Passing through the wooden doors again, he looked back at the lintel. S. Prisca. Yet another martyr in a city of the self-involved.
Most of the ostracods in his lab progressed through nine instars of development between egg and grown, the intermediate larval stages nearly indistinguishable: nine forms of teenage beans, chaosing into each other. The carapace got harder, larger; the antennae and palp and legs lengthened and segmented; by the eighth instar the reproductive organs appeared—the shape of the sperm pump in males being key in distinguishing species. They got tougher, more mobile, and then, finally, sexual. Bless their mutations. Ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny, but how easy it would be to think so, watching the creatures evolve from the primordial ooze of the tiniest egg. In a world of limitless funding, Tom could test each set of chemicals on each instar and then watch the effects play out over multiple generations, but this semester he contented himself with the grown-ups. They knew what they wanted.
Aldo collected the discarded juveniles in a large aquarium he called the romper room. “These are same as those, just not yet,” he said. The boy’s historical philosophy was comforting to Tom: everything was the same as everything—just not yet.
While the larvae were maturing, Tom bombarded the adults with a series of re-created chemical settings based on his understanding of the evolving Caffarella Valley. Through the university, he’d been able to interlibrary-loan articles on lahar deposits, archaeomorphology, viticulture runoff, sheep shit, myths of the Almone River, seventeenth-century watercolors of the crumbling mausoleums. He dove deep into environmental forensics. He wanted to get the sediment right, the levels of leached lime and agricultural nitrogen; he wanted the temperature of the water to reflect the fluctuating climate; if he had historical data on solar flares, he would’ve had Aldo blitz them with proton radiation. But most important was the human touch: the copper and lead from metallurgy, the bone char from goats offered to the gods, the ways they turned the wilderness into yet another layer of human history. Some researchers were experimenting with reverse ecology, peering into the gene sequence of bacteria to deduce the prehistoric environments that shaped them, but they weren’t up to arthropods yet, and humans weren’t a part of the landscapes they were reconstructing. Tom didn’t want to be removed from the equation.
He could hear his old advisor: “If you wanted to write poems, you should never have picked up a microscope.” But Tom didn’t understand how you could avoid them: either the microscope or the poem.
He wrote years on the tanks in masking tape, arbitrary dates pulled from the eras he could get data on: 165 CE, 896 CE, 1559 CE. Aldo had been collecting the requested chemical compounds and storing them in beakers with illegible labels. The boy wanted all the tanks to be historicized at once, but Tom restrained him, tried to explain the value of slowness—the methodical of the scientific method.
“But these bugs are not the old ones,” he said. “They get fat on old poison, but old bugs, maybe not.”
“Point taken, but nothing major and permanent is going to happen, evolutionarily, shy of about a million years.”
Aldo raised his eyebrows and made a quick note in his journal. “I think different about change.”
They’d introduce the first set of chemicals the following day, and Tom would make sure Aldo, who almost certainly had no interest in being a scientist, piped in the first one himself. Though he questioned Tom’s technique, he liked the idea that they and the ostracods were clasped in a waltz, that human history was not an oppressive downward march but that even in our pollution we were circling around all the other things, always. He’d named the biggest ostracod Bruno.
“How can you tell which it is?” Tom asked.
“It must be the one I see the first.”
Tom usually took his afternoon snack outside to escape the basement, but feeling unsteady, he ate his pear while watching Aldo take pictures of himself to send to his girlfriend. He’d had a good weekend, he said—brought Gabriella to meet his mother, with whom he still lived, and she’d eaten two bowls of his mother’s pappardelle, so they were planning for a wedding. Though no, Aldo himself didn’t particularly want to settle down; he liked another girl he’d met in class. Tom shook his head at him. Aldo thought the crypt toilets were hilarious and asked for directions so he could take his little brother.
“Take Gabriella,” Tom said, for a joke. “It’s romantic.”
Aldo wagged a finger at him. “Too romantic. Death is forever. You do not want that a girl thinks of forever.”
