Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (13 page)

Hence it does not want for defense. And for that reason, the rhinoceros falls by body-type to the tricerotops category.

Nonetheless, all pictures that exist of unicorns show the breed to be of a different stripe.

It has no armor; it is entirely defenseless, not unlike a deer. If the unicorn were then also nearsighted, the defect could be disastrous. Even highly developed senses of smell or hearing would be inadequate to save it. Hunters would find it easy prey. Moreover, having no horn to spare, as it were, could severely disadvantage the unicorn in the event of an accident.

Still another failing of the single horn is the difficulty of wielding it with force, just as incisors cannot distribute a force equivalent to that of molars due to principles of balance.

The heavier the mass, the greater the stability when force is applied. Obviously, the unicorn suffers physio-dynamic defects.

"You're a real whiz at these explanations, aren't you?" I interrupted her.

She burst into a smile and trekked two fingers up my chest.

"Logically," she continued, "there's only one thing that could have saved the unicorn from extinction. And this is very important. Any idea?"

I folded my hands where her fingers were and thought it over a bit, inconclusively. "No natural predators?" I ventured.

"Bingo," she said, and gave me a little peck on the lips. "Now think: what conditions would give you no natural predators?"

"Well, isolation, for one thing. Somewhere no hunter could get to," I hypothesized.

"Someplace, say, on a high plateau, like in Conan Doyle's
Lost World
. Or down deep, like a crater."

"
Brill
!" she exclaimed, tapping her index finger now on my heart. "And in fact, there is a recorded instance of a unicorn discovered under exactly such circumstances."

I gulped. Uh-oh.

She resumed her exposition:

In 1917, the very item was discovered on the Russian front. This was September, one month prior to the October Revolution, during the First World War, under the Kerensky Cabinet, immediately before the start of the Bolshevik Coup.

At the Ukranian front line, a Russian infantryman unearthed a mysterious object while digging a trench. He tossed it aside, thinking it a cow or an elk skull. Had that been the end of it, the find would have remained buried in the obscurity of history. It happened, however, that the soldier's commanding lieutenant had been a graduate student in biology at the University of Petrograd. He noted a peculiarity to the skull and, returning with it to his quarters, he subjected it to thorough examination. He determined the specimen to be the skull of a species of animal as yet unknown. Immediately, he contacted the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology at the University and requested that a survey team be dispatched. None, of course, was forthcoming. Russia was in upheaval at the time. Food, gunpowder, and medicine had first priority. With communications crippled by strikes, it was impossible for a scientific team to reach the front. Even if they had, the circumstances would not have been conducive to a site survey. The Russian army was suffering defeat after defeat; the front line was being pushed steadily back. Very probably the site was already German territory.

The lieutenant himself came to an ignoble end. He was hanged from a telegraph pole in November that year. Many bourgeois officers were disposed of similarly along the Ukraine-Moscow telegraph line. The lieutenant had been a simple biology major without a shred of politics in him.

Nonetheless, immediately before the Bolshevik army seized control, the lieutenant did think to entrust the skull to a wounded soldier being sent home, promising him a sizable compensation upon delivery of the skull, packed securely in a box, to the Faculty Chairman in Petrograd. The soldier was released from military hospital but waited until February of the following year before visiting the University, only to find the gates closed indefinitely. Most of the lecturers either had been driven away or had fled the country. Prospects for the University reopening were not very promising. He had little choice but to attempt to claim his money at a later date. He stored the skull with his brother-in-law who kept a stable in Petrograd, and returned to his home village some three hundred kilometers from the former Imperial Capital. The soldier, for reasons undetermined, never visited Petrograd again, and the skull lay in the stable, forgotten.

The skull next saw the light of day in 1935. Petrograd had since become Leningrad.

Lenin was dead, Trotsky was in exile, and Stalin was in power. No one rode horses in Leningrad. The old stablemaster had sold half his premises, and in the remaining half he opened a small hockey goods shop.

