The Best of Gene Wolfe

Death of the Island Doctor

This story took place in the same university I mentioned in the Introduction to Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days.

At this university, there was once a retired professor, a Dr. Insula, who was a little cracked on the subject of islands, doubtless because of his name. This Dr. Insula had been out to pasture for so long that no one could remember anymore what department he had once headed. The Department of Literature said it had been History, and the Department of History said Literature. Dr. Insula himself said that in his time they had been the same department, but all the other professors knew that could not be true.

One crisp fall morning, this Dr. Insula came to the chancellor’s office—to the immense surprise of the chancellor—and announced that he wished to teach a seminar. He was tired, he said, of rusticating; a small seminar that met once a week would be no trouble, and he felt that in return for the pension he had drawn for so many years he should do something to take a bit of the load off the younger men.

The chancellor was in a quandary, as you may well imagine. As a way of gaining time, he said, “Very good! Oh, yes, very good indeed, Doctor! Noble, if I may resort to that rather old-fashioned word, and fully in keeping with that noble spirit of self-sacrifice and—ah—noblesse oblige we have always sought to foster among our tenured faculty. And may I ask just what the subject of your seminar will be?”

“Islands,” Dr. Insula announced firmly.

“Yes, of course. Certainly. Islands?”

“I may also decide to include isles, atolls, islets, holms, eyots, archipelagoes, and some of the larger reefs,” Dr. Insula confided, as one friend to another. “It depends on how they come along, you know. But definitely not peninsulas.”

“I see . . . ,” said the chancellor. And he thought to himself, If I refuse the poor old boy, I’ll hurt him dreadfully. But if I agree and list his seminar as Not for Credit, no one will register and no harm will be done.

Thus it was done, and for six years every catalog carried a listing for Dr. Insula’s seminar on islands, without credit, and in six years no one registered for it.

Now as it happened, the registrar was a woman approaching retirement age, and after registration, for twelve regular semesters and six summer semesters, Dr. Insula came to her to ask whether anyone had registered for his seminar. And there came a time, not in fall but rather in that dreary tag end of summer when it is ninety degrees on the sidewalk and the stores have Halloween cards and the first subtly threatening Christmas ornaments are on display, when she could bear it no longer.

She was bending over her desk making up the new catalog (which would be that last one she would ever do), and though the air-conditioning was supposedly set at seventy-eight, it was at least eighty-five in her office. A wisp of her own gray hair kept falling over her eyes, and the buzz of the electric fan she had bought herself, with her own money, kept reminding her of her girlhood and of sleeping on the screened porch in Atlanta when Mommy and Daddy took her to visit relatives.

And at this critical moment, the hundredth, perhaps, in a long line of critical moments, she came to the section labeled “Miscellaneous” at the very end of the catalog proper, just before the dishonest little biographies of the faculty. And there was Dr. Insula’s NO CREDIT seminar on islands.

A certain madness seized her. Why, mistakes happen all the time, she thought to herself. Why, only last year, the printer changed that lab of Dr. Ettelmann’s to Monday, Grunday, and Friday. Besides, NO CREDIT can’t possibly be right. Who would take a No-credit seminar on islands? Anyway, they really ought to run the airconditioning if they want us to work efficiently.

Almost before she knew it, her pencil had made a short, sharp, vertical line in the Credit Hours column, and she felt a great deal cooler.

So it was that that year when Dr. Insula came to inquire she was able to tell him, with some satisfaction, that two students—a young man and a young woman, as she said, judging from their names, as she said—had in fact enrolled in his seminar.

And when the young man, and later the young woman, came to the Registrar’s Office to ask just where the Friday afternoon seminar on islands was to be held and one of her subregistrars (who naturally did not know) brought them to see her, she was able to explain—twice and with almost equal satisfaction—where it would be. For the good old custom of holding undergraduate seminars in faculty living rooms had fallen so much out of use at the university that Dr. Insula himself and the old registrar were almost the only people who recalled it.

Thus it came to be, on a certain September afternoon when the leaves were just beginning to change from green to brown and red-gold, that the young man and the young woman walked up Dr. Insula’s gritty and rather overgrown walk, and up Dr. Insula’s cracked stone steps, and across Dr. Insula’s shadowy, creaking porch, to knock at Dr. Insula’s water-spotted oak door.

He opened it for them and showed them into a living room that might almost have been called a parlor, so full it was of the smell of dust, and mementos of times gone by, and stiff furniture, and old books. There he seated them in two of the stiff chairs and brought out coffee (which he called java) for the young man and himself, and tea for the young woman. “We used to call this Ceylon tea,” he said. “Now it is Sri Lanka tea, I suppose. The Greeks called it Taprobane, and the Arabs Serendib.”

The young man and woman nodded politely, not quite sure what he meant.