He didn’t himself want to think of forever, not when his body was waving great flags about its nearness. His tanks of historically sterile ostracods were only waiting for tomorrow. He remembered the errand he meant to give the boy.
Aldo raised a shoulder with disinterest when he saw the fishhook. His hand was deep in a bag of cheese puffs.
“Piece from old fence,” he said.
“You know Savelli down the hall with the gospels project? Can you run this over and see if he’ll lump it in with his next batch for the mass spectrometer? I need a radiocarbon.”
“But it is metal.”
“Yes,” Tom said, “but forged over a wood fire, etc. It’ll take. One can even test the rust if it’s the right kind.”
The boy reached out for the hook with a new sense of appreciation. “It reads my DNA too?” Dee, enne, ah.
“He mentioned driving down with a kit next week and said he could toss it in. I’ll buy you a sandwich.”
Something in his gut tugged as the boy left the room with the object, flipping it over in his stubby fingers. He’d told Savelli about the hook over a beer—he was one of the few Italian researchers whose English was passable—and the older man, who could smell the first edge of obsession, offered to date it for him. The accelerator mass spectrometer was at the CIRCE Lab at the University of Naples, and though Savelli invited him to come—they could see Herculaneum, make a day of it—Tom was reluctant to lose any scrap of time in Rome. He just wanted to sit still while all the pertinent information was brought to him.
The boy returned with a smear of orange powder across his cheek and went back to his spot at the window, where he could watch the girls’ ankles pass.
He felt a buzz in his left eye. The door of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri was heavier on his way out. He came for a postcard of the church’s marble meridian to send Daphne, another Important Sight to show time rolled on and the living were still fine. Something trembled in his shoulder.
A man without teeth stooped at the church’s entrance, his hand held out with a cup, and Tom turned his head—Non ho i soldi—and though it was true he didn’t have money, just a bus ticket, he still felt that he’d lied. The church abutted the roaring Piazza della Repubblica at an angle, as if modernity had staged a sneak attack. Crossing it required a mouse-like darting, certainly a mouse-like panic. Cars came within inches, squealing, elbows jammed onto horns. Tom camouflaged himself behind a knot of young Germans who still had enough alcohol in their systems to have forgotten their mortality, and together they danced through the traffic to the island at the center. “Scheißkerl!” said a girl with a boa.
On the far side of the piazza he could see the turmoil of Termini station. His bus left from somewhere in there. A short jazz riff played in his eyeball. On his own now, he nearly slammed into a toy-sized white delivery truck. Beyond the truck, an Alfa Romeo with an antique woman behind the wheel had already come to a stop, waiting patiently for Tom’s next animal move. He felt such gratitude for this woman, for her temperate out-of-placeness, but she didn’t respond to his smile—her eyes didn’t even move with him, making him wonder if she was blind.
Termini was an anthill of travelers, foreigners toting outrageous amounts of luggage, the buses circling their movements like bombardier beetles. Signs indicating stops and routes were too numerous to represent any kind of ordered reality. He walked the length of the parking lot, scanning the notices, seeing every number bu
t 75. Orange construction barrels blocked some lanes; other stops had digital signs, the lights of which had blinked out, leaving them ciphers. When he saw his bus circling into the lot, he ran to it unabashedly, a child. The driver told him he was heading north instead, and Tom asked if he could get on anyway, ride it till it turned around, because his legs were frizzing, but the driver shook his head—fine della linea—and Tom felt a warmth behind his eyes. No reason to get emotional. He’d have to find another. He had no money for a cab. Non ho i soldi.
He asked a woman with a stroller where the southbound 75 stopped, but he couldn’t remember whether it was sessanta or settanta, and she too shook her head. Pointed at the baby, as if that were an explanation. At some point, he should start walking home; there was that fine edge between perseverance and unreason.
