Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (8 page)

A Gift

On Christmas morning I step out onto the stoop and find the herpetologist's book, laid carefully on a patch of white ice. A bright green chameleon is staring up at me from the dust jacket, its eye following my every move. When I pick
it up I open to a mimeographed list of errata pasted to the flyleaf. The copyright date is thirty years ago. I turn to the back flap, hoping to see a photograph of the herpetologist as a young man, but there is only a list of his degrees and credentials. On the inside front cover, there is an inscription made out to me:
With warmest regards.
Only then do I wonder how he found my apartment. I stay home all day and read it cover to cover. I read that, at six weeks, a human embryo is nearly identical to a salamander's—gill slits, webbed hands, tail bud. I read that snakes have two hundred pairs of ribs and tiny, vestigial leg bones. I read all about hibernation and estivation. In the section on evolution, I find a chapter titled “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.”

Perpetuation

A bullfrog in a corner aquarium has laid her eggs. They float in a raft of jelly on the surface of the water, knocking against the glass. The big green frog courses around, kicking her thick thighs, oblivious to them.
In the wild, she'd be long gone by now,
the herpetologist says.
Her existence is a perpetual struggle. She can't be burdened by babies. But still, she must replace herself.
I think of all of us, people racing around trying to leave something to the world as we put the world itself at stake in the process.
What's the point?
I don't realize I've said it aloud.
Who knows?
the herpetologist says. He taps the glass.
Ask her.
I turn towards him.
Did you ever have children?
He shakes his head.
Always been married to my work
.
We never
did,
I say.
My husband wanted to. But I just couldn't bring a child into this world. I don't know. Do you think I should have?
He shakes his head.
Should have, should have,
he says.
Look at her.
He taps the glass again.
She knows no such word as “should.” She knows only “can” and “do.”
I look down at the eggs. There must be thousands of them, each with a dark spot at the center like the pupil of an eye, and I am suddenly dismayed by the thought of the mother kicking away from them without leaving behind so much as a promise.
How many will make it?
I ask. The herpetologist ticks off the hazards that would face the eggs in the wild: flood, drought, pollution, construction, snakes, fish, turtles, toads, raccoons, other frogs.
The tadpole stage is even chancier,
he says,
and you can just about forget it when you're a froglet.
Then he says,
But at least one.
One? I think, looking at the mass of eggs with a sinking sense of despair. Which one? The lucky one?

Locomotion

On a day with little else to justify my getting out of bed in the morning, the herpetologist gives me a turtle skeleton.
A turtle's backbone is fused to its carapace,
he chants,
an arching armature for its armor.
The neck and leg bones are impossibly frail, fine as pebbles. They seem far too delicate to support the heavy awning of the shell.
Yes,
the herpetologist says, seeing me looking,
poorly designed for locomotion on land. No lateral possibility, with those bones.
He takes the skeleton from me and shows me how a turtle moves: lifting two legs,
deliberately throwing itself off balance until it falls forward. Lifting the other two legs and falling forward again. Falling, picking itself up, falling.
Like this, the turtle has lurched its way through two hundred million years. Through all kinds of weather.
This strikes me as the most remarkable thing I've heard in months.
Humbling,
I say.
Yes! But think of your own skeleton,
he tells me.
The bipedal frame is a triumph of design. Thirty-three articulated vertebrae, all in a line. And at the tip, the unparalleled mass of electricity that is your mind. And you didn't even have to ask for it.

Range

As I walk through the frozen city, I do think of it, my skeleton hanging in perfect balance. The bones of my toes and feet, flexing inside my shoes. I trace them up my shinbones, the long bones of my thighs, up the ladder of my spine. All the way up to the thought that I could walk for miles, hundreds of miles if I so chose, clear out of the city to a warmer place.

Company

On New Year's Eve I go out for a walk, surprised by a sudden desire to breathe the sharp night air. People scurry through the street two by two, heads bent against the cold, wearing their best clothes. The men check their watches as if there is a train to catch, headed for a fabulous destination. A man
and a woman are leaning close to a shop window, their voices filled with delight. It is my husband with a much younger woman, both dressed for a party. When he looks up and sees me, a strangled noise escapes his throat.
I don't want to see you anymore,
I say, because it's all I've got.
Okay,
he says,
all right,
not even pretending to put up a fight. As they walk away and join the throng on the street, I get the sense that the train is departing imminently, and that there's no chance that I will be on it. I look in the window at what they had been examining. It is a glittering diamond and emerald brooch, something I myself have admired in the past. But now it seems gaudy and crude, and I realize I was expecting something infinitely more beguiling to be crouched behind the glass. I hear a noise behind me and wheel around, thinking that maybe he's come back, but it is just a lone crow, picking delicately through an overturned trash can. It feels as if we're the last two creatures left in the abandoned city, just me and this crow. Grateful for the company, I raise my hand.
Oh, hello,
I say.

Las Vegas Leopard Frog

There is a grainy black-and-white photograph of a frog taped above the herpetologist's desk. It is an ordinary-looking frog. Beneath the photo hangs a narrow page torn from a field guide. I read it so many times I am able to repeat it from memory, or almost. It reassembles itself in my mind as a sort of a poem:

Deficiency

The herpetologist needs my help.
I wouldn't ask,
he says on the phone,
except that no one else is here.
A snake has just been brought in, a confiscated reticulated python that someone has been keeping as a pet. When I arrive, the herpetologist is standing in front of its tank, dwarfed by it.
I'm afraid it must be destroyed,
he tells me sadly.
It has an irreversible and degenerative vitamin deficiency, resulting from an inadequate diet. Nothing can be done.
I watch it slowly map the terrain of its tank, staggered with disbelief that someone would keep such a massive, commanding thing in the house and not take pains to see that it has everything it needs.
Ready to shed, too,
the herpetologist says, pointing to its milk-white eyes.
Dull all over. Would be brilliant in a week or two. I've seen them tie themselves in knots in an effort to shed the old skin. What a shame,
I say, and feel a shiver of grief as the loss suddenly
multiplies—the snake, and the newness the snake won't have the chance to inhabit.
People,
the herpetologist sighs. I help him hold the snake as he makes the injection, and in my hands I feel a change in the taut muscles, the exact moment that life leaves them. We hold vigil over the enormous body. The herpetologist looks stricken, drawn and old.
I don't know,
he says over and over.
I just don't know.
I shove my hands in my pockets, wishing I could give him something. We stand there together for a long time, bewildered as two night travelers with a map they can't make out in the dark.

