The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  “I am,” I replied with suspect emphasis, brushing my hand in a sort of caress along her arm. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well,” she said, “sometimes you don’t seem to be all here.”

  “Here?” I asked guiltily.

  “Here. At dinner the other night with the Wanstap woman, you barely had anything to say.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought I was … right there.”

  “It’s not a complaint,” she told me, “I just wonder whether you’re well?”

  I assured her I felt fine and promised I’d catch up on some missed or fobbed-off medical appointments when we got back to Sydney.

  “Are you bored, then?” she persisted.

  “What could I be bored with?” I was reckless enough to ask.

  “With your job.”

  “What sort of ungrateful bastard would be bored by my job?”

  “If you’re bored, you’re bored,” Cath replied. “It’s existential. I sometimes suspect you feel you can’t say it because your father stuck out a boring job. But if you’re bored and going through the motions, that’s the reality.”

  “I do feel facile,” I ventured. “But I’m not bored.”

  Certainly not in a world that contained Louisa!

  “Outsiders are the best judge of your work. And they’ve already pre-bought what you’ll shoot. Maybe your ‘facile’ is profundity to them. Why can’t you just take what comes your way?”

  I asked her would she like to come with me on a walk across the island later. It seemed to me to be a gesture of sanity on my part. “I think I’ll stick to the lowlands for now, Shel,” she replied. In fact, her right knee had a surgical wound down the middle where her kneecap had been replaced. I thought of our combined scars and atoms adding up to all this madness I was feeling.

  Angelo and I conferred. He and his crew would film the avenue of jaws from the shore and then from amidst its ritual grandeur, and I would take my Sony inland and climb the hill behind and film the gigantic blob of whale and the village from above.

  As I set out, the tundra growth looked shallow, but it soon proved to be a dense, waist-deep mesh of shrubs. The arctic flowers, yellow and purple and blue and tufted white, bloomed only six weeks a year and were a symbol of all things transient and ephemeral, which deserved to be lovingly filmed.

  My path took me up the slope of the mountain and along the spur and down via a shallow valley to another beach just a little way from the village. I struggled through the tough tundra growth and I saw a line of passengers rising up the hip of the hill on a course bound to cross mine. An infallible thrill washed over me when I realized that Louisa was ahead of the others, though not far enough to promise we would have any privacy when she reached me. I kept forcing my way uphill and eventually she neared me, panting. After our greetings she asked a banal question about the filming, but every word was freighted with weighty meaning.

  “This country is a test,” she said, her blue eyes alight.

  “I thought I’d get the long shot of the avenue,” I said as everything vital in me seemed to crowd up into the base of my throat.

  “The flowers are out too,” I added as the others caught up.

  “Purple saxifrage,” Louisa remarked. “Very tough. Always the first to come out in the summer. Do you mind if we go with you, Shelby?”

  I wondered if Cath would see my expeditionary orange parka blooming beside Louisa’s lilac on the escarpment.

  We all struggled forward, bending foliage and apologizing when it sprang back and lashed the walkers behind us. It took forty minutes of such wrestling to get to the summit, but it was worth it to see the whole compass of the island below, with the huge adornment of the thoroughfare with its great skulls, jawbones, and vertebrae. I began to film before we properly had our breath. Turning the camera west, I saw something unwelcome in the form of Professor Silver stumbling up from the blind side of the island.

  “Ahoy there!” he called as if it were the most original greeting shipmates had ever given each other, carrying with him that air of being a man thoroughly happy. Does he have a former wife somewhere who thought him the most boring and monochrome of men? I meanly wondered. He was not puffing much either for a fellow who had forced his way across the tundra.

  “Do you mind if I get some straight footage of the mainland?” I asked with suppressed irritation.

  “Oops,” he said, ornately lunging out of frame.

  The other walkers sensed my annoyance and drifted away.

