Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Nil ignores him, tries to estimate how much time has passed. “Do you ever deal in bugs?” he asks abruptly.

  Riedl stands waving the money.

  “Bugs? You mean insects? Only in silkworms. A long time ago. And some scorpions once. For a collector.” He pauses, reaches back in the drawer. “One hundred then. Go on, see reason. What is it you want with such vermin?”

  “How did you feed them? Your silkworms?”

  “Mulberry leaves. I had to import them, very pricey. And for the scorpions, mice. It made a terrible mess.” He pauses, pulls a cudgel out of the drawer, kept there in case of thieves, stands sad and quiet for a moment before putting it back and digging up more money instead. “A hundred and fifty, boy. Two hundred! It’s all I have.”

  But Nil is already leaving. In the doorway he turns. “Tell me one thing, Riedl. Were you eager to help him? Did they have to beat you, or were you simply bought?”

  The old man cringes, walks over to Nil, beseeches him. “Come now, don’t be a fool. You’ve got yourself in trouble. And what good is a bug to you? Come, take the money. I will tell them you sold it for twenty, they won’t bother you then. It’s better that way.”

  Nil wants to shake off the pawnbroker, call him a bloodsucker, a filthy kike, but there is something to his appeal that gives him pause. So all the while when I was playing at being your friend, he thinks, you went and believed me. You haggled and swore and you believed me all the same.

  And now you feel guilty.

  “I must know where the beetle is from, Riedl. And I must keep it alive.”

  Riedl nods, though it is clear he has no answer to these needs; runs back to the desk, grabs a wad of money, shoves it at Nil.

  “He’ll find you. ‘Mr. Smith,’ he called himself. He’s got the whole city looking for you. You saw the boy racing in here. I tried to tell him to wait. ‘I will talk sense into Nil,’ I said, ‘there is no need in going running to this Smith.’ But that man bought him, soul and all. He might have bought half the town.”

  When Nil accepts the money, the pawnbroker seizes hold of his arm and stoops down low.

  “Go on, hit me, I deserve it. And then I can say I tried to hold you and you put up a fight.”

  Nil does not move. “Tell me who can help me,” he says. “You know everyone in this town.”

  Riedl shakes his head, continuing to present the exposed back of his neck, imploring Nil to hit him, to kick him, to give him a bloody nose.

  Then he grows quiet.

  “Try the Chinese. Ha Xin’s Exotic Spices. They trade in the strangest things. Only be careful, they’re gonifs, part of a tong. But they have no love for any Smith.”

  [ 4 ]

  Nil learns two things from the Chinese. The first is that they don’t recognise the beetle but do recognise the plant matter it was bedded in. He has not presented them with the live insect, of course, but with a drawing, having laboured for several hours to capture its every detail with coloured pencils he acquired from a specialist shop at surprising expense. The bedding of straw or stalks he brought along only as an afterthought, scraping them into a pouch. The elderly man he deals with—the spice trader—picks up a single stalk and brings it to his lips; chews a strand, then spits it on the floor; picks out the remnant of a ghostly petal, spreads it carefully upon his fine-boned palm.

  “What is it?” Nil asks when he does not comment.

  “The root of the Company’s wealth,” the man replies in excellent English. “All the way from India.”

  Nil studies the shreds of plant with new reverence. “Can you sell me any? Can anyone in New York?”

  The Chinese does not reply. There is no need. The flower grows only in Hindustan; its export is forbidden. The Chinese government would pay much for a parcel of seeds.

  “Where do you have it from?” the trader asks instead.

  “I found it.”

  “Of course. Let me know if you find any more.”

