When the map was analyzed in 1972, the questions focused on the ink. The parchment itself was judged genuine, but that alone isn’t significant. If old enough parchment is on your shopping list and you find it, you’ve hit gold. The ink’s the thing. Was the black too shiny, too faded? What about the yellow outline around the letters? Some analysts thought the bled, faded ink proved the map was a forgery, a feature a clever craftsman could duplicate. The presence of a form of titanium dioxide found in the yellow outlines, a form of anatase not commercially available until the 1920s, seriously damaged claims of the map’s authenticity. Also, doubters said, the outline of Greenland was uncharacteristically accurate, and some of the Latin inscriptions were ungrammatical, though it was possible the cartographer’s knowledge of Latin was imperfect. Not everyone was a scholar, people make mistakes, and AutoCorrect was not available.
In 1984 the map underwent a second analysis for proton-induced X-ray fragment analysis. Using this noninvasive technique, which was able to cover a larger part of the map, the results showed five thousand times less titanium dioxide than the previous report. If titanium dioxide was only present in these trace amounts, then it would have no effect on the color of the ink, the clue about the origins of the Vinlandia map that seemed most damning. The ink, initially dismissed as modern, could well have been medieval. The California report was about chemistry only. It couldn’t give a confirmed stamp of authenticity, so the map remains in limbo, waiting for more cartographic and historical evidence to support or deny its claims. When molecules don’t provide definitive answers, the map researchers question the map as a totality. The debate around the Vinlandia map shifted from chemistry and began to refer to things like matching wormholes—genuine or faked with a charred red-hot hatpin—and employed words like paleography, the study of ancient or historical handwriting, and codicology, the study of books as physical objects.
The map may be destined to waver between the twin poles of it’s-the-real-deal and complete hoax, and the true story seems impossible to ever know with certainty. Thomas Cahill, a physicist at UC Davis, has said there are more ways to prove if something is a fraud than if it’s genuine, but the map is owned by Yale University, which has a stake in its authenticity. The document is valued at $20,000,000. A tiny sliver sent to a lab was said to be worth $40,000, making evidence of fifteenth-century fingerprints valued at more than many twenty-first-century citizens earn in a year. The original mapmakers, whether medieval or just post–World War II, when they assembled their materials, might have found these numbers unimaginable, but in the case of Vinlandia, if the map is authentic, it tells when we knew what we knew: when somebody launched Kon Tiki–like into what must have appeared an endless and unpredictable sea toward lands unknown.
Story of the Slums
Can Xue
—Translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
I climbed this simply constructed blockhouse: As far as the eye could see, the rows of thatched slum houses were quietly bending their heads in the mist. I knew their humility was feigned. All these houses harbored sinister intentions. But I had to live in them. I was a son of this mystical land. Sure, it was gloomy here, but I was used to it. I had grown up here. Now in the midst of dreariness, I meditated constantly. I couldn’t get a good look at the inside of the thatched huts. They were too dark inside. Their design had totally ignored the way eyes function. Sometimes when I moved into a house, I thought only two people lived there. Later, I found out there were twelve! I cowered in a corner of the stove: The fire came close to lapping at my skin and fur. They never stopped cooking because they had twelve stomachs to feed. With only one room, they slept anywhere. Two of them even slept under the bed. At midnight, I couldn’t locate any of them. They had disappeared from the house. I stood on the stove and ran my eyes over the empty home. I wondered why I couldn’t keep up with these people’s trains of thought. Once, I had moved into a house where I thought the family was small and simple. I was happy because I’d be able to get a good night’s sleep. But at midnight, an earthquake almost jolted me from the stove to the floor! By grabbing the iron hook from which bacon hung on the wall, I managed—just barely—to keep my footing. I looked back: Seven or eight people were break-dancing wildly. They seemed drunk. They were being flung from one wall to another. They resembled each other, so they must be from this family. Then where were they in the daytime? Some rooms were actually deserted; they just pretended to be inhabited—a garbage can and a broom at the entrance, and the door closed but not locked. I pushed against the door, entered, jumped up to the stove, and slept in that corner. I awakened at midnight and still saw no one. I jumped down and looked for something to eat, but found nothing. The house smelled of mold. Evidently, it had been unoccupied for ages. I slunk around in the darkness, a little fearful. Just then, I heard a sigh. The sound came from the ceiling. The woman who had sighed didn’t seem in pain. Probably she was simply tired. But the sound was incessant. I couldn’t stand it. My chest was about to explode, and so I dashed out and wandered around all night in the cold. Sure, most of the time I blended into the landlords’ lives. I hated them, because they always closed in on me, and yet, and yet, I was curious about their lives—those lives that I usually found incomprehensible. In the end, my relations with them deteriorated each time, and I left in search of another home to live in. It upset me to think of this. When was this blockhouse built? My impression was that although conspiracies riddled the slums, no major disturbance had occurred. So what was the point of building this blockhouse? To resist outside enemies? City people surely wouldn’t come to these lowlands. People here and in the city simply had nothing to do with each other. I couldn’t imagine where any enemies would come from.
