Ship Fever (12 page)

In a huge tree, deep in the forest, he saw several dozen gather together. They raised their wings, they arched their necks, they lifted their long, flowing plumes and shivered them as if to music, darting now and then between the branches in great excitement. Their beauty and strangeness beggared even that of the lyre-tailed drongo-shrike or the Amazonian umbrella-bird. Above the crouching, glossy bodies the plumes formed golden fans. The islanders taught Alec to use a bow, and arrows tipped with blunt knobs. He sat in the trees, dazed by the beauty surrounding
him, and shot strongly, so as to stun the birds without rending the skins or staining the plumage with blood. On the ground below him, boys wrung the birds' necks as they fell.

And of course they had feet, strong and pink and sturdy. The theories about them, Alec learned, had only been misinformation. He was one of the first to see how the islanders, preparing skins for traders, cut off the wings and feet, skinned the body up to the beak and removed the skull, then wrapped the skin around a sturdy stick and a stuffing of leaves and smoked the whole over a fire. This shrank the head and body very much and made the flowing plumage more prominent. Alec prepared his own specimens differently, so that the natural characteristics were preserved. And this absorbed him so completely that only in brief moments, as he fell into sleep, would he wonder about such things as how the golden plumes were related to the emerald disks.

Rain, fungus, aggressive ants, and the ever-ravenous dogs of the region all plagued him. Still, before the fever overcame him and he had to declare his journey at an end, he salvaged four crates of excellent skins and also captured three living specimens. He might not have an hypothesis about the divergence of species, but he knew how these birds lived. At the Smithsonian Institution, where he thought to donate them, he could point to their sturdy pink feet and say, “Look.
I
was the first to bring these back.”

As he hop-scotched his way across the archipelago to Singapore, he easily found fruit and insects his birds would eat. Little figs they particularly enjoyed, also grasshoppers, locusts, and caterpillars. From Singapore to Bombay he fed the birds boiled rice and bananas, but they drooped in the absence of insect food and after Bombay even the fruit ran out. It was Alec's good fortune to discover they savored cockroaches, and for him to be aboard a battered old barkentine that swarmed with them. Each morning he scoured the hold and the store-rooms until he'd
filled several biscuit-tins, and during the afternoon and evening he doled them out to the birds, a dozen at a time. As the ship headed south to round the Cape he worried that the increasing cold would bother them, but they did fine.

And if, as he learned after being back in Philadelphia for only a month, Wallace had been making his way to England simultaneously, carrying his own birds of paradise; and if Wallace's trip was shaped by the same quest for cockroaches—what did that matter? Wallace had traveled once more on a comfortable British steamer, aboard which cockroaches were rare; from his forced stops to gather them on land he made amusing anecdotes. But
I
was the one, Alec thought, who first solved the problem of keeping the birds alive.

From a London paper Alec learned that Wallace had returned to fame, as a result of his Ternate essay. His birds had taken up residence in the Zoological Gardens, where they were much admired. Meanwhile Alec had himself returned, unknown, to a country at war. To a half-country, he thought, which might soon be at war with England. His crates of skins lay uncatalogued at the Academy of Sciences. And the curators at the Smithsonian seemed less than grateful for his beautiful birds. No one had time to look at birds, their eyes were fixed on battles.

Alec wrote to Wallace once more—inappropriately, he knew; their stations had altered, their friendship had lapsed. Still he felt closer to Wallace than to anyone else in the world, and he could not keep from trying to explain himself to this man he'd meant to emulate. After giving the details of his voyage, of his birds and their fate, he wrote:

All of this may be blamed on the war. I cannot explain how bewildering it has been to return, after my long absence, to see what's become of my country. My mother died during my journey home. All three of my brothers have married, and my father has gone to live with my brother Frank,
having lost through improvidence both the tavern and much of the money rightfully mine, which he obtained through trickery from Mr. Barton. Mr. Barton himself is gone, enlisted in the Army. The weather is cold and grey; the streets swarm with pallid people lost in their clothes; the air rings with boys shouting newspaper headlines, over and over again. In the Dyak longhouses, the heads of their enemies hung from the rafters, turning gently as we ate: and I felt more at home with them than here. Do you feel this? When you walk into a drawing-room, do you not feel yourself a stranger?

What I meant to do, what I wanted to do, was to visit Mr. Edwards, whose book sent me off on my life's work. He is no great thinker himself; only a man who traveled, like me, and described what he saw as I have failed to do. I thought he might help me gather some of my impressions into a book. But now I find that what I must do is abandon my collections, leave home once more, and enlist. The Potomac swarms with a great armada, ready to transport 100,000 men for an attack on Richmond.

