Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  Out the window and down the Hauptstrasse, this genius’s most famous opera is in performance. At one point he tells his wife he can hear the soprano hit her aria’s top note. At that opera’s finale, a lonely bird-catcher takes the stage. He’s covered in feathers and ready to die. He sings a string of short pips—“Pa! Pa! Pa!”—and turns just in time to see his companion running out from the wings. As she runs, they lock eyes and she nods her little, feathered head, singing—“Pa! Pa! Pa!”—right back to him.

  Despite his flat denial, we know that he did collect at least one tortoise.

  Paul Chambers

  I can’t see why she shouldn’t live to two hundred!

  Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin

  WHEN THE HMS Beagle drops her anchor in 1835, get under the biggest, shadiest frond in sight as fast as you can. Dozens of hungry sailors will jump ship, spears in hand, many lancing their first turpin within minutes. Other men will follow the deep highways of tracks up to the higher points of the island, where hill-dwelling turpin grow longer, saltier necks. In a few hours, they’ll all trudge back to ship, hefting dozens of your kind in makeshift stretchers of oars and canvas. Three men to every heavy shell.

  The earth trembles. A huge man lumbers past with a fifteen-stone turpin on his back, its arms and legs tied into shoulder straps and its shell like a pack. You tuck yourself in, little girl. Be still. Don’t hiss. Not that you have too much to worry about. There’s not enough meat under your dinner-plate shell to merit the tedious chore of turpin-gutting.

  And then, to your right, a set of lighter steps. A pair of clean pants, a slight cough: the “Ship Naturalist.” Before he even sees you, he will sense you. He’ll clear away the brush and yell to the others that it might be wise to bring back a few tiny, young tortoises that will wander the ship for months or years, eventually growing into weeks of meals for every name on the manifest. He’ll pick you up in his small, soft hands without strain. “Tortoise,” he’ll call you, not “turpin.” With your mouth closed, tap your tongue twice and hiss. How fancy.

  He will shortly thereafter name you “Harry,” but don’t doubt that some part of him knows you’re all woman. Feel his delicate touch as he swiftly flips you and runs his fingers along your soft, salty underbelly, scrutinizing each shingle, each shank. Delight in how he hand-feeds you pink flowers. Back in his cabin, he will sketch you by lamplight—the shadow and flame giving your checkered exoskeleton a red-green glow. He will coax your neck from the shell and tickle it, measure it, memorize it, muttering, “Amazing.” Try to whisper back to him—Charlie.

  It turns out that Lawson, the gentleman jailer of the Galapagos penal colony, was your matchmaker. The rumors are true; lonely Lawson’s got a tortoise in every port—girls to whom, in your opinion, he pays an unhealthy attention. You never gave Lawson the time of day, but Charlie does. In his notebook, he scribbles: “Mr. Lawson states he can, on seeing a tortoise, pronounce with certainty from which island it has been brought.”

  I’ll bet he can, you think, looking underneath Charlie’s adorable script to a portrait of you in odalisque, your neck tilted just so. But it’s nice to know Lawson told Charlie you were a catch. Nothing he could find in Africa or the West Indies, and certainly not in England. Now when he eyes you, your unique shell, a wildness stirs in him.

  As the sailors plow through the other tortoises on the Beagle—sometimes three adults for every day at sea—rest easy. They’ll slice each neck in one blow, gulping the gallons of fresh water that spill from each gullet, but remember Charlie’s tacit promise to take you away from all this. Sure, he joins the crew in sipping the bladder of your old neighbor at dinnertime, then comments on her “only very slightly bitter” taste, but he’s doing it to keep you safe, to not arouse suspicions. You’re not dinner; you’re different.

  He’s getting stronger, you think. The planks of the captain’s quarters shake when Charlie bangs his fist on the table. Captain FitzRoy thought he’d hired a seminarian-turned-science-man to come along for the crossing and prove the world made in seven days. A few nights with you, however, and Charlie’s become a charlatan. The two men fight like dogs but Charlie leaves you out of it. Instead, they talk finches:

  “The islands are as old as Genesis,” FitzRoy growls.

  “No,” says Charlie. “These islands are young, and as they multiply, the finches change their beaks to serve it.”

