The High Places: Stories

Good News for Modern Man

When I began my study of the colossal squid, I still believed in God. The squid seemed to me then, in those God days, to be the secretly swimming proof of a vast maker who had bestowed intelligence — surprisingly, here and there — on both man and mollusc. I’ve discussed this with Charles Darwin, who visits me most days, always a little out of breath. His cheeks are red, his hair white. He looks nothing like a ghost. He puts his feet up on the rocks and gazes out over this small corner of the Pacific, calm at sundown and partially obscured by a mosquito haze. We sit above the tree line and consider the movements of the colossal squid in her bay below. She moves this way and that; she floats and billows in the tide. She reminds me of my mother’s underwear soaking in a holiday basin. Her official name, her name in polite company, is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. We’ve named her Mabel and together we plan to free her.

It’s no easy thing, this freeing of a colossal squid. It was difficult enough to imprison her in the first place. There is the issue of her size.

‘A colossal squid,’ I tell Darwin, ‘makes a giant squid look like a bath toy.’

He agrees with me, although as far as I know he has never seen either a bath toy or a giant squid. He remains surprisingly unexcited by my account of Mabel’s capture: the months-long hunt with smaller squid for bait, the boredom and fussy seasickness, Mabel emerging from the sea with her hood pink in the sudden sun. She flailed at the surface, she swam and sounded, smelling as much like the sea as anything I have ever smelled. But we hooked her, and we panicked her, and she raced ahead of us, right into this bay, through a narrow channel that we were able to block. And now she spends her days here, rotating among her many arms, and I spend my days watching her. They’re going to build her a facility, but first there’s money to raise and laws to change. For now it’s just the two of us — and Darwin.

Darwin first appeared on my 402nd day on the island. We often argue, but in a neutral, brotherly sort of way, and I appreciate his company. The sun sinks into the sea, but we also see it rise from the sea. This makes the world seem very small, even though we’re two hours from any town. There’s a Catholic school higher up the mountain and we see the girls walk down to the water and back up again. I hear their singing in the early morning and it surprises me; at sundown it makes me sad. Late in the afternoons they swim in the white sea — far out into the lagoon, where I often see bullet-shaped sharks. Darwin and I take turns peering through my binoculars. It’s an innocent and companionable lechery. Although he’s a ghost, he leaves sweat around the eyepieces.

I’ve been thinking for some time of taking one of the monthly supply boats back to New Zealand, then a plane home. At home the rain will be cold, pigeons will grow fat, there will be supermarkets. I’ve refused replacements and talked up the malarial solitude and now no one will come, not even over-eager graduate students with an itching for the Pacific. But this is my 498th day on the island, and lately I’m troubled by headaches and abrupt changes in temperature. There’s something feverish about this air. It’s not only the headaches, although they’re bad enough; my major symptom is a kind of vertigo, a frequent and sudden awareness that the universe is expanding out from me. This feeling begins with my feet, as if the ground — the planet — the galaxy — has suddenly dropped away from them and I’m floating untethered in space, only space doesn’t exist, and neither does my body. I can only describe the sensation as the suspension of nothing in nothing. But I look down and there are my feet, dirt-brown, and there are Darwin’s, sensibly shod. Below our feet swims Mabel. It’s only while watching Mabel that I feel tied to the earth once more and a sense of order is restored. Still, that moment of vertigo is briefly and terrifyingly glorious. It reminds me of the way, when I was younger, I used to feel my body respond to the singing of hymns: an interior fire, a constriction of the heart that I took for a visitation of the Holy Spirit. I never mentioned this sensation to anyone. Maybe other people feel it. Perhaps the schoolgirls on the mountain feel it, singing in their concrete church: the large feeling of singing toward something that sings back. I often wondered if sex felt that way, undernourished adolescent that I was. And now — the quiet sky, the patient waiting, the tick of time in the bones, until the world rushes out and the vanishing of the cosmos presents itself again, magnificent.

I’ve told Darwin of my troubles (he suspects malaria, which is possible; I stopped taking my meds on day 300, partly because of the dreams they gave me, bright crystal dreams of exhausting flight). Sitting here, atop our hot rock, we might be the last two survivors of the flood, chosen by Noah: a pair of scientists, two by two. But the ark broke up somewhere along the Line and left us stranded with a squid for company. Darwin regards me sadly when I say this, stroking his diluvian chin.

‘Geology,’ he says, ‘disproves you.’

‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a joke.’

