The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  The great jet floors, lit resplendently now, became speckled with bacteria and colonizing microorganisms the closer we got to the volcanic vent in the sea floor, and there in the probe lights and on my monitor stood a chimney of saturnine black, for all the world like the industrial chimneys accursed of William Blake, black flues sending black plumes of smoke into the water under such pressure that one would have thought oneself in a dark evening in an industrial city. For the smoke rose like usual, terrestrial smoke, vast energies in it. The five hundred atmospheres down there failed to quell the power behind it! It became apparent that the earth was being made here, out of its own belly, and the chimneys were mere grace notes on the great slash in the earth we now slid past, hedged in by its banks of bloodred giant tubeworms gulping hydrogen sulphide and flourishing on it. And it occurred to me then that Learned Man wanted his stone here, back in the stew that began everything, amongst beasts that appeased it.

  In the wet laboratory on the Akademik I had seen Russian biologists slice these worms open, finding no interior as in normal fish caught by normal humans. Brother Tubeworm lived off the bacteria from the vent, and bacteria made up half of a worm’s body weight, and could convert hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide into its own organic molecules and into the red hemoglobin that gave it its rich color. All I knew was that on the laboratory bench, they smelled somewhat of ammonia. Their blood was full of nitrates. And the love of a tubeworm … ? They reproduced, I had been told, by the females releasing eggs into the surrounding water which floated upwards while the males simultaneously unleashed bundles of sperm. And when a larva was produced of this dark, deep love, it did not swim towards the light far, far above, since the suspicion of light was not in its system, but sought the rocks by the beloved sea vent, and there took longer than two hundred years to grow two meters in its white, keratin-like tubing.

  As I lay here with my own willful cells, including the cancerous ones that had, like the tubeworms, with a chemistry as subtle as that, chosen darkness, I did not understand and had neglected to study why my cells added up to me, and why those cohesions of cells down there in the black hot poisonous deep added up to what they were. I seemed keenly to want to know why I was kin to these brachiopod fish who nosed amongst the thickets of red tubes and the skeletal vent crabs busy around the volcanic rocks. I asked Cath this question today and she thought I was feverish.

  “Is it theology or biology?” I insisted on knowing. “Maybe someone could tell me.”

  For I felt the operation had made me closer to the deep-vent creatures. Certainly, given the great slashes in my back and front, I felt I was getting closer to the vent animals, that I was no longer a biped but a floating thing.

  “It’s because you’re here and they’re there,” said Cath softly. “Life’s all a matter of postcodes, darling,” she went on to tell me. “You know that, don’t you?” The idea was that I should concentrate on my own postcode and on an unlikely cure.

  I know I am in the hospital bed, yet I am as well an inhabitant of Sergei’s capsule, and by way of the cameras in the exterior casings, I am now getting wonderful, light-drenched footage of thickets of the worms in their white mucilage. Around them grow barnacles on stalks, living off the blizzard of visible microorganisms. I must acquire them by my camera, despite the claims the stone makes on my attention. Snails and navigating shrimp are incredibly here, looking like shallow ocean creatures, and blobfish, and fish with conventional fronts and flattened tails, and all of them modest about the triumph of their existence.

  And this is what I see as I absorb the so-called cocktail of palliative care the surfer-surgeon has prescribed for me. And there—there it is—the great gliding octopus, more balletic than anything at this depth should be, balletic at five hundred atmospheres, a hymn to the universality of grace, auditioning before us at huge gravity.

  “Christ, Sergei,” called Trumbull from his bench. “We are only the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first humans to have ever seen that creature! They haven’t even classified it yet.”

  The Americans who first saw it had called it Dumbo, and I wondered dizzily whether Disney’s Dumbo was worthy of the compliment. Octopus in form, it played gracefully through the forests of tubeworms and of my delirium. It was the nymph, the form we were all seeking. I tracked it with my inside Steadicam. In the breathlessness of my dissolution, I track it still. It is the ultimate escapee of the light and thus of the malice of the gods. Even my cameras, internal and external, held it only for a second and a half. Nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first, I repeat in a haze of pain and fever. They are important numerals.

