I’m nervous, but deep inside my heart is calm. The sea below is astoundingly level, the surface rippling infinitesimally from this height. The thunderous chopping of the Sea Ranger’s blades are muffled by the headset and have me locked in a kind of trance of auditory solitude. I kind of resent the remarks that the pilot makes in the headset, which are achingly knowledgeable, forcibly casual.

The Sea Ranger is a military helicopter. So said the pilot during a very shotgun seminar on safety literally on the tarmac, before we left.

My arms rest on the army-green canvas duffel that I carry on my lap. My arms really want to grip the thing, but I just kind of notice that and let them lay there. Inside the duffel are a shave kit, my precious laptop computer, flip-flops, shorts, t-shirts, and a rain slicker. I’ve been told I won’t need anything warmer to wear. And with my books, I won’t need anything more. I plan to spend most of my time writing, not reading.

My main goal is to write an update to a revered short story, Toby Wolff’s “A Bullet in the Brain.” I’m not sure what the update is exactly. Of course in the original, the book critic Anders is helplessly critical as he waits in line at the bank. Then robbers enter and his inability to put aside judgment, to NOT judge, earns him the titular object, or event, we might say—a bullet in his brain. I find it an enduring metaphor, and I want to explore that. There might be a new bullet, of sorts: the inability of the literary artist to even do their art without thoughts of its nature as a product in the marketplace. But, at the same time, it could be the same bullet that Wolff wrote about. I'm not sure. It's what I want to find out.

In the Sea Ranger’s “hold” there’s a crate that contains books and papers and non-perishable food. If I need anything more across my ten weeks, it will be shipped—air-dropped into the waters, which my cocky, know-it-all pilot—and the owner of the one-man air-ferry and shipping company currently taking me to my destination—has assured me will wash ashore on the island. He’s never “mis-dropped” a shipment.

I ask him why not land? He just laughs.

⧉

I had a long flight from New York the day before, and I may have celebrated a bit too much in the hotel bar, so I actually sag into the quicksand of sleep for a time. When I wake, we begin slowing and descending. The chopper blades’ pitch lowers, and then there it is—the island. A dozen acres? It’s not much. In fact, it looks staggeringly isolated. There’s a paper-colored beach, a small copse of tropical trees, and the hut, sided by a blue plastic rain barrel under a downspout.

The chopper’s wind rudely harasses the water, the sand, the palm leaves. We set down roughly, and with only a small sense of ceremony I am released—my body and my duffel. There’s nothing to say now. All has been said. Shielding my eyes, I scurry to the hut and watch the red-and-white Sea Ranger, with its air of medical emergency, its associations of peril and rescue, leave me. Its tail swings around, and the nose leads it back up into the air as if retracing our approach. I wipe the sand from my eyes and ears, the sound lessens and lessens, and soon the hulking piece of machinery is but a mosquito, then a dot, then nothing, and I chuckle as my predicament enfolds around me: my incredible location, the frightening mass of my solitude, my long-anticipated isolation.

⧉

In a way, I consider this an escapade in recovery. A sobriety retreat if you will. But not from booze. Not from any drug.

Just twelve months ago, in Volume 1 of the Aspiring Writer Omnibus, I drove a bus, hauling readers around my psychic landscape. It was a ragged, mad, inspiring, and draining trip. Now I need something different. I need to be stationary and contemplative, less social and far less mobile. By coming here, I can be assured of no swerving at 70 mph, no roar of tires, no anticly playing the part of guide. A whole new schema overlays my narrative consciousness now: that of the island.

The first thing I do of course is check out the hut. It’s a step up from the bamboo and thatch jobbers that Gilligan and the Skipper were always repairing. Clearly my pilot friend and his cronies brought out a chopper-load of nice lumber—teak or something, local to here, but exotic in other parts of the world. It’s handsome, the wood, brown like milk chocolate. It’s used for the siding and floors.

The hut is elevated, built on a platform, with steps leading down the sand. But it’s tiny. Inside is an old army hospital cot. A table and two chairs. And a portable/temporary faucet and sink with plastic tubes coming and going through the wall to the rain barrel outside. A little rug lies in the corner. A small bookshelf holds matches, bug sprays, and other provisions. A few canteen style mugs and plates are untidily stacked.

That’s it.

Once I’ve regarded all this, there’s a baffling, but also exhilarating, dearth of options about what to do next.

It’s warm. I wear cargo shorts and a t-shirt. I take off my shoes and socks, and in bare feet stroll the island. The beach is rocky in places and peppered with dry dead branches—sun-bleached driftwood, bark long gone, grain streaky, cracked. There are reams of tiny seashells, and kelp left behind by the fallen tide. The surf and sand smell of salt, and the sourness of sea life. I don’t touch the starfish that I find; everything feels too precious too touch.

I sit, looking out on the water. The acre or so of trees is the only part I haven’t walked through. I’ll save it for another time. There are some sea birds in the upper boughs of some trees, and that is a surprise, but also welcome. I am not entirely, entirely alone.

I think back to just a couple days before my departure.