I live in an astronomical observation station owned and, until recently, forgotten by the New Zealand government. It’s partway up the mountain, and I can walk down to the sea in thirteen minutes. Paths have been cut into the rock, as if this were a holiday beach frequented by sure-footed children, but it’s still a relief to step out onto the sand from the mountain path, to see the sea spread wide and to my left the smaller inlet that is Mabel’s temporary home. The clear water is deeper than it looks from above. When I say the water in Mabel’s bay is clear, I don’t mean it’s transparent, but that it’s see-throughable, and Mabel is see-able there at the bottom. I feed her fish thawed from a deep freeze, or freshly caught if I’m in the mood, and these she grasps at the end of her tentacles and rolls up toward her beaked mouth. The coral sand is sharp and clean and my feet never feel dirty. When Darwin accompanies me (which he usually does on those days I’m feeling my worst), he only removes his shoes to wade into the shallows, and then his feet are the delicate brown and blue and yellow of Galápagos finches.

The view of Mabel from the shore is more intimate than the bird’s-eye view from my station fifteen metres above. It’s impossible to take in her vastness or the pattern of her tentacles and arms, so it’s her eyes that fascinate me. They interest Darwin as well. They’re hard to avoid. Mabel has the largest eye in creation, and it looks like ours, although its structure is entirely different. This humanoid appearance far out on the lone branch of invertebrate evolution gave scientists pause, at one time; they paused over Darwin and his theory of natural selection. The eye of the squid once gave my friend a great deal of trouble. Now he and I stand on the shore and consider the vertebrate appearance of Mabel’s canny eye. It looks so very God-given. Difficult to assume that such an eye doesn’t think, or ponder, or dream.

I think about squid too much, Darwin cautions me.

‘A squid is not a human,’ he says.

‘A human is just another animal,’ I say.

‘Oh, no,’ says Darwin. ‘The highest of the animals.’

‘Careful,’ I tell him.

We argue about this — the concept of progress, the tricky politics of supposing one thing higher than another. He’s impatient with the twentieth century on this point. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the twenty-first has begun, and I don’t tell him. I do tell him that whenever I spend an extended length of time with Mabel, peering into her large eye from the rocks on the shore, I find myself shaking off the feeling that there’s a person inside her, watching me. Darwin mocks this as sentimental. He says this sensation is so typical as to be ‘fatally unfresh’. I suppose my desire to free Mabel is similarly unfresh. But there are no fresh desires.

Today I feel very well. I feel an immense good health. Today I feel with great certainty my precise location upon the earth, the latitude and longitude, the position of the sun. This is important, because today we free Mabel. The date is September 23rd, but that’s elsewhere. Here on this island we’ve dropped out of time, although once, I believe, the island was within time: when it was first created, it was a definite volcanic event. Then the rock subsided, the sea settled, the coral multiplied, and the powerful boats of the islanders came. Whalers and traders, adventurers, missionaries, and gentleman naturalists endlessly agog at the taxonomic world. Mabel’s arrival might qualify as an occasion, a specific point on a timeline, except that the strangest of sea creatures must come butting up against this place in secret, yesterday and today and tomorrow, and usually there’s no one here to care or notice. No, the real things of the world take place elsewhere. And yet today will be an eventful day, and yesterday was too. So these are the end times.

Yesterday I visited the Catholic school. I have an arrangement with the school: I go there once a month and am driven into town by the school’s driver. We travel in a primordial jeep. In town, I pick up the supplies shipped in by my research group and send my month’s data home; then we drive back to the school. It’s a suitable arrangement for everyone, worked out in the distant days in which I was apparently capable of dreaming up such things: the school, which seems to exist in a state of immaculate fundlessness, gets some of my grant money, and I don’t have to go to the trouble of maintaining a vehicle. I order in treats for the schoolgirls: lollies and biscuits, novelty erasers, books. These I pass on to the head of the school, Father Anthony, who always wants me to come to his office for a chat; I always refuse him. Every month I anticipate these trips with an obscure dread.

For the past few months, Father Anthony has been inviting me to address his students on the subject of marine life. I declined at first. It felt false to arrive at the school and pose as an expert when a) I no longer believe in God, and b) to this date my most significant contribution to the science of the squid is the observation that male colossal squid probably do have a penis. I discussed my qualms with Darwin and he rejected them immediately. First of all, he said, I am a scientist, and these priests and nuns and children are not. They don’t know how many papers I haven’t had in Nature. Second, I’ve been invited to speak on marine, not heavenly, life, so my lack of faith shouldn’t interfere. And third, I have a problem that I need help with: namely, freeing Mabel. It was Darwin’s suggestion that the school may be able to provide this help. He has a tactical mind.

