I, the insubstantial substance of memory, the dispersed droplets of the ranging fog, saw the man lift his hands for the last time. Strangely, in all that ravished body, they alone had remained unchanged. They were strong hands, the hands of a craftsman who had played many roles in his life: actor, laborer, professional runner. They were the hands of a man, indirectly of all men, for such had been the nature of his life. Now, in a last lucid moment, he had lifted them up and, curiously, as though they belonged to another being, he had turned and flexed them, gazed upon them unbelievingly, and dropped them once more.
He, too, the shadow, the mist in the gaping bones, had seen these seemingly untouched deathless instruments rally as though with one last purpose before the demanding will. And I, also a shadow, come back across forty years, could hear the question at last. “Why are you, my hands, so separate from me at death, yet still to be commanded? Why have you served me, you who are alive and ingeniously clever?” For here he turned and contemplated them with his old superb steadiness. “What has been our partnership, for I, the shadow, am going, yet you of all of me are alive and persist?”
I could have sworn that his last thought was not of himself but of the fate of the instruments. He was outside, he was trying to look into the secret purposes of things, and the hands, the masterful hands, were the only purpose remaining, while he, increasingly without center, was vanishing. It was the hands that contained his last conscious act. They had been formidable in life. In death they had become strangers who had denied their master’s last question.
Suddenly I was back under the overhang of the foundered boat. I had sat there stiff with cold for many hours. I was no longer the extension of a blizzard beating against immovable gates. The year of the locusts was done. It was, instead, the year of the mist maker that some obscure Macusi witch doctor had chosen to call god. But the mist maker had gone over the long-abandoned beach, touching for his inscrutable purposes only the broken shell of the nonexistent, only the tracks of a wayward fox, only a man who, serving the mist maker, could be made to stream wispily through the interstices of time.
I was a biologist, but I chose not to examine my hands. The fog and the night were lifting. I had been far away for hours. Crouched in my heavy sheepskin I waited without thought as the witch doctor might have waited for the morning dispersion of his god. Finally, the dawn began to touch the sea, and then the worn timbers of the hulk beside which I sheltered reddened just a little. It was then I began to glimpse the world from a different perspective.
I had watched for nights the great bolts leaping across the pane of an attic window, the bolts Emerson had dreamed in the first scientific days might be the force that hurled reptile into mammal. I had watched at midnight the mad scientists intent upon their own creation. But in the end, those fantastic flashes of the lightning had ceased without issue, at least for me. The pane, the inscrutable pane, had darkened at last; the scientists, if scientists they were, had departed, carrying their secret with them. I sighed, remembering. It was then I saw the miracle. I saw it because I was hunched at ground level, smelling rank of fox, and no longer gazing with upright human arrogance upon the things of this world.
I did not realize at first what it was that I looked upon. As my wandering attention centered, I saw nothing but two small projecting ears lit by the morning sun. Beneath them, a small neat face looked shyly up at me. The ears moved at every sound, drank in a gull’s cry and the far horn of a ship. They crinkled, I began to realize, only with curiosity; they had not learned to fear. The creature was very young. He was alone in a dread universe. I crept on my knees around the prow and crouched beside him. It was a small fox pup from a den under the timbers who looked up at me. God knows what had become of his brothers and sisters. His parent must not have been home from hunting.
He innocently selected what I think was a chicken bone from an untidy pile of splintered rubbish and shook it at me invitingly. There was a vast and playful humor in his face. “If there was only one fox in the world and I could kill him, I would do.” The words of a British poacher in a pub rasped in my ears. I dropped even further and painfully away from human stature. It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
Yet here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed, innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of its two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head. The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing.
It was not a time for human dignity. It was a time only for the careful observance of amenities written behind the stars. Gravely I arranged my forepaws while the puppy whimpered with ill-concealed excitement. I drew the breath of a fox’s den into my nostrils. On impulse, I picked up clumsily a whiter bone and shook it in teeth that had not entirely forgotten their original purpose. Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment. We were the innocent thing in the midst of the bones, born in the egg, born in the den, born in the dark cave with the stone ax close to hand, born at last in human guise to grow coldly remote in the room with the rifle rack upon the wall.
But I had seen my miracle. I had seen the universe as it begins for all things. It was, in reality, a child’s universe, a tiny and laughing universe. I rolled the pup on his back and ran, literally ran for the nearest ridge. The sun was half out of the sea, and the world was swinging back to normal. The adult foxes would be already trotting home.
A little farther on, I passed one on a ridge who knew well I had no gun, for it swung by quite close, stepping delicately with brush and head held high. Its face was watchful but averted. It did not matter. It was what I had experienced and the fox had experienced, what we had all experienced in adulthood. We passed carefully on our separate ways into the morning, eyes not meeting.
