Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“I don’t know,” Erasmus said, looking from his dead friend’s sketches to his new friend’s drawing. “It must have been warm there once. At Tierra del Fuego, years ago, I saw the fossil remains of a whale on top of a mountain.”

“You could argue,” Alexandra said, “that it was left behind by the Noachian Deluge. That these leaves ended up in the arctic the same way.”

“You could,” he said. “If you didn’t believe any of the geological evidence Lyell’s assembled. All of which suggests that the earth and these fossils are millions of years old.”

In England, he knew, even as Lyell and Darwin and Hooker discussed the mutability of species and the nature of geological change, a respected clergyman had put forth a theory that the surface of the earth had never changed, and that life forms never altered or developed. He said, “A man in London argues seriously that when the act of creation took place, the earth sprang into being complete with all its fossils and other suggestions of an earlier life. It’s a test, this man says. Another version of the tree in paradise. God hid the fossils in the rocks to tempt us into questioning the truths revealed in the Bible. Supposedly the fossils aren’t even the relics left by the Flood but just — I don’t know, just decorations.”

“Do you believe that?” Alexandra said. She picked up one of the leaf casts and regarded the symmetrical veins.

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” he replied. “About anything. In Germany, there’s a man who says the fossil-bearing rocks fell to earth as meteorites. And so the fossils represent beings from other worlds.” He looked down at the loops and whorls of Dr. Boerhaave’s writing, and then closed the journal and stood.

“I can’t stay here,” he said. His father had coaxed him into joining Wilkes’s expedition; Zeke and Lavinia had lured him north; Ned had dragged him away from the Narwhal; Alexandra had steered him toward his book. But this one small decision might be his. “I have to talk with Annie. If Zeke’s forcing her somehow to perform like this — I’m going to go to Washington. Maybe she’ll tell me what Zeke really did up there. Maybe I can make him cancel the rest of the tour.”

HIS TIMING WAS bad — as always, he thought. Off by a year, a month, a day; in this case by just a few hours. He hadn’t allowed for his new feet, which slowed every stage of his journey. He couldn’t have predicted that the biggest bank in Philadelphia would close its doors and that depositors anxious to get to other banks would be crowding every form of transportation. And he’d forgotten what Washington was like in September, so hot and humid that the Potomac seemed to have risen into the atmosphere. There were pigs in the streets. Mud, and people shouting; everywhere the litter of construction and the long faces of men whose financial dreams were ruined. He followed a trail that led from a newspaper advertisement to a handbill to a poster to the new Smithsonian building. When the carriage let him off he confronted a mass of stone, wings and a cloister, battlements and a host of towers. He made his way to the main entrance and found himself in the Great Hall.

The beautiful display cases being built in the galleries behind the rows of columns caught his eye, as did the mounds of crates near the finished cases, but he moved past them toward the stairs at the hall’s far end. People streamed at him, busily talking; hundreds of people who passed the tall windows and were lit by beams of muddy, late afternoon light, shadowed by the columns, and then set gleaming again. A river moved against him, parting with murmurs of apology. He was carried forward by a fantasy that he’d stand beside Zeke and, after pulling Annie and Tom to safety, tell his version of the story. Just once, in these august surroundings, he’d justify himself and Dr. Boerhaave and Ned, all of them, everyone.

The staircase looked like a waterfall. He fought his way up the inside railing, knowing all the time where this river of people must have its source but praying he was wrong. At the rear of the apparatus room, a few people trickled past him; he slipped past the hydroelectric machine and the pneumatic instruments, the Fresnel lens and the big battery. He drew a deep breath and passed through the wide door into the lecture room. The room was empty. The oval skylight above the speaker’s platform shone down on an empty podium. The curved rows of seats spreading out in the shape of an open fan were empty; the horseshoe-shaped gallery above was empty as well. A poster attached to a pillar announced Zeke’s lecture: 4:30 to 6:30 P.M., in this room, on this day. It was just past six now, yet somehow he’d missed it.

Where was Zeke? Where were Annie and Tom? The room was as big as a theater and held perhaps fifteen hundred seats; he could imagine Zeke’s voice resonating from the smooth plaster walls as Annie and Tom went through their paces under the skylight’s false sun. He sat for a minute and caught his breath, before making his way back downstairs again. Now the Great Hall was empty as well. Bewildered, unsure where to go next, he moved slowly. At the end of the hall nearest the stairs, the galleries were empty. Farther on, neat stacks of wood and panes of glass, sawhorses and boxes of workmen’s tools sat between each pair of columns. Then he passed rows of half-built cases, rising in three tiers from floor to ceiling but without their glass doors or hardware; beyond them were a few rows of finished cases. A Negro carpenter adjusting a door on one of these looked up at him.

“May I help you?” he asked. “If you’re having trouble walking…”

Erasmus looked down at his feet. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “It just takes me a little longer.”

“Take all the time you want,” the carpenter said, tapping the brass hinge. “So many people at that lecture, you were smart to wait until the room emptied out.”

“I missed the lecture,” Erasmus said, and moved on. Zeke and Annie and Tom could be anywhere, he thought. At any hotel, at anyone’s home. He stared blankly at a mountain of crates, considering what to do next. Then realized what he was looking at.

Back home he’d read in the newspaper that Congress had appropriated money to build these cases, which were meant to house specimens from the expeditions of the last two decades. The centerpiece, he’d read, was to be the collection from his old Exploring Expedition. Stuffed in the Patent Office for fifteen years, mislabeled and poorly displayed, the specimens were to find a home here. He’d been thinking about other things when he read that; it had hardly registered, although once this would have been the most important news in the world. Now it didn’t seem to matter where the things on which he’d wasted his youth ended up.

On the crates were labels, apparently meant to go on the doors of the cases once they were filled. He bent over one and read it wonderingly.

Case 71.

Collections made by the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the Feejee Islands… Cannibal Cooking Pots.

The Feejees are Cannibals. The flesh of women is preferred to that of men, and that part of the arm above the elbow and the thigh are regarded as the choicest parts. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say that it is as tender as a dead man.

Vessel for mixing oil… Fishing Nets of twine, from the bark of the Hibiscus… Flute of Bamboo, and other musical instruments… Paddles… Mask, and Wig worn in dances… War Conch, blown as the sign of hostilities … Fishing Spears… War Clubs… Feejee Wigs… Native Cloth, worn as a turban on the head… Feejee Spears… Feejee drum made of the hollow trunk of a tree.