“Ta-dah! Presenting the darling of cryptozoology.” He slapped the tank. “This is one of the oldest fish in the world. A living fossil from the Devonian period. More specifically, a coelacanth in an ethanol bath.”
“Devonian,” I muttered, transfixed by the mammoth creature. “When was that?”
“Three hundred and fifty million years ago. Way before dinosaurs. He’s their ancestor, like a great-great-grandfather.”
The seelakanth was a primeval-looking fish from marshy lore. It was at least five feet long and looked to weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Rather than the soft exterior of fish I knew, it had an armour-plated outside consisting of shale-like scales as large as guitar picks, speckled with silver flecks. Its fins were more like arms and legs, and it had a big, wary eye. Its mouth was agape, revealing sharp teeth.
“Is it real?” I asked.
Jonathan nodded. “Extinct and eluding us for sixty-five million years, until a fisherman trawled one off the coast of South Africa in 1938.” He knelt so that he was level with the fish.
“How many are there?” I leaned in closer to the peculiar fins.
“Less than five hundred. After lasting millions of years, they’re headed for the abyss of mass extinction again,” he said, his voice thickening. As I stared into the milky-white marble eye, Jonathan added, “They need constant water pressure around them. When they’re brought to the surface, they die, turning from indigo to slate grey.”
It was a bewitching fish extricated from primitive art. A mirage.
Jonathan took a cloth from the counter, wiping his fingerprints off the glass. Then he asked if I wanted to get a coffee.
We went by the gift shop. In the window a pyramid of sea monkeys was displayed, each kit stamped with the Instant Life! insignia. I hadn’t seen any in ages.
“My sister and I used to buy these,” I told him.
“Same here. Retro, hey? They’re a big hit.”
“What were they, tadpoles?”
“Brine shrimp in a state of suspended animation.”
“Ours didn’t live long.”
“Ours neither.”
Still, the aquarium pets were magical to me back then, so I entered the shop to buy one for Clair. Although they were spending the holidays with Nahlah’s family in Montreal, I was already planning another visit with my niece.
The coffee in the canteen poured brownish clear. We sat at a table near some lively camps of children. Jonathan watched them with a mirthful look on his face.
“They’re here for the planetarium show,” he explained.
“Do you always work over the holidays?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s fun to tour the kids around this time of year. I don’t get much accomplished.” With his guileless brown eyes, he was like a big kid himself.
I noticed he had dry, chapped hands. “I have the perfect cream for that,” I told him.
“Yeah? I’ve tried everything.” He laced his fingers together, then asked, “How do you know Theo, anyway?”
“I work in the National Gallery’s viewing room. He came in to study some prints. You?”
“He advised me for my thesis on the thylacine. Did he tell you about it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Check out the archival footage on YouTube. Type in ‘last Tasmanian tiger, thylacine, 1933.’ It died of exposure in the zoo three years after that film.”
“So Theo was your professor?”
He looked up at the ceiling as though he was trying to determine how much information to disclose. “And I worked with his wife here. Saskia. She was our librarian.”
“Theo didn’t mention her.”
“She passed away a few years ago. Brain tumour. I owe them both a lot.”
“Did they have children?”
“No, no.” He paused before going on. “His family was in the Amsterdam diamond trade.” There was a malaise in his voice as he spoke.
“He said they were merchants of some sort,” I told him.
“He didn’t speak of it. But he would get in these moods. It was hard on Saskia.”
“Was he—”
“Not him, his family. All of them. His parents, two sisters, a brother. He went out to buy bread, and when he came home, the door to the house was open. A chair was overturned. The rest was exactly the same, except everyone was gone. The neighbours—a doctor and his wife—hid him. Not for long, the war was almost over. He slept on a slab of cement in the attic, in case soldiers fired at the ceiling. Never saw them again.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“Better you didn’t. He wouldn’t have wanted you to.”
“I hope he’s doing well on that island.”
Jonathan seemed puzzled.
“Where he went to find his bird,” I went on. “Hiva Oa.”
“The koao? Funding for that was cut. Grant committees said his work was founded on too much circumstantial evidence.”
