The Unfinished World Page 6

  With cordial thanks, believe me yours very sincerely, Charles Darwin

  We were still young when we set about proving we were done with gods.

  The West is full of a new kind of wild freedom. How can that compare with paved streets, a good restaurant, a vast library, a beautiful woman waiting in one’s bed come moonlight? The West is full of painted skies, of sharp blues hanging over a sepia landscape. The West is full of vibrant cruelty, of dangerous and beautiful things.

  Our bodies were flamed like the oil lamps, bones underneath rattling with the force of the explosion. At the climax, she puffed her cheeks out and smiled with her mouth and eyes squeezed shut, like she was holding her breath. An old trick, she said; she learned it from a “friend” long ago. It makes it better, she said. More powerful. She was still shuddering as if to demonstrate the truth of this.

  A pink foot poking out from beneath a sheet. A bosom rising and falling. Golden hair fanned over a white linen pillow.

  You see, there are bad women who like good men, she told me.

  I’m not good, I said. I just prefer a quiet heart.

  I would prefer a new heart altogether, she said, and her eyes were like old stars as she spoke; echoes of stars burned out eons ago.

  It really began at Haddonfield, after he pointed out Cope’s dreadful mistake with the Elasmosaurus platyurus. The head is on the tail, he told the team in private. He knows how it looked, knows how Cope and his temper took it. But he didn’t intend to embarrass him, truly, though it was the beginning of the end. It was something too much for Cope, a needle in the throat. Cope’s fierce rage would always be meant for Marsh, now.

  All the nights spent with her wrapped round his chairs, round his sheets, round his tall, portly body. All those nights covered in dewy flesh, in violets and jasmine and glasses of wine. Nights of open windows, of soft air in waves, of dreams punctuated by crickets and faint piano wafting up from the dance hall.

  He knows what they say at the club, at the university, at the dig sites in the Badlands. They say he cannot feel affection. They say Marsh, why, he is impossibly cold. They would be astounded to learn what music his nights are made of, how he has learned to love a fallen woman like a fallen angel. How he has learned that they are nearly one and the same.

  Cope spent far more time than Marsh did away at the digs, glaring at the bleached white, the bones an open puzzle. With him always: an obsessive, complete journal of Marsh’s perceived misdeeds. Every one of them recorded faithfully in that terrible, cramped handwriting. Cope never had the handwriting of a naturalist, despite all his training.

  Marsh thinks they are related to birds, he wrote.

  Marsh has stolen another discovery.

  Marsh has bribed my men to turn over the larger fossils to him.

  Marsh does not properly document his finds. He does not keep his books separate as he should.

  Marsh has stolen her, now. I hear she has stopped seeing other clients. Another set of bones once mine, now his.

  The sap and smoke and soot waft down the river in Hartford, and Marsh pours another glass of brandy. It is his fourth tonight. He has tired of reading about Cope’s latest expedition. He will ask her to come to him. She will open him up and suck out the hurt, like a snakebite.

  We were on a large liner at sea, the black sky falling on us like a blanket. I dreamt of hipbones and sockets, of locks and keys. She drew her dream for me: she was lying in bed, when a great wall of water swept over her and dissolved bedding, nightgown, underthings, left her naked in the salty damp of the water’s wake. She tried to move but the wall of water returned, it hurt, it scalded, and she was trapped like a fly in amber as it hardened, as it cooled and cracked. And there you were, Othniel, she said, there you were, chipping away with your hammer and chisel, trying to free me, and when you did my body was ruined, blackened, nothing but burnt bits. And you put me back together, pins through my bones, and stuck me in a case at your museum.

  Then there was the time the two teams came upon one another in the Como Bluffs and threw shouts, then insults, then stones, until their ears and fingers bled. Until they were covered in bruises and little red stars.

  We gave the same damn species thirty-some names. You published seventy-six academic papers in one year. I acquired so many fossils I’ll never have time to look at them all, to open the crates and unpack the bones. They called it wasteful, useless. We called it love. We called it the rush to greet our long-lost dead.

  She finally left Marsh, the only way she knew. She was losing her insides by then, scarlet flowers in all her white handkerchiefs, so she went out West, where he had always promised her they’d go. Only she went alone, and she never came back. He learned of her death from a telegram, sent from a sanitarium in Arizona.

  He heard that Cope’s wife and daughter had left him, also. One of the side effects, evidently, of their mutual hunger for bones. He tried one more trick: to take Cope’s fossils, to commandeer them for the government. It was the end of the end for Cope. For both of them, really. Cope turned over his catalogue of Marsh’s misdeeds. The headline: SCIENTISTS WAGE BITTER WARFARE. Congress investigated and eventually saw an opportunity to eliminate the department of paleontology at the Geological Survey, along with Marsh’s position as its head. Woe and wickedness, said one of Marsh’s assistants, and he cried as they packed up the lab. Then he went to work for Cope, until Cope ran out of money, too.

  That ass in Congress shouting about birds with teeth, birds with teeth, are we taxpayers funding such a foolish blasphemy? And the other jackals taking up the cry. It has me in a black and dangerous mood, the brandy not enough to keep the devil from my tongue tonight.

