Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

“He called it allopatric speciation.” With forefinger and thumb, Vanags flipped the burning tip of his cigarette into the sand and carefully restored the half-smoked remainder to his shirt pocket. “Allopatric — in another country, another fatherland. Mayr knew something about that: he came to America from Germany in the thirties, and dreamed up his theory when he was at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Know how he spent his first day in the city? He rode the subway until he’d mastered the entire system. Talk about Darwinian adaptation.”

Wanting to rid herself of a small rock that was painfully embedding itself in her left heel with each step, Lucy took off her flip-flops and went barefoot. Vanags studied her ankles, his white lashes blinking slowly over eyes of crackled china blue. The piggy, inquisitive eyes looked older than the man.

Catching her glance, Vanags said, “Hermit crab!”

A rather large whelk shell was traveling fast between her feet, propelled by tiny whiskery claws.

“Adaptation again. Clever little bugger, isn’t he?” Grinning, Vanags treated Lucy to a full-frontal view of his dazzling artificial snappers. “Dollars to doughnuts he killed and ate the poor old whelk to get possession of his property.”

She saw now that the sand was alive with unlovely creatures — beach hoppers hopping, clams squirting, dark squadrons of flies buzzing over stranded clumps of kelp. She trod on soft, heaped spirals of lugworm poop. Spotting a jellyfish almost underfoot — a yard-wide blob of thick diaphanous slime, wrinkling fast in the heat of the sun — she put her flip-flops back on.

“It’s critter utopia out here. No surf, and every tide brings in another haul of plankton. You gotta see it when the water’s up and we get the sea lions and porpoises and bald eagles. Oh, man — the bald eagles. I tell you, I’ve counted forty here at one time, when we’ve had the herring in.”

Sidestepping a condom, Lucy did her best to share Vanags’ pleasure in his new habitat. A familiar bird call came from quite a ways inland: Dee! Dee-dee-dee-dee! Kill-dee-a! Kill-dee-a! “Killdeer,” she said. “That’s a real Montana bird.”

“Yeah,” Vanags said complacently. “Those guys are like chump change around here. Hear ’em all the time.” He stopped to investigate a beached sea cucumber that looked to Lucy like a pimply turd. “Out here in the boonies, it’s easy to forget that we’re at war, huh?”

“War?”

But Vanags didn’t hear the question. “Of course, we miss the city. We don’t know too many folks on the island, but it has its compensations. Like this…” He inhaled the sea air deep into his lungs as if it were smoke from a joint, holding it in his chest before releasing it through his nose. “Ozone.”

“But everyone says you’re a recluse.”

“Me? No, this was CollierParnell’s idea. They wanted me to be a mystery man.”

“The publishers sent you here?”

“Well, kind of. First, when they got the boy book, they were going to send me on a tour. Twenty-one cities. I’d been looking forward to that — there’s a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to say that I couldn’t get into the book. Then we had a meeting with the big kahunas in New York, and they came up with this new plan. They put the kibosh on the tour — no interviews, no nothing. They said they wanted to let the book speak for itself and spend the tour moolah on advertising. Day it shipped, Minna and me went on a cruise — Seattle to Rio de Janeiro, thirty-six days. That was my editor’s idea: he said I’d get pestered half to death if we stayed in town. Had to change our phone to an unlisted number. When we got back from the cruise, the local rep told me about this house on Whidbey, and my editor talked me into buying it. ‘Better get used to it,’ he said: ‘You’re going to be a rich man now.’ You wouldn’t believe the trouble they went to, looking after us. All part of the marketing strategy is what they said — I tell you, they don’t do things by halves at CollierParnell.”

Lucy could imagine the scene at the publishers’ office. Counting on a ripely accented, gaunt, hollow-eyed Holocaust survivor, a figure of haunting telegenic pathos, they’d come face-to-face with this chipper and garrulous American know-it-all. August Vanags was unworthy of being the author of his own book. Put him on Larry King and he’d unsell Boy 381 at the rate of thousands a minute. They must have wanted to strangle him when they saw what they were up against.

Ahead of them, a flock of small, long-legged birds skittered across the glassy sand flats, came to a sudden stop, then raced off on a fresh heading, like panic in strict formation.

“Sanderlings.”

Far from evading journalists, Vanags had lusted to catch their ear, which was bad news for Lucy. She hated people who tempered the facts to fit the story, but the whole point of the GQ piece was supposed to be tracking down the famously shy and elusive historian. It was going to be tricky in the extreme to tell the truth and still have a story worth telling.

“I got to hand it to them. The CollierParnell people sure know their stuff. Six hundred thousand in hardback, jeepers! Guess how many copies my Yalta book sold in toto?” Vanags had a gruff, chirruping laugh.

Aiming diplomatically high, Lucy said, “Three thousand?”

“Five hundred and fifty. But that was the UW Press,” Vanags said, as if the geniuses at CollierParnell would have sold a million. “Took me eight years to write that book. I did the boy book in a month.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It seemed dead easy at the time. Scribble, scribble, scribble, like I was on automatic pilot or using a planchette. It pretty much wrote itself, with just the occasional shove from me. I never knew I had all that stuff in my memory. It was like whenever I sat down to write, more little doors would open inside my head. Every night I’d read what I’d written during the day to Minna, like a bedtime story, and that kept me going the next day — Minna had to have her story.”

“But she must have known most of it already.”

“Funny thing, she didn’t. I never talked to her about those times — hardly ever thought much about them myself, to be honest. Everything was news to her. A lot of it was news to me.”

“How did you—”

“Hello!” Vanags had veered suddenly off to the side. “Now what would you call that ?”

The thing at his feet was the size of a football, hump shaped, the color of congealed blood. Lucy heard Vanags’ knees creak as he squatted down to get a better look. Whatever it was, it was the sort of object that Lucy would’ve given a wide berth to, belonging to the same unpleasant category as condoms, jellyfish, worm crap. But Vanags was fascinated by his find, which he prodded experimentally, as if to find out whether it would bite.

“That,” he said, “is really something else,” and rolled it over on its hump, exposing a sandy reddish underside.

“It’s incredibly ugly,” Lucy said.

“Ugly?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Sort of like a giant red potato bug.”

“My first thought was armadillo, I don’t know why.”

“Turtle?”

“Touch it.”

Lucy bent down and reached out a reluctant finger. It felt — as she had known it would — fuzzy and slimy in the nastiest possible combination. Leathery flesh or hard shell? It might be either. “D’you think it’s some sort of mollusk?”

“Mollusk.” Vanags savored the word. “Seems on the big side for a mollusk to me.” His own manikinishness made the whatever-it-was look enormous.

“You know those gourd things that people bring back from like the Seychelles?”