It was getting dark. I ran down from the blockhouse that had gradually turned ice-cold. Another one of my species was running in front of me. He had a somewhat longer body than mine, and a bigger skull too. A spot of white hair was growing on his left hind leg, somewhat resembling the two house mice that I knew so well. But he wasn’t a house mouse! He ran to the small pond over there and jumped down. My God! I certainly wouldn’t jump into the icy water! At first, he was still visible. He swam and swam and then disappeared. Clearly, he had dived deep into the water. I stared blankly for a while at the edge of the pond. I thought of what had happened early this morning: The woman of the house had thrown me out. She disliked my dirtying the stove in her home. That wasn’t true, though. I ate and slept on the stove every day and so I couldn’t avoid leaving a little trace of my presence, could I? But she couldn’t put up with it! She was a cleanliness freak. When she had nothing to do, she swept and dusted. This made absolutely no sense. I had never known anyone else in the slums who did that. Such a simple, crude house. Even if it was spotless, it looked no different from any of the other houses here. But this woman (I knew others called her “Auntie Shrimp”) never gave me a break. If I came in with a little dirt on my feet, she brandished a broom and swore at me for a long time. At mealtime, she wouldn’t tolerate it if I dropped a single grain of rice or a slice of vegetable onto the stove. She scrubbed my fur viciously with a brush every day, not stopping until I screamed. As for her, she spent a lot of time taking baths in the wooden basin. Whenever she had time, she heated water and bathed and washed her hair, as if she wanted to scrub away a layer of skin. Auntie Shrimp loved to talk at midnight. Maybe she was talking in her sleep. She always called me “the little mouse.” She tossed and turned in that wide bed and talked incessantly: “The little mouse doesn’t care about hygiene. This is dangerous. There’s pestilence all around this area. If you don’t want to get sick, you have to be strict abou
t hygiene. My parents told me this secret. The year they left for the north and left me behind, they urged me to clean up every day. I was a sensible girl … ” Early one morning, she stood upright in bed and shouted, “Mouse, did you take a bath today? Something smells rotten!” She got out of bed and scrubbed me with the brush. It hurt so much that I screamed. I had always slept on the stove, but one day all of a sudden that displeased her. She said I had turned the stove into something that wasn’t like a stove. She said if this continued, she and I would both come down with the plague. With this, she threw out the jar that I slept in. Brokenhearted, I was going to jump down from the stove, and then I glimpsed the murderous intent on her face. Oh—was she going to kill me? Her face was flushed; she held a kitchen knife in her hand. I thought that the moment I jumped down from the stove, she would chop me into pieces. And so I hesitated and retreated to a corner of the stove, making room for her to clean it. But she didn’t clean. She kept saying, “Aren’t you coming down? You aren’t coming down?” As she spoke, she brandished the knife and pressed the back of the knife against me. I had to risk my life and jump down. She twirled the knife and chopped. Luckily, I dodged out of the way in time, and she chopped the muddy floor. The door wasn’t closed, so I rushed out. Behind me, she shouted abuse, saying that if she saw any trace of me, she would kill me. How had my relationship with her evolved to this point? At first, when I drifted to her home, she had been such a genial woman! She not only fed me well, she also arranged for me to sleep in a jar, saying this would keep the flames from lapping at my fur. But before long I experienced her mysophobia. At the time, I didn’t think it was a serious problem. One day, she suggested cutting off my claws (because they were filthy). That’s when I started being on guard. What kind of woman was she? I started avoiding her. Luckily, it was all talk and no action. And so I kept my claws.
