The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Jane interjects before he says something crass. “Have you read the book?” There is a large pressboard mock-up of The Lost Gardens of England staring down at them from over Duncan’s shoulder.

  “Nah. You?”

  Jane nods.

  “What’s his name again, anyway?” Duncan takes another sip of wine and squints into the distance. “Is it Wallace?”

  “William,” Jane says, scanning the crowd. She can feel the muscles of her face trying to approximate indifference. “William Eliot.”

  Names are the most valuable things. We have always said this. They are more valuable than the clocks, books, photographs and objects we find ourselves circling; more important than the tortoise behind the musicians, than the logbook and slivers of wood from Nelson’s ship in the nautical cabinet beside us. Names are pronouncements, entries, claims. Where things hold secrets—ones the people passing through the Chester do not always seek out—names state. They say, I was, I am. When the Chester first opened, it was the things that were highlighted: the wadded birds that could be stroked so that their feathers’ remiges and vanes might be felt under the tip of a finger, the sea sponge modelled in glass that could be lifted toward a lamp and turned over, its latticework marvelled at. The pickaxe the explorer Hoburn carried on his expedition north was once swung through the air by the nephew of a Society member, one swift swish that startled everyone. Back then, names mattered less because the men attached to them still lived. But Edmund Chester knew better. He forecasted a future rife with forgetting. As much as we love his museum, as much as we love Jane, we must admit that if we thought in terms of currency, and if fluttering were allowed, we would pick up the gold astronomical clock in our hands, we would secrete Jane away and we’d hold them both ransom for names. To have lost the thing that you have carried with you the whole of your life is no slight thing. This is why we stand around Jane’s desk and crane our necks when she flips through censuses or logs, church registers, hospital records or ship manifests. We are looking for the slightest scrap of a signature, any blotted bit of ink we might know. Some of us mouth the names she writes down to see if the form they take is familiar, to see if we can slip into them like we would our own coats or favoured pair of shoes.

  A day or two before Jane met Lewis at The Lamb to tell him about William Eliot’s lecture, the suggestion arose that we should all take names. It was evening, and we were in Jane’s flat and still reeling from news of the closure. One of us said that taking names would help us sort out who was who, be an expedient way to reference the speaker. He was over by the bookshelf perusing the spines, and after a minute he said, “Call me John.” Most of us are superstitious and so we hesitated.

  The theologian said, “No.”

  “I think we should all have a say,” John countered.

  “Ah, democracy, excellent choice,” said the idiot.

  It was almost ten o’clock and Jane was curled up on the sofa. There was an old black-and-white film on the television and she’d been drifting in and out of sleep. The dog was flopped down by the door, nosing the draft from the landing.

  “What exactly is the motion?” the theologian asked from the window.

  “That we take names,” John said, “like I just did.”

  “Pseudonyms,” the theologian corrected.

  “What’s that?” asked the girl, who was sitting on the floor watching the tail end of a commercial for mobile phones.

  “It’s sort of like a nickname, like the one the poet gave me. Except that it’s an assumed name, an alias,” Cat said.

  “You mean made up?”

  Cat glanced at the television. The movie had come back on and the two main actors were facing each other, a man and a woman pretending to be real people, pretending to be in love. “Yes,” she said, “made up.”

  “It’s a false name,” the theologian added warily, not even bothering to turn around.

  “What’s the harm in voting?” John asked. “Who’s with me?”

  A few of us raised our voices, started to argue. The poet cleared his throat.

  “Stop talking!” the boy shouted. “We’re trying to watch the telly!”

  Sam stood up and gave a low growl.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Cat said.

  “Who started the dog up?” the theologian asked.

  “My point exactly,” said John.

  “Pay attention!” the boy seethed, turning back toward the screen.