"Hockey?" I dropped my jaw. "In the Soviet thirties?" "Don't ask me. That's just what I read. But who knows? Post-Revolution Leningrad was quite your modern
grad
. Maybe hockey was all the rage."

In any case, while inventorying his storeroom, the former stablemaster happened upon the box his brother-in-law had left with him in 1918. There in the box was a note addressed to the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology, Petrograd University. The note read: "Please bestow fair compensation upon the bearer of this item." Naturally, the purveyor of hockey goods took the box to the University—now Leningrad University— and sought a meeting with the Chairman. This proved impossible. The Chairman was a Jew who had been sent to Siberia after Trotsky's downfall.

This former stablemaster, however, was no fool. With no other prospect, rather than hold onto an unidentified animal skull for the remainder of his days and not receive a kopek, he found another professor of biology, recounted the tale, and prevailed upon him for a likely sum. He went home a few rubles richer.

The professor examined every square millimeter of the skull, and ultimately arrived at the same conclusion as had the lieutenant eighteen years earlier—to wit, that the skull did not correspond to any extant animal, nor did it correspond to any animal known to have existed previously. The morphology most closely resembled that of a deer. It had to have been a hoofed herbivore, judging by the shape of the jaw, with slightly fuller cheeks. Yet the greatest difference between this species and the deer was, lo and behold, the single horn that modified the middle of its forehead.

The horn was still intact. It was not in its entirety, to be sure, but what remained sufficed to enable the reconstruction of a straight horn of approximately twenty centimeters in length. The horn had been broken off close to the three-centimeter mark, its basal diameter approximately two centimeters.

"Two centimeters," I repeated to myself. The skull I'd received from the old man had a depression of exactly two centimeters in diameter.

Professor Petrov for that was his name summoned several assistants and graduate students, and the team departed for the Ukraine on a one-month dig at the site of the young lieutenant's trenches. Unfortunately, they failed to find any similar skull. They did, however, discover a number of curious facts about the region, a tableland commonly known as the Voltafil. The area rose to a moderate height and as such formed one of the few natural strategic vantage points over the rolling plains. During the First World War, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies repeatedly engaged the Russians in bloody confrontations on all sides. During the Second World War, the entire plateau was bombarded beyond recognition, but that was years later.

What interested Professor Petrov about the Voltafil was that the bones unearthed there differed significantly from the distribution of species elsewhere in that belt of land. It prompted the professor to conjecture that the present tableland had in ancient times not been an outcropping at all, but a crater, the cradle for untold flora and fauna. In other words, a
lost world
.

A plateau out of a crater might tax the imagination, but that is precisely what occurred.

The walls of the crater were perilously steep, but over millions of years the walls crumbled due to an intractable geological shift, convexing the base into an ordinary hill.

The unicorn, an evolutionary misfit, continued to live on this outcropping isolated from all predation. Natural springs abounded, the soil was fertile, conditions were idyllic.

Professor Petrov submitted these findings to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in a paper entitled "A Consideration of the Lifeforms of the Voltafil Tableland," detailing a total of thirty-six zoological, botanical, and geological proofs for his lost world thesis. This was August 1936.

It was dismally received. No one in the Academy took him seriously. His defense of his paper coincided with a power struggle within this august institution between Moscow University and Leningrad University. The Leningrad faction was not faring well; their purportedly non-dialectical research incurred a summary trouncing. Still, Petrov's hypothesis aside, there was the undeniably physical evidence of the skull itself. A cadre of specialists devoted the next year to excruci-ating study of the object in question. They were forced to conclude that it, indeed, was not a fabrication but the unadulterated skull of a single-horned animal. Ultimately, the Committee at the Soviet Academy of Sciences pronounced the embarrassing artifact a spontaneous mutation in
Cervidce odocoileus
with no evolutionary consequence, and as such not a subject fit for research. The skull was returned to Professor Petrov at Leningrad University.

