The Last Island

by Joan J. K. Groves

  Then I began talking in my head to my reflection as seen in the polish and clarity of the tank. Since people do things in their best interest, what is the obsessive fixation that is in the Deacon’s fascination?

  I drew a conclusion but the conclusion was not intelligent, the conclusion was not even sensible and the Deacon was intelligent and the Deacon was sensible; however, truer descriptive adjectives of the Deacon were shrewd and cunning. The Deacon was more cunning than he was sensible and the Deacon was more shrewd then he was intelligent. And, therein was the resolution to the riddle of the tank. The answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is not the smile of the Sphinx. The resolution is man’s face with a smile and head in stone in the middle of the desert. The smile is just for sages to contemplate for millennia and for fools to blabber about for millennia with both sages and fools coming to the same resolution.

  The giant goliath tank that was colossal enough to contain a behemoth-type leviathan was the deceptive smile that I saw, finally.

  The drowned yet living buddy—and it exceeded the rationale of the genus and species of reason. The truth of the Deacon was as unidentifiable in the tank as that stone-faced smile of the Sphinx. I knew that the tank was a lie.

  We did not see Manta in the reflection of the tank. We did not hear Manta enter. Without introduction, he began. It was not his usual sing-song voluminous voice but an almost inaudible chant.

  “The Deacon found Ol’Joe and the Capt’n in the locker.”

  The thread that was knitting our fates together was becoming ever more heavy-gauge. We were without emotion.

  John Henry began, “There is the Holy Land that draws people together.”

  “Not in peace,” I said.

  She ignored me. “It has us all seized in its net and is drawing us ever closer downward. You may not admit or concede this and it may not be fact and it may not be mystical but that is the truth of it. And, I am scared—”

  Manta and I both interrupted at the same time. She did not acknowledge either one of us.

  Manta looked into his heart and found his truth. I looked into my mind and found my truth. She looked at both of us and fathomed a certain uncertainty. We were lifeless.

  23

  In time, I was by myself and there was an inescapable truth to the situation. It was that only the divers searching for it met with death. Many had dived and were none the worse for the experience and, as a matter of fact, all were joyful in having survived the dive.

  “Have a good dive?”

  I had once put the question to a green-finned diver on his return to the island from a dive to the U-Boat.

  “Has there ever been a bad dive?” he exclaimed.

  And, it was true. Any dive you survive is a good dive. This was my feeling. But, there was a joy in his voice as if he had opened his first Christmas present and had gotten exactly what he had desired for three hundred sixty-four days.

  The U.S. navy was not looking for it. They were looking for atomic fuel pellets and plans for an atomic device. Not looking for it they found nothing. The Russians did not know what to look for but dove because the U.S. navy dove. Not looking for it they found nothing. The Nazis and the stranger were looking for it and found death. The Deacon’s friend, also knowing what it was, found it and also found death. The Deacon knew it and found it but survived. The others survived by grace. Knowing not what it was, all I thought about was the Deacon. The Deacon was the whole, the total, the sum of my thinking.

  Everything about the Deacon: his character, his vocabulary, and his actions, were minimal but there was nothing trifling about the Deacon.

  His residence was also very true to his character. He had all that he needed and needed all he had and everything was functional, purposeful, and effective. The observation and conclusion that was most contrary and prejudicial was that everything was always so neat and so tidy. I always thought it strangely inexplicable that he was so fastidious. I never did question him about the matter. I just assumed that he had an enduring fear that his mother would drop in without invitation and he just wanted to be prepared for her inspection. There were times that I imagined the Deacon’s mother and it made me straighten up and fly right in my own housekeeping.

  “I am going over to the Deacon’s,” John Henry commented.

  “For what?” Manta asked.

  “I do not know. All I know is if anybody knows anything; it is the Deacon.”

  “You are telling me that the Deacon is the answer,” I questioned her.

  “I really do not know. I know that I don’t know. Maybe, if he is not the answer, he is part of the question,” she said.

  If there is any innocence in truth, then this was the most truthful statement ever spoken.

  If you are fortunate, you meet a person like the Deacon once in your life. It is also true that if you are fortunate you never meet a Deacon in your life. The character of the Deacon is elemental. Not precious like platinum, gold, or silver but more valuable like lead, iron, or copper.

  In a gulp, the Deacon could observe, analyze, and decide the relevant method, mode, and means. I had always assumed that the Deacon had taught himself for there was such surety in his being as if he were the teacher and the student in a Zen moment—as if, after having made the mistake and then making the self-correction, he was satisfied in the final solution. There was nothing loose, dangling, or sloppy in his thinking, in his actions, or in his way of life. Discipline, order, nor regiment was the Deacon’s lifestyle nor was it worship of all things correct and proper; it was that like all refined elements the dross of his life had been burned off, disregarded, and discounted.

  I did not know if the Deacon was the question or if the Deacon was the answer but I did know that if there were a question, I would ask the Deacon and if there were an answer, I would be astute to listen to his voice.

