On Magdalena Mountain, the onset of autumn is palpable. Marmots bask, feed, grow fat and somnolent. Pikas, never more awake, harrow their clippings to cure in the late sun, then store the sweet haystacks in clefts within the castle walls. Ptarmigan are getting whitewashed along with the varying hares downslope: brown feathers and fur are falling out, to be replaced by white. Most of the other birds skedaddle downhill or down south. Even the rocks seem to close ranks, preparing for the storms, whose unblunted breath only they can withstand, and even then not unscathed.
By late August, most of the butterflies have died on Magdalena Mountain. They have left behind living legacies in various forms, but seldom in their own image. The rockslide checkerspot caterpillar has settled for the winter in a naked, hanging chrysalis in which the most marvelous changes will take place while the world about it sleeps. The lustrous copper has left her eggs, like jeweled pincushions, among rosettes of alpine sorrel. The plant will die back, but then come on again in spring, when the eggs hatch.
The butterfly that bears the mountain’s name, the Magdalena alpine, spends its winters as a tiny caterpillar. The first adults emerged from their pupae in early summer, mated, and laid their eggs near clumps of grass among the boulders of the talus or in steep, broken meadows beside the rockslides. These eggs hatched while the autumn sun still shed life onto the alpage. The larvae took their first meal from their own eggshells, the next of tender, new-growth grass or sedge. A few more feedings, maybe a molt when their skins grew taut, and they ceased grazing. Crawling down among the very rootstocks of the grass clumps, the larvae spun loose, individual tents of dead grass and silk and there went to sleep, or something like it, snug within the blanket of the alpine turf.
Of one particular female’s hundred eggs, ten fed ants or other foragers right off. After they hatched, twenty-six of the baby caterpillars went to spiders, beetles, and such. The rest made it to hibernation. Several settled in near their point of nascence and there perished when the mother pika harvested their grass clumps—some to eat, some to dry—on her penultimate foraging trip of the year. But one of the siblings feels a walkabout urge prior to settling down, saving him from that fate. This creature, called Erebia for his genus, wanders many times his body length. A chance left turn at a lichened cobble keeps him from a lethal head-on with a ground beetle. Finally he pauses in a tussock at the base of a great boulder, hunkers in, and shuts down but for a flicker of life in his dormant cells.
Come morning, snow covers the talus. It has fallen before, even during midsummer, but it never lasted. This time it sticks to the rocks, fills exposed clefts, and blows about with the fierceness of Boreas making Mehitabel dance, more with each new day. Clicking ptarmigan dive into powder downslope, followed by the rock-roosting ravens. Marmots sleep hard. Pikas, their rock-top vigils finished for now, curl among their faded haystacks deep beneath the glazed surface of the roof stones.
This one alpine caterpillar, Erebia, moves not at all. A minute tube of life, he sleeps on as the world of Magdalena Mountain freezes, solid and pale.
4
“So what happened to her?” Iris asked.
“What happens to all the young ones who aren’t here for war shock or drug-busted brains?” Ellen said. “Head injured in a car crash.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Mary,” the doctor said. This one made him sad and uneasy, and he wanted to get away from the nursing home as quickly as he could. She was like the young women brought in after motorcycle wrecks without helmets—the few who survived—but somehow worse. He took a moment to tell the floor nurse and the attendant what he knew. “Three months ago her Karmann Ghia went out of control on Trail Ridge Road, and she fell more than nine hundred feet down into a canyon, fortunately strapped in, and no fire. She was busted up pretty bad, but reparable, except maybe for her head.”
“How bad?”
“Both her legs were broken—bilateral tibia and fibula fractures, fifth through tenth ribs, punctured lung, lots of lacerations. But nothing too bad inside; she’s healed well.”
“Except her head?”
“The tests show little permanent damage. She had a skull fracture and no doubt bruising of the brain, but no major bleeding. Frontal lobe okay, cortex—but next to no mental activity upon admission. Autonomic functions and reflexes fine. The exact nature of her trauma is puzzling. Now that she has recuperated physically, we can’t justify keeping her at C. U. Med Center any longer.”
The nurse considered this information. She frowned, tsked, then translated it for herself. “So her mind is lost?”
“Oh, Iris . . . who knows? There appears to be no physiological reason, but the psyche seldom consults physiologists. She doesn’t seem to know herself. It may be for life or for a month. In the meantime, we thought it best that she come here, where she can’t hurt herself.”
Mary Glanville, waiting in the nursing home’s office, listened to the others speak outside in the hall. She heard some of the words, but they made no sense. Wreck? All she had where the memory of these months should have been was a picture of mountains upon mountains.
“But why here, Dr. Ziegler? Does she really need to be here? She looks so much younger, brighter, healthier than most of our others. Can’t she recover somewhere else?”
“But will she recover?” asked the doctor. “She doesn’t speak or respond after three months. She has no advocate, no relatives we’ve been able to find, and no resources or insurance as far as we could discover. Her ID was never found, by the way—we know her name is Mary only from a girl’s charm bracelet she was wearing.”
“What about the automobile registration?”
“Licensed in Connecticut to some fly-by-night secondhand auto dealer, since flown. The temporary registration must be with her bag, somewhere down that canyon. No one has answered state patrol’s APB on her. Something will turn up eventually, I suppose, but not so far. So for now? Mary is a ward of the state, and destitute. That means here is it.”
Iris tsked. The doctor went on. “CU did all they could. Fort Logan wouldn’t take her without a specific psychosis or other mental diagnosis. So it’s either here, with Medicaid, or Pueblo, which I’m sure you wouldn’t wish on her—they’ve had nothing but budget cuts, and they house the hard cases, often violent. If she were my sister, I wouldn’t want her there. Anyway, if she gets better, she’ll be free to leave.”
“No one gets better here,” Iris muttered. “I think you know that.”
“Take care of her, Iris,” said the doctor. “Maybe she’ll be the first. Just vitamins for now; if she has any trouble settling in, give her Thorazine, one hundred milligrams, morning and night, for now.” He turned and left the facility for the clear night air. He felt relieved, but not happy about it.
With nothing else to do, the nurse led Mary to an empty bed in a bare little room. There were two other beds in the room. Across one lay a confused woman in an old robe who smiled childlike at their approach. “Can I go too, Iris?” she implored.
“We’re not going anywhere, Beth, we’re coming in. This is Mary, your new roommate.”
“Oh, goodie! Gotta smoke, Mary?”
“Mary isn’t speaking now, Beth, and she doesn’t smoke. Let her rest and move in in peace. Besides, I told you to stop bumming cigarettes.”
“Everybody smokes,” Beth said with certain sureness. She was almost right. The atmosphere was so thick with tobacco smoke that it almost masked the odors of urine and disinfectant. The residents couldn’t smoke in their beds, but the hallways and common areas were filled with puffing, vacant faces.
The second bed held an ancient woman who lay babylike, whimpering, toothless. At the sight of her, Mary started and opened her mouth, but did not speak. The third bed, nearest the heavily screened window, was hers. The nurse showed her to it, then pointed out her closet. “Watch your clothes, they tend to disappear. Showers in the morning at six. I’ll be back for you then to show you the ropes
. Toothbrushes kept by the bathroom sink, toilet over there. Breakfast is at eight, lunch at noon, dinner six.” Iris had no idea if Mary was taking any of it in.
Then she said, “I’m so sorry you have to be here. Talk to me sometime, okay? My name’s Iris.” Then the floor nurse, a bulky woman with russet hair, black skin, and red lipstick, her face a mixture of weary officiousness and defeated tenderness, smiled at Mary. She squeezed her hand and returned to her station.
Mary Glanville lay upon the dorm-like bed, her back to the other four eyes in the bleak room. Until then her movements had been slow, tentative, compliant. Now she began, slowly, then gaining speed and violence, to shake. No tears came, just a dry, silent sobbing that wailed against the realization growing in her bruised brain. She shook and shook until she rolled off the bed onto the floor. Disinfectant spiked her nose, and still she shook and writhed. And then a new thing—new, that is, since the day three months before when her car left the black stripe on the mountain and arced over the falling, falling slope—her voice came.