  When it was time to descend, I followed Louisa and the others, and was soon wallowing in waist-deep bracken again. The sun was bright. There was heat and the vivid little flowers shone appealingly, and I sank down to plant level to film while, nearby, Silver chattered away.

  I sweated plentifully on the lower slopes, trapped in the dense Arctic heath, struggling like a fly in honey. Out on the shingle, I went along the shore to reconnect with Angelo and the crew and discuss whether we had enough. Angelo said he had shot four thousand feet.

  Louisa and Cath had long since left the beach. That did not mean I would avoid doing something crazed when I got aboard again. It was not that I had every intention to do so. It was that I believed doing something crazed was unavoidable. I was a convinced lemming. I was in love with the precipice.

  Back in our cabin Cath and I took turns in the shower. She was solid in her half-naked movements. Her breasts were gourds. On top of all my other grief, I was in a state of frantic grief that in recent times they had gone too infrequently caressed, thinking Cath deserved a better lover.

  Back in our cabin after dinner, I told Cath that I had Arctic insomnia and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I apologized that I was going to sit up.

  After kissing her treacherously I left the cabin and went forward past the lounge. I hoped Louisa would be in her cabin, but not profoundly asleep, as I paced up and down the starboard side and the stern framing my exorbitant speeches. I did not look at a watch, but at a given and emphatic instant, I turned inside, and waited awhile before reentering the soft hum of the interior of the ship.

  Louisa’s cabin was one deck below ours, and I took the stairs, every step feeling momentous and possibly irreversible. Standing in the slightly bilious fluorescent light at the head of her corridor, I breathed awhile, storing up oxygen for my bravery and planned eloquence. The seventh cabin was Louisa’s, and I was about to make my way towards it when I saw someone enter the corridor from the direction of the aft stairs. I stepped back amongst the red curtains that screened the functional doors to the crew’s quarters. And from here I saw it was Silver making his casual way down the corridor, without having seen me. He looked a little ridiculous, with both arms extended as if the ship were rocking considerably, which it was not on tonight’s millpond Bering Sea. He was pensive and hesitant as he paused in front of a cabin and gave a discreet little knock. It was Louisa’s cabin. Now I understood his almost sportive gait. The door opened to him, and I saw him touch Louisa’s face, then he started kissing her. The door closed.

  “Nooooooo!” I howled, without much sound, dropping to my knees. If anyone had seen me during these demonstrations, they would have presumed I was suffering some sort of cardiac or vascular episode. And I found the necessary voice to plead, again over the murmur of the ship’s engines, “No! Louisa! Louisa, no!” My mouth was in a rictus and I pounded the floor, carpeted here, with my hands.

  After a while I got up with resolve and took myself to Louisa’s door. But as I went to knock, all intention left me, all vigor, all plans, and all madness. I slumped against the opposing wall and slid myself along it. I had no idea and no care that anyone, observing, would think my dragging and stumbling in any way comic. It is painful to admit that I now considered pitching myself into the Bering Sea just to deal with this crisis of grief and emptiness. In a few breaths and a few seconds, however, I felt myself return to my flesh, and then I straightened and took the stairs thinking, Christ, I’m tired. And I remembered, as the
first thing I could rejoice in, that tomorrow was a day of cruising towards the Aleutians, back to the islands of the American Inuit.

  In our cabin Cath was deeply asleep in her bunk. I managed to take off my outer clothes before I got into my bunk, and allowed myself to be sucked into oblivion.

  * * *

  We ended the journey with the shoot in the bag and the duty of editing ahead.

  During the final stages of the voyage I would see Louisa chatting with the two friends I’d seen her with at the carousel in Nome, and with the older couple, but there was no hint of her Silver association, and no hint of what it meant—nothing, something, everything. These were illimitable questions I was sick of rehearsing. Had she chosen Silver recreationally? Or had she sought him out because I, who had uttered such exorbitant pledges to her once, was around playing the dutiful husband? Or did her turning to Silver represent something about her marriage, or about mine? Or did it all mean nothing? The way Silver had been drawn into the cabin did not seem to bespeak any grand impulse on his part, and suggested sexual opportunism on hers. Had he been co-opted like a servant at that door, rather than entering as an equal partner? He seemed to have blundered into a great gift, and been a sexual lottery winner. It might be Silver’s very lack of gifts and charms and adornments that she had chosen. Or were there merits in the fellow I hadn’t perceived?

