But it wasn’t over yet. B. Reid contorted his features and threw back his head, and then he plunged a hand into the deep pocket of his coat; in the next instant his clenched fist shot into the air. I caught a glimpse of something dark and leathery, a strip of jerky, tissue with the life drained from it. “The Costa Rican golden toad,” he cried in his wild burnished declamatory tones, “R.I.P.!”
The woman beside me gasped. A cry went up from the back of the room. There was a shriek of chairs as people leapt to their feet.
B. Reid dug into his breast pocket and brandished another corpse. “Atelopus zeteki, the Peruvian variegated toad, R.I.P.!”
Cries of woe and lamentation.
“Rana marinus, R.I.P.! The Gambian reed frog, R.I.P.!”
B. Reid held the lifeless things up before him as if he were exorcising demons. His voice sank to nothing. Slowly, painfully, he shook his head so that the coils of his hair drew a shroud over his face. “Don’t bother making the trip to Costa Rica, to Peru or Gambia,” he said finally, the shouts rising and dying round him. “These”—and his voice broke—“these are the last of them.”
The following day was my sister’s birthday, and I’d invited her, Jerry and the children to my place for dinner, though I didn’t feel much like going through with it after B. Reid’s presentation. The lecture hall had echoed like a chamber of doom with the dying rasp of his voice and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Stunned silent, our deepest fears made concrete in those grisly pennants of frog flesh, Adrian and I had left as soon as he stepped down from the podium, fighting our way through the press of stricken scientists and heartsick toad lovers and out into the rain. The world smelled of petroleum, acid, sulfur, the trees were bent and crippled, and the streets teemed with ugly and oblivious humanity. We took a cab directly to Grand Central. Neither of us had the stomach for lunch after what we’d been through, and we sat in silence all the way back, Adrian clutching Jane Austen to her breast and I turning The Frog Book over and over again in my hands. Each bump and rattle of the Hudson Line drove a burning stake into the small of my back.
The next morning I debated calling Charlene and telling her I was sick, but I felt guilty about it: why ruin my sister’s birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a handbasket? When Adrian showed up at ten with three bags of groceries and acting as if nothing had happened, I took two aspirin, cinched an apron round my waist and began pulverizing garbanzo beans.
All in all, it was a pleasant afternoon. The rain drove down outside and we built a fire in the dining room and left the door to the kitchen open while we cooked. Adrian found some chamber music on the radio and we shared a bottle of wine while she kneaded dough for the pita bread and I folded tahini into the garbanzo mash, sliced tomatoes and chopped onions. We chatted about little things — Frank Sinatra’s hair, whether puree was preferable to whole stewed tomatoes, our friends’ divorces, lint in the wash — steering clear of the fateful issue burning in both our minds. It was very nice. Tranquil. Domestic. The wine conspired with the aspirin, and after a while the knot in my back began to loosen.
Jerry, Charlene and the kids were early, and I served the hummus and pita bread while Adrian braised chunks of goat in a big black cast-iron pan she’d brought with her from her apartment. We were on our second drink and Jay and Nayeli, my nephew and niece, were out on the porch catching the icy rainwater as it drooled from the eaves, when Adrian threw herself down in the chair opposite Jerry and informed him in a clarion voice that the frogs were dying out.
The statement seemed to take him by surprise. He and Charlene had been giving me a seriocomic history of their yacht, which had thus far cost them something like $16,000 per hour at sea and which had been rammed, by Jerry, into a much bigger yacht on its maiden voyage out of the marina. Now they both paused to stare at Adrian. Jerry began to formulate his smile. “What did you say?”
Adrian smelled of goat and garlic. She was lanky and wide-eyed, with long beautifully articulated feet and limbs that belonged on a statue. She drew herself up at the edge of the chair and tried out a tentative smile. “Frogs,” she said. “And toads. Something is killing them off all over the world, from Alaska to Africa. We went to a conference yesterday. Peter and I.”
“Frogs?” Jerry repeated, stroking the bridge of his nose. His smile, in full efflorescence now, was something to behold. My sister, who favored my late mother around the eyes and nose, emitted a little chirp of amusement.
Adrian looked uncertain. She gave out with an abbreviated version of her horsey laugh and turned to me for encouragement.
“It’s not a joke,” I said. “We’re talking extinction here.”
“There was this man,” Adrian said, the words coming in a rush, “a biologist at the conference, B. Reid — from Berkeley — and he had all these dried frogs in his pockets…it was horrible….”
I could hear the rain on the roof, cold and unseasonal. Nayeli shouted something from the porch. The fire crackled in the hearth. I could see that we weren’t getting it right, that my brother-in-law, the doctor, was making a little notation of our mental state on the prescription pad of his mind. Why were we telling him all this? Was he, the perennial jokester who couldn’t even salvage my lower back, about to take on loss of habitat, eternal death and the transfiguration of life as we know it?
No, he wasn’t.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said after a moment. “You really believe in all this environmental hysteria.” He let the grin fade and gave us his stern off-at-the-knee look. “Peter, Adrian,” he said, drawing out the syllables in a profound and pedagogical way, “species conflict is the way of the world, has been from the beginning of time. Extinction is natural, expected: no species can hope to last forever. Even man. Conditions change.” He waved his hand and then laughed, making a joke of it. “If this weather doesn’t let up I think we’re in for a new ice age, and then where will your frogs be?”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“What about the dinosaurs, Peter?” Charlene interjected. “And the woolly mammoth?”
“Not to mention snake oil and bloodletting.” Jerry’s smile was back. He was in control. All was right with the world. “Things move on, things advance and change — why cry over something you can’t affect, a kind of fairy-tale Garden of Eden half these environmentalists never knew? Which is not to say I don’t agree with you—”
“My god!” Adrian cried, springing from her seat as if she’d been hot-wired. “The goat!”
Late that night, after everyone had gone home — even Adrian, though she’d gotten amorous at the door and would, I think, have spent the night but for my lack of enthusiasm — I eased into my armchair with the newspaper and tried to wipe my mind clean, a total abstersion, tabula rasa. I felt drained, desolate, a mass of meat, organ and bone slipping inexorably toward the grave along with my distant cousins the frogs and the toads. The rain continued. A chill fell over the room and I saw that the fire had burned down. There was a twinge in my back as I shifted my buttocks to adjust the heating pad, and then I began to read. I didn’t feel up to war in the Middle East, AIDS and the homeless or the obituaries, so I stuck to the movie reviews and personal-interest stories.
It was getting late, my mind had gone gratifyingly numb and I was just about to switch off the light and throw myself into bed, when I turned to the science section. A headline caught my eye: