The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  There was nothing in his theory that accounted for any of this.

  He scanned Esther for signs of movement again. There, a little twitch, though this was followed by such a sudden thrashing about that he thought she had gone into a seizure. His hand went for the call button, but then the movement ceased as abruptly as it had started. He waited again for the heave of her chest. There. And again. It had crossed his mind that it could happen this way, those last throes. Not gently.

  He made a mental list of what he needed to do before leaving. Pay his credit card, get kronor, go through his things. Sort out what to toss into the fire—his matchbook collection? his Amnesty files? his high school memorabilia?—and what to save from it. Rent a van. Bring things home. Tell his father about his son.

  The shock had been his mother’s reaction: he had made a special trip home and sat with her in the kitchen while Mimi spoon-fed the details to her in little increments.

  “What are you saying? Sandr’, tell me what she’s saying. What does she mean, you have a son?”

  Alex stared at the floor.

  “His name is Per,” he said, as if that would help.

  He waited for her to break into wails.

  “Oh! A son!” Her face had lit up as if she had solved a great riddle. “A son! That’s what you were saying on the phone! Ah-san, ah-san! I couldn’t understand what you meant, this ah-san!”

  He had never seen her so animated.

  “Ah-san! Ah-san! But how long did you know? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think we would chase you away?”

  Her reaction was so far from what he had expected that he could barely gather his wits.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do.”

  She reached out impulsively and pulled him to her in a gesture that was half mock-aggression and half embrace. She had never done such a thing.

  “You idiot! What did you think I would do? I’m your mother!”

  For a moment he and Mimi sat speechless. Mimi, if anything, looked disappointed at how well she had taken the matter.

  “Ma, we have to work this out,” she said. “It’s not some little thing.”

  “What is there to work out? It’s done. He’s not a boy anymore, I can’t tell him what to do. If he has a son, he has to go to him.”

  It made the tears well up in Alex to hear such a bald statement of faith.

  “But what about Dad?” Mimi persisted. “What’s he going to say?”

  “What can he say? He’ll have to accept it.”

  Nonetheless, they had all agreed to put off telling him. Now Alex would have to bring the matter up—and he had to be the one, that much was clear to him—when he was already backing out the door, when there wasn’t time for the usual pattern to play itself out of psychotic anger followed by oppressive silence leading to weeks of depression which gave way to resignation and grudging acceptance. Which could be seen as a good argument in support of the delay.

  Or maybe, who knew, he would sit across from his father at the kitchen table, that awful place where everything had always happened, the fights, the recriminations, the shame, the whole family history across three generations, and he would speak to him for the first time as a sort of equal. He would tell him the truth. His father would have to respect that. He would have to see that the matter joined them as much as it set them apart.

  Eventually, at any rate.

  Blip. Ninety-six point nine.

  Why did the readout keep going down? Alex wasn’t even sure what it showed, exactly, her body heat or the heat of the pad underneath her, and so couldn’t say if the machine was fighting to cool her from a raging fever or she was in some sort of thermal failure and it couldn’t keep up. Why didn’t he know this? He eyed the call button dangling from her wrist again—it was entirely useless to her there by this point, her fingers having long ago severed any sort of formal communication link with her brain—but instead of going for it he leaned in to put a hand to her forehead. Not burning: cool. He felt his own head, then hers again. Normal, maybe, or close to normal. Her skin still had the same soft feel he remembered, for all the months of hospital air. The feel of something alive. That needed touching.

  Her head shifted away from him.

  “What is it?” he whispered, but she was still deep in her sleep.

  He looked at his watch: past midnight. He felt that he had crossed the point where leaving her would have been normal, correct, that he ought to be thinking now about settling in for the night. He wondered if there was some sort of twenty-four-hour depanneur in the place where he could get cigarettes. Not bloody likely. Three days now he had gone without, or most of three days. He had to be ready for when he left.

  The stuff’s going to kill me, I know it, but still I won’t stop. You have to wonder what that’s about. If I don’t actually want it somehow. It’d be such a bloody relief, if you want the truth. No more of this fucking blather, day in and day out.

  (Sotto voce) Uh, I think your mike’s still on, Peter.

  Well, fuck the mike. There, I’ve said it. Just fuck it.

  He could feel sleep coming on now in earnest, though he was usually at his most lucid at this hour. Not enough stimulants: he had had to cut out coffee along with the cigarettes, they were like symbionts in him. Though also maybe the linchpins of his own private ecosystem: by midday now the whole organism had started to fail, his head would be throbbing, his eyelids drooping, he’d find it impossible to hold a thought or remember the simplest things, appointments, where the margarine was, his own name. If this was his life after cigarettes, he might as well swallow the hemlock. Then there was that anguish in him, the sense of looming dark, as if he were losing the one friend who’d been true. It was just his addiction speaking, he knew that, but what if the demon had so threaded its way into his parts, like those viruses that took over their hosts from the inside, that turned them into their own private motor homes, that he couldn’t cut it away without destroying his very self?

  A sad man he was, very sad, if sucking on a cigarette was the sole pleasure he’d managed to wrest from life. He might as well have been a slug, a barnacle, a stone.

  At least the barnacles had been of use.

  Blip. Ninety-six point six.

  Old Charlie Darwin, slicing away at his barnacles in the quiet of his study, finding the little penis-ones nestled in the folds of their brides. The Ideal Husband. Was he happy there, did it please him to putter alone among his specimens? He had rigged that mirror outside his window to keep watch for visitors, so he could take a powder. Not much of one for human intercourse. Better the barnacles.

