Daniel Quinn: Ishmael

“Could it be a blown fuse?”

“Could be,” he said. But he ruled that out by trying a new one, which did no better than the old one. He said, “Hold on,” and fetched a pen–type probe, which he used to test the plug that connected the fan to the electrical system. “You got fire to the fan,” he told me, “so it looks like it’s the fan itself that’s shot.”

“Where can I get a new one?”

“Here in town, nowhere,” he told me. “Not on a Saturday.”

I asked him if I could get home with it as it was.

“I think so,” he said, “if you don’t have to do a lot of city driving to get there. Or if you stop and let it cool down whenever it starts to overheat.”

I made it back and got the car into a dealership service garage well before noon and left it there, even though they assured me that nothing at all would happen to it before Monday morning. I had only one errand to run, and that was to visit one of those dear little money machines, where I proceeded to plunder all my cash resources—checking, savings, credit cards. When I walked into my apartment, I was carrying twenty–four hundred dollars—and was otherwise a pauper.

I didn’t intend to think about the problems ahead, because they were just too tough. How do you get a half–ton gorilla out of a cage that he doesn’t care to vacate? How do you get a half–ton gorilla into the back seat of a car that he doesn’t care to ride in? Would a car with a half–ton gorilla in the back seat even function?

As this indicates, I’m a one–step–at–a–time kind of guy. An improvisor. Somehow or another, I would get Ishmael stashed in the back seat of my car, then I’d figure out what to do next. Presumably I’d bring him back to my apartment—and then again figure out what to do next. In my experience, you never really know how you’re going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

They called at nine on Monday morning to tell me what was what with the car. The fan had gone out because it had been overtaxed; it had been overtaxed because the whole damn cooling system was shot. A lot of work was needed, about six hundred dollars’ worth. I groaned and told them to carry on. They said it’d probably be ready around two o’clock, they’d call. I said, skip the call, I’d pick the car up when I could; the fact is, I’d already abandoned the car. I couldn’t afford the repairs, and the damn thing probably wouldn’t be up to carrying Ishmael anyway.

I rented a van.

You will doubtless wonder why in hell I didn’t do that in the first place. The answer is, I just didn’t think of it. I’m limited, okay? I get used to doing things in a certain way, and that doesn’t include taking trips in rented vans.

Two hours later I pulled up at the carnival lot and said, “Damn.”

The carnival had moved on.

Something—maybe a premonition—prompted me to get out and poke around. The lot seemed much too small to have held nineteen rides, twenty–four games, and a sideshow. I wondered if I could find the site of Ishmael’s cage without any landmarks to guide me. My feet remembered enough to get me to the vicinity, and my eyes did the rest, for there was a visible trace: the blankets I’d bought for him had been left behind, had been dumped in a messy pile along with other things I recognized: a few of his books, a pad of drawing paper, still showing the maps and diagrams he’d made to illustrate the stories of Cain and Abel, Leavers and Takers, and the poster from his office, now rolled up and secured by a rubber band.

I was stirring it up and sorting it out in a bewildered way when my aged bribee turned up. He grinned and held up a big black plastic bag to show me what he was doing there: clearing away some of the hundreds of pounds of trash that had been left behind. Then, when he saw the pile of stuff at my feet, he looked up at me and said, “It was the pneumonia.”

“What?”

“It was the pneumonia that got him—your friend the ape.”

I stood there blinking at him, unable to fathom what he was getting at.

“Vet came Saturday night and shot him full of stuff, but it was too late. Passed off this morning around seven or eight, I guess.”

“Are you telling me that he’s… dead?”

“Dead is what he is, pardner.”

And I, the total egotist, had only vaguely registered the fact that he seemed a bit wan.

I looked around the vast gray lot, where here and there the wind raised clumps of paper trash and sometimes sent them tumbling, and felt one with it—empty, useless, choked with dust, a wasteland.

My ancient pardner waited, plainly interested to see what this friend of apes would do or say next.

“What did they do with him?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“What did they do with the body?”

“Oh. Called the county, I guess. Took him off to where they cremate the roadkills. You know.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“No sweat.”

“All right if I take this stuff?”

From the look he gave me I could see I’d presented him with a new high–water mark in human lunacy, but all he said was, “Sure, why not? Just get dumped otherwise.”

I left the blankets, of course, but the rest all fit easily under one arm.

What was to be done? Stand for a moment with lowered gaze outside the county furnace where they cremate the roadkills? Someone else would have handled it differently, probably better, revealing a greater heart, a finer sensibility. Myself, I drove home.

Drove home, turned in the van, picked up my car, and went back to the apartment. It was empty in a new way, with a new degree of emptiness.

There was a telephone there on an end table, connecting me to a whole world of life and activity, but who could I call?

Oddly enough, I thought of someone, looked up a number, and dialed it. After three rings, a low, firm voice answered:

“Mrs. Sokolow’s residence.”

“Is this Mr. Partridge?”

“Yes, this is Mr. Partridge.”

I said, “This is the guy who visited you a couple weeks ago, trying to locate Rachel Sokolow.”

Partridge waited.

I said, “Ishmael is dead.”

After a pause: “I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“We could have saved him.”

Partridge thought about that for a while. “Are you sure he would have let us?”

I wasn’t sure, and said so.

It wasn’t till I got Ishmael’s poster to the framing shop that I discovered there were messages on both sides. I had it framed so that both can be seen. The message on one side is the one Ishmael displayed on the wall of his den:

The message on the other side reads:

Daniel Quinn, the author of Ishmael , was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935, studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna in Austria, and Loyola University of Chicago. In 1975 he abandoned a long career in publishing to become a freelance writer.

The first version of the book that ultimately became Ishmael , his award–winning novel, was written in 1977 and was followed by six others before finding its final form, as a novel, in 1990. Quinn went on to explore the spiritual and experiential origins of Ishmael in a work of innovative autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty Year Vision Quest .

Of his latest novel, Quinn writes: “For years I worried that I might never equal (much less surpass) what I achieved in Ishmael . This worry has been erased for me by The Story of B . Ishmael would definitely approve of this book.” The Story of B is now available from Bantam Books.