I delivered my talk yesterday, after my usual visit to town in the jeep. The driver of the jeep, Eric, is a sinewy man of tremendous energy. I understand that he does various kinds of physical work for the school: gardening and maintenance as well as driving. When he talks, which is rarely, it’s mostly about the branch of his family who moved to America long ago and are thriving there as if having discovered a taproot from which they were once dramatically severed. Eric speaks of America with an ancient nostalgia, but refuses to go because he was born on this island and his elderly father lives here. His energy is badly placed behind the wheel of a car. He sits in tense near-sightedness, coiled, attentive, as if he’s offended by the stillness required in order to travel so far so quickly. The roads are covered at all times in blotchy fruits that, when crushed, spill out slippery seeds. Apparently, the animal that would once have eaten them — a large bird with a frighteningly hooked claw — is so near extinction it now trembles with evolutionary neurosis in the quietest corners of the forest, eating less perilous fruits. These are the roads we take — viscous, birdless — into town. Town: one store and five drinking establishments. When the supply ship docks, the entire place seems to double in size. I like arriving with Eric. He knows everyone, and with him I’m greeted like a brother. Without him I appear to go unnoticed, which I know is not the case.

Yesterday, everything was quite normal — my crates were stacked on the dock, already clear of ‘Customs’ — except for the presence of five white women, all young and dressed in T-shirts and baseball caps. They sat together on benches by the dock, fanning themselves with the necks of their shirts and glowing with satisfaction at their evident discomfort. The girls rested their heads on each other’s shoulders and took self-portraits with their mobile phones, and no one paid them any attention. They looked to have been sitting there for some time.

‘Who are they?’ I asked Eric.

‘Students,’ he said.

‘Students? Where from?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Someone must know!’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘They’re waiting for someone to drive them.’

‘To drive them where?’

‘Around.’

After our errands we went to a bar, where we found the young men who clearly accompanied the girls outside. They were discussing this question of a driver with the patrons. Their American voices and emphatic gestures lacked economy in the midmorning heat. Eric expressed no interest in interacting with the visitors, so I lost interest in them too. All kinds of people come through this place, just as I’ve done. They’re none of my business. We drank, we drove the slippery roads, and Eric delivered me back to the school in time for my presentation.

This is how I prefer to remember all my contacts with civilisation: as briefly as possible.

Fans revolved idly in the school’s lobby. A row of African violets butted up against each window, brown in the heat, and a small table was stacked with copies of a pamphlet called ‘Good News for Modern Man’. I read it while I waited for Father Anthony, and it reminded me of the Church I grew up in: the primary colours and cheerful messages, the merry Heaven and blotty, yellow Hell. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it told me in a bright, responsible voice. I felt a small nostalgia. I had one of my headaches and all the angles of the world seemed wrong.

‘Dr Birch!’ cried Father Anthony, arriving. Father Anthony seems always to be arriving: there is a perpetual commotion about him. I’ve also never met a pinker man in all my life. His face is rose and his ears are salmon. His neck folds into itself like certain kinds of coral. His hands sprout from the ends of his arms anemone-like and gloved in pink.

‘Dr Birch!’ he cried again.

‘Call me Bill.’

‘Bill, Bill,’ he said with delight, shaking my brown hand with his pink one. His was smooth and cool; mine was damp. Father Anthony has a gift for the comfortable use of names. He dispenses them like small gifts, as if they’ve been prepared lovingly in advance. I can imagine it — this small recognition — feeling large enough to turn a soul back to God. I believe that Father Anthony’s God is an old friend to him, gracious and prudent, with a priest’s sympathy, a compassionate memory, and a steady heart for his flock’s misgivings and undoings and hurts.

‘This way, Bill, this way,’ said Father Anthony, ushering me along with his hands. I wonder if, like certain corals, they glow all the pinker in the dark. ‘We’re proud to welcome you. The sisters are very excited, as are our students. This is quite a treat. What a treat. We have so few visitors. The bishop once — what an occasion. This is in my lifetime. Well, my tenure here — a lifetime in itself. Ha, ha! This way, this way.’

He escorted me into a small, overcrowded hall in which nuns quieted students and drew blinds over windows. They went about their tasks with a sensible bustle I found intimidating.

Father Anthony introduced me as Dr William Birch, eminent marine biologist. I introduced myself as Bill Birch, malacologist.

‘A malacologist,’ I explained, ‘is a scientist who studies molluscs.’

It occurred to me for the first time that this title of mine is extremely ominous, belonging as it does to the list of distasteful words beginning with ‘mal’: malcontent, maladjusted, malformed, malicious. I wanted to explain that until my passion for the colossal squid blotted out my love for all other marine organisms I was a conchologist, which sounds much safer. More avuncular, sort of bumbling. Instead I loomed above them, malacologist, and ordered the lights out.

The students watched my slideshow presentation rapturously in the semi-dark. Their crowded bodies gave out a smell of warmed fruit about to spoil. It seemed to me as if their hair were filling up the room and muffling my voice, and when I felt prickles of fever up my legs and sweat behind my knees, I couldn’t be sure of the cause — sickness, or girls?

