The Signature of All Things (67 page)

What’s more, Alma thought, the struggle for existence also defined the
inner
life of a human being. Tomorrow Morning was a pagan who had transmuted into a devout Christian—for he was cunning and self-preserving, and had seen the direction the world was taking. He had chosen the future over the past. As a result of his foresight, Tomorrow Morning’s children would thrive in a new world, where their father was revered and powerful. (Or, at least, his children would thrive until another wave of challenge arrived to confront them. Then they would have to make their own way. That would be their battle, and nobody could spare them it.)

On the other hand, there was Ambrose Pike, a man whom God had blessed fourfold with genius, originality, beauty, and grace—but who simply did not have the gift of endurance. Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield. He had spent his life longing for the eternal, the constant, and the pure. He
desired an airy covenant of angels, but was bound—as is everyone and everything—by the hard rules of nature. Moreover, as Alma well knew, it was not always the most beautiful, brilliant, original, or graceful who survived the struggle for existence; sometimes it was the most ruthless, or the most lucky, or maybe just the most stubborn.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

Alma called her idea “A Theory of Competitive Alteration,” and she believed she could prove it. Naturally, she could not prove it using the examples of Tomorrow Morning and Ambrose Pike—although they would live forever in her imagination as outsized, romantic, illustrative figures. Even to make mention of them would be grossly unscientific.

She could, however, prove it with mosses.

A
lma wrote quickly and copiously. She did not slow down to revise, but would simply tear up old drafts and begin again from scratch, nearly every day. She could not slow her pace; she was not interested in slowing her pace. Like a besotted drunk—who can run without falling, but who cannot
walk
without falling—Alma could only propel herself through her idea with blind speed. She was afraid to slow down and write more carefully, for she feared she might tumble over, lose her nerve, or—worse!—lose her idea.

To tell this story—the story of species transmutation, as demonstrable through the gradual metastasis of mosses—Alma did not need notes, or access to the old library at White Acre, or her herbarium. She needed none of this, for a vast comprehension of moss taxonomy already existed within her head, filling every corner of her cranium with well-remembered facts and details. She also had at her fingertips (or, rather, at her mind’s fingertips) all the ideas that had already been written over the last century on the subject of species metamorphosis and geological evolution. Her mind was like a terrific repository of endless shelves, stacked with untold thousands of books and boxes, organized into infinite, alphabetized particulars.

She did not need a library; she
was
a library.

For the first few months of her journey, she wrote and rewrote the fundamental guiding assumptions for her theory, until she finally felt she had it correctly and irreducibly distilled to these ten:

That the distribution of land and water across the face of the earth has not always been where it is now.

That, based upon the fossil record, mosses appear to have endured all geological epochs since the dawn of life.

That mosses appear to have endured these diverse geological epochs through a process of adaptive change.

That mosses can change their fate either by altering their location (i.e., moving to a more favorable climate), or by altering their internal structure (i.e., transmutation).

That the transmutation of mosses has expressed itself over time in a nearly infinite appropriation and discarding of traits, leading to such adaptations as: increased resistance to drying, a decreased reliance upon direct sunlight, and the ability to revive after years of drought.

That the rate of change within moss colonies, and the extent of that change, is so dramatic as to suggest perpetual change.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

That moss was almost certainly a different entity (most likely algae) before it was moss.

That moss—as the world continues to transform—may itself eventually become a different entity.

That whatever is true for mosses must be true for all living things.

Alma’s theory felt audacious and dangerous, even to herself. She knew she was in treacherous territory—not only from a religious perspective (though this did not much concern her), but also from a scientific perspective. As she marched toward her conclusion like a mountaineer, Alma knew she was at risk of falling into the trap that had consumed so many grandiose French thinkers over the centuries—namely, the trap of
l’esprit de système
, where one dreams up some giant and thrilling universal explanation, and then tries to force all facts and reason to bend to that explanation, regardless of whether it makes any sense. But Alma was certain that her theory
did
make sense. The trick would be to prove it in writing.

A ship was as good a place as anywhere to write—and several ships, one after another, moving ponderously across the empty seas, were better still. Nobody disturbed Alma. Roger the dog lay in the corner of her berth and watched her work, panting and scratching at himself and often looking terribly disappointed in life, but he would have done that wherever in the world he happened to be. At night, he would sometimes jump into her bunk and curl up against the crook of her legs. Sometimes he woke Alma with his little moans.

