Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  The woman frowned. “Papa,” she said. “Can we just sit you up? We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Sophia. The man bent over again, sliding his hands beneath Linnaeus’s armpits and gently raising him to a sitting position. He was Hasselquist or Ternström, Lofling or Forskal or Falck. Or he was none of them, because all of them were dead.

  Linnaeus’s mind left his body, rose and traveled along the paths his apostles had taken. He was young again, as they had been: twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, the years he had done his best work. He was Christopher Ternström, that married pastor who’d been such a passionate botanist. Sailing to the East Indies in search of a tea plant and some living goldfish to give to the Queen, mailing letters back to his teacher from Cádiz. On a group of islands off Cambodia he had succumbed to a tropical fever. His wife had berated Linnaeus for luring her husband to his death.

  But he was not Linnaeus. He was Fredrik Hasselquist, modest and poor, who had landed in Smyrna and traveled through Palestine and Syria and Cyprus and Rhodes, gathering plants and animals and keeping a diary so precise that it had broken Linnaeus’s heart to edit it. Twice he had performed this task, once for Hasselquist, once for Artedi. After the drowning, he had edited Artedi’s book on the fish. Hasselquist died in a village outside Smyrna, when he was thirty.

  Of course there were those who had made it back: Pehr Osbeck, who had returned from China with a huge collection of new plants and a china tea-set decorated with Linnaeus’s own flower; Marten Kahler, who’d returned with nothing. Kahler’s health had been broken by the shipwreck in the North Sea, by the fever that followed the attack in Marseilles, by his endless, grinding poverty. The chest containing his collections had been captured by pirates long before it reached Sweden. Then there was Rolander, Daniel Rolander—was that the man who was with him now?

  But he had said Ro…, Ro…Rotheram, that’s who it was, the English pupil. Nomenclature is a mnemonic art. In Surinam the heat had crumpled Rolander’s body and melted his mind. All he brought home was a lone pot of Indian fig covered with cochineal insects, which Linnaeus’s gardener had mistakenly washed away. Lost insects and a handful of gray seeds, which Rolander claimed to be pearls. When Linnaeus gently pointed out the error, Rolander had left in a huff for Denmark, where he was reportedly living on charity. The others were dead: Lofling, Forskal, and Falck.

  Sophia said, “Papa, we looked all over—why didn’t you come back?”

  Pehr the coachman said, “I’m sorry, he begged me.”

  The pupil—Lofling?—said, “How long has he been weeping like this?”

  But Pehr wasn’t weeping, Pehr was fine. Someone, not Pehr or Sophia, was laughing. Linnaeus remembered how Lofling had taken dictation from him when his hands were crippled by gout. Lofling was twenty-one, he was only a boy; he had tutored Carl Junior, the lazy son. In Spain Lofling had made a name for himself and had sent letters and plants to Linnaeus; then he’d gone to South America with a Spanish expedition. Venezuela; another place Linnaeus had never been. But he had seen it, through Lofling’s letters and specimens. Birds so brightly colored they seemed to be jeweled and rivers that pulsed, foamy and brown, through ferns the height of a man. The letter from Spain announcing Lofling’s death from fever had come only months after little Johannes had died.

  There he sat, in his sleigh in the kitchen, surrounded by the dead. “Are you laughing, Papa?” Sophia said. “Are you happy?”

  His apostles had gone out into the world like his own organs: extra eyes and hands and feet, observing, gathering, naming. Someone was stroking his hands. Pehr Forskal, after visiting Marseilles and Malta and Constantinople, reached Alexandria one October and dressed as a peasant to conceal himself from marauding Bedouins. In Cairo he roamed the streets in his disguise and made a fine collection of new plants; then he traveled by Suez and Jedda to Arabia, where he was stricken by plague and died. Months later, a letter arrived containing a stalk and a flower from a tree that Linnaeus had always wanted to see: the evergreen from which the Balm of Gilead was obtained. The smell was spicy and sweet but Forskal, who had also tutored Carl Junior, was gone. And Falck, who had meant to accompany Forskal on his Arabian journey, was gone as well—he had gone to St. Petersburg instead, and then traveled through Turkestan and Mongolia. Lonely and lost and sad in Kazan, he had shot himself in the head.

