The Origin of Species (69 page)

It was while recovering from a bout of malaria, what apparently passed as leisure for him, that Wallace happened to make a connection between the origin of species and the theories of Thomas Malthus. This was where matters grew positively uncanny: it was that same conjunction of forces, the far archipelago, the Malthusian spark. Wallace sent his paper on the subject not, as anyone more secure in his reputation would have done, to a scientific journal—how differently matters might have turned out for him—but to none other than Darwin himself. It beggared the mind, this unlikely intersection of forces. Darwin by then had toiled
over his theory for half his life, refining and delaying, afraid of upsetting all those old boys who had given him a hand up. “It is like confessing a murder” was how he had put the matter to a friend, when he had dared to confide to him the theory’s barest outlines. Yet here was Wallace coming to him like a whelp, an innocent, seeking the Great Man’s approval, having whipped off the same scheme between rounds of fever. It was almost as if none of the getting there had really mattered, only that this moment should come when the two men were suddenly faced with the specter of their other selves.

Blip. Ninety-six point four. Would an alarm go off, would he know? He needed a cigarette, badly. This time he took her hand: still warmish. Still a pulse.

“Esther,” he whispered. “Esther.”

But she didn’t turn.

It had begun to irk Alex how Darwin’s apologists always made so much of how sportingly he had handled things with Wallace. Twenty years, Darwin had slaved. A life’s work. Then along comes this upstart. Wringing his hands, Darwin had put the matter to the objective judgment of some of the top scientific minds of his day, who also happened to be his best friends. At their urging he drafted a quick summary of the views he had claimed were impossible to summarize and presented it, along with Wallace’s paper, to the Linneans, to their general bafflement. Wallace, meanwhile, was still off in the islands awaiting a yea or nay from his
père manqué
. He had not been informed.

The rest, as they said, was history. After all the years of skulking and shirking, Darwin managed to rush
The Origin of Species
into print in a matter of months, so that by the time Wallace had straggled home from the East, Darwin was already safely ensconced as the father of evolution. He’d handled things expertly: he had covered his ass and got the prize. By then he had managed to surround himself with faithful supporters to mop up the shit when it hit the fan, men he had cultivated one by one to replace all the former supporters he had betrayed. Smiling and shuffling, pleading his stomach troubles, he retreated to his garden and his study. Wallace, for his part, put out a flurry of publications, none anywhere near as successful as
The Origin
; fell into penury again; veered off into spiritualism and socialism. He earned his living grading government exams and doing editing work for people like Darwin, never quite able
to land a proper job. And yet still he had been there, an honor, after all, bearing the Great Man’s remains into the Abbey.

Ninety-six point three. Blip. What was left of them now, those remains? Food for worms. Such a piece of work, the human body, to come to that. Everything so finely tuned, seeking its balance; of the billion things that could go wrong, so few of them did. A masterwork: the work of an artist.

The portrait of an artist.

All right, he admitted it, he hadn’t really liked that one. A bit pompous. Self-indulgent. While he was at it, what of that turgid bit in “Scylla and Charybdis,” was that really necessary? An extra appendage. An appendix. Should have cut it out.

See, he could do it too, all that childish punning.

It sounds like you’ve got a bit of a love-hate with Mr. Joyce. I know you’d like to move on from Freud, but it looks to me like the old anxiety of influence. And didn’t he also teach at Berlitz, if I’m not mistaken?

(Wryly) So I guess these are what pass for the tough questions with you. Though I’m not sure everything comes down to that same old dynamic, Peter. Look at you and me
.

Well, here’s my question to you, then, sir: Who’s really in control here? Because all I hear in my headphones is my producer screaming at me to get that blanking a-hole out of the studio!

The appendix hanging there, a little blob of flesh. A little penis. A pen. Upon. What did it do, exactly, upon a time? For eating leaves or something. It could kill you, but there it was, refusing to go. Vermiform. Vermin. Worm. Darwin had liked worms. He’d had a little worm stone in the back garden that sank as the worms worked away underneath it. You could still see it there—had Alex actually done this? had it been the original?—by the beech tree at the back of the lawn.

