Alison Hawthorne Deming

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and cybernetics, when we set up exhibits in the cafeteria for the judges to review what we’d made of our hypotheses. The class skeptic (he later refused to sign anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental degradation of language) chloroformed mice, weighing the bodies before and after to catch the weight of the soul, wanting to prove the invisible real as a bagful of nails. A girl who knew it all made cookies from euglena, a one-celled compromise between animal and plant, she had cultured in a flask. We’re smart enough, she concluded, to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland, poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed he really had built it when a kid no one knew showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that the tiniest particles could be changed into something even harder to break. And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now, it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes to paint it on the backs of shaven mice. She wanted to know what it took, a little vial of sure malignancy, to prove a daily intake smaller than a single aspirin could finish something as large as a life. I thought of this because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct. It may never be as famous as the pterodactyl or the dodo, but the last one died today, a resident of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water and they inflate. One other thing this brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

Eastham, Massachusetts One of the spectators is disappointed there isn’t a guide to explain the beaching, the scientists busy cutting into ninety-four pilot whales stranded on the salt grass. No one knows why and, try as the rescue team might, not one whale will go back to water. So they’re injected to speed up the dying, lined up like lumber and sawed into, except when the black skin splits we can’t stop staring, their meat is so red. I don’t want to know why this happens— what parasite or geomagnetic anomaly finished their love of motion. Why should anything have to leave this world when water can cycle from atmosphere down to land, the ocean and back to forgiving sky. I’m on my way to Connecticut where my father has a little vegetation on his heart valve—that’s how the intern describes it, trying to minimize the danger of him slipping into a haze so cold, some nights, bone-cold, his hand can’t get from his plate to his mouth. Rain slicks the highway slowing me down. The same water fattened into snow in the woods of my childhood, the whiteness unbroken except where my father cut trails and taught me to ski, laying down the herringbone behind him as he broke up hills that left me with legs made of slush. He wanted me strong, no patience for pain. No choice but to find the muscle to follow. Even now when he boasts how I zigzagged the breakneck hills in an icestorm, there’s no hint of my knee-chattering fear, slats skittering out of control, each run a victory of luck more than will, each ride up the lift a prayer for my bones. I wonder how it is for him now there in the ward where whiteness can’t hide the cold blank that’s ahead. When the whales beached, spectators came like pilgrims, each new arrival scanning the faces of those heading back to their cars to see how it changed them to survey so much death. Nothing showed. Their eyes followed the asphalt, heads bent in private devotion. There in a room where others have died, my father keeps a record of each test and drug. He watches medicine drip into his arm and circle in the dark of his blood. I believe it will heal him, as I believe in the strength of my blood to protect me from failures of will. Once when my grandmother at ninety-six lay delirious with pneumonia, pitching on her high horsehair bed, she saw three crows perched on the dresser. They smell so awful, she said. Please, open the window. Let them out. It was my father who did what she asked. And the crows flew out, carrying her fever over the treeline, dissolving into sky, and she lived. Whatever she saw, by love, luck or dumb Yankee will, it was true. That’s what I mean by medicine.

Pomegranates fell from the trees in our sleep. If we stayed in the sun too long there were aloes to cool the burn. Henbane for predators and succulents when the rain was scarce. There was no glorified past to point the way true and natural for the sexes to meet. He kept looking to the heavens as if the answer were anywhere but here. I was so bored with our goodness I couldn’t suck the juice from one more pear. It’s here, I kept telling him, here, rooted in the soil like every other tree you know. And I wove us a bed of its uppermost branches.