  We confessed our fears of what to us seemed the only course of events. As there is no way to walk off an island, there seemed no way on this island except to the Deacon. Question or answer, right or wrong—the pathway led to the Deacon’s door and then to him.

  On a small island, there is commonality in where you live due to the smallness of the land mass and how you live is due to the limitedness of choice. What was true for the other citizens of the island was true for the Deacon, also. It was not that it was different for it was the same; it was that it was somehow different because it was the same.

  Manta, John Henry, and I stood there like three little children in front of the old Hag’s house on Halloween wondering if we had enough nerve to ask for sweets.

  Inside and seated Manta was drinking water, John Henry was drinking iced tea, and I was nursing a frozen coke while reaching for a cream-filled cupcake. If any of us had been dressed, we could have passed for citizens of polite society but, as it was, we were natives of the bush. Strange, I had been in the company of the Deacon and I had even been in his home by myself and I had been there with friends but I assumed a certainty and he simply did not embarrass me by going below or going above my expectations of him. Not knowing what to expect, I could not have expected more of the Deacon.

  Manta was relaxed. John Henry was leaking energy. I was in a ready state. The Deacon looked at us with his back to the window and, with the cadence and tone of a Baptist preacher beginning a sermon, he began low and slow.

  “He was alive—once. He was very much alive. He was like you. He was like me. There is a question: Do we deserve our fate?”

  We all knew that it was a rhetorical comment and so followed his voice with absolute concentration of will.

  “It did not begin with him. It is that he swam into his fate.” He paused and looked into the deep. Then he continued, “Have you ever thought about it?”

  None of us said anything but we looked at each other—it?

  “Whatever happened to it?”

  It?

  “He and I never, and I suppose no one ever, thinks about it but we swam into its effect and he was once alive and
now is not.”

  I thought to myself, What does he mean?

  “The tank and the story are one and the same. The story needed the tank and the tank needed the story.”

  I knew it! I knew it! I said to myself.

  “Both were needed and both had to be a large enough lie to seem true.”

  Well, that makes sense in the non-sensible way of reality.

  But, it was not a lie for he did not profit from it and, after all, there is an ethic to lying and, as it were, the tank and the tall tale were in the fine traditions of yarn-spinning.

  It? It! It. What is it? I waited silently.

  “We found the truth of it. We were not the first. We had never even wondered about it as others have but we literally swam into it.”

  What is it?

  He began again.

  “Manta, you remember when we first arrived on the island?”

  Manta said yes with his eyes.

  “We were just a couple of dive buddies looking for the perfect double dive. We were just having fun. Then we dove the sub. It was fun, at first. With our cute pastel suits, we thought we were something. Then there was a change. That scroll was what ended our fun, that scroll, if only we had never made contact with that scroll. That ship of the damned would not have damned and ended his life and damned my life.”

  Was that it? Was that scroll it? How could a scroll exist underwater for so long? What the—! I couldn’t help thinking.

  “That stupid gold scroll! Why had fate chosen us? Had we chosen our own fate?”

  Gold, okay.

  Gold!

  I dreamed.

  Well, that makes sense.

  The light was behind him. The Deacon sat down. The chair was large and very ornate. The legs had carvings that resembled the legs and paws of a lion. The ornate brow of the chair imparted the illusion of wings. His dreadlocks imparted the impression of a mature lion’s mane.

  I thought to myself, the Deacon is a little girl who is scared of an enchanted trinket.

  The Deacon continued. With his hands clenched over the arm rails of the chair, it was truly the image of the talking Sphinx.

  “The scroll was not it.”

  I thought.

  What the—It is not it!

  “B-A-B-Y-L-O-N,” he spelled.

  “B-A-B-E-L-I-O-N,” he spelled.

  What the—, I thought.

  John Henry and Manta were paralyzed.

  Then he began to address a fifth person in the room but there was no fifth person in the room.

  “Balal means to confuse. Babel, if you wish, means the ‘The Gate of God’. That was where the first great city arose. After exponential millennia, a great city arose overnight from the desolate sands of a waterless dessert. Ur, it was called and it arose overnight. A metropolis constructed, erected, assembled without previous knowledge. And, that is it—where was the previous knowledge base?”

  “It was outside ‘The Gate of God’.”

  John Henry and Manta were now enslaved.

  I thought, It was an old dead city.

  The Deacon continued talking ever more directly at the person who was not there.

  “Ur was not it.”

  What the—, I thought.

  “Outside the Gate of God, Ur, a great city, arose. A master builder’s mind was involved. But how was it possible to have such a complete knowledge on the first attempt? And, he built a city.”

  The Deacon was preaching and John Henry, Manta, and the unobserved one were the congregation.

  But, I did not concentrate on them.

  That sounded familiar. I knew those words. Wait, wait, wait—that’s it! Is he crazy? I thought. He is not serious. He’s mad.

  He cannot mean that is it. I looked at him to detect if there were any sign that would betray him. He was still. He was quiet. He was looking at the one who was not present.

  Then he continued.

  “He took it with him. When he left, he simply took it with him. He picked it up and came through the gate with it in his hand. It is as simple as that.”

