monkey ass. Ride some epic waves. A week from now, in your heart, your mom is just your mom again — if you want to let it be that way.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.
“Attitude, bro. It’s everything.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“One thing surprises me, though.”
“What?”
“Your mom must’ve been really pissed about losing the fight to keep that statue in the park.”
Bobby broke the connection. I switched off my phone.
Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn’t to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little harm to others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it — but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.
This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.
I try to live as Bobby Halloway does, but I’m not as successful at it as he is. Sometimes I thrash when I should float. I spend too much time anticipating and too little time letting life surprise me. Maybe I don’t try hard enough to live like Bobby. Or maybe I try too hard.
Orson went to the pool that surrounded the sculpture. He lapped noisily at the clear water, obviously savoring the taste and the coolness of it.
I remembered that July night in our backyard when he had stared at the stars and fallen into blackest despair. I had no accurate way to determine how much smarter Orson was than an ordinary dog. Because his intelligence had somehow been enhanced by the project at Wyvern, however, he understood vastly more than nature ever intended a dog to understand. That July night, recognizing his revolutionary potential yet — perhaps for the first time — grasping the terrible limitations placed on him by his physical nature, he’d sunk into a slough of despondency that almost claimed him permanently. To be intelligent but without the complex larynx and other physical equipment to make speech possible, to be intelligent but without the hands to write or make tools, to be intelligent but trapped in a physical package that will forever prevent the full expression of your intelligence: This would be akin to a person being born deaf, mute, and limbless.
I watched Orson now with astonishment, with a new appreciation for his courage, and with a tenderness I had never felt before for anyone on this earth.
He turned from the pool, licking at the water that dripped from his chops, grinning with pleasure. When he saw me looking at him, he wagged his tail, happy to have my attention or just happy to be with me on this strange night.
For all his limitations and in spite of all the good reasons why he should be perpetually anguished, my dog, for God’s sake, was better at being Bobby Halloway than I was.
Does Bobby have a wise strategy for living? Does Orson? I hope one day to have matured enough to live as well by their philosophy as they do.
Getting up from the bench, I pointed to the sculpture. “Not a scimitar. Not a moon. It’s the smile of the invisible Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.”
Orson turned to gaze up at the masterwork.
“Not dice. Not sugar cubes,” I continued. “A pair of either the grow-small or grow-big pills that Alice took in the story.”
Orson considered this with interest. On video, he had seen Disney’s animated version of this classic tale.
“Not a symbol of the earth. Not a blue bowling ball. A big blue eye. Put it all together and what does it mean?”
Orson looked at me for elucidation.
“The Cheshire smile is the artist laughing at the gullible people who paid him so handsomely. The pair of pills represent the drugs he was high on when he created this junk. The blue eye is his eye, and the reason you can’t see his other eye is because he’s winking it. The bronze pile at the bottom is, of course, dog poop, which is intended to be a pungent critical comment on the work — because, as everyone knows, dogs are the most perceptive of all critics.”
If the vigor with which Orson wagged his tail was a reliable indication, he enjoyed this interpretation enormously.
He trotted around the entire fountain pool, reviewing the sculpture from all sides.
Perhaps the purpose for which I was born is
Pleased by Orson’s wagging tail at least as much as he seemed to be pleased by my latest riff on the sculpture, I consulted my wristwatch. Less than two hours remained until dawn.
I had two places I wanted to go before the sun chased me into hiding. The first was Fort Wyvern.
From the park at Palm Street and Grace Drive in the southeast quadrant of Moonlight Bay, the trip to Fort Wyvern takes less than ten minutes by bicycle, even allowing for a pace that will not tire your canine brother. I know a shortcut through a storm culvert that runs under Highway 1. Beyond the culvert is an open, ten-foot-wide, concrete drainage channel that continues deep into the grounds of the military base after being bisected by the chain-link fence — crowned with razor wire — that defines the perimeter of the facility.
Everywhere along the fence — and throughout the grounds of Fort Wyvern — large signs in red and black warn that trespassers will be prosecuted under federal statutes and that the minimum sentence upon conviction involves a fine of no less than ten thousand dollars and a prison sentence of no less than one year. I have always ignored these threats, largely because I know that because of my condition, no judge will sentence me to prison for this minor offense. And I can afford the ten thousand bucks if it comes to that.
One night, eighteen months ago, shortly after Wyvern officially closed forever, I used a bolt cutter to breach the chain-link where it descended into the drainage channel. The opportunity to explore this vast new realm was too enticing to resist.
If my excitement seems strange to you — considering that I was not an adventuresome boy at the time but a twenty-six-year-old man — then you are probably someone who can catch a plane to London if you wish, sail off to Puerto Vallarta on a whim, or take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. You probably have a driver’s license and a car. You probably have not spent your entire life within the confines of a town of twelve thousand people, ceaselessly traveling it by night until you know its every byway as intimately as you know your own bedroom, and you are probably, therefore, not just a little crazy for new places, new experiences. So cut me some slack.
Fort Wyvern, named for General Harrison Blair Wyvern, a highly decorated hero of the First World War, was commissioned in 1939, as a training and support facility. It covers 134,456 acres, which makes it neither the largest nor by far not the smallest military base in the state of California.
During the Second World War, Fort Wyvern established a school for tank warfare, offering training in the operation and maintenance of every tread-driven vehicle in use in the battlefields of Europe and in the Asian theater. Other schools under the Wyvern umbrella provided first-rate education in demolitions and bomb disposal, sabotage, field artillery, field medical service, military policing, and cryptography, as well as basic training to tens of thousands of infantrymen. Within its boundaries were an artillery range, a huge network of bunkers serving as an ammunition dump, an airfield, and more buildings than exist within the city limits of Moonlight Bay.
At the height of the Cold War, active-duty personnel assigned to Fort Wyvern numbered — officially—36,400. There were also 12,904 dependents and over four thousand civilian personnel associated with the base. The military
