The Curiosity (11 page)

CHAPTER 11

The Button

M
y name is Jeremiah Rice, and I begin to remember.

There was a girl, she had fiery hair and ran toward me. I feel her fervent breath on my neck. She liked to dig in my pockets. I would put things there for her to find: a stone, a candle stub, a penny. She had the littlest hands and her name was . . . her name was . . . It will come to me.

I was born Christmas Day, 1868, which makes me, well, how does one count? Thirty-eight Christmases passed before I went to sea, and one more whilst abroad. How many since then? I cannot say. They have not yet told me the year. Till this moment I had not thought to ask. I am too busy reorganizing. Remembering.

They arrive in pieces, my recollections. Fragments as though I gathered broken glass. I flinch, and wince, and inhale in gulps. When the flood grows overwhelming, I sleep, deeply like the ocean that took me. And wake once again to amazement.

My father went to war, they tell me, and came home changed. My sisters were years older than I, born before he went soldiering. My mother made a habit of prayer for his safe return, and when that was answered, of thanksgiving. My sisters said that after the conflict he rarely conversed, worked twice as hard, and often stared at things in the distance. Delivered into this life three years after his return, I knew him no other way.

It was a war about skin. Cotton, too, the price of shoes, and whether a nation ought to accept the severing of its bonds over internal strife. I learned these things in school, which now is vague like a group of desks in a field of fog, blurred voices and a chalkboard just at the edge of sight. The war about skin I remember, because of the day of my mother's burial. It was 1880; I was twelve. For some reason she'd chosen to butcher uncooked pork with a paring knife, punctured her thumb, and the infection climbed her arm like black string under the skin. It progressed so rapidly, even amputation would not have saved her. On the walk home from the graveyard, my father began to speak.

“Never do a job with a too-small knife,” he began, in his usual terse manner. But then he continued, remarking on the war, its causes, and his experience. I had never heard him utter so many consecutive sentences. Although we'd just left a burial, grief like a yoke on my shoulders, still I felt giddy with the intimacy of his revelations. Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg. The sound a ball made as it rifled past your ear. The way a body resisted when you thrust a bayonet, and then gave under the blade. The sight, calming and frightening both, of enemy fires across a meadow at night.

It was, he explained, all he had known until then about death. Useless, though, he concluded, because it failed to prepare him to lose a wife.

On that single occasion he spoke of it, never after. But once was enough for me to recall all this time. Oh time, now there is a marvel. Here on the other side of my mortality, I would like to see Mr. Darwin explain this one. I would like to hear Mr. Edison's theory. I would love to hear Wilbur and Orville make a flight of these fancies.

Thus far the people here explain little. They feed me gruel and attach things to me. There are numbers and noises, measurings and masks. They speak curtly and fear the dark. Still I am in restraints. Canvas holds my wrists and ankles as though I were a convict. Hm. Life's ironies are never subtle.

Cold in childhood; I remember that, too. Frigid mornings when the bucket by the stove wore a skin of ice. Dawns in January when my turn came to light the stove, and I blew hard on the reluctant embers. Dressing whilst still in bed was another way to warm, I discovered one morning when the rafters bore layers of rime from my breath rising through the night. I walked to school under clear, cerulean skies, and learned that cold has a particular beauty, its own brilliance for those who are hardy—and wearing wool, ha.

Perhaps that is what brought me to adventures, the appreciation of cold. I presumed that because I loved nature, nature loved me. Now I know better. Nature does not know I exist. Nature goes about its affairs, and if I stray from a path in the woods, a bear may eat me. If I dive from a cliff, the rocks will tell untroubled truth upon my flesh. And if I go a-sailing, seeking unnamed species in the northern seas . . .

Not yet. I am not ready to remember that particular cold quite yet. But what was her name? Her fingers when stretched wide reached smaller than my palm. Her voice was high like a cricket, melodic like a wren.

The only one I trust here is the first one, present at my waking. She comes when the others are gone. She turns down the lights, a pleasure in a room with neither night nor day. She releases my wrists and tells me to unbind my ankles myself so that I may be the agent of my own eventual freedom. I do not comprehend her meaning but her tone is one I trust. Merely I bend my knees, enjoy my legs' motion, and keep my own counsel. She insists I am not a prisoner; they want to protect me from illness.

The one who seems to be the boss would not last five minutes in the shoe mills of Lynn.
Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, never come out the way you went in.
Someone would arrive at work one morning to find a hog-tied foreman's hand in a gear, mangled to uselessness. Or his necktie noosed on a rafter, the fellow tiptoe all night for his life's sake. Or, on one occasion, his carcass in a vat of tanning chemicals, nose down.

Then they would bring the suspect to me, he would confess, and there would be my Solomonic duty—measuring his conduct against its provocation. Law versus justice. I am a servant of the former who hoped to achieve the latter. I remember the courtroom but not the building that held it. What, though, what was her name?

My wife—goodness, I had a wife—was Joan. It comes back to me directly now, a marvel from some cobwebbed bin of the mind. I hear her voice from a moment of irritation. Distracted by the courts, I have forgotten some chore. The horses need fresh feed. The farrier did not come as scheduled. We are low on coal. But that is not all. There was another side to Joan which only a husband would know: anytime I reached for her, slid an arm around her waist after supper, or woke in deep night to find our bodies spooned in their bedclothes and my wrist between her breasts, or blinked in the light of a new dawn, having awakened with desire, always her reply was the same: I am willing. Always that, she never once refused me. I am willing. I can hear that whispered generosity even now. What a thing, how she gave herself to me, and how ardent her body was with mine, till we shined, her understanding and her compassion and possibly even her pity, all in that quiet phrase: I am willing.

