The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  The morning’s exam papers were sitting on the corner of Novak’s desk. Alex shot a glance at them and saw that his own was right on the top, already riddled with red but not graded yet. This was exactly the kind of childish ploy that Novak would pull, and that made Alex loathe and admire him.

  “So.” He sat tenting his fingers at his desk, pointedly ignoring the exams. “You have something for me?”

  Alex was caught off guard.

  “Well, no. Not exactly. I mean, I gave you a copy of my proposal last month.”

  “Ah,” Novak said, though Alex couldn’t tell whether he was actually acknowledging possession of the thing.

  There was a silence. Novak had always asked his grad students to address him by his first name, Jiri, a privilege he didn’t extend to his undergrads, though for Alex this had the effect of making him feel he couldn’t address him at all.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is you really want to do,” Novak said finally. “Plain and simple. In your own words.”

  A little spasm of terror went through Alex. This wasn’t what academia was about, putting things in your own words. In any event he could hardly tell Novak that what he really wanted to do was redeem his own life.

  “I suppose it’s like Derrida,” he started. “This idea that there’s a whole structure in our minds that controls how we think. Except instead of language or binary opposites or something like that, it’s genetic.”

  “But you’re talking about biochemistry, not literature. What are you actually going to write about, what are you going to analyze? Are you going to find the genetic code in Anna Karenina?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “But that’s just boring. You’re just stuck saying that people are ruled by self-interest or they aren’t. It’s too simple a mechanism, don’t you see? It’s fine for protozoa, but it doesn’t explain much when you get to humans.”

  Alex was losing heart. He was ashamed at how unformed his ideas still were. Every once in a while some insight would come to him and he’d think he’d cracked the back of the thing, little aphorisms that he’d write down in a notebook he kept for the purpose, but then he’d go back and every entry would seem hopelessly banal.

  And yet he remained convinced he was on to something.

  “What’s really behind all this?” Novak said. “I mean, it seems such a tangent. It’s not like you’ve got a background in this.”

  “I did do my Master’s in Victorian Studies,” Alex said peevishly.

  “And you probably read Dickens and Ruskin and Oscar Wilde just like I did. I doubt you were reading The Origin of Species.”

  He had in fact read The Origin at the time, but wasn’t about to try to score points by mentioning that.

  “So?” Novak said. “What is it?”

  Alex felt cornered.

  “It’s nothing. I guess it was a trip I took when I was younger. To the Galápagos.”

  He regretted the admission at once.

  “Aha. World’s End.” Novak had latched onto the thing like a springing cat. “Now things are beginning to make a bit of sense. Tell me about it.”

  Novak often made a show of inviting confidences, as if he were some benevolent patronus, but he was probably the last person Alex would have wanted to pour his heart out to.

  “It was just a trip. An accident, really. But it got me interested in all this stuff.”

  Novak was losing patience.

  “Look, Alex, that’s great. It’s good to work with something that’s relevant to you. But no one’s going to give you a doctorate just because you’re interested in something. You have to know it like the back of your hand.”

  Alex could feel his blood pressure rising.

  “Did you even read my proposal, at least?”

  Novak gave him a look.

  “Alex, all that was just the standard kind of bullshit people put in their proposals. You know that as well as I do. It was impressive bullshit but it was still bullshit. You’ll have to do better than that with me.”

  Alex reddened. His anger crested, then spent itself on the shores of shame.

  “So you’re saying I should just find something else.”

  But Novak actually seemed taken aback.

  “That’s not what I meant at all. Don’t misunderstand me—it’s intriguing, I’ll give you that. It’s original. I just need you to spell it out.”

  It looked like he’d have to be happy with just this crumb. It was almost worse than nothing: he couldn’t quit the thing now, yet wasn’t sure he had the will to go on.

  Novak had stood to indicate the interview was over.

