Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

The first piece was a bust, a child’s head and shoulders. The pigtailed pianist. A drawer at the nape of her neck, with a little heart inside. A paper heart, coin-sized and inked in scarlet. He kept it in his pocket until it fell to pieces.

His eventual response: a small wooden copy of den lille havfrue , Andersen’s little mermaid on her rock. But instead of the sea woman’s visage, it was her own features carved into the soft basswood. She smiled when she saw how well he remembered her face.

Down the years they sent their strange missives. She sent maps made of clay, locks with no key, books with words cut out, fantastical animals and landscapes. He sent puzzle boxes, lacquered bangles engraved with kanji , bright yellow Dutch clogs. They sent maps of where they’d been and circled where they were going. And the world was crowded with things that meant love.

Once she received a plain cedar box with a wooden knife inside, and she was disappointed for a long time. She felt the sentiment fell too far from love and into something much darker. She was not sure they could be sustained by such cruel gestures.

But then at the Paris flea market she found a beautifully carved antique music box. She brought it home and sculpted a little ballerina, lovely and lithe and wearing, of course, her smiling face. She snipped the plastic ballerina out of the box and put her own inside. She wouldn’t dance, but he would recognize a clumsy sort of hope here, the echo of his very first gift to her.

And so the gifts continued, from Brussels to Tokyo, from Lodz to Buenos Aires, from Ankara to Johannesburg. Wood and clay went by boat, by air, by train. Each gift arrived with a slip, printed with only a new address. Messages slower but more powerful than those carried in the digital noise of the world. They never spoke, never wrote, never texted, never exchanged a photograph, though they sculpted and carved each other many times. They could not help but notice each grew lovelier in memory, even as they grew older and older in life.

Eventually, he went to sleep one night in a hotel bed in Heidelburg, and he never awoke again. The room was full of beautiful objects, the hotel maid saw; souvenirs, she supposed. She found a curious item next to his body: a plaster arm — a woman’s arm with fingers curled as if around some object. No one on the hotel staff could tell if the hand was giving or receiving — or if it was beckoning something or someone to finally come home.

He is thinking about Cope’s skull. His rival issued the challenge publicly: Let us compare sizes! Let us see whose brain is bigger at last! But Marsh doesn’t like the idea of his skull floating about the university labs, unmoored from its lonely body. Let Cope live on, headless with his challenge; Marsh will go to his grave a whole corpse.

He mourns alone in the breakfast room, slicing hard-boiled eggs and sprinkling them with pepper, watches dots darken the white like locusts over clouds. He imagines Cope’s skull, grin stretched across like a rictus.

Your rope trick: you used to take out your own false teeth, grinning like a skull to entertain the Indians. You were a beautiful fool. Everyone loved you, even my own research assistants, everyone but me. There is no room for love in a boxing match, no room for affection in a street brawl. No room when the score was always so close .

But years ago, before the war began, there was room. They talked for hours at Haddonfield, grinning in helpless academic passion and exclaiming at their own twin hearts. They ate breakfast together on a heap of rock in the marl pits, black bread and coffee as the sun swam into the sky. Cope in shirtsleeves, a boy’s face, looking more like Marsh’s son than his contemporary.

I was a child once, and yet in so many ways I was never a child. I was a farmhand, and my father’s only use for me was as a simple body, up before dawn to milk the cows, feed the pigs and chickens, muck out the stalls and troughs. I don’t remember playing. I think now that I never played. I think that I was never a child .

Cope, the child prodigy, cutting up lizards and snakes; Cope, the child-man, the Quaker with his “thee”s and “thou”s and the broad smile Marsh hated, even as he longed to crawl under its canopy. Cope smiled too much. He was too open, like a pilgrim sleeping on the road.

Raw boy, with your Hadrosaurus foulkii, coming out of your first triumph; you were soft as a baby. The pits were still rich with fossils then. You cannot blame me for seeing that you needed hardening. You and your smiles needed steeping in sap, needed polymerizing. You needed toughening, green shoot. This was a cutthroat business. This was a bone rush .

There were roses the day the woman left Marsh. Toppled over in the fight, petals scattered across the tiled floor. It looked like a love scene, not a fresco over the fringes of violence. She gasped and gasped like her life was falling away, like it was pouring out of her, a waterfall of hurt and astonishment. Stop breathing, he said, again and again. Stop breathing. Stop breathing.

You came to the Continent, Cope, full of rage and sadness that you twisted into a hunger for learning. We loved each other instantly, I think we did; I showed you Berlin and you spoke of that first trip to Boston when you were seven, spoke of the whales and how you’d drawn hopeful pictures of the harpooners at work. You’d wanted to see what a whale hunt looked like .

I told you about the cows and pigs and the way my uncle saved my life, appeared suddenly like Athena to Perseus, offered a world outside that small island. You told me about her, how your father didn’t approve, how he sent you to Europe to keep you out of her clutches as much as the army’s. We drank together and ate together and debated together, and we stepped on one another’s words in an eagerness to spill them all out. And when we returned to the States, we remembered. You named an amphibian fossil Ptyonius marshii, after me, and I named a new serpent Mosasaurus copeanus, after you. I think we did love one another. I truly think we did .

Both discovered pterodactyls on their first trips out West. Marsh took measurements, sketched it, pushed it into the pages of the scientific journals. Dry bones on a dead thing. Cope, though, gave the monster life. He was one of the first to do so, to bring these New World fossils a stunning, bright sense of existence. “These strange creatures,” he wrote, “flapped their leathery wings over the waves, and often plunging, seized many an unsuspecting fish; or, soaring, at a safe distance, viewed the sports and combats of more powerful saurians of the sea. At night-fall, we may imagine them trooping to the shore, and suspending themselves to the cliffs by the claw-bearing fingers of their wing-limbs.”

In my reports, I detailed my discoveries, drew pictures of the new species, the shape and size of the bones. You wrote of the desolate wilderness, how ancient seashells littered the ground, how the jawbones of monsters hung hungry from the limestone cliffs. You always were a better writer. You always had a bit of the showman in you.