by Chris Eaton
Chris Eaton had purchased it from a specialty shop in Amsterdam on a work trip, vertical fishing for giant zander in the Volkerak. The trip’s production assistant, who was present on the trip solely to ensure they did not go over budget, was an Italian named Noah Cresti, brilliant with his flare for numbers but also a staunch vegan and thus firmly against the idea of fishing at all. This caused no problems until the shoot was complete, because he spent most of his time below deck listening to music and reading The Collected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1823–1831). But when they capped off the trip with celebratory beer and jenever at a bruin in the capital, Cresti could no longer resist, particularly as the general conversation devolved, in inverse relation to the amount of alcohol he had consumed, from basic small talk to the ranking of Dutch ales against other beers of the world (particularly German and American) to women and finally to acts of bravadic angling, which set a line of opposition down the group, with nearly everyone – including the largely Dutch technical crew, the Asian Canadian director and host, the host’s assistant/girlfriend, and a handful of other top fishermen/consultants from Holland, a Brit, a South African and Chris Eaton – on one side and a slurring Cresti on the other. Cresti zeroed in mostly on the professional anglers, baiting each into circular arguments about morality and evolution, and finally Johann Scheuchzer. The world is not a factory, Cresti berated them. And: Animals are not products for our use. And one of the Dutchmen said: I thought we were speaking of fish. And the rest of them laughed. And Cresti said: Intelligence is sadly only recognizable to those who have it. And the crew, who had worked with Cresti and seen him drunk before, shrugged their shoulders and toasted him, anyway.
Cresti scowled, but the Dutch were already in full disregard, so he merely readjusted his chair and continued, as if he and Chris Eaton were the only ones present. Had Chris Eaton ever heard of Scheuchzer? (“The painter?” Chris Eaton asked. And the Dutch crew laughed again.) Although a medical doctor and professor by trade, Johann Scheuchzer had been, in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, an avid proponent of the study of fossils, and their existence as keys to the past, an understanding of our origins and that of the Earth. But while some saw the remains of giant reptiles, or dinosaurs, Scheuchzer was a man of science, unwilling to believe in the dragons of myth, and having, in fact, spent several years in the service of the Roman Catholic Church debunking the claims of many early paleontologists across Europe, he laid forth, in various scientific papers submitted to the Royal Society, that the majority of these petrified remains were actually those of large fish. And because the typical fossil deposit was located on land and not in the oceans, he also believed that their existence was proof of the great Biblical Flood. Much of his published work from this period has this theory as its focus, including his fabulist Piscium Querela et Vindiciae, in which fossilized fish hold mankind on trial and berate us for not understanding their message of harmony and conservation. And Scheuchzer had many supporters, particularly in the Church. But the one piece of evidence that he and his colleagues were missing, according to those firmly in evolution’s camp, was the remains of a man, homo devilus. If God had decided to wipe out those sinful humans and start from scratch, should they not have been, like all other fossils, deposited deep into the rock by the forceful tides of the Noachic Cataclysm? Scheuchzer’s detractors claimed he would never find one because they did not exist, while even his proponents were unoptimistic, arguing that fossilized mammals were extremely rare, due to their size and fragility. Thus it was a surprise to everyone when, on Christmas day in 1725, Scheuchzer submitted to the Royal Society that he had done it, marking his discovery in a quarry near a cloister in Germany where the St. Hecarion monks, who had up to that point made a weak living off cultivating yeasts for bread and beer, had recently leapt on the bandwagon and begun creating their own faux-sils for profit. He’d planned the trip to put a stop to this practice, but on closer inspection of the area, he instead unearthed the holy grail of paleontology, the partial skeleton of a man, or apparent man, unlike any he’d ever studied, with a vertebral column that extended from its slightly flattened skull like a curved bell, culminating in stumpy lower limbs and “even some vestiges of a liver,” which he used to calculate the approximate year of death at 2306 B.C. It is certain that this is the half, he wrote, or nearly so, the proof we have been waiting for: that the substance even of the bones, and what is more, of the flesh and parts still softer than the flesh, are incorporated into the stone. We see there the remains of the brain… of the roots of the nose… In a word, it is one of the rarest relics we have of that cursed race which was buried under the waters.