It came first in a tiny, almost inaudible squeak, rose into a low howl, and grew to a shriek that for thirty seconds silenced the entire home. No words, just the scream, which seemed like words to Mary, demanding to know “What is happening to me? Why am I in this place? This is no dream and I realize what it is and this is the kind of place you VISIT only when you must and don’t stay any longer than you have to and then get out, and damn it I am HERE and staying behind and WHY? Get me out, oh, out, anywhere, OOOUUUT!” All this she wailed without words until the last ones, which came again, wailed, wailed. And she screamed it so loud that her temples swelled and her hands, gripping the bed legs, turned white.
All the nurses and orderlies came, bound Mary, gave her shots, subdued her into a dull, tormented semblance of sleep. For the next three days, every time she awakened, Mary wailed and shrieked “Why? WHYYYY? Get me OUUUUT!” Whenever the sedatives lost their grip on her savaged larynx, Mary keened. And then, on the fourth day, when the mental health agency ordered an ambulance to take her to the state asylum at Pueblo, Mary awoke becalmed. Iris called the doctor, who canceled the ambulance.
Hoarse, but silent, Mary was permitted to remain at Mid-Continent Care Center. She settled in. She took meals with the burned-out boys from Vietnam—overflows from the VA who seemed to age more day by day. And with the brain-shattered youths, the poor and vacant with dementia or drugs, and the menacingly or mildly mad for whatever reason. In self-defense, her eyes took on a shieldlike hardness. Her mouth turned up in a demi-smile below permanent furrows in her forehead. And she no longer shrieked aloud, only within, for all the others as well as herself.
Mary was free to go outside, but there was little reason to do so. This was downtown Denver. There were no living things to be seen, felt, or heard, other than a few street trees, weeds, pigeons, and blank-faced people. Or so Mary thought at first. But then one day, when the smoke sting grew too much, she stepped out to the back for air and found a vacant lot. Bachelor’s buttons, cornflower blue, bloomed profusely, and little checkered butterflies, bluish too, skipped among the green disks of cheeseweed. They intrigued her. Here was a fragment of peace and relief, entirely unexpected. She took to coming here often after that, sitting on an old aluminum-and-plastic chair from a dinette set that someone had hauled out to the alley.
Mary was afraid to venture farther into streets she heard were mean, especially after her one walk around the block got her groped. Once, an activities bus took her up into the Denver Mountain Parks, along with a few other residents. The breath of the ponderosas was heavenly after the smoke and smog below. But then Mary realized that she could see the higher peaks between the trees, and, beyond her control, that slow wail began to swell from her belly like the cold water from the pump in the picnic ground. Nurses had a needle in her arm in seconds and had her back in bed in an hour. After that Mary remained in the home. At most she went out to her vacant lot. That she did often, until the cold came.
Then new snow dropped on Denver like a clean diaper over a dirty one. Mary withdrew even deeper into her pupa of confusion. She sat in her spare little room, barely noticing as the other beds filled or emptied. She thought little, spoke less, failed to understand anything, especially not herself. Why couldn’t she just stand up, say “I’m all right now,” and leave? Why did her head ache so, especially where her hair was still short above her forehead? Why couldn’t she carry an idea through to conclusion? Some mornings she thought she might begin to speak with the floor nurse, and then the pill came, and the blankness.
And then Iris was transferred, the only one who had shown her any kindness, personal interest, or concern. Missing her, and hearing she was gone, Mary despaired even more. Now there was no one to talk with, even if she could.
5
James Mead had been off the bus for less than an hour, the images of possum bombs and leering lecturers fresh in his muddy mind. It was the latter that troubled him now. A couple of years earlier, as an undergraduate at New Mexico State in Las Cruces, his route had looked clear. After graduation he would take a teacher’s certificate, then spend an adequate life in the ranks of the public school pedagogues—the family tradition. But Mead showed talent in research, and at the urging of a perceptive professor he took a lucky whack at a Fulbright in the U.K. After that, larger horizons seemed in order, and (again through luck, as he saw it) he was accepted at Yale University for doctoral studies in biology. Once here, he wondered whether his own ambition had outpaced his abilities.
