The Isle of the Dead

I built huts along the shore in the style of the Sea Indians who used to populate the rocky beaches along the far northern edges of the United States. Although my island is a south seas affair with sand like fine powder, and my huts are built of palm fronds.

If you must know, I am Swiss and my name is Erik, pronounced for reasons unknown to me, Irike. I am half Italian, although that half only shines through on moments when I have managed to set aside my longing -- my all too Germanic longing -- as I contemplate the blessedness of the blind.

My mother was a beautiful little person, nearly what you would call a midget. Although her condition left her congenitally hairless, she had the finest features I have ever seen. Even as a boy I was haunted by her beauty, a woman among women; as a young man I could not find a rival in those that courted me for my birdlike bones, my shock of slick, black hair and pigeon-toed feet.

Soon after coming of age, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions I resolved to retreat from the world of reproduction into the study of anthropology. Since a child, I had always been fascinated by Indians, the huts, the archery, the smoke signals. I found a kindred spirit in Doctor Lars Meerschaum at the University of Bern, who aside from being faculty, was also a practicing acupuncturist and lobbied against the practice of dentistry on the young or infirm.

***

"It's been done. Done, done done," said Doctor Meerschaum in his casual Dutch way, as if the matter was as much settled as the turning of the tide. "But, now, no, well, it probably wouldn't interest you..."

"What wouldn't interest me, Dr. Meerschaum? Please let me know because I am at a total loss as to what my dissertation topic will be."

We sat on one of the old stone benches lining the shady walk which led from the anthropology building to the fish pond. I was much younger then. In my memories, my youthful face collided at the end of my nose creating a sharp tip. I must have faced the world like a bloodied dagger, although I was as innocent and tearfull as a newborn.

"Well, I was going to suggest that you could research the peculiar beach huts of the Sea Indians of the Northern Coasts," Meerschaum added, his Dutch lilt making this suggestion seem like nothing at all.

I didn't spare two seconds before blurting, "But, this is just perfect, don't you see? This is just perfect, Dr. Meershchaum! Dr. Meerschaum! look at how the setting sun reflects off of the mirrored skylights of the arboretum!"

And then we spent the remains of that same refracted glare in heated conversation.

***

Of course I had heard of the Sea Indians before: the coastal tribes dwelling along the bleak northwestern stretches of the American wilderness. Backwards American policies have since forced this once proud people into a situation of total dependency on revenue secured from gambling and the sale of fire crackers.

Indeed, the fire crackers and their usage are the hardest for a man, a swiss man like myself, to understand. Patriotism to us is a foreign concept, or else it is one so inbred into us, it is like an observation. Yes, we are Swiss, what of it? I have my knife, my watch, my folk costume for special occassions, and that is all.

In my mind, America is a nation of constant explosions: a stick of dynamite ignited to mark the hour, the passing of the president in his long, black limousine down the street through the gates of the white house; screeching, smoking bombs handed out to children dressed in costumes.

It is a sad irony that the once proud race of hunter gatherers has become peddlers of the ugliest American things.

***

After my topic was resolved, time seemed to excellerate. The years went by in peaceful study. I purchased a pair of spectacles inset with the glass of a welder's fire mask to keep the outside world a murky haze. As a result, I achieved nocturnal vision which I put to use in the Swiss Mountain Rescue Squadron which was periodically called out into the foot hills around the Eiger to search for lost tourists, usually Italians. And always, we found them somewhere in their inconvenient clothing, eating or drinking something, some orange Fanta perhaps, wildly gesticulating at the setting sun as if the sun itself had led them astray.

On moments like these, the Italians standing, hands outstretched like angry limurs toward the incomprehensible golden orb, wild chimp voices prattling, I was not proud of my heritage.

Yet, despite my self-loathing condition of half-Latinate celibacy, I had already managed to encrust myself in a shell of knowledge which, as a larval creature engorges itself on its own residual discharge in order to nourish itself into a state of transformation, so I consumed and disgorged, covering the world in an informational film which had its own transformative purposes.

As the world became a reflection of my own studies, the light hurt less. The past did not jab at me like a little black boxer from New Orleans. Everything in my life revolved around the Sea Indians and their little twig huts, called Lika, built along the shores of the State of Washington which administratively is in no way related to the capital of Washington, representing instead a redoubling of the pathological homage to the founding Indian killer.

