“No more and no less. But you’re a skeptic.”
“Everyone’s a skeptic. Did God lean down and put his thumbprint on the Earth, Dr. Vale? William Jennings Bryan cared deeply about the answer to that question, but I don’t.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not in that sense. Oh, a lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis. The real question is how much we’ll suffer in the meantime. I mean political intolerance, fiscal meanness, even war.”
Vale opened his eyes slightly, the only visible sign of the excitement that leapt in him like a flame. The gods had pricked up their ears. “War?”
Randall might know something about war. He was a curator at the Smithsonian, but he was also one of that institution’s fund-raisers. He had spoken to congressional committees and had friends on the Hill.
Was that why Vale’s god had taken an interest in Randall? One of the ironies of serving a god was that one didn’t necessarily understand either means or ends. He knew only that something was at stake here, compared to which his own ambitions were trivial. The resolution of some eons-long plan required him to draw this portly cynic into his confidence, and so it would be. I will be rewarded, Vale thought. His god had promised him. Life eternal, perhaps. And a decent living in the meantime.
“War,” Randall said, “or at least some martial exercise to keep the Britons in their place. The Finch expedition — you’ve heard of it?”
“Certainly.”
“If the Finch expedition comes under Partisan attack, Congress will raise hell and blame the English. Sabers will be rattled. Young men will die.” Randall leaned toward Vale, the wattled skin of his neck creased and fleshy. “There’s no truth in it, is there? That you can talk to the dead?”
It was like a door opening. Vale only smiled. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think I’m looking at a confidence man who smells like soap and knows how to charm a widow. No offense.”
“Then why do you ask?”
“Because… because things are different now. I think you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“I don’t believe in miracles, but…”
“But?”
“So much has changed. Politics, money, fashion — the map, obviously — but more than that. I see people, certain people, and there’s something in their eyes, their faces. Something new. As if they have a secret they’re keeping even from themselves. And that bothers me. I don’t understand it. So you see, Mr. Vale, I begin as a skeptic and end as a mystic. Blame it on the bourbon. But let me ask you again. Do you speak to the dead?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“And what do the dead tell you, Mr. Vale? What do the dead talk about?”
“Life. The fate of the world.”
“Any particulars?”
“Often.”
“Well, that’s cryptic. My wife is dead, you know. Last year. Of pneumonia.”
“I know.”
“Can I talk to her?” He put his glass on the desk. “Is that actually possible, Mr. Vale?”
“Perhaps,” Vale said. “We’ll see.”
Chapter Eight
The Navy had a shallow-draft steamer at Jeffersonville to carry the Finch expedition to the navigable limits of the Rhine, but their departure was delayed when the pilot and much of the crew came down with Continental Fever. Guilford knew very little about the disease. “A bog fever,” Sullivan explained. “Exhausting but seldom fatal. We won’t be delayed long.”
And a few sultry days later the vessel was ready to sail. Guilford set up his cameras on the floating wooden pier, his bulky dry-plate camera as well as the roll-film box. Photography had not advanced much since the Miracle; the long labor struggles of 1915 had shut down Eastman Kodak for most that year, and the Hawk-Eye Works in Rochester had burned to the ground. But, as such things went, both cameras were modern and elegantly machined. Guilford had tinted several of his own plates from the Montana expedition and intended to do the same with his Darwinian work, and with that in mind he kept careful notes:
Fourteen members of expedition, pier at Jeffersonville, Europe: 1-r standing Preston Finch, Charles Curtis Hemphill, Avery Keck, Tom Gillvany, Kenneth Donner, Paul Robertson, Emil Swensen; 1-r kneeling Tom Compton, Christopher Tuckman, Ed Betts, Wilson W. Farr, Marion (“Diggs”) Digby, Raymond Burke, John W Sullivan.
B/ground: Naval vessel Weston, hull gunmetal gray; J/ville harbor turquoise water under deep blue sky; Rhine marshes in a light northerly wind, gold green cloudshadow, 8 a.m. We depart.
And so the journey began (it always seemed to be beginning, Guilford thought; beginning and beginning again) under a raw blue sky, spider rushes tossing like wheat in the wetlands. Guilford organized his gear in the tiny windowless space allotted to him and went up top to see whether the view had changed. By nightfall the marshy land gave way to a drier, sandier riverbank, the saltwater grasses to dense pagoda bushes and pipe-organ stalks on which the wind played tuneless calliope notes. After a gaudy sunset the land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.
He slept fitfully in his hammock and woke up feverish. When he stood he was unsteady on his feet — the deck plates danced a waltz — and the smell of the galley made him turn away from breakfast. By noon he was ill enough to summon the expedition’s doctor, Wilson Farr, who diagnosed the Continental Fever.
“Will I die?” Guilford asked.
“You might knock on that door,” Farr said, squinting through eyeglass lenses not much larger than cigar bands, “but I doubt you’ll be admitted.”
Sullivan came to see him during the evening, as the fever continued to rise and a rosy erythema covered Guilford’s arms and legs. He found it difficult to bring Sullivan into focus and their talk drifted like a rudderless ship, the older man attempting to distract him with theories about Darwinian life, the physical structure of its common invertebrates. Finally Sullivan said, “I’m sure you’re tired—” He was: unspeakably tired. “But I’ll leave you with a last thought, Mr. Law. How is it, d’you suppose, that a purely Darwinian disease, a miraculous microbe, can live and multiply in the body of ordinary mortals like ourselves? Doesn’t that seem more than coincidental?”
“Can’t say,” Guilford muttered, and turned his face to the wall.
At the height of his illness he dreamed he was a soldier pacing the margin of some airless, dusty battlefield: a picket among the dead, waiting for an unseen enemy, occasionally kneeling to drink from pools of tepid water in which his own reflection gazed back at him, his mirror-self unspeakably ancient and full of weary secrets.
The dream submerged into a long void punctuated by lightning-flashes of nausea, but by Monday he was on the mend, his fever broken, well enough to take solid food and chafe at his confinement belowdecks as the Weston moved deeper inland. Farr brought him a current edition of Finch’s Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy, and Guilford was able to lose himself for a time in the several ages of the Earth, the Great Flood that had left its mark in cataclysmic reformations of the mantle, for example the Grand Canyon — unless, as Finch allowed, these features were “prior creations, endowed by their Author with the appearance of great age.”
Creation modified by a worldwide flood, which had deposited fossil animals at various altitudes or buried them in mud and silt, as Eden itself must have been buried. Guilford had studied much of it before, though Finch buttressed his argument with a wealth of detaiclass="underline" the one hundred classifications of drift and diluvium; geological wheels in which extinct beasts were depicted in neat, separate categories. But that single phrase (“the appearance of age”) troubled him. It made all knowledge provisional. The world was a stage set — it might have been built yesterday, freshly equipped with mountains and mastodon bones and human memories — which gave the Creator an unseemly interest in deceiving his human creations and made no useful distinction between the work of time and the work of a miracle. It seemed to Guilford unnecessarily complex — though why, come to think of it, should the world be simple? More shocking, perhaps, if one could render the universe and all its stars and planets in a single equation (as the European mathematician Einstein was said to have tried to do).