  Such were the grand issues that ran through my mind. I am afraid compassion for the Inuit had very little part of my conscious life. And when I was not engaged in those ridiculous, vain, and unrequitable debates with myself, I was a studied and guilt-struck valet to Cath.

  Like all fools I thought I had managed the deception, until the ship docked, and our bus to the airport stopped for the toilets near a river up which red-flanked salmon were trying to ascend. I watched them, all at once more concerned for the salmon than I had been for most people on the entire journey. These muscular fishes attempted the leap up the falls below the bridge. I felt, of course, that I had a lot in common with the leaping, striving salmon, and thus a kind of dull fraternity with Silver, a leaper in his own right. It was wonderful to see the salmon make the jump successfully, but a dreadful thing to see those milling in the ponds beneath the falls, their skin turning perceptibly from rosy to gray. Every time they jumped and failed to make the falls, their coloration grew duller. They thrashed in the pools of denial. They seemed robust still, sinewy, and yet doomed.

  I was thus mourning the unsuccessful salmon, looking down on them from the bridge, concentrating on them and their graying flesh, when Cath came up, and stood beside me.

  “Did you fuck her?” she asked in a falsely placid tone. “All of those times you were out of the cabin? Did you fuck her?”

  “No,” I hastened to say, hungry to be able to make an assertion. “No, of course not.”

  “Did you fuck her once?” she asked again with that air of wanting to tidy things up, to eliminate the loose end. “In the past, I mean.”

  I looked down at the dying gray salmon. They seemed so able, no less so than the ones that even now were clearing the falls. Perhaps they had cleared them last year. In their prime.

  “I did,” I said, feeling appalled for Cath. She was my love. It was as if I were a compass whose arm had swung back erratically to true north. “I’m sorry, Cath. It was lunacy. A misuse of her, an insult to you …”

  “I’ll let her look after her own grievance. But I feel violated. Do you understand?”

  I told her I did.

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve been mooning around for the whole journey and we haven’t had anything happening, and generally we do when we go away. Generally, it sets us off. Travel as the great aphrodisiac and all.”

  A robust red male salmon bounded over the lower falls and she couldn’t help but applaud. “Some people would consider you’ve been pathetic,” she murmured. “I think you’ve been bloody pathetic.”

  “I have been,” I agreed. “I know … When I …”

  “When you saw her again? You thought, Ditch the old lady!”

  “You’re no one’s old lady,” I pleaded. “But yes, both times … Lunacy, Cath. I went mad …”

  Cath whistled, country girl at heart. “Mad. Well, it might be a psychiatric condition to you. It doesn’t mean it’s not life and death and betrayal.”

  “The truth is I’m terrified of how mad I did go. How easily …”

  “Then,” said Cath, “you bloody well know. If you let it happen again, it’s the end for me.”

  Under her counseling, if this is what it was, and under the counseling of the gray flesh of the unsuccessful salmon, I could see I had been afflicted. But I was awake, all at once, to my dementedness.

  “I’m over it all,” I said, marveling at how the obsession had all sloughed away. “It was ridiculous …”

  I felt scarified, though, by the question I knew would never go away. If Silver hadn’t gone to Louisa’s cabin, would I still be suffering the obsession, and would I be considering disrupting the world for it?

  “So, are you going to California to shake her loose from her marriage … ?” asked Cath. “Or are you coming home with me? If I bloody let you?”

  Utterly humiliated, I said, “I’ll come with you if you’ll have me.” An exquisite thing: three young salmon vaulted the falls in unison. It made the graying and the failed in the shallows more poignant. “I’ll be lucky if you agree,” I added.

