Which was why he had been fired from his position as senior instructor of philosophy and history at the university. He had pontificated all kinds of things that just weren't in the books. He made things up and he didn't even realize he was
doing it. Much of what he invented was far more interesting than what was factual.
He was a hit among students who reported back on final exams detailed information about wars that had never occurred and great thinkers who had never existed. Toye's favourite subject for discourse was Guilliamo Mellesandro, a seventeenth-century Italian philosopher who had dissected the brains of a living subject without injury and discovered what he believed to be the seat of the human soul, a small, pentacle-shaped organ that could be accessed by a minor incision in the base of the skull. Mellesandro, of course, was scoffed at in his day, especially when he deduced from these surgical experiments that some people had the newly discovered organ (which he called the mellengra) and some people did not.
Ipso facto
, some people did not have souls. Toye admitted to his students that, of course, Mellesandro was wrong. You could not physically locate the human soul. But Toye also professed that Mellesandro the Italian philosopher had set in motion the very basis for our understanding of the physiology of the brain. Yet, he had never been given due credit. If you didn't know your Mellesandro, you were not likely to pass the final exam for Professor Toye's Philosophy 800 course.
There had been a departmental meeting finally when this Mellesandro business was put on the table and Toye was deeply insulted, outraged. The youngest member of the department, a small man with pinched glasses named Smeets who had only recently received his PhD from the University of Toronto, asked Toye to account for Mellesandro. “Pull any book from the department's library shelves and turn to the page,” Smeets challenged. William Toye refused to have any man question his scholarship. Certainly, Mellesandro had lived in seventeenth-century Rome, where he had performed medical experiments upon cadavers, and even several living subjects. He had taken a faulty
step in the evolution of knowledge but, in the long run, it had proven to be a useful one. All this was explained to a roomful of colleagues who knew painfully well that Guilliamo Mellesandro had never existed and that Dalhousie was not prepared to risk its reputation by keeping Toye on as a professor. Before the hour was up, he had resigned, maintaining that he was being crucified. Free speech and academic freedom were
in absentia
at Dalhousie that day and Toye would leave at once.
It never occurred to William Toye that he could be wrong, and he himself refused to crack open any book to verify what he knew to be fact.
“The English metaphysician, M. John McTaggert, believes that time does not exist,” William Toye stated at breakfast on the third day of his tenure at Sylvie's house. Sylvie would have had no way of knowing if McTaggert was real or illusion, but then if time was an illusion, what were the reference points for reality?
“I always thought mainlanders placed too much emphasis on time. When to do this, when to do that. Schedules and such. Did you know this man, McTaggert?”
“Knew him from his writings. Sometimes that is one's most intimate relationship. McTaggert had this notion, shared by others, that nothing exists
outside
of the mind.” He tapped a finger ever so gently against Sylvie's brow, and studied the sea pools again in her eyes.“What's up here is all there really is.”
“Do you believe that?”
He traced her hairline with his index finger as if reading a road map.“I keep an open mind. I can embrace the idea. It opens up all kinds of possibilities.”
“Which kinds are they?” Sylvie was falling in love with this wonderfully curious man. She adored his talk, his intellect, his furrowed brow that had horizontal ridges, like the line of distant
waves on the sea. But what was she doing with another man in her house? Hadn't she sworn herself to a solitary life?
“You and I. Here on this island. It may only exist in our thoughts. This is just theoretical, mind you.”
Sylvie touched his neck, let her fingers glide over his Adam's apple.
Men, such odd creatures
.
Comical. Always working away at a thing, never happy to just let it be.
She smiled.“I can believe that I created this place, this island. Or that it created me somehow. It's a connection that I feel very strongly.”
“Animism. The idea that a thing like the island is alive.”
“But it is.”
“Yes.” He kissed her. William Toye let the world of ideas rest for a time. He felt her strong body in his arms. If she existed only in his mind, if neither of them had real physical flesh at all, then this was enough. This moment, this room, this woman. This embrace, not of an idea, but of a woman. It was enough. Was there a category for this experience? Was there a school of thought that already articulated what he had just discovered to be true in this instance? If not, he would lay down the basics of it, by God.
Neither the Baptist minister nor the Pentecostal one would have anything to do with marrying William Toye who was already living with Sylvie. There was a justice of the peace in Mutton Hill Harbour, a doddering old man whose office contained hundreds of souvenir bells from tourist destinations around the world. He had yellowed newspaper clippings on the wall about the Dionne quintuplets. Toye had noticed other curious things: books, records, and various framed advertisements where the number five was prominent. Hillory Docker, J. P., had some particular affection for the number five but when asked about it, he'd only answer, “A random interest. As a boy, I picked a number and decided I would collect anything involving that number. I
selected number five. It's been a good selection. If I had picked something obvious like seven or something too round, like the number eight, it wouldn't have been the same.”
And so they were married, Sylvie to her fourth husband in a room that was a kind of shrine to the number five. It was the first day of a full moon, the second highest tide of the year, and they were the third couple to be married that week by Docker.
It was Toye's first marriage to a woman, although he had been married to several fields of scholarly research before and one or two schools of historical analysis. He was of the opinion, after his fifth night of wedded bliss, that this type of marriage was much more satisfying than the others. He worked hard at being a fine husband although he had poor credentials and had not been properly trained for the job. He needed tutoring.
“You're going to have to coach me on things. What to do. How to interact with your friends and neighbours, responsibilities around the house, that sort of thing. I'm very bad, I warn you, when it comes to anything financial. I just can't seem to lather up any interest in money matters.”