  “Look, Alex,” he said, “you’re an intelligent young man, anyone can see that. I read that paper of yours in Canadian Studies—I thought it was brilliant. You just need to focus a bit, that’s all. Maybe scale back a bit on what you’re trying to do.”

  For all his iconoclasm, Novak was bowing like the rest of them before that gold star of academia, publication.

  “Try starting fresh. Take the summer to write something out, then bring it by.”

  Novak had come around his desk. He extended a hand and Alex started to raise his own, then checked himself when he saw Novak had only meant to open the door.

  “Good exam, by the way. A little weak on Benjamin, maybe.” Alex couldn’t shake his sense of humiliation as he left Novak’s office. Somehow that felt like the point of all this, of the whole academic shuffle, not some search for the truth but just this endless jockeying for position. But then he was the one who had consecrated himself to this undertaking as if it could matter, as if some sort of expiation could come out of it.

  That was his mistake in this as in everything, that he didn’t simply shed his skin and move on. You got no points for wallowing. He should forget his dissertation, forget the Galápagos, should go out this minute and buy his ticket. This was the chance he’d been waiting for, a new beginning. He felt it kindle again, fickle flickering hope, then quickly snuffed it for fear it would spread.

  – 7 –

  Back in his apartment Alex checked the news again: Chernobyl had dropped from the lead to position three, beneath Charles and Di’s visit to Expo and the fall in the prime rate to 10.5. From Tokyo, Mr. Reagan intoned, “The Soviets owe the world an explanation.” Sanctimonious ass. Explain El Salvador. Explain Bedtime for Bonzo.

  He ran himself a bath, his little refuge in moments of crisis, though this wasn’t something he cared to admit to people. Unfortunately the bathroom in his apartment was a holdover from someone’s bad seventies decorating idea, the walls and ceiling lined all around with one-foot-square smoked mirror tiles, so that lying in the tub Alex saw himself reflected darkly from almost every conceivable angle like a bad cubist painting.

  He lay back in the water and closed his eyes. Noise, noise, noise; his head was full of it. Row out from the shore and drop your thoughts into the sea, he told himself, a technique he’d picked up from a self-help book back in high school. But it was no use, his thoughts wouldn’t solidify into the necessary pebbles. He wished he had one of those sensory deprivation tanks that had been the rage after Altered States. Alex had become obsessed after he’d seen the movie with the notion of stripping down to his core, of climbing into one of those tanks and regressing like William Hurt to his most primitive animal self.

  At the time, of course, Peter, I was thinking of it in Jungian terms, as a sort of descent into the collective unconscious. But it would have been more logical to be looking at Darwin.

  That was still your Jungian period, I guess. Before you’d found out about the anti-Semitism.

  Actually, that wasn’t what put me off him in the end so much as all the hokeyness. But in a sense, I suppose, a Darwinian sense, Jung was right: it’s all there in our genes, the whole history of the race, right back to the protozoa.

  There had been an instant in Novak’s office when he’d felt on the verge of the thing again, of the crucial insight, but still it had refused to sho
w itself. Maybe time had already run out for him. He’d read about a study of Nobel laureates that showed they’d all had their big inspirations before they’d reached thirty. It was true of Darwin, just barely—his real breakthrough, his first inkling of the little mechanism that governed the origin of species, had come a matter of months before his thirtieth, while he was reading Malthus’s essay on population. All the rest had been just the slow working out of that original insight, over twenty years and more and through the minutest accumulation of data from the most painstaking, most banal of investigations.

  Alex sank lower into the water. Thump, thump, thump, went his heart, counting the seconds off in his brain’s slow decline. Yet there was hope, perhaps, in Darwin, in his unspectacular life—apart from his Beagle trip he’d spent most of his life holed up in his study, sifting through bird shit and cutting up barnacles and worms. You saw it in The Origin, which was mainly just a compendium of the most domestic of observations, almost entirely devoid of anything resembling a grand statement. Maybe that was Alex’s error; maybe he was looking too hard for the Big Explanation.