Thereafter, Professor Petrov waited valiantly for the winds of fortune to shift and his research to achieve recognition, but the onslaught of the German-Soviet War in 1940 dashed all such hopes and he died in 1943, a broken man. It was during the 1941 Siege of Leningrad that the skull vanished. Leningrad University was reduced to rubble by German shelling. Virtually the entire campus—let alone a single animal skull—was destroyed. And so the one piece of solid evidence proving the existence of the unicorn was no more.

"So there's not one concrete thing that remains?" I said.

"Nothing except for photographs."

"Photographs?"

"That's right, photographs of the skull. Professor Petrov took close to a hundred photos of the skull, a few of which escaped destruction in the war. They've been preserved in the Leningrad University library reference collection. Here, photographs like this."

She handed me the book and pointed to a black-and-white reproduction on the page. A somewhat indistinct photograph, but it did convey the general shape of the skull. It had been placed on a table covered with white cloth, next to a wristwatch for scale, a circle drawn around the middle of the forehead to indicate the position of the horn. It appeared to be of the same species as the skull the old man had given me. I glanced over at the skull atop the TV. The T-shirt covering made it look like a sleeping cat. Should I tell her?

Nah, a secret's a secret because you don't let people in on it.

"Do you think the skull really was lost in the War?" I asked her.

"I suppose," she said, teasing her bangs around her little finger. "If you believe the book, the city of Leningrad was practically steamrollered, and seeing how the University district was the hardest hit, it's probably safe to say that the skull was obliterated along with everything else. Of course, Professor Petrov could well have whisked it away somewhere before the fighting started. Or it could have been among the spoils carted off by the German troops… Whatever happened to it, nobody has spoken of seeing the skull since."

I studied the photograph and slammed the book shut. Could the skull in my possession be the very same Voltafil-Leningrad specimen? Or was it yet another unicorn skull excavated at a different place and time? The simplest thing would be to ask the old man.

Like, where did you get that skull? And why did you give it to me? Well, I was supposed to see the old prankster when I handed over the shuffled data. I'd ask him then.

Meanwhile, not to be worrying.

I stared absently at the ceiling, with her head on my chest, her body snug against my side.

I put my arm around her. I felt relieved, in a way, about the unicorn skull, but the state of my prowess was unchanged. No matter. Erection or not, she kept on drawing dreamy patterns on my stomach.

The Wall

ON an overcast afternoon I make my way down to the Gatehouse and find my shadow working with the Gatekeeper. They have rolled a wagon into the clearing, replacing the old floorboards and sideboards. The Gatekeeper planes the planks and my shadow hammers them in place. The shadow appears altogether unchanged from when we parted.

He is still physically well, but his movements seem wrong. Ill-humored folds brew about his eyes.

As I draw near, they pause in their labors to look up.

"Well now, what brings you here?" asks the Gatekeeper.

"I must talk to you about something," I say.

"Wait till our next break," says the Gatekeeper, readdressing himself to the half-shaved board. My shadow glances in my direction, then resumes working. He is furious with me, I can tell.

I go into the Gatehouse and sit down at the table to wait for the Gatekeeper. The table is cluttered. Does the Gatekeeper clean only when he hones his blades? Today the table is an accumulation of dirty cups, coffee grounds, wood shavings, and pipe ash. Yet, in the racks on the wall, his knives are ordered in what approaches an aesthetic ideal.

The Gatekeeper keeps me waiting. I gaze at the ceiling, with arms thrown over the back of the chair. What do people do with so much time in this Town?

Outside, the sounds of planing and hammering are unceasing.

When finally the door does open, in steps not the Gatekeeper but my shadow.

"I can't talk long," whispers my shadow as he hurries past. "I came to get some nails from the storeroom."

He opens a door on the far side of the room, goes into the right storeroom, and emerges with a box of nails.

"I'll come straight to the point," says my shadow under his breath as he sorts through the nails. "First, you need to make a map of the Town. Don't do it by asking anyone else.