hospitalized, except briefly for tests. And he was docile. He wasn’t to drive a car anymore, but he understood that, and did not seem to resent it when Mary hid the keys to his Jeep station wagon. He even said that maybe they should sell it, since it didn’t look like they were going to do much camping anymore. So Mary didn’t have to hire a nurse to watch over Roy while she worked. Retired people in the neighborhood were glad to pick up a few dollars, keeping him company and making sure he didn’t hurt himself in some way.
He was certainly no trouble to them. He watched a lot of television and enjoyed playing for hours, never leaving the yard, with Donald, the golden retriever who had died, supposedly, on Bikini Atoll.
As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galápagos Islands, though, she would be stopped in mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: “Maybe I’m just a crazy lady who has wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these young people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything.”
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.
10
HOW MANY GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS were there a million years ago? There were thirteen big ones, seventeen small ones, and three hundred and eighteen tiny ones, some nothing more than rocks rising only a meter or two above the surface of the ocean.
There are now fourteen big ones, seven small ones, and three hundred and twenty-six tiny ones. Quite a lot of volcanic activity still goes on. I make a joke: The gods are still angry.
And the northernmost of the islands, so all alone, so far from the rest, is still Santa Rosalia.
Yes, and a million years ago, on August 3, 1986, a man named *Roy Hepburn was on his deathbed in his right little, tight little home in Ilium, New York. There at the very end, what he lamented most was that he and his wife Mary had never had children. He could not urge his wife to try to have children by someone else after he was gone, since she had ceased to ovulate.
“We Hepburns are extinct as the dodoes now,” he said, and he rambled on with the names of many other creatures which had become fruitless, leafless twigs on the tree of evolution. “The Irish elk,” he said. “The ivory-billed woodpecker,” he said. “Tyrannosaurus rex,” he said, and on and on. Right up to the end, though, his dry sense of humor would pop up unexpectedly. He made two jocular additions to the lugubrious roll call, both of which were indeed without progeny. “Smallpox,” he said, and then, “George Washington.”
Right to the end, he believed with all his heart that his own government had done him in with radiation. He said to Mary, and to the doctor and the nurse who were there because the end could surely come at any moment now: “If only it had been just God Almighty who was mad at me!”
Mary took that to be his curtain line. He certainly looked dead after that.
But then, after ten seconds, his blue lips moved again. Mary leaned close to hear his words. She would be glad for the rest of her life that she had not missed them.
“I’ll tell you what the human soul is, Mary,” he whispered, his eyes closed. “Animals don’t have one. It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, but I always knew.”
And then he scared the wits out of Mary and everybody in the room by sitting up straight, his eyes open wide and fiery. “Get the Bible!” he commanded, in a voice which could be heard throughout the house.
This was the only time anything to do with formal religion was mentioned during the whole of his illness. He and Mary were no churchgoers; or prayers in even dire circumstances, but they did have a Bible somewhere. Mary wasn’t quite sure where.
“Get the Bible!” he said again. “Woman, get the Bible!” He had never called her “woman” before.
So Mary went to look for it. She found it in the