She stood and looped her scarf back into position, then she stretched her arms up towards the fluorescent lights, making herself as straight and slender as a ruler. “My neck will be warm again in just a minute,” she said, thinking that she was no longer holding up her end of the bargain as a heat source. “You can put your hands on my stomach while we wait. That’s the second warm place.”
Tip rubbed his hands together and pulled on his fingers until he felt the smallest indication that they were flexible and alive. “No, thank you.”
“I won’t mind.”
“You’re a model scout.”
“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”
He said that he was.
“Maybe you could write a note to my troop leader. We get extra points for practical application.” She bent back her shoulders and dropped the backpack to the floor, then she took off her coat. Her track suit was the pink of a dime store budgie with white stripes running up her legs and down her arms. “It’s warm in here.”
“It feels good.”
“That’s because you have hypothermia.” Kenya picked up a jar from the desk beside her and looked inside, agitating it gently left to right so that the long-dead fish rose up to swim.
Her touch was so light that he didn’t feel the need to stop her. She didn’t shake them the way a child would, she simply reanimated them. “Do you want to help me finish up my work?”
“Sure.” She looked around at the long tables covered in papers and fishes. If they did everything that needed doing around here she’d never get a chance to run.
“I need to refile some of these and I can’t carry them with my crutches, so I was thinking that you could carry the jars and I’ll tell you where to put them back.”
“Just tell me where they go and I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I think you should keep sitting down.”
“Is that what the handbook says?”
“Don’t joke,” she said. “You could have died.”
“Well, I didn’t, and now I need to get a little work done.”
Kenya made an assessment of the situation. She looked down the hallway in front of them and looked at the chairs. They were by no means shoddy in their construction. The fish department at Harvard clearly wasn’t skimping on chairs. She had rolled around plenty of old people in the place where her mother worked and she knew a thing or two about how helpful a good set of wheels could be. “Okay,” she said, giving her hands a single, authoritative clap, “this is what we’re going to do: you hold the jars and I’ll push you. I think you can even keep your leg up if you work to steer the second one yourself.”
“I’m too heavy for that.”
His lack of imagination made her impatient. “The chairs roll. I didn’t say I was going to carry you.” Kenya got behind him and gave a demonstrative push. There was the practical application of the theory.
So Tip told her where the basket was and which jars should go in the basket and she brought them to him, stopping every time to hold the glass up to the overhead light and rock the occupants back into motion. “Lepomis macrochirus, immature bluegills,” Tip told her when she asked. “Couesius plumbeus, lake chub.” He didn’t need to read the labels in order to know the occupants of all the jars on the desk. He didn’t have to hold them or, for that matter, even get a very good look.
“Do you know every fish in this place?” she asked.
Tip shook his head, amused at the thought. “There are over a million fish here.”
At that she held up her hand. “Wait,” she said, and ran into the other room, into the endless rows of shelves and jars and fishes. She gave a small scream when she saw the full force of them there, the occupants of what appeared to be an entire ocean divided into jars and stacked into soldierly rows. It was a noise of pure delight. A scant half hour ago, Tip had considered telling Kenya she shouldn’t be so impressed by things: the house, the street, the school, but his heart leapt that she did so love the sight of the museum’s collection. She rushed back holding a larger jar in both of her hands, one enormous fish doubled over on itself, its pearly underside pressed tight against the glass so that every scale was clearly etched, its adipose fin pinned in snug to the body, its wide and rubbery lips kissing the bottom. “What’s this?” She was giddy, drunk on the abundance of marine life the way other children would have spun manically at the entrance of Toys R Us if they were told they could have any one thing they wanted.
“Don’t go taking the specimen off the shelves,” Tip said. “We’re here to put them back.”
She raised the jar higher. “Name that fish.” It was a threat, a dare, a sentence that said in no uncertain terms You don’t have a clue.
“Catostomus commersoni,” he said. “White sucker.” There were easily 1,295,000 jars she could have grabbed that would have left him with only an educated guess and very possibly not even that. Her random choice had been his luck.
“You’re right!” she screamed in a voice worthy of a game show host and did one twirl with the sucker pinned to her chest. “I thought that maybe you knew the ones that were out here because you were going to have a test on them or something.”
“I don’t know most of them. You made a good pick.”
Kenya held the bottom of the jar up to her nose and did her best to shape her mouth to the mouth of the sucker. “You’ve got to wonder what this guy looked like when he was still swimming.”
