It might have been one of those golden, delicately lit spring mornings invested with all the warmth and urgency of the season, bees hovering, buds unfolding, the air soft and triumphant, but it wasn’t. We took a cab down Park Avenue in a driving wintry rain and shivered our way up two flights of steps and into a drafty lecture hall where a balding man in a turtleneck sweater was holding forth on the molting habits of the giant Sumatran toad. I was feeling lighthearted—frogs and toads: I could hold this one over her head for a month; two, maybe—and I poked Adrian in the ribs at regular intervals over the course of the next two stultifyingly dull hours. We heard a monograph on the diet and anatomy of Discoglossus nigriventer, the Israeli painted frog, and another on the chemical composition of the toxin secreted by the poison-arrow frog of Costa Rica, but nothing on their chances of surviving into the next decade. Adrian pulled her green beret down over her eyebrows. I caught her stifling a yawn. After a while, my eyes began to grow heavy.
There was a dry little spatter of applause as the poison-arrow man stepped down from the podium, and it roused me from a morass of murky dreams. I rose and clapped feebly. I was just leaning into Adrian with the words “dim sum” on my lips, words that were certain to provoke her into action—it was past one, after all, and we hadn’t eaten—when a wild-looking character in blond dreadlocks and tinted glasses took hold of the microphone. “Greetings,” he said, his hoarse timbreless voice rustling through the speakers and an odd smile drifting across his lips. He was wearing a rumpled raincoat over a T-shirt that featured an enormous crouching toad in the act of flicking an insect into its mouth. The program identified him as B. Reid, of UC Berkeley. For a long moment he merely stood there, poised over the microphone, holding us with the blank gaze of his blue-tinted lenses.
Someone coughed. The room was so still I could hear the distant hiss of the rain.
“We’ve been privileged to hear some provocative and stimulating papers here this morning,” B. Reid began, and he hadn’t moved a muscle, save for his lips, “papers that have focused brilliantly on the minute and painstaking research crucial to our science and our way of knowledge, and I want to thank Professors Abercrombie and Wouzatslav for a job well done, but at the same time I want to ask you this: will there be a Seventh Annual International Herpetology and Batrachiology Conference? Will there be an eighth? Will there be a discipline, will there be batrachiologists? Ladies and gentlemen, why play out a charade here: will there be frogs?”
A murmur went up. The woman beside me, huge and amphibious-looking herself, shifted uneasily in her seat. My lower back announced itself with a distant buzz of pain and I felt the hackles rise on the back of my neck: this was what we’d come for.
“Cameroon,” B. Reid was saying, his voice rasping like dead leaves, “Ecuador, Borneo, the Andes and the Alps: everywhere you look the frogs and toads are disappearing, extinction like a plague, the planet a poorer and shabbier place. And what is it? What have we done? Acid rain? The ozone layer? Some poison we haven’t yet named? Ladies and gentlemen,” he rasped, “it’s the frogs today and tomorrow the biologists … before we know it the malls will stand empty, the freeways deserted, the creeks and ponds and marshes forever silent. We’re committing suicide!” he cried, and he gave his dreadlocks a Medusan swirl so that they beat like snakes round his head. “We’re doomed, can’t you see that?”
The audience sat riveted in their seats. No one breathed a word. I didn’t dare look at Adrian.
His voice dropped again. “Bufo canorus,” he said, and the name was like a prayer, a valediction, an obituary. “You all know my study in Yosemite. Six years I put into it, six years of crouching in the mud and breathing marsh gas and fighting leeches and ticks and all the rest of it, and what did it get me? What did it get the Yosemite toad? Extinction, that’s what. They’re gone. Wiped from the face of the earth.” He paused as if to gather his strength. “And what of Richard Wassersug’s albino leopard frogs in Nova Scotia? White tadpoles. Exclusively. What kind of mutation is that?” His voice clawed its way through the speakers, harsh with passion and the clangorous knelling of doom. “I’ll tell you what kind: a fatal one. A year later they were gone.”
My face was hot. Suddenly my back felt as if it were crawling with fire ants, seared by molten rain, drawn tight in a burning lariat. I looked at Adrian and her eyes were wild, panicky, a field of white in a thin net of veins. We’d come on a lark, and now here was the naked truth of our own mortality staring us in the face. I wanted to cry out for the frogs, the toads, the salamanders, for my own disconnected and rootless self.
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 e
aves, 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:
HOPES RISE AS NEW SPECIES MOVE INTO SLUDGE OFF COAST
And what was this? I read on and discovered that these rising hopes were the result of the sudden appearance of tubeworms, solemya clams and bacteria in a formerly dead stretch of water in the Hudson Canyon, used from time immemorial as a repository for the city’s sewage and refuse. Down there, deep in the ancient layers of sludge, beneath the lapping fishless waves, there was life, burgeoning and thriving in a new medium. What hope. What terrific uplifting news. Tubeworms. They had to be joking.
