Treasure Island!!!

Robert Louis Stevenson’s consciousness, I told Rena; I must have been a sea-bird streaking through the azure sky of his daydream; in just the same way spirits are said to commune across cultures, time, and continents, Robert Louis Stevenson’s book
Treasure Island
felt
cosmically intended
for me.
    “Isn’t it a kids’ book?” Rena said.
    “That doesn’t matter. It’s sophisticated. It has multiple levels. A lot of the vocabulary I had to look up.”
    “And isn’t it a boys’ book?” Rena said.
    Okay maybe, but so what? When I was in fourth grade I kept a large, profusely illustrated chart to show all the books I read, and I remember now that the books were pretty girly. I did piles of Judy Blume, beams of Beverly Cleary. When the librarian pushed, I did
Anne of Green Gables
. Then I discovered jump rope and drifted toward the playground faction with the best rhymes. “All in together, girls. How do you like the weather, girls?” Then came sticker collecting. Then friendship pins. I believe I lost a whole year of school to their assembly. When we were supposed to be following the presidential election on TV, I was studying Jenny Galassi’s sneakers and trying to figure out how she had gotten more friendship pins than me. In fifth grade, the year we did the continents, my mother confronted me with my warped cardboard reading chart. “Is this important?” she said. “I found it behind the radiator.” Maybe a boys’ book was exactly what I needed. And it was a classic; gold letters said so right on the cover.
    “This book is going to change my life.”
    But it’s useless to explain the prospect of personal change. Thousands of dollars in student loans to major in philosophy, and now she unlocked apartments every day in order to meet the superficial needs of half-crazed animals. Rena Deutsch, Freelance Pet Sitter. She wasn’t stupid, but there she was, covered in cat hair. Compared to her, I was highly evolved.
    “Rena, I’m so serious about this, it hurts. What has the hero of
Treasure Island
got that I haven’t got? How can I become a hero of my own life?”
    “You’re tired of your job at the Library. Maybe you should go back to school. Get a master’s degree in something. You were always good at writing papers.”
    I felt a tiny jolt of pleasure. But I knew it wasn’t true. Rena and I had gone to a state university, where many of the courses culminated in a machine-read Scantron test, the kind of test that measures knowledge with no compassion for error. The iron quality of the directions alone had filled me with dread: “Do not make any stray marks on the answer sheet,” “Fill in each circle completely,” “To change your answer completely erase the mark.” After racking up a row of D’s and F’s my freshman year, I avoided any class that required a Scantron and somehow wound up as an English major. Thus Rena remembered me writing lots of little pastorals, in which a simple-minded thesis shepherded its wooly flock of evidence over hills and dales and
very
shallow rivers
.
English majors never failed; at worst, their opinions simply differed from their teachers’, and everyone agreed that this difference could be adequately expressed with a C and a down-tilting minus. But I ask you reader, where had all that paper writing got me?
Fill in the circle completely:
    O Nowhere!
    So I shrugged off Rena’s compliment and delved into my backpack for the golden compass I had made for my new life. This was not a long, gangly composition; I had merely—merely!—written down boy hero Jim Hawkins’ best qualities, which formed, I realized every moment with increasing warmth, the Core Values of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
.
    I am copying it out hurriedly here; of course, the original was carefully hand-lettered in a serifed style on a creamy seventy-pound piece of paper with a lovely deckled edge.
     
    BOLDNESS
    RESOLUTION
    INDEPENDENCE
    HORN-BLOWING
     
    Rena put her hand on my arm gently, as if expecting to get burned. “Are you taking your Zoloft?” she said.

CHAPTER 2

     
    T
reasure Island
—as you have ample reason to know, having read it yourself or heard about it or seen the movie or maybe eaten in the restaurant Long John Silver’s—is a classic of boys’ adventure fiction, and almost immediately was recognized as a masterpiece when it was published in 1883. The funny thing is—and it took me ages to even remember this—I first read the book, or a