Not a masterwork, really: a hodgepodge, a mishmash, a mess. Things wore down; they turned against themselves; they sat crammed in their flimsy body bag like so much underwear and socks packed in a hurry. There was no artist, really, that was the problem.
No plan
. This happened, then that; something worked, then it didn’t. The way his father had run things on the farm: whatever was handy. Try this coupling. Try this bolt. Look at Esther there, with her T cells pinging away at her myelin sheath like mice gnawing the covering off a wire. You’ve
got mice. You’ve got MS. Myelin sheath. It was all connected. So little went wrong, but then it took so little: one microbe amiss, one link, and the whole system ran amok. It was like those petri dishes in science class: a bit of this, a bit of that, see what survived. A bit of mold, maybe, and presto: penicillin. Penis. Pen. All connected. Esther was a petri dish in there, her own little habitat, a human test tube, to see what survived: something, maybe, but maybe not something human. What was alive out there at Chernobyl? Massive carrots the color of Mars; little glowworms that fed on strontium 90.

Blip. Panic went through him: the readout had dropped to the ninety-fives. This time he pressed the button. What if this was it, what if she was fading away? Her parents ought to be here, not him; he didn’t deserve it.

There is nothing worse than to watch the death of your child
. Where had he heard that? Esther’s mother could have said it, the tone was right. But what she had actually said was, “What can we do? It’s God’s will.”

It seemed no one had broken the news to her yet of his demise.

Fear was all it was, he figured, what had kept Darwin silent all those years, simple animal fear.
Like confessing a murder
. He had killed off the biggest father of all. People lost jobs for that sort of thing, they became villains, they were raked over the coals by every institution. Darwin had done the math of who his allies were: Hooker could be counted on, maybe Lyell as well; but not Henslow, the old codger, Henslow who had taken him under his wing at Cambridge, who had given him his start. Henslow would have to be sacrificed. The romantics who claimed Darwin had kept his peace those many years for the sake of his Emma, to spare her Christian sensibilities, were on drugs, as far as Alex was concerned. He had acted at every turn for his own preservation, had marshaled his forces and then, when the moment had come to move forward, had done so with brutal resolve. All his wringing of hands over Wallace had been to wipe the blood off them: he’d needed Wallace was what it was, had needed his symbiont, his other half, to show he wasn’t merely some crackpot, some flake. That he wasn’t alone. He had needed him to fertilize the thing, to bring it to light, to make it whole, and then to crawl back into his cranny like the little penis mates of those barnacle mothers.

That was a way of looking at the matter. It made sense. Even Emma had
had to forgive him then, when it came to a matter of legacy; even the church. The smiling public man, the happy simpleton, red in tooth and claw.

I dreamed I went to heaven, and everyone liked me
.

No one had come yet. He was about to go out in search of someone when the monitor blipped, then again, and was suddenly back up into the mid-ninety-sixes. That wouldn’t make sense if you were on the way out. The reading probably changed if she so much as shifted a leg, if the air current from a closing door wafted in, if Alex leaned an elbow on the underpad.

Which he was doing. Shit.

A nurse appeared in the door. Not one of the regulars: she was small and dark and decidedly Wamalie-like, a Filipina, surely. His first thought, which immediately fell under the scrutiny of his mind’s subcommittee on racism, was,
Good for her. She has a proper job
.

She made a kind of friendly wince at finding him there.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here now,” she whispered.

“I know. It’s just—her monitor. It keeps going up and down.”

She came over and gave it a look.

“It’s nothing. It’s normal. We have it there at the station, also. The numbers.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

She had come for Esther’s turning. With an effortlessness that seemed remarkable for her size, she got Esther onto her side, rearranging her limbs and her bedsheets until she actually looked like herself.

Alex was waiting for her to send him away.

“It’s okay.” She put a finger to her lips. “You stay. It’s good.”

When she’d gone he felt like he’d just got word that some seemingly inevitable punishment had been waived. He wasn’t going to be kicked out; Esther wasn’t going to die. He took Esther’s hand again, wanting to reach her somehow.

“Esther,” he whispered. “Esther. I have a son.”