“I guess he went on his own dime,” I said. “He told me goodbye in November.”
Jonathan shook his head. “Theo’s travels ended years ago. He had bypass surgery in November. There was a stroke. He’s in a home now.”
* * *
AFTER MY VISIT with Jonathan, I stayed up past midnight, reading about Theo on the Web. Dated Internet biographies stated that he was a renowned zoologist who conducted research in the most inaccessible habitats of Vietnam, Africa, and South America. The only personal information I found was that he’d emigrated from Holland in the 1960s with his wife, and that he taught zoology at the University of Toronto, where he lived for many years.
There was just one picture of him. In it, he looked to be in his early thirties. He wore a narrow suit and thin tie. His hands were in his pockets and he leaned against the bars of a cage with a pipe sticking out of his mouth. Behind him to the left was the okapi, with its long, tapered face and butterfly ears. Like Theo’s, its enormous eyes were on the camera. Theo’s furrowed brow, his untamed hair and intense gaze gave him the presence of a brooding artist. The younger Theo had been what Constance called un beau laid—a person of ugly beauty whose disproportioned features made him alluring.
Online there were dozens of articles with his name on them, about quests for exterminated species and species discovered over the last fifty years. Then I came across Bernard Heuvelmans, who wrote one of the books Theo had given me. Heuvelmans was a Belgian-French zoologist who became known as the father of cryptozoology. I wondered if he’d mentored Theo; Holland being adjacent to Belgium, where Heuvelmans had studied.
On the Track of Unknown Animals was reputed to be one of the most influential works in the field. Like Theo, Heuvelmans had searched the world’s oceans and forests for animals known to local people but unknown to science. Skeptics called his belief in cryptids outrageous, but he held to his convictions until he died.
“Cryptozoological research should be actuated by two major forces,” Heuvelmans said, “patience and passion.” He founded the International Society of Cryptozoology in Washington, DC. But it was now defunct.
“There are lost worlds everywhere,” Heuvelmans also said.
* * *
I CHECKED MY email. There were no messages. I scanned the weather forecasts for Ovalle, Hiva Oa, and Florida. All were hot and sunny.
I envisioned myself following Liam all my life, leagues behind him, unnoticed, floundering for him inside his vast landscapes studded with crevices and meandering rivers. I envisioned seeing Viv in his eyes.
I resisted writing to tell him that the open-air amphitheatre where we used to meet had been roped off and would be dug up in the spring—the grass and trees, the curved stone seats with a view onto the bluffs. Since the earthquake, the entire area was deemed unsafe. Even One Hundred Foot Line would be moved once the ground thawed.
Before going to sleep I googled the thylacine. Jonathan had described it as wolflike with a straight, stiff tail and a pouch opening to the rear of its body. What the choppy footage showed
was a graceful and otherworldly animal with the facial traits of a small kangaroo and the stripes of a tiger on its back and hind legs.
When the black-and-white film opened, the thylacine gave a dramatic, toothy yawn. For an instant its jaw seemed to come unhinged, so concealed was its face by its gaping mouth. The animal paced in its cramped concrete and wire enclosure. It held a piece of meat down with its paws, tearing at it. It rested in the sun, lying atop a crack extending the length of the ground, and did more pacing, momentarily looking like a plain old dog, almost smiling.
The image of the last living thylacine that died from neglect in the zoo stayed with me, replaying in my head as if on a reel, like the voices in Forty-Part Motet.
The film was too exposed—the animal and its surroundings at times whited out completely in some areas, erased then reappearing and disappearing altogether.
FIFTY-ONE
VIV FLOATED THROUGH MY sleep in a birchbark canoe, all decked out in a glitz dress. I swam up to her, but she peeled my fingers off the rim of the vessel. When she smiled and said Don’t worry, little one, I saw a hole in her throat. Then she rose and danced the cancan. A monstrous snake emerged from the water, a hairy, toothy serpent with red eyes. It bit Viv’s head off and spat it out. Her white plaster-cast death mask bobbed up and down like a buoy in the black waves, singing Que sera, sera while I drowned.