  Then I spoke. “You mean to tell me that you believe that? That he picked it up off the ground. It was bitten and he walked away with it. Is that what you are telling me? Is that what you really think? And, is that what caused the fate of those drowned dead men? Is that what you are saying? Is it? Is it?” I questioned him.

  “What I am saying is that there are drowned men out there and some are dead because of it. It did not cause them to die but it caused some of them to drown,” the Deacon said.

  He was certain, now, that I had knowledge. The population of the room was he and I.

  “Men die. Some die out of the plan and design and die due to the fact that they try to force their life through their own desire. That is what happened to my buddy. He wanted it more than he wanted his own life,” the Deacon said.

  “It did not rot,” I said.

  “It came from the other side of ‘The Gate of God’ and it is incorruptible.”

  I was now enslaved and paralyzed.

  The Deacon continued.

  “It was spirited from Ur and hidden away for three generations. It became meaningless but because it did not rot or show corruption from year to year it became a curiosity and was eventually sold for supplies in Egypt. The Egyptians—simple native people at the time—became in days an empire. It was traded for seed. From it the seed of Egypt came that allowed for an Empire. His name in English is Lion. And, it gave him wisdom and the title of the deed to earth. And, he claimed his deed and watered his field with the blood of many people. Being wise, he kept the secret of his wisdom but he kept it in plain sight. There it was in view but the wisdom of it was unknown except to him and he died not telling his heirs.

  “It was there. It became nothing more than a royal relic.

  “Then the wisest of all men realized what it was. Having read an ancient scroll he set out upon a quest to reclaim it for it was his ancestor that had first claimed it by right of ownership. It was in the possession of the Queen of Sheba and was just an artifact. In reverse, as the ancient ones from the east had traded it for seed grain to gain life, she would go east and trade it for his seed to gain life. She desired to be the fertile field of his wisdom.

  “Being the only person with the wisdom of it he used it, he abused it, and he always kept it hidden in the foundation of his great temple under the empty place. It was secure in the empty place of the great foundation stone of the palace.

  “The bargain with the Queen of Sheba was fair because she conceived and bore a son, his seed, from this most wise man, a king. She went west with his seed and it was again in the land of the original possessors.

  “That was the secret of the Sphinx. It allowed for the wisdom of man or it allowed for the behavior of a beast. It never allowed for both. It allowed for a choice—good or evil. It did not allow for one to choose good and evil. Therefore the Sphinx sits in the sands pondering its predicament. The Lamassu has chosen—look upon its face. And, the Griffin with its wings tries to avoid a choice. They are stone. They are protohumanoid minds, after all.

  “In 1899, Koldeway told Schliemann of his findings from the scroll. It was most unwise. Schliemann, wanting to keep it to himself, killed his half-brother Koldeway.

  “Schliemann, although a murderer, was however no fool. He was intelligent and schooled and had done research for decades but his most useful, practical, functional, and valuable trait was that he was a Nazi. And, being a Nazi, he realized a lie when he was told or read one. The lie was the Holy Grail. As the acquisition of Austria and the invasion of Poland was based upon a lie, the Holy Grail was also.

  “The Knights Templar were looking for it. Not the Holy Grail—they were looking for it and a cohort of knights found it.

  “Knowing the authority, supremacy, and dominance that it could be utilized to achieve, the cohort sent out one band of three knights with the cover story of the Holy Grail; another band of three knights was sent out mysteriou
sly in silence; and the last band of three knights simply walked out as common folk with it.

  “Everyone was hunting for the Holy Grail of the first Knights, or perhaps the treasure map of the second group of knights, but the last knights who had it were obvious and with them it was hidden in plain sight. If you can recall, Richard went to the east with a red cross on his shield but came back to the west with a lion—a lion—on his shield.

  “Looking at Richard on horseback, does not he have the appearance of a lamassu?

  “The flames of the inquisition opened closed mouths and what had been a clandestine secret in a dark room was now an open actuality and became the thing of royal desire and royal craving. It was taken to the edge of the realm and then out of the realm and placed in a dark foundation. It was a place in secret and lost from sight. Herr Schliemann uncovered the secret of it and then unearthed it.”

  There was light, a beam highlighting the Deacon’s face, but he did not blink and bathed most comfortably in the rays. The Deacon’s eyes reflected the fullness of the light and the iris of his eyes became the color of root beer with pupils of true blackness.

  “Herr Schliemann has dissolved into the stuff of the ocean and so has his fantasy, as the dreams and fantasies of them all. All the builders of huts, builders of cities, and the builders of empires endeavor to claim it, then clasp it, then control it, and finally it consumes the builders of huts, the builders of cities, and the builders of empires. Some are dust in the desert floors, some are dust of the fields, and some are dust on the floor of the ocean.”

  I knew what it was. I looked at John Henry and then I looked at Manta and I wondered if either or both had come to the fathoming of it.

  We were less than what we had been.

  “Tell me—” John Henry began.

  But the Deacon cut her off and began to speak.