Extinctions, p.12
Extinctions, page 12
But it was not enough. It had never been enough. He ought to have cut the peppers.
Whether or not a man of his age was capable of leaping out of a Marcel Breuer chair is in dispute, but Frederick was up and out of the house in seconds, clutching his keys, his wallet, and his book. He banged on Jan’s front door but the curtains were already drawn. Damn. He opened the garage and reversed out, and then swung the car in the direction of the main road and the bus stop, cursing at the stop sign and the oncoming traffic. As he turned the corner into the two lanes he strained to see if she was still there, at the bus stop, waiting.
If there were a god in heaven, he would have offered up a year of rosaries and a thousand candles, or some Buddhist equivalent. When he pulled up and wound down the window, Jan looked at him in astonishment.
“Get in,” he said. “Quick, before I hold up the traffic.” Neither of them said a word as they crossed the freeway.
He stole a sideways look at the river. Would he ever see his dolphin again?
As they crossed the bridge into the city, Jan took out a compact road directory. “Left at the interchange, Fred, and then you need to go around the block because it’s a one-way street.”
Frederick found a loading zone near the Central Courts. Jan leaned toward him. She was wearing some kind of perfume he associated with meditation and yoga. Martha had taken to essential oils in the late 1970s, and he had wallowed in her heavy, sweet smell until Caroline developed chronic sinusitis.
“I’ll catch the bus back. I can’t thank you enough, Fred.”
“I’m going to wait for you to finish. I’ve got nothing to do today.”
“What about your shopping? What about your beans and yogurt?”
“Pardon? I’ll park the car in the multistory garage and wait for you over there.” He gestured toward a small shaded square in front of a park, where office workers were eating lunch.
“But I have no idea if I’ll be half an hour or three hours.”
“I have this,” he said, holding up the book.
“A Book of Dolphins,” she read. “You have a book of everything, Fred. Are you sure you can wait?”
“I’ll be fine. Good luck, Jan.”
“How can I repay you?”
I’m well in arrears, he thought. And then, to his horror, he began to cry. “I loved Martha the moment I saw her,” he blurted out. “Go, please,” he said, gripping the wheel of the car. “You’ll be late.”
Jan put her hand across his. “The trouble is, it’s not enough. I loved my son, and look what happened to us. Love is a feeling. But it’s also like yoga. You have to do it over and over again, and then you have to accept that you’ll never be perfect. Stay out of the sun. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Ich habe genug. I have enough. I am enough. I had enough, but it wasn’t enough. God was not enough. My wife was not enough. I was not enough to my wife. My daughter was not enough. My son was not enough. I am not enough. I am not anything close to enough. And I didn’t do enough.
I ought to have cut the peppers.
It was said that Dionysos, the god of wine and frenzy, engaged a vessel to take him from the island of Ikaria to the island of Naxos; but the sailors were a crew of pirates and, not knowing that he was a god, they formed a plot to abduct him. Sailing past Naxos they made for Asia, where they intended to sell him as a slave. When he realized what they were doing he called on his magical powers. He changed the oars into snakes and filled the ship with vines and ivy and the sound of flutes. The sailors felt madness coming on them and all dived into the sea where they were changed into dolphins and made incapable of doing any harm.
Frederick sat on a bench with his book. He would like to be made incapable of doing any harm. Every now and then he sipped his water. Men in suits rushed past on their phones, sweating in the heat. Office girls stopped to light cigarettes and dragged on them hungrily, flicking ash to the ground before heading down the Terrace. A council worker in a bright safety vest and a wide-brimmed hat pushed butts and litter into a dustpan. The red arm of a giant crane swept a steel girder across the blue-white sky. He closed his eyes and picked out from the din of cars and buses the deep repetitive beat of a pile being driven into the ground. Once upon a time he had felt connected to the upward thrust of the city. Even for a professor who had never built a thing there was a deep pleasure in construction. At its purest level it was mathematical, abstract, even in its concrete form. He opened his eyes. One day all these buildings would fall to the ground. All his thin-shell structures would crumble, like hollow bones in a grave or shells on a beach.