  “I wouldn’t say that. I am a cold bitch sometimes. But you have humiliated me, and you won’t get away with that again. In the end, we all have to live and die with someone.”

  “I don’t deserve to live and die with you,” I replied. And it was the truth, of course.

  “Do you still like anything in me? Do you?” she asked.

  “I like everything in you,” I assured her.

  “Ah yes? You haven’t even talked to me for the last three weeks. You were too riveted by the banalities of your Miss Wanstap.”

  I frowned and thought, She’s right. A revelation: Louise had never said anything remarkable.

  “What’s happened to you men? The fifties used to be the age of gravitas. Now it’s when you all revert to being bloody Labrador pups. Running round, banging into furniture with your erections.”

  She was right about that. Like Louisa’s discourse, my passion was simply a commonplace.

  “It will never happen again,” I said. And I was sure of it, for Louisa had imparted a terminal education to me.

  Cath looked down at the tragic salmon and up again and shook her head, and then went to take a seat on the bus.

  A Death Before the Death: The Slicer

  IN THE MORNINGSIDE when we woke, we could see aslant our path the place Dart knew from the song of that country to be the Creeper Hills. Their sharp stones rose above the plain separated from earth by a morning band of vapor which caused them to float in the air. This was where the slicers liked to make their secret home. We all grew hushed now and Dart ceased his song. My son and his friend went forward with part of the saved carcass of last night’s hopper and laid it on the ground as the rest of us drew level. We looked at the meat sacrifice offered to the grand presence. This was the meat the slicer would be tempted forth with. The light on the rocks became sharper and all their clefts and cunning concealments were apparent to us.

  Two of our party went beyond the rocks, upwind, to make a noise with spear against shield in the hope of flushing the slicer out. The two young men stood with the slaughtered remains, waving the carcass about in the grass to make its scent go further. I remained in the line, as did the five others, making a shallow trap of men, flimsy so that it might entice the slicer to emerge. The two young men by the meat were, according to a long-honored plan, to pierce the beast beneath his armpits and then raise his body above us on their spears. I had seen it done in the past, and when the slicer was so raised on a spear point it looked very much like a man.

  Now, as we stood, we sang a softer song of invitation, and
after a while could hear the men from the far side of the rocks making their harassing noise to nag a slicer from its nest.

  At last we saw, amongst the boulders, a tawny and spotted movement and the lash of thick tail—the moving creature we had been imagining for so many hours and days was beginning to take an interest, for whatever reason, in the wider world. The men with the spear and shield drew beyond the rocks, safe from the slicer’s approach because of where they stood upwind, and grew louder, with great hoots and mockery. A crasser animal than the slicer would have been driven forward to us by them. But it took a great deal of such clamor to overcome the slicer’s preference for being aloof. Once a slicer emerges, it is willing to fill the earth with its fearsome presence, but to get it to choose the broader and more dangerous earth takes a gift for haranguing.

  When the slicer came into the open, we saw it was a female, more awesome than the male we had expected. A male might fight for his lair and advantage and food, and his woman and young. A female slicer would be driven by something closer to her, the future of her womb and her pouch, of those she was still to bear. We on our side kept singing to her in a more flattering and cooing way than the men on the upwind side. She moved forward like a judge whose laws we did not know, her head swaying, her shoulders magnificent and potent. She advanced on four feet, but now and then stood back on her strong hind legs to assess the air. At such times she was a person, with the appearance of someone who walked two-legged all day. Though the wind ensured she could smell both us and last night’s meat, she wanted us to believe she took no interest in us at all. Why should she descend to recognizing us or show any desire for the gross meat on our living bones? For she had a way of denying that it was a hunger for flesh that had brought her out. She sought to convince us that she had a higher purpose than appetite. And it was possible to believe that she had come forth with her heroic indifference just to show us what life should be. That it should be her. That in us was a failed and imperfect thing. And there was no doubt we were all humbled by her.