Authors: Francine Prose
The Laguna Room is dark except for the glow from the screen on which Professor Glengarrie traces a graph plotting water depth against available light. Vera has to infer some reference to Loch Ness, because Glengarrie’s lilting Scottish accent sounds to her unschooled ear like glunk glunk glunk, bubbles surfacing in the loch. Occasional words come through. “Plankton” she hears. “Metabolism.” “Kilogram.” Perhaps he’s used to Americans not understanding; his charts tell the whole story. Nothing could winter over in the depths of that dark, cold lake.
Maybe it’s not his accent but the bad news that makes him humble. Because when the lights come up and a man in the second row asks if Glengarrie would please address the question of a possible winter migration, his answer couldn’t be clearer. “Of course it’s possible,” he says. “And let me repeat, my purpose here is not to deny Nessie’s existence, but only to show how unlikely it is for a species to winter in Loch Ness.”
This brings down the house. That “possible” is the magic word, much as “terrific” must be for those self-improvers next door, and saying it has squared Glengarrie with the party line on unexpectedness. Despite Vera’s touchy insistence on the noncrackpot nature of cryptobiology, she’d come expecting something a bit less…detached. She’d imagined believers with strong investments in the actuality of these unlikely creatures, but all that matters here is the scientific process: research and debate. If one of them captured Bigfoot, they’d be gratified: a feather in their L.L. Bean caps. If one of them disproved his existence conclusively, that would be almost as good. It’s essential to their sense of themselves as scientists: objective, unbiased, clear. But what it proves to Vera is the essential triviality of their pursuits. If this were a convention of cancer researchers, someone would
care
.
During the break between lectures, Vera plays Dan Esposito on vacation. Pretending the coffee machine is some middle-American campground lake, Vera stares into it, sipping her coffee and eavesdropping. By now all she really expects to hear about is breakfast. But in fact what the two donnish fellows beside her are discussing is the sex life of Mona Miller, whose second view of Nessie is scheduled to begin any minute.
The tone of their exchange reminds Vera of the gossipy dowager elephants in
Dumbo
. Lips pursed so tight it’s a wonder words can squeeze through, one’s explaining how Mona Miller’s been married five times, each time to an academic who was married to someone else when she met him at a scientific convention and who subsequently left her for another professor or student.
“Well!” says his friend. “Live by the sword, die by the sword. I wonder who’ll get lucky this time.”
“Hard cheese, old chap,” says the first. “She’s engaged again, I hear. Some microbiologist from UCLA she met at the AAAS meeting.”
Such snickering is hardly what Vera longs to hear, but when the lecture begins, she’s thankful for this insight into Mona Miller. For one thing, it makes her instantly sympathetic toward someone she might otherwise instantly hate. Vera’s first impression of Mona Miller is that she’s Alfred Hitchcock’s type: Grace Kelly, or the person James Stewart was trying to dress Kim Novak up as in
Vertigo
. Her pale linen suit is loose-fitting and smooth, her hair blond and thick like a very expensive doll’s, her thin shoulders tense and carried so high, her little hoop earrings could be epaulets. It’s not that Vera has any natural affinity for this scholarly homewrecker, this scourge of five miserable academic wives. But how can she not feel something for a perfectly groomed and slightly panicky five-time loser?
In a voice modulated by a two-hundred-year prep-school tradition, Mona Miller speaks of atmospheric distortion, temperature inversions, refractions, and gradients. For Vera, her remarks have special poignancy, conjuring up images of a modern-day Lady of Shalott, seduced and abandoned by five successive Lancelots, standing on the shoreline and measuring angles of light. Slides of a New Hampshire lake—which, Mona claims, duplicates Loch Ness—show a stick protruding from the water, held presumably by some invisible swimmer underneath. In one photo, the stick looks two feet long; in another, taken later in the day, twenty. And monstrous. The contrast is impressive, but what Vera wants to know is: Who was holding the stick? Was it one of her husbands? Why did she fall in love with him, and why did he leave? Was it taken when yet another marriage was showing signs of disintegration, so that Mona was scanning that stick in the water for reassurance that things aren’t always what they seem?