  And then a party for Sergei and Allan Trumball and me. We have risen up off the bottom, we have emerged into the first intimations of the light-regulated universe through our little capsule portholes, the first great tinge of dazzle from the surface, which we break in a brilliant tropical sea. The ship beside our portholes blazes with flagrant light in the sunset.

  The party aboard the ship started. It was feverish. Too much vodka in my blood. But we were apparently required to be drunk for brotherhood. For it was Sergei’s birthday and we were not women scientists—they had left early despite me exhibiting my respect to them by engaging with them in front of Sergei and asking them about their work. Oceanographers and biologists, they were calm about the possibilities of what they had seen, calm even about their own research, but they were wearied already by the dreary, clogged testosterone in the mess, by men determined to droop, to stupefy themselves with vodka. Sergei was of course glad to see the women go, and when they had, he sang a song on the guitar, this inventor of titanium spheres that can hold up at depth. He sang a song of fraternity between honest brothers at the bottom of the sea, Russian, American, Antipodean, all great guys, unfussy, untemperamental, undemanding, and grateful for whatever Sergei showed us of the hydrothermal vents. This was a party I tried in my delirium of remembrance to get away from, for the vodka did not suit me and was clogging into a rock at my core. But Sergei sang along with his guitar to convince me, and poured me another of those poisonous little shots of vodka, in glass as thick as a curse.

  I am under the hull. The air fades, the air devoured, used up. The Bismarck’s iron rump lies on my sternum. I can feel how intractable it is. I call out in protest.

  “No,” says Cath. “We’re all here.”

  And I see their faces. My grandchildren have brought their blood-oxygen to my bedside. I tell my eldest grandson, Michael, “The breeding cycle of the tubeworm. The really deep ones. Hydrothermal vents. It’s fascinating, Mick.”

  “Yes,” said Michael in his sixteen-year-old basso. “You were telling me.”

  A beautiful boy with dark brown hair and a dutiful brow. And he looked at me knowingly. He got the stone. But he didn’t mention it.

  “You get these things, Micky,” I tell him. “You always did. Good old Mick. My cobber.”

  The endearments I utter pierce me because the stern of that Nazi supership still lays athwart the route of my speech.

  I see by my bed Brendan, Gracie’s boy, seeking refuge from the ennui of the sickbed/deathbed by fighting with Pokémon on his DSi XL. I approve mightily of this. In my own childhood I hated the sickrooms of the old. And I had to take them straight—too young for booze, and Pokémon and the iPad and the mobile phone as yet unintroduced as palliatives to the places your parents insisted you go.

  “Hey, mate,” I yelled to Brendan.

  He looked up. His cowlick spiking free. I’d never met a cowlicked kid I didn’t like, though they were generally a lot of trouble, with their reverse horn of hair, a warning to the earth’s conventions that they would not hold up against the principle of chaos the cowlick stood for.

  “Round up those Pokémon, Tiger!” I called.

  “Yeah, Shelby!” he replied, calling me by my first name, something I always got a kick out of.

  My wife and daughters hush me. Only because it’s too much. Brendan’s sage sister, little Sophie, elev
en now, frowns at us, for she knows what is happening. She has her granny’s frown of comprehending and she knows what the case is, that I’m stuck under the iron hull, between propeller and stern. She has already acquired a woman’s taste for reality, reality being something her brother can face only with a soothing electronic device in hand.

  Exactly as I’ve faced the world frame by frame, excluding with the rectangular limits of the lens whatever does not suit my case; now it is only fair that the world should strike back with the unframeable, the unfilmable.

