The Evolution of Jane (21 page)

"I know it's not right," Jack said, "but—"

"I'm not even talking to you," I said.

"Yes, I know, but—"

"I don't care if it's right. What does that mean, anyway? I'm not interested. I have to talk to
Martha.
Martha has to talk to me. There are too many stupid secrets and misunderstandings."

"I know it's awful to keep it secret, but it was important," Martha said. She smiled, which I thought almost indecent under the circumstances.

"Martha had to keep this a secret. She could get into trouble," Jack said. "She's been so wonderful. She figured out the logistics, she made this possible, she found the perfect place. She had to keep this a secret, you can understand that."

"Wrong secret," I said.

"Well, all secrets are wrong," Jack said.

"No, they're not," Martha said. "That's not true."

The two of them began earnestly debating when it was morally permissible to keep information from someone else. Jack felt that if the information would hurt the other person, you could keep it to yourself and remain in the clear ethically if not morally.

"If you see what I mean."

While Martha believed that silence and discretion could in and of themselves be a form of moral courage.

"You agree with me, don't you, Jane?" she said. "Now, let's proceed with the business at hand."

Jack smiled. "Yes," he said. "At last."

Okay, okay, uncle! I give up! How could I properly confront Martha now, as she prepared her woodland bower of lust, like Dido drawing Aeneas to her love cave? Proceed with your epic lovemaking. Go about your business. Just stop talking. Stop these hideous confidences.

I turned to go back.

"Oh, you can stay," Jack said.

"You can watch," Martha said. "Quietly."

This is what you get for stalking people, Jane, I thought. Seek and ye shall find.

"Mom should be here any minute," Jack said.

"She should?"

"This is all for her, really."

"It is?"

"But my sister and the rest of the gang are coming, too. Quite an event, isn't it?"

"You're a very close-knit family."

He put his arm around Martha's shoulders.

"Don't be nervous," she said.

"So we're like going native?" I said.

"There are no natives here," Martha said. "Unless you count Margret Wittmer."

"I know this seems silly, Jane, but people need rituals."

The rest of the voyeurs arrived and stood in a circle around Martha and Jack, and I saw that this was probably not a mating ceremony, but a marriage ceremony.

"I think we should hold hands," Mrs. Cornwall said.

Only Dot seemed embarrassed.

"Now we'll sing," Mrs. Cornwall said.

Then they all seemed embarrassed. But they sang. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

Jack walked over to me, and whispered, "Cheer up."

Then Mrs. Cornwall whipped out a cardboard box from her backpack. She opened it and sprinkled Mr. Cornwall on the ground.

"Maybe I should keep a little," she said. "I've grown accustomed to—"

"To what?" Jack said. "His weight? Come on, Mother. Enough is enough."

"Now's the time," said Jack's sister, more gently.

"This is gross," said Dot.

We walked back along the path in a pure and utter darkness. So, I thought, natural selection is a kind of cosmic farce, in which it all comes out right in the end because whatever comes out in the end is by definition right because there is no right and wrong?

Maybe Martha was correct. Maybe metaphor was a mistake.

T
HE FRIGHTENING THING
about Darwin is not nature red in tooth and claw. The frightening thing about Darwin is not our ancestors the apes. The frightening thing about Darwin is what my mother called chaos. I realize that there is some specific scientific meaning to the word
chaos.
But I think that my mother's meaning is more profound: there is no plan, there never was one. Everyone knows this. It is a cliché of modernism. Everyone knows this now. But Darwin knew it first. And Darwin knew it best. Darwin met chaos head on. He saw it wandering aimlessly, meaninglessly, shifting and turning without warning through a world in which every creature considered itself the most important and not one of them mattered a whit. My mother found this notion to be invigorating, and maybe it is. But imagine realizing it for the first time, realizing it not just personally, but on behalf of the entire Western world. For the years after his great journey, after his discovery of the mechanism of the randomness of our existence, after his discovery of chaos, Darwin suffered mysterious illnesses—long bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, blinding headaches, fainting spells, weakness, and exhaustion. It might have been some virus he picked up on his travels. He may have been allergic to the chemicals he used to preserve specimens. And it may have been psychosomatic, a physical revulsion at the truth he had discovered. And yet, picture this: It is a spring morning. Darwin has been home from his
Beagle
adventure for years. He stands in his garden, waiting, armed with a flour sifter borrowed from the kitchen. A bee lands on the rose in front of him. Darwin dusts it with a fine white coating of flour. He alerts his assistants—little Darwin girls in their pinafores and little Darwin boys in their short pants, the Darwin governess in her sweeping skirts, all posted at strategic points surrounding the garden. Charles Darwin is wearing a frock coat. They run after the dusty white bee, following its path. The path of the bee, even in the midst of a world of meaninglessness, means something to Darwin. And Darwin, a bearded Victorian paterfamilias, running through his glorious flower garden chasing a bee with his children and their governess—that means something, too.

