The Bestiary (17 page)

“Until the eighteenth century,” he said, “an average of .25 animal species per year became extinct. In the nineteenth century, it jumped to one species per year—and that was considered a big jump. Today the rate of extinction is one thousand species per year. By 2000 it will be 40,000—110 per day. And that’s a conversative estimate. In our lifetime, the hippopotamus, the gorilla, and the polar bear may all be gone. Twenty percent of the birds, twenty-three percent of mammals. Fifty percent of the turtles—an animal so durable it can live for centuries. As for plants, one a day now becomes extinct, and that will double in twenty-five years.” He shook his head. “In any other branch of science, figures like these could only be termed catastrophic. But when we say that, we’re accused of crying wolf.”

“Why, when you’ve got the data?”

“Oh, it’s not the data. People don’t want to hear the word ‘catastrophe.’ To them, that’s drama, not science. In fact, in this situation, it couldn’t be more scientific.”

There was dismay, not bitterness, in Bruno’s voice.

“All we can do is save as many species as possible,” he went on. “I don’t want to spend my life writing postmortems—or obituaries. Ever hear of the wisent?”

I shook my head.

“It was the European bison—but even unluckier than its American cousin. The last wild wisent was hunted down in the Bialowiecza Forest in Poland on February 19, 1921. The last sea mink, a shy, beautiful creature, was harpooned off Greenland on April 2, 1860. The one surviving Réunion Island sheldgoose, a multicolored ground bird, died in captivity on Christmas Day, 1710. It’s obscene when we can pinpoint the last member of any species, and the exact date of its death, which is the death of all those that came before it. Most species die off anonymously. A species down to its last hundred members is on a precipice. Right now, I’m tracking a couple that are teetering: the wild Bactrian camel and the nomadic Saiga antelope, which roams the desert steppes from Iran to Mongolia. The Chinese poach it for its horns, which they grind into aphrodisiacs. You know what tipped us off to the Saiga’s disappearance? The disturbance in the food chain. A proliferation of the sagebush and saltwort it feeds on, and the fact its main predator, the red wolf, was attacking domestic sheep. Only later were Saiga herds sighted that should have been forty strong and instead were down to six head.” He sighed. “But enough. I want to know what you’re doing. After all you’ve been through—are you really okay?”

“I’m going back to school. To get my degree. As for the war, I’ll give you the short version.”

The war Bruno was fighting interested me more. The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just a dry run. Once you believed animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian value only, it wasn’t so hard to move on to people.

Riding back to the airport in Chicago, I had passed the ruins of the old stockyards. They were demolished the previous summer, but at twilight, with dust clouds sifting into the smoky sky, it was as if the wrecking balls and bulldozers had just finished their work, leveling the vast holding pens, cattle walks, and slaughterhouses, where blood ran ankle-deep on the killing floors. The air was dense with the spirits of the animals that had passed through there. Someone like my grandmother, who could detect an ailing pigeon in a crowded park, would have been overwhelmed in that place. The blood heaviness was still palpable, misting over the lake, clouding the car windows, streaking the horizon. I felt as if I would choke on it.

“Science is on the march in Vietnam, too,” I concluded sarcastically, rising from the windowsill. “They’re napalming whole villages, Bruno. Entire swaths of jungle. Frying every living thing by the square mile.”

He was staring past me, out the window. Since he was a boy, when he was truly upset he grew silent. Finally he reached for my arm and pulled me down and embraced me.

In the living room Lena was sitting alone on the sofa, immersed in the Georgetown course book.

I was happy to see this. But I was also sad. It was not the first time Mrs. Moretti had declared me a member of the family; but it felt as if I had officially cemented my role by helping Lena out financially. I would always be like a sibling to her. As it was, I had long feared that if I initiated a relationship with her which didn’t work out, my ties to the family, and my friendships with her and Bruno, would evaporate.