There was Scotch shortbread too, and he reminded them that Scotland is only the northern end of the island of Great Britain, and that Scotland itself embraces three famous island groups, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides. He quoted Thomson to them:

Then he asked the young man if he knew where Thule was.

“It’s where Prince Valiant comes from in the comic strip, I think,” the young man said. “But not a real place.”

Dr. Insula shook his head. “It is Iceland.” He turned to the young woman. “Prince Valiant is supposed to be a peer of Arthur’s realm, I believe. You will recall that Arthur was interred on the island of Avalon. Can you tell me, please, where that is?”

“It is a mythical island west of Ireland,” the young woman said, that being what they had taught her in school.

“No, it is in Somerset. It was there that his coffin was found, in 1191, inscribed: Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futuris. Avalon was also the last known resting place of the Holy Grail.”

The young man said, “I don’t think that’s true history, Dr. Insula.”

“Why it’s not accepted history, I suppose. Tell me, do you know who wrote True History?”

“No one writes true history,” the young man said, that being what they had taught him in school. “All history is subjective, reflecting the perceptions and unacknowledged prejudices of the historian.” After his weak answer about Prince Valiant, he was quite proud of that one.

“Why, then my history is as good as accepted history. And since there really was a King Arthur—he is mentioned in contemporary chronicles—surely it’s more than probable that he was buried in Somerset than in some nonexistent place? But True History was written by Lucian of Samosata.”

He told them of Lucian’s travels to Antioch, Greece, Italy, and Gaul, and this led him to speak of the ships of that time and the danger of storms and piracy, and the enchantment of the Greek isles. He told them of Apollo’s birth on Delos; of Patmos, where Saint John beheld the Apocalypse; and of Phraxos, where the sorcerer Conchis dwelt. He said, “ ‘To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man to paradise.’ ” But because it did not rhyme, the young man and the young woman did not know that he was quoting a famous tale.

At last he said, “But why is it that people at all times and in all places have considered islands unique and uniquely magical? Can either of you tell me that?”

Both shook their heads.

“Very well then. One of you has a small boat, I believe.”

“I do,” the young man said. “It’s an aluminum canoe—you probably saw it on top of my Toyota.”

“Good. You would have no objection to taking your fellow student as a passenger? I have a homework assignment for both of you. You must go to a certain isle I shall tell you of, and when we next meet describe to me what you find magical there.” And he told them how to go down certain roads to certain others until they came to one that was unpaved and had the river for its end, and how from that place they would see the island.

“When we meet again,” he said, “I shall reveal to you the true locations of Atlantis, of High Brasail, and of Utopia.” And he quoted these lines:

“Okay,” the young man said, and he got up and went out.

Dr. Insula rose too, to show the young woman to the door, but he looked so ill that she asked if he were all right. “I am as all right as it is possible for an old man to be,” he told her. “My dear, could you bear one last quotation?” And when she nodded, he whispered:

The young man and the young woman stopped at a delicatessen and bought sandwiches that the young woman paid for, she saying that because the young man was driving, her self-respect (she was careful not to say honor) demanded it. They also bought a six-pack of beer that the young man paid for, he saying that his own self-respect demanded it (he too was careful not to say honor) because she had paid for the sandwiches.

Then they followed the directions Dr. Insula had given them and so came to a sandy riverbank, where they lifted the aluminum canoe from the Toyota and set sail for the little pine-covered island a hundred yards or so downstream.

There they explored the whole place and threw stones into the water, and sat listening to the wind tell of old things among the boughs of the largest pine.

And when they had cooled the beer in the leaf-brown river, and eaten the sandwiches they had brought, they paddled back to the spot where they had parked the Toyota, debating how they could tell Dr. Insula he had been mistaken about the island when they came next week—how they could tell him there was no magic there.

But when the next week came (as the next week always does) and they stood on the shadowed, creaking porch and knocked at the water-spotted oak door, an old woman crossed the street to tell them it was no use to knock.

“He passed on a week ago yesterday,” she said. “It was such a shame. He’d come out to talk to me that morning, and he was so happy because he was going to meet with his students the next day. He must have gone into his garage after that; that was where they found him.”

“Sitting in his boat,” the young woman said.

The old woman nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose you must have heard about it.”

The young man and the young woman looked at each other then, and thanked her, and walked away. Afterward they talked about it sometimes and thought about it often, but it was not until much later (when it was time for the long, long vacation that stretches from the week before Christmas to the beginning of the new semester in January and they would have to separate for nearly a month) that they discovered Dr. Insula had not been mistaken about the island after all.

I love this story. In truth, I like all the stories in this book (although not all the stories I have written), but this is a special favorite. Not because it ended the cycle I began with “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” but because it so resolutely refuses to be like other stories. It is its own wistful self, always, weeping as it smiles. I hope you love it, too.