I was more angry than I'd been in a long time. Of course things changed. I understood that. Things change. Things change in time. The Galapagos Islands had changed from hot, sterile, volcanic explosions into oases of oddball populations. Things change in space. Even in that short distance, we were moving from one ecological environment to another. Things die. I understood that, too. Who didn't? Things happen for no reason. Yes, yes, the commonplaces of modern life. Bumper stickers. I got it.
Still, one was not a Buddha. One was a human being, flesh and blood and nerve endings and chemical messages to one's brain. And those messages said, "Fuck you, Martha."
We arrived at a small clearing. In the middle was the post-office barrel atop a heap of sticks and boards and flags, like a big wooden bird on a big wooden nest. There were plaques and carved medallions from visiting groups like ours, laminated ID tags from students, and one or two religious medals.
The post-office barrel, or one like it, had been on that spot for over a hundred years. Sailors, whalers mostly, on outgoing trips would leave letters for ships on their way home and vice versa. My great-great-grandfather might have mailed a letter here. Now tourists left letters. If I, for example, had found a letter addressed to someone in New York City, I would have taken that letter home and delivered it or put a local stamp on it and popped it in a normal blue mailbox.
Martha removed a plastic bag full of letters from the barrel and began looking at the addresses. Many from Germany. Many from Israel. France. England. Ohio. There were also about two dozen business cards from lawyers.
Fuck you, Martha, I thought.
We sat down and milled around and read other people's postcards. Jeremy Toll seemed the most animated of the group. The light grew dimmer, but if you squinted you could still eavesdrop on these unknown correspondents. "Wish you were here!" the postcards said in one language or another. "Hope you get this!"
"They're all writing to their children," Jeremy said. "How utterly unimaginative."
I had a postcard I'd bought earlier that day from Margret Wittmer's hotel. I addressed it to my mother and father. It said, "Thank you. Love, Jane."
"What lovely manners," Jeremy said, looking over my shoulder.
It was dusk. The sky was a beautiful dark softening blue. Gloria was staring off in a particularly distracted way.
"What's a species?" I said.
"Oh, Jane."
"Darwin saw that every barnacle was different from every other barnacle, right? So how can they all be barnacles? If every one is different?"
Gloria said she was sorry the trip was almost over. "It's very beautiful here in a stark and impersonal way."
I looked out at the bushes around us, at the sky, which had turned the color of iron. It was getting cold. Fuck you, Martha, I thought again. And then again.
"It's ironic, isn't it," Gloria said, "that the scientific understanding that led us to realize that we are one with the animal kingdom relied on the recognition of the existence of the individual."
Brian and Liza Cornwall and Mrs. Cornwall herself squatted on the sand to read the notes, the ID tags, the wooden plaques left hanging from the post-office barrel as souvenirs, great heaps of sentimental trash. The Tommasos were scrutinizing a stalk. Craig and Cindy flipped through the lawyers' business cards for familiar names. Jeannie sat with Ethel, Jeremy sat with Dot.
Gloria pointed to the group. "A species is a collection of individuals," she said.
But I didn't say anything, for I realized that two individuals were missing from the collection. Martha and Jack.
"The individuals have certain things in common," Gloria went on. "Historically those things have changed. Aristotle grouped animals differently than we do today. People have used all kinds of criteria—what animals ate, whether or not we eat them, or how many legs they had, or whether they had fur or feathers. Now we look at populations that can share DNA. Okay? Does that help? Species are real, with real boundaries, but they're always changing. All right? They're statistical entities. You're part of a species, but you're still you. And you can't mate with a barnacle."
"Just sheep," Jeremy called from the log where he was sitting.
"That's called a sheep shagger," Dot said.
"You astonish me, young lady," said Jeremy. "And delight me."
Gloria gave me a fairly friendly push, then turned away to resume contemplating the sky, which was now even deeper and darker. It was the latest we had ever been ashore anywhere.
"Where's Martha?" I said.
"She went up that path," Jeannie said. "Some old ruin of a cement mixer or something equally fascinating. I prefer other people's mail."
