Tom McCarthy - C

“What’s it to you?” she asks. “Who said you could come in here?”

“Can I come in?” he asks.

Sophie shrugs, and turns back to her work desk. She’s stayed in this room pretty much non-stop since arriving back from London, where she’s been studying natural sciences at Imperial College for two terms now. In front of her, on the desk’s surface, microscope slides smeared with variously tinted substances fan out like card-hands; dotted around these, like tokens wagered by invisible opponents, or perhaps the miniature opponents themselves, are insects, dead ones: beetles, grasshoppers and dragonflies, rigid as the dog-avatar in the Realtor’s Game. Above these, pinned to the wall, are charts, diagrams and passages written in Sophie’s hand. She doesn’t seem to object as Serge leans over her and scans a couple of them:

I placed a specimen of the Helochara family inside a jar,

one reads,

and introduced into its cell a mixture of potassium and ether until it turned onto its back and appeared dead; however, when a little ammonium was sprinkled over it, it effected a complete recovery.

Another states:

Aphrophora spumaria entomb themselves within a frothy coat of viscid cells. The bubbles not only surround the insect and the stem upon which it rests, but flow in a continuous sheet between the ventral plates and abdomen.

Beside the text, an annotated sketch shows some kind of tick embedded in a mass of spawn-like foam. Serge runs his eyes across to one of the charts. Beneath the heading “Poisonous Qualities of” a complex set of lines-straight, curving and dotted-threads disparate Latin words and letter sequences together. To Serge’s mind, cluttered with RX traffic, the sequences appear like call-signs. It’s not just the compounds on the chart that make him think this way; Sophie has highlighted certain letters of the wall’s various texts, making them stand out by drawing over them in yellow, blue or purple crayon, as though tracing from one to the other a kind of continuum, a grander alphabetic sequence slowly emerging from the general eclectic mesh. Most intriguingly of all, a study of the Emperor moth, complete with illustration demonstrating the vibratory capacities of its antennae, carries the word, written in brackets in the margin, “Morse.”

“Morse?” asks Serge. “Do moths know that?”

“What?” she murmurs-then, following his eye towards the wall, scoffs: “No, stupid; no connection. Professor Morse, an entomologist from Nanterre, France.”

She doesn’t venture any more, and turns back to the slide in front of her. She seems preoccupied-full not of the eager energy with which she used to throw herself into their chemistry experiments, but with a more concerned and troubled set of mental compounds. She looks haggard, much older than she did six months ago; staring at her cheeks, Serge can see worry-lines snaking their way down from her eyes towards the corners of her mouth.

“What are you looking at?” she snaps. “Go now; I’ve got to work.”

She works the next day, and the next night too, and the day after that. Serge starts to wonder when-or if-she ever sleeps. By the time he wanders down for breakfast late each morning, she’s already gone, a few scattered breadcrumbs and a buttered knife the only evidence of her having passed through the kitchen-those, and the eviscerated newspapers she leaves on the table after tearing from them headlines that, for whatever reason, catch her eye. With their father away at a conference on deaf education up in London (“His train will have passed yours,” Serge commented to Sophie’s pronounced indifference when she first arrived back) and Mr. Clair home on leave, they’ve got the run of the place. Maureen’s given up trying to stage meals in single sittings, and leaves out bread, meats, cheeses, pies and stews for them to help themselves to when they like. As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae…

Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera.

“Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.”

“Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays-then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.

Three or four nights after his first sighting of the white figure on the Mulberry Lawn, Serge sees it again. This time he sees her face: it is Sophie, most definitely. She glides past the Orchard like she did the other night, then disappears from view again. Serge shuts his RX station down, throws on a jumper and heads down the stairs and out of the front door. He catches up with her inside the Crypt Park, where she’s moving through the long grass slowly, hesitantly.

“Sophie,” he calls out as he approaches her from behind.

Sophie takes two more steps, then stops and slightly turns her head in his direction.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

She stays there with her head half-turned, as though preferring to sense him rather than face him-through the skin on her cheek, perhaps, or the small hairs on her neck. He repeats his question. After a while she answers:

“Looking for the Balkan beetle.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“A type of flying insect, made by Pilcher,” she answers absently. Her eyes turn down, towards the grass-then sharpen, as though catching sight of something couched within it. “There are all these segments,” she murmurs. “Broken bodies.”

“Where?” asks Serge.

“Everywhere,” she replies. “When one antolie colony attacks another, they cut the victims up, and leave their limbs and torsos lying around the battlefield.”

“What’s an antolie colony?” asks Serge.

Slowly, her head turns fully away from him again, and she moves onwards through the long grass-ponderously, her exposed legs angling sharply at the knees, like an insect’s articulated limbs.

“You’ll catch cold,” he calls after her, then heads back to his radio set.

The next day, sure enough, she does look ill-although not colded: more ravaged, as though worn down by fatigue yet at the same time fired up by a manic sense of purpose. When Serge slinks into her lab, she’s scribbling away, furiously sketching the anatomy of flowers that, culled from Bodner’s garden, lie dissected on the desk in front of her.