Before that time there had been no dolphins. After it, they stood for kindness and virtue in the sea; and the first to learn of their usefulness was the god of the ocean himself, Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him.
Behind the square was a fenced park backing onto the Governor’s Residence. “Open 12 to 2 daily, except Sunday,” said the sign on the gate. Frederick walked toward a shaded grove of old trees. He recognized the oaks and elms from his childhood. Martha carried little botanical reference books wherever she went, but he had never been interested in nature. She was always writing letters to the local council, asking them to replace exotics with natives. Despite the traffic and the heat behind him, he could have been in Old Hag Wood, in the ancient forest, playing hide-and-seek with Virgil. There was a theatrical sleight to the park; in the bucolic shade of this vast canopy the invader could go on pretending they were right at home.
Jan was fanning her face as she came toward him. “There you are! I thought you might be here. Look at these trees. Aren’t they wonderful? I suppose they remind you of jolly old England.”
Jan had been successful; he could see that straightaway.
“He’s mine,” she said carefully, holding a thick manila file.
“That’s wonderful,” said Fred. What else could he say? “It was so quick.”
“I know, it took no time at all. I can’t believe it, really.”
“So what’s next, Jan? Where is he? Where is—Morrison?” Saying his name was difficult. It made him real.
“He wasn’t at the hearing—it wouldn’t have been appropriate. I have to wait for documentation from the department. He’s with the foster family. I’ll see him this week and tell him what’s happening. He can come out with me for the day on Friday, and then again on Saturday night, but I won’t have him permanently for at least three weeks, until I work out where we’re going to live. I’m going to talk to management this afternoon, and hopefully they’ll have someone on the waiting list ready to buy. It’s all happening so quickly. I’ll have to pack again. And then there are the budgerigars . . . they were Sam’s, you know.”
“He has to go to school!” said Fred, registering for the first time the practicalities of Jan’s situation. “You’ll have to find him a good school. When’s his birthday? Does he start this year coming?”
“He can enroll in preschool thank goodness. I don’t know what I’d do with a five-year-old all day, every day. But I’m going to have to go farther afield if I want to buy. Imagine me at the school cafeteria. I’ll be the oldest mum by fifty years. Have you ever kept a budgerigar, Fred?”
“Pardon? I’m sure it will be fine at school,” he said. But it didn’t sound fine. It sounded difficult and exhausting and not at all what a woman of Jan’s age should be doing.
“Do you think we could go now? I’m exhausted. My ankle’s sore from standing for so long.”
Fred led Jan out of the park to the bench in the square. “Sit here. I’ll find somewhere to pull up. I’ll beep when I get back. I should be about fifteen minutes. Will you be all right?”
“Where’s that book of yours—the dolphin book? Thanks, Fred. Really, I mean it.”
Jan read to him for the whole trip back. The traffic was heavy and the air conditioner strained to keep the car cool.
“Listen to this: ‘When Poseidon was looking for the dark-eyed Amphitrite, to make her his bride, it was a dolphin that found her for him. She had been hiding from him in a cavern by the sea. For this service, Poseidon conferred the highest of all honors, setting in the sky the constellation of the Dolphin. If you live in the northern hemisphere you can see it in July, over in the southeast sky between Aquila and Pegasus.’ Do you have any knowledge of astronomy, Fred? ‘The very word for dolphin, or dolphins as the Greeks wrote it, is itself a beautiful representation of the animal’s twirling motion through the water’—I can’t read the Greek.”
“I think you say it delphis. It means ‘womb.’ There’s an index in the back.”
“Womb? How beautiful. So is that a sign, a symbol, a metaphor, or just a strange coincidence? What do you think?”
Fred kept his eyes on the road. “I’m not sure, Jan. Here we are, home at last.”
