The Unfinished World Page 5

  The time traveler materializes in the gallery, where the painting no longer hangs. Now there is another painting, lilies on a pond, and Google finds only a retired dentist in Modesto, California. The time traveler smiles then, a soft, sweet smile, and no, her limbs don’t start to fade away, nor does that smile hang on the air, nor does she slowly dissolve, like pixels on a screen or shadows over a wall. She simply smiles, and then isn’t.

  Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World

  Lancelot has been summoned out of sleep to find a secret kingdom. Dreams of daffodil hair and golden summer smoke all drifted away when the earth opened above and the men shoveled him out. You have been to the Perilous Chapel, they said. You can help us find what we seek.

  He does not think he has been of much help so far. The expedition is traveling in terrain he is unused to, unfamiliar with, and in his weakened state he can barely hold a sword. The men, strange in their colorful threads and accented voices, are looking for another kind of relic: the lost kingdom of Prester John. The Prester descended from the Magi themselves, it was said; he was the ruler of a fruitful land, full of new plants and animals, of new kinds of people. Nestorians and their descendants, heavy with the riches of their flight from other worlds.

  These warriors with whom he travels now are not knights, but they claim a quest just the same. They are seeking this fabled hidden kingdom and all the treasures inside: the Gates of Alexander, the Fountain of Youth itself, and especially, most especially, a wondrous mirror, in which every part of a ruler’s land can be seen at a word. It is this mirror their master has sent them for. He is a foreign prince, Lancelot has been made to understand, and he desires the mirror to help him wipe out his enemies. Such men have always sought such artifacts.

  They have been traveling in a dark jungle for days. Lancelot does not know jungles; he has never known such uncomfortable and wet heat. The damp reminds him of the damp he and Gwin made when their bodies came together. He misses her bright, brassy smell. He does not like this place. It has too many eyes. The men chatter to themselves and Lancelot cannot understand them and he is shorter than everybody here. And he is bored. There are no devilish knights to joust with, no castles to besiege and break. Only this vague heat and a cascade of invisible threats, surrounding them in the jungle like nightmares waiting to pounce. He is afraid of these nightmares. Defenseless against things he has never seen, he sleeps with his head to the tent, avoiding attack from behind.

  The men are taking turns cutting through vines, hacking and slashing and cursing the foliage in this miserable heat and humidity. Mosquitos swarm the party, and the mules stop, well, mulishly in protest, half-hidden behind a lacy veil of pests. One of the beasts has just attempted to shed its pack again, standing firm and four times heavier in the middle of a small copse of trees, when Lancelot feels eyes on the back of his head. The men laugh, thinking he has gone stupid from too much time under the soil. Those are insects, they say, slapping at the backs of their necks and palming the blood smears as if to pantomime. Lancelot rolls his eyes. Even outside of space and time there seems to be a language barrier when it comes to metaphor.

  Something is watching, he says. Following. I can feel it.

  The men are still laughing, but not as hard now, and their eyes narrow as they survey their surroundings. These are not careless men. They have not earned the favor of their prince by being foolish. They fan out to the edges of the path. They wait, laughter fading down into a buzz saw of jungle silence, which is not a silence at all so much as a warning.

  Lancelot is not the first to see it, but he is the first to believe it. A pale man, body and hair the color of paper, almost nude but for a leather loincloth and holding a sharp wooden spear. He appears in an instant as though he’d fallen from the sky.

  He blinks, slowly. Just the once. Stands extraordinarily still.

  We are looking for the kingdom of Prester John, says Lancelot. His heart swims into his throat for his own lost kingdom, but he swallows it down and watches the man’s spear carefully, ready to duck or dodge if necessary. The spear lowers, inch by inch, spear hand relaxing. The man’s face makes a bitter smile. And bitter, notes Lancelot, translates through all the many languages and races of the world. Bitter has a note that’s hard to miss.