Looking for the dolphins that never materialized one morning, I told Gloria I had read about Darwin's powdered bee in one of her books.

"Imagine him, thinking up some way to mark the bee, chasing it all over with his kids, with the nanny. Pocket watch banging against his belly. Now, that's what I call science."

Martha, walking by us as I was talking, said, "Poor bee."

This made me want to kill her. Perhaps it is not nature but friendship that is red in tooth and claw. Perhaps a family feud or even a personal feud with my best friend, Martha, should never have come as a surprise to me. Perhaps the feud is the paradigm of all relationships, a long history of exaggerated slights, of misinterpreted actions and misguided reactions. Neo-Darwinists have said that natural selection is an algorithmic process, an unthinking, unchanging equation that governs all of life, all of creation.
What if they're wrong? What if it's the feud that regulates life? Feuds are algorithmic, unthinking, unchanging. No matter what you plug into them, the answer is the same. At that moment, I think I liked the idea of feuding with the entire universe. It made me feel connected.

Darwin lived with the secret of creation tearing at his conscience and his intestines for twenty years. Some historians think he was cowardly for not announcing his theory much earlier. Others think he was, rather, a responsible, meticulous scientist. Secrets are funny things, leading a potential existence, an actual existence, a virtual existence, a nonexistence. Secrets don't make any more sense than feuds do.

The Cornwalls' secret was safe with me, that I knew. But not because I felt any protective need to guard it, or by extension, them. It was safe with me because, like so many secrets, once it was revealed to me, it lost its interest, its power. And it embarrassed me. My role in it, as an eager supplicant stalking the cool and distant Martha, embarrassed me. Jack's role embarrassed me, too. Poor Jack, traveling all that way to sing around the campfire of Dad's ashes. The whole Cornwall family, Mr. Cornwall in particular, all embarrassed me. Only Dot, so embarrassed herself, seemed unscathed by the absurd event on Floreana Island.

The next morning, when we set off for our island du jour, a flat rock called South Plaza, I pushed Floreana from my head and placed Gloria's hat (a vast straw object she had purchased at the airport in Guayaquil "for an emergency") on it instead. I was the emergency, for in spite of ginger pills and Dramamine and acupressure bands on my wrists, I was still suffering from seasickness.

"Maybe the absence of meaning in the world has distressed your stomach," Gloria said. "As it did Darwin's."

"Maybe."

The hat flopped lightly on all sides, blocking my vision, but reassuring me. The sky was gray, but painfully bright and hot. Floreana with its macabre hillbilly feuds, with its murders and mummies and, now, the ashes of Mr. William Cornwall, was left far behind.

Mrs. Cornwall did seem a little down in the mouth, though.

"Separation anxiety," Jack whispered to me, nodding at his glum mother. He seemed a bit forlorn himself.

I made a polite response of assent, a murmur sort of thing. We had seemed to have an understanding, Jack and I, if only for a moment, a subtle, sub-rosa protoflirtation that might not have been a flirtation at all—that kind of understanding. But, Really, I thought, you have made me very uncomfortable with your dance of death.

"I'm bored," Dot said. "I'm hot. I want a real shower."

"Decadent creature," said Jeremy.

I avoided Martha, as much as one can avoid the leader of a group. I hung back, drifted ahead, sat off to the side on a rock—anything to steer clear of Martha's stories, Martha's voice. She certainly didn't notice. She talked, on and on.