Much like swallows, the Indians wove their huts using a basic, spiral pattern, the spiral originating at the top and descending the walls of the ovular mound like the hair of a little boy tousled by a breeze. And in his hut, the Indian fisher catcher slept between his jaunts to the inlet where, shrieking in the dim, grey light, he snagged the salmon as they tried to move inland.

I created a mild sensation when, one day, I decided to erect a Lika in the middle of our beloved quad on the grassy field usually reserved for young lovers miraculously drawn to each other's bodies, possessing a desire as cosmically mutual as two planets entwined within a singular gravity.

And there I was, sitting in my Lika. It began to rain, but I was prepared with a thermos full of hot tea and a Calzone. I must say, even through my welders glasses I saw the people turn their heads and gawk at me as they passed. Finally one of these gawkers stopped and stared, raised a hand in greeting or warning and froze. I blinked. It was as if the man had always been there, a stone sentinel placed at random to remind people of a lurking hazard. I couldn't make him out until I realized who it was.

It was Doctor Meerschaum. I could tell for his broad shoulders and overly long limbs characteristic of people from excessively flat areas. In an instant, I realized that his attention was exactly what I longed for, although instead of acknowledging his greeting I turned my head as if I had not seen him and needed to attend to some passing thought. I looked off toward Wexler's Towers for a long time until I was sure he had gone.

***

And so, in study and in tragedy, my 33rd birthday came and went, and in the blink of an eye everything changed. But no event in life is so bleak as to entirely dominate the past with its own insatiable irrevocability, and so before I recount the tragedy, let me tell you about what happened along the road to rupture.

At some point between 25 and 32, I discovered that I wanted to make vinegar a lifelong passion. Ah! Vinegar, the brother of wine, a little wilder, invested with the brashness of a man who stays out all night, but as a garnish deceptively healthful and risk free. I added to my vinegar cellar gradually. Well, it wasn't a seller: more of an area in the upper part of my closet.

I discovered that a masturbation cycle of once every three days worked.

Like a never ending story written by some maniac, my dissertation grew longer and longer until it assumed the form of one of those eccentric things produced once every 50 years by friendless, Austrian janitors and salesmen who are constantly on the go but who nevertheless have the chance to amass gigantic balls of lint, yarn, or gum gathered at random from different locations across Europe.

My mother and father divorced, my mother marrying a man half her edge once formally reprimanded by the Geneva authorities for impregnating a 13-year-old Albanian prostitute. His name was Wendell Crappus and he was the partial owner of a chain of sex shops in Bavaria.

While I did not detest Crappus's company per se, although for some reason his face reminded me of axle grease, I could not stomach he and mother together. On those initial occasions when I did join them on one of their walks around Lake Geneva, the Bodensee, the Matterhorn (they enjoyed and were part of an international club of circumnavigators), something in me came to the forefront, a deeply buried homicidal impulse, a secret wish to rend human limbs and rip human flesh.

But while I did not act upon my base urges, another better man did. It was as if my secret thoughts had evaporated, exiting my left nostrel and, having assumed a gasseus form, saught another proximal host. On that fateful day in the spring of 1986, professor Meerschaumm removed his prized arrowac spear from its place above his office door and, in nothing but an orange sheet wrapped around his waste, ran amok on campus eventually hurling his artifact into the buttocks of a young, chemistry student where it lodged in the bone.

***

The institutionalization of Doctor Meerschaum left me disconsolate. My dissertation was a 3226 page mess. Without Doctor Meerschaum to guide me by the becon of his own unshakable Dutch certainity, I was lost. All of a sudden, I found myself the age of Jesus Christus, a deity in which I did not believe but respected as one cannot help but pay heed to a siren in the night. I took refuge in my mountain rescue missions. My vision had become so acute, I became Night Leader, guiding missions by the moonlight, traversing glaciers, scrambling through shale along the rims of massive canyons. And so it was, I led that fateful night mission down into the gully where I found Franciska alone, bathed in the moonlight as if swimming in a pool of desire.