Nothing. Nothing there.

There was room enough in his scheme for God, according to Darwin. It wasn’t his place to pronounce yea or nay. And yet in his heart, in that rat’s nest, that bag of blood. It was his Annie, some said, who had taken his God, not his theory—he had doted on her, she was simple and pure, she brought him snuff when he’d passed his quota. It was simpleminded to think that it hadn’t occurred to him people died, even innocents, that
he would rest the matter of faith on such a trifle, and yet Alex could see it. It wasn’t a question of theology. It was that sense of being abandoned, of being alone. Nothing there.

Where’s the guy when you really need him? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ve had a few dark nights of the soul yourself
.

I’m not sure if that’s something I feel comfortable talking about here, Peter
.

What? Do you think anyone’s listening? Do you think anyone cares?

He squeezed Esther’s hand.

“Esther,” he said again. He felt her hand in his, the crooked fingers, the little bones, the feeble thump, thump of her heart. “I have a son.”

He was growing maudlin again. He would keep admitting his son’s existence until it was real.

Darwin had kept a box all his life, Annie’s box, filled with her goose quills and pen nibs and sealing wax.

Esther had turned.

“Esther!” He squeezed harder. She was looking at him in her unfocused way, with her pools for eyes. “Esther, it’s me. It’s Alex.”

Orbs, her eyes had become, little satellites. Lost in space. Who knew what they saw?

“Esther, I’m leaving, I’m going to my son. His name is Per. He lives in Sweden. I have to go to him.”

He felt the imperative of this as he said it, of going: it was not a choice.

“He’s my son, I have to go.”

Esther’s eyes took him in for the briefest instant with what might have been actual focus, actual recognition, then closed. He had killed her, he thought. He had used up her last ounce. But then he felt her tiny pulse again, saw her chest lift and fall, like the waft of a feather.

She had heard him, that much seemed certain. Maybe not so coherently as to make sense of him, but to hear, at least, to feel the vibrations of air, to feel spoken to. No one did that now; no one spoke to her. He ought to keep talking, say anything, the way they said you should. He could entrust his secrets to her. He could give words to things he had never dared to speak of.
I shall tell you all
.

He picked up
Les Misérables
and began to read softly from where he’d left off.

Such a strange thing, these little scratches on a page, what a million years before or a million hence might seem without remotest pattern or
intent but conjured a world up now, so that the room slipped away, and the stink of illness, and the infernal machine, and they were in the streets of Paris. The barricades were ahead of them, and the sewers, and Javert in the Seine; and then Jean Valjean alone on his deathbed, forsaken by Cosette for her lover. It seemed to stretch out before them for weeks still, for decades.

How did it turn out, in the end? He couldn’t remember.

She had never been to Paris. All that he took for granted, she had never had, the little towns in the Netherlands, the German autobahn, walking through the wheatfields to the Puttgarden ferry and then collapsing on the beach on the other side, where the sun rose over the water at three in the morning.

He didn’t know—who did?—how the mind worked at the end. If things flashed by with some sort of meaning or pattern or just sputtered out like ruined computer files. Decaying sense: what the Enlightenment thought imagination was. Entropy. Not Paris, just Spain, and not Spain, really, only her version of it. Then there were the car trips she had told him about with Lenny: he would drive her to Tobermory for treatment in the divers’ tanks. Some doctors said it helped. Hyperbaric oxygen. Sensory deprivation. Like death, she had said. Then had added, “But not in a bad way.”

What did they talk about on those drives? Did they take solace from one another, did they broach the important questions? Did they fight over where to stop, when to eat? All the promising names of things, Alexandria, Cornwall, Belleville, and then the same straggling outskirts of fast food and strip malls and the same endless stone and wind-bitten trees.

The worst rides for him were the long ones home from the train station with his father, the rote mumbled questions, the rote gruff replies. Who knew what it was: something beyond dislike, not more than it, but different, a sort of rawness, of injury. Once, where the road curved at Staples, they had seen a line of cars on the road ahead inching along as if it were a funeral cortege, half a dozen or more moving perfectly spaced like a single entity, though the road stretched deserted before them.