The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  They began locking her door. Peas for dinner; soup for lunch. She felt herself sliding away; the muscle of her heart had thinned and blood slopped around inside. Something deep and untrammeled within her had died, diseased somehow, trampled. How had it happened? Hadn’t she guarded it carefully? Hadn’t she secured it away in the center of her?

  After the hospital—she could not say how many days she was locked in that room—Ward brought her home and installed her in a chair by the window. She watched buses, taxicabs, neighbors plodding back and forth with their heads down. An immense emptiness had settled inside her; her body was a desert, windless and dark. Africa could not have seemed farther away. Sometimes she wondered if it even existed, if her whole history was just some dream, some fable meant for children. Look where impulsiveness can get you, the storyteller would say, wagging his finger in the child’s eyes. Look what happens when you stray.

  Spring passed, summer and fall. Naima did not get out of bed until noon or later. With the slow revolution of seasons only the tiniest memories—the squeaks of robin chicks begging worms from their mother, snow sifting through a streetlight—trickled back. They came to her as if through a thick wall of glass; their meanings were changed and they had lost their context, their edge, their wild savor. Even her dreams came back eventually, but these too were altered. She dreamed a train of camels sauntering through a woodland, orange clouds looming over the canopy of a forest, but in these scenes she was nowhere to be found—she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward’s museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren’t allowed to touch.

  Some mornings, watching from the bed as Ward tied his tie, the tail of his shirt hanging over the plump backs of his thighs, she felt resentment foam up from some rotting place within her and she’d turn onto her stomach and hate him for hounding her through the rainforest, for leaping from the rim of that cliff. Everything had unraveled between them: Ward had given up trying to reach her and she had given up allowing herself to be reached. She had been in Ohio five years but it felt like fifty.

  Evening. She was squatting on the back steps, half asleep, when a line of geese skimmed over the gable of the house. They passed so low she could see the definition of their feathers, the smooth black curves of their bills, the simultaneous, coordinated blink of their eyes. She felt the sudden power of their wings as the air they displaced shifted over her. They moved steadily toward the horizon, bleating, alternating leaders. She watched until they were gone and then watched the spot they had disappeared into and wondered: What avenue did they follow? What strange and hidden switch in their heads was thrown each winter, what sent them shuttling down the same invisible pathways to the same southern waters? How glorious the sky was, she thought, and how unknowable. Long after they were gone she trained her eyes sky-ward, waiting, hoping.

  It was 1989; she was thirty-one years old. Ward was eating a cupcake—a stalactite of frosting hung from his bottom lip. She went in and stood before him. Okay, she said. I want to go to college.

  He stopped chewing. Well, he said. All right then.

  In a gymnasium students milled between stalls labeled Government, Anthropology, Chemistry. One booth—decorated with glossy photographs—caught her eye. A volcano ringed with snow. The cracked seat of a chair. A series of photos of a bullet exiting an apple. She studied the images, filled out paperwork: Photography 100, Introduction to the Camera. Ward had an old Nikon 630 in the basement and she dusted it off and brought it to the first class.

  That will never do, her instructor said. It is all I have, she said. He fiddled with the loading door, explained how light would seep in and spoil her photos.

  I can hold it shut, she said. Or I’ll tape it. Please. Tears sprung to her eyes.

  Well, the instructor said, we’ll see what we can do.

  Their second day he led the students onto the campus. We’re snapping a few exposures here, he called. Don’t burn your film. Focus on the structures, people.

  The students fanned out, aiming their lenses at the cornerstones of buildings, the chiseled end of a handrail, the domed cap of a fire hydrant. Naima walked to a grizzled, bent oak leaning out of a triangle of lawn between sidewalks. Her camera was taped shut with electrical tape. It contained twenty-four exposures. She hardly understood what that meant, to have twenty-four exposures in her machine. F-stop, ASA, depth of field, all this meant nothing. But she leaned forward, pointed the lens up, where the leafless branches shifted against the sky, and waited. The cloud cover was thick but she could see a rift forming. She waited. In ten minutes the clouds parted gently, a thin ray of light nudged through, illuminating the oak, and she made her exposure.

  Two days later, in the darkroom, she watched the instructor unclip the black coil of her negatives from the line where they were drying. He nodded and handed the strip to her. She raised them as he had done, to the bulb, and suddenly, seeing the rendered image of what she had captured only days before—oak branches bloomed over with sun, a fracture in the haze beyond— she felt a darkness tear away from her eyes. Shivers ran down her arms; joy founted up. It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.

  That night she could not sleep. She burned. She was three hours early for the next class.

  They made contact sheets, then prints. In the darkroom she watched the developing bath intently, waiting for the grain of her photo to emerge on the paper—it floated in, first faint, then gray, then fully there, and it struck her as the most beautiful magic she’d ever seen. Developer, stop-bath, fixer. So simple. She thought: I was made and set here to give voice to this.

  After class the instructor called her over. He leaned over the prints and pointed out how she’d trapped a telephone wire in this frame, how she could have extended that exposure a bit longer. Good, though, he said, a good first set. But it’s a bit wrong, too. Your camera lets light in—can you see here how the fringe is washed out? And here the tree looks flat; there is no background, no point of reference. He took his glasses off and leaned back, pontificating now. How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It’s the central challenge for every artist, Naima.

  Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?

  Every day she went out and snapped pictures of clouds: altonimbus, cirrocumulus, the cross-hatching of contrails, a child’s balloon drifting over train tracks. She caught the skyline of the city reflected in the bottom of a cloud, two puff-ball cumulus drifting across the face of a puddle. A cerulean rhombus of sky mirrored in the eye of a dog, killed minutes earlier by a bus. She began to see the world in terms of angles of light; windows, bulbs, the sun, the stars. Ward would leave money for groceries on the counter but she’d spend it on film; she wandered into neighborhoods she’d never seen before; she squatted in someone’s front yard, motionless, for an hour, waiting for a thick raft of stratus clouds to rupture, to see if the light might saturate the thin spar of a spider’s web trussed between two blades of grass.

  Again there were phone calls: we saw your wife squatting by a dead dog, Ward, taking pictures of it. She took pictures of our trash cans. She stood on the hood of your car for an hour, Ward, staring at the sky.

  He tried talking to her. So Naima, he’d try, how’s class? Or: Are you being careful out there? He had been promoted again and spent nearly all of his time at benefits, on the phone, walking the museum with donors in tow. By then he and Naima were miles apart—their trails had diverged and were unrolling through different continents. She’d show Ward the exposures and he’d nod. You’re doing so great, he’d say and touch her on the back. I like this one, and he’d hold up a print she disliked, a patch of iridescence in a cirrus cloud drifting past the moon. She
didn’t mind; the kindling of her soul had caught fire. Nothing could slow her. Let Ward and his neighbors turn their eyes down, she would turn her eyes to the skies. She alone would witness these orange and purple and blue and white world-travelers, these bossed and gilded shape-shifters that came scudding overhead. Each morning, stepping out the front door, she felt the hard, dark center of her flare up.

  Photography 100 ended. She earned an A. In the fall she took two more photography courses: Contemporary Photography and Techniques of the Darkroom. One professor lavished praise and offered to direct an independent study, saying, I think it’s best if we let you continue down this path you’re on. And Naima was on a path, she could sense it stretching out in front of her. She clicked and clicked. By the end of the semester she had won a student prize for her photo of the dead dog; people she had never seen before passed her in the halls and wished her well. In January a coffee shop called to offer a hundred dollars for a print of her first photo, the oak branches washed in light. By summer her work was made part of a group exhibition at a small gallery. It’s her patience, a woman murmured. These photos remind you that each moment is here, then gone forever, that no two skies are ever the same. Another edged in to declare that Naima’s work was perfectly ethereal, a sublime expression of the intangible.

  She left early, escaping past a tuxedoed waiter with a tray of spring rolls, and marched into the dying light to take photo -graphs: a wedge of sunset through a bridge buttress; the spinning rosette of light left by the moon as it eased behind a building.

  Late at night—it was April 1992—she felt that old feeling, the exhilaration of approaching a trail’s end at a sprint. She stood on the marble steps of the Natural History Museum and studied the sky. It had rained during the afternoon and now the starlight fell cleanly through the air. The light of galaxies bathed her neck and shoulders, lifted the tide of blood in her heart—the sky was only yards deep. She could reach through it and seize the frigid center, set suns swaying like tiny droplets of mercury. Deep and shallow: the sky could be so many things.

  Ward was in the hall of butterflies, unpacking a box filled with dead specimens. It had been packed poorly and many of the wings were torn, their powdery designs smeared. He was lifting them out and piecing them together on the floor. She shook him by his shoulder and said, I’m leaving. I’m going home. To Africa.

  He leaned back but did not meet her eyes. When?

  Now.

  Wait until tomorrow.

  She shook her head.

  How will you get there?

  I’ll fly. Already she was turning, moving out of the hall, the soft sounds of her footfalls fading into silence. Although he knew she meant by airplane, later that night, alone in their bed, Ward couldn’t help but imagine her spreading her arms, opening her hands, and gracefully, easily, lifting her body over the plains and hills, toward the ocean.

  A photograph—impossible towers of cumulonimbus banked against the horizon, livid with lightning—came to Ward in the mail. He shook the envelope but she’d sent only the photo. The next week another arrived: a lone rhinoceros silhouetted on the horizon, the trails of two falling stars intersecting above it. She didn’t write a word, didn’t sign her name. But the photos kept coming, two a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Between them yawned Ward’s life.

  He sold his house, sold the furniture and bought a condo in the center of the city. He spent his weekends buying things: a gigantic television, two tile murals for the bathroom walls. He redecorated his office: rare seashells on the windowsill, Spanish leather stretched over the desktop. He became especially good at his job. Over paella, over maguro and gyoza, he could get nearly anyone to donate to the museum. He learned how to make himself invisible, a listener who spoke only when the person he was courting needed reassurance or time to compose what to say next. He tweaked their consciences by describing children pouring into the museum, thrilled them by showing animated footage of digitized dinosaurs on the museum’s movie screen. His finale always involved a line like: We offer children the world. And they would clap him on the shoulder and say, Why not, Mr. Beach. Why not.

