Free Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban Page A

is it and this is all there is and nothing up ahead but death. The girls will grow up and move out and we’ll be left alone together. I remember that very well. It’s the thisness and thisonlyness of it that drives middle-aged men crazy.
    Why turtles for God’s sake? Helping them find what they’re looking for won’t bloody help me. And now I’m lumbered with it. I’ll have to find out what it costs to hire a van. I wonder if the two of us can get the turtles on to the trolley. She doesn’t look that strong. We’ll need a board or something for a ramp. Maybe I should build crates for them, they’d be easier to handle that way. I hate details. And now it’s got to be Polperro just to make life more difficult. I know there’ll be some kind of physical problem like having to climb a million steps or lower ourselves by ropes or the tide will be out and we’ll have to drag the turtles across a mile of mud in the dark. What on earth can Polperro mean to her?
    I saw a film years ago,
The Swimmer,
with Burt Lancaster. In it he was an American advertising man whose mind had slipped out of the present. He thought he still had a wife and children and a house but it was all gone. The film began with a golden late-summer afternoon. He turned up at the swimming pool of some friends who hadn’t seen him for a long time. They looked at him strangely, he wasn’t part of their present time any more. While he was there it occurred to him that there were so many swimming pools in that part of Connecticut that he could almost swim all the way home. So he went from pool to pool, public and private, swimming across Fairfield County meeting people from different bits of his life whilst swimming home as he thought. And wherever he went people became angry and disturbed, he didn’t belong in their present time, they didn’twant him in it. At the end of the film he was huddled in the doorway of the empty locked house that had been his while rain came down and he heard the ball going back and forth on the empty tennis court and the voices of his daughters who were gone. Dora and I saw the film together.
    No swimming pools for me. Just a bath that I have to clean Mr Sandor’s pubic hair out of while Miss Neap’s lavender scent marches up and down the walls like a skeleton in armour. The water is not relaxing. Or indeed it may be relaxing, may be totally relaxed but I’m not. I don’t want to be naked with anybody now, especially myself.
    Haven’t smoked for three days. Busy night and day not smoking. Already I can climb stairs better but that’s not much of a life. With smoking one has a life while dying. How did the Greeks ever run a whole culture without it? Maybe that’s why there was so much homosexuality. The turtles are no substitute for smoking. I’m tired of playing with pebbles and sucking wine gums. Breathing straight air seems an empty exercise. I may kill somebody if I don’t smoke. Mr Sandor’s life is hanging by a thread if he only knew it.
    Shamans in a state of ecstasy fly, travel long distances or think they do, say they do. When 1 was between twelve and thirteen I was lying in bed one night not asleep, not awake, and all at once I was looking down at myself from the ceiling. It wasn’t a dream, I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about ecstasy. It happened another time that year too. I was standing by the window looking at myself lying in bed. Twice in my life I’ve been out of myself in that way. I don’t think I’ve been into myself yet.
In
myself like a prisoner. But not into my self.
    Ocean. When I think that word I want to be immersed in it and at the same time contain it all. Great green deeps of ocean. A medium of motion and being. And of course the sharks. Walking on the ground is not comparable to that underwater flying, green water touching every part.
    I walk a lot at night now, sit on benches in squares feeling the dark on my face, looking at the street lamps. Most ofthe other