  This Brendan, just a few years back, would make me drive out on Saturday mornings to a place not far from where I grew up. And there, approached through artificial hills that reminded me of Teletubby Land, we came to a wonderful park which had been imaginatively designed for children. There was a great spinning disc on which children could sit or lie or else hang from by their fingertips, as Brendan did. Colorful tunnels ran through the hills, connecting one play pit with another. Great webs and funnels of rope were everywhere for the climbing. There was a flying fox, plenteous swings, and then, above all, a treehouse that was ten stories high. The way you ascended this tree house was by a series of internal steps, each about a meter tall, and from the top story you could see the river flowing as assertively as the Amazon. Brendan went up this structure of timber, concrete, and protective wire like an animal, for he was a young animal, and turned around occasionally to urge me on my way as I hauled myself from level to level, mainly by the strength of my upper body, or when that failed by simply rolling myself upwards, level by level, an undignified and painful method. And on either side of me children hurried and scuttled and bounded, ascending and descending, with the well-bred ones, of whom there were many more than the modern age was rumored to have delivered, pausing to say, “Sorry.”

  As a child of White Australia, the Australia that had battled to keep itself Caucasian at all costs and had even in my childhood considered Italians and Greeks the Aboriginals of Southern Europe, I was delighted to see turbaned little Sikhs yelling in an Australian accent, the children of the Prophet from Western Sydney, their hijab-wearing mothers anxious at the bottom of the tower, and Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean kids with no time to be wasted on their way to the Parramatta River apex, the top of this wonderful house amongst the trees. This obstacle course for me, a joyous, hectic ascent for Brendan and them.

  When I reached the top and lay on the cement floor for a few seconds gathering my breath, I often found some young Chinese woman already there with her spry children, taking in the river view. “Oh,” she would say, “are you well, sir?”

  And though I wasn’t sure about it, I’d assert I was.

  “Do you need help?” she would gently ask. I was an object of mercy to her, and yet I enjoyed meeting these beautiful young women, their eyes softening, their Asian respect for the elderly deployed in my direction. So I would smile and say something banal like, “Getting up here was the hard bit.” Even so, I didn’t have the stone then.

  And so I acquired what vanity I could from the exchange with the young woman who smiled and cautioned her children to make way for “Grandfather.” I had fulfilled a small ambition I had, that of being the grandfather who was to be found in unexpected places. On that basis, I’d gone on a treetop adventure course with Brendan and his wise sister, Sophie, and as much as I complained to myself and grunted, as much as my feet slid off the wires or off the swinging slabs of wood hanging by ropes and providing steps forward, as much as I bruised my ankles with panicked missteps, I felt my own geriatric heroism also. And Brendan often turned back to yell to me, “Come on, Shelby!” He was like me perhaps in that it was all life in the treetops or in the virtual world he liked. Ground level was a problem. Poor little fellow, I had passed that on to him.

  And I had wanted until recently, indeed till now, to be Brendan’s fellow adventurer and not a venerable figure. I didn’t believe in venerable figures, especially not for children. I had never met one. I’d met the reserved, the careful, the self-regarding, who sometimes seemed to think of themselves as venerable. But there was no venerable creature around as I tottered, harnessed though I was—helmeted too—on some jungle treetop course. In uneasy balance, I’d fibrillate in the treetops as Brendan harangued me. “Hurry up, Shelby, we have to do the black course yet!” For the black course could only be attempted by children in the company of an adult. And he did not doubt that I, though the object of mercy of young, handsome Chinese-Australian mothers, should be that adult not only above the earth but above vertigo, and superior to limited stamina. I was aware he was doing me honor.

  Did I do these things for love of children? Or was it for the absurd vanity I felt from the pathetic, momentary conceit? Or was I willing to be a pretend child? It was all of these, of course. And so, now, under the keel of the battleship. The stone as big as the ship and indistinguishable from it. But I did not want Brendan’s mother, Gracie, to say, or imply, “Put that Pokémon down and pay attention to your grandfather. He is very sick, and he’s been good to you.” A grandparent who can’t be “good to you” is—what?—a less than human entity. A failed and venerable being.

  Even with the Bismarck on my chest, and the serious octopus, crappily named Dumbo, gliding by for enchantment, I had time to remember how at the water slides Sophie lingered for me in the pool, and when I was ejected by the tube and rose up with my nasal cavities scalded by chlorinated water, she was there, smiling a complicit smile, child to child, joyrider to joyrider.