  “Serve an island, not our God?” And the turpin stew goes flying.

  If we can adapt to an ever-changing island, who says we can’t adapt for love, you think. Adaptations, after all, are nothing more than labor: fueled by chemistry, successful only when lauded by a mate. What makes one special, what makes one species, what makes the only changes on the earth that matter—it’s always something love-born: a horn, a neck, a killer claw.

  For we were not born to mate, wallow, and die. We were not born to duplicate the image God threw together long ago, before the earth smoothed or the stars pulled ships through the wet dark. We were born to move—by leap or by creep. To riff and code on a vector. To surprise God as we catch up to the morphing rocks and malleable seas on our own volition.

  Listen to me, Charlie. His pupils move to you and deepen. This is something you already know. Together, you can map the places in the body, the heart, and the blood where God was wrong.

  Two endpoints reconnect and send the vectors in reverse, subtracting shells and snouts and thumbs back to a stock image: the same embryo spinning in the nest of a woman, a salamander, a salmon.

  Once you finally land in England a year later, it’s not exactly featherbeds and mud baths till the wheels fall off. Boxes of corpses—birds, plants, bugs, old rocks—pass through his study, which he piles into groups to be sent out for analysis. Hmmm, you think, chewing wilted watercress. No tortoises. You were the only one he thought to keep, the remains of the others heaved overboard with the slop.

  But that fall, you’ll find yourself in the draftiest room of the British Museum, shivering on a butcher-block table with three other girls about your age. Surprise—you’re all from the Beagle, four secrets stashed away in the gentlemen’s cabins. Even godly Captain FitzRoy had a Galapagos on the sly—Dick, from Española Island, the prettiest of the bunch. On the table, she tucks her head into her shell and weeps, her voice muffled and snuffling.

  I’ve been out in the garden since October. He took a wife the week we docked. A wife!

  At least he doesn’t have kids yet, says Tom, the big girl from San Salvador, who followed a father of three to the Albany West. His brats use me for pony rides.

  John Gray, the museum’s Keeper of Zoology, jostles each of you in his oily hands, then declares your lot too young to assess scientifically. Your shells won’t develop their distinct shapes until full adulthood. “Sorry, Charlie,” he says. “Maybe in thirty, forty years,” he says. “But these finch specimens—yes. Another matter altogether.” Charlie turns away from you and faces the bird box on the opposite laboratory table.

  Oh, God, wait for me, Charlie, you beg. I’ll grow faster. I know I can figure something out. He sends you home to Great Marlborough Street in a hatbox.

  On come the heart problems—his and yours—until his sweet notebooks change temperature. Doodles of beaks and feathers in the margins, and at the top of one page—

  “Marry” on the left side, “Not Marry” on the right:

  “constant companion” “less money for books.”

  “friend in old age “terrible loss of time.”

  (better than a dog, anyhow)”

  He’ll move you in with his doped-up brother and wed his nervous, pious cousin, devoting his days either to her or to the finches. He takes her in a carriage and brand-new hat to the Zoological Society of London, but hides you in his cheap “B Notebook”—heated scribblings he wouldn’t dare be seen with in public. Instead of words like “marry,” “companion,” he writes you words like “specimen,” “transmutation,” “common descent.”

 
; Desperate, you rifle through his letters. “My Dear Gunther,” he writes one reptologist, “I find that I did not bring home any tortoises from the Galapagos.” Now you roll and reel in the yard.

  Soon, wifey will force him to banish you and the other mistresses to the Royal United Services Museum in Whitehall, where London’s gales freeze you into a state of perpetual hibernation. Tom dies. Dick defects to warmer climes. Surely somebody will see you’re sick and get you the hell out of there—away from her, from him, from that notebook that has changed him so. What are you waiting for, my girl? High-tail it back to the boat; beg them to take you home.

  Wickham, the new captain of the Beagle, takes you to Australia instead. You remember him from the trip with Charlie, when he was only first lieutenant, butchering ten turpins an hour just to drain them for lamp oil. Wickham likes the shape of you and takes you in as his.