  Outside the weather had changed and now it was raining. The pupil: Falck or Forskal, Osbeck or Rolander—Rotheram, who had fallen ill several years ago, whom Sophia had nursed, who came and went from his house like family—said, “I hate to move you, sir; I know you’re enjoying it here. But the rain is ruining the track. We’ll have a hard time if we don’t leave soon.”

  Rolander? There was a story about Rolander, which he had used as the basis for a lecture on medicine and, later, in a paper. Where had it come from? A letter, perhaps. Or maybe Rolander had related it himself, before his mind disintegrated completely. On the ship, on the way to Surinam, he had fallen ill with dysentery. Ever the scientist, trained by his teacher, he’d examined his feces and found thousands of mites in them. He held his magnifying glass to the wooden beaker he’d sipped from in the night, and found a dense white line of flour mites down near the base.

  Kahler lashed himself to the mast of his boat, where he remained two days and two nights without food.

  Hasselquist died in the village of Bagda.

  Pehr Kalm crossed the Great Lakes and walked into Canada.

  In Denmark, someone stole Rolander’s gray seeds, almost as if they’d been truly pearls.

  Generic names, he had taught these pupils, must be clear and stable and expressive. They should not be vague or confusing; neither should they be primitive, barbarous, lengthy, or difficult to pronounce. They should have significant metaphorical or historical associations with the character of the genus. Another botanist had named the thyme-leaved bell-flower after him: Linnaea borealis. One June, in Lappland, he had seen it flourishing. His apostles had died in this order: Ternström, Hasselquist, Lofling, Forskal, Falck, and then finally Kahler, at home. His second son, Johannes, had died at the age of two, between Hasselquist and Lofling; but that was also the year of Sophia’s birth. Once, when Sophia had dropped a tray full of dishes, he had secretly bought a new set to replace them, to spare her from her mother’s wrath.

  His apostles had taken wing like swallows, but they had failed to return. Swallows wintered beneath the lakes, or so he had always believed. During the autumn, he had written, they gather in large groups in the weeds and then dive, resting beneath the ice until spring. An English friend—Collinson, Peter in his own tongue but truly Pehr, and also dead—had argued with him over this and begged him to hold some swallows under water to see if they could live there. Was it so strange to think they might sleep beneath the water above which they hovered in summer? Was it not stranger to think they flew for thousands of miles? He knew another naturalist who believed that swallows wintered on the moon. But always there had been people, like his wife, who criticized his every word.

  He had fought off all of them. The Queen had ennobled him: he was Carl von Linné now. But the pupils he’d sent out as his eyes and ears were dead. During his years in Uppsala he had written and lectured about the mud iguana of Carolina and Siberian buckwheat and bearberries; about lemmings and ants and a phosphorescent Chinese grasshopper. Fossils, crystals, the causes of leprosy and intermittent fever—all these things he had known about because of his pupils’ travels. Over his bedroom door he’d inscribed this motto: “Live blamelessly; God is present.”

  A group of men had appeared to the left of the fire. Lofling, Forskal, Falck he saw, and also Ternström and Hasselquist. And another, whom he’d forgotten about: Carl Thunberg, his fellow Smalander.

  Thunberg was back, then? Thunberg, the last he had heard, was still alive. From Paris Thunberg had gone to Holland. From Holland he had gone to the Cape of Good Hope, and then to Java and finally to Japan. In Japan he had been confined
to the tiny island of Deshima, isolated like all the foreigners. So desperate had he been to learn about the Japanese flora that he had picked daily through the fodder the servants brought to feed the swine and cattle. He had begged the Japanese servants to bring him samples from their gardens.

  Of all his pupils, Thunberg had been the most faithful about sending letters and herbarium specimens home. He had been scrupulous about spreading his teacher’s methods. “I have met some Japanese doctors,” he’d written. “I have been teaching them botany and Linnaean taxonomy. They welcome your method and sing your praises.” He had also, Linnaeus remembered, introduced into Japan the treatment of syphilis by quicksilver. He had left Japan with crates of specimens; he’d been headed for Ceylon. But here he was, sharp-featured and elegant, leaning on the mantelpiece and trading tales with his predecessors.