The buses continued to pull in—38, 82, 170, 64, 910—and the numbers started to blur, and Tom felt an unjustified fear, a premonition that things were about to go very badly, that the bus would never materialize, and more, that the materiality of his body would falter. His neck felt like it was being grasped by someone angry, by the driver of the white truck, and great flares began to light the other waiting passengers like they were Bethlehem stars. Here were the angels and the martyrs. He crouched down, knowing this made him look strange, knowing it would look stranger were he to collapse. His feet went tingly. They were sparking. The fuzzy holy world was sparking, and before his body fully crumpled, he decided either he was having a second episode of demyelination (now understanding how precious the isolated in clinically isolated had been) or he was being spoken to directly by God the Father—something about trust and renunciation and surrender—and in that last moment before the darkness, he couldn’t decide which was worse.
A girl perched on his leg, small, like a sparrow.
His leg had no feeling—either he was dead, or it had gone to sleep under her weight.
His brain stretched to assimilate the data: self, child, scratchy sheets, a low beep. The timer was going off. Someone had set the timer for the pie; no, it was for his heart. Someone was monitoring his life. The girl must be real. Her eyes opening twice as big as his, great loving eyes. Her hand jerked toward him, yanked a rope binding him. She shrieked, he laughed, a woman in white came running. Yes, heaven was his daughter.
“It’s your head,” she said, gently tapping the side of his face with her fingers. “Are you okay? I ate your cornflakes.”
“Have I been dead for long?”
“Not once have you been dead. You only fell down in the street, and someone brought you here, and they patched you up, and then we came.”
“But you’re miles and miles away.” His Beatrice, come to light up the circles as he climbed—or descended—them. He needed her forgiveness, as long as it lasted.
“We’re your egermency contact.”
E-germ-ency, an ejection of infection from his body. The nurse replaced the IV tracing his forearm, and Daphne wriggled to his left leg, leaving the other to wake up in this new world.
“Your mom?”
“She went for coffee.”
“And what about—”
“Who?”
Best evidence that he wasn’t dead: the Janiculum girl wasn’t standing in the corner with a pair of party-store wings elasticked to her arms.
“Are you really my child?” he asked.
She whacked his chest with her head, nuzzled at his gown until her hair sprang out of its tie.
“No,” he said with a sigh. “Merely a rodent. I knew I was dreaming.”
“Tell me about multiple sclerosis.” He stumbled over the elision between “ple” and “scl”—too many adjoining consonants—and considered the disintegration of his brain. “Multiple sclerosis,” he said again, adding a rest, an implied vowel, between the words. He was a day out of the hospital, the only sign of his collapse a butterfly bandage on his temple. His wife and daughter were touring the Colosseum; Daphne wanted to see warriors.
Dr. Tromba smiled. “It’s easier in Italian. La sclerosi multipla.” She had asked if he had anyone to help take care of him, someone who should be in this meeting.
“Then tell me about it in Italian.”
He wanted her to collect the papers on her desk into a neat stack, or pull a pen from the mug, click it once or twice, and put it back. He wanted some evidence of her discomfort. But she leaned back in her chair and placed her hands in her lap, a move he recognized from his own efforts at patience.
“La sclerosi multipla, come sai, è una malattia infiammatoria progressiva del sistema nervoso centrale. È neurodegenerativa perchè è demielinizzante.”
“Demiel . . . ?”
“Si continua a perdere la mielina.”
“Myelin. Like miele,” he said. “Honey.”
“Tipicamente, è controllata; non è curato. Dunque, è cronica.”
“How does it happen? I mean, are there risk factors?”
“La eziologia è sconosciuta.”
“If I don’t understand everything you say, am I permitted to live in ignorance? Can we pretend you did your duty?”
She leaned forward and rolled her chair up to her desk. “Scientists are the hardest. And not always for the reason one would expect.”
“I should want to know. That’s what you mean.”
“There is no should. If I were to learn of a terminal cancer diagnosis, or Huntington’s, say, I think I would buy myself a stack of coloring books and take them to a meadow in Alaska.”
Her sharp little boarding-school face in that moment looked like it would fit right in among the moose.
