My Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
PRAISE FOR
My Ishmael
“My Ishmael isn’t just a sequel to the original. Instead, the original must be seen as a springboard for this new penetrating look into the machinery of our own culture, with all the drama and intrigue that a culture’s history has to offer.”
—Lance Pierce, Editor, Illusions Magazine
“[An] intellectually dynamic tale … Quinn’s intention is to stimulate discussion, and he succeeds.”
—Booklist
‘I’m crazy about any book that can get people, especially young people, excited about ideas. And that’s just what Quinn has done with his writing.… [He] has an amazing story to tell.”
—Lois Blinkhorn, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“My Ishmael … is a lesson in the evolution of modern society.”
—The Rocky Mountain News
“Quinn engagingly presents an antidote to a fundamental flaw of our culture, invoking a law in human history that can halt our civilization’s plunge toward planetary catastrophe.”
—Lit Notes
PRAISE FOR
The Story of B
“The author writes a facile, clear prose, and the ideas he wants to discuss are admittedly important. Quinn is a provocative thinker.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Continuing the thought-provoking philosophical construct that he set up in Ishmael, Quinn provides an even deeper and more wide-ranging story. The Story of B is enormously readable, with several shocking plot twists that help mold what could have been just a treatise into a good story. A must for fans of Ishmael, this disturbing, intelligent book will also attract new readers.”
—Booklist
“One of the most important storytellers of our age, Daniel Quinn, in The Story of B, continues the journey begun so beautifully with Ishmael. Whether or not you agree with every word, there is no doubt that ‘B’ offers us a unique opportunity—to think together about the unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that have shaped our culture over the past 10,000 years and that will, if they remain unquestioned, keep us on a path that seems increasingly unsustainable.”
—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline
PRAISE FOR
Ishmael
“From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories—the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.”
—Jim Britell, Whole Earth Review
“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet … laid out for us with an originality and a clarity few would deny.”
—The New York Times Book Review
BOOKS BY DANIEL QUINN
Ishmael
My Ishmael
Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest
The Story of B
A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife
(with Tom Whalen)
This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
MY ISHMAEL
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published December 1997
Bantam trade paperback edition / October 1998
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1997 by Daniel Quinn.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-35803 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56984-4
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1_r1
Many persons, inspired by Ishmael, have inspired me. This book is dedicated to three of them: Rachel Rosenthal, Ray C. Anderson, and Alan Thornhill (with special thanks to Howie Richey, the architect of Mokonzi Nkemi’s revolution, and to author James Burke, whose books and columns brought to my attention some of the connections noted in the chapter entitled “Revolutionaries”).
Readers familiar with the work of Richard Dawkins, especially in The Selfish Gene, will easily recognize the debt owed to him in these pages—a debt I most humbly and gratefully acknowledge here.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Hello There
Room 105
I Take on The Ape
We Lurch To The Starting Line
The Daydream
Meet Mother Culture
The people of The Curse
“Your Culture”
The History of Man in 17 Seconds
Tunes and Dancers
The Parable Examined
A visit to Calliope
Calliope, Part II
Intermission
The Fertile Crescent
The Crescent, Part II
A Goddamned Pride Thing
School Daze
School Daze II
Unschooling The World
Wealth Taker Style
Wealth, Leaver Style
Less Is Not Always More
My God, It Isn’t Me!
Revolutionaries
A Look Into The Future
The Man From Africa
Getting Me Ready
En Route
Lukambo Owana
Mokonzi Nkemi
Feats of Timing
Farewell, My Ishmael
Life Goes On
Alan’s Ishmael
The Waiting Ends
Author’s Note
About the Author
Hello There
I think it’s pretty lousy to wake up at age sixteen and realize you’ve already been screwed. Not that there’s anything terrifically unusual about getting screwed at this age. It seems like everyone inside fifty miles is bent on doing you in. But not many sixteen-year-olds get screwed in this particular way. Not many have the opportunity to get screwed this way.
I’m grateful, I really am.
But this story is not about me at age sixteen. This is about something that happened when I was twelve. That was a painful time in my life.
My mother was deciding she might as well go ahead and be a drunk. In the previous three or four years she wanted me to think she was just a social drinker. But she figured I must know the truth by now, so why go on pretending? She didn’t ask my opinion about it. If she had, I would’ve said, “Please go on pretending, Mom. Especially in front of me, okay?”
But this isn’t a story about my mother. It’s just that you have to understand some of this if you want to understand the rest.