But Tip did know that. A sucker was not such an uncommon sight. “He would have had three irregular lateral blotches, right about here.” He touched the jar. It was then he realized how ridiculously glad he was to have been asked. No one ever asked him anything about fish. Doyle hated the MCZ. The only reason he ever came to the building anymore was because he had some cause to drag Tip out of it. Teddy liked to come. After he’d been upstairs to lose himself in the glass flowers or stare at the skeleton of the giraffe, he’d follow Tip around talking while Tip shelved the specimen, or he’d sit at Tip’s desk to study, but he certainly never asked him what he was working on. He never picked up a jar and said, Wow, look at this one, or formulated a single question about what Tip knew or what Tip did. Teddy hadn’t asked him a question about anything concerning school since approximately the fifth grade as he assumed, incorrectly, that any answer would be over his head. Tip would have been so glad to explain it: the function of gills, the placement of fins, the evolution of his beloved jaw structure. As for Sullivan, he just thought the whole thing was hysterical. He saw Tip’s work not as a legitimate scientific pursuit but as some enormous, cosmic cruelty leveled against Doyle for his desire to steer his smartest son into politics. Most of Tip’s friends were in the sciences and to them the fish were just disgusting. They regarded ichthyology as an elaborate smoke screen because for whatever reason Tip didn’t want to admit that he was eventually going to apply to medical school like the rest of them. Yes, he had completed the prerequisites, but he wasn’t going to medical school. He was going to stay in ichthyology for the rest of his life. Even the guys he worked with in the lab never pulled a jar off the shelf and said, Name this. He didn’t expect them to. But in truth he was alone with a great deal of knowledge, knowledge that he would put into papers and eventually publish in scientific journals where his family and his friends and all the people he hoped would think well of him would never look at it.
“Do one more,” Kenya said.
Tip could neither sigh nor affect a world weariness of any kind. He would have played this game all day were it not for his fear of lessening her love for it. “Put that one back first. It has to go exactly where you found it. Double check the numbers and turn the label face out.”
Kenya nodded, glad to exercise total obedience in Tip’s domain, and then she was gone again, diving down into the crystal drink of alcohol solution. He listened to her tennis shoes lightly slapping away. She liked the fishes. She wasn’t squeamish. She didn’t make fun of the sucker or his name but instead showed an interest that was more than
a simple mimicry in what Tip showed interest in, although that in itself would have been enough. Maybe she had a real mind for science and their shared predilection for evolutionary biology could be genetically linked, not that a gene for scientific interest had been identified but he imagined there was one. Tip had never given much thought to his own genetics before since the only person he had ever known to share DNA with had less in common with him than most strangers he passed in the Square.
She was back again, breathless, smiling hugely (those teeth!). She kept one hand flat on the top and the other on the bottom and held the jar out to him with straight arms, the label turned away. He knew it in a second. Apeltes quadracus. It was an excellent choice, not one made by any eleven-year-old girl who ran to grab the first thing she saw. These fish were from the third room. She would have passed several hundred thousand possible candidates in order to find them. It was also a kind choice since the pectoral fin still showed the slightest trace of red—the giveaway of the fourspine stickleback. In a living specimen it was the fish’s bad luck, a bright red flag hanging beneath the gut like a bloody lure. When Tip told her what they were her face lit up with amazement. She looked at the label again and then stared at the fish as if she had no idea how they had appeared in her hands. “You could do this on stage. You’re like a magic trick.”
“It helps that you pick out the ones I know,” he said.
“I bet you’re lying. I bet you know every fish in there.”
They added the stickleback to the basket and decided it was time to go to work. She got behind him and pushed. It wasn’t a perfect system, they had to keep stopping and realigning themselves, but the floors were smooth cement and good for rolling. Tip used his good foot to help maneuver them forward. The doors between the rooms were as heavy as the doors on mausoleums and Kenya had to lean her shoulder into every one, but any way you considered it, it was a vast improvement over crutching. For every jar they put away, Tip gave a brief explanation of how their specimen related to the fish that sat on either side. It was so logical, after all, the redbreast sunfish beside the pumpkinseed, the pumpkinseed beside the smallmouth bass.
“What’s the oldest fish here?” she asked.
“Seventeen hundreds, all the way in the back room.”
Her eyes opened wide. “And the newest fish?”
Tip shrugged. “We’d have to go into the prep room and see what’s there.”
“I mean when’s the last time someone discovered a new fish.”
“Last week, the week before.” Tip picked up a slender jar of inland silversides and turned it around so that the label was face out. He wondered who would have left them there so carelessly. “I don’t know. People discover new species all the time.”
“I thought it was done, “Kenya said, her voice sounding slightly panicked.