It was a decent home, not grand. Gaslights, good chairs in the parlor, a front hall with wide stairs. We sought an honorable life at no one's expense, and that ambition brought us to the threshold of greatness but not into its inner rooms.

Perhaps that was what led me to exploration. Vanity, and the desire to make a name for posterity. After all no one remembers a magistrate, however just. No one but drunkards and wife slappers and horse thieves, and the unfortunate victims of their deeds. Yet I submit that it was not weakness which widened my horizons. It was the power of curiosity, of wanting to know. So many great minds in that time were enlarging our sense of the world. Who would not wish to dine at the tables of discovery?

Here they make the same claim. Hm. I listen to them all day, puttering around me as though I have no ears. They say I am a first. Not a miracle, because there are scientific explanations, but nonetheless. Thus they measure my body weight and heart speed and arm strength. They draw my blood; I watch it pulse from my body into their glass tubes. They snip my hair into a clear bag. One afternoon a man went from finger to finger, toe to toe, trimming my nails into a little white tin. Meanwhile I must eat particular foods, void in containers they remove as though sacred, and remain in this tiled room with the long window that looks upon their desks and nothing beyond.

They say my name will be known forever. I say, not yet. Not until I tell it to them. I have saved that secret for her, the one I trust, since it fell back into my memory during the afternoon as if dropping from the sky. Until I say it aloud, my name is a fist of coal, warming me silently while one remembrance after another tiptoes forward from its chilly hiding place. Yesterday she promised to tell me how I came to be alive. I relate to her that this question, in my time, could only be answered by God. She laughs, a little melody, and tells me no such luck, she is just a thirty-five-year-old biologist from Ohio. Still, as the day drones along I cannot wait for the others to leave, and her to come.

Say what you will about the human spirit. I am but four days awakened in this new world. Yet already I have preferences, already I have hopes.

I wonder what has become of precious Lynn now. Wait. It was not precious to me. I preferred Boston. Lynn was Joan's home. When she consented to marry me, it was with the understanding that we remain near her mother and brothers. A chilly crew they were, every one, but her father had died in the War Between the States. Thus Lynn was her sanctuary. Hm. Now I recollect that she was older than me, my Joan. By six years, and whilst my sisters snickered and implied, I felt it no compromise. Joan had dignity, and a generous way before I knew about her willingness. Age explained why we only had the one child. The girl's name, though, her name . . .

People work oddly in this time. They claim to stand on a frontier of humanity, yet strike me as uniformly joyless. Instead of performing tasks together, they sit each apart, staring at a square of light, speaking into a flat cone, and rarely addressing each other at all. The rather, they sneer behind one another's backs. They bicker like chickens.

At day's end, in the courthouse there was a hush, as in a library, and a feeling that something important had happened in which we all took part. People came to us with their conflicts, enmities, and betrayals, and we sought by degrees to make sense of it all. It was solemn, and often I walked home under the weight of responsibility.

Here, at a fixed hour they darken their squares of light. They push chairs in against their desks or leave them indifferently askew. They grunt good-byes. Clearly I am missing something, for they seem exhausted by their labors, though mostly what they did was sit.

And then she comes. The only one to tell me her name. The one who neither complains of her tasks nor troubles her fellows. She carries a board with a clip to hold the papers. She has shown me the words she writes there, a neat and minuscule script. I have learned much from her already: there is a thing called blood pressure, it measures the energy with which the heart pumps vital fluid through the body. Edison's inventions, which transformed the humble shoemakers of Lynn into factories of mass production, also led to the lights that hum overhead. Apparently the workers here tolerate their insufferable boss because he alone had the capacity to bring this enterprise together, and thereby to coax me back into wakefulness. They are all in his debt. So, I suppose, am I.

Tonight she is late, but I do not worry. I know she waits till others have gone. She says a machine in the other room records all that we say and do, just as court clerks of my time would mark down every syllable of testimony as though it were scripture. People all around the globe see those recordings, through squares of light like those in this office. She has explained these concepts several times and I still do not comprehend. When I am strong enough to withstand the germs that outside people carry, she has promised to bring me into the other room and show me. I do not understand this concern about germs. Is the world that drastically unhealthier from when I was first alive? Is the air so different?

At last she arrives. One remaining scientist comes and goes, busy with tasks. She tosses things on a desk, then hurries to start various machineries. She moves with feline grace. No one notices. Oh, I misspeak. One person has noticed, the heavyset man who writes down everything that everyone says. I know his kind. I was a judge for eight years, then a participant in a celebrated Arctic voyage. I recognize a reporter when I see one.

Midway through her tasks, she hangs her jacket on the back of a chair. I spy a glistening on the shoulders. Ha. It is winter. There are still seasons. Longing swells in my chest. There is a world outside in which snow falls in the evening. I cannot wait to see it, smell it, feel the cold on my face like the touch of familiar fingertips.

A memory appears then, complete like a jewel. An evening when I returned home late from court, hoping that the little girl would still be awake. I am striding up the last hill toward home, the scent of supper in the chilly air. It is December, a few flakes falling, the fat ones that melt upon landing. All the way home I have been preoccupied with the case before me, a procedural knot I must somehow untie. When I see the gaslights out front, I realize I have forgotten to put something in my pocket. I feel a minor panic.

There are four buttons on my vest. I never close the bottom one. I clasp it firmly, knowing that if Joan discovers this deed I am certain to hear her disapproval, and yet yank that button free. The fabric does not tear. I pick the remaining threads away; the vest appears as new.