The Inelegant Universe

  Chapter 5. Archaeopteryx

  Probably it’s just the mimosas. Her limbs seem to have weights attached to them, hanging from long cables that converge at the center of the earth. Her muscles have melted; her old body is pinned to the bed, engraved on it, while her thoughts flap anxiously around in the semidarkness.

  One of the more annoying tricks of old age is that her body demands sleep but won’t take it when offered. Her nights now are longer than they’ve ever been. On the recommendation of friends, a nice young couple in their 60s, she recently bought a new mattress, some kind of special “memory” foam that’s supposed to be soft but also to provide better support. Under the meager weight of her bones, which these days feel as frail as dried grass, it gives agreeably, shaping itself to the contours of her narrow body without sagging in any of its other parts. But the new mattress also emits some sort of gas that plays havoc with her breathing, so that she has to lie on her back with her chin tilted up to avoid suffocating. She’s hoping it’s just the newness of the thing, on which she spent a lot of money. One of the thoughts that now torment her during her wakeful intervals is that this expensive purchase was a mistake.

  Her nights are all like this now. Only the subject matter of her mental circling varies. She dozes for half an hour after going to bed, then awakens, at some faint noise from the hallway or from outside, or a bulletin from one of her own internal voices. Then begins a familiar journey of eight or ten hours, depending on the season. She drifts down a long valley toward the dawn, crossing and recrossing the meandering rivulet of sleep that winds along its bottom, her thoughts like the incessant flicker of willow leaves in the sunlight or the swaying of rushes in the wind. She never seems to step into the stream itself, only notices that it’s first on her right, then later on her left. She’d like to get up and read, or perhaps listen to some Mahler; but every night she lies like a stone, hypnotized by the trickle of time.

  It’s today’s lunch at Ellie’s house that has left her over-stimulated. The Farm is a perfectly lovely place for a solitary old lady to live. It’s like her own country house, or condominium, but with services, including the medical care she knows must soon come to dominate what’s left of her life. For the moment, though, despite her nine decades, that’s not a problem. Her days are almost too comfortable, too orderly and quiet, a tranquil succession of meals, walks, reading, tending her flower box in the community garden, the occasional exercise class with the few residents who are still able to raise their arms and legs. She attends the latter only to see other faces and maintain her English; the gardening and her daily walks though the hilly environs of The Farm provide all the exercise she really needs, while most of her thinking these days is done in Polish. For the rest, there are her books and her addiction to the Internet, where she can continually update herself on the paleontological controversies that still engage her mind. No one else at The Farm – either residents or attendants – has the slightest interest, although some of them will smile indulgently at her and pretend to listen if she absent-mindedly raises the topic.

  Ellie and Andrew live in the city. To go to their house for lunch, as she does a half-dozen times a year, is to be rather shockingly reminded of speed, noise, traffic, fast conversation, people who are doing something other than merely waiting. Ellie loves to assemble gatherings of acquaintances drawn from the diverse sectors of her own busy life, hoping for interesting synergies. There were a dozen guests today, three or four of them almost as old as Freya herself, the rest relatively young and bright-eyed. There was a writer, a couple of TV producers, a black belt in judo; and Freya’s brain is still clanging with echoes of the unaccustomed conversation. But mainly she’s wondering how much of a fool she made of herself.

  Ellie put out quite a spread – bagels, two kinds of lox, cream cheese, hummus, bowls of beautiful strawberries, potato salad. None of this interested Freya, whose nutritional needs have shrunk nearly to zero. But there was also a bottomless pitcher of mimosas, and she found that the combination of sweet juice and champagne went down rather easily. Before long she noticed that she was talking a lot. The other guests were listening politely and watching her with a mixture of expressions that, emboldened by the mimosas, she didn’t make much of an effort to decipher.

  They sat around Ellie’s big round table, where all that food was artfully arranged on a beautiful lace tablecloth and fired by slanting beams of afternoon sun. While the guests attentively dressed up their bagels in lox and cream cheese, the conversation begun in the living room continued with a lot of head-shaking over the distressed economy, progressed to the falloff in public funding for basic amenities, thence to the deplorable situation of the public schools, and finally, rattling off onto a slightly diverging track, the continuing educational battle between evolutionists and creationists in some parts of the nation. Here Ellie deftly applied a drop of social lubrication by mentioning that Freya was not only a paleontologist but, as a recognized expert in the field, had provided scientific testimony for a court hearing in one of those benighted Midwestern school districts that were trying to institute the teaching of “intelligent design” on an equal footing with evolution. This information had inspired some genuine interest in the group, and Freya, absently toying with the bagel whose edges she had mouse-nibbled, described the issues in the hearing, some of the testimony, including her own, and a few of the more garish participants.