“Why Alaska?”
“Don’t distract. Let me give you the information, and then you can make your choices. You have relapsing-remitting MS, which is good, if we are classifying conditions by degree. I’ll put you on a medication that will slow things down.”
“With side effects.”
“Headache, diarrhea, flushing of skin. You’ll tell us.”
“I might blush more?”
“We adjust once we see how you respond.” She dashed something off on a pad and handed it to him. “Orally, once a day. I’m starting you with seven milligrams.”
“Aubagio?” he read. “What does that translate to?”
“It’s not Italian. Just a name. Made-up Italian, if you like.”
“What would it mean?”
She smiled. “Adagio . . . bagaglio . . . auguri . . .”
Slowly, baggage, best wishes.
She walked the narrow stone wall by the nymphaeum like a balance beam, pausing every few steps to flick her hands, stick her butt out, flourish her ponytail.
“If you had to guess where we are, what would you say?”
Daphne leapt for the dismount, applauded herself. “Rome,” she said. She grabbed her head with her arm and bent it against her shoulder.
“But if you didn’t know.”
She looked around at the fields rolling down from the spring’s cave, the cover of cane and willow shivering by the stream, the hot huddle of sheep. “Paradise?”
He put down his notebook and grabbed her face in his hands, squeezed her cheeks until her mouth popped out like a fish’s. His fetus, his bean, grown to this. She wrapped a leg behind his ankle and tripped him.
“Can you stay forever?” he asked.
“Can you come home?”
“Compromise,” he said. “Let’s go to Puerto Rico. Christmas break.”
“Oh, let me guess. There are ostradocks there.”
He described the bioluminescent crustaceans of Vieques Bay, named blue tears—cute, she said; not cute, he said. “The substrate of any light-emitting reaction is the compound luciferin. Lucifer, of course, meaning bringer of light.”
“Like, aquifer? Bringer of water?”
“How do you know what an aquifer is?”
“I go to school, Dad.” She combed through the grass, picked dianthus, pink periwinkles, cornflowers.
“They call those bachelor’
s buttons,” he said, pointing to the blue one.
She drew it from her wild bouquet and stuck the stem in the collar of his shirt.
“Swiffer,” she said. “Bringer of swiff.”
Earlier that summer, she had asked him to come with her and her mother to see the ballet—some local production of whatever ballerinas danced when they weren’t dancing The Nutcracker—and he had excused himself; and a few weeks later she asked him to come to Shanisse’s birthday with her—there’d be a slip-and-slide—and he mentioned deadlines; so when she and her mom went to see a minor league game in August, they hadn’t invited him. Just told him where they’d be. The night before he flew to Rome, he put Daphne to bed and said, “You won’t even know I’m gone.” She pulled the covers to her chin and looked at him with profound disappointment. You know so little about love, the look said.
After their picnic and poohsticks and staking out the bird blind and watching her run sprints, Tom said it was time they found her mother, and a cloud passed over them. The path out of the valley wound through mulberries and southern nettles, beside an old Roman tomb where a woman was buried after being kicked to death by her husband.
“I won’t do it,” she said, referring to marriage.
“But don’t not do it,” he said.
“I’d just rather know everything for certain, is all.”
Out on the Appian Way, they sat on a wall by a church to wait for the bus. A priest walked by, paused, and turned back. A car swished by at a heretical speed, tossing the old man’s skirts. He pulled a cell phone from somewhere in the folds of fabric; the wind carried away most of the conversation. In some far-off kitchen, a lamb was being prepared, and prepared incorrectly. “Madonna!” said the priest. Daphne covered her mouth to hold in her laugh. When the bus came, only she and Tom got on. He hoped someone—or someone’s son—was being sent to pick up the Father.
He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.
The women were staying at a hotel off Piazza Navona—the woman he was considering uncleaving from and the girl made of half of himself. Daphne had asked him to stay over (two beds! chocolate on the pillows!), but her mom said girls’ weekend.
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