I thought: only a moment like this could possibly wrench me from my fanatic celibacy.

The lost Italian was bold. She lay upon the mossy earth, her legs spread, her head propped upon what appeared to be a drained 2-liter bottle of orange Fanta. Her hair as dark as Erebus flowed down to grace her carmel shoulders. She had long, slender legs, her feet encased by impractical high-healed boots typical of Italian women in the mountains.

She lifted her legs higher and higher until until she revealed her vageoplectic occulus. Like a sleep walker I fell into her again and again. I was consumed by her. Engulfed. The years of sorrow suddenly dropped away as if severed by an invisible scalpul. I lay my head upon her thigh. For one instant the moment of inception when soul binds with fate and the world is rent from its alignment returned to me. It was as if I had come full circile and had returned to the beginning.

But when we came out of the mountains, the Italians had already begun to angrily gesticulate as if they had forgotten the fault was theirs alone. When we departed, Franceska ignored my lude gaze and clung to a man's hairy arm.

***

The experience with the Italian woman, who in my fantasies I called Franceska, or Sophia or Theresa, or Lucia, had shattered my calm. Already bruised from the loss of Dr. Meershaum, now I could not study whatsoever. I suddenly felt as if I had wasted my entire life researching the esoteric architecture of the veins layering my own brain. I felt like I had hidden away in this research from my true self, as if once, long ago, I had ignored the middle road and had made a choice to be destroyed one way, the softer way, rather than to have my guts rent from me by the vulturous beak of beauty as is the natural fate of all men.

And now, I had felt beauty's bite, and now I wanted no more of either option, and I was too old to be saved.

***

I traveled by jet to Moscow. From Moscow to Beijing. From Beijing to Tokyo. From Tokyo to Auckland, and from Auckland to the Solomon Islands where the women were as black as coal, their doubtless lithe bodies lost to my tangled, burnt vision veiled behind my welder's lenses.

And then, from the Solomon Islands, I swam. An American named Dave advised me not to. It was as if he could sense in me the impulse as we sat in the rundown hotel bar sipping water so heavily aerated it cut our throats. He had seen the urge before; in himself.

"Now, I know you're thinking about it, but don't do it!" He said before stumping back up stairs. It was then that I noticed he had an artificial leg.

To this day, I do not understand how he knew.

***

From the Solomons I swam to an island called Pete's Skag. From Pete's Skag, I swam farther north to an island my waterproof map called Sputum. My object was Sputum's little neighbor: a nameless hunk of sand and stone, which, after several weeks, I began to think of as the Isle of Meerschaum, or Indian Beach, or Nothingness or any number of names vacillating from the commemorative to the bleak.

Luckily, large ugly birds nested on the north shore providing an ample supply of eggs I harvested daily. These, the mangoes and the slow moving crabs which could not keep pace with the outgoing tide, were the simple fair of my hermitage.

As a hobby, I began to construct Lika out of palm fronds: strange ironic, tropical Lika. The beach became besotted with my creations, the design of which it occurred to me I could market to north Germans hungry for novel, thatched structures to climb into and copulate.

I garnered a reputation: the Swiss hermit who builds the beach huts, although the visitors, mainly lone bearded white men in kayaks, kept their distance. I lived on the Isle of the Dead for 25 years, and everything that came before grew infinitely less.

***

When I myself was no longer young, my mother came to visit me. By now she was an old woman, but aside from her stooped posture and the slight peach fuzz which had begun to grow on her face, her shoulders, the tops of her feet, she appeared little more than 7.

"Irike," she said. "What happened to you. I mean, this is ridiculous. We knew you were here, but we imagined you living in some kind of cabana type situation, apart from the others but within reach, as is your way. But this, this, Irike, is just unnatural," she paused, closing her eyes, inhaling deeply the sea air through her miniscule nose. "Oh, Irike. I have always had a deep capacity for enjoyment, but you. It is as if you turn everything, even this beautiful natural panorama, into an expression of idiocy."

After we circumnavigated the island together, she remounted her green canoe piloted by a Polynesian. Before vanishing around the bend, the Polynesian turned, his face twisted with rage, silently mouthing curses. I immediately understood the source of his impotent wrath and wished I could gift him back all his people's stolen years.