Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

Watching Oliver, I have learned still more. Lucy has put a rock in his tank, a rudimentary shelter, and Oliver will dig beneath it, scooping armfuls of pebbles to one side. Then he will pour his body into the hole he has made. Gradually he will alter his color and texture, becoming invisible by degrees. When Lucy taps three times on the lid, however — a signal to indicate mealtime — he will balloon upward, a rabbit conjured out of a hat.

I think he has a sense of humor. For a while, Lucy kept a lamp trained on him during the day, an extra measure of heat. But one afternoon, Oliver grew tired of the constant glare. I was on the couch at the time, watching him over the top of my book. Oliver sucked in a mouthful of water. He spouted it upward in a stream, right through the mesh lid. There was a burst of smoke, an acrid smell, and the lamp shorted out.

WE HELD THE Secret Santa a few days before Christmas. As it turned out, not everyone would be present for the holiday itself. Mick, Lucy, and Forest were all planning to return to their homes for a much-needed vacation.

In the morning, we gathered in the living room. I had pulled Lucy’s name out of the hat, which was awkward for me. I considered insisting that I be allowed to pick again, or maybe cornering Mick and begging him to trade. In the end, however, I decided to make a few small presents for Oliver. I saved and squirreled away anything I could picture the octopus playing with in the quiet space of his tank. Now, with everyone watching, Lucy opened my explanatory note, then unwrapped a chain of paperclips, a tiny glass jar, and a ruby-red marble. She lifted each object into the air and examined it. She got to her feet and gave me a one-armed hug, her body as stiff as a board. I honestly couldn’t tell whether she was pleased.

The rest of the gifts were similarly makeshift. A shell pendant on a length of twine. A sand dollar. One of Forest’s shark sketches, stuck into a picture frame that had been salvaged from the mantel-piece. Galen offered up a seal stone — a dark, smooth orb, as heavy as a meteorite. (He has a collection of them in a bucket in his room, amassed over years on the islands.) Mick was the worst. He gave Charlene a can of tuna. There was a great deal of laughter. At lunch that day, Galen wore his new necklace with pride. Charlene insisted upon eating her tuna as a side dish. The conversation was light. Mick, Lucy, and Forest would be leaving as soon as Captain Joe arrived, and they chatted eagerly about what they were looking forward to. For the first time, they were people with somewhere else to go.

AND NOW THERE are three. Charlene, Galen, and I are rattling around Southeast Farallon alone. The temperature has dropped and the wind has picked up — an awful combination. I have found myself envying the elephant seals. They frolic in the icy ocean, bundled up beneath layers of blubber.

Galen appears to be equally immune. He often goes for long walks. I will see him through the window, a dandelion of a man, lean and rangy, topped by a plume of silver. He will wander across Marine Terrace and stroll toward Mussel Flat. Eventually he will disappear on the slopes of Lighthouse Hill. I get the feeling that he is looking for something out there. What, I can’t imagine.

Even among the other biologists here, Galen is unique. He has been on the archipelago for a decade. No one else has ever come close to staying so long. Most people average a couple years at most. What’s more, Galen has never once, in all that time, returned to the mainland — not for a day, not for an hour. This is unusual in the extreme. The others voyage home at regular intervals for the sake of their own sanity. But Galen’s sticking power is legendary. I have heard all about it. Forest, Mick, and Lucy have spun yarns about him, like campfire stories.

Galen does not travel to his hometown for the holidays. He does not take weekends in San Francisco. He has even refused to return to the continent for medical care. Periodically, of course, he has suffered sprains, colds, even pneumonia. Mick took Galen’s temperature once, then begged him to call a helicopter and head straight to the hospital. But Galen demurred. Instead, in a creaking voice interspersed with coughing, he described his symptoms over the radiophone. Captain Joe was dispatched with medicine on board the ferry. (This was a few years ago; Mick told us all about it long after the fact.) Once, Galen broke his wrist while at work on the Janus . He marched away to the cabin, set the bone himself. An hour later, wearing a homemade cast, he headed back to work. Once, while in the kitchen preparing dinner, he got word on the radiophone that his brother had passed away. (This was Forest’s story; he had been with Galen at the time, way back when, and he shared it with the rest of us recently, in a whisper.) The funeral took place somewhere on the mainland. But Galen did not attend. Instead, on the morning his brother was put in the ground, he spent the hours in the lighthouse alone, walking back and forth and staring to the east, as though with a little effort he could see all the way to the cemetery.

Yet Galen’s motivation has always been a mystery. He has appointed himself Lord High Protector of the Farallon Islands, and in keeping with such a weighty title, he has cut himself off entirely from the rest of the world. None of the others have taken their isolation to this extent. They still keep in touch with their families. They head home for big events. They take the time to return to normal life, however briefly.

Even I am not so far gone. I send the occasional postcard to my father. I write letters to you.

OVER THE LAST few days, Charlene and I have bonded. Entombed in a wasteland of rain and mist. Miles from the nearest Christmas tree. We have taken to huddling together on the couch, tucked beneath the blankets we have scavenged from the beds of the biologists now on the mainland. We will play double solitaire or flip through one of Lucy’s bird books, our heads close, trying in vain to glean the differences between the fourteen identical varieties of sparrow listed there. Recently, in a fit of energy, we even got out all the jigsaw puzzles hidden in the back closet. We took over the table, though it soon became clear that each puzzle was missing a significant number of pieces. Undaunted, Charlene and I worked on, overlapping the disparate images in a patchwork quilt — a dolphin’s tail next to a leafy stretch of forest next to a fragment of one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces. When Galen returned hours later, his nose and ears charred red from the chill, we presented him with a frenetic, disconcerting collage: an image put together by a madman.

Throughout the week, Charlene has been sad. I have heard a lot about her family. At Christmas, they chop down a tree together. There is popcorn to be strung, and eggnog to be spiked, and carols to be sung to the neighbors. Though Charlene and her siblings are all in their twenties now, they are still expected to leave out milk and cookies for Santa, which their father will sample during the night, leaving a few crumbs on the plate. Like me, Charlene is too broke to go home this year. As an intern, she can’t even send presents to her family, let alone manage a plane ticket. In my case, the income I have scrounged together has absolutely no wiggle room for luxuries. Room and board are covered, but vacations are outside my scope.

I don’t mind. The islands are where I want to be.

A few days ago, on an icy morning, Charlene and I decided to clean the cabin. Galen had disappeared right after dawn, throwing on a hat and fishing his binoculars out of the bureau. Charlene swept, and I mopped. She dusted, and I wiped down the windows. All the time, however, she was acting peculiar. As we beat the dust out of the rugs, as we scrubbed the kitchen sink, she kept turning to me, pausing, then moving away again. Clearly there was something on her mind.