A tiger shark swam across the screen. The girls all breathed together, softly, ‘Shark.’ An anemone appeared, and they sang together, ‘Anemone.’ ‘Starfish,’ they sighed, and ‘Seahorse,’ ‘Eel.’ I showed them a beach camouflaged by thousands of newly hatched turtles and they inhaled collectively (we slow-breeding humans are always astonished by the extravagance with which sea creatures, seasonally awash in salt and sperm, reproduce themselves). I showed a photograph of myself in the observation station, taken by my departing colleagues. I paused on this photograph for too long because I was struck by the plump health of my former self, with his light tan and professionalism (he stands in the station doorway in prudent boots and his posture is in no way diminished by the tropical mountain rising above him). Then I showed pictures of Mabel in her bay and the students giggled. They know Mabel, although we have taken care not to publicise her. They know I’m the man who watches Mabel in the long afternoons and then watches them with his long binoculars. They laughed at her, friendly, and they laughed at me.

‘Thanks to the wonders of technology,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you have shown us the goodness of creation.’

The students can walk for minutes through the goodness of creation to see firsthand, in the blood-temperature sea, the same wonders I had just displayed. Since leaving the school I’ve found myself repeating the girls’ breathless catalogue: shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel. A children’s book of the sea. And I think of the waste involved, the sea full of death and the dying: all of creation’s necessary hunters fanning out among the reefs and rocks and sunken ships, all of them hungry, and if not hungry, dead. What if I’d discussed this in my talk? A Lecture on the Origin of Species? But Father Anthony seems a sensible man. Perhaps the students are taught evolution. I suspect we think similarly, all of us who were trapped yesterday in that hot room: we’re worried, daily, by the vast number of unredeemed things in the world.

Father Anthony took me to his study after my presentation. A white room with a view of jungle trees, and above the window, an ivory Christ on an ebony cross. Sun-faded copies of ‘Good News for Modern Man’ filled a low bookshelf. The sun ages everything so quickly that they might have come in on last month’s supply ship. Even Darwin looks a little more worn around the edges than when he arrived a few months ago, glumly agnostic. Only the thirsty trees seem to resist the sun, growing greener by the day, sweating out a greenness that hurts my eyes and forces me to keep them trained on the sea. The mosquitoes, also, seem unaffected, but I suppose they hide from the sun in the daytime.

‘May I ask you a question?’ said Father Anthony.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Are you a man of faith, Bill?’

‘That seems like the kind of thing you’d ask before letting me get up there in front of your girls.’

‘Our students are not necessarily young women of faith, Bill. And we would never keep you away from them on the basis of your beliefs.’

This implied — I was sure of it — that Father Anthony had considered keeping me away from them on some other basis.

‘Well, I’m not a man of faith,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not.’

And because this seemed so definitive — because this was the first time I had said anything like it aloud to a living man — I wanted to qualify it. I said, ‘I used to believe, you know. God, the maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit. The third day he rose again from the dead. You know, all that. The Church of England.’

‘But not anymore?’

‘Not anymore,’ I said. ‘So I suppose that means I’m going to hell.’

And I regretted this immediately; it was such an amateur thing to say. But my head was bad and I was worried I might have an attack — a vertigo attack — right there in his office.

‘God knows your heart better than I do,’ said Father Anthony. ‘I thought you might be a believer because in your lecture you said the way a squid eats is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ha, ha! I found that very funny. It’s rare these days to come across a good biblical joke. Can I order you some tea?’

Father Anthony is a kind and good-natured man, one of those beaming, healthful men who truly believe drinking a hot liquid in insufferable heat will cool you down, and my heart went out to him — broke for him, really — and I loved my fellow men and wanted to sail home to them instantly. I wanted to have sailed already. And why hadn’t I? Mabel, I suppose, whom only I could save. I was also embarrassed at having said so much. I was talkative in my guilt and sorrow, and would admit to anything.

‘No tea, no thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll have some. ‘A “spot of tea”, yes? I’ll ring the bell. Something cool for you, perhaps, Bill?’

His hand was poised in midair, holding a small silver bell. Did I mention we were both sitting, him behind his desk, and me in front of it? It was like being at school again.

‘Yes please, something cool,’ I said.

I pressed my hand against my forehead, and when the something cool came, I pressed the glass against my forehead too. Father Anthony looked concerned. He looked on the point of ringing his little bell again.

‘When you agreed to give this presentation today,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you asked for a favour in return. You said there was a scientific matter we could help you with. Is it to do with your squid?’

‘With Mabel, yes,’ I said. ‘Strictly speaking, of course, she’s not my squid. She’s not anybody’s — not even God’s. Do you see? I want to free her. That’s what I want your help with.’

‘You agree, then, with those activists in town?’ said Father Anthony. I realised he was referring to the young people I’d seen at the port; I understood that Mabel was no longer a secret and they were here to protest her captivity. This explained why Eric had been so unforthcoming with me.

