Calypso(19)

Leviathan



As I grow older, I find that the people I know become crazy in one of two ways. The first is animal crazy—more specifically, dog crazy. They’re the ones who, when asked if they have children, are likely to answer, “A black Lab and a sheltie-beagle mix named Tuckahoe.” Then they add—they always add—“They were rescues!”

The second way people go crazy is with their diet. My brother, Paul, for instance, has all but given up solid food, and at age forty-six eats much the way he did when he was nine months old. His nickname used to be the Rooster. Now we call him the Juicester. Everything goes into his Omega J8006—kale, carrots, celery, some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees—and it all comes out dung-colored and the texture of applesauce. He’s also taken to hanging upside down with a neti pot in his nose. “It’s for my sinuses,” he claims.

Then there’s all his disease prevention, the things that supposedly stave it off but that the drug companies don’t want you knowing about. I’ve heard this sort of thing from a number of people over the years. “Cancer can definitely be cured with a vegan diet,” a friend will insist, “only they want to keep it a secret.” In this case the “they” that doesn’t want you to know is the meat industry, or “Big Meat.”

“If a vegan diet truly did cure cancer, don’t you think it would have at least made the front page of the New York Times Science section?” I ask. “Isn’t that a paper’s job, to tell you the things ‘they’ don’t want you to know?”

Paul insists that apricot seeds prevent cancer but that the cancer industry—Big Cancer—wants to suppress this information, and has quietly imprisoned those who have tried to enlighten us. He orders in bulk and brought a jarful to our house at the beach one late May afternoon. They’re horribly bitter, these things, and leave a definite aftertaste. “Jesus, that’s rough,” my father said after mistaking one for an almond. “How many do you have in a day?”

Paul said four. Any more could be dangerous, since they have cyanide in them. Then he juiced what I think was a tennis ball mixed with beets and four-leaf clovers.

“Add some strawberries and I’ll have a glass as well,” my sister Lisa said. She’s not convinced about the cancer prevention but is intrigued by all the weight our brother has lost. When he got married in 2001, he was close to 200 pounds—which is a lot if you’re only five foot two. Now he was down to 135. It’s odd seeing him thin again after all these years. I expected him to look the way he did when he was twenty, before he ballooned up, and while he’s the same physical size as he was back then, his face has aged and he now looks like that kid’s father. It’s as if a generation of him went missing.

Part of Paul’s weight loss can be attributed to his new liquid diet, but I think that exercise has more to do with it. He bought a complicated racing bike and rides it while wearing what looks like a Spider-Man costume and the type of cycling shoes that have cleats on them. One day that May, as I walked to the post office, he pedaled past without recognizing me. His face was unguarded, and I felt I was seeing him the way other people do, at least superficially: this boyish little man with an icicle of snot hanging off his nose. “Mornin’,” he sang as he sped by.

It’s ridiculous how often you have to say hello on Emerald Isle. Passing someone on the street is one thing, but you have to do it in stores as well, not just to the employees who greet you at the door but to your fellow shoppers in aisle three. Most of the houses that face the ocean are rented out during the high season, and from week to week the people in them come from all over the United States. Houses near the sound, on the other hand, are more commonly owner-occupied. They have landscaped yards, and many are fronted by novelty mailboxes. Some are shaped like fish, while others are outfitted in cozies that have various messages—BLESS YOUR HEART or SANDY FEET WELCOME!—printed on them.

The neighborhoods near the sound are so Southern that people will sometimes wave to you from inside their houses. Workmen, hammers in hand, shout hello from ladders and half-shingled roofs. I’m willing to bet that the local operating rooms are windowless and have doors that are solid wood. Otherwise the surgeons and nurses would feel obliged to acknowledge everyone who passed down the hall, and patients could possibly die as a result.



While the sound side of the island feels like an old-fashioned neighborhood, the ocean side is more like an upscale retirement community. Look out a street-facing window on any given morning, and you’d think they were filming a Centrum commercial. All these hale, silver-haired seniors walking or jogging or cycling past the house. Later in the day, when the heat cranks up, they purr by in golf carts, wearing visors, their noses streaked with sunblock. If you were a teenager, you likely wouldn’t give it much thought, but to my sisters and me—people in our mid-to late fifties—it’s chilling. That’ll be us in, like, eight years, we think. How can that be when only yesterday, on this very same beach, we were children?

Of course, the alternative is worse. When my mother was the age that I am now, she couldn’t walk more than ten steps without stopping to catch her breath. And stairs—forget it. In that regard, our father is her opposite. At ninety-one, the only things wrong with him are his toes. “My doctor wants to cut one off, but I think he’s overreacting,” he said on the second morning of our vacation. The sun shone brightly through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and he was sitting shirtless at the kitchen table on the side of the house that Hugh and I share, wearing black spandex shorts.