If Martha had wandered off, I could wander off after her. The ruin of a cement mixer sounded important and intellectually engaging. I could ask her more about the relationship of the individual to the species. I could ask her more about our parents' broken engagement. What could I ask Jack about? Well, it wasn't as if I were following them. Fuck them.
I slipped away from the group and walked nonchalantly along the path that Jeannie had pointed out. It was almost dark, and I reminded myself that the only wild animals on this island were mice and cows and donkeys and cats and dogs. Strays. Brought there on ships, left behind by ships. Goats. Rats. It was quiet. So different from Barlow at dusk with all its birds and squirrels and insects. So different from New York, where people called for taxis and discussed their therapists and fought with invisible spouses on cell phones. I looked through the gloom at the barren landscape.
"Taxi!" I said, very softly.
I spent only a few minutes sneaking, lonely, through the scant brush. Then I saw them.
They stood close to each other.
"This is perfect," Jack said.
"I told you it would be worth the wait," Martha said.
Jack put his arms around Martha.
"You're incredible," he said.
"Just one of the Ecuadorian park ranger's many services," she said.
"Taxi!" I said, as Martha caught sight of me.
I think you could say they both blanched. They moved away from each other. Jack muttered, "Oh dear." Martha coughed.
"Hi!" I said.
"Hi," they answered.
"I was just..." I started to say. But I was just what? Following them? That didn't sound very nice. "I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to—"
But I did mean. I meant to follow them, to find them and, I realized, I meant to tell Martha off, finally, after all these years.
"I'm sorry I didn't mention this before," Jack said. He walked over and took my hand.
I took my hand back. I was here to see Martha, to speak to Martha, to confront Martha. I would deal with him later. Or not. He was a sidebar. I moved past him. I faced Martha.
"We have to get a few things straight, Martha."
"I know it's not right," Jack said, "but—"
"I'm not even talking to you," I said.
"Yes, I know, but—"
"I don't care if it's right. What does that mean, anyway? I'm not interested. I have to talk to Martha. Martha has to talk to me. There are too many stupid secrets and misunderstandings."
"I know it's awful to keep it secret, but it was important," Martha said. She smiled, which I thought almost indecent under the circumstances.
"Martha had to keep this a secret. She could get into trouble," Jack said. "She's been so wonderful. She figured out the logistics, she made this possible, she found the perfect place. She had to keep this a secret, you can understand that."
"Wrong secret," I said.
"Well, all secrets are wrong," Jack said.
"No, they're not," Martha said. "That's not true."
The two of them began earnestly debating when it was morally permissible to keep information from someone else. Jack felt that if the information would hurt the other person, you could keep it to yourself and remain in the clear ethically if not morally.
"If you see what I mean."
While Martha believed
that silence and discretion could in and of themselves be a form of moral courage.
"You agree with me, don't you, Jane?" she said. "Now, let's proceed with the business at hand."
Jack smiled. "Yes," he said. "At last."
Okay, okay, uncle! I give up! How could I properly confront Martha now, as she prepared her woodland bower of lust, like Dido drawing Aeneas to her love cave? Proceed with your epic lovemaking. Go about your business. Just stop talking. Stop these hideous confidences.
I turned to go back.
"Oh, you can stay," Jack said.
"You can watch," Martha said. "Quietly."
This is what you get for stalking people, Jane, I thought. Seek and ye shall find.
"Mom should be here any minute," Jack said.
"She should?"
"This is all for her, really."
"It is?"
"But my sister and the rest of the gang are coming, too. Quite an event, isn't it?"
"You're a very close-knit family."
He put his arm around Martha's shoulders.
"Don't be nervous," she said.
"So we're like going native?" I said.
"There are no natives here," Martha said. "Unless you count Margret Wittmer."
"I know this seems silly, Jane, but people need rituals."
The rest of the voyeurs arrived and stood in a circle around Martha and Jack, and I saw that this was probably not a mating ceremony, but a marriage ceremony.