Something smacked against the window with a kowww kowww, startling me from the nightmare. I opened the curtains. A crow lay in the snow, stunned but breathing.
As the sun crept across the blanketed yards, the snow stole colour from its light sources like a Vermeer—purplish off the clouds, intermingled with streaks of yellow and red from the mountain ash berries. The crow flew off, leaving an indentation of feathers.
It was my first day back at work and I went in early. Passing the taiga garden, I asked a security guard for a cigarette. I sat on a powdery ledge and smoked it in requiem for Theo. All morning I felt seasick from the cigarette and the dream.
There was a stack of botanical studies to get through. With precision, I noted details—accession number, object name, maker, title, date, culture, materials, and measurements—in the vaults. Then I entered what was outstanding at my desk: legal status, home location, current location, valuation, activities, authorities, and on and on. But I just didn’t care anymore, about dandelions and bramble. In the grand scheme, their insignificance was blatant.
The librarian had loaned me a tape player. I’d had it on my desk for weeks. I fished through my bag for the cassette Con had given me, and inserted it into the slot. When I hit Play, the machine’s mechanisms squeaked and there was a granular hissing.
The quality of sound wasn’t great. But I made out the muffled voices of my young parents right away. “Grand sourire, ma fille!” and “Attagirl!”
Then came a pitter-patter of feet and a little voice—mine. “Reeeeee … fffeeeee … rrreeeeee … fffeeeeee…” in quick succession.
“Elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist,” Con instructed.
“Say it slower, Edith.” Henry spoke over our mother. “Like this: Preee-sennn-tiiinnng … Vivieeennnne!”
“Prrreee fffeee prrreee fffeeeee preeeee fffveee ffvvvee fvvveeeee vvveeee Veeee!”
“Maman, put the wings on me,” Viv demanded.
“Vivienne, don’t pull your sister’s arm so hard.”
“C’mere, sis, watch this. I’ll flutter away flut flutter awayyy…”
I could hear Viv skipping around barefoot. Then a jingling—our father playing a tambourine. Dropping the musical instrument to tickle us. Viv and I shrieking like crazy.
“Henri, enough!”
“Fffffeeee bye-bye fffffffveeee bye-bye fvvveeeee Vvvvveeeee!” I started up again. I guessed I was maybe two. It was all I kept saying till someone pressed the Stop button, probably Con.
I pulled the cassette out of the machine. I didn’t want the player to eat the tape. I had no recollection of us that small, or of me enunciating some of my first words with my sister. The black plastic rectangle was my memento. If I took proper care of the artifact, it would outlive us like a heart in a reliquary.
* * *
I PACED THE office halls. Alejandro and Raven were off for another week, and the staff quarters were empty. I continued feeling sorry for myself through lunch, eating a spongy ham sandwich until a ding dong notification alerted me to an email from Jonathan Cole. Just wanted to see how you’re doing, the message read. It was invasive to have someone inquire after me like that. Even though we’d exchanged contact information, I hadn’t expected to hear from him again.
On a whim, in my bleak mood, I responded. Fine thanks. I’d like to see Theo.
Jonathan’s reply was instantaneous. He’d be going to Theo’s later in the afternoon and I could accompany him then. It crossed my mind that he was instigating the visit for my sake, which further aggravated me.
He pulled up at the Gallery in a Smurf-blue Smart car. When I squeezed into it, he had a coffee waiting for me.
On the drive to Sunnybrook Lodge, he updated me on Theo’s condition, assuring me that he was making progress. He could sit in a wheelchair and move his right arm and leg. He wasn’t speaking, but he was writing. That Theo had lost his speech didn’t deter Jonathan. His grandmother had two good years after her stroke, he told me.
“I watched the thylacine on YouTube last night,” I said as we parked. “What happens when you catch your species?”
“It’s not a cryptid once it’s scientifically accepted.”
“And the animal?”
“It becomes a conservation problem nobody wants to deal with.” He reached into the back for his gloves. “But I didn’t have that issue. Neither did Theo.” His face was uncomfortably close to mine in the cartoon car. I made the move to open my door when he added, “Because we never found what we were trailing.”