  He eats the last of his egg, finishes his coffee, and reads the rest of the obituary. Small pleasures now, small hurts, too. He dabs at his beard with a napkin, feels his breath come shorter these days.

  My own grave will be ready for me soon.

  I have heard about your nightmares, he almost wrote to Cope, years ago, but he tore the paper out of the notebook and balled it up till the ink was smeared through. Nightmares where the bones of the dead assemble themselves, where they dance and gambol and knock their joints together in his ears, eternal ringing sounds and terrifying laughter. Nightmares where the creatures we discovered hover over Cope’s camp bed and keep watch like vultures.

  I have heard about your dreams, he tried then, and put his head down, suddenly old, suddenly tired down to his own weary bones.

  Sometimes I long to go West again, to watch the prairie grass ripple and the wind blow history clean. Like we could take it all back, this whole sordid business of living, and just fall into dust. As I suppose, one day, we will.

  For These Humans Who Cannot Fly

  The annals of the German waiting mortuaries are a “damned” chapter of history; few people outside Germany know anything about these extraordinary establishments. Even German writers on the subject concentrate on architectural and social aspects and avoid the central questions: Why were these bizarre hospitals for the dead built? Why were they maintained for a period of more than a hundred years? Did they ever serve any purpose?

  —FROM BURIED ALIVE: THE TERRIFYING HISTORY OF OUR MOST PRIMAL FEAR, BY JAN BONDESON

  Every death is a love story. It’s the goodbye part, but the love is still there, wide as the world.

  When my wife died, I began to understand this. I began to build the death houses. The name is misleading, since these houses hold not only death but futures, possibilities, hopes that the end isn’t the end. These are perhaps tall tales, but they stack up better than dead bodies and they burn longer than kindling. I sell these tales for the living, and for the dying, and I have done this since my wife flew away.

  The story about my wife is a short and sad one, not so new or so tall. My wife was lovely, with a smile like the moon dipped in stars. When we first married, she would fit herself into the crook of my arm as we slept; she would write me love letters three times a day and slip them
into pockets, under cushions, behind the backs of mirrors and along the linings of drawers. She loved animals even more than she loved me, and we always had a cat or two in the house along with the dogs, mice, chickens, hedgehogs, goats, and sometimes even pigs. We never had birds because my wife couldn’t stand to see them caged.

  She sang on the stage, but soon grew to fancy herself an actual songbird. She would chirp and whistle instead of speaking and flap her arms as though they were wings. She started digging worms out of the soft earth in the early mornings, crushing them with her moon-smile and leaving pink fleshy bits in her teeth. She would hop to the window on light feet and watch the birds in the trees, weeping because she couldn’t join them in flight. She banished the cats from the house after one brought in a robin with its neck broken and dropped it on her pillow.

  I have reached a milestone today. I have built exactly one hundred death houses, all over Europe and the United States. In those houses I’ve placed exactly five hundred Temporary Resting Containers, built to house the newly dead until they reawaken. Five in each house to start with. (The clients are free to build more, but I provide only five.) Five hundred love stories, begun at their ends. I do think of myself as a romantic. I think of myself as a false idol, or sometimes, a saint. Women often embrace me, and many offer me expensive gifts and sometimes more than that. Men shake my hand and choke up, clearing their throats. When I leave a village or a city with its very own death house, I can see it collectively sigh and relax, as if a great weight had been lifted from its massive shoulders. I can see the people’s relief rising like smoke, the residue of tamped-down fear.

  I usually choose a restful spot for the death house, or Leichenhaus. It should rise gracefully in an arc, casting a long shadow on cobblestones and hearts. But I try to keep things playful, too. In many villages, I find that placing it at the end of a long road and a short curve mimic the element of surprise when death arrives.

  One morning my wife told me that on the river, bodies crash like a car wreck. She said she had been waiting at the high bridge, watching and studying the jumpers for years. She had discovered the sound was almost glacial, glassy, like somebody breaking hundreds of china plates all at once.

  Your skull splits right open sometimes, she said.

  I feel sorry for these humans who cannot fly, she said.

  I will show them how it’s done, she said.

  So I put my lovely wife in a place where the windows were barred and the doors were locked, and where the bird-ladies that roamed the halls could find no worms to tear into.

  I always assemble the finest materials and the most skilled workmen when building a death house, taking special care when choosing the images for the stained glass. I particularly prefer Gertrude, robed in a light, flat gray, or Margaret of Antioch, lines of blue cut glass flowing through her gown like small waves. St. Michael, too, makes an excellent guardian of the dead; I often put him in royal red with the Kingdom of Heaven as a backdrop. And always appropriate: St. Joseph, patron saint of a happy death.

  She wrote me letters just as before—three times a day, I discovered later. She never spoke but she could scratch out a few thoughts. The doctors who cared for her thought it best to keep these letters from me, as they contained useless scraps and musings, hopping from subject to subject and leaving sense entirely behind. The doctors seemed also to harbor vague suspicions about me; they seemed to believe something terrible had happened to tear out my wife’s tongue like Philomela’s.