But to me the mist had come, and the mere chance of two lifted sunlit ears at morning. I knew at last why the man on the bed had smiled finally before he dropped his hands. He, too, had worked around to the front of things in his death agony. The hands were playthings and had to be cast aside at last like a little cherished toy. There was a meaning and there was not a meaning, and therein lay the agony.
The meaning was all in the beginning, as though time was awry. It was a little beautiful meaning that did not stay, and the sixty-year-old man on the hospital bed had traveled briefly toward it through the dark at the end of the universe. There was something in the desperate nature of the world that had to be reversed, but he had been too weak to tell me, and the hands had dropped helplessly away.
After forty years I had been just his own age when the fog had come groping for my face. I think I can safely put it down that I had been allowed my miracle. It was very small, as is the way of great things. I had been permitted to correct time’s arrow for a space of perhaps five minutes—and that is a boon not granted to all men. If I were to render a report upon this episode, I would say that men must find a way to run the arrow backward. Doubtless it is impossible in the physical world, but in the memory and the will man might achieve the deed if he would try.
For just a moment I had held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone. It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.
TEN
The Last Neanderthal
For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.
—JOB 5:23
IT HAS LONG been the thought of science, particularly in evolutionary biology, that nature does not make extended leaps, that her creatures slip in slow disguise from one shape to another. A simple observation will reveal, however, that there are rock
s in deserts that glow with heat for a time after sundown. Similar emanations may come from the writer or the scientist. The creative individual is someone upon whom mysterious rays have converged and are again reflected, not necessarily immediately, but in the course of years. That all of this wispy geometry of dreams and memories should be the product of a kind of slow-burning oxidation carried on in an equally diffuse and mediating web of nerve and sense cells is surprising enough, but that the emanations from the same particulate organ, the brain, should be so strikingly different as to disobey the old truism of an unleaping nature is quite surprising, once one comes to contemplate the reality.
The same incident may stand as a simple fact to some, an intangible hint of the nature of the universe to others, a useful myth to a savage, or any number of other things. The receptive mind makes all the difference, shadowing or lighting the original object. I was an observer, intent upon my own solitary hieroglyphics.
It happened a long time ago at Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles, on a shore marked by the exposed ribs of a wrecked freighter. The place was one where only a student of desolation would find cause to linger. Pelicans perched awkwardly on what remained of a rusted prow. On the edge of the littered beach beyond the port I had come upon a dead dog wrapped in burlap, obviously buried at sea and drifted in by the waves. The dog was little more than a skeleton but still articulated, one delicate bony paw laid gracefully—as though its owner merely slept, and would presently awaken—across a stone at the water’s edge. Around his throat was a waterlogged black strap that showed he had once belonged to someone. This dog was a mongrel whose life had been spent among the island fishermen. He had known only the small sea-beaten boats that come across the strait from Venezuela. He had romped briefly on shores like this to which he had been returned by the indifferent sea.
I stepped back a little hesitantly from the smell of death, but still I paused reluctantly. Why, in this cove littered with tin cans, bottles, and cast-off garments, did I find it difficult, if not a sacrilege, to turn away? Because, the thought finally came to me, this particular tattered garment had once lived. Scenes on the living sea that would never in all eternity recur again had streamed through the sockets of those vanished eyes. The dog was young, the teeth in its jaws still perfect. It was of that type of loving creature who had gamboled happily about the legs of men and striven to partake of their endeavors.
Someone had seen crudely to his sea burial, but not well enough to prevent his lying now where came everything abandoned. Nevertheless, vast natural forces had intervened to clothe him with a pathetic dignity. The tide had brought him quietly at night and placed what remained of him asleep upon the stones. Here at sunrise I had stood above him in a light he would never any longer see. Even if I had had a shovel the stones would have prevented his burial. He would wait for a second tide to spirit him away or lay him higher to bleach starkly upon coral and conch shells, mingling the little lime of his bones with all else that had once stood upright on these shores.
As I turned upward into the hills beyond the beach I was faintly aware of a tracery of lizard tails amidst the sand and the semidesert shrubbery. The lizards were so numerous on the desert floor that their swift movement in the bright sun left a dizzying impression, like spots dancing before one’s eyes. The creatures had a tangential way of darting off to the side like inconsequential thoughts that never paused long enough to be fully apprehended. One’s eyesight was oppressed by subtly moving points where all should have been quiet. Similar darting specks seemed to be invading my mind. Offshore I could hear the sea wheezing and suspiring in long gasps among the caverns of the coral. The equatorial sun blazed on my unprotected head and hummingbirds flashed like little green flames in the underbrush. I sought quick shelter under a manzanillo tree, whose poisoned apples had tempted the sailors of Columbus.