My parents were divorced when I was five, but I won’t bore you with that story. I don’t even know that story, really, because Mom tells it one way and Dad tells it another. (Sound familiar?)
Anyway, Dad remarried when I was eight. Mom almost did the same, but the guy turned out to be a creep, so she skipped it. Along about in there, she started putting on weight big time. Luckily, she already had a good job. She heads up the word-processing operation at a big law firm downtown. And then she took to “stopping for a drink after work.” This got to be a pretty long stop.
All the same, she rolled out of bed every morning at seven-thirty, no matter what. And I think she made it a rule not to start drinking before the end of the business day. Except on weekends, of course—but I won’
t go into that either.
I was not a happy girl.
In those days I thought it might help if I played the Dutiful Daughter. When I got home from school, I tried to put the house back to the way Mom would have wanted it if she cared anymore. Mostly this meant cleaning up the kitchen. The rest of the house stayed pretty neat. But neither of us had time to tackle the kitchen before heading off to work and school.
Anyway, one day as I was gathering up the newspaper, something in the want-ad section caught my eye. It read:
TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
This was followed by a room number and the name of a ratty old office building downtown.
It struck me as weird that a teacher would be seeking a pupil. It just didn’t make any sense. The teachers I know, seeking a pupil would be like a dog seeking a flea.
Then I took another look at the second sentence, Must have an earnest desire to save the world. I thought, Wow, this guy doesn’t want much.
The crazy thing was that this teacher ought to be pitching his services like everyone else, and he wasn’t. It was like a help-wanted ad. It was like the teacher needed the pupil, not the other way around. A shiver started at the back of my neck, and the hair stood up all over my head.
“Wow,” I said, “I could do this. I could be this guy’s pupil. I could be useful!”
Something like that. It sounds silly now, but this ad hooked into my dreams. I knew where the building was, and all I had to remember was the room number. But I tore the ad out anyway and put it in a drawer in my room. That way if I fell down, hit my head, and became an amnesiac, I’d still find it sitting there someday.
It must have been a Friday night, because the next morning I lay in bed thinking about it. Having a daydream about it, actually.
I’ll get to the daydream later.
Room 105
The good news was that Mom didn’t try to keep me on a short leash. She didn’t keep herself on a short leash, so maybe she figured she had no business keeping me on one. Anyway …
After breakfast I told her, “I’m going out,” and she said, “Okay.”
Not “Where’re you going?” Or “When’ll you be back?” Just “Okay.”
I took a bus downtown.
We live in a pretty decent little city. (I’m not going to say where exactly.) You can stop at a red light without getting car-jacked. Drive-by shootings are rare. No snipers on the roofs. Like that. So I didn’t give a second thought to going downtown on a Saturday morning by myself.
I knew the building mentioned in the ad. It was the Fair-field. A loser uncle of mine once had an office there. He chose it because it was in a good location but cheap. In other words, crummy.
The lobby brought back memories. It looked just the way it smelled, like wet dogs and cigars. It took me a while to figure out where to go. There was just one bank of offices on the ground floor, and Room 105 wasn’t in it. I finally found it at the back, by the loading dock, facing the freight elevator.
I said to myself, This can’t be right. But there it was, Room 105.
I said to myself, What am I doing here, anyway? This door’s not going to be unlocked on a Saturday. But it was.
I walked into this huge, empty room. Then I took in a lungful of air and was almost knocked down. It wasn’t wet dogs and cigars this time. It was zoo. I didn’t mind that. I like zoos.
But, as I said, the place was empty. There was one sagging bookcase over at the left and one overstuffed chair over at the right. They looked like leftovers from a garage sale or something.
I said to myself, The guy has moved out.
I looked around again. At the high dirty windows overlooking the alley. At the dusty industrial lights hanging from the ceiling. At the peeling walls the color of pus.
Then I said to myself, Okay, I’ll move in.
I think I meant it. Nobody could possibly want this place, could they? So why shouldn’t I have it? I mean, it already had a chair, didn’t it? I could do without the rest for a while.
There was one feature I hadn’t figured out. The chair was facing a big sheet of dark glass in the middle of the right-hand wall. It reminded me of the kind of window witnesses look through to identify suspects in a police lineup. There had to be a room behind it, because there was a door beside the window.
I went over to have a look. I put my nose up against the glass and used my hands to block out the light, and …
I thought it was a movie.