  The captain’s quarters are far larger than the naturalist’s—a lady should improve her station—but Wickham is disorderly. Upturned inkwells, gnawed turkey bones, loose dickies. You avoid your silhouette, haggard and bulky, in the light from his lantern. Keep calm, honey. Buck up. Gain a few hundred pounds.

  You’ll endure Wickham’s rough touch all the way to the Antipodes. He bobs along the coastline, drawing maps by day and snoring all night. He’s tired of you, he says, resting his cufflinks in a buffed turtle shell. “Don’t you hiss at me, fatty,” he says. “I’m all you got.” The next day, he names a new inlet “Port Darwin” just to spite you.

  The men on deck curl their lips as they sing and swing their ropes into the air. Fists pull; thumbs rotate and chafe. Above you, gulls beat their wings like pterodactyls. Grinning fish trail the boat, chattering as they surface, breathing the air in deep gulps.

  Once you dock, his manservant dumps you on the grounds of a Moreton Bay mental asylum without so much as a thank-you-ma’am. Wickham sashays off to Sydney, marries his sweetheart, becomes a God-fearing policeman. Now you watch those same gulls from the boat circle the grounds before they wing it back out to sea.

  At the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, your roommate, George, understands.

  I say you’re better off without him, she wheezes. Those scientific types are all the same—emotionally incapable of seeing past their own needs. Doesn’t even matter if they marry; they’re only really ever married to their work. Usually it’s because their fathers didn’t show them enough affection. George had it bad for the whaler who brought her over the Pacific. She made the crossing only to get drugged and dragged to a pub in Queensland, where the bastard made her race blinded wallabies for coins through most of the 1850s.

  Damn freak, she says, her voice a lifeless muscle. When George sleeps, you stare at the initials the whaler carved in her shell. Within a year, she’s dead.

  And every day, all the talk is of Charlie—in the mouths of the visitors, the botanists, the apprentices who douse your shell in laundry water after closing time. His book, his fucking finches, his revolution, his ten kids. And eventually, his last words. Not “my love” or even just “my notebook,” or—God be merciful—“my tortoise.”

  He says, “I am not the least afraid to die.”

  A tomato fattens in the sun and breaks the vine, rolling into a scorpion’s nest. The scorpion grows a second, orange-red stinger to scratch a crude, red circle in the dust.

  After the cave salamander wills away his eyes, he feels a gull’s discarded feather float across his tail. He spends the rest of his life begging his sight to return.

  Every morning, before dressing, Charlie would read in his ship cabin. The buttons of the chair left checkered patterns down the flesh of his back.

  So that’s it, babe. You’re forty years shy of middle age and it’s over. If you had the ducts for it, you’d weep a deluge of tortoise tears. But don’t exhaust yourself staying up all night crying; nature will do it for you. The Brisbane River swells all through the first weeks of 1893, then surges in February: three floods in thirteen days. Let yourself tumble in that rising water. Dodge the uprooted trees, and stay close to Dick, the ol’ girl from the Beagle, the only other tortoise left in your gardens. She’s traveled as far and as long as you have, but she’s got more street smarts. Mines explode. Bridges collapse. If this keeps up, they’ll start eating us again, she says.

  The two of you float to a shed’s rooftop and, from that perch, watch the city sink into the rain. Isn’t Brisbane tonight the same dark, the same thick, the same wet as the islands that made you? And guess what? Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day.

  Later that night, Dick smacks you awake. It’s happening! she says, and nods toward the sea wall. Three gunboats, the Paluma, the Elamang and the Mary Evans, spin on their tethers in the vast current, like toy tugs fighting the pull of a drain.

  One ship tears from its mooring and floats sideways toward the botanical gardens, blotting out the moon. The Mary Evans. There’s a woman strapped to its hull with the teats of a cow and the tail of a fish. Swim to her for awhile, fight that current, mind the debris, push outward and upward, survive, survive, survive. But then again, what’s the point? Another ship, another map, another man. Tuck your legs in and sink. You’ll barely feel it when your head hits the prow.

  Charlie wrote pages about his own “fever dreams,” but you never imagined that yours would be cool and windowless. Around you sit strange things in dirty pens: a muskrat with swim fins who lays leathery eggs in the mud. A huge dog that hops and keeps its pups in a furry pocket. A winking cat chewing on the limbs of a tree. A hissing dog with the teeth of a tiger.

