Dedication
for the boys
Epigraph
Go thou to Rome, —at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Wilderness (2015)
The City (1559)
The Grave (896–897)
The Paradise (165)
The Wilderness (2015)
The City (1559)
The Grave (896–897)
The Paradise (165)
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Katy Simpson Smith
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Wilderness
[ 2015 ]
In a corner of a rented flat on one of the minor hills of Rome drooped a pair of empty hip waders. Not empty. The mud caked on their soles held microorganisms in suspension.
Tom broke off a piece of valley dirt to hold up to his screen.
“I don’t see anything,” his daughter said across nine time zones.
“Make a spyhole with your fingers.”
Daphne curled her thumb and index finger into a whorl and peered through the pin-sized gap. “Yes,” she said. “Whales.”
He left her to rescue the whistling kettle off the stove. When he’d moved in a month ago, she made him give a laptop tour of the apartment; he carried her image like a baby in his hands through the half-sized kitchen, the red tile room with low sofa and lower bed, the expanse of the terrace, where she tried to scare the gulls with her caw. As he poured the coffee, they shouted details of their day. She saw him stumble on the way back, but he turned it into a Gene Kelly tap step, and she made a face like, Parents. After he’d gone a week without remembering to call, she’d stopped asking when she could visit. Her father had limits. On her side of the internet, she held up a macaroni portrait of her crush.
“He still wears Velcro shoes and doesn’t know any jokes.” She pointed to the bow tie she’d glued on him, a farfalla painted black.
“But you said he’s funny?”
Daphne tilted her head, her dreamy open bucktoothed mouth, right out of the frame. Tom pushed his computer to the left, as if he could somehow catch her in California.
“His face is funny.” Her head came back, one finger tenderly in her nose. “It’s like you and your bugs. I just want to look at him all the time. Is that how you know if—you know—if you like someone?”
“What does your mom say?”
“Not to be melomadratic.”
Meloma dratic. The Latin name of an undiscovered bee.
The ostracods at the heart of his work were a kind of crustacean: as impertinent as his daughter, as pervasive, as fine. A research semester here, where the rubble was playground to man and shrimp alike, was a luxury. Pounding the door to his study, Daphne used to accuse him, in toddler terms, of misdirected love. (His wife had already laid down her arms.) But there on the slide was a mirror of the domestic. Gaiety and chaos and yes, cannibalism. He’d put his headphones on to dull the sound of tiny fists. Independence couldn’t be learned too early.
Now out the open window a parakeet zipped by Venus.
“Do you think I’d look better with a bob?”
On the webcam, his daughter had grabbed her unruly hair into a bunch behind her neck and was examining herself in the corner of the screen. Lord help them, she was nine. When did a human first consider her own beauty? [When another human first denied it. Cf. Adam re: Eve. I, the snake, was the soother. Ask your questions; I, Satan, am the answerer.]
“You’re already perfect,” he said.
“Dad.” She collapsed on the breakfast table in a pile of pixels. “You don’t know anything.”
Though his feet were still warm in the stream, a cold ring circled his ankles where the water met the air. The breeze scuffed along the surface, lifting the duckweed like shallow breaths. Tucked in their roots were several hundred ostracods, no bigger than mustard seeds, their innards hidden in shells that resembled two hands in prayer. To them, Tom’s toes were monstrous fish, fat and half-drowned tubers. The water crowded with microscopic action, with bloomings and sex and feasts. What carnivorous frenzy was happening at the level of his soles, as aquatic protozoa met the rich and writhing landscape of his epidermis.
The only other humans in the Caffarella Valley were two old walkers passing each other on their circuits and a gang of Eritrean teenagers smoking in the bushes by the mill house, their laughs like woodlark song. In Tom’s back pocket was the permit that allowed him to hop the nymphaeum’s fence; it said nothing about bare feet. Sunsets often found him reconsidering his place in the ecosystem, but these were the mild crises of anyone who made a living triangulating data. Whatever form his ostracods took was designed by cycles of food and lack of food, cooling air and warming waters, fish with bigger bellies and men with tired feet. No matter how he measured, they would continue morphing, at glacial pace, long past the point when the last person who could interpret his scribbling had turned to dust. He put down his notebook and leaned back on the damp creekside grass, the thin green leaves folding around his bare neck, wrists. Man on photosynthesis on dirt. Under air, under ozone, under galaxy. His thoughts wafting out of his mind in sideways flares, invisible and evaporating. Some factorially larger scientist might peer down and take him for dead.
In the valley, no one spoke. No questions were asked, no answers expected. No one could be let down. Shh, he told his brain. Shh, he said to the figments of the undeveloped future. The invertebrate objects of his devotion couldn’t even be seen. You have to see it to believe it, his daughter liked to say, picked up from a mattress commercial.
They first met at noon. It was a Tuesday, sunny, and he was walking to loosen the hypotheses in his head. Given that ostracods thrive in agitated systems, in environments thick with pollutants, invasive species, human disturbance, are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse? Tom bumped into a teenager with oversized sunglasses. Do they overcome the stain of our presence or is human interference as natural to them as a flood? He leaned over to support his notebook with his thigh, licked his pen. Should we reexamine the “natural”? [Should you pull your miniature gaze from the puddles at your feet and collect data on your damage to women? Oh, pardon, are we not there yet?] A large explosive detonated a hundred feet to Tom’s right; his vertebrae jolted back protectively. His body crumpled without the certainty of its spine.
