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what sort of place I was looking for.
    I got off on the wrong track for a while. I thought it might be ideal to live on a small boat, going wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. I went around pricing boats and decided I had more than enough cash to swing what I wanted.
    My list helped me. Buying a boat was spending money, and spending money wasn’t doing nothing. Buying a boat also meant owning a boat, and I had already figured out that the less I owned, the better off I was. If I couldn’t carry it with me or throw it away, I didn’t want it. And worst of all, a boat would enable me to move around. The one thing I wanted to do was stay in one place. Moving around is not doing nothing.
    So I let a few real estate men show me rental property on the smaller keys, and one of them took me around Mushroom Key. I was all set to take a small house there when the realtor’s motorboat passed a little island the size and shape of a football field, with a little weathered shack at one end of it. I asked what it was, and he said he was damned if he knew, but during the hurricane season it would blow to hell and gone. I asked who owned the island, and if anyone lived in the shack. He said he didn’t know. I told him to take me back to Mushroom Key directly. He tried to argue me out of this, and I told him if he didn’t do what I said I would throw him overboard and see if he could swim. He thought I was joking, so I threw him overboard. It turned out that he couldn’t swim, so I had to jump in and rescue him, but after that he ran me straight back to Mushroom Key without a word.
    And it was Clinton Mackey who answered my questions. Who lived in the island? Nobody. A man named Gaines had lived there, a wino, no one ever knew his first name, and several months ago he had disappeared. It was presumed that he had drowned. Who owned the island? Again, nobody. Well, the state, probably, but it didn’t really matter who owned it. Gaines sure as hell hadn’t owned it, nor paid a cent of rent on it, and he lived there without any trouble, except of course the trouble of drowning.
    I started moving in that afternoon. It took me two days to move in with everything I needed, and it took me just about a month to belong there. There was no particular day when it happened. There was just one day after another, exercising and fishing and reading the Do Nothing list, eating and sleeping and taking two drinks of corn whiskey before dinner, swimming and getting brown and rowing to Mushroom Key and back, until somewhere along the way I passed a point without even noticing it.
    The point of not returning, I called it.
    Because until then I had regarded all of this as a sort of emotional Operation Bootstraps, a self-guided course of therapy with an undefined but never-forgotten goal. Someday, I had thought, I would have it all sorted out, and it would no longer be necessary to stay away from the rest of the world. Some glorious day I would come down from the mountain with two tables of stone in my hands. Some day I would know what role I could best play in life, and I would be ready to play it.
    But the island surprised me. It turned unseen from a means to an end. There was no need to leave it, not now, not ever. At the present rate, my money would last forty years. So, it seemed, would I—I had never been in such extraordinarily fine physical shape in my life. My emotional condition was becoming comparably excellent. The bad dreams and the night sweats came further and further apart. Unwelcome thoughts bothered me less and less. I slept well, I ate hungrily, my digestion was sound. Doing Nothing evidently agreed with me. Clinton Mackey provided just the right amount of human contact; I looked forward to seeing him every sixth day, and after half an hour with him I was anxious to get back to my island again.
    How easy it was to follow the rules! Never write a letter to anyone. Make no phone calls. What could be simpler? Don’t talk to anyone. I only