The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  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 rot
e 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.

  “Damn cops,” his father said, with a grunt that would have been a laugh if he had been with someone else.

  Alex saw it then, the cruiser at the head of the file. It turned off at one of the concession roads, and one by one the other cars sped away.

  The incident had put his father in a good mood.

  “That’s how people are,” he said. “They’re good until nobody’s looking.”

  He could hardly remember another time when his father had done that, when he had shared anything like a worldview with him outside the context of a bitter argument. Afterward that line of cars had become a sort of koan for him of the strange ambivalence that surrounded anything associated with his father. What had he meant, exactly? Had this been just another of his knee-jerk attacks against the welfare state or some protective truth he was passing on like a talisman? If a truth, didn’t it fly against every supper-table argument Alex had made that the human animal was perfectible, that it deserved things like unemployment insurance and special rental units that were set aside for welfare moms? The real battle, of course, was the one within: his own private suspicion, amounting sometimes to a dastardly hope, that his father was right, that humans were rotten to the core, that the only thing keeping the farmers on those concession roads from slitting their neighbors’ throats and stealing their combines, keeping the mucky-mucks in town from raping the farmers’ wives and then stringing them up till their legs twitched, was the fear of being punished for it.

  Of course, it was possible that his father had only been making a joke.

  Note to oneself: Molly Bloom’s orgasm as the Big Bang. He had never actually got that far in the book, but he’d heard of the scene so often he felt like he’d fucked her himself.

  He was drifting. It had been some time since he had actually been attending to what he was reading: they were with Little Gavroche, haunting the wineshops and eating dandelions in the street, though when Alex pictured him he saw Per. It was that Norman blood. There would still be time, he thought, they could still fly their kites on the coast as he had years before with Lars and Eva. It kept coming back to him, that day, the smell of the air, the not-quite-describable thingness of things, the gray cliffs, not gray, the not-green grass, the unbearable un-blue of the sea. What was the point of these longings, these hearkenings back? They seemed to want to be the very thing they recalled, and show that they couldn’t be, and be the thing in between. To make you long, and long for longing. To say there was a chance, and a chance, and a chance, yet all was lost.

  Such a funny thing, Ingrid had said. The whole of it, she’d meant, every beat of a wing, every breath.

  Out in the sound you could make out the island of Ven. Tycho Brahe had sat there, jotting his numbers down, but though they had stared at him, speaking their truth, they had not shaken his faith. Earth at the center; sun to the side. Little circles and circles within circles to explain the anomalies. That had been the Ptolemaic World, all this figuring and working out just to buttress people’s pigheaded assumptions, as if knowledge was always merely the handmaiden to belief. Who knew what circles they were drawing now, to explain away what they had misunderstood. It was all darkness and ignorance, Alex figured, more profound than the human mind could fathom. If God was the thing that passed understanding then there was still God enough in the world, for surely every truth, every fact, every faith, that was now held sacrosanct would one day prove the merest superstition.

  Note: The end point of evolution, if there was one, would be the perfect creature: contradictory impulses resolved, no thoughts, no needs, no rage; able to see through rocks; to survive without eating; to change things by force of will. To live forever. It would be exactly what it had displaced. It would be God.

  Ninety-six point seven: going up. Menswear. Lingerie. Home furnishings.

  It was not much more than a year, he thought, since he’d met her. Walking then, on her cane; chatting about Chernobyl. Isn’t it awful?

  In The Gazette that day there had been an article, small and buried in the back pages but there, about the worldwide ban on CFCs. From the most unlikely places came hope. María had backed the right horse. Now that she was home, he expected to hear any day that she’d ended the war.

  This was what would happen: he would go off to Sweden like Wallace to the Rio Negro, it would be cold, he and Ingrid would argue, Per would dislike him in some covert, lingering way. He would teach English as a second language, part-time, for peanuts; he would work for the university marking exams. He would never finish his dissertation. Or he would finish it and it would be ignored, or scooped, or, worse, turn out to have been unconsciously plagiarized and have to be shredded. Meanwhile he would be stuck with his no-name degree from his no-name university. He would give up and come home. He would teach English as a second language, part-time, for peanuts.