  He did his best to see that the museum evolved. People wanted interactive exhibits, complicated robotics, miniature reproductions of Brazilian forests. He got to work before everybody else and stayed until everything had closed. He arranged to have a simulated ice age occur every forty-five minutes in a room off the lobby. He had a miniature savannah built, complete with sunning hippopotami, swaying acacias, a three-inch zebra being feasted on by a pride of tiny, meticulously savage lionesses. But still he was mourning, and something in his face gave it away.

  How Ward Beach suffers so quietly, his neighbors said, the museum volunteers said. He should find someone new, they said. Someone a little more grounded. Someone with his taste.

  He grew corn, tomatoes, snap peas. He sat by the window in a café and read the paper, smiled at the waitress as she set down his change. And every few weeks the envelopes came: nimbus clouds reflected in the wet pawprint of a lion; squall lines warping over the summit of Kilimanjaro.

  Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland. He dreamed of catching her as she flew through a forest; his arms were great butterfly nets; just as he held them above her, about to close the mouths of the nets over her, he woke, his throat closing, and had to lean gasping over the bed.

  Sometimes, on his way home, walking through the empty museum, the heels of his shoes clicking over the floors, Ward would pass the fossilized bird he had sent back from Tanzania almost twenty years before. Its bones, caught as they were in the limestone—the curves and needles of its winglike arms, the jacket of its ribs—were crumpled; its neck was miserably bent; it had died broken in pain. What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.

  In his mail an envelope with a Tanzanian postmark arrived, the first in months. Happy Birthday, it said, scribbled in her lilting, girlish cursive. It was his birthday, a few days away. Inside was a photograph of dark, rich grass, deep in a gorge, bisected by a river, the flat panel of water shimmering with stars. He held it under his desk lamp. The grass, the curve of the riverbank—it seemed familiar.

  He saw: it was their place, the stretch of river he had plunged into from a cliffside, where she had come to him, almost dissolving into the water. He withdrew the print from the light and set it facedown, and wept.

  What did he regret most? Their chance meeting on the road, her decision to leap onto the hood of his truck? His decision to bring her to Ohio? Letting her go? Letting himself go?

  He didn’t have her address, a phone number, anything. Twice on the plane he got up and walked to the lavatory to look at himself in the mirror. Do you know what you’re doing? he asked aloud. Are you crazy? In his seat he drank vodka like water. Far below his window the clouds revealed nothing.

  He was forty-seven years old and he had walked into the chief curator’s office and given his two weeks’. He’d bought his ticket, carefully packed his clothes. These were all cliff edges off which he’d had to step.

  In the wet air of Dar es Salaam he felt old memories come springing back: the familiar pattern on a woman’s khanga, the smell of drying cloves, the lopsided face of an amputee holding out her palm for coins. His first morning the sight of his shadow standing sharp and black against the hotel wall caused déjà vu.

  The sensation stayed with him on the drive up the coast toward Tanga. The green and brown pan of the Maasai Steppe, punctuated here and there with thin spires of smoke; the sight of two dhows sailing out to Zanzibar: he felt he had seen all these things before, as if here he was, twenty years younger, driving up this road for the first time with a Land Rover full of shovels and sifting pans an
d chisels.

  Some things had changed: there was a hotel in Lushoto now with a menu in English, and hawkers out front who offered glamorous safaris at ridiculous prices. The Usambaras had changed too: hundreds more terraced plantations had been cut into the hillsides; antennas stood blinking on ridgelines. But these changes—cellular phones and taxi-vans and cheeseburgers on a menu—didn’t matter. After all, he considered, wasn’t this the land where the first thick-browed humans walked, under these same brooding mountains, with these same winds bringing them smells of rain, of drought? He read in a guidebook that humans hadn’t witnessed the great migration of wildebeest and zebra up the Serengeti until 1900. A hundred years—in Ward’s field, a century was a finger-snap. What change could a hundred years bring? What small fraction of time was that for the animals who had been charging up and down that plain, teaching their young how to live, forever?

  He slept deeply and peacefully and for the first time in years did not wake from a dream with something clenched around his throat. He drank coffee on the porch of his hotel and chewed a scone before setting off. He thought he would find her parents’ house easily—how many times had he made that drive: fifty?— but the roads were changed, wider and graded; he would round a bend and think he knew where he was but the road would suddenly descend when it was supposed to climb; he’d be at plantation gates when he should have been at an intersection. Dead ends, turn-offs, U-turns.

  After days of winding through the hills he began to ask anyone he saw about her parents, about her, if anyone knew of a place where a photographer might develop film. He asked tea pickers, tour guides, duka owners. A boy at the hotel desk said he mailed tourists’ film to an address in Dar to have it developed but that only white people dropped off rolls of film. An old woman told Ward in broken sentences that she remembered Naima’s parents but no one had lived in their home since they died many years ago. He bought the woman lunch and plied her with questions. Do you remember where they lived? Can you tell me how to drive there? She shrugged and waved vaguely at the mountains. The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.