  But audiences were rare for her these days, and she’d found herself unable to stop with the bare outlines. She knew that in her – tiny, white-haired, bent over her uneaten bagel like a goblin mellowed by extreme age – what the other guests were seeing was a sort of living fossil, like a coelacanth hauled up from the abyss. Far more than the events she recounted, it was her eyewitness to what was for them the deep past that caught their attention. But that knowledge hadn’t kept her from talking, each story leading smoothly to the next: the obtuseness and scientific cherry-picking of the creationists who’d testified at the hearing; the tart exchanges between the lawyers of the opposing camps and the bemusement of the judge; the battles among her own colleagues over how best to debunk the scattershot fundamentalist arguments; the intellectual arrogance of some of the paleontologists themselves, including one of the most famous, an icon in the field and, by paleontological standards, almost a household name. She was further tempted by this man’s fame and the obvious signs of recognition in the eyes of her listeners to describe how she had risen fearlessly at a meeting more than 40 years ago – she had been one of three women among more than a hundred paleontologists and geologists in attendance – to attack his misguided ideas, as he waited massively and impatiently at the podium.

  And although the polite silence enforced by her nonstop rambling had by now become quite noticeable, she continued stubbornly into an exegesis of her own decades-long work, which had focused on the mysterious proto-bird, Archaeopteryx. She wanted to impress on these youngsters the amazing beauty of the enigmatic fossils – like fallen angels, sprawled delicately on their backs; and haloed around them, imprinted in the golden limestone, the faint memory of their plumage, the tantalizing hint that these were the ancestors of today’s colorful profusion of birds. Of course that. But what was this need to keep talking, without haste, but just rapidly and continuously enough to prevent the conversation from spilling away from her and carving out a new bed? She glanced from face to face as she spoke, willing them to remain silent, focusing mostly on the elegant young woman sitting across from her – one of Ellie’s finds – who was not only the editor of a slick Parisian photo magazine but also the mother of two sons. Freya felt that she was speaking directly to this very modern phenomenon as she described her own work, now decades in the past but still glowing in her own mind. She caressed the minutiae of the fossil record, knowing that only a paleontologist could love these homely details. And yet... Most of the fossils had been found on their backs, their wings – if wings they were – wide open and displayed almost heraldically. The theor
y was that they had floated for a while, dead and belly up, before finally sinking, to be embedded in the muddy bottom of a shallow sea and slowly blanketed by the snowfall of limey sediment. Didn’t this bring these ancient animals to life in some way, make them real? And there was the hotly debated question: dinosaurs or birds, or some transitional form? Above all, there was the still unresolved controversy – to which she had devoted nearly 20 years of intensive work before her powers had begun to fail – over whether Archaeopteryx could fly under its own steam, or was merely a tree-climber and glider, like a flying squirrel, or even confined to the ground, the feathers fulfilling an unromantic thermoregulatory function...

  Here she was brusquely interrupted by a tap on her upper arm from the old man on her left. He had been introduced to her at the beginning of the gathering as Gerald, a retired physics professor – a large man, somewhat age-bent himself, with thick glasses, a white beard, and a huge head of anarchic Einsteinian hair. Though his weathered face now wore an ambiguous smile, the tap on the arm had clearly been intended, at a minimum, as a rebuke to her garrulousness. “I’ve heard,” he said when she stopped talking to look at him, “that the Archaeopteryx fossils are forgeries. That some 19th-century archaeological villain actually constructed those so-called fossils by adding a layer of cement to dinosaur fossils and then pressing chicken feathers into it. This was supposed to provide proof of Darwin’s theories. Or maybe to discredit them.”

  Now, in the darkness of her bedroom, Freya feels her face turning red as she remembers the suddenly deeper silence at the table while the other guests awaited her response to this crude challenge – crude in its brushing aside of everything she’d just said, and even brutal in its implication that she could be so incompetent as to spend most of her academic career studying a bogus line of geological evidence. It was also contemptuous on a scientific level of which the other guests could hardly be aware. His voice and expression projected the arrogance of the “hard” scientist who believes that his own intelligence and his own sharp-edged discipline are superior to and subsume all others, and especially those studies, like archaeology and paleontology, whose conclusions rest of necessity not on equations but on inference and interpretation, or sometimes even intuition. This foolish forgery theory had been advanced, of course, by two astrophysicists, and very well known ones at that. As though a couple of cosmologists with a camera and some unacknowledged prejudices could overturn a century of meticulous examination and analysis by men and women who had made paleontology their lives.

