“So what do you think?” he said, sweeping his darkened forearm
over the entire expanse of sea and land.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is a wonderful
place.”
“It helps keep my life in balance. It keeps me close to the animal
soul,” he said softly. “The two sides of this island are two sides of my
psyche, of everyone’s psyche. On the right, modern intellect and
initiative. On the left, reptile instinct and mammal emotion. This is
the fence up here, this clearing—an equilibrium between two worlds.
This is where I live now. To feed my head, I write poetry and read.
But on the other side of the island, I’m something altogether
different. There I meditate and exercise, and feed myself from the
fruits that grow there. I lie in the sun and yell gibberish when I feel
like it. And I run around naked with the monkeys. On the left side of
this island I am an animal, and I am a god. On the right side, I am a
man—a lowly but proud man.”
“That’s nice,” I said. God knew why he was telling me this. Still,
it wasn’t an unpleasant way to spend a morning.
We sat together a while longer, and after an extended, deafening
moment of silence, I told him that I was very tired and had to leave.
I stood up and began to carefully walk back down the hill, into the
deep shadows of the dense foliage. Glancing back casually, I saw that
Tree was still sitting there, staring at the sun.
CHAPTER 15
I didn’t see much of Tree for a while, and I reckoned that it was just
as well. Still, I had a strange hope that he would turn up again. In the
meantime, I was partying harder than I ever thought possible.
One morning after a particularly heavy night of drinking, an
overweight blonde girl woke me up by trying to shove a flyer into my
hand, a hand which was still wrapped around a full beer bottle. I
looked around and realized that I was passed out on the beach. What
the hell was she was doing, I asked her, messing with my breakfast as
she was, and she replied that she wanted to let me know about this
“simply gorgeous” meditation seminar. I tried to place her face, but
couldn’t, so I read the flyer instead as she lumbered off down the
beach.
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
102
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