  They attempt to look up the beetle in a book. That’s the second thing Nil learns: that there exist books full of pictures of insects. They have to send for the book and for a man who is an expert in such matters, a tiny, cheerful fellow of thirty or thirty-five with a waist-long queue and not a word of English to his name. The book itself is large-leafed and leather-bound, each page showing drawings of insects of such proficiency they make a mockery of Nil’s crude sketch. The drawings are systematic, showing top and side views, drawing attention to the legs, the head, the segmentation of the belly. Here and there a beetle is cut in half, splaying it open into a colourful system of tunnels and caverns, maw to arse. There are close-ups of legs and mandibles, of eggs, cocoons, and grubs. Nil’s beetle is not in the book. The scholar spends considerable time on his search, leafing back and forth between three separate sections, tracing the outline of Nil’s drawing with short, tapered fingers, pointing out various similarities between one insect and another, some of them obvious, others hard to spot: the colour and configuration of legs and joints; the shape of the thorax; the ruff of fur at throat and head. At long last he leans back, scribbles some characters on a slip of paper, offers it to Nil.

  “What’s that?”

  The question sets off a consultation between the spice trader and the scholar, requiring several back and forths.

  “It’s the beetle’s name. Not its precise name, but its family name. He says beetles come in families, just like anything else.” The old man shrugs. “It costs twenty dollars.”

  “Will you translate it for me?”

  “I cannot. He says it is a scientific name. A transcription into our system of writing. I don’t understand it.”

  “Then it’s useless to me.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The man bows. He can see Nil’s need and simply waits him out, pouring tea for himself, drinking it in short, precise sips.

  “It isn’t worth twenty dollars.”

  Again the man bows, takes the scrap of paper, crumples it up. It’s only after Nil places the money on the counter that the old man orders the scholar to write out the characters once more. He does so, larger this time, with more flourish, embarrassed perhaps by the stupendous price, then passes over the paper with a bow.

  “He thinks you must be a prince,” smiles the old man.

  “Why?”

  “Only a prince would pay good silver to know the name of the cricket that he loves.”

  [ 5 ]

  An hour later Nil can be found crossing the Big Scar. It would take a keen eye to recognise him. He has shaken off the two children the Chinese sent to follow him; secured new lodgings; has washed and cropped his hair close to the skull and donned a cap and woollen suit. A starched button-on collar is riding loose around his scrawny neck. It gives him that fresh-off-the-boat look, an immigrant dressed in his Sunday best in honour of the city, shorn in quarantine against the spread of lice. An upright sort of lad: button-eyed, decent, and hungry, quietly pining for some lunch. The private policemen who patrol the Big Scar on the lookout for riffraff don’t give him a second glance.

  As Nil crosses the great open space that cuts Manhattan in two, the scar changes around him. At its southern edge, it is a scruffy affair, Soot-blighted and pockmarked with rubbish. Towards its northern end it grows verdant and manicured, dotted with shade trees. Beyond lies a chessboard grid of leafy avenues; front lawns guarded by ornamental metal fencing, their artistry and whimsy masking fear. Many of the houses are new. Uptown burned during the Second Smoke.

  Nil walks ten blocks, passes a field now used for baseball: knickerbockered youths stand pelting balls into each other’s mitts. There used to be a public library here, albeit public only to the rich. It, too, burned in the riots. Whatever books survived have been moved to a newly built structure, which hulks amongst the uptown houses looking more like
a fortress than a temple of learning, despite the sandstone, the decorative carvings, the portico and pillars that mark its gate. A philanthropist’s name is engraved into its stone. Nil reaches into his bag and dons a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. This, and a change of posture, and he is a student, or perhaps a house tutor of exotic origin, who is making his first pilgrimage to this, one of the wonders of the world. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and Natural History. He takes off his cap in reverence and enters as one would a church.

  [ 6 ]

  It is a risk, this. If Smith has gone to the trouble of hunting down Riedl, he must prize the beetle. The Company has a large network at its disposal: employees, business partners, friends within the civic government. Their description of Nil may be vague, but they know his age, his build, his shade of skin. The question is simply whether Smith has anticipated this move: that his thief will seek for answers in this place. As Nil approaches the front desk, the clerk’s face betrays no suspicion. He simply looks Nil over and places him before adopting a demeanour in equal parts helpful and patronising.