  I visited only once. My wife spent the visit tilting her head and chirruping at me in frustration. She finally ran at the only small window in the room, so many times that her head was bloodied and her hands and arms bruised all over. I tried to stop her but could not; she had become so small and light she could slip out of my arms as easily as she used to slip into them. I cried for the attendants and when I saw how they bound her, how they forced white pills into her small red mouth, I fainted and woke to find myself being driven home. I never returned.

  I usually construct the death houses as large, simple structures with gently sloping roofs. Sometimes there are cupolas. But I never use spires or flourishes or gargoyles. No stone creatures of any kind, in fact.

  It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I feel the death house should be much like a room in God’s own house, and would God’s house be a Gothic affair? Some of my clients seem to think so, but I can usually tempt them toward a more modest design. I make sure the building will stay dark and cool most of the time, and always include at least one large room for the dead and one small room for the watchman and his medical supplies.

  One day the hospital wrote to tell me my wife was dead. She had escaped from her room somehow and had discovered an open window in an office from which to fly. She had broken almost every bone in her body, they said. I imagined her, hovering at the window the way she had done at home, reaching up to separate the edges of her life like chaff from the ball of clouds—then plummeting. Would she have known? I wondered. Would she have realized halfway down, checking her thin shoulder blades, surprised like anything that the wings she thought she saw that morning seemed to have disappeared like smoke?

  I usually assist my employers in furnishing their Leichenhaus. The watchman’s room is kept comfortable, but spare, to prevent sleeping on the job. I suggest a chair, a table, a light, and a pack of playing cards. Also a cot and a small first-aid kit for attending to the dead if they suddenly become the living. I always make sure the openness of the large hall is not marred by any unnecessary furnishings. Only the Temporary Resting Containers should lie in this hall. I usually recommend that customers limit the number of Containers, to keep unpleasant odors to a minimum.

  Sometimes, when I arrive, the mayors of the towns drape medals around my neck. Sometimes they present me with the oversized keys to their cities. Someone important makes a speech, the citizens clap, and the local inn agrees to put me up for free. Once a local artist painted my picture and it hangs in the central courthouse, I am told, even to this day. I have grown elderly and weak but the local people still describe me in hero words wherever I go, whenever I come to save them from their deaths.

  I built the first Leichenhaus for my wife, of course. She was so damaged that they would not let me see her, not at first, but when I begged the doctors relented and brought me to the morgue. She was purple and black in places, and her head was a strange shape, and she looked flattened and out of joint, like a rag doll. But her pale face was still perfect, and her lips were still slightly O-shaped and pink, and her eyes were wide and sea-calm. She looked as though she were about to speak. So how could I bury her? I knew she was dead, of course I knew, but at the same time I doubted. She who had longed for sky and spurned four walls—how could I put her in a box? How could I shut her up in the earth with a face like that? I’d read Bruhier’s best-selling pamphlet, Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort. It detailed the various ways to determine if a loved one is really dead: stabbing the nose or feet with sharp objects, pouring vinegar into the mouth, holding the fingers over flame, placing a mirror over the mouth to detect breath, pulling the tongue to facilitate artificial respiration, etc. I went out of my head, I demanded the doctors perform every one of these procedures, I shouted that they would never bury or burn her.

  Instead I built the first Temporary Resting Container, just for her. I used an ordinary coffin, and attached a three-foot cord to a bell and a bell stand. I sawed off the top half of the coffin lid, and laid the remaining length of cord in the top half of the coffin itself. I laid her mangled body on the red velvet and tied the piece of cord to one swollen, broken finger. In case she woke, in case she rose, she could but move her finger and the bell would ring. To guard her I hired two former soldiers; around them I built a small shelter to keep out the rain and heat. I employed doctors to stay on call for seven days, ready at a moment’s notice to rush to my wife’s aid should she awaken. They all thought I was insane; I was insane. But after seven
days, the madness left me in a rush and I consented to the burial of my wife. I was comforted. I was sure that the ending of our story was what it ought to be. I was sure it was really an ending.

  I always suggest placing the Temporary Resting Containers in the middle of a large hall, in a harmonious and pleasing arrangement. This allows corpses awakened during the day to take in the full majesty of the stained glass windows, and may help to counter feelings of terror and confusion. Although I do not provide them, I also suggest placing flower arrangements around the Resting Containers; this aids in covering the unpleasant odors of rot and decay with more pleasing scents like violet, rose, and peony.

  I usually do the hiring myself as far as death house personnel are concerned. I hire two to four watchmen, depending on the size of the facility, to guard the hall and administer medical aid if necessary. I look for watchmen who are alert, healthy, strong, incurious, and possessed of little or no imagination. This is very important, as it would be very bad for business if one of the watchmen frightened himself to death in a death house. The watchmen must also be trained a little in medicine, in case any simple emergency medical procedure need be performed before a doctor could be summoned. Basic first-aid training usually suffices.