We walked through a forest of dry, white trees called Palo Santo trees from which another species of booby, with French blue beaks and tomato red-webbed feet, watched us from their nests. Little bundles of white down wriggled beneath them, occasionally poking a beak up, demanding to be fed. Sometimes a male blue-footed booby would whistle at us on the narrow trail and peck at our legs. I used Gloria's hat as a shield, holding it against my leg each time we passed a whistling booby glaring at us with those round, close-set booby eyes. Then we made our way across a rocky plateau spattered with white guano paint. Swallow-tailed gulls swept fearlessly from the sky to their nests deep in the cliffs. We posed for pictures beneath towering cactus trees. The heat accompanied us everywhere.

The blue-footed birds hissed at us as we passed out of the grove of bare trees to be greeted by a vast rocky plateau dotted with their circular nests, nests that were nothing but white lime rings, orbits of guano sprayed on the inhospitable rocks, circles of shit.

"Circle of death," Jack reminded us, dutifully, without his usual zeal.

Jack was shimmering. Why was he shimmering?

The boobies sat on the ground surrounded by their bull's-eyes of guano. We stood, staring at the circles of shit, silent and intent.

The boobies were shimmering. Martha was shimmering. Gloria was shimmering, too, beside a shimmering Cindy. Why was everyone shimmering? Was it from the heat? Interesting that everyone was shimmering. I closed my eyes for a moment, but that only made the swaying and shimmering worse.

I looked at the white circles. Inside was caked brown dust. Outside was caked brown dust. Inside was home. Outside was death.

"Shocking," said Mrs. Tommaso.

"Gloria thinks anthropomorphism can cloud your understanding," I said.

"Or clarify it!" said Gloria. She turned to one of the birds, squatted down beside it, and looked it right in its close-set booby eyes. "Isn't that right, dear?" she said.

South Plaza was the location, among other things, of a bachelor colony of sea lions. They all hung out here, the hapless males who couldn't score. Martha made some jokes about their lack of housekeeping, which I thought were rather lame until we approached the colony and the smell of sea lion excrement and urine greeted us, as thick as a curtain.

I followed Gloria along the narrow trail. She still shimmered and swayed in the heat, like an oasis. I stopped to catch my breath.
The sun had come out, burning off the mist, and the heat was becoming even more oppressive.

Martha was talking. I noticed from a great distance. I was standing right beside Martha, but the heat blurred her words. I sensed that she was relating a crucial chapter in her big book of nature, but I could not take in the words.

The bachelors sprawled on the rocks. Some of them had come here to recuperate after a frenzy of copulating and fighting and keeping the harem in line. Some were waiting to go out and overthrow some equally exhausted bull. Some were losers who would never get a girl, much less a harem. They looked fat to me—gross, wallowing, snoring, grunting. They weren't cute at all. How could I ever have thought such a thing? They were stinking slovenly males. They probably didn't even lift the seat when they peed. They left their used tissues on the kitchen table. They didn't put the milk back in the fridge.

I put one foot in front of the other, then brought the first foot forward, then repeated, one foot, then the other foot, stepping forever over sharp hunks of lava. Pahoehoe lava? Or the other kind? What was the other kind called? If only the lava and the stinking sea lion piss would disappear. If only the boat would appear. A porter in a white sailor suit would pull back the covers on the narrow cot in the cool, dark cabin, and I would put this swaying, whirling body down to rest.

"Someone said that poetry was a product of the lower intestines," Jeremy said. "And I should like to say that I feel this place is truly poetic."

"Do you want some water?" Gloria asked me.

I think I moved my hand in a gesture that suggested, No, thank you.

She snapped my picture. "You're actually green."

I sat on a rock. It was not green, it was white, white with bird shit. But a pool of greenish sea lion urine lay just beyond my left foot. I heard Martha's voice as she lectured nearby, the inflection familiar and comforting.

I stood up. I tugged off the vast straw hat. The cord was around my neck, caught in the cord of my binoculars, the cord of my camera, the cord of my sunglasses. I tugged at all the cords. Martha's voice stopped talking. I felt hands helping me. Fingers pulled the cords apart, like the fingers of a nineteenth-century gentleman unlacing a lady about to faint. My father once told me men used to carry little scissors with them so they could unsnip the corset laces quickly. Was someone unsnipping my binocular cords with a Swiss Army knife? I wondered this as I vomited violently onto the hallowed ground of Darwin's Galapagos Islands. I wondered this briefly, then realized it was not true as I noticed that I was not only vomiting violently, tearing my throat in great heaving rasps, but was also fiercely emitting something warm into my special quick-dry nylon underpants, something I first thought was urine, then knew was not.