‘I don’t know who they are or what they believe,’ I said.

‘They want the very same thing you do — to release the squid. You could ask for their help.’

I thought of the boys in the bar and the girls on the dock, of their sincerity, their photogenic martyrdom, and the primary colours of their T-shirts, and I said, ‘Tomorrow, Father Anthony, it has to be tomorrow. Before they find her and turn her into something she isn’t.’

‘Turn her into what?’ he asked.

‘Do you know very much about colossal squid, Father Anthony?’

‘Only the information you presented in your lecture today,’ he said. ‘Their brains are round with holes in them, like donuts. They have eight arms and two long tentacles.’

‘The most important thing I said about colossal squid today, Father Anthony, was that we don’t know anything about them. And even though I’ve been watching Mabel for over a year now, I still know nothing. It’s even possible that Mabel is still immature, that she could get bigger. How can we be sure of the true size of the colossal squid? Who knows what we’ll fish up some day — the gargantuan squid? We might have gone a step too far, calling this one colossal. Soon we’ll run out of superlatives. Wouldn’t it be better just to leave things be? They’ve recorded a mysterious bloop, you know, coming from somewhere underwater, which could only have been made by an animal of unthinkable size. I hope we never find it.’

Father Anthony waved his hand in the direction of his tree-crowded window as if mysterious bloops were none of his business.

‘The squid an infant — interesting,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t it look different if it were so young? Forgive me, but you must know that at least? You scientists?’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible to tell. Darwin talks about it in Origin: “There is no metamorphosis; the cephalopodic character is manifested long before the parts of the embryo are completed”. A squid is always a squid, right from birth — so we talk of mature or immature squid, but never of infants. The squid has no infancy, which means no nostalgia. It has no Romantic period. Squid think Wordsworth is full of horseshit. They have no childhood! None at all! They’re born adult, and the only change they undertake is death. There is no metamorphosis!’

At the end of this speech I felt as pink as Father Anthony looked. There was a ticking in the room; I thought it came from the ivory Jesus crucified on the wall.

Father Anthony drew a long breath. ‘Do you like it here on our island?’ he asked.

‘Actually I’m thinking of leaving.’

‘Do you crave human company? That’s only natural.’

‘I want to be surrounded by people again, but I don’t have much desire to talk to them.’

‘But you have so many ideas to share,’ said Father Anthony. ‘If you’ll excuse my asking, do you feel quite well? Not everyone can withstand this climate. I myself, many years ago, spent an entire year supine on my bed. The heat, you see, and it led to a sort of spiritual crisis, a lack of faith, you might say, in the sustaining hand of God. I thought I may have dreamed winter. It was only prayer that gave me strength, Bill — the strength of God against the burden of His creation.’

‘Prayer!’ I said. ‘Can I ask you a question? Doesn’t faith feel to you like a deep-down knowing, something you’ve discovered rather than made? And what do you do when you’ve lost that knowing? Hope that praying to something you no longer know will get it back for you?’

‘Would you like me to pray for you, Bill?’

‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I have headaches.’

‘I understand,’ said Father Anthony, reaching out a hand, and I was able, then, to imagine him laid out on a bed, dreaming winter. ‘Why not leave?’

‘Mabel.’

‘Mabel is the squid, yes?’

‘She belongs in the sea.’

‘And what do you propose?’

I explained that the net with which we’d plugged Mabel’s bay was impossible to move with only two men. I corrected myself — one man. Of course he didn’t know about Darwin. Could a priest see the ghost of Darwin? Unlikely. But if all the students were to come down to the bay and we worked together, we could unfasten the net and, very swiftly, move it from one side of the bay to the other, so that Mabel, on escaping, wouldn’t tangle herself in it. (Confession: when I imagine this, I have in mind a delirious scene from the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty where the girls of Tahiti, bare-breasted, hold an enormous net in the water, into which the native men drive schools of fish.) Father Anthony seemed concerned about this plan. He asked if there would be any danger. I told him no, there would be no danger — unlike octopi, squid are not dangerous to human beings. All those old etchings of whaleboats embraced by monstrous tentacled creatures are completely false. I said this, but we don’t really know. No one has ever swum with a colossal squid. But just to be on the safe side, it’s my plan to feed Mabel all the fish I have while the girls move the net. I’ll get into the water to distract her if I have to. I’ll get so close I’ll fill her clever eyes.

‘Select your strongest swimmers,’ I said to Father Anthony. ‘Those girls will take the end of the net farthest from the beach. They’ll be the ones to swim across the entrance to the bay.’

‘I see you’ve thought this through. Would you excuse me for a minute? I must consult a colleague.’