As he mailed his letter, he thought about the legend that seemed—even before he left—to be growing up around his presence in the Aru Islands. He'd learned some of the islanders' language, and had occasionally entertained his companions by lighting fires with a hand-lens, or picking up bits of iron with a magnet, which acts they regarded as magic. And because he asked questions, even laughable questions, about the birds with no feet before he ever saw them; because he knew where beetles might be found and how to lure butterflies to a bit of dried dung; and most of all because he walked alone through the forests, for hours and days, and was comfortable there, and at peace, the islanders ascribed mystical powers to him. The birds, they claimed, came down from the trees to meet him.

One of the boys he hunted with said, “You know everything. You know our birds and animals as well as we do, and the ways of the forest. You are not afraid to walk alone at night. We
believe that all the animals you kill and keep will come to life again.”

Alec denied this strenuously. “These animals are
dead,
” he said, pointing at a cluster of ants preserved in spirits. “Truly, truly dead.”

The boy looked serenely into a golden glade dense with fallen trees. “They will rise,” he said. “When the forest is empty and needs new animals.”

Alec remembers staring at him; how the jar of ants dropped from his hand and rolled into the leafy litter. The suggestion seemed, in that moment, no more likely or unlikely than what Wallace had proposed for the origin of species: another theory of evolution; another theory. In that instant a line from Wallace's first letter to him returned and pierced like a bamboo shaft through his heart:
Each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science.

But this was only ever true for Wallace, not for him, he thinks; he has never been the scientist he'd believed himself to be, perhaps is no scientist at all. And that legend is as false as the moment, on the first leg of his first voyage home, when he hung suspended in joy. All the animals he's collected, sure that more would spring forth from the earth, are gone and will not rise. But as he packs his bags and readies himself for another murderous journey, they are what he thinks of now. The objects of his desire along the Amazon, in Borneo and Sumatra and Celebes, on the Aru Islands; his sloth, his orangutan, his birds with no feet.

The girls' mother told them stories: how their grandfather Leo had grafted French vines onto North American roots with his German-Russian hands, finding the western New York winters easy to manage after the Ukraine. At the head of the lake the Couperins, who ran a rival winery, had laughed at Leo's cultivation practices, but in 1957, when Bianca was born, Leo had his revenge. That winter's violent cold spell left the Marburgs' earth-shrouded vines untouched when everyone else's were killed, and Walter Couperin lost all his hybrid vines and switched back to Concords in a fury.

Leo smiled and kept his secrets and established acres of
gewurztraminer,
which Couperin couldn't grow, and
rkaziteli,
a Russian grape temperamental for everyone but him. The girls grew up hearing words like these:
foxy, oaky, tannic, thin.
Like all children, they knew more than they knew that they knew.

In the fall the cold air slipping down from the hills hung white and even below the trellises. Leo's winery thrived, and his oldest son—Theo, the girls' father—threw himself into the business with a great and happy passion. Peter Couperin, Walter's heir, field-grafted Seyvals onto half his Concord stock, and still Theo outdid him.

The girls' mother, Suky, told them this, along with much else; she was herself the daughter of another winemaking family. When the girls were still quite small, she said, “Your father named you red and white, like girls from a fairy tale.”

So they were Rose and Bianca, Bianca and Rose: inseparable. Or so they thought. In the white house in Hammondsport, on the western shore of Keuka Lake, their names formed a single word in their mother's mouth, like the name of one of Leo's grapes.
RoseandBianca,
they heard, as she called them in for dinner. “You were lucky,” Suky said, “that you weren't named Merlot and Chardonnay or Cabernet and Aurore.”

In other ways they were not so lucky. When Rose was ten and Bianca almost nine, a tourist speeding down the lakeshore road struck their strolling mother and killed her instantly.
Suky Marburg,
the headstone read.
Beloved wife of Theo
;
cherished daughter of Alice and Charles
;
adored niece of Agnes, Marion, Caroline, and Elaine.
Nothing about “Missed Mother of,” and they were thought too young to attend the funeral. Yet who could miss her more?

After that they were wild girls, in a place that seemed like wilderness. Suky's Aunt Agnes came to care for them; a loving woman, but soon she took sick and spent her days perched on the porch glider while her mind disintegrated. When she called the girls she said,
Rose? Bianca?,
the long pause between the two names another bewildered question. Meanwhile the girls' teachers called them holy terrors and the neighbors referred to them as “the Marburg sisters,” which term connoted nothing so kind as their mother's fusing of their first names. Even before her death they'd been unusually close. Afterwards they seemed like the two sides of a coin, easy to distinguish but impossible to split. Much of what they did together is best passed over.

