His mother died, and this is where all the sad tales begin or end, but for James Kilbride, nothing had changed. The office remained the same; the bus took no new routes. The house was larger, now, and darker and more silent, but that was all.
His mother had been well insured, and there was quite a bit left over. Something from his reading, or from a conversation over lunch, gave him the idea and the impetus, and he bought a boat. He bought a sailing cap. On Sundays, alone, he went sailing in the near waters of the Pacific.
But still nothing changed. The office was still bright with incandescent lights, and the bus took no new routes. He was still James Kilbride, and he still lay wide awake in bed and dreamed of women and another, livelier, happier sort of life.
The boat was a twelve-footer, with a tiny cabin. It was painted white, and named Doreen, the woman he had never met. And on one bright Sunday, when the ocean was bright and clean and the sky was scrubbed blue, he stood in his boat and stared out to sea, and he thought about going to China.
The idea grew. It took months, months of thought, of reading, of preparation, before he knew one day that he would go to China. He really and positively would. He would keep a diary and would publish it and become famous and meet Doreen.
He loaded the boat with canned food and water. He arranged for a leave of absence from his employer. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to quit completely, though he intended to never come back. And then he took off, once again on a Sunday, and steered the little boat out to sea.
The Coast Guard intercepted him, and brought him back. They explained a variety of rules and regulations to him, none of which he understood. On the second try, they were more aggressive, and told him that a third attempt would result in a jail sentence.
The third time, he left at night, and he managed to slip through the net they had set for him. He thought of himself as a spy, a dark and terrible figure, fleeing ruthlessly through the muffled night from an enemy land.
By the third day, he was lost. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. He paced back and forth, his sailing cap protecting him from the sun, and stared out at the trembling surface of the sea.
Ships, black silhouettes, passed on the horizon. Islands were mounds of mist far, far away. The near world was blue and gold, and silence was broken only by the muted play of the wavelets around his boat.
On the eighth day, there was a storm, and this first storm he managed to survive intact. He bailed until the boat was dry, then slept for almost twenty-four hours.
Three days later, there was another storm, a fierce and outraged boiling of water and air, that came at dusk and poured foaming masses of black water across the struggling boat. The boat was torn from him, and he lashed his arms about in the water, fighting and clawing and swallowing huge gulps of the furious water.
He reached the island at night, borne by the waves into the slight protection of the crescent cove. He crawled up the sanded beach, above the reach of the waves, and slept.
When he awoke, the sun was high and the back of his neck was painfully burned. He had lost his sailing cap and both of his shoes. He crawled to his feet and moved inland, toward the scrubby trees, away from the burning sunlight.
He lived. He found berries, roots, plants that he could eat, and he learned how to come near the birds, as they sat preening themselves on the tree branches, and stun them with hurled stones. He was lucky, in one way. In his pocket were matches, water-proofed, that he had put there before the storm hit. He built a small shelter from bits of branch and bark. He scooped out earth to make a shallow bowl in the ground, and started a fire in it, keeping the fire going day and night. He only had eight matches.
He lived. For the first few days, the first few weeks, he kept himself occupied. He stared for hours out at the sea, waiting expectantly for the rescuers. He prowled the small island, until he knew its every foot of beach, its every weed and branch.
But rescuers didn’t come, and soon he knew the island as well as he had once known the route of the bus. He started drawing pictures in the sand, profiles of men and women, drawings of the birds that flew and screeched above his head. He played tic-tac-toe with himself, but could never win a game. He had neither pencil nor paper, but he started his book, the book of his adventures, the book that would make him more than the minor clerk he had always been. He composed the book carefully, memorizing each sentence as he completed it, building it slowly and exactly, polishing each word, fashioning each paragraph. He had freedom and individuality and personality at last. He roamed the island, reciting the completed passages aloud.
It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. Months had passed, and he had never seen a ship, a plane, or any human face. He prowled the island, reciting the finished chapters of his book, but it wasn’t enough. There was only one thing he could do, to make the new life bearable, and at last he did it.
He went mad.
He did it slowly; he did it gradually. For the first step, he postulated a Listener. No description, not even age or sex, merely a Listener. As he walked, speaking his sentences aloud, he made believe that someone walked beside him on his right, listening to him, smiling and nodding and applauding the excellence of his composition, pleased by Jim Kilbride, no longer the petty clerk.
He came almost to believe that the Listener really existed. At times, he would stop suddenly and turn to the right, meaning to explain a point he thought might be obscure, and he would be shocked, for just a second, to find that no one was there. But then he would remember, and laugh at his foolishness, and walk on, continuing to speak.
Slowly, the Listener took on dimension. Slowly, it became a woman, and then a young woman, who listened attentively and appreciatively to what he had to say. She still had no appearance, no particular hair color, shape of face, no voice, but he did give her a name, Doreen. Doreen Palmer, the woman he had never met, had always wanted to meet.
She grew more rapidly. He realized one day that she had honey-colored hair, rather long, and that it waved back gracefully from her head when the breeze blew across the island from the sea. It came to him that she had blue eyes, round and intelligent and possessing great depths, deeper even than the ocean. He understood that she was four inches shorter than he, five foot three, and that she had a sensuous but not overly voluptuous body and dressed in a white gown and green sandals. He knew that she was in love with him, because he was brave and strong and interesting.
But he still wasn’t completely mad, not yet. Not until the day he first heard her voice.
It was a beautiful voice, clear and full and caressing. He had said, “A man alone is only half a man,” and she replied, “you aren’t alone.”
In the first honeymoon of his insanity, life was buoyant and sweet. Over and over, he recited the completed chapters of his book to her, and she would interrupt, from time to time, to tell him how fine it was, to raise her head and kiss him, her honey-blonde hair falling about her shoulders, to squeeze his hand and tell him that she loved him. They never talked about his life before he had come to the island, the incandescent office and the ruled and rigid ledgers.
They walked together, and he showed her the island, every grain of sand, every branch of every tree, every bush and bird. He showed her how he killed the birds, and how he kept the fire going, because he only had eight matches. And when the infrequent storms came, whipping the island in their insensate rages, she huddled close to him in the lean-to he had built, her blonde hair soft against his cheek, her breath warm against his neck, and they would wait out the storm, their arms clasped tightly about each other, their eyes staring at the guttering fire, hoping and hoping that it wouldn’t be blown out.