I let him go with regret. It had begun to grow cool in the room, if it’s possible here to have any sense of what cool truly is, and I fancied that this relief emanated in some way from Father Anthony. His pink skin suggested not clammy heat but the smooth, cool skin of a baby. I was content, sitting there in that office. My presentation had gone well. I was acting on my belief that Mabel should be free. It was good to talk to another man again. And, as if offended by this betrayal, Darwin — who was he, if not another man? — appeared at the window with the air of someone casually strolling by. He peered in.

‘It’s safe,’ I said in a loud whisper. Then I gave him the victory sign, at which he looked puzzled.

‘Where is he?’ asked Darwin.

‘Gone for help.’

‘Help for whom?’

Darwin ambled away from the window and out into the trees, but I could see the bright camel colour of his naturalist’s coat among the greenery; he hadn’t gone far. Sitting comfortably in that cooling office, I considered the ways in which Darwin had never been particularly helpful to me, despite the initial promise of his appearance. After all, to a man — a scientist, no less — who has recently lost his faith, the ghost of Darwin could be a rich resource. We might have sat and talked about God’s sovereignty, and then about its dissolution: a little of God vanishing into the dodo, a little into the long-lost ichthyosaurus. But he seems impatient when I raise these topics, and I’ve come to avoid them. I used to think of Charles Darwin in the same way some people think of Jesus Christ: he was a real man who existed in a specific historical time and he taught some valuable lessons, many of which I could adopt with no sense of contradiction. In short, I was a sensible man. I was no Creationist. I was reconciled with Darwin. I weighed it all up, and with the same clever hands I held something else entirely: that joyful faith of mine, impregnable.

I was once quite certain that God so loved the world. How sudden it was, on day 282: God’s absence upon my shoulders, like a heavy flightless bird that can still hop to a height. How sobering to pass from Dr William Birch, beloved of God, to Bill Birch, organism. Just to be there on my sticky cliff and feel this way for no specific reason — it was a kind of grief. And I saw Mabel differently after that. How could I help it? She has nothing to do with me. I can’t eat or reproduce with her. She’s without complication. I was sure of one thing, until I was no longer sure; now my conviction is that Mabel must be free. And not for her own sake, no; although I love her, I would have put her in a tank and watched her in it for the rest of her life, or mine. But now I think she should remain a mystery. There must be some things in the world that no one sees and no one knows. Some monsters.

I began to worry about Father Anthony. Why was he taking so long? I rang the silver bell and a girl appeared. She was about sixteen, neat and shy behind heavy hair, and I felt like a Bounty sailor encountering beauty for the first time. I thought of the one mutineer who had the date on which he first saw Tahiti tattooed on his quivering arm.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ she answered. She was solemn, and so was I. The heat had returned.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Faith,’ she said, and she was so allegorical, standing there, she may as well have been draped in white robes, placed on a plinth above a plaque that read ‘Faith’. I laughed, which startled her.

‘Is that really your name?’ I asked. ‘Or did Father Anthony ask you to come in here and tell me that?’

She was confused but pleased. I knew I wouldn’t touch her — I’m not so mad as to have touched her — but I wanted to. I want to. Oh, Tahiti! Was Darwin ever there? No, I don’t think so. He preferred dustier places, godforsaken places like the Galápagos, prehistoric with tortoises. This girl and girls like her would come to the beach with me and draw aside the net.

‘Do you like to swim, Faith?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

Father Anthony entered the office, and behind him was Eric, the driver.

‘Faith!’ Father Anthony cried, as if overjoyed to see her, and he ushered her merrily out. She looked back at me very quickly, the way she might look over one shoulder while swimming. Where had she appeared from and where would she go now? Father Anthony went behind his desk but didn’t sit down. Eric leaned against the bookshelf.

‘Now, Bill,’ said Father Anthony. ‘You mentioned headaches. The brain is a very delicate thing, which you as a scientist would know very well. The brain and the mind — two different things, yes? Both very delicate. If we’re going to help you, I’d like you to do me a favour first.’

‘I already gave the lecture,’ I said. ‘You owe me a favour.’

Father Anthony laughed.

‘Very true, very true,’ he said. ‘You’re right. But perhaps you’d consider doing this favour anyway. For my sake. Let me just tell you what I have in mind. I’d like you to see a doctor about these headaches of yours. Symptoms that seem harmless enough in other places become much more serious on an island like ours. When I first arrived, I was reluctant to see doctors. I thought I could cope with all the discomforts. But things escalated until I was in the grip of a brain fever.’

‘You called it a spiritual crisis,’ I pointed out.

‘It was, Bill, it was,’ he said, smiling, pinker than ever. ‘I want you to travel back to town with Eric. There’s a doctor on the supply ship, and he’s willing to see you. It’s either today or you’ll have to wait another month. Why suffer needlessly?’

‘And the squid?’