Despite their disgraceful scrapes, they whizzed through school at a frightening pace. A strange rivalry drove them, darker
and more serious than the one between the wineries—some sort of competition for the scraps of their father's attention. When he allowed it, they helped him out in the winery. Most often he ignored them and they worked on their own projects. A chemistry set appeared one Christmas, along with this information; yeast enzymes, he said, were the proteins made by yeast, which made winemaking possible. The girls made wine from grapes and honey and different flowers and once from rhubarb, for a lark.

From a book full of mysterious pictures, they learned about the uses of hair and eggshells and feces and worms, herbs and the blood of a red-haired man. They painted black the walls of their room and then hung pictures they snipped from their books; alchemists' labs juxtaposed with models of DNA and the three-dimensional structure of hemoglobin. Their father turned dirt and sunlight into wine; was that alchemy, or chemistry? Either one might turn their isolation into freedom.

And so of course they studied biochemistry in college, first Rose and then Bianca right behind her. Both of them gawky and geeky and barely sixteen when they entered. And of course they were entranced by the equipment and the theories, which made their earlier experiments seem childish. They never dreamed that they wouldn't work together.

In college they shared lovers and books. In graduate school, before Bianca dropped out, they wrote two papers together. Now Rose studies enzyme structure and kinetics at a research institute outside Boston; she has several grants and two technicians, although she's still younger than some of her graduate students. A whole section of her address book is devoted to Bianca—San Diego, Vancouver, Alaska, Hawaii. All places Rose has never been. Bianca does different things, which vary from year to year and are hard to explain.

That's the short version, the dry version—of course the details differ, depending on which of us tells it. Still, anyone could tell that version of our history to a stranger in a bar, and both of us have done so.
Oh, look,
in effect we say wryly.
A dead mother, a crazy great-aunt, a distant father. But here we are.
All the shameful details buried, all the juicy parts elided; both of us grown now, no big deal.

Good enough for strangers. But once we were closer than twins, and there were times, with the width of a street or a country between us, when we wondered why this version of our history didn't account for how we drifted so far apart. The drift was far from steady, but it was persistent.

On an August night in 1980, we made a fumbling attempt to find our way back to each other. Our evening included drugs and drink and voices and visions, a lot of water and a dog. Later, we'd look back on it as a time of preparation that failed in most ways but succeeded in a few, which helped us endure the loss to come. The story of this night forms a sort of pendant to our early history.

As Bianca drove from state to state while meaning only to reach Boston, she'd been thinking about the dead. The road beyond the cone of her headlights had been as black as a lake, and from the corner of one eye she had seen faces: Suky, Agnes—almost as if Rose had been beside her in the car. This had suggested a plan to her, for which she needed Rose's help. By ‘the time she arrived at the institute's low white building, she was bursting with things to say. But before she could reach her sister, a man in a uniform stopped her in the lobby.

“Miss?” he said politely. “Miss?”

He blocked her with his body. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Visitors
must be accompanied past this point. May I ring someone's office for you?”

“My sister,” Bianca said.

“And your sister would be?”

“
Rose,
” Bianca said huffily. When he still waited she said, “Rose
Marburg.
”

The man took her name and repeated it into the phone. A few minutes later a pair of doors opened with a hermetic sigh and Rose appeared in the lobby. Her dark hair was cut very short; her hands were in the pockets of her long white coat and she had a nametag pinned to her chest. For a minute Bianca wasn't sure who she was.

Rose, who'd run from the lab to the lobby as soon as she got the call, suspected trouble right away. “What is it with that guy?” Bianca said. “How come he couldn't see we were sisters?” Then, as they passed dark labs and offices, Bianca described how she'd been brooding about Suky and the accident and their lumpy impossible childhood.

That old story, which Rose already knew. At the moment all she wanted to do was fend off Bianca's rush of words.

“Isn't it obvious?” Bianca said. Although she was tall and fair and Rose was dark and slight, she couldn't understand why that man at the door hadn't seen their resemblance at once.

“Wally,” Rose said to her babbling sister. “His name is Wally. He was just doing his job.”

“Wally, schmally,” Bianca said. “He should have known who I was. When did you cut your hair so short?”

Rose led Bianca into her lab. Gleaming benches and rows of glassware; a tidy office in which a computer screen glowed. She didn't stop to show Bianca all the gadgets in the lab; Bianca had been here before and knew how to use them as well as Rose did herself. In her office she guided Bianca to a chair. “I wasn't expecting you,” she said, interrupting Bianca mid-sentence. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Bianca said. “A little ragged, a little jagged. I almost got arrested but that was last night. You have any coffee?”

Rose poured her a cup, noting the fine tremor in Bianca's hands and the way her pale hair stuck out in all directions. Rings beneath her eyes, a stain on the front of her shirt; a general air of funky poverty. For the last few months she'd been supporting herself by proofreading organic gardening articles for a magazine in Vermont. Rose suspected that Bianca needed another loan.

