Erasmus leaned inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but perhaps you could help me.”
“A visitor!” the third young man said. In his hands he held something that looked like part of a human pelvis. “Come join us.”
“I’m looking for Zechariah Voorhees,” Erasmus said. On the windowsill a tumbler of whiskey caught the light, casting golden rays over bones and books and the huge-canined skulls of Asian swine. The room had the feel of a clubhouse, chaotic and busy, and for a moment he was reminded of the Toxophilites who’d sent the Narwhal off with such a splash.
“You’re a friend?” asked the red-haired man.
“A colleague,” he said; thinking, Brother-in-law? “I missed the lecture, but I heard the Esquimaux were taken sick. I was hoping to help.”
“He was here a minute ago,” said the man with the pelvis in his hand. “But I think he went to fetch the doctor.”
“Where are they?” Erasmus asked. “The Esquimaux.” If these were the men who’d helped carry Annie and Tom, they seemed mightily unconcerned about them now.
“Follow me,” said the man. He looked curiously at Erasmus’s feet, but asked nothing as he led the way to the next room over.
Erasmus knocked, pushing the door open when no one answered. Inside the stuffy room, Annie lay on one narrow cot and Tom on another. A desk and chair and a litter of dirty clothes filled the rest of the space. On the desk was a precarious tower of flat stone slabs, and in the chair a pale young man, already balding, who looked up when Erasmus entered.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” the pale man said. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m nearly deaf.”
“May I come in?” Erasmus said, enunciating clearly. “These are my friends.”
“Whose friend?” the man said, cupping his hand to his ear.
“Annie’s friend,” Erasmus shouted. He made his way past the desk, pushing socks and linen aside with his sticks. Annie’s eyes were closed, but she stirred when Erasmus touched her shoulder. “Tseke?” she said.
“Erasmus. Do you remember me?”
Her skin was very hot. A coarse sheet was pulled up to her chin; when Erasmus turned back the corner he saw that she was naked beneath it, filmed with sweat. Hastily he covered her and checked on Tom. Unclothed as well, he lay on his side, staring at his own hands.
“Where is Tseke?” Annie whispered.
“He’s coming,” Erasmus said. He turned to the pale man. “Who undressed them? Whose room is this?”
“It’s my room,” the man answered. “I’m Fielding, I work here. The explorer who lectured this afternoon is an acquaintance of mine. His Esquimaux collapsed during the lecture—the heat, we think—and he asked if they could rest here until the doctor arrives. She undressed her son and herself, after Zeke left. I stepped outside. Of course. You know them?”
“I’m Zeke’s brother-in-law.”
“You know Zeke!” Fielding said.
“Yes!” Erasmus shouted again, exasperated despite himself. He couldn’t imagine why Zeke had left Annie and Tom in the care of a man who couldn’t hear their requests. “Where is he?”
“Next door,” Fielding said. “With the others.”
Through the wall Erasmus could hear the young men’s voices. “He’s not,” he said. Then he gave up trying to explain and concentrated on Annie and Tom. He found a jug of water near the door and dampened his handkerchief, dabbing at Annie’s face and Tom’s face and hands. Fielding hovered, polite but useless. “Do you suppose they’re really sick?” he asked. “The fellows next door told me they were just overheated.”
“You have eyes—look at them.”
Fielding shrugged and stepped back to his desk. “I don’t have much experience with women and children,” he said. “I’m in here all the time . . . the other scientists never want me to drink with them and we disagree about almost everything.” He lifted a thin slab of stone, pointing to something that looked like a crinoid. “What I think about this,” he said.
“Please,” Erasmus said. “Not now.” He heard feet pounding up the stairs, and then Zeke was in the room.
“Where have you been?” Erasmus asked, just as Zeke said, “What are you doing here?” After glaring at each other for a silent moment, they both bent over Annie.
Annie was someplace hot and dark, streaked with red, filled with noise and the smell of blood. She was a seal who’d come up for a breath of air and met a bear; the bear had been waiting and she was caught by surprise; there was a blow and then burning. She tried to heave herself back in the cool water but she was being dragged across the ice. She was being bitten. She was being eaten. She moaned and turned and opened her eyes and her son was staring at her. The worst thing about what was happening to her body was the way it kept her from protecting him. But her journey must mean something, her reasons for coming with Zeke must be true.