In no time at all, Philosophical Transactions, the Journal des Scavans, the New Memoirs of Literature and other periodicals were all proclaiming that the war against prehistory had finally been decided. Copycat findings were unearthed across Europe and Africa, but Scheuchzer debunked most of those as well, either as an attempt to augment the importance of his own specimen or to reinforce the objectivity of his critical faculties, legitimizing only the report of the Bohemian Captain Janek van Toch on a small island in Sumatra, purely on hearsay because that sample had actually been lost at sea when his ship sank in Bondy Bay. Scheuchzer died as one of the most important thinkers of his age, even though the true meaning of what he had found, according to Cresti, had escaped even him. As far as he was concerned, Scheuchzer was a prophet, ridiculed, then disputed, who would eventually be recognized as a genius. Not for toeing the Catholic line, but for discovering the real missing link, that we hadn’t been created spontaneously by some benevolent God – Creationists are lunatics and butchers, Cresti said. The fruits of Christianity are war and oppression and the extermination of Native Americans and the introduction of Africans to slavery! – and not that we had descended from apes – Why miraculously decide to walk upright if our knees were originally constructed to hinge backward like a dog? Or for the climbing of trees? – but that we had evolved from creatures of the sea, and one day we were likely to return.
***
Then – suddenly – someone laughed. Chris Eaton thought it was the host’s girlfriend, but it could have been any woman in the bar. And because it was a woman, Cresti would not fight. His fuel had been abruptly cinched off and he lost all steam. Someone brought up Gessner, who had reassessed Scheuchzer’s supposed arms as flippers, and the fossil as just another large fish. Then there was Cresti’s own countryman, Collini, who had declared they weren’t short flippers, either, but huge wings, destroyed by the sedimentary pressure on the creature’s uncommonly hollow bones, another example of the pterosaurs he had discovered several years prior. When Georges Cuvier was asked to clean the specimen in the early-1800s – someone at the table said it was on display at the nearby Teylers Museum in Haarlem, if they really wanted to see for themselves – he proclaimed it a giant salamander. Much quieter than before, Cresti murmured something about otoliths. And the vestigial gills that are apparent in human embryonic development. He held his hand above the candle and directed their attention to the shape of the bones beneath it. This was what made us different. Special. This shape. This biology. Not our hopes and dreams, which were nothing more than biological impulses, brought on by various shiny trinkets and lures. What each person was striving for made no difference. It was the striving that mattered, what made people live. Humans were nothing more than shells for aimless desire. And in every case, achieving it would ultimately lead to downfall, with no more purpose or will.
But it was obvious to Chris Eaton that his heart was no longer in it. Cresti said: If you look at the other animals of the savannah today, most of them still have fur. The other beasts who had lost all or most of their fur: whales, dolphins, walruses, manatees, hippos, pigs and tapirs. And Cresti said: They are also some of the only animals who can regulate their own breathing, like humans, which allows them to hold their breath when they need to dive under water, or even when they fall in. No one was listening any more.
&nbs
p; Do you know why they surround animals at zoos with a moat? To scare the shit from them.
…
Once a gorilla falls in over its head, he said, it takes only a half minute to die.
***
Chris Eaton managed to find the book before heading to the airport, and started reading it on his way home. When he had returned, Julie could tell something was different. He was distant. Distracted. He’d put on a remarkable amount of weight. And when he spoke, his thoughts ripped out in all directions like scattering birds, or startled atoms, as if linearity no longer meant a thing to him. Had he been meant to die as a child? he thought. To drown in a pool, on a river, in a bathtub, in a puddle? And if so, had every moment since merely been a mistake? An infinite string of wrong possibilities?
I need a rest, he said to her one morning after all the fishermen were on the trails.
Lover…. She stopped for a moment to look at him. You totally should.
I’m going back to the East Coast to visit my parents. I need to be close to home, to get some real rest, you know? Sometimes, no matter how long I’m here, I can’t seem to escape it. It’s a part of me….
She was staring at him: You were born in Montana.
…
…
Yeah, maybe you’re right.
And the next day, he got up from his desk and never came back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Eaton is originally from New Brunswick but currently lives in Toronto. He also records music under the name Rock Plaza Central. This is his fourth book.
COLOPHON
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