  Freya was suddenly struck by the sheer, obtuse bulk of this man, despite the curvature of old age. His huge head, with its mad hair, floated above her like a grinning rogue planet. She felt bent and shrunken next to him. It was perfectly clear from his expectant leer that he had very little interest in Archaeopteryx and even less in the technical facts that refuted the forgery theory. His object was, in fact, to shut her up; or, failing that to induce her to make a fool of herself. She knew it was a mistake even to attempt a rational reply. But he had read her perfectly, with the intuition of the master tormentor. To him, of all people, it would have been impossible for her not to respond. And to this gathering of nonscientists, as he well knew, the content of her reply would of course lie not in the peculiarities of the Solnhofen limestone or the authenticating characteristics of the fossils themselves or the ignorant misreadings of the challenging astrophysicists, which they could not understand or care about, but in the flush on her wrinkled face and the excessive emotion that colored her words. Despite – or because of – the mocking gleam in the physicist’s eye, she could not restrain herself. She could feel the other guests’ previous deference turning to indulgence as she spoke. How amusing, and a little embarrassing, that an obscure scientific squabble could still ignite such a flame in the quavering little old lady! They all watched her, fascinated, or perhaps merely trying not to laugh. Even Ellie looked disappointed, as though she’d seen a tightrope walker slip and end up clinging ignominiously to the wire, like an incompetent opossum. The puzzlement on the sympathetic face of the elegant young magazine editor was particularly dispiriting. Only Gerald’s wife, a dignified white-haired lady who wore a beautiful peach-colored silk dress she had sewn herself, watched her husband rather than Freya, without expression. But she had hearing aids in both ears, and might not even have been following the exchange.

  Freya had eventually managed to get herself under control, with the help of Ellie, who, availing herself of the hostess’s prerogative, had hastily retired to the kitchen and returned with a spectacular raspberry tart and a large bowl of whipped cream. The tension was quickly dissipated in the contemplation, admiration, and consumption of this object, while Freya sat silently, clinging to the handle of her coffee cup and feeling her face gradually cool. Gerald the physicist, meanwhile, had commandeered the conversation with an animated lecture on the glories of Viennese pastry, which he and his wife had sampled in depth some 30 years earlier. He dissected them stratum by stratum, expanding on the techniques used to create each one and the gustatorial implications of these age-old technologies. The guests had been greatly relieved by the switch to a lighter topic, and the brisk banter had started up again. Only Freya had not contributed. She’d sat, distracted, her gaze drifting across the faces of the other guests, feeling as though she’d been pushed off a moving train.

  She sighs and slows her breathing, trying to calm herself enough to go back to sleep. As often in her wakeful intervals, she tries to focus on the dear Archaeopteryx itself, whose fragile but evocative impressions in the limestone, after so much looking, feel burned into her own neurons. But how is it that after all these years her faith in her own conclusions can be so easily undercut by any arrogant fool like Gerald the physicist, who knows nothing about it and cares less, whose only real concern today was that she was talking more than he was? Never mind about the so-called forgery – that’s just foolishness. But could they fly, really? That’s what really matters, although she’s not sure why. Someone will eventually nail it down, of course, long after she’s gone. So why should she worry about it?

  Sleep, perhaps, is coming. On her back, arms spread in the only comfortable position her ancient joints will allow, she feels embedded in the new foam mattress, as though she’d fallen from a great height. Arrayed around her in the darkness are all the years of intensive labor and achievement, the mental imprint of her incessant efforts. Thousands of hours spent examining photos of the fossils and the fossils themselves, the minutely argued articles on dinosaur anatomy and bird anatomy and bat anatomy and biometrics and biomechanics and even aeronautics (she’d needed a physicist’s help on that one), the dozens of hours spent delivering papers in the semidarkness of countless auditoriums, her face spookily lit from below by whispering overhead projectors. Hundreds of nights like this one, lying awake and staring up into the darkness, puzzling over some ambiguous piece of evidence. In the course of all this she’d more than convinced herself that Archaeopteryx could indeed fly, and not just by dropping from some tree, but under its own power, like any bird, leaping upward and taking to the air. The evidence is overwhelming! How can anyone doubt it?

  But who is she talking to now? Ellie’s congenial luncheon party has dispersed, north and south, over freeways and bridges, back to their busy lives, its members have doubtless already forgotten the little collision between relics they witnessed at lunch. Gerald the physicist is probably somewhere within a mile of her right now, innocently snoring, dreaming of sacher torte. But the intervention of that embittered old coot has somehow cycled her back helplessly for the hundredth time to the very beginning of her quest, forcing her to shuffle mentally through the old pile of evidence once again, pulling out pages here and there and assembling them in a new framework, slightly different from the hundred others she’s constructed in the past, all of them buttressing the same somewhat defiant conclusion. What about those new CT scans, for example, the braincase studies? They’ve proved that Archaeopteryx’s b
rain was considerably larger than the brains of most dinosaurs, easily big enough to meet the needs of a flying organism. The unusual development of the vision and hearing and muscle coordination regions...

  Tonight, however – perhaps her old tissues are still processing the mimosas – she’s unable to taxi very far along the familiar pavement of logic before it’s replaced by a feeling of rising and floating, up and out over the edge of the earth, and then settling, as the sediment of sleep drifts down on her.