The piece of peculiar ice her mother had seen had turned out to be a thing called mirror; more were on the ship, and in the building full of dead insects and birds. She and her son had inched up to those mirrors, stared into them, touched each other’s reflections. In the room below, before she’d stumbled and fallen and been unable to rise, she’d seen herself reflected in the watching people’s eyes. She’d been sent here like a shard of splintered mirror, she thought, to capture an image of the world beyond her home.
“Annie,” Zeke said. “Can you hear me?”
“Is the doctor coming?” Erasmus asked.
Annie heard their voices but not their words. The strangers’ language left her and she longed for someone to say her real name and speak to her in real words, but these large figures murmured incomprehensibly. One was Zeke, a walking finger who pointed at her and then turned into the barrel of a rifle. The rifle had brought her tribe meat and fed the children. But the rifle was a finger and the finger was Zeke, who had not understood his connection to the other fingers, the hand, the wrist, the body that was her tribe. The body that had once been her. When she coughed a bullet seemed to enter her lungs.
Her son asked in their shared language if they could go home now. One of the bears took the other by the shoulder and both stepped out of view, leaving only a white figure, a little white fox, behind. The fox put his paws on a piece of stone. A fox might follow a bear, waiting for scraps from the kill. She closed her eyes again. At home, she thought, her body would be wrapped in skins and carried away from the huts, then laid on the ground with a rock for her pillow. Around her someone would place her soapstone cooking pots, each one broken into pieces, and her needles and thread and her ulo, all she’d need for her life beyond. Over her body a vault of rocks would be built. Over her jawbones the wind might play a song.
“He’s here,” Zeke said. “Right behind me.” He turned and beckoned to the doctor; Fielding tiptoed away.
Brisk and gray-haired and competent, the doctor felt Annie’s pulses, rolled down her lower eyelids, and slid his arm beneath her covering sheet. “Enlarged liver,” he said. His hand crept beneath the cloth. “Enlarged spleen.” He moved over to Tom and repeated his investigations, asking Zeke how long these people had been away from their home, where they’d been staying, when their symptoms had first appeared. He made a note when Zeke described the site of the Repository.
“Near a river and a creek?” He felt the sides of Annie’s neck. “Most likely it’s a miasmatic bilious fever,” he said. “Normally you’d see a yellowing of the skin, but of course on them . . . you can see, though, the way the whites of their eyes have yellowed.”
“Can I move them?” Zeke asked.
“Carefully,” the doctor said. “And not far.” He rummaged in his bag, pulling out boxes and vials. “Preparation of Peruvian bark,” he said. “Decoction of boneset as an emetic, a calomel purgative to relieve congestion of the liver, a diaphoretic in an effervescing draught—we’ll try to break the fever with these. Then they need to rest in a clean, dark, well-aired room.”
“I talked to a fr
iend here in Washington,” Zeke said. “He’s willing to let us stay with him for a few days.”
“Not one of those young men,” Erasmus protested. “They’re hardly more than children.”
Zeke shook his head. “Someone else,” he said. “A physical anthropologist who’s in charge of a whole section—he has a big house a few blocks from here, servants, spare rooms. His children are grown and his wife is very . . . tolerant. He’s had Indians from the Andes staying with him before.”
“That sounds suitable,” the doctor said. “I can call on you twice daily there. I want to bleed them now; this almost always helps.” He looked down at Annie and Tom. “Race does modify the action of remedies, though.”
Erasmus leaned against the desk, watching as Zeke held the basins and lancets and helped the doctor spoon a dark brown liquid into Annie and Tom. He had a real affection for them, Erasmus saw.
Afterward Annie and Tom looked more comfortable. “Go out for a bit,” the doctor said. “I want to listen to their bowels.”
In the narrow hall, with the stairwell yawning below them, the two men regarded each other. “I can’t believe you brought them here in this condition,” Erasmus said. “You have to cancel the rest of the tour.”