But finally it’s Mona who’s doing the reassuring. Like Glengarrie, she finishes by promising her listeners that she is in no way denying the existence of underwater creatures, merely stressing the importance of accurate optical technique in the continuing search for unexpected life forms. Her reception is a good deal warmer than Glengarrie’s. Vera gets the feeling that—even knowing what they know—every man in the audience would gladly volunteer to be number six. Gerald Davis stands, applauding with his hands over his head. It does seem a little excessive, and there’s a flutter of disapproval, as if Davis’s colleagues had caught him propositioning the Ice Maiden of optical science.
Davis is still standing when Ray Bramlett scurries up to the mike and announces they’re running late and will go on without a break to hear Frank Karsh of the Wildlife Preservation Task Force speak on “The Lesson of Steller’s Sea Cow.”
Vera wants a smoke, feels she’s earned one. She’d like to repair to the ladies’ room, which has a lobby of its own, minus the taxidermy, with mirrors and upholstered banquettes like a set for
The Women
. She wants to sink into one of those revolving, half-moon armchairs and look in the mirror, think of Mona Miller’s angles of light, and smoke a cigarette. Nor is Vera the only malcontent. Lots of people drank coffee during the first break and look ready for the powder room, too.
Vera’s glad she’s not Frank Karsh, having to face this crowd with his pedagogical sea cows—but Frank doesn’t care. He bounds up to the mike like the young Johnny Carson. Beamish boy, ex-Peace Corps or Vista volunteer, he wouldn’t shrink before a roomful of NRAers with rifles or grizzled Captain Ahabs with harpoons. He’ll do anything,
be
Johnny Carson if he has to; it’s not show biz here, but the survival of whole species. When Frank Karsh waves for the lights to go out, it’s a gesture of benediction.
A slide appears on the screen, a sepia etching of some huge, whiskered porpoise or seal. “Steller’s sea cow,” says Frank. Another slide follows, this time a little manatee floating in a tank, staring plaintively at the camera with the moist, shiny eyes one finds on greeting cards of various creatures—puppies, chimps, hippos—illustrating the sentiment, “Missing You.”
“Two hundred years ago,” Frank Karsh begins, “thousands of giant sea cows inhabited the waters near the Bering Strait. Now there is not one of them in the world, nor will there be again.”
Frank goes on to tell the story of how, in 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller, First Surgeon on the Bering expedition, discovered, christened, and essentially fell in love with this species of Sirenia, each one thirty feet long, weighing approximately four tons, and graced with a placid sweetness that was its undoing. For Bering’s men were starving, and one day an especially brave or especially hungry sailor speared one, cooked it, and found its flesh to taste “like sole, only better—like sole amandine!”
The crowd titters nervously, laughter such as one might hear in a roomful of guilty ex-cannibals who’ve just heard human flesh described as tasting like chicken marengo.
“And then, just fifty-four years later, a certain Sergei Popoff killed the very last surviving sea cow in the waters near Bering Island.” Frank goes on, making the sea cow extermination sound worse than Dresden and Guernica combined. It’s what Vera’s always suspected of these preservationists: if they had to pick one species to be eliminated, they’d pick man.
The “lesson” part hardly needs saying, but Frank can’t stop now. As he names the species in imminent danger of meeting the sea cows’ fate, Vera thinks of the Vietnam War, how the lists of dead and missing seemed to scroll down the TV screen forever. The list goes on and on, and when it ends, the crowd’s so demoralized they can’t move. When at last they rouse themselves to applaud, it’s that chastened, dutiful clapping one hears at the end of documentaries about concentration camps and failed revolutions.
What Vera’s just realizing is that the lesson of Steller’s sea cow is why no one will ever see Bigfoot. If Bigfoot shows himself, just once, he’ll wind up neatly packaged and labeled in some housewife’s freezer, waiting to reappear as Bigfoot amandine. That
any
of these creatures might show themselves is as unlikely as Mona Miller finding a stolen husband who’ll stay with her.
This is what Vera’s thinking as she hurries from the Cottonwood Room, so when she rounds a corner and nearly runs into Mona Miller, she feels as if she’s summoned her. Mona’s in one of those vintage stagecoaches converted here into phone booths. Riding shotgun, she’s speaking intensely into the receiver, gesturing wildly with the other hand. She looks profoundly unhappy. Is she speaking to the prospective number six, or one of the previous five? Vera’s seized with desire to squeeze in the booth beside Mona and tell her all about Lowell. Then together they will decide if loving and losing five husbands is better or worse than loving and losing the same one five times. If only Mavis were here. She could fit in there too and lecture them both about constancy and passion.