  “What are we looking for, young man?”

  Nil stops his gawking at the opulent ceiling; crumples his cap against his chest in his excitement; speaks quickly and almost in a whisper. “Is it true that the building holds ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and that these can be viewed by the public?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “And how much might it cost to view these?”

  The man smiles at so much self-abasing awe; collects the dollar entry fee with good-natured condescension and hesitates a moment only when noticing the dirt under Nil’s fingernails.

  “West wing, ground floor,” he says. “Follow the signs to Egyptology. And be sure not to touch anything, if you please.”

  There is no inconspicuous way of inquiring about books featuring bugs. So Nil goes roaming, spending just enough time in each room not to mark himself out by his disinterest. On the second floor of the west wing he stumbles on stuffed animals; moves past governesses with well-dressed cohorts of young girls and boys staring at panoramas staged in a series of glassed booths: a lion, crouching; a rearing bear; a white-bellied ray skewered by a long harpoon; a (carved? stuffed?) Eskimo skinning a humongous seal. At the far end, in a room less popular with the public, the walls are lined with display cases full of smaller vermin: lizards in one case, spiders in the next, locusts in a third, along with a photograph of a flying swarm, black and ominous like a cloud of Smoke.

  Two cases on he finds them. Beetles. The initial pang of excitement quickly gives way to disappointment. There are perhaps three dozen insects on display here, pinned to a board by fine, long needles under a banner that reads COLEOPTERA. Some schiller in vibrant colours; others are stripy like Humbug mints; some have horns or pincers serrated like saws, have their wings spread under shields of horn or sit impaled upon their spikes with the fissured solidity of flint. But ugly or pretty, tiny or monstrous, they all are just this: curiosities, ornaments, pests, devoid of meaning, the fern-rustle of home.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?”

  Nil has not heard the guard approach. A tall man, a Negro, light of skin.

  “They’re my favourites. Them and the locusts. Strange things—like they come from the moon. A thousand varieties, all different. Praise the Lord, I suppose.”

  Nil nods, smiles. All he wants is to avoid being remarkable, memorable. But it is already too late. The guard has remarked upon him; has picked him out as different and extended to him a solidarity rooted in their shared complexion.

  Nil turns to leave.

  Then he stops. “A thousand varieties? You mean there are more here than just these?”

  “Why yes. Cases and cases.”

  “Where can I find them?”

  The guard points to a closed door at the end of the hall.

  “In the Mendel Library. Members only, I’m afraid. Are you with the university? You will have to ask one of your professors for a letter of introduction. I am sure it can be arranged.”

  “Oh, I am certain it can.”

  [ 7 ]

  The museum closes at seven. Nil finds a broom closet to hide in. How much of his life has been filled with this, waiting in dark places, still, encoffined, until it is time again to move?

  Like a beetle in a box.

  He has learned to shut himself off: no thoughts, no memories, just the hollow void of the wait. Time passes to the rhythm of noises drifting dully through the walls; to the sour pangs of hunger climbing up from his stomach into the dryness of his throat. At last Nil emerges, probing the darkness with his ears. Then he moves, one hand on the wall. He has made sure to memorise the way.

  The Mendel Library is unlocked. A square room, not overly large, with a single long desk at the centre. It is flanked by chairs on either side, each workplace marked by a reading lamp with a coloured-glass shade, poison green. There are three walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, and a ladder on wheels so one can reach the top shelves. The fourth wall is made up of deep drawers to the height of Nil’s chest. Above them hangs a row of windows like dark paintings in heavy lead frames.

  Nil tries the books first. This is what brought him here, the Chinese scholar’s volume, those vivid renderings of pincers, hooked legs, overlapping plates of armour made of coloured horn. He finds the relevant section on the bookshelf and is once again plunged into the miraculous abundance of shape and shade nestling between its covers. He fetches down volume after volume, turns their pages with reverence, haste, and greed. Then the overviews are exhausted and more specialist works displace illustrations with text. No doubt one of these volumes contains the secret of how to satiate one’s beetle; it will yield to a week’s study, or perhaps as little as a day’s. But there are guards in the building and the lamp he’s lit may show under the door. Nil needs instant wisdom: a revelation. Above all he must not be caught.