  The spat with Butler: he had to give it a closer look. There was something truly rotten there, he could smell it. The matter had cast a pall over Darwin’s last years: he had sought advice from every intimate, drafted a dozen letters he had never sent, pondered every course of action, then in the end had done nothing. It was beneath him, his counselors said; Butler was a nut. And yet there’d been cause enough, from what Alex could tell. He couldn’t remember all the details—a dispute about dates was what it was, over a piece a German acolyte had written on Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus but then revised when it appeared in English in the light of Butler’s own new book on Erasmus. The problems arose when Darwin wrote a preface for the piece that implied it was being reprinted unchanged, though he himself had sent Butler’s book to the German. It would have been easy to dismiss all these convolutions as just the usual sort of academic hairsplitting, except that the effect of the German’s revisions, for anyone who didn’t know they’d been done after Butler’s book, was to make Butler look at best a little foolish and at worst a plagiarist, since the revisions had carefully pilloried Butler’s arguments without however once making actual reference to him. Even this might not have looked so bad on Darwin if Butler’s book hadn’t been a sort of coming out against his old mentor, pushing Erasmus’s theories over Darwin’s.

  Such had been the moral contests of the putative founder of the po
st-theistic world. Darwin had written Butler claiming he’d known nothing of the revisions, though in the absence of any sort of public amends Butler grew increasingly rabid and embittered, firing off letter after furious letter to the Athenaeum, so that Darwin went to the grave with the shadow of the dispute still hanging over him. What was it in Alex that took comfort from this sort of pettiness and intrigue, from the thought that behind even the greatest of minds lay a wounded ego? In one of his letters Butler had made cutting reference to the “happy simplicity” at which Darwin had been declared a master by the newspapers of the day: all his life he had played the handwringer, the invalid, the innocent, and had got what he’d wanted. The rich wife, a good breeder to boot; the country retreat; the respect of his peers. In every regard, the English gentleman. In Downe he had been appointed the local magistrate, doing his dining room over in Queen Anne, more stately than the Victorian clutter of the rest of the house, and holding court there from his throne, pronouncing yea or nay on stolen chickens and disturbing the peace. Then, at his death, whisked off to Westminster. A little plot in the village churchyard was all he’d asked for, though within hours of his death the movement was already afoot for a proper state funeral.

  Alfred Russel Wallace—could this be right?—had been one of the pallbearers. That “Russel” had always stuck with Alex, limping along there with its missing l like a little cripple. If Darwin’s was the sort of fate Alex aspired to, Wallace’s seemed the one to which he was doomed: the poor cousin. Whenever he came across references to Wallace in the literature he always wanted to avert his eyes, though in this way, of course, through the back doors, Wallace had taken up an increasingly stubborn tenancy in Alex’s brain. Alex didn’t like to go there much, to the Alfred Russel Wallace room, but there it was, with all its pathetic little collections and memorabilia and drafts of letters seeking preferments that never came.

  They had had two versions of the same life, Wallace and Darwin, good homes, professional fathers, decent pedigrees, though it seemed there had been air enough in the world for only one of them. Darwin’s father had prospered where Wallace’s had failed; and so the die had been cast. At thirteen, Wallace was pulled out of school and apprenticed as a draftsman; Darwin, meanwhile, flunked out of medical school but then spent several years swanning around Cambridge, gambling and riding horses and collecting bugs and meeting the old boys who ran the Establishment. Darwin’s father paid his way aboard the Beagle, the trip that made his career: he returned home with cratefuls of specimens, mainly secured by his hired shooter but paving the way for his entry into the upper echelons of the scientific world. It was only in hindsight, once the specimens had been properly classified by real professionals, that the first glint of a bright idea began to flicker in Darwin’s head. He owed a debt in this to his very same shooter, who had carefully labeled a collection of finches from the Galápagos that Darwin himself hadn’t thought worth the bother.

  Wallace, too, had set out for South America. Self-taught and self-financed, he hoped to bankroll his own research on the species question by selling specimens to armchair naturalists back in England. He carried with him a copy of the same Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell that had made almost daily reading for Darwin aboard the Beagle, and whose observations on the shift of continents and the anomalies of the fossil record had first led Darwin to question the accepted notion that the world had been created in its entirety somewhere around 4004 BC. Wallace, however, had a run of bad luck. First he grew ill while traveling up the Amazon and had to cut his trip short. Then when he returned to Pará he learned that his brother, who had been working there, had died of yellow fever. Meanwhile the specimens Wallace had been sending to the coast for two years to be shipped over to England had unaccountably been held up at the docks, so that he had to arrange to bring the whole lot back with him on his own passage. A few weeks out to sea, his ship caught fire and sank, and all his specimens were lost. He survived in a leaky lifeboat until he was picked up by a passing cargo ship, which almost sank in its turn before finally creaking into port some two months later.

  It was like something out of Buster Keaton, this strange shadow dance between the two men, Darwin ambling obliviously past the open manhole, the tottering ladder, the sheet of plate glass, while Wallace, shouting warnings from behind, suffered every pratfall. In England Darwin settled into his comfortable marriage and home to work out his theory at his ease while Wallace was forced almost at once back into the field, this time the Malay Archipelago. It was there that Darwin finally entered the annals of his life, as one of his clients. Wallace sent him the skins of local domestic fowl and such, and Darwin grumbled, half in jest, about the carriage costs. Meanwhile Wallace published a paper on the origin of species that was ignored by virtually everyone except Darwin, who wrote him a cheery letter on the subject and mentioned in passing his own many years of work in the field. “It is really impossible to explain my views in the compass of a letter,” he said coyly, in the way of warning Wallace off his turf. Wallace, after all, was merely a lowly chore boy, while Darwin, by then, was the Great Man of Barnacles.

  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.