Bianca rose from her chair and paced the small room. “What a drive,” she said again.

Rose tried to shape the cloud of her sister's words into a plot as linear as the graph on her computer screen. “When did you leave?”

“Last night—seven o'clock? Maybe eight?”

“From
Brattleboro
?”

Somehow Bianca had been on the road for almost twenty-four hours. Rose had driven twice to the house Bianca had shared for the last year with two potters, a fiber artist, a disk jockey for an alternative radio station, and an herbalist—a three-hour drive, no more, up Route 91 to a tiny road that led back into the hills. In the middle of nowhere stood a fussy Victorian with porches and peculiar windows. There were chickens in the yard, and two tethered goats and a mound of firewood as big as a shed. Rural, and yet nothing like Hammondsport. In the vegetable garden off to the side was a good-sized patch of marijuana, chastely surrounded by tasseled corn. Inside, dope plants hung in the stairwell like dead men, drying upside down.

Bianca stuck both hands into her mass of hair with her fingers outspread like rakes. “I didn't drive
straight,
” she said impatiently.

When Rose raised an eyebrow Bianca laughed. “Not straight through,” she said. “Not straight, either. We were having a little party at the house, checking out the new weed. And then I got
this idea to visit you, and I got in the car but when I hit Brattleboro I remembered I hadn't seen Tommy in a while. I told you about him. So I drove over to North Conway and woke him up, and he was crabby at first but we had some drinks and did a few numbers and then we got to talking about Margie and Don—you remember, my friends from Vancouver?—and Tommy said they'd moved to Maine so I thought I'd just buzz over and see them but when I got there they weren't home and so I decided to swing by Keene and see another friend but halfway there this cop stopped me and…”

“Bianca,” Rose said quietly. “When's the last time you slept?”

“Tuesday?” Bianca said. “I think.” It was Thursday now.

Rose stared at the data she'd been plotting and then turned her computer off. Bianca said, “I think I called Dad last night.”

“You did?” Rose said. She'd had a rule for some time, which was one of the things that stood like a wall between her and Bianca; she forbade herself to dwell on their past. At the moment she was also forbidding herself to think of their father, who had recently announced that he was getting married and was considering selling the winery.

“I'm not sure. I think I might have. From a phone booth—New Hampshire? Maine? I don't know, I don't remember what I said to him. I think I was stupid.”

Bianca in a phone booth in the middle of the night, babbling at their father the way she was babbling now; it was more than Rose could bear to contemplate. If she'd known how to do so, she would have cut her past away with a knife. “How about I take you home?” she said. “I'll make you some dinner, you can have my bed. I'll sleep on the couch.”

“No, no, no,” Bianca said. “Here. I'll sleep here. On the floor—I don't want to be in your way, I don't want to be any trouble. And I brought food and stuff to drink—everything for
a picnic.” She had this plan, which she'd hatched in the car and would not reveal to her sister yet. It depended on them staying in the lab.

She reached into her knapsack and took out a bottle of Jim Beam and another of tequila; lemons, salt, tortilla chips, two cans of bean dip, and a jar of salsa; then a loaf of dill-and-wheatberry bread and an ounce of dope, a chunk of hash, some papers, and a pipe. “This cop?” she said. “Last night, when he stopped me, I was sure he was going to look in here. He asked me why I was driving so late, and…”

“Okay,” Rose said. “I get the picture.” She shut the office door.

“Relax,” Bianca said. “Who's here? You're the only one who keeps such wacky hours.”

She pushed the door open again and Rose let it stay that way. Bianca was right: no one else would be in the building except a few security guards and the night cleaning staff. Perhaps a handful of graduate students, running experiments or crunching numbers—but no one like Rose, none of the senior staff. They'd all be safely back in Newton or Concord, having dinner with families and dogs. She didn't socialize with them. She was single, she lived by herself in a studio with a broken-down couch and a wall of books and no TV. She had no friends, no pets, at the moment no lover. The lab was cheery and well-lit, the only place in the world where she felt at home. Her sister was here.

Bianca said, “So?” and Rose said, “Well. We could camp out here, I guess.”

We demolished almost everything in the pack. Bianca gave Rose a bracelet she'd picked up in Maine and Rose clasped the heavy metal around her wrist. After midnight it started to rain, and we opened the window in Rose's office and stuck our heads out to catch the falling water. This felt so good that we exchanged
a glance and then dropped through the window to the empty ground below. We were as high as kites, as high as Denali, which Bianca had once climbed but which Rose had never seen. Bianca was perfectly comfortable, but Rose felt like she'd lost her mind.