  We stopped talking and gathered around the television. The couple was now in a convertible driving along the coast. The woman had a silk scarf over her hair, the tip of it flapping lightly in the wind. They started to argue and the man jerked the wheel, pulling the car over to the side of the road under a cloud of dust. The woman threatened to get out. When the dust settled the man knocked his cap back with his knuckle and drew the actress toward him. She turned away and the music rose a notch.

  “Haydn!” the musician shouted, figuring it out at last.

  “It was better during the car chase.” The boy sighed.

  Over by the door the dog slid his forelegs forward, his chest hitting the hardwood with a thump.

  “What about the names?” John asked.

  “Let’s wait a bit longer,” we said, still watching the movie. “See what happens.”

  “Right,” John said tersely. “Meaning wait and see what happens to me.”

  It was the next day, or maybe the day after, that we went with Jane to meet Lewis at The Lamb. We remember the day almost as clearly as Jane does because of what she said at the end of it. She’d arrived at the pub early and instead of entering sat on the heath across the road to pass the time. A few of us lay on the green beside her, watching the clouds sweep overhead like lantern slides. Others sat by the pond and drifted into else-wheres: parks from childhood, village squares, meadows in some other when.

  It was a Sunday, and when we went inside the pub it was quiet: a few couples finishing lunch by the windows, two men at the bar. Jane bought a pint and slid into a snug surrounded by diamonds of stained glass.

  “Right,” one of us said, picking up the thread of the conversation we’d been having on the heath, “so if everything Ceases eventually—”

  “Not a hypothetical,” the theologian interjected.

  “If everything Ceases, then why are we still here?”

  “Because,” the theologian snapped, “we’ve chosen to be here.”

  “To what end?” John asked.

  “Love,” sang Cat.

  “Fear,” the poet ventured. “The alternative being unthinkable.”

  The one we call the idiot sighed and said wearily, “Listen. Matter is equivalent to energy, it cannot be lost; it can only be transferred. The physical system, endowed as it is with an unobserved quantity—”

  The theologian clapped his hands together. “Who’s up for today’s pub quiz?”

  “I am!” Cat said.

  “Fine. Ready? Tell us something you like. First thing that springs to mind.”

  “Cats,” she shouted. This was her usual answer.

  “Excellent. Anyone else?”

  “Chopin!”

  “Good, next?”

  “Those white sweets with green inside. What is that?”

  “Mint,” we said.

  “Anyone else?”

  Beside us Jane lifted her glass and took a sip, wiped a daub of froth from her lip with her finger.

  “Stout!” a gruff old voice shouted, a voice we rarely heard. And, happy for him, we cheered.

  Duncan excuses himself to head to the bar and Jane stays where she is, at the edge of the gathering, the door that leads to the staff offices a quick twenty paces behind her. Some of the crowd are migrating to their seats and the music has become more sombre as if it is trying to lull the audience into a more attentive state of mind.

  From where she is standing Jane can sometimes see Gareth’s head as he moves around the room shaking hands. He doesn’t have anyone with him, which m
eans that William isn’t here yet. Twice Gareth has moved in the direction of the front door and Jane’s pulse has started racing—but in both instances he then steered toward another circle of people. The second group includes a tall redhead with a glint of diamonds on her neck, a woman who Jane realizes is Dr. Osborne, the science director William works with at the Natural History Museum. If Lewis had come, if Jane had let him, Dr. Osborne is exactly the kind of person he’d be interested in talking to. He’d have launched into some specialized topic with the doctor—phylogenies or evolutionary convergence—forgetting that it is his job to protect Jane.

  What Jane remembers now about the day she met Lewis at The Lamb is how relieved she was to talk with him. He’d tossed his car keys onto the table and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, his face smelling soapy and clean.

  “Sorry I’m late. Natalie just got back from yoga and I had the girls.”

  Jane hadn’t seen him in two weeks and he had a new haircut, his brown locks cropped in a vaguely Roman style with a short horizontal fringe. “All hail Caesar,” she said as he flopped onto the bench.