“I doubt I’ll be able to hack this place,” he told his coffee.
The waitress, serving her opinion with his doughnut, said, “You wouldn’t be the first,” and the dishwasher winked from the kitchen. Resolving to keep his thoughts to himself, Mead set off for whatever awaited.
He walked up Prospect Avenue toward the unequal edifices of the Yale biological establishment: Kline Biology Tower and Osborn Memorial Laboratories. Osborn, a twin-turreted pile with an arched entrance, looked like a college department should look, he thought, recalling the real thing at Cambridge. Osborn was the scene of a half century’s progress in ecology. But in the past twenty years, actual animals and plants had become passé, and the cell was the thing—or the gene, or the molecules. Kline Tower was the citadel of the cell. It brimmed with privilege and grant-borne pretension: stories upon stories of slag-brown bricks that shone in the September sun and positively repelled ivy, between black windows that never opened—all the looks and personality of a giant Tootsie Roll.
Happily for him, Mead seemed destined for Osborn. Some said ecology was already dead at Yale, but the recent environmental cyclone had blown fresh breath into that field in New Haven. That there was anything left to resuscitate was the result of the labors of certain torchbearers in Osborn who had never lost track of natural history in the swirl of change. One of these was Evelyn Hutchinson, who developed the now-universal concept of the ecological niche here in the 1920s. Another was George Winchester, whom Mead was about to meet—his first Yale professor, his likely adviser, a famous man of science. Mead shook a little in his mountain-states boots as he entered Winchester’s outer office.
The friendly smell of thousands of scientific papers in file drawers overrode an unfamiliar scent coming from down the hall. Mead wondered what was in there, a door away, but his thoughts were interrupted by a lilting “Good afternoon.” A handsome, relaxed woman of fifty or so occupied the anteroom. She removed her chained glasses and looked up from her typewriter. “May I help you?”
“Hello, I’m here to see Professor Winchester?”
She took on a guarding-the-ramparts air. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Uh, yes—I’m sorry. I’m James Mead. I believe Dr. Winchester has been assigned as my adviser, and I wrote that I would be arriving today.”
The secretary’s expression slid into a relaxed smile. “Of course—Mr. Mead. We’re expecting you. Dr. Winchester is with another st
udent, but I’ll let him know you’re here. I’m Mrs. Pauling,” she said, offering her hand. Then she disappeared into an inner sanctum, and Mead heard muffled voices, one high, one deep. He felt just as he did in any doctor’s waiting room. Mrs. Pauling said, “The professor will be with you in a few minutes,” and handed him a copy of Discovery, the magazine of the university’s natural history museum. Well, he thought, it beats Highlights.
Under “Staff Notes” in the back of the magazine, Mead noticed that Winchester had recently returned from a summer in Colorado, where he journeyed annually for research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Mrs. Pauling was typing copy for what he took for specimen labels, all headed “Colo.: Gunnison Co.” He relaxed a degree; at least they would have the Rockies in common. Mead asked himself, but not out loud, why he was already blaming Yale (and everyone in it) for being superior, and himself for his background.
After a few minutes the big varnished door of the inner office opened, and a young female student emerged. She was glowing. “All right, Professor, I’ll read that paper and let you know what I think of it Monday,” she said over her tawny shoulder.
A syllable of concurrence came from within, then a spirited, “See you then, Noni. Enjoy your weekend, but do try to get another modest number of pages of your draft ready for me to read.”
The woman passed Mead, smiled, and left with a word for Mrs. Pauling and a back-glance at him. Mead noticed that her dark eyes possessed epicanthal folds. Yet she did not look entirely Asian: her long, straight hair was brown. He also noted her accent. No midwesterner she, probably straight out of the Seven Sisters, likely bound next for Harvard. His relapsing sense of inadequacy was suddenly swamped by a reddish dust devil as a large presence flew out of the inner office, halted before him, and thrust out an enormous paw. Tilting his head, grinning through his ginger beard, the professor blurted, “Welcome, Mr. Mead! Please come inside.”
Magdalena Mountain Page 2