‘You see the doctor,’ said Father Anthony, ‘and then we’ll worry about the squid.’

‘It has to be tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow,’ nodded Father Anthony.

Of course he was transparent; a man like Father Anthony always is. He was perched on the edge of his desk, becalmed in his own solicitude, hoping I would submit without fuss to his will. So I did. I allowed myself to be ushered out, I allowed him to assure me that my supplies had been refrigerated, I allowed myself to be seated comfortably in the jeep. Father Anthony followed the jeep as Eric reversed it onto the road, he waved us off as if with a valedictory handkerchief, and I turned my head at the first corner to see him walking toward the school with his arms behind his back, his head lowered, as if in prayer.

Around that first corner I offered to pay Eric to stop the jeep.

‘No, no,’ he said, intent on the road.

‘Please, Eric. This is important. How can I make you understand?’

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I’ll lose my job. You know how hard it is to earn money here if you want to stay legal? I have a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Auckland and this is the only work there is. I’ll drive you into town. After that you do what you want, I don’t care, and if anyone finds out, it’s not because I’ve told them.’

We drove on. Soon afterward I noticed movement in the trees alongside the road. There was Darwin, running. I’ve never seen a man move so fast. He couldn’t quite keep up with the jeep, although he managed it for stretches of a minute or two and at times seemed to extend his right arm out to reach the car door. Perhaps he was trying to warn me of what I already knew. Faithful Darwin sped beside us, the wings of his coat flying out behind him, his feet a blur and his face a study of determined strength. We lost him shortly before town, when it was necessary to cross a river and he made the mistake of plunging into the water rather than waiting to follow us on the narrow bridge. I turned to look and saw him thrashing about with the incredulous fury of an Olympian who’s just lost the final.

Eric and I parted in town. He made no reference to the doctor, but also no promise of a lift back to the school. I walked through the sandy streets to the end of the beach farthest from the dock, observing the population as I myself was no doubt observed, and I hoped that once I left the island I would never see a place like it again in my life. I longed for escape. The supply ship sat smugly in the harbour, equipped with its doctor, and I was tempted to board it waving a white flag. But who then would free Mabel? If she doesn’t belong to God, she belongs nowhere. I must remember to write that into my grant report.

I thought I might find Darwin on the beach, but I found the protesters instead. They talked in groups in the extended shadows of the palm trees. I walked toward them with my hands in the pockets of my trousers, and when they saw me coming they stirred with hope and indignation. I stopped a few feet from them, and despite the failing light they peered up at me with their hands cupped over their eyes, as if the absurd sun of the island’s midday had forced them into a permanent habit.

‘Good evening,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ they chorused.

A blond boy stood, handsome, a kind of voluntary Achilles. He advanced toward me. ‘Maybe you can help us,’ he said. He seemed to be wondering aloud. A ripple of assent went through the group: Yes, yes, they seemed to sigh, maybe he can help us.

‘I hear you’re looking for transportation,’ I said.

‘Do you have a car? Even better, a truck?’ said the boy.

‘A bus?’ called one wag, and they laughed.

‘Where is it that you’d like to go?’

‘We need to get to the other side of the island,’ said the boy. ‘Do you know of a scientist, a Dr William Birch?’

‘Bill Birch, yes. Sure I do.’

‘And you’re not him?’

‘Me? I’m no scientist,’ I answered, and for some reason they all laughed again, perhaps in relief. The boy began to explain to me that he — they — objected to the work Dr Birch was doing with a certain captive squid. He was guarded, but furious. They’d all been together on some kind of ecology project in the Cook Islands when news of Dr Birch’s work broke, and had talked their way onto the supply ship.

‘That was only three days ago,’ the boy said, with pride. ‘We’re here before the media.’

‘So you want to get to Dr Birch,’ I said.

‘No one seems to know where he is,’ said the boy. ‘It’s like he’s a hermit or something.’

It thrills me to know the locals protected me from that lovable, good-looking, deluded band.

‘I know where he is,’ I said, ‘and I’ll do what I can to get you to him.’

They rose up as one then, and surrounded me with their relief and zeal, shouting names at me and asking mine.

‘Eric Anthony,’ I said. ‘Now tell me, what would you have said if I’d been Dr Birch?’

‘We’d have said we were marine biology students,’ said Todd, the Achilles. ‘Who wouldn’t want to see a colossal squid if they had the chance?’

And they asked me to take a photo of them, all together on the beach; it was a beautiful picture, sand-lit, and they pressed together inside its frame with such health and trust that I wanted to — I did — like them, very much. And I knew they would help me if I asked them to; they would swim out across the bay, they would remove the net, they would farewell Mabel with me, sending her seaward, and every second of her escape would be captured on their phones. Mabel would swim forever in a digital sea. She’d be free, but all the world would know her.