She cleaned the house so thoroughly that it created endless trouble for her. For example, she had to brush the soles of her shoes each time she entered the house. She covered the windows and doors with heavy cloth. The inside of the house became as dark as a basement. She used much more water than other people did to clean vegetables, wash dishes, and take baths. She was forever going to the well to fetch water. She was always busy. I didn’t know how she made a living. Perhaps her parents had left her some money. She wasn’t much interested in men. She merely stood in the doorway, idiotically watching a certain man’s silhouette, but she never brought a man home. She was probably afraid outsiders would make her house dirty. But then how had she taken a liking to me in the first place, and even let me in? I was even dirtier than those men, wasn’t I? And I rarely bathed with water. When I first arrived, she combed my fur with an old comb. After combing my messy fur, she threw the comb into the garbage. With some satisfaction, she pronounced me “very clean.” Now, remembering this, I thought she was sort of deceiving herself. But she persisted in thinking that she could do anything. She was a conceited woman. From that day on, she brushed me every day. It hurt a lot. But at least I was much cleaner than before. I used to get along well with her, even though I despised her constant cleaning. Still, as long as I stayed inside the jar on top of the stove, there was no big problem.Who could have guessed that her mysophobia would worsen?
One day, she actually found a metal brush to brush my fur. I was bruised all over from her brushing, and I let out a scream the way pigs do when being butchered.When she let go, I ran off and cowered under the eaves of another home. I was still bleeding from my back. After the sun set, I couldn’t stand the cold, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to endure the night and would die outside. A young girl with a pointed face noticed me. She squatted and looked me over under the dim streetlight. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, she was also shivering from the cold. “King Rat,” she said, “you mustn’t stay here. If you do, you’ll die, because it’ll freeze tonight. Are you imitating those children? They’ve been doing this for years. As soon as they learned to walk, they went outside to sleep. That’s the way they’ve lived for a long time. Go on home, King Rat. If you don’t, you’ll die.” And so I walked back slowly. Finally I was limping almost every time I took a step. I was cold and in pain, almost losing consciousness. When I got home, it was probably close to midnight. The light was still on, though Auntie Shrimp was in bed snoring. I climbed on top of the pile of firewood next to the stove and squatted down to rest. Then, probably because of my loud groans, Auntie Shrimp woke up. She got out of bed and looked at me by the light of the kerosene lamp. Before long, she set the lamp down, turned, took a bottle of balm out of the cupboard, and gently smeared it on my wounds. “Mouse, why didn’t you tell me I was hurting you when I combed your fur?” she rebuked me. This confused me greatly. What was illusion? What was reality? Did I know this woman at all? Anyhow, the balm helped. I could finally breathe, and then I fell asleep on the woodpile.
The very next morning, the incident that I described above happened. Even now, I have no idea what Auntie Shrimp’s real idea was. Yet when I ran out of Auntie Shrimp’s home, I realized that it was indeed filthy outside! These were the slums, after all—what could you expect? I seemed to be stepping on human waste with each step I took. The side of the street was filled with human waste, dog shit, and puddles of urine, heaps of decomposed vegetable leaves, the guts of animals, and so forth. Swarms of mosquitoes and flies were fluttering around and entering your nostrils. I couldn’t put up with it anymore, and I climbed that blockhouse. I sat on top of the blockhouse for a long time without recovering my equilibrium. I didn’t understand: How had the outside environment worsened so much in the few months that I had lived in Auntie Shrimp’s home? People said that the slums had never been clean, but I had been almost oblivious to that. Now the filth had completely polluted the air—so much that I wanted to throw up. Even though I was on top of the blockhouse, I still felt that everything below was a huge garbage dump. The stench rode the wind. The people on the street looked down at their feet, covered their noses, and hurried on. I seldom went out during the few months that I stayed with Auntie Shrimp. And even when I did, I went no farther than the neighbors’ eaves. Otherwise, Auntie Shrimp would have constantly told me to wash my feet and she would have scolded me mercilessly. And so, was it simply by comparison that I finally realized how filthy the slums were? Had Auntie Shrimp been training my senses over the last few months? Maybe I had never before noticed that passersby covered their noses as they walked past. Maybe the sides of the streets in the slums had always been heaped with dirt, and I had simply never noticed. Thinking back on the last few months of Auntie Shrimp’s slave-like life, putting myself in her shoes, and then thinking about myself, I couldn’t help but shudder. However, I still had to thank Auntie Shrimp—for in the past, I was covered with pus-filled pimples, I was toxic from head to foot, and I ate filthy food. But after spending a few months in her home, I had no pus-filled pimples and I understood the importance of hygiene. People of the slums were too apathetic. How could they have become so lazy that they let the doorways become dumps for waste and dirt? Not only was filth overflowing into the air here, but it also seeped underground. The asphalt roads and the cobblestone sidewalks were stained by a thick layer of something black and greasy. Even the mud was dirty, filled with ash and oil. Why hadn’t I ever noticed this before? This blockhouse, though, was clean, as if no one had ever come up here and heaven’s wind and rain had cleaned it naturally. This granite structure must be very old. Plumbing the depths of my memory, I found no trace of it. Was it because no one had ever come here that it was so clean? Why hadn’t others come up here?
