks like Americans. We’re all a bunch of bloody soft cocks. The average ones whinge and moan. Scared of their potential, I reckon.

After another half hour of tramping, they emerged onto a promontory. Dave jogged in place atop a sharp rock. The water far below him was the bluish slate of fancy cats.
This island’s healed me,
he said.
And I can see how it could help others in a big sense.
A salesman at heart, Dave rarely spoke without making and sustaining eye contact. His own were a shallow aqua, and they seemed almost to shimmer with refracted light whenever he talked business.
I don’t know what it is,
he said.
I don’t pretend to understand it. But I feel energy here.

He’d felt it the moment he walked ashore. It was as though he’d been lost in the bush and finally heard his
Cooee!
call.
This
was good fortune.
This
was the genuine article. None of that other dribbleshit, the God bothering and the money chasing.
Here, he had recovered his lost unity, his wholeness and harmony. Why couldn’t the power of this place be used to restore others?

Our most enduring love story, if we go by the numbers, is man + island. We in the West adore us a maroon’s tale,
Robinson Crusoe
being of course the urtext. Since its publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s novel about an enterprising castaway and his courtship of solitude has produced about two hundred English and six hundred foreign-language editions. To say nothing of the adaptations, imitations, and homages it continues to inspire.

Crusoe himself was based on the true-life account of a Scottish sailor, yes. Maybe. No one’s sure to what extent. Anyhow, over the centuries, Crusoe’s place in our cultural consciousness has continued to shift. We’ve sort of willed ourselves into forgetting that he’s a character rendered whole by an author. He has come now to exist in a kind of limbo: we don’t believe he was a historical person—but we don’t believe he’s entirely fictional, either.

One thing he was, though, was our first realistic portrayal of the radical individualist. In Defoe’s story, Crusoe gets shipwrecked on a desert island with only a pocketknife and a little tobacco in his pipe. Things look grim until he pulls himself together and works to make a heaven of this hell. Via rational thought and elbow grease, Crusoe discovers that his unfathomable depths contain: an architect, an astronomer, a baker, a carpenter, a potter, a farmer, a tailor, and an umbrella maker. He builds a fenced-in redoubt, plants crops and a privacy hedge. He
glazes pots, bakes bread, stitches clothes from animal skins. He wrights a ship with a sail and a parasol. And, most incessantly, he accounts for and makes use of every single thing he comes across, people included.

Robinson Crusoe values people not as human beings, but as objects that might be of some utility to him now or down the line. For example, the Moorish boy who helps him escape from a pre-island bit of slavery? Crusoe turns around and sells
him
into slavery. He comes to regret the sale, but only because it would’ve been nice to have an extra set of hands around. (“Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the long-boat with shoulder-of-mutton sail …”) The first word he teaches to Friday, the native companion he recruits? “Master.”

Crusoe is free and accountable to no one, preferring his hard new liberty to the easy yoke of society. He claims to find God on the island—but, just in case, he takes care to learn how to wrest his own good from himself. “I was lord of the whole manor,” he says, “or if I pleased I could call my self king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals; I had no competitor.” Depending on your mien, that might sound like paradise. Or, on the other hand, the wet-dream somniloquy of a tyrant or monopolist.

Regardless, Robinson Crusoe remains one of our most influential dead white men. For better and for worse. As James Joyce said of him, “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.” He’s who’s behind the Boy Scouts, libertarianism, and three hundred years’ worth of solitary, self-reliant heroes. He was wise to our condition, this
isolato,
and the story he invented for himself out of his freedom still reads like a survival guide, a crash course in modern existence.

My dream is to create a healing center here,
Dave said to his customer as he turned the dinghy up a muddy creek.
For corporate people. The time-poor; not the mob.
He angled the motor out of the shallow water, and the two of them slid underneath an arch of mangroves threaded together like prayerful hands.
I think the mob’s just looking for a quick fix. Do
you
think those people are equipped to heal themselves?

A wince rippled across the customer’s face. He threw out a line weighted with wire leader and a realistic six-inch lure, holding it loosely in his right hand while it trailed behind the boat. Dave went on:
It all starts with the individual, you see. People need to restore themselves. But they need to have the infrastructure to do so. That’s where I come in. I’ll have ’em come here, and then I’ll give ’em an umbrella and an esky of champagne before buggering off. A club atmosphere, hey? Have the Google blokes visit. I’m thinking four thousand
—
Australian—per day.

Dave made little slashing gestures over the jungle to show his customer where he intended to level trails for the elderly and less-abled.
This’ll be private, word-of-mouth,
he said.
Right now I’m building a network of therapists and wellness birds who’ll refer patients. A nice way to cop a flow.
Here, a funicular would run. There, a meditation pavilion. Up higher: wind turbines. Dave pointed out six tree house units that only he could see.
It’ll be on a ninety-nine-year sublease, with some of the KuukuYa’u as employees,
he said.
That’s what the guests’ll want, anyway. After ninety-nine years, they should be ready to take over.

The wind blew in regular glugs, as if somewhere someone had unbunged the day.
I just need five hundred thousand dollars to deal myself back into the game. Shit, I used to pump that in a fucking day, mate.

The customer sat there nodding and emoting, and puppeteering the fishing line so that it kept clear of mangrove roots. But really, he was considering how, the week before he left for Resto, he went five consecutive days without talking to another human being. Times like that, he could get to feeling like he was one of those mystery boxes at the science museum. The ones you stick your blind hand into and wonder, nervously, What’s in here—a luxurious pelt? A motherloving
scorpion
? Except even he wasn’t sure what was in his box; he couldn’t or wouldn’t feel around. Much of what he knew about himself, he knew from watching others reach in, which happened rarely. When it did, when he let them, he saw their faces go from excited, to curious, to distressed, to straight-up repulsed. Wasn’t a turtle shell in there, apparently.