"I think we should hold hands," Mrs. Cornwall said.
Only Dot seemed embarrassed.
"Now we'll sing," Mrs. Cornwall said.
Then they all seemed embarrassed. But they sang. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
Jack walked over to me, and whispered, "Cheer up."
Then Mrs. Cornwall whipped out a cardboard box from her backpack. She opened it and sprinkled Mr. Cornwall on the ground.
"Maybe I should keep a little," she said. "I've grown accustomed to—"
"To what?" Jack said. "His weight? Come on, Mother. Enough is enough."
"Now's the time," said Jack's sister, more gently.
"This is gross," said Dot.
We walked back along the path in a pure and utter darkness. So, I thought, natural selection is a kind of cosmic farce, in which it all comes out right in the end because whatever comes out in the end is by definition right because there is no right and wrong?
Maybe Martha was correct. Maybe metaphor was a mistake.
11
THE FRIGHTENING THING about Darwin is not nature red in tooth and claw. The frightening thing about Darwin is not our ancestors the apes. The frightening thing about Darwin is what my mother called chaos. I realize that there is some specific scientific meaning to the word chaos. But I think that my mother's meaning is more profound: there is no plan, there never was one. Everyone knows this. It is a cliché of modernism. Everyone knows this now. But Darwin knew it first. And Darwin knew it best. Darwin met chaos head on. He saw it wandering aimlessly, meaninglessly, shifting and turning without warning through a world in which every creature considered itself the most important and not one of them mattered a whit. My mother found this notion to be invigorating, and maybe it is. But imagine realizing it for the first time, realizing it not just personally, but on behalf of the entire Western world. For the years after his great journey, after his discovery of the mechanism of the randomness of our existence, after his discovery of chaos, Darwin suffered mysterious illnesses—long bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, blinding headaches, fainting spells, weakness, and exhaustion. It might have been some virus he picked up on his travels. He may have been allergic to the chemicals he used to preserve specimens. And it may have been psychosomatic, a physical revulsion at the truth he had discovered. And yet, picture this: It is a spring morning. Darwin has been home from his Beagle adventure for years. He stands in his garden, waiting, armed with a flour sifter borrowed from the kitchen. A bee lands on the rose in front of him. Darwin dusts it with a fine white coating of flour. He alerts his assistants—little Darwin girls in their pinafores and little Darwin boys in their short pants, the Darwin governess in her sweeping skirts, all posted at strategic points surrounding the garden. Charles Darwin is wearing a frock coat. They run after the dusty white bee, following its path. The path of the bee, even in the midst of a world of meaninglessness, means something to Darwin. And Darwin, a bearded Victorian paterfamilias, running through his glorious flower garden chasing a bee with his children and their governess—that means something, too.
Looking for the dolphins that never materialized one morning, I told Gloria I had read about Darwin's powdered bee in one of her books.
"Imagine him, thinking up some way to mark the bee, chasing it all over with his kids, with the nanny. Pocket watch banging against his belly. Now, that's what I call science."
Martha, walking by us as I was talking, said, "Poor bee."
This made me want to kill her. Perhaps it is not nature but friendship that is red in tooth and claw. Perhaps a family feud or even a personal feud with my best friend, Martha, should never have come as a surprise to me. Perhaps the feud is the paradigm of all relationships, a long history of exaggerated slights, of misinterpreted actions and misguided reactions. Neo-Darwinists have said that natural selection is an algorithmic process, an unthinking, unchanging equation that governs all of life, all of creation. What if they're wrong? What if it's the feud that regulates life? Feuds are algorithmic, unthinking, unchanging. No matter what you plug into them, the answer is the same. At that moment, I think I liked the idea of feuding with the entire universe. It made me feel connected.
Darwin lived with the secret of creation tearing at his conscience and his intestines for twenty years. Some historians think he was cowardly for not announcing his theory much earlier. Others think he was, rather, a responsible, meticulous scientist. Secrets are funny things, leading a potential existence, an actual existence, a virtual existence, a nonexistence. Secrets don't make any more sense than feuds do.