  This was the likely scenario. And yet, and yet. There it was in his breast, he could feel it battering away at his ribcage like a trapped bird, hope.

  He had stopped reading. It was miracle enough, maybe, the thingness of things, their funniness. That there were clouds, that there was air, that stones formed from the sand and then turned to sand again, on and on. What were these things, where had they come from, what could they mean? How could they fill the mind and yet be so small? There might be gods beyond them, and gods of gods, and, beyond these, things unimaginable, that the human mind could not name or give shape to and yet it could think they were there, it could marvel at the immensity of its own ignorance. Somehow through the chance of events, the slow building of things with No Plan, the mind had become fitted for such thoughts, for such moments of wonderment.

  A shred of memory came to him, or perhaps something he’d dreamed, beckoning there at his mind’s mid-horizon. He was in a northern country, walking or cycling, it wasn’t clear which, and it was raining or had rained or the sun was out, and he was traveling, he was on a journey. He had been here before. For a moment the place took on such a vividness he thought he could hold it whole, could possess it: there were farms, clapboard houses, the outskirts of a town, a view across woods to a lake. The smells of things, the clarity of them, even while they slipped from him and refused to take on their meaning. It was like living a thing and losing it in the same instant. Where were those houses, that lake? He had been here. It was like a place in the mind he returned to to find its meaning, only to find that the meaning of it was simply that it was there.

  He took Esther’s hand again, and knew he was about to go. If he were to tell the story of this moment, all the important things would be missing—the slightly clammy feel of Esther’s skin, the pilled thinness of her sheets, the scuffed floor. The feeling like sadness in him, not sadness, and then that part of him that was already elsewhere, that had finished with this.

  Alex heard footsteps in the hall. Likely one of the other nurses on her way to send him packing. The footsteps had the hollowness to them of nighttime desertion. Things would end, and they would end, and they would end, they seemed to say, and still go on.

  “Good-bye, Esther. Good-bye.”

  She hadn’t turned.

  Outside, he knew, the city still lay stretched, just an instant’s remove from the wildness it had been once, and would return to; the planet was still hurtling through space at untenable speeds. He kissed Esther’s hand, then slipped quietly through the door and into his life.

  acknowledgments

  For their help with my research and with this manuscript I am deeply grateful to the following: Marvin Luxenberg; Rafy Winterfeld; Benjamin Cornejo; Nubia Diaz de Cornejo; Francisco Rico Martínez; Rivka Augenfeld; Colin MacAdam
; John Montesano; Oscar Rangel Manjarrés; Ana Escobar; José Escobar; Myron McShane; the Centre for Refugee Studies, York University; Marshall Beck; Lisa Kowalchuk; Tanya Basok; André Jacob; Eusebio García; Roxana Valencia; Alfonso Valles; Salvador Torres; Iliana Hernández; Nancy Giacomini; Nicola Martino; Don Melady; Alex Schultz; Lorena Leija; Stephen Henighan; Daniel Poliquin; Paul-Antoine Taillefer; and Paul Quarrington. I owe a special debt to my wife, Erika de Vasconcelos; to my agent, Anne McDermid; and to my editor, Martha Kanya-Forstner.

  In the course of my research I consulted many sources, foremost among them the works of Darwin himself. Apart from those, I will mention only Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore; The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright; and The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross On Darwin’s Islands, by Paul Quarrington. And, of course, Wikipedia.

  For their material support I am grateful to the University of Windsor Department of English; Assumption University, Windsor; the Canada Council Writer-in-Residence Program; Mitch Kowalski and the Toronto Writers’ Centre; John Carroll University, Cleveland; Steven Hayward and Katherine Carlstrom; Jimmy, Eddie, and Frances; and Barbara and Dr. John Schubert and the Schubert Foundation.