  Alex had seen the study where Darwin had cut up those barnacles, on one of the few real trips that he and Liz had ever treated themselves to. It had been at a heady time for them, just after his Canadian Studies coup and a rave review of Liz’s work in the local entertainment rag and before the whole disaster with the abortion. The trip, the calm before the storm, had gone perfectly: it had been a beautiful, rainless May and the whole of England, despite the dawn of Thatcher, had seemed laid out for their benefit, immaculately scrubbed and prettified and trim. Alex had hardly given Darwin a thought until he’d come across a display at the Natural History Museum in London on Darwin’s house at Downe and been surprised to discover it was not more than twenty miles out of the city.

  While Liz did the Tate he went out to see the house, by train as far as Bromley and from there by bus through hopelessly quaint Kentish farmland, along roads that were hardly the span of a human body. Darwin’s village still boasted an inn where Charles had apparently taken ale; from there it was a five-minute walk along Luxted Road to his house, which was tucked off the main road along a narrow lane and lay buried in a wilderness of shrubbery and trees.

  The house had a ramshackle look, a long rambling two-story manor in graying stucco tacked haphazardly with aging trellises that were just as haphazardly overgrown with ivy. At the entrance a portly custodian with the damp, tousled look of having been surprised at a nap told him in a tone of hushed apology that visits were only by appointment.

  “Oh. I just came from London. I didn’t know.”

  The man glanced over his shoulder and gave Alex a conspiratorial look, as if Darwin himself were sleeping upstairs.

  “I’m sure it’ll be all right if I just show you around a bit.”

  The place was kept up, for some reason, by the Royal College of Surgeons. The only room that was actually open for viewing was Darwin’s study, which had been restored at some point after apparently serving as the rumpus room for a girls’ boarding school. The room was gloomier than Alex would have expected, given the hours Darwin had spent there peering at specimens.

  “You must be a student of Darwin, then,” the custodian said encouragingly. “To go to all this trouble.”

  “Not really.” In fact, Alex, having recently finished an utterly useless degree in Victorian Studies, wasn’t entirely sure what exactly he was a student of. “I mean, I’ve read him.”

  “Well, you’ve done more than most then, I expect. A very complex man, Mr. Darwin. Much more to him than meets the eye.”

  The room held a couple of tables laid out with Darwin memorabilia, specimen bottles, implements, notepapers, open books. There was a cupboard in the corner with a tiny-drawered cabinet on top; there were shelves of chemicals, weights and scales, rows of books. The place did not look especially scientific in any contemporary sense; rather, it looked like what it was, the study of an amateur, of a country gentleman.

  The custodian pointed out through a window toward the lane that passed in front of the house.

  “He had that wall built out there, and the road lowered, quite a job in those days. To make things a bit more private.” He motioned Alex over to the window. “Look just outside, next to the window frame—you can still make out where the rivets were that held the mirror in place. So he could get a look at anyone who came to the front door, you see. In case he wanted to nip away for a moment.”

  Darwin’s special chair was pulled up to one of the tables, a worn leather armchair he’d had fitted with wheels so he could coast around the room at will. He had written The Origin in it, on a cloth-covered board he placed over the arms. There was a matching ottoman, which was also fitted with wheels, and which his children—“A big healthy brood he had, he did his part in that regard”—used to commandeer to ride up and down the hall. Behind a divider wall were his facilities, with a washstand and a big metal tub: this was where he had his treatments, daily dousings in icy water, for the mysterious illness that plagued him most of his life.

  Alone in the center of the main table stood a framed photograph of a slightly homely girl, sad-eyed and stoic-looking, in fusty Victorian dress. Beside it sat an old pen nib, a scrap of embroidery, a lock of dark hair. A kind of eeriness came off the little island the ensemble formed, as if it had been set apart like pagan medicine, the bundles and scraps of private things used to win a lover or ward off the evil eye.