  And in the center of it all, Master Fleay, who speaks through his nose and shows the wealthy ladies of Queensland the marks that tiger-dog left on his ass when he tried to capture its image in a little black machine. Another naturalist, but this one’s a grinner, born a century after Charlie, and the first to give you a lady’s name.

  “Go back to sleep, ol’ girl,” he says. “Sleep long as you fancy and leave everything to me. I’ll save you. Better yet, I’ll make you famous.”

  “Ladies?” he gestures to the women around you. I’ve saved the best for last. Isn’t she a beyoot? Harriet is her name. Used to belong to Darwin, she did, back in the last century. But now she is mine, all mine.”

  Snap out of it and into a dry field with a sturdier fence. How long have you been out? Now the sun is relentless; the women around you wear trousers and no hats. Many of them sport square, beetle-black faces with one shiny eye. When the eyes blink, it makes daytime lightning.

  A fully grown man in short pants, named Irwin, hops to either side of you, his hair stuck to his ruddy forehead in wet, blond drips. “CRIKEY!” he yells, then “CRIKEY!” again, like the boys from the asylum, stricken with tics. He holds a few poses for the crowd and their flashing eyeballs: hugging your neck, an elbow on your shell to prop up his flushed chin, straddling you with outstretched arms and mouth open wide. His wet touch is warm, like a baker patting out dough. At the edge of the pen, his long-haired wife grits her teeth.

  He will lead the crowd in a dirgelike “Happy birthday, dear Harry-ette,” then skip a few hundred yards over to the “Crocoseum” for an impromptu reptile freak-out. Watch him bound onto the stage, a baby croc in each hand, shaking them like maracas in the dusty breeze.

  The two crocs roll their bobbling eyes toward your pen: Out of the way, Gran. Irwin tosses you a few pink flowers to gum, and the grimacing wife cuts a huge cake in half, fourths, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. She slices through your name in sugar, as well as your age—the cause for all this celebrating. The numbers in icing read 1-7-5.

  This world has needs, thought the ancient god Manjushri, when he levitated a tortoise just above the primordial sea. As she hovered there, gorgeous and in love, he shot her in the chest with an arrow of gold. The blood, the shit, the fire she vomited married her to the water, creating dirt, lava, rock—all on top of her. This mass spiraled and grew until the entire world rested there. Not on her shell, but on the flat flesh of h
er belly. The future—all our endpoints—landed there too, below the gold beam lodged in her heart. Did that arrow stay stuck, pushing up through the bottom of the planet like a pole? Lie on your back and look up, sweet pea. See how it still tickles you as it spins?

  Look away from the arrow, and there is Charlie 124 years ago, hand to chest, staggering in the woods around Down House.

  Look away, and there is the morning next June that you decide to roll over, switching from backstroke to crawl. It’s heavier today, you’ll think, cringing.

  Look away, and there is Irwin in the Batt Reef ten weeks after that, chasing tail on a Monday afternoon.

  When someone puts a barb in your heart, the worst thing you can do is pull it out.

  These are the birds we immortalize—on our jackets, in our coops, in our lives—because these are the troopers. You know what I mean? Real soldier pigeons.

  Mike Tyson

  GAMBETTA

  It took less than a week for the Prussians to find the secret wire buried in the Seine and to cut it. Then the Parisians tried rolling iron balls stuffed with notes downriver toward Le Havre, but the balls were uncontrollable. And after the five sheepdogs they’d trained to run messages back from the countryside were never seen again, besieged Paris turned to its pigeons.

  Just one look at the birds proved how positively gaudy they were with this beady-eyed desperation to fly back to their lofts at the L’Espérance pigeon club or the Roitelet Society. They’d been beelining home since the Bonapartists, since Genghis Khan, since twenty million years before anything even remotely resembling a Frenchman. So why not stamp an official number under their wings, lift them out of town in one of Paris’s notorious hot-air balloons, and then send them flying back to the walled city? Each of those bird tails could be tied to twelve tiny rolls of microfilm, and each film could bear thousands of messages from the outside world. The birds would just do for Paris what they were already so keen to do for themselves.