Museums and Women: And Other Stories Page 17

  The iguanodon’s high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.

  Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow assurance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of feathery leaves from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband; the two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. Even as the iguanodon gritted his teeth in assumption of an ironical stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelling to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses—the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.

  Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned a conventional career in finance to enter an Episcopalian seminary. This regression—as the iguanodon felt it—seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.

  How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was exquisite. Her facial essence appeared to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realized, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, to be impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs—strange adaptation!—were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.

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  “Comment va le bon Dieu?”

  “Ah?” The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humored. Seconds elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.

  The iguanodon insisted. “How are things in the supernatural?”

  “The supernatural? I don’t think that category exists in the new theology.”

  “N’est-ce pas? What does exist in the new theology?”

  “Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith.”

  “Work? I had thought you had quit work.”

  “That’s an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I’ve changed employers.”

  The iguanodon felt in the other’s politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said gnashingly, “The Void pays wages?”

  “Ah?”

  “You mean there’s a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense.”

  “Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I’m not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself.”

  “Yourself? That little thing? Cette petite chose? That’s all you’re looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator. Permettez-moi.” The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialized and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound was already healing.

  The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to the iguanodon and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out. He was told to use the sweet, or else substitute white wine. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophodon, tipsy, perched on a banister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. The iguanodon was drawn to the pair, surprised that his wife would presume to engage the much larger creature—would presume to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife confided to him, “The salad is running out.”

  “Amid all this greenery?” he responded, incredulous, and turned to the brontosaurus. “Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?”

  Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. “I’ve been talking to your husband about religion,” he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.

  “I’ve given up,” she said. “It’s such a deprivation for me and the children.”

  “He says he’s looking for himself.”

  “It’s so selfish,” she blurted. “The children are teased at school.”

  “Come live with me.”

  “Can you support me?”

  “No, but I would gladly sink under you.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “Je t’aime.”

  “Don’t. Not here.”

  “Somewhere, then?”

  “No. Nowhere. Never.” With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!

  “But I,” he said, “but I lo—”

  “Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately.”

  “You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?”

  She shrugged. “If they disappear, we will too.”

  “I’m not so sure. There’s something about us that would survive. It’s not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Let’s stop. It’s too painful.”

  “Stop dancing?”

  “Stop being.”

  “That is a beautiful idea. Une belle idée. I will if you will.”

  “In time,” she said, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars—fresher, closer, bigger then—he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.

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  The Baluchitherium

  IN 1911, C. Forster-Cooper of the British Museum unearthed in Baluchistan some extraordinary foot bones and a single provocative neck vertebra. Thus the baluchitherium first intruded upon modern consciousness. Eleven years later, in Mongolia, an almost complete skull of the creature was uncovered, and in 1925 the four legs and feet of another individual, evidently trapped and preserved in quicksand, came to light. From these unhappy fragments an image of the living baluchitherium was assembled. His skull was five feet long, his body twenty-seven. He stood eighteen feet high at the shoulders (where the North American titano-there measured a mere eight feet, the bull African elephant eleven). Though of the family Rhinocerotidae, the baluchitherium’s face was innocent of any horn; his neck was long and his upper lip prehensile, for seizing leaves twenty-five feet above the ground. He was the largest mammal that ever lived on land.

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  Recently, I had the pleasure of an interview with the baluchitherium. The technical process would be tedious to describe; in brief, it involved feeding my body into a computer (each cell translates into approximately 120,000,000 electronic “bits”) and then transecting the tape with digitized data on the object and the coördinates of the mome
nt in time-space to be “met.” The process proved painless; a sustained, rather dental humming tingled in every nerve, and a strange, unpopulous vista opened up around me. I knew I was in Asia, since the baluchitheres in the millions of years of their thriving never left this most amorphous of continents. The landscape was typical Oligocene: a glossy green mush of subtropical vegetation—palms, fig trees, ferns—yielded, on the distant pink hillsides of aeolian shale, to a scattering of conifers and deciduous hardwoods. Underfoot, the spread of the grasses was beginning.

