ALSO BY JOHANNA SKIBSRUD
FICTION
The Sentimentalists
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories
Quartet for the End of Time
POETRY
Late Nights with Wild Cowboys
I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being
The Description of the World
CHILDREN
Sometimes We Think You Are a Monkey
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
First published 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Johanna Skibsrud
The advertisement read by Dean in “A Horse, a Vine” is from myholysmoke.com
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Skibsrud, Johanna, 1980-
[Short stories. Selections]
Tiger, tiger / Johanna Skibsrud.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780735234567 (paperback).—ISBN 9780735234574 (electronic)
I. Title.
PS8587.K46A6 2018 C813′.54 C2017-904422-2
C2017-904423-0
Cover and interior design by Andrew Roberts
v5.2
a
For John
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Johanna Skibsrud
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
TIGER, TIGER
KEY LIME, 1994
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
WEATHERMAN
THE OPENING
A HORSE, A VINE
THE VISIT
THE LAST FRONTIER
THE ACCOUNT
THE LESSON
MR. DOYLE’S ANCESTRAL GENETIC HOMELAND
THE NOVELIST
THE REMEMBERER
Acknowledgments
THEY ARRIVED IN PACKING CRATES, like any ordinary shipment—the news delivered to my desk by a breathless Dr. Singh. His thin white hair was askew. It surrounded his face like a halo of light.
“They’ve arrived!” he said, in a voice that—though its tone was a whisper—in register was more like a shout.
We went into the mailroom to have a look. We admired the way the packing tape stretched and shimmered over the seam of each crate, like the smooth surface of burned skin.
Then Günter, our young intern, loaded the crates on a trolley and trundled them into the cramped office I shared with Dr. Wolff. With haste, we cut through the glistening tape and tore through layers of packing fill, to find, nestled toward the bottom, exactly what we were looking for. A small case, roughly the size of my own hand.
I took out the case—was surprised by how light it felt. Even though I hadn’t expected it to weigh anything.
I placed it in the middle of my desk, which I had recently cleared, my hand lingering on it a moment as though, if I let it go, it would immediately evaporate into thin air.
Dr. Singh looked at me; he was practically panting with delight. His eyes gleamed over his spectacles, which, as usual, had slipped slightly, down the bridge of his nose. It made you wonder why he wore the glasses at all, the way he strained in order not to look into them.
I can’t deny I felt it myself. That same thing, whatever it was, that you could almost see tingling through Dr. Singh’s veins. To tell you the truth, I was almost annoyed at Dr. Singh—at the obvious delight he was allowing himself to take in the moment, which for some reason detracted a little from my own. Who can say why, but I suddenly felt an unexpected ripple of disgust at the whole venture. Even though it was as a result of my own efforts—not those of Dr. Singh—that we had been presented with the opportunity. And now an enormous responsibility loomed before us.
We bent toward the case on the desk before us, and slowly, very slowly—Dr. Singh at my shoulder—I lifted the lid.
At first, there did not seem to be anything inside at all. We gazed as though into a perfectly empty cylinder. But then, I caught a glimpse…not of any thing exactly, but of a slight difference in the texture of the case’s interior.
It was a thin plastic sleeve, almost as smooth and thin as the packing tape we had removed from the crate’s exterior. Identical (I noted, with some surprise), both in quality and dimensions, to an envelope my wife, Franziska, had received last spring from a seed plant in California, after taking it into her head, for some reason, to order away for half a dozen varieties of desert succulents.
It was not long before the seeds arrived. All the way from the United States. How odd, I thought as I held my own thin envelope, that two such very different things, with two very different points of origin—one arriving from the only dimly remembered past, and one from the unforeseeable future—could appear, on the surface at least, almost identical!
And yet what had I expected? What I held in my hand at that moment was just as obscure, just as—nearly—impossible to measure or grasp as that which had already come and gone. Like the past, it did not exist in any conceivable form except as an idea, a wish. A prayer, even! Here it was (I felt the fact of it, despite Dr. Singh’s form hovering at the corner of my eye, thrill through me): the future itself. No wonder it was nearly invisible to the eye!
With a confidence I did not actually feel, I seized a pair of tweezers from the little tray I kept in the upper left corner of my desk—selecting it from the jumble of more or less useful objects that remained there: thermometers, paper clips, a wind-up airplane given to me on some now long-forgotten occasion by my wife. But the tweezers felt clumsy in my hand, and the distance they introduced between myself and my object only further heightened my sense of remoteness from it. It was disappointing, I thought, and really a bit odd, that this very basic tool—a set of tweezers—was still the best thing so far invented for searching for small items at the bottom of nearly empty bags.