Sometimes Alma, too, uttered little moans in the night. Just as she had found during her first voyage at sea, she discovered that her dreams were vivid and powerful, and that Ambrose Pike figured prominently in them. But now Tomorrow Morning made frequent appearances in her dreams, as well—sometimes even melding with Ambrose into strange, sensual, chimeric figures: Ambrose’s head on Tomorrow Morning’s body; Tomorrow Morning’s voice emerging from Ambrose’s throat; one man, during sexual congress with Alma, suddenly transforming into the other. But it was not only Ambrose and Tomorrow Morning who blended together in these strange dreams—
everything
seemed to be merging. In Alma’s most compelling nighttime reveries, the old binding closet at White Acre metamorphosed into a cave of mosses; her carriage house became a tiny but pleasant room at the Griffon Asylum; the sweet-smelling meadows of Philadelphia transformed into fields of warm black sand; Prudence was suddenly dressed in Hanneke’s clothing; Sister Manu tended to the boxwoods in Beatrix Whittaker’s Euclidean garden; Henry Whittaker paddled up the Schuylkill River in a tiny Polynesian outrigger canoe.

Arresting though these images may have been, the dreams somehow did not disturb Alma. Instead, they filled her with the most astonishing
sensation of synthesis—as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming
one thing
. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again—that feeling she had experienced only once before, in the weeks leading up to her wedding with Ambrose—of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.

She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.

Having established the ten guiding principles of her daring theory, Alma now harnessed her most quivering, electrified energies, and wrote the history of the Moss Wars of White Acre. She wrote the story of the twenty-six years she had spent observing the advance and retreat of competing colonies of moss across one tumble of boulders at the edge of the woods. She focused her attention most specifically upon the genus
Dicranum
, because it demonstrated the most elaborate range of variation within the moss family. Alma knew of
Dicranum
species that were short and plain, and others that were dressed in exotic fringe. There were species that were straight-leafed, others that were twisted, others that lived only on rotting logs beside stones, others that claimed the sunniest crests of tall boulders, some that proliferated in puddled water, and one that grew most aggressively near the droppings of white-tailed deer.

Over her decades of study, Alma had noticed that the most similar
Dicranum
species were the ones that could be found right next to each other. She argued that this was not accidental—that the rigors of competition for sunlight, soil, and water had forced the plants, over the millennia, into evolving minuscule adaptations that would advantage them ever so slightly over their neighbors. This is why three or four variations of
Dicranum
could simultaneously exist on one boulder: they had each found their own niche in this contained, compressed environment, and were now defending their individual territory with slight adaptations. These adaptations did not have to be extraordinary (the mosses did not need to grow flowers, or fruit, or wings); they simply needed to be different
enough
to
outcompete rivals—and no rival in the world was more threatening than the rival who was brushing right up against you. The most urgent war is always the one fought at home.

Alma reported in exhaustive detail battles whose victories and defeats were measured in inches, and over decades. She recounted how climate alterations over those decades had given advantages to one variety over another, how birds had transformed the destiny of the mosses, and how—when the old oak beside the pasture fence fell and the pattern of shade shifted overnight—the whole universe of the rock field changed with it.

She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”

She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”

She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”

She wrote, “The victor shall win—but only until he no longer wins.”

She wrote, “This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”

She wrote, “Ongoing battle between and among species is inescapable, as is loss, as is biological modification. Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”

She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”

Sometimes she had to cross out entire pages of work, when she looked up from her writing only to realize that hours had passed, and she had not
stopped scribbling for a moment, but was no longer exactly discussing mosses.

Then she would go for a brisk circumambulation of the ship’s deck—whatever ship it happened to be—with Roger the dog trailing behind her. Her hands would be trembling and her heart racing with emotion. She would clear her head and her lungs, and reconsider her position. Afterward, she would return to her berth, sit down with a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing all over again.

She repeated this exercise hundreds of times, for close to fourteen months.

B
y the time Alma arrived in Rotterdam, her thesis was nearly complete. She did not consider it entirely
complete, for something about it was still missing. The creature in the corner of the dream was still gazing at her, unsatisfied and unsettled. This sense of incompletion chewed at her, and she resolved to keep at the idea until she had conquered it. That said, she did feel that most of her theory was irrefutably accurate. If she was correct in her thinking, then she was holding in her hand a rather revolutionary forty-page scientific document. And if, instead, she was incorrect in her thinking? Well, then she had—at the very least—written the most detailed description of life and death in a Philadelphia moss colony that the scientific world would ever see.

In Rotterdam, she rested for a few days at the only hotel she could find that would accept Roger’s presence. She and Roger had walked the city for much of an afternoon, in an all but futile search for lodging. Along the way, she’d become increasingly irritated by the bilious looks that hotel clerks kept throwing their way. She could not help but think that if Roger were a more handsome dog, or a more charming dog, she would not have encountered so much trouble finding a room. This struck Alma as terribly unjust, for she had come to regard the little orange mongrel as noble in his own fashion. Had he not just crossed the world? How many supercilious hotel clerks could say the same? But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.