  He stretched his long legs out under the table. “You look good.”

  Jane crossed her eyes and made a face. Lewis was playing nice. He always played nice—the little brother with the big house, lovely wife and brilliant kids, trying to bolster his cloistered sister.

  After the first round of pints Lewis broached the situation with the Chester. He put his feet on the bench beside Jane and said, “Well, the upshot is, if the museum closes and you don’t find work right away, we’ll probably see you more. The girls miss their auntie.”

  Jane mustered a smile, wanting him to believe she’d been sufficiently encouraged. “I was thinking I might go up to the cottage if I can’t find anything straight away, air the place out, go through mum’s things. We have to start thinking about selling it.”

  “I know. But if we do—if—I’d still want to wait until the market’s better. You want the Merc?”

  “If you can spare it.”

  “Gran left it to both of us.” Lewis tapped his fingers on the table; clean white crescent moons.

  “So how goes the—?” Jane narrowed her eyes trying to remember what bird he was on now.

  “Pigeon?” he offered.

  “Wasn’t it a starling?”

  “We finished that weeks ago. Now we’re on to passenger pigeons.”

  “Very sexy.” She plucked a petal off the daisy hanging out of the finger vase in front of her.

  Lewis picked up his coaster and flung it at her head. “I don’t make fun of your narwhal horns.”

  “It’s a narwhal tooth.”

  “Actually, you’d like this pigeon. We got it frozen—from an American zoo of all places—so we’re working from that.”

  “Aren’t passenger pigeons the ones that carry little scrolled-up messages in tubes around their neck?”

  Lewis tilted his head, trying to decide if she was having him on. “Leg, Jane, around their leg. You’re thinking of the carrier pigeon—or a St. Bernard. The passenger is extinct. Ka-put. Gone.”

  • • •

  Most of us paid attention when Lewis spoke about work. We had enjoyed the field trip we took with Jane to his new lab outside the city, recalled the strange feeling we had watching computer screens in white rooms sequence creatures we only knew as corporeal things: bodies we saw flit through woods, peck across lawns, ones we saw wired in the cases of the museum. We were like the school kids who came to the Chester, overwhelmed and giddy; the theologian like an obstinate teacher asked to surrender control of his class. While the rest of us wandered in our little group from lab to lab, the theologian paced along a walkway that overlooked a clipped lawn bordered by tear-shaped hedges. In the atrium, Lewis had introduced Jane to a colleague called Shiro, who bowed stiffly before escorting her toward the aviary. His guided tour was rehearsed. He recited a string of statistics and findings, said that there were five international teams vying for the full genome patents of each avian species. “Every day is a race,” Shiro added, swiping his pass to access a room at the back of the facility, “and right now we are in second place.”

  When the tour was done, Jane rejoined Lewis in the lab where his team was working. He pointed to a multicoloured pattern of squares running down his computer screen and said, “This is the kingfisher.”

  One of us whistled three times and then flapped both arms in the air.

  “Whoosh!” shouted another from a different computer, as if the bright pattern on that screen had suddenly swerved into a bird wing and the bird had lifted off.

  “Cheep cheep,” said a third—for no reason we could discern—and soon we were all flitting about and cackling with laughter.

  That day at The Lamb, listening to Lewis talk about his work, most of us felt happy. We liked to think about the afterlife of birds, the idea that a scroll of data on a computer might one day bring the passenger pigeon back into the world. The theologian was less enthused. He turned to those of us standing around the snug and said grittily, “I would like the record to show, once and for all, that birds, like all living things, are tangles of DNA and that we, to the best of our knowledge, are not, so we ought not to care about whether Lewis’s lab maps the genome of every living thing on the planet or makes toasters.”

  “Atomus,” said the idiot, “from the Greek for indivisible. Matter being what it is, it is plausible that we—”

  Cat yawned loudly. A ruckus broke out by the cigarette machine. The one who never speaks began waving his arms up and down vigorously.