  Venturing forward, I found the baluchitherium embowered in a grove of giant extinct gymnosperms. He was reading a document or missive printed on a huge sheet of what appeared to be rough-textured cardboard. When I expressed surprise at this, the baluchitherium laughed genially and explained, “We pulp it by mastication and then stamp it flat with our feet.” He held up for my admiration one of his extraordinary feet—columnar, ungulate, odd-toed. What I had also not been led by the fossil record to expect, his foot, leg, and entire body as far as my eye could reach were covered by a lovely fur, bristly yet lustrous, of an elusive color I can only call reddish-blue, with tips of white in the underparts. Such are the soft surprises with which reality pads the skeleton of hard facts.

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  “How curious it is,” the baluchitherium said, “that you primates should blunder upon my five-foot skull without deducing my hundred-kilogram brain. True, our technology, foreseeing the horrors of industrialism, abjured the cruel minerals and concerned itself purely with vegetable artifacts—and these solely for our amusement and comfort.” He benignly indicated the immense chaise longue, carved from a single ginkgo trunk, that he reposed upon; the rug beside it, artfully braided of wisteria vines; the hardwood sculptures about him, most of them glorifying, more or less abstractly, the form of the female baluchitherium. “All, of course,” he said, “by your time sense, fallen into dust aeons ago.”

  By now, I had adjusted my tape recorder to the immense volume and curious woofing timbre of his voice, so his remaining statements are not at the mercy of my memory. His accent, I should say, was Oxonian, though his specialized upper lip and modified incisors played havoc with some of our labials and fricatives, and he quaintly pronounced all silent consonants and even the terminal e of words. To my natural query as to his own time sense, he replied, with a blithe wave, “If you are able from a few crusty chips of calcium to posit an entire phylum of creature, why should not I, with a brain so much greater, be able, by a glance at my surroundings, to reconstruct, as it were, the future? The formation of your pelvis, the manner of your speech, even the moment of your visit are transparent in the anatomy of yon single scuttling insectivore.” He gestured toward what my lower perspective would have missed—a tiny gray plesiadipid miserably cowering high in a primitive magnolia.

  The baluchitherium brandished the printed sheet in his hand; it rattled like thunder. “In here, for instance,” he said, “one may read of numerous future events—the mammoth’s epic circumambulation of the globe, the drastic shrinkage of the Tethys Sea, the impudent and hapless attempt of the bird kingdom, in the person of the running giant diatryma, to forsake the air and compete on land. Hah! One may even find”—he turned the sheet, to what seemed to be its lesser side—“news of Homo sapiens. I see here, for example, that your wheat-growing cultures will make war upon your rice-growers, having earlier defeated the maize-growers. And one also finds,” he continued, “horoscopes and comic strips and a lively correspondence discussing whether God is, as I firmly believe, odd-toed or, as the artiodactyls vainly hold, even-toed.”

  “B-but,” I said, stammering in my anxiety to utter this, the crucial question, “given, then, such a height of prescience and civilized feeling, why did you make the evolutionary error—the gross, if I may so put it, miscalculation—of brute size? That is, with the catastrophic example of the dinosaurs still echoing down the silted corridors of geologic time—”

  Imperiously he cut me short. “The past,” he said, “is bunk. The future”—and he trumpeted—“is our element.”

  “But,” I protested, “the very grasses under my feet spell doom for large leaf-browsers, presaging an epoch of mobile plains-grazers.” As if to illustrate my point, a rabbit darted from the underbrush, chased by a dainty eohippus. “As you must know,” I said, “the artiodactyls, in the form of swine, camels, deer, cattle, sheep, goats, and hippopotami, will flourish, whereas the perissodactyls, dwindled to a few tapirs and myopic rhinoceri in my own era, will meet extinct—”

  “Size,” he bellowed, pronouncing it “siz-eh,” “is not a matter of choice but of destiny. Largeness was thrust upon us. We bear it—bore it, bear it, will bear it—as our share of the universal heaviness. We bear it gratefully, and gratefully will restore it to the heaviness of the earth.” And he fixed me with a squint so rhinoceroid I involuntarily backed a step, tripping the computer’s reverse mechanism. All my nerves began humming. The baluchitherium, as he faded, stretched himself toward the leaf-clouded sky; the reddish-blue fur on his throat shimmered white. Ravenously he resumed what I saw to be, under one form or another, an endless, unthinkable meal.