There was a small, begrudged pension from the university for all those years spent lecturing about nonexistent events of history and imaginary heroes of philosophy.“And I should be receiving a small royalty soon from my scholarly book. A trifling thing, really, a slim volume on Immanuel Kant, published by Oxford. I have to make sure they have my new address. Of course, I'll have to find a bank that can cash a note in pounds Sterling.”
But something must have gone afoul with the postal delivery system and the forwarding of mail, because the cheque from the publisher never did arrive. Sylvie never suspected that there had
not
been a book. Nor did William. He remembered writing it. He remembered posting the manuscript and receiving acceptance. All as if it had really happened. Living proof that McTaggert may have been right.
Other books did arrive, however. A big crate of books from Dalhousie, shipped at the university's expense. Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger, volumes of world history. The books invaded the house and filled shelves, piled in corners, scattered themselves under beds and lounged on chairs. The books did not seem to quite know what to do with themselves now that they had been kicked out of the university and trundled off to this rustic island home. Sometimes, while her new husband was refreshing his memory on Egyptian kings or inching his way through a biography of Immanuel Kant written in German, Sylvie grazed through a book titled
Understandings of Paradox
by a long-winded fellow named Lancelot Vertiges.
Sylvie taught husband number four how to split wood and bake bread and cakes that were sold on the mainland, ferried over and delivered to a couple of small stores there. William tried hiring on with a couple of fishermen but proved to be more in the way than any good and had a poor stomach for choppy days. “He spends most of 'is time feeding the fish,” as Moses Slaunwhite's father put it. William Toye had never vomited so much in his life.
So, a hangashore he would be, and do whatever a hangashore was cut out to do on an island. He did not mind the smell of fish or tasks around the wharf so island men, still skeptical of Toye as some kind of mainland gigolo or something, were big-hearted enough to give him the odd piece of work. And odd it was. Toye's favourite job, it turned out, was untangling massive convolutions of rope and netting. Before he had arrived and proved so adept, some fishermen would just cut the mess and let it drift off in the currents of the sea.
“I learned more in one week about logic and problem solving,” William told his wife, “than I learned from all those years of reading and research. It's quite incredible, really.”
“My father knew all about tangles and knots. Always start with the loose end, he'd say. Follow it. Let the tangle teach you what to do; never force it. Patience wins out.”
“Yes, it does.”
William Toye drank his rum, read his books, and wrote in a notebook that he seemed somewhat private about.
“Can I see what you write?”
“My handwriting's bad. Always has been. You can't make much out.”
She peered over his shoulder and stared into the puddle of light on the lined page. Bad was not quite an accurate description of his writing. Impossible was more like it. Squiggles, symbols, tangles of letters and lines looking like a mass of very tangled nets and rope piled on a wharf in disgust.
“What's it about?”
“Trifles is all. Things that turn through a man's head. Ideas and notions. Half thought out patterns of understanding. Just a mind cast loose with words and images. I always have the feeling that if you put enough down on a page, enough jabbering and rambling of intellectual thought, just one day you'll come up with an idea that will change the world.”
William Toye did not change the world. Yet he made his wife very happy. He was ill-prepared for much about life on the island but he never complained. He nearly cut his foot off splitting knotty softwood junks. His hands grew a bit tougher from untangling hand-lines and mending rough nets. He piled eelgrass around the bottom of the old house to help keep out the winds of winter, and, in bed on those cold nights, he kept his wife very warm and made love to her with dignity and passion, somehow blended together just right. He would praise her in Latin and console her when she felt sad in a language that he said came from the ancient Celts.
Those were happy years, and Sylvie shared her own understanding of the deeper things of life with her husband, who was an eager student. She always believed that William's eccentric notions and his wild ideas were somehow rooted in reality. Well, most of them were. She became more convinced he was truly mad when the business came up about Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
“Moses Slaunwhite's father told me the story and I can't quite believe it. Fichte was here.” William gave an alien throaty hiss as he pronounced the
cht
sound. “Fichte came here himself at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Part of a wave of German immigrations.”
“Many German families came here. Who was this man?”
“Student of Immanuel Kant himself. And famous in his own right. Knowledge, Fichte believed, comes from a free, self-determining mind. Within that mind is the moral code of the world⦠well, the universe.”
“If you say so.” This one sounded like so much gibberish to her.
“Fichte was here in the summer of 1801, if I have the story correct. He came here with the intent of establishing a utopian community. A perfect society.”
“But I've never heard anything about this. Usually all the stories about the island filter down to me one way or another.”
“Fichte didn't stay. He became disillusioned when no one would pay attention to him. But it was here he formulated some of his most prominent theories.”
“Here on Ragged Island?”
“Yes. Isn't that beautiful. He went back to Germany and he did some of his best work.”
And to that discovery, they celebrated.
The next day, while visiting with Viddy Slaunwhite, she mentioned the business about the dead German philosopher and discovered that Noah Slaunwhite had been sick in bed for
several days with “a raspy throat and a fever like a kettle aboil.” He'd had no visitors.
It was the first time that Sylvie had fully doubted her husband on anything. She felt horrible and guilty about sitting down alone in the house and looking for Johann Gottlieb Fichte in the index of one philosophy text after another. And then she breathed a great sight of relief when she found a reference to him and discovered he had lived from 1762 to 1814. She read a chapter in one volume about this man and his ideas but could find no reference concerning his efforts to start a utopian community or a trip to Nova Scotia. She closed her eyes and considered the possibility that her husband was just a bit of a liar, like the men on the wharf who make up great false, entertaining yarns â half true, half fabricated. Maybe that was all there was to it.
She tried to put the worry out of her mind as if it were a bird that had accidentally flown in through an open window. Chased it out of the house. Gone. But it wasn't that easy.