  We seek the same, says the man, and he gestures. Some thirty-odd men like him, all paper-colored and silent, emerge from the surrounding trees and stand with spears at the ready. The prince’s men, normally taciturn and unshakable, shout in surprise. Lancelot cannot understand how the pale men managed to hide themselves among all this dark and greenery. He thinks it is a trick he would very much like to learn.

  Would you like to join us? asks Lancelot. We can seek for this kingdom together, and split the treasure among ourselves. The prince’s men mutter darkly; Lancelot is offering what he has not been authorized to give. The prince’s men begin to wonder if digging up a hero was in fact a mistake. Some of the prince’s men had argued for making a golem instead, and it is looking like perhaps they were right after all. But it doesn’t matter in the end, because the pale men want nothing to do with the prince’s men and their search. At Lancelot’s words, they break into a single hiss, like a long white snake, and then fade into fog, into mist, into nothing. Lancelot and the prince’s men stand their ground, uneasy for a time. Eventually, as the sun begins to loosen its grip on the blue overhead, they seek for a place to camp. To rest for the night and to water the mules.

  They’ve only made it a short way forward when there comes a wailing like a heart run through.

  Everyone turns and stares, watches helpless as the swampy sand opens and eats one of the men and his mule. One by one, small mouths of jungle-earth emerge and drown the prince’s men where they stand. The ground rumbles and churns, men and mules shriek and run about, and in the sand’s grumbling Lancelot hears the warning: We are the seekers. We will seek those who quest for what is hidden, and we will swallow you whole. We will keep the kingdom safe.

  Lancelot does not want to be swallowed here, so far from where his king and queen lay. He smells green in the air, and in wild panic to live seizes a nearby vine and pulls himself up. He is face to face with a tiny monkey, old-man-faced and screeching. Lancelot has never seen a monkey before, but somehow he recognizes a relative. He is encouraged. He suddenly feels he has been made to swing from treetops, in the way that heroes do. As the men below dance about, avoiding the sand’s hunger, Lancelot flies to another tree, and then another, until finally he spots solid ground below. The remaining men gape as he calls to them, but only for a moment. These may be foreigners but they are not fools. If gravity has suspended her pull for a moment, they will happily follow suit. After the ground has given up the chase, Lancelot waits at a respectful distance while the others mourn their dead and distribute their belongings.

  Later that night, they come to the edge of what looks like a village. There is a clearing, and a clump of small huts; a group of tall men in hooded robes confer in hushed tones by torchlight. Their eyes glow like embers, but their faces remain in darkness. As if in a dream, Lancelot opens the door to the nearest hut, drawing his sword. But his weapons would be useless here; he knows this. Another tall man, taller even than the others, stoops by a fireplace, half-hidden and half-flamed by the meager fire in the hearth. He is tossing papers and books to the floor, he is muttering to himself. He is too absorbed in his search to notice Lancelot at first. But then he hears the scuffle of footsteps, turns, looks with no surprise on the knight and the band of men behind him. Where his face should be is a pool of ink, spreading in the soft firelight.

  Is this Prester John’s kingdom? asks Lancelot.

  The man laughs, hateful, bitter. We are also searchers, he says. We have only just arrived ourselves. And we will depart as you will: empty-handed, empty-hearted.

  But who are you, Lancelot says. No real question. The answer does not matter. They are seekers, that is all. He suddenly understands that there is no kingdom. There are
only the seekers and the lost places they drive toward, always just out of reach.

  And with that, he breathes a last breath of stone and copper, of green and damp, of soil and skin. Then he tumbles to bones and is still, sleeping once more, and now the men must find their own way home.

  And the World Was Crowded with Things That Meant Love

  They met only once, at a piano recital in her hometown. Both of them were there for other people’s children. He caught her yawning while a blonde in pigtails murdered The Blue Danube, and they exchanged grins. After drinks and dinner they were delighted to find they shared a hobby: both were sculptors of sorts, though she worked in clay and he worked in wood. Both had jobs that sent them round the world, and it was a way to kill the long, late hours that haunt the solitary traveler.