  In this hospital room, beneath the Bismarck’s keel, my elder granddaughter Vicki kissed my forehead honestly—no peck—and said, “We all want you well, Shelby!” Her emotional deftness was apparent in that kiss. It was authentic. What a ferocious two-year-old she had been, an empress of diktats! Now everyone called her “the sweetest girl,” which she authentically was, though of course she’d known from the womb how to torment her brother, the boy they called “poor old Mick,” our first grandchild, friend and fellow explorer. Vicki embodied the conundrum of women. On the one hand fatuous enough to be enchanted by the boy band called Latitude Forty and their formulaic pop. And yet … here she was too, the eternal mothering healer, the woman as wise as her grandmother, the consoler above the capacity of boys to console. So, women—wise enough to transcend us; crass enough as an ill-advised majority to be charmed by us … My adolescent granddaughter. On her way.

  I asked Vicki, “Do you know Sergei?”

  “Sergei?” she asked.

  “The Russian,” I told her. “He’s been here. Driving this thing.”

  “This thing,” she said, but as if she knew what this thing was.

  “He’s somewhere around. Try the waiting room. I think he’s there.”

  She nodded. Good girl. She did not let confusion or anything patronizing enter her gaze. “I can find out,” she promised me. Vicki was the one in the hospital room best equipped to collaborate with Cath and get me out from beneath the steel ceiling.

  “Look,” I warned her, “he’s a sexist. They’re like that. The Russians. But you can handle him. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said and frowned.

  I wondered who could define the frown of a fourteen-year-old, and why hadn’t any of us, from Leibniz to Kant to Kierke-bloody-gaard, taken on such a supereminently useful and engrossing task?

  “Ask him when he thinks we’ll get us out of here,” I instructed her, “because the air’s getting thick.”

  Cath’s face appeared in formidable but confused alliance behind Vicki’s. “Sergei?” she asked.

  “Trumball hasn’t synthesized the enzymes yet,” I thought of telling her. Therefore it was unlikely I could be altered from my extreme existence to one that would involve breathing on Mars or under the keel of Bismarck.

  “It’s all right.” Cath intervened. “Because we’re taking you to another hospital. It has better palliative care.”

  “Are you crying?” I asked sternly, because neither of us trusted easy tear
s.

  “I’m just hoping you get better,” said Cath as a nurse stokes my intravenous with some drug or other.

  The nurse sees I notice. “It’s just for your ambulance transfer, Mr. Apple.”

  I want to thank her, but the words lie above me like two whales. Then the ambulance arrives. There are tall men carrying me to the ambulance. One of them is Andy. I start laughing. “What in fuck’s sake are you doing, you bloody clown?” But, Jesus Christ, by my head is a black hand, long in the palm and fingers, guiding. I feel a surge of gratitude and I confide in that man. I say, “Mum’s the word.”

  In Palliative Care

  MY THOUGHTS DO not nest, they have no ledge to settle on as I go down. In the house made of sediments of the hills and dunes of the lake, its interlaced roof speaks to me like a brother through the mouth of a far-seeing, striped water lizard which has somehow appeared on my tray table in the palliative care ward. It says, “The world you swallowed is too big for you.”

  Well, I happen to know that and I think of telling him, “I ate it a rectangle at a time.” Like oxygen, it was what I needed. Like oxygen, it will kill me. “But what sort of choice did I have?” I ask the lizard. After the death of Andy, how could I have stopped? “I owed him a record of the world he lost. I fed it to him in rectangles of film.”

  Since Andy was a gentleman and undemanding, I thought he needed this tribute all the more. He didn’t ask for it. The air around us asked that he be given it.

  As I make this argument to the lizard in the palliative care ward, Cath leans down from a celestial elevation and kisses me on the forehead. The kiss is distant, like a tremor in the chasms of the sea.

  “He’s a wise fella, that lizard,” I tell her. But, like most of my statements, it doesn’t have time to perch, it is gone. The hole in me is a tunnel in which time blows like a wind, all the time. There are no ledges and no purchase. A nurse has arrived to adjust my IV, frowning as if she is deciding what degree of mercy I deserve.