“Go to bed,” I said to him once. “I’ll watch it.”
“And if you fall asleep?”
He said nothing. I let it go. “May I ask you something?”
His eyebrow rose; the eye beneath remained lidded.
“It didn’t drop out of the sky, and it wasn’t preserved in a frozen tundra for a hundred years or, I am guessing, laid a century before it will hatch. How can it be the last of its kind? Where is its mother?”
He cleared his throat. His voice sounded like a shoe scraping over broken glass. “Dead, according to Maeterlinck. Killed by the same coal miner who discovered the nest.”
“But wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume . . . ?”
“Her mate had been killed the week before. Reasonable to assume it was her mate—a big male, nearly forty-five feet from tail to snout.”
“That is my point. Where there is one, but especially where there are two . . .”
“Oh, I suppose anything is possible. It is possible that a tribe of Neanderthals survives in the inaccessible regions of the Himalayas. It is possible that leprechauns emerge from the Irish woods and dance in the highlands when the moon is full. It is equally possible that you were born of two monkeys mating and switched upon your birth. It is also possible that this entire conversation—no, your entire existence—is but a dream, and you will wake up to find that you’re an old man in your farmhouse next to your stout but practical wife and marvel at the power of dreams while you sleepily milk the family cow!”
I pondered his argument for a moment and then said, “Must I be a farmer?”
On one or two occasions he gave in to the human imperative and allowed me to help him upstairs and into his bed. “Well, why are you hovering about like some ghoulish angel of death?” Snapping his fingers at me. “Back to the basement, Will Henry, and snap to!”
Oh, if I hear that loathsome phrase attached to my name one more time . . . !
I set the gun beside the nest and contemplated the gestating T. cerrejonensis. It glowed in the orange light of the heat lamp. The basement was cold; the place in which it rested was warm. Three days before, it had begun to quiver, ever so slightly, nearly unperceptively. When you listened through the stethoscope, you could hear it, a wet squishy sound, as the organism writhed and twisted within the amniotic sac. Hearing it gave you a certain thrill: This was life, fragile and elemental, tender and implacable. Entropy and chaos reigns o’er all of creation, destruction defines the universe, but life endures. And isn’t that the essence of beauty? It occurred to me, while I watched the thing shiver with the ancient force, that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution’s highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us.
But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere—and nowhere. We are no more beautiful or essential or magnificent than an earthworm.
In fact—and dare we go there, you and I?—you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm’s heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?
Sitting in the cold basement before the warm egg, my eyes filled with tears. For true beauty—beauty, as it were, with a capital B—is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price.
I reached out my hand and laid it gently upon the pulsing skin.
Forgive, forgive, for you are greater than I.
Canto 2
ONE
Forgive.
The empty eye and the tangled strands of hair still clinging to the skull beside the ash barrel.
And what might Dr. Pellinore Warthrop be needing, Mr. Henry?
Oh, the usual things. He isn’t an invalid, but he is a careless housekeeper and never cooks for himself. He needs someone for the laundry and the shopping, cooking, cleaning, someone to answer the door, but I don’t anticipate much of that—the doctor receives hardly any callers these days.
Yes, sir. Bit of a recluse, is he?
Somewhere between that and a hermit.
So he doesn’t practice medicine anymore?
He never did. He isn’t that kind of doctor.
Oh, no?
Oh, no. No, he is a doctor of philosophy, and I wouldn’t recommend you broach that topic with him—or any other topic, for that matter. If he wants to talk, he will. If he doesn’t, he won’t. You can expect to be ignored for a great deal of the time. Well, nearly all the time.
And the rest of the time, Mr. Henry? What might I expect then?
Well, yes. He has quite the temp— Well, let’s just say he’s a bit hotheaded for a philosopher.
A hotheaded philosopher? Oh, Mr. Henry, that’s funny!
More humorous in the abstract, I’m afraid. The best strategy is to agree with everything he says. For example, if he either implies or explicitly states that a worm’s intelligence exceeds your own, a good answer would be, “I have often thought so myself, Dr. Warthrop.” At other times, he may say something that makes no sense—it doesn’t mean he’s off his rocker; he’s just being Warthrop. He speaks out of context. I mean, the context is hidden.
Hidden, Mr. Henry? Hidden where?
Inside his own mind.
He hides things . . . in his mind?
Well, don’t we all, Beatrice?
I tapped the skull on its face with the edge of my shoe.
I knew I should fetch the constable. Have him arrested. It would be a fitting end for a doctor of monstrumology, whose business irrevocably leads to murder. We were both up to our elbows in blood, Warthrop and I.
But I did not fetch the constable. We are creatures of habit, and I had been his indispensable companion for too long.
I righted the overturned barrel and returned its macabre contents, her skull last, and I let the moment pass; I did not pause to contemplate the empty eye like some wavering Dane to whom human life held a measure of value. I tossed the skull into the barrel with the rest of the garbage; it clanged against the metal side, loud in the cold air.
More kerosene. Another match. And a blast of delicious heat against my face. There is no one on earth who doesn’t enjoy a good fire. The memory is embedded in our genes: Fire has been our friend for millennia. It made us who we are. No wonder the gods punished Prometheus. Master fire and in a few thousand years you will walk on the moon.