“I already have,” Zeke said. His hair was glowing like a helmet. “Did you come here just to tell me that? I know they’re sick, I’ll take care of them. I’m not a monster.”
Erasmus had planned to say something about the conditions in the Repository, which Alexandra had described to him; about his impressions of the Philadelphia exhibition; about Lavinia, left alone so Zeke could trot around accumulating fame. Then he thought of the way Annie’s first words, whenever he saw her, were always “Where is Tseke?”
“Let me stay with you and Annie and Tom,” he said. “I want to help them.”
“There’s nothing you can do to help,” Zeke said. “I’ll be with them, though.” He peered over the railing, apparently fascinated by the zigzagging flights of stairs. “You can visit them all you want, when they’re better. But you can see for yourself how sick they are. You’re not a doctor—what can you do?”
He reached over and flicked one of Erasmus’s sticks with his thumb. “You belong at home,” he said. “You always did.”
The stick rose, until the tip was pointed at Zeke’s right knee; Erasmus couldn’t help this, his arm did it, it had no connection to him. “I belong at home?” If the stick swung, at just the right angle, Zeke would topple, topple. “I’m not the one . . .”
“Stop worrying,” Zeke said. He leaned over and pressed on Erasmus’s forearm, pushing the stick back to the ground. “At least until they regain their health, I’m done with this tour.”
Behind them the door opened. “I’m finished,” the doctor said. “If you’d like, you can come back in.”
“I want to talk to Annie,” Erasmus said to Zeke. “I want her to tell me what she wants. Let me see her alone for a minute.” Without waiting for an answer he backed into the room.
“Annie?” he said. “What can I do for you? Tell me how I can help.”
“Tseke?” Annie said yet again.
“Erasmus,” he said.
She opened her eyes. The whites were filmed with yellow—as was the rest of her, he thought, peering more closely at her face. It wasn’t true what the doctor had said; the sickness glazed her normal color and gave her a slight greenish tinge, as if she’d been dusted with lichen spores.
“Oh,” Annie said. “You.”
Over the windows the curtains lifted, reaching toward the bed. She turned her head into the breeze and closed her eyes. “Go home,” she said faintly.
For a minute more he gazed at her. She said nothing else. Perhaps she had gone to sleep. Tom too had his eyes closed; the curtains lifted and fell, lifted and fell, refusing to give Erasmus an answer. He gave up and returned to the hall.
“It’s you she wants,” he told Zeke bitterly. You Lavinia wants, he thought. “She keeps asking for you.”
“I’ll take care of them,” Zeke said. “I promise.”
He ran a thumb over his bushy eyebrows. Erasmus stood before him, hot and miserable. Not a breath of breeze moved through this windowless hall.
“I need her,” Zeke said. “I’ve learned a lot from her, she’s been helping me with my book.” He bit off a fragment of thumbnail and dropped the shard down the stairwell. “It’s going to be good,” he said. “Personal, a sort of adventure tale—my encounters with the Esquimaux, my last vision of the Narwhal. It’s going to be like Dr. Kane’s book, only more interesting, more dramatic.”
Erasmus’s stomach knotted and rose. Why were they talking about this now, with Annie and Tom lying sick next door? They had never talked about anything, not Dr. Boerhaave’s death or Ned’s nose or all that might have been prevented if only Zeke hadn’t been determined to head north. And now, now . . . my encounters, my vision. The lecture in Philadelphia had been shaped exactly this way. Erasmus said, “Why would you write an account that pretends all the rest of us weren’t there?”
“You’re all in it,” Zeke said. “But no more than you deserve to be. Minor, minor characters.”
“I haven’t written about you,” Erasmus said. “I didn’t think that would be fair.”
“What’s fair?” Zeke said. “Was it fair that you abandoned me? Is it fair that I have nothing left, except the story I tell? You can’t know what it was like for me up there. Coming back to the ship, finding you’d all walked out on me: it was very—clarifying. I learned who I could depend on. No one. No one but myself. You . . .”
