Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

The three men he glimpsed through a half-open door were arguing too passionately to see him. Fossil dogs, fossil wolves; for a second Dr. Boerhaave’s voice seemed to float across the surface of their discussion. Large groups of plants and animals share a comman morphology, a unity of plan. These plans exist as ideas in the mind of God, who expresses them differently from age to age. Individual species may disappear, but the blueprints persist, with variations; variant forms of the Form. A wiry man in his early twenties leaned forward and said, “Cuvier doesn’t even contest the existence of man during the epoch of the giant mammals.”

“The question,” said the red-haired man next to him, “is whether the associated human bones should be assigned equal antiquity with the dog bones found among them, and the hippopotami and extinct bears…”

Erasmus leaned inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but perhaps you could help me.”

“A visitor!” the third young man said. In his hands he held something that looked like part of a human pelvis. “Come join us.”

“I’m looking for Zechariah Voorhees,” Erasmus said. On the windowsill a tumbler of whiskey caught the light, casting golden rays over bones and books and the huge-canined skulls of Asian swine. The room had the feel of a clubhouse, chaotic and busy, and for a moment he was reminded of the Toxophilit.es who’d sent the Narwhal off with such a splash.

“You’re a friend?” asked the red-haired man.

“A colleague,” he said; thinking, Brother-in-law? “I missed the lecture, but I heard the Esquimaux were taken sick. I was hoping to help.”

“He was here a minute ago,” said the man with the pelvis in his hand. “But I think he went to fetch the doctor.”

“Where are they?” Erasmus asked. “The Esquimaux.” If these were the men who’d helped carry Annie and Tom, they seemed mightily unconcerned about them now.

“Follow me,” said the man. He looked curiously at Erasmus’s feet, but asked nothing as he led the way to the next room over.

Erasmus knocked, pushing the door open when no one answered. Inside the stuffy room, Annie lay on one narrow cot and Tom on another. A desk and chair and a litter of dirty clothes filled the rest of the space. On the desk was a precarious tower of flat stone slabs, and in the chair a pale young man, already balding, who looked up when Erasmus entered.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” the pale man said. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m nearly deaf.”

“May I come in?” Erasmus said, enunciating clearly. “These are my friends.”

“Whose friend?” the man said, cupping his hand to his ear.

“Annie’s friend,” Erasmus shouted. He made his way past the desk, pushing socks and linen aside with his sticks. Annie’s eyes were closed, but she stirred when Erasmus touched her shoulder. “Tseke?” she said.

“Erasmus. Do you remember me?”

Her skin was very hot. A coarse sheet was pulled up to her chin; when Erasmus turned back the corner he saw that she was naked beneath it, filmed with sweat. Hastily he covered her and checked on Tom. Unclothed as well, he lay on his side, staring at his own hands.

“Where is Tseke?” Annie whispered.

“He’s coming,” Erasmus said. He turned to the pale man. “Who undressed them? Whose room is this?”

“It’s my room,” the man answered. “I’m Fielding, I work here. The explorer who lectured this afternoon is an acquaintance of mine. His Esquimaux collapsed during the lecture — the heat, we think — and he asked if they could rest here until the doctor arrives. She undressed her son and herself, after Zeke left. I stepped outside. Of course. You know them?”

“I’m Zeke’s brother-in-law.”

“You know Zeke!” Fielding said.

“Yes!” Erasmus shouted again, exasperated despite himself. He couldn’t imagine why Zeke had left Annie and Torn in the care of a man who couldn’t hear their requests. “Where if he?”

“Next door,” Fielding said. “With the others.”

Through the wall Erasmus could hear the young men’s voices. “He’s not,” he said. Then he gave up trying to explain and concentrated on Annie and Tom. He found a jug of water near the door and dampened his handkerchief, dabbing at Annie’s face and Tom’s face and hands. Fielding hovered, polite but useless. “Do you suppose they’re really sick?” he asked. “The fellows next door told me they were just overheated.”

“You have eyes — look at them.”

Fielding shrugged and stepped back to his desk. “I don’t have much experience with women and children,” he said. “I’m in here all the time… the other scientists never want me to drink with them and we disagree about almost everything.” He lifted a thin slab of stone, pointing to something that looked like a crinoid. “What I think about this,” he said.

“Please,” Erasmus said. “Not now.” He heard feet pounding up the stairs, and then Zeke was in the room.

“Where have you been?” Erasmus asked, just as Zeke said, “What are you doing here?” After glaring at each other for a silent moment, they both bent over Annie.

Annie was someplace hot and dark, streaked with red, filled with noise and the smell of blood. She was a seal who’d come up for a breath of air and met a bear; the bear had been waiting and she was caught by surprise; there was a blow and then burning. She tried to heave herself back in the cool water but she was being dragged across the ice. She was being bitten. She was being eaten. She moaned and turned and opened her eyes and her son was staring at her. The worst thing about what was happening to her body was the way it kept her from protecting him. But her journey must mean something, her reasons for coming with Zeke must be true.

The piece of peculiar ice her mother had seen had turned out to be a thing called mirror; more were on the ship, and in the building full of dead insects and birds. She and her son had inched up to those mirrors, stared into them, touched each other’s reflections. In the room below, before she’d stumbled and fallen and been unable to rise, she’d seen herself reflected in the watching people’s eyes. She’d been sent here like a shard of splintered mirror, she thought, to capture an image of the world beyond her home.

“Annie,” Zeke said. “Can you hear me?”

“Is the doctor coming?” Erasmus asked.

Annie heard their voices but not their words. The strangers’ language left her and she longed for someone to say her real name and speak to her in real words, but these large figures murmured incomprehensibly. One was Zeke, a walking finger who pointed at her and then turned into the barrel of a rifle. The rifle had brought her tribe meat and fed the children. But the rifle was a finger and the finger was Zeke, who had not understood his connection to the other fingers, the hand, the wrist, the body that was her tribe. The body that had once been her. When she coughed a bullet seemed to enter her lungs.

Her son asked in their shared language if they could go home now. One of the bears took the other by the shoulder and both stepped out of view, leaving only a white figure, a little white fox, behind. The fox put his paws on a piece of stone. A fox might follow a bear, waiting for scraps from the kill. She closed her eyes again. At home, she thought, her body would be wrapped in skins and carried away from the huts, then laid on the ground with a rock for her pillow. Around her someone would place her soapstone cooking pots, each one broken into pieces, and her needles and thread and her ulo, all she’d need for her life beyond. Over her body a vault of rocks would be built. Over her jawbones the wind might play a song.