Despite its upbeat name, Sunnybrook wasn’t much different from Mechanicsville’s low-income housing. The roof was in disrepair, windows were cracked, and paint peeled off the building’s exterior. Inside, the air was oppressive and damp. We signed in for visiting hour that went until five o’clock. After that, meals were served, Jonathan said. Most residents were in bed by eight.
Theo was in the high-needs wing. We passed through a light green hall jazzed up with motivational posters. A kitten dangling by its claw hooked into a branch: Hang In There! A beaver resting on a log: I’m not procrastinating, I’m waiting for divine inspiration. A snapshot of the sky with I am not afraid, I was born to do this scrawled across it.
There were no seniors milling about. Other than the sound coming from TVs in rooms where doors were open a crack, the atmosphere was glum.
I tried not to breathe in the sickly-sweet odour of decaying flowers and apple juice mixed with stale smoke and diapers. Where doors were open, nurses smiled at us. We seemed to be the only visitors.
“It’s busier on weekends,” Jonathan told me. “Most folks can’t get away from work this early.” The last person I’d heard use the word folks was my father. There was something hokey about Jonathan, as if he came from the olden days.
I stopped him before the common area. “He doesn’t need to know I’m here,” I said, taking a chair against the back wall when we entered the room. I respected Theo’s dignity too much. I wanted to see him without disconcerting him.
“Fair enough. Maybe next time,” he said affably before leaving me there.
Someone had already wheeled Theo in. He sat by the bay window above the river pathway where joggers ran with dogs and strollers on a salted path of packed-down snow. Even with a thick wool sweater over his shoulders, he didn’t look so big anymore. I didn’t like seeing him confined in this ghastly place—and it was ghastly, however much Jonathan raved about the staff.
I hardly knew a thing about him, other than that he studied animals people thought were extinct. Yet believing he’d been out there on his island had brought me peace of mind. At that point, I understoo
d my attachment to Theo, who, on blind faith, brought the dead back to life by seeking proof of their existence out in a lonely and far-off wilderness. He’d given me what nobody else had: hope. So what if it was delusional or unrealistic? Theo was the firefly in the pitch-dark lairs where I searched for Viv. How many people like this did we come across in a lifetime?
Jonathan sat by him in an easygoing, natural way. I only half made out his words as he gave him news on recent discoveries in the animal kingdom. Not once did Theo’s head move. But Jonathan touched his arm frequently, and made a point of laughing. Sometimes he pulled a tissue from his pocket and dabbed at Theo’s eyes.
Later, the nurse came over. She spoke to Jonathan like they were friends. Jonathan gave her the National Geographic he’d been reading from.
Then he walked over to me and extended a hand for me to stand, as though we were in a dance hall or something. “A round of chess?” he asked.
“I’d like to go,” I told him as I watched Theo. The nurse sat beside him now, chit-chatting. “Where did they put his okapi cane?”
“It’s hanging on his door. He just sees this as a setback,” Jonathan said. “Thinks he’ll walk out of here and resume tracking die-offs.”
Jonathan drove me home with more stories of the thylacine and his voyages to the Australian outback. Then—I sensed he added this bit of information for my benefit—he told me he was a homebody, and was relieved to be done with fieldwork.
“Not me. I want to travel,” I said, realizing it was true.
Theo had privileged me with a picture of the greater world, the journeys and expeditions that were possible.
FIFTY-TWO
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Jonathan phoned to ask me out for dinner.
“Like a date?”
“Affirmative. Or an un-date if you fancy.”
“Why not,” I told him, feeling neutral about it.
When the designated night came, I didn’t primp. Had it been Liam, the beautifying rituals would have taken hours. With Jonathan, I put on a fresh sweater and jeans just before he got there, washing my face, combing my hair, and doing up my eyes in under five minutes. I was engrossed in a reality TV show and was cranky that I couldn’t stay in and watch with a box of strawberry Passion Flakies, especially on such a cold night. Seeing the farcical Smart car pull up through a crack in the curtains, I cursed myself for having said yes.
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 24