  “See?” John said. “We’re not so unlike Lewis’s pigeons.”

  “I fail to see the analogy,” the theologian said stiffly.

  The arm waving increased and the flurry of commotion drew closer. The daisy bobbed its head in its vase and Jane’s napkin drifted off her lap and onto the floor.

  “Enough!” the theologian snapped.

  “Who put you in charge?” John asked.

  All of us stopped what we were doing except for the one flapping over by the wall. Jane picked up her napkin.

  “Are you saying you ought to be in charge?”

  “Maybe,” John said.

  “And you actually think you’re fit for the job?”

  “As fit as you.”

  “As fit as me? Sorry, but we are not equals, John,” the theologian said. “I am not like you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’m not mad.”

  A woman in a light-pink summer jacket who’d been sitting at a table by the door walked through the group of us toward the loo. We shuddered, could smell the laundry soap on her clothes, the trace of a lemon wedge on her fingers. Whenever a physical form moved quickly through our throng—or we through it—a feeling of disarray came over us.

  “What’s ‘mad’?” asked the girl.

  “Or who,” said the poet.

  “It’s a kind of preoccupation,” said the one with the soft voice.

  “It’s everything-all-at-one-time,” Cat added.

  “Well, we have that in common,” John said, watching the door the woman in the pink jacket had gone through. “We’re all susceptible to moving forms, which means we’re all—”

  “Twoo, twoo,” insisted the voice by the cigarette machine.

  “Dear God,” said the musician.

  And the arm waving started again, except this time Cat joined in, and then John, and even the boy cried caw-caw as he staggered around the pub like a monster.

  Jane takes a glass of white wine from a waiter’s tray and wanders to the back of the hall to stand by the Vlasak cabinet while she waits for the lecture to start. She can see Gareth milling around by the bar, sipping Mortlach from his private stash and chatting up Randall Wood, the Chester Prize’s co-founder. A few acquaintances from other museums come by to talk with Jane, stay for a minute or two asking after work prospects, and then, finding Jane anxious and distracted, excuse themselves to circulate amongst the
crowd. When no one is looking, Jane turns toward the side of the mahogany cabinet and drains the last half of her glass of wine, closing her eyes at the calming effect.

  “Brilliant,” the theologian says. “Here we go again.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Cat snaps. She moves toward Jane, as if to put her arms around her.

  A few minutes later, Gareth passes through the crowd near Jane and raises a hand in greeting; his tufty white eyebrows flare up as if to say, What are you doing back here? Then he slips between a woman in a red jacket and a man in a grey suit, moving in the direction of the main door. Jane calculates that he’s probably seen William arrive and is going to greet him. She starts for the bar.

  “What do we do?” Cat asks.

  “Abandon ship,” the musician says.

  “Ka-pow, ka-pow,” shoots the boy, and the girl standing next to him whispers, “Stop it.”

  “And the handbook says?” This is the theologian’s favourite quip, his way of taking pleasure in our confusion, as if there were a handbook, as if we could even open it if such a thing existed.

  “We stay with her,” the one with the soft voice says, and the poet throws his arms overhead and intones: “And so to enter the last chamber of the ungated world.”

  When Lewis came back from the bar that day at The Lamb, dropping a last round of pints on the table and plunking himself down on the bench, Jane closed her eyes tight and said the one thing she’d been holding back. “William Eliot’s written a book.” Then she opened an eye to gauge the expression on his face.

  When Jane was growing up, Lewis was the only person other than Clive who’d let her talk openly about what had happened with Lily. But ever since he and Natalie had the girls, she’d been unsure how the mention of Lily would sit with him. As soon as William’s name was out of her mouth, she was sorry she’d said it.

  “A book on what?” Lewis looked peeved.

  “Victorian plant hunters.” She moved the pint Lewis had set in front of her closer and a dollop of stout slopped over the side.