“I’m going straight to see management. Do you have plans?”
“Plans? For when?”
“As in, would you like to go out to dinner tonight? My treat, but you’d have to drive. I used to love to go to the beach in the late afternoon for a dip, so we could do that and shower in the change rooms, and then go straight to dinner. The salt water is good for my ankle.”
Fred hadn’t been to the beach in years. He was not sure he had a swimsuit he would dare to be seen in. Did he have the time and energy to go to the department store and get some new trunks? Trunks. Another stupid English word.
“I’m sure you swim like a dolphin, Fred. What about we go at about a quarter to six, after the traffic? I know a very good Vietnamese restaurant. And don’t buy the wine, that’s on me too. One thing, though, if you don’t mind me saying?”
What now? He wanted to get out of the heat.
“Get out the Braun. Have a shave. I’ll be at your place at about five thirty?”
“But what about Tom’s sister?” he called after her. “Don’t you have to see her tonight?”
“I’ll call her now and tell her I’m busy. I’ve got something in the freezer she can have.” She laughed and shook her head.
Fred went straight to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. How long since he’d been in a rush? Or had a decent shave? Or a haircut? He still had hair, didn’t he? He would go over to the shopping center right now and buy trunks, and get one of those long-sleeved Lycra tops to cover up his parchment. He would floss. He would scrub. He would iron and he would polish.
And with that, he flicked his tail and disappeared into the shower.
BOOK THREE
EGGS
As you walk the length of the darkened corridor toward the illuminated wooden case you hear sounds that are difficult to place.
“A few low croaks,” wrote Newton in 1861. “A rough and hoarse scream,” noted Fabricius in 1842. “The captive bird utters a gurgling noise when expressing anxiety,” wrote Fleming. These sounds collide and amplify as you draw near. You are listening to the guttural choking of a single creature cut off forever from the millions of heavy-bodied birds that once nested side by side on Funk Island. It is a sound that marries an arctic tern sheared off from its flock by a winter storm with the insatiable cry of a foundling. Blind hope: Could this be an incubator, and the mottled egg inside not some cold booty lifted out from under the smashed and bloodied bones of its mother, not some egg abandoned on a cliff face, but something warm and alive, something that might, with care and attention—with what might even be called love—become a living thing?
SUNDAY EVENING, JANUARY 22, 2006
It was freezing in London, but at least it wasn’t raining. Caroline Lothian had spent the night wondering what to do until six in the morning, when she could begin to get ready for her flight. At one point she considered the club down the road. How long since she’d had sex? She could still put on tight jeans and boots and a leather jacket and don some war paint and, with a bit of luck and a bottle or two of white wine, snare a local Romeo, but why bother? For a woman close to extinction, sex was merely palliative.
People didn’t understand loneliness; they thought it was something to be overcome by moving to a table with more people. But loneliness could not be chased out of the room by a crowd, at least not the kind that Caroline felt. She had always felt as if something essential had been ripped out of her and taken away, leaving a raw selvage, but since Martha died the edges were smooth and cold to the touch, like polished concrete.
Perhaps it was because she was thirty-seven, perhaps it was because she was adopted, but Caroline could not stop thinking about a child of her own. Her mother would have disapproved of the expression, with its assumption of motherhood as possession by birth alone, but when she imagined being pregnant she felt such a mixture of terror and longing it left her breathless. When she dreamed about her baby it was always a girl who looked just like her. Such undisguised narcissism, thought Caroline. So much braver to dream of a child who looked nothing like you.
She heard a faint mechanical whirring on the street, like a windup toy. Through the narrow pane of glass that ran the length of the basement flat she saw the rim of a wheelchair and the torso of a man. The chair came to a sudden halt, rotated 360 degrees, and stopped. Was he waiting for friends? No one came trailing after him. The man turned to face the wall of her building. He was wearing long Ugg boots. What was he doing? Why was he out there alone?