  “The people are small and dark and suspicious of us,” he was saying. “They find us coarse. But their gardens are magnificent, and they have ways of stunting trees that I have never seen before.”

  “In Palestine,” Hasselquist replied; “the land is so dry that the smallest plants send roots down for many feet, searching for buried water.”

  “The tropics cannot be described,” Lofling said. “The astonishing fertility, the way the vegetation is layered from the ground to the sky, the epiphytes clumped in the highest branches like lace…”

  “Alexandria,” Forskal said. “Everything there is so ancient, so layered with history.”

  “My health is broken,” Falck said; and Kahler said, “I walked from Rome almost all the way to Sweden.”

  In Lappland, Linnaeus said silently, a gray gnat with striated wings and black legs cruelly tormented me and my most miserable horse. His apostles did not seem to hear him. A very bright and calm day, he said. The great Myrgiolingen was flying in the marshes.

  “We’ll go home now, Papa,” the tall woman said. “We’ll put you to bed. Won’t you like that?”

  Her face was as radiant as a star. What was her name? Beside her, his apostles held leaves and twigs and scraps of blossoms, all new and named by them with their teacher’s advice. They were trading these among themselves. A leaf from a new succulent for a spray from a never-seen orchid. Two fronds of a miniature fern for a twig from a dwarf evergreen. They were so excited that their voices were rising; they might have been playing cards, laying down plants for bets instead of gold. But the woman and the other pupil didn’t seem to notice them. The woman and the other pupil were wholly focused on helping Pehr the coachman push the sleigh back outside.

  The woman opened the doors and held them. Pehr and the pupil pushed and pulled. The crisp, winy air of the afternoon had turned dank and raw, and a light rain was turning the snow to slush. Linnaeus said nothing, but he turned and gazed over his shoulder. The group gathered by the fireplace stepped back, displeased, when Pehr returned and doused the fire. Thunberg looked at Linnaeus and raised an eyebrow. Linnaeus nodded.

  In the hands of his lost ones were the plants he had named for them: Artedia, an umbelliferous plant, and Osbeckia, tall and handsome; Loeflingia, a small plant from Spain; Thunbergia with its black eye centered in yellow petals, and the tropical Ternstroemia. There were more, he couldn’t remember them all. He’d named thousands of plants in his life.

  Outside, the woman and the pupil separated. Sophia? Sophia, my favorite. Sophia bundled herself into the borrowed sleigh in which she’d arrived; the pupil wedged himself into Pehr’s sleigh, next to Linnaeus. In the dark damp air they formed a line that could hardly be seen: Pehr’s sleigh, and then Sophia’s, and behind them, following the cunning signal Linnaeus had given, the last sleigh filled with his apostles. Pehr huddled into his coat and gave the signal to depart. It was late and he was weary. To their left, the rain and melting snow had turned the low field into a lake. Linnaeus looked up at his pupil—Rotheram? Of course it was him: the English pupil, the last one, the one who would survive him—and tried to say, “The death of many whom I have induced to travel has turned my hair gray, and what have I gained? A few dried plants, accompanied by great anxiety, unrest, and care.”

  Rotheram said, “Rest your head on my arm. We will be home before you know it.”

  The Littoral Zone

  When they met, fifteen years ago, Jonathan had a job teaching botany at a small college near Albany, and Ruby was teaching invertebrate zoology at a college in the Berkshires. Both of them, along with an ornithologist, an ichthyologist, and an oceanographer, had agreed to spend three weeks of their summer break at a marine biology research station on an island off the New Hampshire coast. They had spouses, children, mortgages, bills; they went, they later told each other, because the pay was too good to refuse. Two-thirds of the way through the course, they agreed that the pay was not enough.

