Andrea Barrett: Voyage of the Narwhal

“He’s here,” Zeke said. “Right behind me.” He turned and beckoned to the doctor; Fielding tiptoed away.

Brisk and gray-haired and competent, the doctor felt Annie’s pulses, rolled down her lower eyelids, and slid his arm beneath her covering sheet. “Enlarged liver,” he said. His hand crept beneath the cloth. “Enlarged spleen.” He moved over to Tom and repeated his investigations, asking Zeke how long these people had been away from their home, where they’d been staying, when their symptoms had first appeared. He made a note when Zeke described the site of the Repository.

“Near a river and a creek?” He felt the sides of Annie’s neck. “Most likely it’s a miasmatic bilious fever,” he said. “Normally you’d see a yellowing of the skin, but of course on them… you can see, though, the way the whites of their eyes have yellowed.”

“Can I move them?” Zeke asked.

“Carefully,” the doctor said. “And not far.” He rummaged in his bag, pulling out boxes and vials. “Preparation of Peruvian bark,” he said. “Decoction of boneset as an emetic, a calomel purgative to relieve congestion of the liver, a diaphoretic in an effervescing draught — we’ll try to break the fever with these. Then they need to rest in a clean, dark, well-aired room.”

“I talked to a friend here in Washington,” Zeke said. “He’s willing to let us stay with him for a few days.”

“Not one of those young men,” Erasmus protested, “They’re hardly more than children.”

Zeke shook his head. “Someone else,” he said. “A physical anthropologist who’s in charge of a whole section — he has a big house a few blocks from here, servants, spare rooms. His children are grown and his wife is very… tolerant. He’s had Indians from the Andes staying with him before.”

“That sounds suitable,” the doctor said. “I can call on you twice daily there. I want to bleed them now; this almost always helps.” He looked down at Annie and Tom. “Race does modify the action of remedies, though.”

Erasmus leaned against the desk, watching as Zeke held the basins and lancets and helped the doctor spoon a dark brown liquid into Annie and Tom. He had a real affection for them, Erasmus saw.

Afterward Annie and Tom looked more comfortable. “Go out for a bit,” the doctor said. “I want to listen to their bowels.”

In the narrow hall, with the stairwell yawning below them, the two men regarded each other. “I can’t believe you brought them here in this condition,” Erasmus said. “You have to cancel the rest of the tour.”

“I already have,” Zeke said. His hair was glowing like a helmet. “Did you come here just to tell me that? I know they’re sick, I’ll take care of them. I’m not a monster.”

Erasmus had planned to say something about the conditions in the Repository, which Alexandra had described to him; about his impressions of the Philadelphia exhibition; about Lavinia, left alone so Zeke could trot around accumulating fame. Then he thought of the way Annie’s first words, whenever he saw her, were always “Where is Tseke?”

“Let me stay with you and Annie and Tom,” he said. “I want to help them.”

“There’s nothing you can do to help,” Zeke said. “I’ll be with them, though.” He peered over the railing, apparently fascinated by the zigzagging flights of stairs. “You can visit them all you want, when they’re better. But you can see for yourself how sick they are. You’re not a doctor — what can you do?”

He reached over and flicked one of Erasmus’s sticks with his thumb. “You belong at home,” he said. “You always did.”

The stick rose, until the tip was pointed at Zeke’s right knee; Erasmus couldn’t help this, his arm did it, it had no connection to him. “ I belong at home?” If the stick swung, at just the right angle, Zeke would topple, topple. “I’m not the one…”

“Stop worrying,” Zeke said. He leaned over and pressed on Erasmus’s forearm, pushing the stick back to the ground. “At least until they regain their health, I’m done with this tour.”

Behind them the door opened. “I’m finished,” the doctor said. “If you’d like, you can come back in.”

“I want to talk to Annie,” Erasmus said to Zeke. “I want her to tell me what she wants. Let me see her alone for a minute.” Without waiting for an answer he backed into the room.

“Annie?” he said. “What can I do for you? Tell me how I can help.”