  She started the exchanges, the reminders they sent to one another as they aged in different cities, countries, hemispheres. But that would come later. At first it was the dinner, and the drinks, and the porch outside where her laughing relatives lingered. At first it was her childhood bedroom, the quilt flung to the floor, the way she moved like a dancer and the way she flung her arms about and the way he surprised them both by bursting into tears. At first it was finding their faces fit perfectly, a jigsaw. A locket severed and the halves hung round the neck of the world they would cross many times over the years, always looking for one another.

  The first piece was a bust, a child’s head and shoulders. The pigtailed pianist. A drawer at the nape of her neck, with a little heart inside. A paper heart, coin-sized and inked in scarlet. He kept it in his pocket until it fell to pieces.

  His eventual response: a small wooden copy of den lille havfrue, Andersen’s little mermaid on her rock. But instead of the sea woman’s visage, it was her own features carved into the soft basswood. She smiled when she saw how well he remembered her face.

  Down the years they sent their strange missives. She sent maps made of clay, locks with no key, books with words cut out, fantastical animals and landscapes. He sent puzzle boxes, lacquered bangles engraved with kanji, bright yellow Dutch clogs. They sent maps of where they’d been and circled where they were going. And the world was crowded with things that meant love.

  Once she received a plain cedar box with a wooden knife inside, and she was disappointed for a long time. She felt the sentiment fell too far from love and into something much darker. She was not sure they could be sustained by such cruel gestures.

  But then at the Paris flea market she found a beautifully carved antique music box. She brought it home and sculpted a little ballerina, lovely and lithe and wearing, of course, her smiling face. She snipped the plastic ballerina out of the box and put her own inside. She wouldn’t dance, but he would recognize a clumsy sort of hope here, the echo of his very first gift to her.

  And so the gifts continued, from Brussels to Tokyo, from Lodz to Buenos Aires, from Ankara to Johannesburg. Wood and clay went by boat, by air, by train. Each gift arrived with a slip, printed with only a new address. Messages slower but more powerful than those carried in the digital noise of the world. They never spoke, never wrote, never texted, never exchanged a photograph, though they sculpted and carved each other many times. They could not help but notice each grew lovelier in memory, even as they grew older and older in life.

  Eventually, he went to sleep one night in a hotel bed in Heidelburg, and he never awoke again. The room was full of beautiful objects, the hotel maid saw; souvenirs, she supposed. She found a curious item next to his body: a plaster arm—a woman’s arm with fingers curled as if around some object. No one on the hotel staff could tell if the hand was giving or receiving—or if it was beckoning something or someone to finally come home.

  Birds with Teeth

  He is thinking about Cope’s skull. His rival issued the challenge publicly: Let us compare sizes! Let us see whose brain is bigger at last! But Marsh doesn’t like the idea of his skull floating about the university labs, unmoored from its lonely body. Let Cope live on, headless with his challenge; Marsh will go to his grave a whole corpse.

  He mourns alone in the breakfast room, slicing hard-boiled eggs and sprinkling them with pepper, watches dots darken the white like locusts over clouds. He imagines Cope’s skull, grin stretched across like a rictus.

  Your rope trick: you used to take out your own false teeth, grinning like a skull to entertain the Indians. You were a beautiful fool. Everyone loved you, even my own research assistants, everyone but me. There is no room for love in a boxing match, no room for affection in a street brawl. No room when the score was always so close.

  But years ago, before the war began, there was room. They talked for hours at Haddonfield, grinning in helpless academic passion and exclaiming at their own twin hearts. They ate breakfast together on a heap of rock in the marl pits, black bread and coffee as the sun swam into the sky. Cope in shirtsleeves, a boy’s face, looking more like Marsh’s son than his contemporary.

  I was a child once, and yet in so many ways I was never a child. I was a farmhand, and my father’s only use for me was as a simple body, up before dawn to milk the cows, feed the pigs and chickens, muck out the stalls and troughs. I don’t remember playing. I think now that I never played. I think that I was never a child.