She was in a crowd of several dozen smiling strangers when she turned from the overlook and, between two children clapping, saw him seated on the cobblestones. Later she told how she circled him, peripherally appraising. She said if she got as far as the truck selling soft drinks and plaster Colosseums and he hadn’t moved, she’d call for help. The scene unfolded for her in quarter time: the long arc of stones, the smoke still hanging in the air, the man’s brow bending from surprise to analysis, his jellied limbs now hardening, embarrassed at their own quick surrender, or was it a sacrifice, a fundamental defense of the core. When she reached the spinning postcard rack, he’d just managed to turn to the right, toward the once-sound. Yes, she thought, investigate the disturbance. His dark hair Italian, his open, dazed face decidedly not.
“Va bene?” she said.
He was aware of a shape appearing, a backlit envoy with some message about his fate. A black dress waving over two brown knees, knees like citrus. The hair around her head as thick as the smoke. She reached out a hand.
“Va bene,” he said, shaking his head, not a little humiliated. “Non lo so,” he said. I don’t know. But the
hand was still there. So he took it.
She bought him a gelato because he had no money on him, and when he had a second to look around him, to take in more than just the smoke and the stones and her citrus knees, he said, “How’d I end up at the goddamn Janiculum?” Because if he had known where he was, the explosion that rattled his brain and sent him sprawling would’ve registered as a familiar daily occurrence: the cannon set off at noon.
The Janiculum girl asked what he did, and he said biology, streams and rivers, that sort of thing, and she said But what exactly? and he said looking for balance, water quality, how things interact, and she said But what things? and he said fairly small organisms and she said Yes? and he said, okay, ostracods. Crustaceans on a millimetric scale, you’d never even know you’d seen one. She said Are they beautiful? and he said they have the largest sperm, proportionally, of any animal, endless frail filaments that are four or six or ten times as long as the creature itself, great silk threads that dominate the rest of its anatomy—whips, just waiting.
Her eyes narrowed.
He didn’t want to strike up an acquaintance; the point of Rome was an indulgent detachment. But his wife hadn’t asked him a question about his work—about his job, yes, his day-to-day, but not his work—in years. They were, apparently, past that.
She said something about architecture school, or was it archaeology, and showed him the slivers of soil beneath her nails from Ostia, or was it Appia, but he was distracted by her patterns: the loops of accented speech, unplaceable, the twists of hair like chrysalises.
After the gelato, they didn’t exchange numbers. She merely extended her hand again, this time to shake, and turned south toward the alley of trees that forked—right to Monteverde, left to Trastevere. She went left. He watched her slip through the disoriented stream of tourists, a fast snake. A last whirl of disco light from the sycamores caught the side of her face in sun.
Something was tilted in his head. He’d been on a walk, and there had been an explosion—not an explosion, a routine firing of a petite nineteenth-century cannon—and a fall, and then a woman and a scoop of stracciatella and a disappearance. An absence. He should find his way home again. He followed, imagining the mark of her footsteps under his, and took the right fork, toward Monteverde, and didn’t consciously think that if she had appeared on the Janiculum once, she might appear again, but determined to direct his walks this way more often, because just look at that spin of light through the trees, just look at how late summer colored the hill.
His desk was under a window, the window opening out onto a terrace from which one could capture the intimacies of a half-dozen neighboring buildings. His eyes settled on the older man on the rooftop across the way. They weren’t close; the stranger was two inches tall. For several days he’d been attending to his roses: he’d duck down, hands buried in a pot or trough, and pull back with some string in his hands, as if he were a mouse-sized tailor with a human-sized needle. But today the man had moved from the pots to the railing around the balcony, the string now obviously wire, the large movements alternating with time spent bent over a joint or a tangle, hands fiddling with something small. Tom returned to his computer, answered emails, followed a research link to a political website to a story about a pop star’s collapse. When he looked up again, the wire had lifted off the rooftop entirely—it stretched out and up until it reached what appeared to be a makeshift satellite tower. The whole contraption was tethered to the man’s terrace, was somehow bound to the very rosebushes that were being so assiduously tended, and Tom could in no way retrace the mechanics of its construction. First there were strings, the strings became wires, and now a tower had sprouted—almost floated—from the roof. What was once a garden was now an electrical sailing ship.
Sight was selective. One day you saw the woman who had been there all along. One afternoon the roses grew receivers. What changed? [The degree of your self-absorption. Have I told you about the summer when I—] The atmosphere, perhaps: the molecules that capriciously obscured random specks of vision; the photons fritzing as they passed through a pine canopy, or smog; humidity blurring the edges of a face until the brain registered it instead as a cloud. Recently his vision had been tricking him more often; objects in his periphery had a new habit of dancing. He blinked more often, and this seemed to help. He should ask a doctor about it—a cousin of his once had a tumor fattening on his optic nerve, and he claimed to have shrunk it by aiming his closed eyes directly at the sun for an hour a day—but who wanted to go to the doctor.