  “That was his Annie. The one who passed on.” The custodian paused as if the wound was still fresh. “He never recovered, they say.”

  Alex couldn’t have been in that room more than twenty minutes, yet his sense of it had never left him. Something had struck a chord, a spirit that was almost sinister but also commonplace and familiar. Later, when he had been let loose on the grounds and had gone out to the Sandwalk, the path in the woods behind the house where Darwin used to take his constitutionals, he’d had a sort of insight: he was not so hopelessly distant from this man. That was when the idea for his dissertation had been born, when it had seemed possible to dare such a thing.

  His bathwater was going cold. He ought to get up and start preparations for his party. The image often came to him, when he was in the bath, of Darwin lowering his bony rump into the frigid water of his tub: it was such a humiliating thing, to have a body, to be held in such thrall to it. These days the theorists made a big deal about the body, the body as text, writing on the body, men writing on women, but it was all just metaphor, from what Alex could tell—you only had to spend five minutes in a roomful of academics to see there wasn’t a single body among the lot of them. Theory porn, was how Alex thought of it; pure compensation. He wanted something a little less metaphysical, something that might take account of Darwin’s bony haunch, otherwise what was the point? Somewhere in literature’s dark beginnings there had to be real blood on the page, there had to be real bodies being sacrificed or being saved.

  He stared up at himself in the smoked mirror tiles on the ceiling, this unpleasant slab of pasty flesh and matted hair. He seemed such an unlikely hash in that instant, as unpredictable and strange in his lineaments as the arthropods of the Burgess Shale, with their inefficient tentacles and extrusions and frills. Why this limb here, why fingers, why a nose? It beggared the mind to think of all the billion little evolutionary mutations and mistakes that had led just here, to this freakish amalgam. He had riddled it with scars over the years as if to mark it with his own private history—a sickle-shaped ridge in the fat of his palm from when he’d put his hand through a sheet of greenhouse glass; a black dot near his knee where one of his brothers had jabbed a pencil.

  He peered more closely into a mirror tile to see if he could make out the scar on his eyelid. There it was, barely discernible now, just a thin intimation of white, zigging down between his lashes. That one he’d got when he’d jumped off the back of their stake truck into the corner of a piece of plywood his brother was unloading. “My eye
, my eye!” he’d screamed, clutching at it like a kid in a B movie, though meanwhile so much blood and goo was oozing from it he was certain he’d ruptured it. His father had been spreading some kind of chemical in the greenhouses and had come running out covered completely in white, head to toe, his clothes, his hair, his lashes.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “My eye!”

  By the time they’d got to the hospital his father had given up trying to shout some sense out of him and had started in on a litany of moaning imprecations in Italian, the increasingly desperate tone of which had done much to inch up Alex’s panic. Alex knew what was going through both their heads: his brother David’s accident the year before. He didn’t think they could bear it, another dismemberment. He was also thinking about the little shoplifting spree he’d been on that summer—in a drawer of his desk the items had been accumulating, completely useless things like key chains and penlights and paperweights that he’d wanted, at the moment he’d taken them, with all of his being.

  “What happened? How did it happen?”

  Alex hadn’t once dared to take his hands away from his eye.

  “I just hit my eye!” he wailed.

  He was dumbfounded at the air of calm that greeted them at the hospital emergency room. The nurse smiled at him and spoke slowly, though there was the life of him gushing out in his hands. Then he was stretched out in a cubicle and the doctor was with him, while his father, still ghostly white, stood by wheezing with emotion.

  “It was a piece of wood or something. It was his brother who seen it.”

  Back when David had had his accident Alex had tried making a pact with God to bring him right—a joke, really, not just because the matter had been hopeless but because Alex was already at a point when he and God were not really on speaking terms. And yet he couldn’t stop himself now from hedging his bets. If God saved his eye, he swore, he’d never steal another blessed thing his long life.