I stood at the si
de of the pond, thinking of all kinds of things. I would soon freeze to death. My top priority was to save my life by finding a home to move into. I noticed a house with a door that wasn’t shut tight and thought I’d go in and deal with any consequences later. “Who’s there?” An old voice spoke in the dark. I curled up quietly against the foot of the wall, afraid the man would see me, but he got up unexpectedly, shone a kerosene lamp on me, and said, “Ah, it’s a snake.” How the hell had I changed into a snake? He poked me with a club and I took the opportunity to roll into the house. How bizarre this was: A heat wave rolled through the house, and I immediately warmed up. The stove wasn’t on, so where had the hot air come from? I saw that familiar mouse stick his head out of the hole. Three scrawny roosters stood under the bed. The man of the house was short and little. His head was wrapped in a white towel, so I couldn’t see him very well. He drove the roosters out with the club, and they jumped up. One flew to the windowsill, scattering the smell of feathers all over. When the little red-tailed rooster passed by me, I was actually scalded! Its body was as hot as red-hot coals! Just then, the man squatted and looked me up and down. His face was triangular, and his cruel eyes were hidden under bushy eyebrows. He swept my legs with the club, and I jumped away. “This snake is really odd …,” he muttered. He still considered me a snake. Was this because I didn’t emit heat? What were these roosters all about?
He suddenly gave a weird laugh and said, “Auntie Shrimp …” The sound seemed to come from a tomb. I looked around: Sure enough, Auntie Shrimp’s face appeared at the door. She was laughing in embarrassment, but she didn’t enter. He waved his hand, and I still thought he was going to hit me, but his hand merely slipped past once and a heat wave dashed against my face. I blinked: Auntie Shrimp had disappeared. The little rooster jumped from the windowsill to his shoulder. The man stood up and, dragging the club, circled once around the room. The two roosters on the floor dashed past me, scalding my nose. A blister immediately appeared there. What the hell? This old man apparently wanted to find these two roosters, but the roosters ran right past him and he didn’t even see them. He just hit the air with his club. The little guy on his shoulder gurgled, keeping time with his swaying. Its claws cut into his clothes. I scurried under the bed because I was afraid he would hit me. I had barely squeezed under it when something struck me in the head. I almost fainted from the pain. When I pulled myself together, I noticed a lot of little animals that were similar to me. They formed a circle around me. Their thermal radiation almost prevented me from opening my eyes. Were they my kin? How had they become so heat resistant? In my hometown in the past, our pasture was icebound most of the year. We hid in dugouts. We never knew what “high temperatures” meant. What was going on now? They turned into balls of fire, and yet they could endure this! Were they surrounding me in order to destroy my physical being? If so, why weren’t they taking action? At the door, Auntie Shrimp was saying to the man, “Have you destroyed that virus? Where did he go? He goes all over the place and might spread disease!” She actually said I was a virus! The old man answered, “Don’t worry. This place is for high-temperature disinfecting. We’ll take care of his problem.” “Then please do that.” Auntie Shrimp seemed to really be leaving.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 14