He went to sleep consciously thinking of anything but her; that consciousness kept him up. He calculated the likelihood of encountering her in the street (if a tourist crosses the Tiber twice every three days, and there are fifteen bridges between Prati and Testaccio . . . ); he corrected himself and made a grocery list instead. The minutes crawled. He estimated the rate of decaying love (if neurogenesis speeds the degradation of memory, and he forced a dozen new experiences in the next twelve days—went parasailing, e.g., or learned how to cook octopus . . . ); no—finish the NSF grant, order more tanks.
He’d found a postcard with a baby cherub puffing along through celestial blue, a cloud emerging from its rear end. “A putto pooting,” he wrote his daughter.
The semester-long fellowship at the Università di Roma to study the effects of chemical pollution on aquatic crustacean populations had been a long shot. His wife had asked him not to apply; he’d said he wouldn’t get it. They were in that uncomfortable limbo of loving while not-loving, which surely must happen to all happy couples who lived long enough. “Why are you both so polite?” Daphne once asked. The conversation they kept promising to have with each other was easily deferred. But now their daughter, that fierce bundle of nine years who had broken more dishes dancing through their kitchen than she’d ever voluntarily cleaned, was clamming up in school. Her teachers alerted them to a new self-consciousness. She stopped raising her hand; at recess, she restrained herself to the mildest games of four square; she tore her sandwich into bites beneath the lunch table before secreting them up to her mouth. To all the questions—Are there problems at home? Is she being bullied? Spending too much time online?—Tom and his wife said no, with no in fact meaning we don’t know. “Boys,” a friend of theirs had said. “She’s just noticed boys.”
His wife had been the one to ask him out, back when he was charmed by the idea of leaning against someone. She had a habit of swallowing her laughs, near-waist-length hair that she would cut when it began creepily wrapping around their newborn’s limbs, and an inability to see Tom beyond what he chose to reveal, which could in no way be her fault, and yet somehow was. Ten years married, nine years daughtered, one well-timed semester apart. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, she’d said with a smile, which sounded to him ominous. He knew well what she wouldn’t do, but his own capacity seemed like anybody’s guess. The leaning, it occurred to him, was a trap. He inched away.
“Remember, you’re a dinosaur,” he wrote to Daphne. “A falcon, a shark, a hungry lion. You have claws and teeth and a roaring heart.” His worst failing as a father would be if she meekened into him. A moth. A snail.
The marble of the ancient nymphaeum was slick with moss. The wealthy used to picnic on its banks, and before that the water had been deemed sacred, undrinkable except by saints and virgins, and now it was just another pile of rocks in a city tumbled with them. No one passing knew Lord Byron once stood here, put the spring’s “green wild margin” in a poem, rhymed its leaping rill with its summer birds. A caterpillar was lounging in the spot by the water where Tom usually sat. He found a dried leaf and scooped up the puff in a fumble of legs and prolegs. The surface of the pond was waxy and still. A quilt of sound: thrush, cricket, the flip of fish, dry lizard rustle, leaf, water, wind, some primal hum of soil, the gnaw-gnaw of soft-mouthed worms, the twist of protozoa.
A pheasant glided over him like a biplane coming in to land, its body swallowed by the glade of giant reeds. Here in the
valley you couldn’t read the past so easily. None of this motion and color existed five hundred years ago, before the oldest of the downy oaks. For continuity you’d have to pull back the soil to the four layers of tuff, the volcanic rock that held the valley and the springs in its palm. That was the substratum that dictated what would grow, what would come, and what would survive. Tom’s ostracods were no more than months old, no less than five hundred million years old, and if people were so impressed by the span of human history caught in a single church in Rome, they should come marvel at his little monsters.
He took a few sample cups out of his backpack and began scooping the water along the pond’s perimeter. He wore white rubber gloves; Romans weren’t above knocking each other over the head with bottles and then tossing the shards in a nearby stream. If the water here was clean enough, there’d be sticklebacks, bug-eyed fish his Italian colleagues called spinarello. He’d heard of an ancient eel that lived in a Swedish well for 155 years. Sometimes he’d be tricked by a glowing white chicken bone some snacker had tossed, and once he found a plastic pony, magenta-maned, tangled in the Equisetum, common name horsetail.
One of his professors mentioned in a letter of reference that Tom tended to linger in the field. “I thought they should know what they were getting,” he said. “I didn’t make you sound distracted. Dedicated, more like. But in a peculiar kind of way.”
“You used the word poetic.”
He hadn’t gotten that job.
But now he had been awarded four months in this verdant valley, a new set of species to learn, Quercus ilex, Salix alba. Corn buntings and serins, groves of butcher’s broom, sloe, wild apple.
Four months needn’t be the end of it. A shortage of aquatic biologists in central Italy worked in Tom’s favor. He could prolong the project, drag out this gap, ease into expatriatism, and as he counted the things he’d have to live without he only got up to Daphne, peanut butter, and a crushing accountability.
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