Vera wishes with all her heart that one day Mona Miller will be out by the lake measuring angles of refraction and suddenly the monster will lift its long neck and tiny brontosaurus head and look straight at Mona and wink.
That
will change her luck. Somehow Vera feels certain that this would make Mona stop stealing husbands who are so easily stolen; she wants to believe that seeing the Loch Ness monster would make you hold out for more. But Mona will never see it. Any creature highly evolved enough to survive on insufficient plankton is smart enough not to get caught like a Steller’s sea cow.
Vera spots a small group of cryptobiologists moving slowly down the hall. Behind them is a picture window, and behind that all God’s grandeur made manifest in three billion years of geology. They don’t see it. And though Vera had hoped to find people like herself who just couldn’t assimilate the canyon, the sight of these doesn’t please her.
She’s thinking about Georg Wilhelm Steller: how he must have loved those sea cows. Closing her eyes, Vera sees him, later in life, long after the sea cows are gone. He’s wading in the shallows. His shoulders are hunched at an angle that takes her a moment to recognize as being just like Mona Miller’s as he stands there waiting, trying, like Mona, not to search every wake and swell for what he knows is no longer there.
I
N THE MIMOSA ROOM,
everyone’s squinting. The only ones not blinking like moles are the crew—very L.A. for Flagstaff Cablevision; with their unbuttoned-to-the-waist shirts, their hairy chests and deep tans, they look as if they spend their lives in the glare of wattage like this. The brightness has the festive, urgent shine of searchlights outside Hollywood premieres, arcing up to pick the stars out of the sky and down to catch the ones emerging from their limos. Before Vera knows it, she’s picked her head up, as if the light’s aimed at her.
Not so the cryptobiologists, none of whom can deal with the cameras. They’re curious and, at the same time, afraid that the slightest show of interest will make them look like those kids one sees jumping and waving behind the reporters on live-action TV news. So they find seats faster than they normally would and wait so docilely, Ray Bramlett doesn’t have to move a muscle for their attention. “And now,” he says. “I’m pleased to present to you, with their astonishing story—Ethel and Carl Poteet.”
Arm in arm, the Poteets take hesitant baby steps toward the front. Vera’s reminded of some celebrity’s aged parents, dragged up on stage for a famous son or daughter’s
This Is Your Life
. It’s hard to imagine them in a remote African valley, traveling
anywhere
, for that matter, except perhaps as golden-age tourists, checking constantly to make sure the bus hasn’t left.
By the time they’ve reached the front and are standing there letting the cameras roll and more dead air flow by than Vera would have thought permissible, they’re looking more self-possessed. Ethel’s neat and pretty in her new perm and Ladies’-Better-Dresses pale-blue polyester. Carl’s seersucker suit is the same shade as Ethel’s dress. Ethel turns to Carl and smiles.
“Well, now,” says Carl Poteet. “The first thing folks always ask us is why we’d want to do such a Looney-Tune thing. So I’ll try to answer that one, then I’ll crawl back behind that slide projector and let Ethel take over.” Though the lights play on Carl’s steel-framed glasses in a metallic, outer-space way, he’s still your Norman Rockwell grocer, the TV-commercial pharmacist you trust enough to burden with your hemorrhoid pain.
“It started when I was a kid,” says Carl. “I was always fascinated with dinosaurs. Couldn’t get enough of ’em. Lots of boys go through it, I know. Me, I never outgrew it. When Ethel married me, I told her she was moving back into the Mesozoic Age, and she said, Fine, long as she could take her Maytag with her.”
Generous laughter here; the Poteets are warming the chilliest academic hearts. Even Gerald Davis is smiling indulgently, as if listening to a favorite dotty uncle.
“As many of you know,” says Carl, “Ethel and I have been part of this organization since they first opened it to laymen.” Laymen? As opposed to what? Professional cryptobiologists? Carl’s humility moves Vera; he sounds like a heart patient deferring to a roomful of Houston surgeons. “So it’s you folks I’ve got to thank for telling me about the Mokele-Mbembe and the Boxberger expedition and of course Professor Lausnitz’s work. Soon as I heard about that, I got to dreaming how someday we’d retire and sell the business, so Ethel and I could go where these early sightings occurred and take a look for ourselves.” Carl says this as if it’s the most normal vision in the world: after supper in the heartland, Carl dozing in front of the TV while Ethel clips coupons and balances the books so that someday they can go hunt for dinosaurs.