The contempt in his eyes was shocking. “You’re nothing. Not in the book. Not to me.”
In his hands Erasmus felt the walking sticks dancing, as if the floor had metamorphosed into the open sea. “I may be nothing,” he said. “But at least I don’t destroy whatever I touch. What you’re doing to Annie and Tom . . .”
Zeke stretched his arms over his head, opening and closing his fingers. “Go home,” he said. “No one needs you here. I’ll take care of Annie and Tom.”
ANNIE WAS IN a room. Her son was in another; Zeke came and went between them. At home the angekok sought his visions in a hollow hidden in thick ice grounded on the shore; she pulled the white curtains of the canopied bed around her and imagined ice. The doctor came; the man who owned this house came. The servants, as fearful and disdainful as those in the house to which Zeke had first brought her, sponged her body and brought her food, which she didn’t touch. The doctor forced pills and liquid between her teeth, some kind of poison. No one would listen to her. Not the doctor, not Zeke; not even Erasmus, who’d asked what she needed but then turned his back and disappeared when she’d said, I want to go home. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Her body would never go home now and she must do what she could for her son. A white cloth over the bed, white cases over the pillows; she had little time; she worked. The great power, the angekok had once told her, comes only after struggle and concentration. By the strength of her thought alone, she must strip her body of flesh and blood and be able to see herself as a skeleton. Each bone, each tiny bone, clear before her eyes. Then the sacred language would descend, allowing her to name the parts of her body that would endure. When she named the last bone she’d be free; her spirit could travel and she could watch over her son. She burrowed under the white cloth and squeezed shut her eyes, beginning the terrible process of shedding her flesh. Let me be bone, she thought. Like the long narwhal spines at home, the walrus skulls, the delicate ribs of the seals. White bone.
THE LESS ALEXANDRA worked on the thing she most loved, the more her family appreciated her. The easiest days were those on which she didn’t try to work at all. When she stopped looking so fiercely for a moment she might call her own, when she stopped rushing through her household tasks and simply gave into them, the days had a reasonable rhythm. And it was lovely, in a way, when her family thanked her—yet at night she weighed those thanks against the nagging sense that she’
d wasted another set of precious hours. Her family won during the days of Erasmus’s absence. But as soon as she saw him again, she regretted every lost minute.
At the engraving firm, he told her Annie and Tom were sick. Which was terrible, but at least their condition had forced Zeke to stop the exhibitions. Zeke was looking after them and would soon bring them home, where he’d settle down to work on a book that was almost done, and in which Erasmus had no place.
“In his book,” Erasmus said, “I am—he said I am a minor character.” He peered over Alexandra’s shoulder. “That’s excellent,” he said. “Our book will be beautiful. You’ve caught the gills and the scales exactly.”
They spent long hours at their desks, working in a kind of splendid trance. Erasmus wrote ten, twelve, twenty pages a day; Alexandra’s drawings accumulated and when they visited Copernicus they found the second painting done, and two more started. Around them the firm was humming, as if their frenzy were contagious. Humboldt concluded negotiations for the plates for a new encyclopedia, which seemed more than usually lucky as businesses elsewhere closed. Pleased with themselves, they all gathered one afternoon in the main office to celebrate over a drink.
The brothers, Alexandra saw, had settled into a new relationship. Perhaps it was their enforced proximity, or the way Erasmus worked so hard, with such clear purpose, and never complained about the small corners allotted to him. Or perhaps Linnaeus and Humboldt, cast for years as the steady, uninteresting middle brothers, were secretly pleased to be doing favors for the eldest. Linnaeus, in particular, seemed to relish his new role. He gave Erasmus frequent advice, visited Lavinia three times each week, no longer criticized Alexandra’s work.
He was with Lavinia now; they lingered over their sherry while they waited for him. There would be an awkward moment, Alexandra knew, when Linnaeus would report that Lavinia was fine, but that she still didn’t want to see Erasmus. It would be awkward, but it would pass. At six-thirty Linnaeus entered the office. Waving away the glass Humboldt held out to him, he flopped down in an armchair, very pale.
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 33