I suppose the apples really made the connection. Or perhaps merely the interior rustling of the lizards, as I passed some cardboard boxes beside a fence, brought the thing to mind. Or again, it may have been the tropic sun, lending its flames to life with a kind of dreadful indifference as to the result. At any rate, as I shielded my head under the leaves of the poison tree, the darting lizard points began to run together into a pattern.
Before me passed a broken old horse plodding before a cart laden with bags of cast-off clothing, discarded furniture, and abandoned metal. The horse’s harness was a makeshift combination of straps mended with rope. The bearded man perched high in the driver’s seat looked as though he had been compounded from the assorted junk heap in the wagon bed. What finally occupied the center of my attention, however, was a street sign and a year—a year that scurried into shape with the flickering alacrity of the lizards. “R Street,” they spelled, and the year was 1923.
By now the man on the wagon is dead, his cargo dispersed, never to be reassembled. The plodding beast has been overtaken by whatever fate comes upon a junkman’s horse. Their significance upon that particular day in 1923 had been resolved to this, just this: The wagon had been passing the intersection between R and Fourteenth streets when I had leaned from a high-school window a block away, absorbed as only a sixteen-year-old may sometimes be with the sudden discovery of time. It is all going, I thought with the bitter desperation of the young confronting history. No one can hold us. Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
At that moment my eye had fallen upon the junk dealer passing his fateful corner. Now, I had thought instantly, now, save him, immortalize the unseizable moment. The junkman is the symbol of all that is going or is gone. He is passing the intersection into nothingness. Say to the mind, “Hold him, do not forget.”
The darting lizard points beyond the manzanillo tree converged and tightened. The phantom horse and the heaped, chaotic wagon were still jouncing across the intersection upon R Street. They had never crossed it; they would not. Forty-five years had fled away. I was not wrong about the powers latent in the brain. The scene was still in process.
I estimated the lowering of the sun with one eye while at the back of my mind the lizard rustling continued. The blistering apples of the manzanillo reminded me of an inconsequential wild-plum fall far away in Nebraska. They were not edible but they contained the same, if a simpler, version of the mystery hidden in our heads. They were hoarding and dispersing energy while the inanimate universe was running down around us.
“We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature,” John Joly the geologist had once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against individual death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely. Yet out of it history is made—the junkman on R Street is prevented from departing. Growing increasingly archaic, that phantom would be held at the R Street intersection while all around him new houses arose and the years passed unremembered. He would not be released until my own mind began to crumble.
The power to free him is not mine. He is held enchanted because long ago I willed a miniature of history, confined to a single brain. That brain is devouring oxygen at a rate out of all proportion to the rest of the body. It is involved in burning, evoking, and transposing visions, whether of lizard tails, alphabets from the sea, or the realms beyond the galaxy. So important does nature regard this unseen combustion, this smoke of the planet’s autumn, that a starving man’s brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. It is a part of unexpected nature.
In the rational universe of the physical laboratory this sullen and obstinate burning might not, save for our habit of taking the existent for granted, have been expected. Nonetheless, it is
here, and man is its most tremendous manifestation. One might ask, Would it be possible to understand humanity a little better if one could follow along just a step of the evolutionary pathway in person? Suppose that there still lived . . . but let me tell the tale, make of it what you will.
II
Years after the experience of which I am about to speak, I came upon a recent but Neanderthaloid skull in the dissecting room—a rare enough occurrence, one that the far-out flitting of forgotten genes struggles occasionally to produce, as if life sometimes hesitated and were inclined to turn back upon its pathway. For a time, remembering an episode of my youth, I kept the indices of cranial measurement by me.
Today, thinking of that experience, I have searched vainly for my old notebook. It is gone. The years have a way of caring for things that do not seek the safety of print. The earlier event remains, however, because it was not a matter of measurements or anthropological indices but of a living person whom I once knew. Now, in my autumn, the face of that girl and the strange season I spent in her neighborhood return in a kind of hazy lesson that I was too young to understand.
It happened in the West, somewhere in that wide drought-ridden land of empty coulees that carry in sudden spates of flood the boulders of the Rockies toward the sea. I suppose that, with the outward flight of population, the region is as wild now as it was then, some forty years ago. It would be useless to search for the place upon a map, though I have tried. Too many years and too many uncertain miles lie behind all bone hunters. There was no town to fix upon a road map. There was only a sod house tucked behind a butte, out of the prevailing wind. And there was a little spring-fed pond in a grassy meadow—that I remember.
The Unexpected Universe Page 17
