Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

That was all far away, but seeing this towering windowless building at the edge of the clearing, I understood why we had come here — to build Fat Boy, to make ice.

This was the distant empty place that Father had always spoken about. Here he could make whatever he pleased and not have to explain why to anyone. There was no Polski here to say "Vumble, vumble." Father said, "You look at Jeronimo and you can't tell what century it is. This is part of your original planet, with people to match. And you're wondering why I gave that missionary the bum's rush?"

Father had found his wilderness.

But the people were afraid of Fat Boy. It started with Francis Lungley. He said he heard noises in it at night. Mr. Maywit said it had a smell, not a machine smell but something like tiger breath. "They's bats inside," Ma Kennywick said, which was true. "He got twenty-two eyes at night," Mr. Haddy said, which was not true. They all watched it anxiously, as if it were a dangerous monster. No one would go inside unless Father went first, but Father had a habit of singing inside, and this frightened everyone. Mr. Harkins said one morning that it was gone. We ran out of the house and saw it was there. He said, "It just come back." The Zambus still heard noises in it. They were voices. Witches, they said.

Father told them to calm down.

"This isn't something to be afraid of," he said. "It isn't new. It isn't even an invention." But they were still afraid.

"It's a marvel, but it's not magic. People call me an inventor. I'm not an inventor. Look, what am I doing here?"

"Spearmints," Mr. Maywit said. He had got the word from Mr. Haddy.

"I'll tell you what I'm doing — what anyone who invents anything is doing. I'm magnifying."

Hammering the shoulders of a boiler, talking as he worked, Father said that most invention was either adaptation or magnification.

"Take the human body," he said. That contained all the physics and chemistry we needed to know. The best inventions were based on human anatomy. He himself had two patents on ideas he had plagiarized from the body — his Self-Sealing Tank and his Metal Muscle. He said there was no better piece of engineering than the ball-and-socket joint in the human hip. Computer technology was just a clumsy way of making a brain, but the central nervous system was a million times more complicated.

"Insulation? Look at fatty tissue!" You had to study natural things. Anyone who took a good look at an alligator or a hicatee could make an armored vehicle. The natural world showed man what was possible. In a world without birds there would be no airplanes. "Airplanes are just magnified sparrows — they're crascos with leg room."

The Zambus stared at Father, and the others listened twitchily to this man who the harder he worked the more he talked.

"What's a savage?" he said. "It's someone who doesn't bother to look around and see that he can change the world."

Everyone looked around and said this was so.

Father went on to say that savagery was seeing and not believing you could do it yourself, and that that was a fearful condition. The man who saw a bird and made it into a god, because he could not imagine flying himself, was a savage of the most basic kind. There were tribes of people who did not have the sense to build huts. They went around naked and caught double pneumonia. And yet they lived in the same neighborhood as birds that made nests and jack rabbits that dug holes. So these people were savages of utter worthlessness who did not have the imagination to come in out of the rain.

"I'm not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I'll give you the best one I know. Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your sandwich. That's about as low as you can go."

Ma Kennywick's laugh went heck-heck, and Mr. Haddy said he had never heard of cheese squirting out of a can.

"Like shaving cream," Father said. "Comes out like Reddi-wip. Disgusting. The ozone layer? It eats it up. And there's four things wrong with it — the processed cheese itself, the squirt, the can, and the sandwich."

He was still hammering the boiler.

He said, "I never made anything that did not exist before in a similar form. I just chose something, or part of something, and made it bigger — like my valves and my Metal Muscle and my Self-Sealer. I got the idea from human anatomy — heart valves, striated muscle, stomach lining. Listen, I made gas tanks punctureproof! But it was just a question of scale and application, and — let's face it — improvement. I mean, doing a slightly better job than God."

Whenever Father mentioned God, the people in Jeronimo glanced at the sky and looked very guilty and ashamed, and squinted as if they expected thunder. Father saw this and changed the subject.

"People talk about the invention of the wheel. What's so wonderful about the wheel? It's nothing compared to ball bearings, but there are ball bearings in nature — you've got a rudimentary one in each hip! The development of lenses? All optical inventions are plagiarisms — of the human eye — though I admit the human eye is pretty inferior by comparison."

Mr. Haddy said he had guessed that before. It was all eyes and noses going by different names. And the cranes and derricks on the pier at La Ceiba were the same as arms, except bigger and roustier.

"You're getting the idea," Father said. "And what's this?"

He had finished hammering the boiler and was dragging it inside Fat Boy.

"That is a spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. "And you ain't catch me in there."

"It's a human's insides," Father said. "Its entrails and vitals. Its brisket. Digestive tract. Respiration. Circulatory system. Fatty tissue. And why build it? Because it's an imperfect world! And that's why I do what I do. And that's why I don't believe in God — stop looking up, people! — because if you can make improvements, that doesn't say much for God, does it?"

But no one replied, and no one dared to go into Fat Boy alone. It was dark and too cool and full of iron pipes. No windows, the insulation made it clammy, its darkest corners muttered.

"It's nothing to be scared of Father said, looking at me. I knew what was coming. He buzzed a rivet at me. "Charlie's not scared. Want to see him climb to the top?"

The faces in the clearing flashed at me like clocks.

"He wunt get out alive," Francis Lungley said.

"That's an ignorant remark," Father said.

Clover said, "Dad, why is Charlie shaking like that?"

"Charlie is not shaking."

So I had to obey.

I had been working the bellows. I dropped it and wiped my hands and looked at all the clock faces. They were saying three-fifteen with their worried squints, and I wondered why. Some were fixed on me, others on Father. If they had not looked so flat and fearful I would have felt better about going into Fat Boy. But they worried my guts.

I said, "Oh, rats," and went in.

Father banged the door after me and cut off most of the daylight. All I could see, through the floor joists that had yet to be planked, was the sun shining dustily down between the cracks in the hatchway door.

It was like being in a monster body, under the cold lips of its stomach tank. Iron pipes rose sideways around the walls. Greasy with sealer and smelling of fresh welds, they had the egg stink of fart gas and meat turned to mud, and the slippery look of human waterworks. Where the cracks of sun lighted some rusty pipes, I could see how these reddened blisters looked like flesh. The smallest movement of my feet made a booming belly echo. Organs was a good word.

A week before, I had scaled the outside with ease. But this was my first time inside, alone, with the door shut, in the dark, making for the top. I gulped my panic and looked up — the way up was the way out. I started climbing the pipes, through the midsection, from the tanks Father called kidneys, across the rusty gizzard, to the steel tube he called the gullet. The only sounds that penetrated the walls were Clover's and April's yells as they played with the Maywit kids — in the sunshine.