  The Invention of the Horse Collar

  IN THE DARKEST DARK AGES, the horse collar appeared. A Frankish manuscript of the tenth century first depicts it, along with the concomitantly epochal shafts and traces attached to the middle of the collar. In antiquity, from primitive Egypt to decadent Rome, horse harness consisted of a yoke attached at the withers by a double girth passing under the chest and around the throat of the animal. When the horse pulled at his load, the throat girth rode up, cutting into his windpipe, compressing his vein walls, and slowing his heartbeat. The loss of tractive power was three- or fourfold. Yet antiquity, which sentimental humanism so much encourages us to admire, did little to remedy this strangling, but for ineffectual measures like passing a strap between the forelegs to keep the throat band low (observable on a Greek vase c. 500 B.C.) or tying the two bands at the horse’s sides, as illustrated in a bone carving of a war chariot on the side of a Byzantine casket.

  (illustration credit 23.1)

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  No, it fell to some obscure fellow in the Dark Ages, a villein no doubt, to invent the horse collar. His name, I imagine, was Canus—an odd name, meaning “gray,” though our hero is young; but name-giving, like everything else in this ill-lit and anarchic period, is in a muddled, transitive condition. Canus sits in his thatched hut pondering. Beside him, on a bench of hewn planks and dowels, lies a sheaf of sketches, an array of crude tools both blunt and sharp, an ox yoke for purposes of comparison, and a whitened fragment of equine scapula with the stress lines marked in charcoal. Outside, darkness reigns unrelieved; even noon, in this year of (say) 906, has about it something murky, something slanting and askew. Roman ruins dot the landscape. Blind eyes gaze from the gargantuan heads of marble emperors half buried in the earth. Aqueducts begin and halt in midair. Forested valleys seclude mazelike monasteries where quill-wielding clerics copy Vergil over and over, having mistaken him for a magician. Slit-windowed castles perch fantastically on unscalable outcroppings and lift villages upward toward themselves like ladies gathering their skirts while crossing a stretch of mud. In the spaces between these tentative islands of order, guttural chieftains, thugs not yet knights, thunder back and forth, bellowing in a corrupt Latin not yet French, trampling underfoot the delicate strip-work of a creeping agriculture. Canus is one of those who work these precarious fields, urging forward the gagging, staggering plow-horse. He has been troubled, piqued. There must be … something better.… Now, under his hands, the mock-up of the first horse collar, executed in straw and flour paste, has taken shape!

  The door of the hut wrenches open. Enter Ablatus, Canus’s brother. Though they are twins, born in the last year of the nonexistent reign of Charles the Fat, they are not identical
. Canus in his eyes and hair shows the scaly brilliance of burnished metal and of the hardened peat called coal; Ablatus, the more elusive lambency of clouds, of water running over quartz, of fire sinking in the hearth. Canus tends toward the swarthy, Ablatus toward the fair. Both are clad in the era’s style of shapelessness, between toga and cloak, bunches of colorless cloth such as a poor child would use to wrap a doll of sticks. On his head Ablatus wears a hat like a beanbag. He takes it off. He stares at the bright hoop of straw. “What is that?” he asks, in a language whose archaic music is forever lost to human ears.

  Triumphantly Canus explains his invention. He describes new worlds: the fourfold tractive increase, the improved deep plowing, the more rapid transportation, the ever more tightly knit and well-fed Christendom. Cathedrals shall arise; the Viking and the Mohammedan will be repulsed. Crusades can be financed. Out of prosperity will arise city-states, usury, and a middle class—all these blessings pouring from this coarse circlet of glued straw. He concludes, “The real collars, of course, will be leather, padded, with increasing ingenuity, to eliminate chafing and to render the horse’s pulling all the more pleasurable.”

  (illustration credit 23.5)

  Toward the end of his twin’s long recital, Ablatus betrays agitation. He flings down his scythe, scarcely changed in design since the Egyptians first lopped maize. His pallid eyes throw sparks. “My own brother,” he utters at last, “a devil!”