“Tseke?” Annie said yet again. “Erasmus,” he said.

She opened her eyes. The whites were filmed with yellow — as was the rest of her, he thought, peering more closely at her face. It wasn’t true what the doctor had said; the sickness glazed her normal color and gave her a slight greenish tinge, as if she’d been dusted with lichen spores. “Oh,” Annie said. “You.”

Over the windows the curtains lifted, reaching toward the bed. She turned her head into the breeze and closed her eyes. “Go home,” she said faintly.

For a minute more he gazed at her. She said nothing else. Perhaps she had gone to sleep. Tom too had his eyes closed; the curtains lifted and fell, lifted and fell, refusing to give Erasmus an answer. He gave up and returned to the hall.

“It’s you she wants,” he told Zeke bitterly. You Lavinia wants, he thought. “She keeps asking for you.”

“I’ll take care of them,” Zeke said. “I promise.”

He ran a thumb over his bushy eyebrows. Erasmus stood before him, hot and miserable. Not a breath of breeze moved through this windowless hall.

“I need her,” Zeke said. “I’ve learned a lot from her, she’s been helping me with my book.” He bit off a fragment of thumbnail and dropped the shard down the stairwell. “It’s going to be good,” he said. “Personal, a sort of adventure tale — my encounters with the Esquimaux, my last vision of the Narwhal. It’s going to be like Dr. Kane’s book, only more interesting, more dramatic.”

Erasmus’s stomach knotted and rose. Why were they talking about this now, with Annie and Tom lying sick next door? They had never talked about anything, not Dr. Boerhaave’s death or Ned’s nose or all that might have been prevented if only Zeke hadn’t been determined to head north. And now, now… my encounters, my vision. The lecture in Philadelphia had been shaped exactly this way. Erasmus said, “Why would you write an account that pretends all the rest of us weren’t there?”

“You’re all in it,” Zeke said. “But no more than you deserve to be. Minor, minor characters.”

“I haven’t written about you” Erasmus said. “I didn’t think that would be fair.”

“What’s fair?” Zeke said. “Was it fair that you abandoned me? Is it fair that I have nothing left, except the story I tell? You can’t know what it was like for me up there. Coming back to the ship, finding you’d all walked out on me: it was very— clarifying. I learned who I could depend on. No one. No one but myself. You…”

The contempt in his eyes was shocking. “You’re nothing. Not in the book. Not to me.”

In his hands Erasmus felt the walking sticks dancing, as if the floor had metamorphosed into the open sea. “I may be nothing,” he said. “But at least I don’t destroy whatever I touch. What you’re doing to Annie and Tom…”

Zeke stretched his arms over his head, opening and closing his fingers. “Go home,” he said. “No one needs you here. I’ll take care of Annie and Tom.”

ANNIE WAS IN a room. Her son was in another; Zeke came and went between them. At home the angekpl^ sought his visions in a hollow hidden in thick ice grounded on the shore; she pulled the white curtains of the canopied bed around her and imagined ice. The doctor came; the man who owned this house came. The ser vants, as fearful and disdainful as those in the house to which Zeke had first brought her, sponged her body and brought her food, which she didn’t touch. The doctor forced pills and liquid between her teeth, some kind of poison. No one would listen to her. Not the doctor, not Zeke; not even Erasmus, who’d asked what she needed but then turned his back and disappeared when she’d said, I want to go home. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Her body would never go home now and she must do what she could for her son. A white cloth over the bed, white cases over the pillows; she had little time; she worked. The great power, the angekok had once told her, comes only after struggle and concentration. By the strength of her thought alone, she must strip her body of flesh and blood and be able to see herself as a skeleton. Each bone, each tiny bone, clear before her eyes. Then the sacred language would descend, allowing her to name the parts of her body that would endure. When she named the last bone she’d be free; her spirit could travel and she could watch over her son. She burrowed under the white cloth and squeezed shut her eyes, beginning the terrible process of shedding her flesh. Let me be bone, she sought. Like the long narwhal spines at home, the walrus skulls, the delicate ribs of the seals. White bone.