  Cope, the child prodigy, cutting up lizards and snakes; Cope, the child-man, the Quaker with his “thee”s and “thou”s and the broad smile Marsh hated, even as he longed to crawl under its canopy. Cope smiled too much. He was too open, like a pilgrim sleeping on the road.

  Raw boy, with your Hadrosaurus foulkii, coming out of your first triumph; you were soft as a baby. The pits were still rich with fossils then. You cannot blame me for seeing that you needed hardening. You and your smiles needed steeping in sap, needed polymerizing. You needed toughening, green shoot. This was a cutthroat business. This was a bone rush.

  There were roses the day the woman left Marsh. Toppled over in the fight, petals scattered across the tiled floor. It looked like a love scene, not a fresco over the fringes of violence. She gasped and gasped like her life was falling away, like it was pouring out of her, a waterfall of hurt and astonishment. Stop breathing, he said, again and again. Stop breathing. Stop breathing.

  You came to the Continent, Cope, full of rage and sadness that you twisted into a hunger for learning. We loved each other instantly, I think we did; I showed you Berlin and you spoke of that first trip to Boston when you were seven, spoke of the whales and how you’d drawn hopeful pictures of the harpooners at work. You’d wanted to see what a whale hunt looked like.

  I told you about the cows and pigs and the way my uncle saved my life, appeared suddenly like Athena to Perseus, offered a world outside that small island. You told me about her, how your father didn’t approve, how he sent you to Europe to keep you out of her clutches as much as the army’s. We drank together and ate together and debated together, and we stepped on one another’s words in an eagerness to spill them all out. And when we returned to the States, we remembered. You named an amphibian fossil Ptyonius marshii, after me, and I named a new serpent Mosasaurus copeanus, after you. I think we did love one another. I truly think we did.

  Both discovered pterodactyls on their first trips out West. Marsh took measurements, sketched it, pushed it into the pages of the scientific journals. Dry bones on a dead thing. Cope, though, gave the monster life. He was one of the first to do so, to bring these New World fossils a stunning, bright sense of existence. “These strange creatures,” he wrote, “flapped their leathery wings over the waves, and often plunging, seized many an unsuspecting fish; or, soaring, at a safe distance, viewed the sports and combats of more powerful saurians of the sea. At night-fall, we may imagine them trooping to the shore, and suspending themselves to the cliffs by the claw-bearing fingers of their wing-limbs.”

  In my reports, I detailed my discoveries, drew pictures of the new species, the shape and size of the bones. You wrote of the desolate wilderness, how ancient seashells littered the gr
ound, how the jawbones of monsters hung hungry from the limestone cliffs. You always were a better writer. You always had a bit of the showman in you.

  This is love for me, she said. I am not a good woman, she said. I am the end of all things, she said. This was at the beginning.

  He shook his head. You are life, he said, and I invite you in.

  She twisted her bracelet and smiled, thin gold band over those sweet white wrists traced with blue. Like Lilith? she asked. She had the thinnest skin, like paper; it was, she said, passed down from her mother, an Irish whore who birthed her in a brothel. I marveled at all that had been handed down from mother to daughter, all that was seeded and grown in the offspring: the thin white skin and the high blue veins and the gold hair and the talent for being the wrong kind of woman. No wonder Cope’s father had chased her away. She was the kind of sickness a man would give anything to feel.

  I wanted to see the graves of monsters, she said, mouth pointed downward, when I said I could not take her on the next expedition. I said no, many times, until she put her perfumed hand over my mouth. Because I am not quite a lady? she asked.

  Because I am not quite a gentleman, I murmured from under her sweet palm, and she flung her arms around me and I could feel her smile press my cheek.

  Aug 31 1880

  My dear Prof. Marsh,

  I received some time ago your very kind note of July 28th, and yesterday the magnificent volume. I have looked with renewed admiration at the plates, and will soon read the text. Your work on these old birds on the many fossil animals of N. America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last twenty years. The general appearance of the copy which you have sent me is worthy of its contents, and I can say nothing stronger than this.