She returned to her emails. The flight for Aberdeen was still departing at 8:20 AM. There had been a forecast of snow, but it had been usurped by an icy wind from the North Sea. She printed out her ticket and then spun on her chair. He was still there. Why didn’t he move on?
The screen went black and the room fell into darkness. When she was little she hid in the cupboard in her room, holding the door shut tight while her mother tried to coax her out.
“There’s a lovely piece of chocolate fudge just out here on a plate. I wonder who’s going to eat it?”
“Not me.”
“Well, I’ll just leave it here for when you get hungry. How would that be?”
“I’m not coming out. Ever.”
She tapped the keyboard and the pale egg floated back out on the screen, like an uninhabited planet in a distant galaxy. The Aberdeen auk egg was not the only specimen left in the world, but it was the one she wanted for her exhibition. The first encounter with the egg in its glass nest would connect her visitor to a primal scene in what Caroline had called in her funding application “the drama of extinction.” An unmarked egg was the beginning of a story, but a marked egg the final word. The dutiful members of the public, having paid their ten Euros or fifteen dollars or whatever the museum determined was right and proper, would stand exactly where the high-browed scientists, the gentlemen collectors, the tomb robbers, and the profiteers had once stood, slack-jawed at nature’s preposterous and exaggerated ways, staring as she herself had stared at the large speckled egg of the extinct auk. They would read for the first time the word written on the egg: Pingouin. She imagined the visitor taking a metaphorical step backward at the sight of the marks on the egg, and turning their attention toward the label. A contemporary font for all the labels and panels in the exhibition, reasoned Caroline, sans serif, global. Helvetica? Egg of the Great Auk, Pinguinus impennis. c. 1844.
Insurance and shipping for all the other exhibits were sorted, but this one little university museum was digging in its heels. She ran through her letters to the vice-chancellor. Small museums were always tricky; they were just not used to lending their collections. Tomorrow she would meet the curator and take her to lunch—what do you eat in Aberdeen? Some kind of fish? Herring? She would show them the draft catalog and explain the importance of the egg to the whole exhibition.
Against Horace’s advice, she would begin ab ovo. “It all begins with the egg,” she would say.
Why had she stayed with Julian for so long? All those wasted years. Julian had lived in a squalid theoretical pile, jumping from one mound to another. She had followed him—or rather, led him—to postcolonial theory, from where he quickly hopped over to trauma theory. All by himself he tiptoed gingerly across to queer theory, where he got quite comfortable until one of his young postgrad students shook her posthumanist booty at him and he left forever.
He and the posthumanist had twins now. Identical twins who looked just like their father.
“Don’t tell me you’re still upset about that man?” her father said when she told him about the twins. “Look on the bright side for once, Caroline. He was a complete narcissist.”
Takes one to know one. But her father was right about one thing: she had always found it hard to see the bright side of anything. “Glass half empty,” he liked to say when she was a teenager, mooning about the house in her slippers and pajamas.
A feeling is more than just a question of point of view, Dad. It is not just a matter of changing the place you sit. Her father preferred not to think about that. He preferred not to think about anything difficult, not even his own son. She was furious with him over Callum’s prescription. All he had to do was verbally okay it with the care facility and they could have gone ahead, but no, he had to put down the phone on them and pull the plug.
When she was young she had a family with a little brother and a mum and a dad. She loved her family. She had never kept a diary, but if she had it would have been full of lines like “I refuse to be tragic.”
No one asked where it had come from, this extinction thing. She rarely spoke to her father about her work, and he avoided questions that might have a complicated answer. She went along with him, as she always had. If he ever got around to asking, she would say something vague, like, “I have my finger on the pulse, Dad. We live on an anxious planet, Dad.”
But right now, her project seemed neither prescient nor provocative. Any minute she would be unmasked as little more than a cheap ventriloquist with a dummy on her knee who feigned silence while the doll slipped and stumbled through every Freudian trick in the book.