  The drawers then. He knows what to expect and yet is awed by what he finds: whole flotillas of beetles, each impaled upon a nail; hovering inch-high above the white rectangle of felt that lines the drawer’s base. Next to each nail, a series of words, the beetles’ awkward, many-syllabled names along with the place where they were harvested.

  Passalus interruptus, Bocas del Toro, Panama.

  Phalacrognathus muelleri fuscomicans, New Guinea (Vogelkop Peninsula).

  Dynastes hercules hercules, Boiling Lake, Dominica.

  Ataenius strigatus, Georgian Bay, Upper Canada.

  There are many hundreds in all.

  Nil works quickly, pulling out each drawer in turn and perusing its contents with one intent glance. He knows he will recognise the beetle instantly, by the mark on its throat but more so by something less tangible: a tug at his sinews, at the tangle of tendrils that suspends us in this world.

  The nineteenth drawer sports a gap, a blank spot, within the formation of floating beetles. Nil’s eye registers it but fails to attach any meaning. It is later, when, without transition, the drawers begin to display plants not beetles—wrinkled, miserable husks pressed flat under a plate of glass as wide as the drawer—that this blank spot taunts him and makes him wonder whether a beetle—his beetle—slipped off its nail and lies crumpled in the drawer’s corner. He retraces his search, relocates the nineteenth drawer, but again finds only a blank spot, marked by a tiny hole where a nail had punctured the felt lining. There used to be a name next to this hole but it, too, has been excised, the glued-down tag ripped out. Only one corner remains, spelling out half a country: “azil.” It is a conjecture—a leap, made bold by his sense of persecution—but it seems impossible not to see in this puncture mark the action of his enemy; not to picture Smith’s fingernail peeling away that name tag and his slipping the beetle in his pocket so he can carry it home and mount it for his private viewing pleasure. In his frustration Nil pulls another beetle husk off its na
il; snaps it in half between his fingers and stares at the desiccated porousness that forms its centre, before crushing it to dust.

  [ 8 ]

  Plants, though.

  Flowers.

  The realisation floods the hollow of Nil’s disappointment and returns him to the search. He devotes himself to a new set of drawers, yanks them open with urgent impatience, and discovers an entire section of wall devoted to tulips, another to roses; to twisting, faded orchids whose gaping petals and jutting protrusions seem nothing short of obscene.

  And here, near the bottom of the second to last section, in an unlocked room of a labyrinthine building open to the public, at the back of a drawer scrutinised by some scholar maybe once a year, labelled in Latin, dried like summer hay and pressed flat as a coin by the weight of the glass heaved upon it, lies the treasure of the Empire, Papaver fuliginosa richteria, in full glorious bloom. The Smoke Poppy. Its grey-black petals look as though they are woven from dusk.

  Nil steals it without hesitation. It takes some doing; the glass plate is heavy and fixed on with metal brackets. But he is buoyant now, careless of the noise, and soon picks the flower with a steady hand. Then he removes all trace he has ever been in the room, picking up insect legs from the smooth parquet floor, forcing his hands to patience against the shiver of his skin. A yank on a desk lamp’s fine-linked brass chain, a game of cat and mouse with the night guards on duty, the long journey back to his downtown hovel: and all the while a humming in his limbs, the certainty that, tonight, the beetle will feed.

  [ 9 ]

  Only it won’t.

  The boardinghouse he has moved to lies quiet around him. Somewhere at the edge of his hearing he listens to a lovers’ quarrel, the timbres of anger and jealousy giving way to cautious reconciliation. Midnight gone, one, two. He tries to woo the beetle yet again; smooths out his wrinkled piece of paper with its Chinese symbols that, for all he knows, instruct any readers to kill him on sight.