  How they reached that first agreement is a story they’ve repeated to each other again and again and told, separately, to their closest friends. Ruby thinks they had this conversation on the second Friday of the course, after Frank Kenary’s slide show on the abyssal fish and before Carol Dagliesh’s lecture on the courting behavior of herring gulls. Jonathan maintains that they had it earlier—that Wednesday, maybe, when they were still recovering from Gunnar Erickson’s trawling expedition. The days before they became so aware of each other have blurred in their minds, but they agree that their first real conversation took place on the afternoon devoted to the littoral zone.

  The tide was all the way out. The students were clumped on the rocky, pitted apron between the water and the ledges, peering into the tidal pools and listing the species they found. Gunnar was in the equipment room, repairing one of the sampling claws. Frank was setting up dissections in the tiny lab; Carol had gone back to the mainland on the supply boat, hoping to replace the camera one of the students had dropped. And so the two of them, Jonathan and Ruby, were left alone for a little while.

  They both remember the granite ledge where they sat, and the raucous quarrels of the nesting gulls. They agree that Ruby was scratching furiously at her calves and that Jonathan said, “Take it easy, okay? You’ll draw blood.”

  Her calves were slim and tan, Jonathan remembers. Covered with blotches and scrapes.

  I folded my fingers, Ruby remembers. Then I blushed. My throat felt sunburned.

  Ruby said, “I know, it’s so embarrassing. But all this salt on my poison ivy—God, what I wouldn’t give for a bath! They never told me there wouldn’t be any water here…”

  Jonathan gestured at the ocean surrounding them and then they started laughing. Hysteria, they have told each other since. They were so tired by then, twelve days into the course, and so dirty and overworked and strained by pretending to the students that these things didn’t matter, that neither of them could understand that they were also lonely. Their shared laughter felt like pure relief.

  “No water?” Jonathan said. “I haven’t been dry since we got here. My clothes are damp, my sneakers are damp, my hair never dries…”

  His hair was beautiful, Ruby remembers. Thick, a little too long. Part blond and part brown.

  “I know,” she said. “But you know what I mean. I didn’t realize they’d have to bring our drinking water over on a boat.”

  “Or that they’d expect us to wash in the ocean,” Jonathan said. Her forearms were dusted with salt, he remembers. The down along them sparkled in the sun.

  “And those cots,” Ruby said. “Does yours have a sag in it like a hammock?”

  “Like a slingshot,” Jonathan said.

  For half an hour they sat on their ledge and compared their bubbling patches of poison ivy and the barnacle wounds that scored their hands and feet. Nothing healed out here, they told each other. Everything got infected. When one of the students called, “Look what I found!” Jonathan rose and held his hand out to Ruby. She took it easily and hauled herself up and they walked down to the water together. Jonathan’s hand was thick and blunt-fingered, with nails bitten down so far that the skin around them was raw
. Odd, Ruby remembers thinking. Those bitten stumps attached to such a good-looking man.

  They have always agreed that the worst moment, for each of them, was when they stepped from the boat to the dock on the final day of the course and saw their families waiting in the parking lot. Jonathan’s wife had their four-year-old daughter balanced on her shoulders. Their two older children were leaning perilously over the guardrails and shrieking at the sight of him. Jessie had turned nine in Jonathan’s absence, and Jonathan can’t think of her eager face without remembering the starfish he brought as his sole, guilty gift.

  Ruby’s husband had parked their car just a few yards from Jonathan’s family. Her sons were wearing baseball caps, and what Ruby remembers is the way the yellow linings lit their faces. For a minute she saw the children squealing near her sons as faceless, inconsequential; Jonathan later told her that her children had been similarly blurred for him. Then Jonathan said, “That’s my family, there,” and Ruby said, “That’s mine, right next to yours,” and all the faces leapt into focus for both of them.

  Nothing that was to come—not the days in court, nor the days they moved, nor the losses of jobs and homes—would ever seem so awful to them as that moment when they first saw their families standing there, unaware and hopeful. Deceitfully, treacherously, Ruby and Jonathan separated and walked to the people awaiting them. They didn’t introduce each other to their spouses. They didn’t look at each other—although, they later admitted, they cast covert looks at each other’s families. They thought they were invisible, that no one could see what had happened between them. They thought their families would not remember how they had stepped off the boat and stood, for an instant, together.