After a while I folded up the newspaper, found my slippers and took this great and rising hope to bed with me.
The week that followed was as grim and unrelenting as the week that had given rise to it. Work was deadening (I shifted numbers on a screen for a living and the numbers had never seemed more meaningless), my back went through half a dozen daily cycles of searing agony and utter absence of feeling, and the weather never broke, not even for an hour. The skies were close and bruised, and the cold rain fell. I went directly home after work and didn’t answer the phone at night, though I knew it was Adrian calling. All week I thought of frogs and death.
And then, on Saturday, I woke to an outpouring of light and a sudden sharp apprehension of the world that was as palpable as a taste. I sat up. My feet found the floor. Naked and trembling, I crossed the room and stood at the window, the cord to the glowing blinds caught up in my hand, the stirrings of barometric change tugging at the long muscles of my lower back. Then I pulled the cord and the light spilled into the room, and in the next moment I was shoving the blinds aside and throwing open the window.
The air was pregnant, rich, thick with the scent of renewal and the perspicacious hum of the bees. All that moping, all those fears, the named dread and the nameless void: it all evaporated in the face of that hosanna of a morning. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge roused on Christmas Day, Lazarus reanimated, Alexander the Great heading into Thrace. I opened every window in the house; I ate a muffin, read the paper, matched the glorious J. S. Bach to the triumph of the morning. It was heady, but I couldn’t sustain it. Ultimately, inevitably, like a sickness, the frogs and toads crept back into my head, and by 10:00 A.M. I was just another mortal with a bad back sinking into oblivion.
It was then, at the bottom of that trough, that I had an inspiration. The coffee was cold in the cup, the newsprint rumpled, Bach silenced by the tyranny of a mechanical arm, and suddenly a notion hit me and I was up and out of the kitchen chair as if I’d been launched. The force of it carried me to the bedroom closet, where I dug around for my hiking boots, a sweatshirt, my Yankees cap and a denim jacket, and then to the medicine cabinet, where I unearthed the tick repellant and an old aerosol can of Off! Then I dialed Adrian.
“Adrian,” I gasped, “my heart, my love—”
Her voice was thick with sleep. “Is this an obscene phone call?”
“I’ve been gloomy lately, I know it—”
“Not to mention not answering the phone.”
“I admit it, I admit it. But have you seen the day out there?”
She hadn’t. She was still in bed.
“What I’m thinking is this: how can we take B. Reid’s word for it? How can we take anybody’s?”
I didn’t know where to begin looking for the elusive toad, Bufo americanus, let alone the spring peeper or the leopard frog, but I was seized with a desire to know them, touch them, observe their gouty limbs and clumsy rituals, partake once more of the seething life of pond, puddle and ditch, and at least temporarily lay to rest the nagging memory of B. Reid and his diminutive corpses. It was irrational, I knew it, but I felt that if I could see them, just this once, and know they were occupying their humble niche in the hierarchy of being, everything would be all right.
We parked along the highway and poked desultorily through the ditch alongside it, but there was nothing animate in sight. The old cane was sharp and brittle, and there was Styrofoam, glass and aluminum everywhere. Trucks stole the ai
r from our lungs, teenagers jeered. Adrian suggested a promising-looking puddle on the far verge of the rutted commuter lot at the Garrison station, but we found nothing there except submerged gum wrappers and potato-chip bags ground into the muck by the numbing impress of steel-belted radials. “We can’t give up,” she said, and there was just the faintest catch of desperation in her voice. “What about the woods off the Appalachian Trail? You know, where it crosses the road down by K mart?”
“All right,” I said, and the fever was on me, “we’ll give it a try.”
Twenty minutes later we were in the woods, sun glazing bole and branch, tender new yellow-green leaves unfolding overhead, birds shooting up from the path as if jerked on a string. There was a smell here I’d forgotten, the dark wet odor of process, of things breaking down and springing up again, of spore and pollen and seed and mulch. Bugs hovered round my face. I was sweating. And yet I felt good, strong in back and leg, already liberated from the cloud that had hung over me all week, and as I followed Adrian up the long slow incline of the path, I thought I’d never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans. This was nature.
We’d gone a mile or so when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the path. “What’s the matter?” I said, but she waved her hand to shush me. I edged forward till I stood beside her, my pulse quickening, breath caught high in my throat. “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”
“Listen.”
At first I couldn’t hear it, my ears attuned to civilization, the chatter of the TV, high fidelity, the blast of the internal-combustion engine, but then the woods began to speak to me. The sound was indistinct at first, but after a while it began to separate into its individual voices, the smallest rustlings and crepitations, the high-pitched disputations of the birds, the trickle of running water—and something else, something at once strange and familiar, a chirping fluid trill that rose strong and multivoiced in the near distance. Adrian turned to me and smiled.