“How’s it going? Good week?” asks Dave. We are in our bi-weekly video call. He’s seated in a sumptuous, if slightly cartoonish log cabin, complete with roaring fireplace and giant, heavy snowflakes falling outside his window—a digital background. I’m on my living room couch, my real living room couch, tucked into the L corner. My feet are up, and my sleeping son is inside a screen of his own just beyond my toes—the baby monitor.

“The nature of things,” I say, sagely (for I have kind of planned this response) “is polar. We have the good and the bad. The ups and the downs. The positive and the negative. Things are, and they aren't. You know what I mean?”

“Word,” Dave agrees, drawing on his vape device like a futuristic Sherlock Holmes. It’s black plastic, the size of a small box of Band-Aids, and has a straw-like spout, colored indicator lights, and an LCD display of its operating temperature. He blows a plume out the side of his mouth as if we're back in Ireland Hall on the north campus of the college we call St. T's.

Why have I planned such a response? Why have I planned a response at all? I’ve planned a response because my weeks are fraught and harried, stressful and busy, full of the challenges of child-rearing and teaching courses and leading writing workshops and reading novel and short story manuscripts, and it’s very typical of me to eagerly anticipate speaking with my best friend of 30 years as a reprieve from this grind. Whenever it's a our chat week, starting Monday I pretty much compulsively formulate descriptions of what my life is like. I tell myself I do this for Dave's edification, but I know it’s largely to increase my own comprehension, to strength my own grasp and see if I can even convey it to him.

On the one hand, it's very academic and important; on the other hand, it's quite simple. One, I plan in the spirit of looking ahead in anticipation of relief, because if I can vent, I know Dave will commiserate, and I’ll feel relief. It’s just that simple. This shouldn’t require explanation; it’s just how quality friendship works—and I count myself lucky.

Because if anyone can get it, it's Dave. He'll commiserate around the parenting especially. “Toddlers are sociopaths” is his go-to line. He gets emphatic around my well-being, and I love that. “You gotta find ways to take breaks.” But he’ll also laugh, and that gets me to laugh. I’ll share an anecdote, and he’ll groan deep recognition, then chuckle. “Ohhhh, ho ho ho. Yeah, they do that.”

So, one, I’ll just feel heard and seen, and that’ll take my mind off the stress. But then there’s more. There’s a deeper need. If I can describe my days, my moods, my successes, my failures, all I’m juggling, all I’ve sacrificed, all that’s changed, then maybe I’ll be able to recognize my life, reflected off my friend who knew me when I was a wild college student, knew me when I was a traveler abroad, knew me when I was a dutiful corporate employee in my thirties, a successful writer, and only now, at 50 a parent.

But there’s more, a phantom third thing, which is like an oily film upon the water of my consciousness. It’s something I feel but no one sees, and that is: the way in which I’ve become estranged from not only my former selves, but from the one thing that has underpinned every phase of my life until recently, the constant, the reason for it all: literature.

Invariably, in our chats I fail to articulate it all to my satisfaction, which is totally okay. It happens week after week. There are videos of my son to share—videos of him running down the street, or playing ukulele. There are of course things about Dave’s life to talk about. He’s interviewing for jobs, helping his nieces move to Minneapolis, being a father, swapping out a motherboard whose PCI bus went on the fritz. There are beers to drink (our chats are drinking chats) and concert dates of our favorite 90s bands to look up and, invariably, bemoan our inability to attend. And so though I always go to bed lighthearted after talking to Dave, and though I tell him of my job-change fantasies and half-hearted LinkedIn efforts, I have not really been able to convey to him, or even to myself, why my engagement with literature has changed so significantly in the past few years, to the point where I now look to my bookshelf for something to read before bed, and often I can’t even find anything that I’m moved to pick up. 

I fail to account for the way that my New Yorker magazines stack up and up and up, eventually getting tossed, and while many of them have the crossword puzzles on the back page completed, literally only about one or two of every hundred has had its short fiction read, whereas in decades past I treasured reading every New Yorker short fiction.

Maybe above all, that’s what I’m here, on this island, to consider: Where I stand in relation to it all, and how I’ll go forward. Yeah, I’ve got the prerogatives I’ve told my wife and agent—write "Bullet Revisited," and write it well enough to get in The Paris Review or Conjunctions or win the American Short Fiction contest and actually make a small check. And there are some essays I'd like to write reflections on that may end up comprising a manuscript. But these are stated goals—the kind of thing that you are just obligated to come up with if. My real goal perhaps could not be stated, because I don't know that I could express to her, because I haven't expressed or even acknowledged to myself, the pain that it causes me to have fallen out of love with fiction and to no longer identify as a bibliophile or act like an avid reader, a die-hard bookworm, up till two a.m. with his eyes scanning pages hour upon hour.

But after sitting on this island a mere 20 minutes, in my cargo shorts and my feet looking sand-dusty, as they will for the coming weeks, I’ve realized, that my estrangement isn’t entirely about me. It's about the literary landscape. This is about context. It’s not about getting to the bottom of my shit. It’s about the latrine itself.