The Cornwalls' secret was safe with me, that I knew. But not because I felt any protective need to guard it, or by extension, them. It was safe with me because, like so many secrets, once it was revealed to me, it lost its interest, its power. And it embarrassed me. My role in it, as an eager supplicant stalking the cool and distant Martha, embarrassed me. Jack's role embarrassed me, too. Poor Jack, traveling all that way to sing around the campfire of Dad's ashes. The whole Cornwall family, Mr. Cornwall in particular, all embarrassed me. Only Dot, so embarrassed herself, seemed unscathed by the absurd event on Floreana Island.
The next morning, when we set off for our island du jour, a flat rock called South Plaza, I pushed Floreana from my head and placed Gloria's hat (a vast straw object she had purchased at the airport in Guayaquil "for an emergency") on it instead. I was the emergency, for in spite of ginger pills and Dramamine and acupressure bands on my wrists, I was still suffering from seasickness.
"Maybe the absence of meaning in the world has distressed your stomach," Gloria said. "As it did Darwin's."
"Maybe."
The hat flopped lightly on all sides, blocking my vision, but reassuring me. The sky was gray, but painfully bright and hot. Floreana with its macabre hillbilly feuds, with its murders and mummies and, now, the ashes of Mr. William Cornwall, was left far behind.
Mrs. Cornwall did seem a little down in the mouth, though.
"Separation anxiety," Jack whispered to me, nodding at his glum mother. He seemed a bit forlorn himself.
I made a polite response of assent, a murmur sort of thing. We had seemed to have an understanding, Jack and I, if only for a moment, a subtle, sub-rosa protoflirtation that might not have been a flirtation at all—that kind of understanding. But, Really, I thought, you have made me very uncomfortable with your dance of death.
"I'm bored," Dot said. "I'm hot. I want a real shower."
"Decadent creature," said Jeremy.
I avoided Martha, as much as on
e can avoid the leader of a group. I hung back, drifted ahead, sat off to the side on a rock—anything to steer clear of Martha's stories, Martha's voice. She certainly didn't notice. She talked, on and on.
We walked through a forest of dry, white trees called Palo Santo trees from which another species of booby, with French blue beaks and tomato red-webbed feet, watched us from their nests. Little bundles of white down wriggled beneath them, occasionally poking a beak up, demanding to be fed. Sometimes a male blue-footed booby would whistle at us on the narrow trail and peck at our legs. I used Gloria's hat as a shield, holding it against my leg each time we passed a whistling booby glaring at us with those round, close-set booby eyes. Then we made our way across a rocky plateau spattered with white guano paint. Swallow-tailed gulls swept fearlessly from the sky to their nests deep in the cliffs. We posed for pictures beneath towering cactus trees. The heat accompanied us everywhere.
The blue-footed birds hissed at us as we passed out of the grove of bare trees to be greeted by a vast rocky plateau dotted with their circular nests, nests that were nothing but white lime rings, orbits of guano sprayed on the inhospitable rocks, circles of shit.
"Circle of death," Jack reminded us, dutifully, without his usual zeal.
Jack was shimmering. Why was he shimmering?
The boobies sat on the ground surrounded by their bull's-eyes of guano. We stood, staring at the circles of shit, silent and intent.
The boobies were shimmering. Martha was shimmering. Gloria was shimmering, too, beside a shimmering Cindy. Why was everyone shimmering? Was it from the heat? Interesting that everyone was shimmering. I closed my eyes for a moment, but that only made the swaying and shimmering worse.
I looked at the white circles. Inside was caked brown dust. Outside was caked brown dust. Inside was home. Outside was death.
"Shocking," said Mrs. Tommaso.
"Gloria thinks anthropomorphism can cloud your understanding," I said.
"Or clarify it!" said Gloria. She turned to one of the birds, squatted down beside it, and looked it right in its close-set booby eyes. "Isn't that right, dear?" she said.
The Evolution of Jane Page 16