Bloom

All night, I lie awake in the light of the bedside lamp, studying my hands. What was it, exactly, that I felt pass out of the snake? The one thing I know for certain: I've witnessed a slight parting of the curtain that hangs over the unknown. By morning I feel a bloom of gratitude for this, which I wear, a bright badge, pinned to my chest for days.

Heralds of Spring

I leave my apartment at five to help the herpetologist with his morning feedings. So this is what it feels like, I think, to be out at dawn, meeting the world head on. Salt trucks are rumbling by, preparing the icy streets for the coming day. The sky is a color I've never seen before. It is as if a corner of the city's gray overcoat has blown back to reveal an orange satin lining.
We drink Postum out of Styrofoam cups. He apologizes that there is no real coffee. I tell him I don't drink it anymore, a last attempt to reclaim sleep.
Good girl,
he says,
good girl.
He pulls a record off the bookshelf and puts it on the turntable. Through the scratchiness I hear a high-pitched, insistent whistle, like crickets, only the notes are rounder, wetter, like water dropping from a leaf into a pond.
The dawn song of the peeper,
he says,
the herald of spring.
He beams.
I don't think spring is ever coming,
I say.
Nonsense,
he says.
And in a week or so, the students will come back. I must say, as much as I enjoy the quiet, it does get lonely around here when they're gone.
The students! The fact of them has never occurred to me. Now I see their bright, eager faces, I see them shaking snow off their boots and talking excitedly, listening raptly to the herpetologist in a lecture room, notebooks open, carrying him away in a wave down the hall. The record switches to the call of a bullfrog, mournful. I have the sudden urge to reach behind me and lock the door.

Secret

I want you to see something,
the herpetologist says.
A secret.
He leads me to a door at the back of the lab that I haven't noticed before. He selects a large key from his ring and unlocks it. We step into a tiny antechamber, and when he closes the door behind us, we stand together for a moment in the utter darkness. Then I hear the click of a key in another lock, and we step through to another room, even darker than the first. He
switches on a dim red light. As my eyes adjust I see a chest-high tank of water in the center of the room. We step to its edge. In the red light I can just make out something swimming around in the water, tiny ghost creatures with red ruffs of gills.
The Georgia blind salamander,
he whispers.
It exists only in the deep wells and subterranean waters of one particular farm in southeast Georgia. You're maybe the tenth person in the world to see one alive.
The salamanders seem to give off a light of their own, dark eye buds showing through the clear skin of their faces, their red gills waving like feathers as they weave through the water. For a heartbeat I forget myself completely. Then I catch my breath and say,
They don't even know we're here.
The herpetologist moves closer. I slip my hand in his.
I think I love you,
I say. He shakes his head firmly, as if it's the wrong answer to a question.
No, you don't.

A Herpetological Event

I stay late at work, in no state to face my dark apartment, overcome by a new sort of loneliness, one that seems as if it will outlive me. By the time I get on the bus, late in the evening, it is hushed and mostly empty, and I collapse into a seat near the back. As we rattle down the street I close my eyes and think of the blind salamanders, down there in their well in Georgia, far from the city, far from me. When I open my eyes I have long since missed my stop. I sit up in a panic, recognizing nothing outside. But then, as the bus voyages through unfamiliar streets, the salamanders come back like a dream.
The darkness deep in the earth where they've been all along. Arcing, looping, somersaulting through the water, somehow finding one another in the dark. Without any thought, care, or need for me. And for a instant, just before the bus turns on its loop, I catch a glimpse of the infinite. There I am inside of it, for one suspended moment—tiny, inconsequential, and utterly free.

Dawn Song

Late in the night a storm settles on the city, throwing snow against the windows and rattling them in their frames. My husband calls to tell me his power has gone out and asks if he can come over.
Just this one night,
he says.
I don't have anywhere else to go.
I sit at the kitchen table waiting for him, listening to the silence of the streets, the weather too bad for even the plows to be out. Things are so still that I am startled to look down and see the collar of my robe is quivering steadily with my pulse. He comes in with a red wind-burned face and cold clinging to his clothes. We sit side by side at the table, no words left for one another. Soon my power goes out as well and there is nothing for us to do but get into bed and huddle beneath the blankets, press tight together to conserve warmth. We make love, a matter of survival, our bodies desperate to generate heat. My heart pounds against his chest with the insistence of self-preservation, tenacious and bright. It is still beating hard, determined, by the time he has fallen asleep. I sit up and try to make out his sleeping face in the
dark, left with the unshakable feeling that there is a stranger in my bed. Sometime before dawn I get up in the cold room to look out the window. The snow is slackening, but down the block, all the street lights are still off. In the darkness, the shine of the deep, white drifts is the only thing I can make out. It seems to conceal a great mystery, the snow. I stand there watching, struck by the possibility of what might be hidden beneath. I watch for as long as I can stand the cold, knowing that by morning the trucks will have come to clear it all away.