With shame, I realized that my hand had begun to tremble. I redoubled my effort, attempting to clear my mind of every thought—especially as to whether Dr. Singh had noticed the way my hand shook, or that I had begun to perspire.
Finally, I managed to seize on something. I lifted it, tremblingly, from the bag, and Dr. Singh and I crouched together in order to gaze, with wonder and delight, at…well, at nothing. We could see almost nothing at all at the tweezers’ pinched end. I motioned to Dr. Singh to move aside, and in unison the two of us shuffled a pace or two so that our backs were now to the door rather than to the window, and the specimen was suddenly exposed to the light. Now, we could just barely make out a small speck, as inconsequent seeming as a mote of dust. It was so slightly different in colour and texture from the air that if we had not been looking very hard we would, almost certainly, not have seen it all.
There it was. The tiger.
* * *
—
&
nbsp; It had been Dr. Wolff, in fact—not either myself or Dr. Singh—who had stumbled on the idea. He who had first informed us of the team of Russian scientists who had recently unearthed the remains of a laboratory dating back at least a hundred years, since sometime before the Last War. The laboratory had evidently been affiliated with a wildlife sanctuary and had housed the genetic information of at least several now extinct Siberian tigers. The specimens had been carefully stored, and three of them had been recovered—it was tempting to say miraculously—intact. They were now being sold to the highest bidder.
A lab in Moscow had already snatched up one of them, Dr. Wolff informed us. But their science programming hadn’t yet fully recuperated from the war, and it was doubtful that anything would come of it. The second specimen had been sold shortly after, to a collector from Brazil. He would keep it on some high shelf in his Rio penthouse, no doubt, Dr. Wolff sniffed. Show it off whenever he remembered it to his more fashionable guests.
The Chinese would almost certainly sweep up the last specimen. Take it back to their laboratories and—hastily, without a thought to the consequences—create their own little monster…
“Yes! That would be just like them,” Wolff cried. “A scientific approach like that of a spoiled child!”
Dr. Singh began to fiddle with the top button of his laboratory coat. I gazed ahead, using a technique I’d perfected—my eyes making just enough contact with the doctor to suggest attention, but in fact gazing steadily past him, toward the row of high shelves that flanked his desk.
The shelves housed the Wolff’s own collection—the extent and variety of which would have impressed even a Brazilian collector. And just like the specimens in Rio, there was no more promising future for these than to remain where they were, gathering dust and waiting for the day when, in a burst of paternal affection, Wolff would take out the feather duster he kept for the purpose and dust each jar—contemplating their secrets, which he alone now kept. His eyes would shine as he dusted the jars in the way that eyes shine only in moments of sincerest love.
How quickly that light would go out once the job was done! It almost made you sorry for him, the way his eyes flickered, then turned inward, toward the trap he had made of his mind. To imagine him in there, shut up and alone—the last of his kind.
Just as for Dr. Wolff, the jars provided me with a source of respite and relief by offering me something to look at while he spoke. For some reason I couldn’t bear to listen to him and look at him at the same time. One or the other, yes—but not both. And so I would look behind him at the collection of human and chimp fetuses floating in formaldehyde, their skin grey from long exposure to preserving agents, and think about how strange it was to decay that slowly—or rather, to not decay at all. Because it was the preservative process that was slowly eating away at the specimens, not the other way around—the possibility of their own immortality that was now slowly destroying them. Sometimes I even imagined I could see it happen. That I could actually detect, in the length of time that I gazed at them, their incremental deterioration. (No doubt this was only my imagination; the oldest specimens, boasted Wolff, were nearly four hundred years old. It was quite ridiculous to imagine that given that great length of time I, who was witness only to the smallest fraction of it, might actually be able to see the moment in which some identifiable change occurred.)
Other times, I would amuse myself by hazarding guesses at which of Dr. Wolff’s specimens were human and which were not, because often in the smaller, less developed specimens it was quite difficult to tell—especially from a distance. I tried to keep my eyes level, and my mind focused on this task, because if I let my eyes drift even slightly—according to some irresistible gravity—down toward the lower shelves, they would inevitably betray me.
The lower shelves housed the doctor’s collection of preserved testicles—all of the human variety. It was the second-largest collection of human testicles in the world, Wolff would sometimes boast, transferred into his care by the great-great-grandson of an ex-Nazi surgeon. Wolff maintained the collection “in the name of science,” though even he would have had to admit that, by this point, the evidence these specimens supplied was less scientific than spectral; from within their murky jars, they conjured a gruesome past only Wolff was capable of looking in the eye. My own always blinked, compulsively, when they drifted to those lower levels. Or skittered away.
