Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Algal blooms," Flail said. That was another thing. He used oddly poetic terms in this dire news. "A cocktail of poisons," "a salad of rotting vegetation," "a plume of effluent." Another was "strange fruit."

And still his refrain was "We live in wolfish times."

It distressed me when he concentrated his attention on Rose. I wanted to shove him aside. I didn't mind his gabbling at me, but something diabolical darkened his eyes when he looked at my daughter, and I could see that she felt it too, the darkness like a bad smell.

"What is that man for?" she screeched, then clamped her mouth

shut.

He winced at the remark; he was unused to anyone challenging him. Rose's small size seemed to enrage him. He was never more furious or animated than when he was among weak or simple people, because he was a bully. Hobart Flail was an enemy of the underdog. If he saw a football team struggling to win on TV he said, "They'll lose." He loved world news for all the disasters that were reported. Earthquakes. Cyclones. Fires. Massacres. Plagues. He was well acquainted with the horrors of Rwanda and Ethiopia and Chernobyl. He knew the death tolls.

"I predicted all that."

Years before, he had called attention to the logging that had caused rivers to be silted up and the terrible floods that had resulted. People's stupidity had brought them diseases and war. He had previewed it all; few people had listened.

The world's major religions were corrupt, he said. "The Vatican has the largest collection of pornography in the world."

Tunnels linked convents with monasteries; the cellars of nunneries were used for orgies. Some of his stories predicted the disinterring of

thousands of strangled fetuses that had been buried alongside convents. Politicians were cheats, the police were crooks, sales clerks were thieves, waiters spat in your soup before they served it, waitresses were whores, the unions were run by the Mob, the Mob was run by the Vatican, the Vatican by the Freemasons — assassins all of them, funded by the drug trade. All of this would be revealed in the near future.

"We live in wolfish times."

If you were incautious enough to say, "Lovely day," he became agitated and would flail and reply, "You think so?"

"Ever been to Michigan?" he said. "There's some real funny smells in Michigan. Chevron had a spill they admitted to, but there are other smells. No one knows what they are, and I know they're bad."

He spoke, even in Hawaii, of dust particles in the air, of tainted water, adulterated food, carcinogens in peanut butter, mouse droppings in the Happy Meals he saw me bringing home to Rose.

After my first encounter with him, I asked Buddy Hamstra who he was. Buddy said, "He's one brick short of a load," and just laughed. "Don't listen!" The man was harmless. He stayed at the Hotel Honolulu for two weeks every winter. He had been born somewhere in the Midwest to elderly parents and had polio as a child. He had not been expected to live. His recovery had been slow, and, bedridden, he had received his education at home, from those old, fretful people. For his first seventeen years he had not left the house. His parents died while he was still housebound. He

was diagnosed with clinical depression. He refused all medication. "Side effects!" Even so, he was afflicted by severe weight loss, liver damage, migraines.

None of this stopped him from prophesying a catastrophic future to anyone who would listen — arson and mayhem and decay. "Wolfish times." Understandably, no one listened. I first named him "Doctor Wolfpits" and then "Hobart Flail."

Nothing would induce him to take his medication. Rose was afraid of him, and Sweetie just laughed uneasily and walked the other way. Unless a guest was a public nuisance, you tolerated his eccentricity. I could not eject him for his ridiculous predictions, nor the way he dressed, though both made me uncomfortable. He wore dark long-sleeved shirts, heavy wool trousers, and fuzzy socks with his sandals. He was rumpled; he sweated. Why did he come to Hawaii?

"While it lasts," Hobart Flail said. "A little more global warming and one bad storm and the whole of Whyee is history."

We laughed and at last he went away. But that man ScoobyDoo, who nicked his shin on the reef? He lost his leg.

Those plow-shaped metal detectors that old men on beaches use to find lost jewelry and money in the sand — the kind you wish you had, which looks so simple and profitable, "like an advanced form of agriculture," said Hobart Flail, who told me this story — the man in question had one. He was making his way down Ala Moana Beach, where the water is calm because of the reef. This was Glen Cornelius, from St. Louis, a shoe salesman, on his second day in Hawaii. He was the scuba diver we called Scooby-Doo.

"I dropped my key chain in the water," a small boy said, approaching

him.

Glen glanced down at the squinting sun-struck boy, who was about the same age as his own son, Brett, a nine-year-old.

"This thing doesn't work in the water," Glen said, the metal detector in his hand.

"You've got a mask and flippers."

The kid was observant: the mask and flippers were in Glen's scuba diver's backpack, which, constructed of strong mesh so they would drip dry, made them visible but not obvious in the bulgy netting.

"It's a red key chain," the small boy said.

Glen had found the usual junk with his metal detector — buttons, foreign coins, rusty nails — but he hoped for more. He had brought the metal detector from St. Louis. It was new and worked perfectly, emitting a whistle when buried metal was nearby. You could strike gold. Alice, his wife, had taken Brett to a movie — that dinosaur one. He had the afternoon free, for treasure hunting and maybe a swim later.

"I was out swimming," the boy said, "and reached into my pocket for my earplugs and pulled out my key chain and dropped it."

Glen wanted to think that if Brett had asked a stranger to help him, the stranger would oblige, especially if it was as serious as a bunch of keys. So he told the boy to mind his metal detector and earphones, and he put on his mask and flippers and swam out to the reef where one hunk jutted like a shark's fin, which the boy had indicated.

The seawater sloshing across the reef was soupy with suspended sand flecks, which blunted and twisted the light. The flattopped reef itself, now skeletal, like dead pitted rock, was coated with the mouse fur of accumulated algae. Glen dived deep three times and saw nothing, not even the bottom. Some yellow antlers of coral drew him onward, for their shape alone, nothing to do with the keys, but when he got close he saw the silly thing under that cluster of antlers. He dived down — the key chain was lodged within the prickly prongs — and after a few tries he plucked them from among the antlers. Short of breath now, he thrashed to get to the surface, pushed his arms, kicked his legs, and with one of the kicks felt a sudden pinch against his shin. Swimming back to the beach, he saw that he had nicked himself, but he was smirking at something else. There were no keys on the key chain.

"I said it was a key chain — I didn't say it had keys." The boy spoke in a pedantic monotone, a bored indignation, as though he had been unfairly contradicted by this simple-minded adult.

"Where's my metal detector?"

"Your brother took it."

"What? I don't have a brother," Glen said, and then howled an obscenity.

He was still furious, muttering swears, when he met Alice later, but she reassured him, telling him he had done the right thing. He had volunteered to help the boy. It was not the boy's fault that some sneak had stolen his metal detector. The police had listened sympathetically but had not held out much hope for the recovery of his stolen goods. They repeated what Alice had said: It could have been worse. And instead of challenging them, Glen saw the logic of this. Yes, it could have been worse.