In town, I had more luck than they had finding transportation. I paid for the use of a utility truck owned by a friend of Eric’s and the crusaders climbed into the tray with their knapsacks. I even bought them supplies and checked the batteries in their torches. The townspeople watched us. Again, it pleased me to think that the only person they would betray me to was myself. Todd rode in the front with me. He asked what I did on the island and I told him I taught in a Catholic school near Dr Birch’s camp. I told him we would pass the school and that they should walk up to visit me there whenever they needed to get into town. He asked if I lived at the school, and I said yes. He asked if I was Catholic, and I said yes. This all came very easily. Todd is an earnest and admirable young man. I’d be proud to have a son like him. But he plays no part in my vision of freeing Mabel, and my principal concern was to cause him as much inconvenience as possible. To accomplish this, I dropped him and his cheerful gang at the head of a trail leading to a beach a few bays east of my observation station and told them that Mabel, far from being trapped in a small inlet, was enclosed by the coral reef and had the whole lagoon to move around in.

‘Don’t go swimming,’ I said. ‘She’s probably pretty angry by now.’

‘Are colossal squid dangerous?’ asked Todd.

‘Deadly.’

I told them Bill Birch moved his camp from place to place in the jungle, so they might have trouble finding him at first. I said that he was essentially harmless, that the machete he carried was only for cutting paths; I warned them too that he was hard of hearing and jumpy when startled. I said I knew they were responsible kids and would act with appropriate caution. We unloaded their gear onto the road. I moved the truck so the headlights shone down along the trail. They remarked on the audible ocean and seemed much less nervous than they should have been; they said goodbye, they expressed their gratitude, and then they plunged off into the humid trees. When they were far beyond the beam of my headlights, Darwin bounded onto the road like a stricken kangaroo.

‘There you are,’ I said.

He climbed into the truck and sat rigidly, like a boy waiting for a roller coaster to descend its first hill.

‘You’ve never been in a car before, have you?’ I said.

He shook his head. I gave him quite a ride. There are some hairpin bends on this old volcano that can knot your intestines like a skilful sailor. By the time we got back to the observation station, we were both giddy as schoolboys. We walked out onto the cliff and looked down at Mabel. It was dark, of course, and colossal squid are not, to my or anyone’s knowledge, phosphorescent, but I would be willing to swear that I saw her outline glowing very faintly from the bottom of her bay.

That was last night. I slept late this morning, day 498, and spent the afternoon writing this account. Now Darwin is with me, and it’s pleasant to see him in the fullest light of the day; he seems more definite and in this way more ordinary. The weather is clear, so we amuse ourselves by pretending we can see New Zealand. I don’t know what’s become of Eric; I don’t know what report he’s given Father Anthony. No one has come looking for me. I imagine the supply ship has left by now. I imagine I’ll spend the next month in town living on this newly discovered goodwill of the locals, just another oddball wanderer. The protesters will find me, eventually, and we’ll make friends; we’ll laugh together when they hear what it is I’ve done, and one of the girls, less pretty, perhaps, but kind, will take pity on me. I’ll resign my position, of course. I’ll take the next ship; I’ll go home. Darwin says he won’t come with me. He’s scornful of Australia and talks of England with the adoration of exile. This is all as it should be. Unless, unless, I get too close to Mabel, and she takes me with her.

In these last few minutes I’ve felt the swimmy brimming that precedes an attack of vertigo. I feel it as a pressure in my feet. Soon, I know, the earth will fall away from them, and this too is as it should be. My head seems to press outward. To myself I say, Shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel. My main concern was that if Eric raised the alarm, Father Anthony wouldn’t permit the girls to take their daily swim. But here they come now, down the mountain. They’re singing, of course, and Faith is among them. She’s singing softly. She likes to swim. She’ll wade out into the water and the other girls will follow her. What is it about being immersed in water that’s so exciting, so vital to us? We all experience it — this thrill of feeling the medium we move in as something dangerous and contingent. It reminds us of the artifice of oxygen and gravity, the sheer unlikelihood of their provision. We feel the water close around our arms and legs and we make our way through it with difficulty and determination, singing and proclaiming and making promises, kneeling and rising and sitting and standing. It feels like the unbearable presence of God, His hands on our submarine chests. A blowfish might waft past, inflated, with a look of dumb surprise on its face. I have basketfuls of fish ready to feed to Mabel. The girls will take hold of the net; I’ll watch as they rise through the sea with it into the air. The light will billow and flare around them in the bright wind, and their hands will reach out to Heaven as if strung on trapeze wires. I’ll wade through the shallows, wet to my stupid waist, then I’ll kick downward and swim. Darwin will observe from the shore in his nineteenth-century socks. And Mabel will fly seaward, holy and beautiful, a bony-beaked messenger bringing no news.