I was taking the last shuttle to Boston, at ten. After I said my goodbyes—and promised Bruno I would visit him in Philadelphia—Lena walked me downstairs. We stood in front of the building, the wind buffeting us, the Broadway subway screeching on the elevated tracks a block away. She looked so beautiful at that moment. I didn’t want to leave her. I wished we had more time alone. I noticed then that she was wearing her gold locket, engraved
L.M
.; either she had slipped it out of her sweater or had just put it on.

Following my gaze, she smiled faintly. “You were admiring my mother’s brooch,” she said. “My father gave it to her, but told her not to wear it until he died. She’s worn it every day since.”

That seemed a mysterious request for a straight-ahead type like her father. “Why was that?”

“I asked, but she wouldn’t talk about it. At my father’s forty-day mass, I asked one of the men from his squad. He told me that some firemen wear a salamander amulet. My father’s amulet was pinned inside his slicker when he died. He gave my mother that brooch years ago.” She shook her head. “My mother’s not altogether with us anymore. You saw it, I know you did.”

“She’s taken a lot of hits.”

“I know. But I still have to get on with my life.”

She put her arms around me, then rose up and kissed my cheek. “I’m glad you’re back safe, Xeno. Thanks for everything.”

I turned up my collar and walked to the subway. The wind stung when I rounded the corner. Inside I felt empty, but also relieved to be leaving. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. Mrs. Moretti was right about that. The Morettis were the only family I had; seeing them for Thanksgiving was like an official homecoming—with all the mixed feelings that entailed. I felt as if I had arrived from nowhere and was headed nowhere. In between, it was a shock to be with people who had known and cared about me my entire life. Perhaps that was why my visit with them, like my recent encounters with Mr. Hood and Evgénia, was quickly falling away from me—as if it already belonged to the distant past. Time had become so elastic that a single day could feel like a month, a month like an hour. I didn’t know if this was a product of raw fatigue or an unconscious attempt to put the war behind me.

Only when I was on the subway did it hit me that, for the first time I could remember, there were no animals—no monkeys, lizards, parrots, not even a cat or dog—in the Moretti household.

As for the salamander, eventually I learned that it meant “fire dragon” in Greek. Aristotle said that it repelled fire. Pliny claimed it was the only animal that sought to extinguish fires, which was why, in the Revesby bestiary, it was called “the fire-fighter.”

N
ATHALIE WORE
a red bandanna around her head, Apache-style. Her hair was long now. Three bloodred streaks—war paint—flared off her cheeks, like wings. She was at war. Her scarf was an American flag. Her wraparounds were opaque. Beneath a leather jacket she wore a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. The seat of her jeans was stitched with multiple patches: the hammer and sickle, a clenched fist, a mushroom cloud, the peace sign, Edvard Munch’s scream. In the twenty-four hours I had been in town, I hadn’t once seen her smile. And that included the thirty minutes we spent in bed.

We were on the Blue Line, en route to Government Center. The subway cars were packed with people heading for the rally. The city expected a crowd of ten thousand, and forty thousand would show up. Nathalie’s small contingent, the Trotsky Worker-Student Alliance, was going to rendezvous near Faneuil Hall. I was one of five vets opposed to the war who would join them. A former lance corporal named Smoltz had gotten my name from Nathalie and contacted me. I had my medals pinned to my denim jacket. It was the first and only time I wore them. After the rally, everyone was to march across the bridge into Cambridge, first to MIT, then Harvard, to protest their research contracts with the Defense Department and the CIA. Several hundred cops and state troopers had been called in by the mayor. They were in full riot gear, armed with tear gas and rubber bullets.

As we emerged into the crisp air and the tumult of the crowd—bullhorns, chants, police sirens—Nathalie turned to me. “We need you—I need you—to do something.”

What she needed me to do was throw my medals onto the steps of the courthouse where the government was trying three antiwar leaders for sedition.

I looked at her. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“Before what?”

“Before we came down here.”

“You mean you won’t do it?”

“I mean I would’ve liked some time to think about it.”

“You have time.” She glanced at her watch. “Twenty, maybe thirty, minutes.”