It will be an immense relief, if and when the Wolff ever does finally retire, to clear out those lower shelves. Sometimes I even allow myself the brief fantasy of overseeing the operation. Of course, I would hire someone to do it; I could never bring myself to actually touch them. I would merely watch as the specimens were carried away by a sanitation engineer on a metal dolly, but it would give me a great sense of satisfaction—even pleasure—to see them go.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until the following afternoon, after Dr. Wolff had first mentioned the tiger, that Dr. Singh and I, in taking our usual turn together about the laboratory grounds, were able to discuss the matter. Before we had even fallen into step, I knew the direction our conversation would take. I could feel it in the air, a shared idea growing—exerting such an increasing pressure between us that it practically exploded when at last our paths converged.
“Perhaps it is already too late!” Singh exclaimed anxiously, wringing his hands and inserting a peculiar little skip in his step, as he always did when he became especially excited or concerned.
“There is only one way of knowing,” I said. My mind had already begun to cool in reflexive response to Singh’s agitation. “It is all a question of approach,” I said.
“The way the thing might”—skip—“be spun,” said Singh.
“That Wolff is opposed to the idea is not entirely to our disadvantage.”
“On the contrary, there even seems to be—”
“An increasing interest in ways that the department may—”
“Move forward.”
“Who wants to spend their entire career buried in the past?”
“This”—skip—“might really be our chance! It may—”
“Yes. But it will be delicate.”
“And yet, at the same time, it might”—skip—“already be too late!”
* * *
—
But it was not too late. Together, Singh and I drafted a letter urging the department to bid on the tiger—and to elect myself as the project head. That was only natural; Singh had spent his career to date working with the genetic material of living organisms, whereas I had always specialized in the dead. My doctoral dissertation had focused on the work of Dr. Alp Tiki, the celebrated Turkish scientist who paved the way for de-extinction back in the last century, with the resurrection of the southern gastric-brooding frog.
The Lazarus Project, as the venture came to be known, also managed to resurrect the dodo, establishing several successful colonies, some of which had even survived the war. However, no one had yet managed, either before or after the war, to introduce the species back into the wild—a fact in support of my own theory, proposed in my dissertation on the subject: the resurrected species had lost its capacity to adapt. The dodo had been reproduced, I had argued, only as a sort of static replica—a “film still,” if you will. This was a metaphor I often exploited in the only article I had so far managed to publish, which I had titled, tongue in cheek (a deliberate bid to the popular attention that had briefly been trained on the subject), “Die zweite Auferstehung.”
“Is it possible,” I had asked, by way of introduction, “to separate genetic material from its historical trajectory? How can any material be ‘reproduced’ if not within, and as, the very fact of its having, in the first place, arisen?”
The dodo, resurrected by Tiki, existed outside of any historical continuum, I explained, and therefore represented the first biological revolution of our common era. The birds were not an ancient genus returned from the dead, but instead an invention of an ent
irely new species—which one had to acknowledge was, at least in significant part, human.
The resurrection of the earth’s lost species was not, I argued, an effort that directed us toward a more natural state prior to human intervention, but a way of further propagating the human species in different and multiple forms. It was no doubt for this reason that, while completing my research at Dr. Tiki’s sanctuary outside Hamburg, I’d often had the uncanny feeling that all of human history was contained within the glazed, subtly reproachful glare of the dodo. That the eyes who watched me watch them were indeed not the eyes of a bird at all, but the eyes of a human being, and perhaps all human beings, myself included—all of us who had conspired, more or less willingly, not only in the species’ initial demise but in its resurrection.
The conclusion of my article was no conclusion at all: “Will our future attempts to study and understand the world around us result only in further demarcating the human being from the rest of the world? Will the human (who so far understands herself primarily in relation to what she is not) cease to exist precisely in the moment—and at the point—where the line separating human beings from other species becomes finally impassable; that is, can be neither imagined nor crossed?”
It would become clear, I reflected (in an earlier version of the article, editorially cut), that no such limit had ever existed at all, that the incarnation of ancient species as essentially human was simply the expression of life—of being itself: its refusal to be bound by any categories at all.
It was my luck that the completion of my dissertation corresponded with a sudden interest in the burgeoning dodo population. A colony had been successfully transported from Dr. Tiki’s sanctuary to a Singapore zoo, and for the first time since the war, the public was permitted to view the creatures. The dodo bird became a pop culture sensation. For a few short months the media was wild for it.
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