About ten feet back from the glass there was sitting this great huge fat gorilla, munching on a tree twig. He was staring right back at me, and I suddenly knew it was not a movie.
“Yow,” I said, and jumped back.
I was startled but not exactly scared. It seemed like I should be scared. I mean, I knew I’d be screaming my head off if I was a character in a movie. But the gorilla was just sitting there. I don’t know, maybe I was just too dumb to be scared. All the same, I did look over my shoulder to make sure I had a clear shot at the door.
Then I slanted my eyes in to see if the gorilla was staying put. He was. He wasn’t even quivering, or I would have been out of there.
All right. I had to put all this together.
The teacher had not moved out. I mean, no one could move out of a place and forget to take his gorilla along. So the teacher had not moved out. Maybe he had just stepped out. For lunch or something.
And forgot to lock his door. Or something.
The teacher would soon be back. Probably. Maybe.
I looked around again, still trying to figure out what the deal was here.
The room I was in was not a living space—no bed, no kitchen facilities, no storage space for clothes or anything. So the teacher didn’t live there. But obviously the gorilla lived there, in the room on the other side of the glass.
Why? How come?
Well, what the hell, I guess you can keep a gorilla if you want to.
But why keep a gorilla this particular way?
I looked in again and noticed something I’d missed the first time. It was a poster on the wall behind the gorilla. It said:
WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?
Well, I said to myself, that’s an interesting question. It didn’t seem like a very hard one, though. Even at age twelve I knew what was going on in the world. The way we were going, gorillas were not going to be around for very much longer. So the answer was yes. With Man gone, there would be hope for Gorilla.
The ape in the next room grunted, just as if he didn’t think much of my reasoning.
I wondered if the poster was part of the course. The ad in the newspaper said Must have an earnest desire to save the world. That made sense. Saving the world would certainly mean saving gorillas.
But not saving people? That’s what popped into my head. You know what it’s like to have ideas pop into your head. It’s like they come from out of the blue. But this one came from outer space. I mean, I can tell strangers from friends. This was a stranger.
I gave the ape a look. The ape gave me a look—and I knew.
I vanished from that place. That’s how fast I got out of there. One second I was eyeing the gorilla, and the next I was standing out on the sidewalk, breathing hard.
I wasn’t far from the center of town, where a couple of department stores are still hanging on by their fingernails. I headed there, where I’d find some people. I wanted to be around people while I thought about this.
The gorilla had talked to me—inside my own head.
That was what I had to think about.
I didn’t have to wonder if it happened. It happened. I couldn’t make up something like that. And why would I make up something like that? To fool myself?
I went over all this while riding the escalators at Pearson’s. Six floors up. Six floors down. Very soothing. Nobody cares. Nobody bothers you. Nobody notices. At the bottom you have to switch from down to up. Jewelry and notions. Women’s clot
hing. Men’s clothing. Housewares. Toys. Furniture. At the top you have to switch from up to down. Furniture. Toys. Housewares. Men’s clothing. Women’s clothing. Jewelry and notions. All coming at you in restful slow motion.
Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.
I say, You mean, save the world, as in gorillas.
And the gorilla says, But not people?
Where was the teacher while all this was going on?
And what would have gone on if the teacher had been there?
What was the plan? What was the idea?
I could see an exotic teacher having an exotic pet.
A mind-talking ape. Pretty exotic. Yeah.
Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world and be able to put up with a telepathic ape.
Hey—that was me, down to a tee.
I stopped for a Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet.
I Take on The Ape
When I got back to Room 105, I put a hand to the door-knob and an ear to the wood.
And heard a man’s voice.
I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was yards from the door—and facing the wrong way. At least that was the way I pictured it.
“Mumble umble bumble,” he said. “Bum bum umble mumble.”
Silence. A full minute of silence.
“Um bumble umble bum,” the man went on. “Bum bum mumble um bumble.”
Silence. Only half a minute this time.
“Umble?” the man asked. “Umble bumble um mumblebum.”
And so on. Exciting listening. It went on and on.
I thought of just walking in. It was an appealing idea—as an idea.
I thought of coming back later, but that wasn’t even an appealing idea. Who knew what I might miss?
I hung in. The minutes dragged by like rainy afternoons. (I put that in a writing assignment once. The minutes dragged by like rainy afternoons. The teacher wrote Good!! in the margin. What a creep.)
Suddenly the man’s voice was right by the door.
“I don’t know,” he was saying. “I really don’t. But I’ll give it a try.”