She said this without a trace of irony.

Smoltz was waiting for us beside a red white and blue van with curtained windows. The curtains were American flags adorned with skulls instead of stars. Smoltz was short and muscular, with a Mohawk and eyebrows that met over his nose. One of his eyes was off, so it didn’t feel like he was really looking at you. He wore a sleeveless leather vest and steel bracelets. His Purple Heart was pinned to his vest.

His handshake was like a vise, and lasted too long. “Honored, bro,” he said.

He introduced me to two other vets, a skinny helicopter gunner on crutches named Tomansky, who had a Bronze Star, and a black Marine with a missing ear who said his squad had given him the name Cork “because I floated down the Kang River on a tree trunk.” The fifth vet hadn’t shown up.

“He’s on a bus for Portsmouth,” Cork said, holding out his arm and mimicking someone shooting up. “His sister’s gonna take care of him.”

Nathalie’s group was assembling around us. They wore red arm-bands. A girl in a trench coat and beret wore a skull mask. Her boyfriend, whose hair was even longer than Nathalie’s, had painted UNCLE $AM across his bare chest. Off to the side, a pair of middle-aged men in tweed jackets and flannel shirts stood tensely, conversing with Nathalie. They were the real Trotskyites, hard-core organizers from a splinter branch of the American Communist Party. That was as far left as you could go in the antiwar movement, and I wondered how Nathalie had arrived there so fast. Just a year earlier, she had preferred staying in bed all day, sipping her hookah and perusing ancient maps. When I asked her about it, she grew testy, insisting she had always held strong political beliefs. Perhaps remembering who she was talking to, she added that her sister’s death had been a brutal wake-up call. Then she reverted to the rote sloganeering I had been hearing from her all day: “The only lasting action is political action.”

Around us the action never let up: speakers on a rickety stage exhorting the crowd in two-minute bursts; a band jamming on a flatbed truck; Hare Krishna initiates ringing bells; “bikers for peace” revving their engines. Some divinity students released 44,000 bloodred balloons—one for each American soldier killed in Vietnam—into the piercingly clear sky. Everyone looked up, except the police. Visors down, they squeezed their batons and scanned the crowd. The state troopers were lined up on side streets, ready to converge on the square. Barricades had been thrown up. Instinctively I checked them for a way out of there if things turned ugly. I didn’t see any way out.

From behind one barricade vitriolic counter-demonstrators were taunting the crowd:
America—Love it or leave it.
They were buttoned-down pro-war students who didn’t want to fight themselves. Young Americans for Freedom, they called themselves. I hated them when I was in college, and I hated them even more now.

Nathalie sidled up to me. “Well?”

“No,” I said.

“You won’t do it?”

I shook my head.

“What the fuck is the matter with you, Xeno? You told me yourself you hate the war.”

“I do.”

“And that those medals don’t mean a goddamn thing to you.”

“They don’t.”

“So?”

The balloons were still visible, sailing in the wind toward the river. I was thinking about Murphy, torn in half in that forest.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Jesus.”

“The answer is no. I’ll march. I’ll sing. But not that.”

She turned on her heel and returned to the men in tweed jackets. A stocky man with a black beard, my age, joined them. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt and combat boots. Grimacing, stoop-shouldered, he seemed to be carrying a tremendous weight. Nathalie spoke hurriedly to the three men. They glanced at me, and the bearded man’s grimace turned to a scowl. Then he turned his back on me, and Nathalie did the same.

I should have left right then—not the rally, but the company of Nathalie and her friends. I wanted to be at the rally, to express my anger about the war. I had no idea what Murphy and the rest of my late comrades would have wanted me to do about the medals. I didn’t care. But whatever I did, it would be on my own terms. This could have been my big chance to purge myself of Operation Phoenix, but I didn’t see it that way. My shame over the medals was a private matter: I wasn’t going to try to exorcise it with a public act. The other vets could deal with their demons, and ghosts, as they saw fit.