“What was done?”
“Finding things. I thought it was all finished, everything was set.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. Since they found all the countries. Since they found the oceans. How can there still be fish swimming around that nobody’s even seen yet?” It unnerved her, the thought that things weren’t settled, that life itself hadn’t been completely pinned down to a corkboard and labeled. It made her feel cold, like anything could happen still. Why hadn’t someone taken the time to name all the fish, and how many more fish were there room for? The shelves were already burdened. This place was like a submarine, dark and gray with dozens of different sized pipes running back and forth over the ceiling. Where were they going to put that many more fish? It would be one thing if he was talking about a dozen or two dozen, but if the number just kept expanding year after year, decade after decade, it was only a matter of time before the fish would have to go upstairs and take over part of the space that belonged to the birds. Then Kenya had a thought that seemed more terrible still: What if they hadn’t found all the birds?
“The bottom of the ocean is a long way away,” Tip said. “There are all sorts of things we don’t know about living down there. And it isn’t just the oceans. Most of the new species come from the Amazon. Scientists find new fish in the leaf litter all the time.”
“Leaf litter?”
“The dead leaves down at the bottoms of the rivers. You just need to take a stick and stir things around.”
“Are you going there?” The vision of him came very clearly, her brother standing in his waders on the banks of a wide, flat river, the jungle, sweet smelling and sticky, stretching out behind him, the shadows filled in with darkly twisting tropical vines. “Don’t you want to find your own fish?”
It had been a long time since Tip thought about fieldwork. There was so much to do on the species that other people were finding that he didn’t consider looking for his own fish anymore. But when she asked the question he remembered himself as a boy, his father reading from Darwin, Tip falling asleep to dream of leaning forward over the prow of the Beagle as it sliced through the waves. “Yes,” he said. “Sooner or later I’ll go.”
“Will you let me come?” If there were really still things in the world that needed discovering she wanted to see them for herself.
“You can come,” he said.
When Tip and Kenya had finished their work he took her to the single jar he loved above all others, a jar that he had found himself one night a year ago when he had finished putting things away and was simply wandering, as he was prone to do, and looking at what was there. He had not told his father about what he had found, nor Teddy, and when he mentioned it to Mr. Hartel who ran the lab he only said yes, of course he knew. Nine Enneacanthus obesus together in a black-capped glass no bigger than a can of shaving cream. He lifted it from the shelf and handed it to her so that she could read the label.
MCZ no. 40687
Banded Sunfish
Centrarchidae
Enneacanthus obesus
local: Concord, MA
Henry David Thoreau
She waited a long time, rocking the fish back and forth, knowing that it was something important and that Tip expected that she should be able to figure it out, but she couldn’t. None of the words meant anything to her. She breathed and blinked. She tackled it again. It was a test, a kind of reading comprehension test, and if she paid attention to every last detail of what was in her hands she would understand it. She broke down the label word by word, she studied the fish again, and when it was clear that she was never going to come up with anything she closed her eyes and gave it her best guess. “Are these the only nine sunfish left?”
Tip shook his head and tapped the bottom line. “Thoreau.”
She looked hard at the name. Thoreau! she wanted to say. I can’t believe I missed that! There it is, right there in front of me. “He’s the scientist?” she said weakly.
Tip took the jar from her and looked at it again. “Walden,” he said, trying to steer her to the answer. “The Transcendentalist movement?”
Never lie about what you don’t know, her mother told her. Somebody’s always going to find out. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Now Tip felt embarrassed. After all, she was only eleven. But at eleven he had been to the pond a hundred times. He went there with friends in the summer to swim and he went there on school trips. His father took them there on the weekends when he was pressed for time and couldn’t drive all the way to the Cape. He and Teddy waded into the water, their pants rolled up to their knees, armed with mayonnaise jars made sterile by the dishwasher. They scooped up the sunfish and brought them back to the shore to identify them in The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fishes, Whales & Dolphins, even though, as Teddy liked to point out, they never found any whales or dolphins. They took out their pencils and printed the date at the top of the page in their field books. They wrote down the common name of the fish, their genus and species, number, and physical attributes. After they had noticed everything they could think of to see, they waded back into the water and gently, gently laid the j
ars on their sides to let the fish swim out undisturbed.
“‘The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling,’” Doyle said from memory. “‘ Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.’”
Then Teddy, just a little boy who cared nothing about fish other than for their safety, repeated the line from Walden ten times until he had committed it to memory.
“He was a famous writer,” Tip said. “He lived by himself at Walden Pond. Have you been to Walden Pond?”