The Extinction Club

  The second book, L’Enfant prodige, was written by Dr. Dorothée Jonquères, Céleste’s grandmother. Most prodigies, she points out, had at least one brilliant (or wacko) parent who was hell-bent on raising a brilliant child. They often become introverts, these children, either extremely shy or downright afraid of people. Or hateful. Leonardo da Vinci despised human beings from an early age, calling them “sacks for food,” “fillers-up of privies.” A young Nietzsche called them “the bungled and botched.” Many child geniuses die young or become suicidal, but bear no resemblance to the near-sighted, forlorn and bookish creatures that populate so many stories about precocious children. And yet Céleste is near-sighted, forlorn and bookish, almost as if she’s playing a part, including the bit about dying young.

  Here are some historical examples cited by Dr. Jonquères:

  Caravaggio, who painted his first masterpieces in his teens, didn’t die young, but had some early problems fitting in. In 1600 he was accused of beating up a fellow painter, and in 1601 he wounded a soldier. In 1603 he was imprisoned for beating up another painter, and in 1604 he was accused of throwing a plate of artichokes in a waiter’s face. The same year he was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman Guards. In 1605 he was seized for misuse of arms, and two months later he had to flee Rome because he had wounded a man in defence of his mistress. In 1606, during a brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed a man.

  Thomas Chatterton began his career as a poet at age eleven and was famous by age twelve. On the night of August 24, 1770, the young genius poisoned himself with arsenic. Age seventeen.

  Terence Judd made his debut as a classical pianist at twelve, playing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. At twenty-two he threw himself off Beachy Head, just before Christmas 1979.

  Ian Curtis led the seminal new wave band Joy Division while still in his teens. He hanged himself in his own kitchen on May 18, 1980. He was twenty-three.

  Kurt Cobain, a singer, guitarist and songwriter of preternatural talent, blew his brains out on April 5, 1994. Age twenty-seven.

  Early entrance into university, it appears, sends more phenoms into early burnout than Olympic gymnastics. Sufiah Salem fled Cambridge University in 2000, aged fourteen, after her third-year exams. When police found her after a huge hunt, she blamed her parents for too much pressure, never finished her courses, and became an administrative assistant for a plumbing firm in Hull. Rita Lafferty graduated from Oxford at the age of thirteen with a first-class mathematics degree in 1999. She now works as a prostitute in Amsterdam.

  At the end of the book were figures from a study by Dr. Catherine Morris Cox, estimates of how sixteen famous men (no women), whose childhood was well documented, would score on a modern IQ test:

  Drake: 130

  Washington: 140

  Napoleon: 140

  Lincoln: 150

  Rembrandt: 155

  Franklin: 160

  Mozart: 165

  Johnson: 165

  Luther: 170

  Kant: 175

  Da Vinci: 180

  Descartes : 180

  Galileo: 185

  Voltaire : 190

  Newton: 190

  Goethe: 210

  After Goethe, in a child’s hand I recognized, was this female addition: Dorothée Jonquères: 211.

  The next morning, the book still open in my arms, I awoke with a start, not because of an animal roar or caveman flight, but because I felt something beside me, touching me, wrapped in the sheet like a shroud. It wasn’t Moon, because Moon was sleeping at my feet. I peeled back the sheet.

  It was Céleste, sprawled on the bed on her stomach. She was in a fathomless sleep, making gentle rasping sounds. Around her neck was the turquoise Indian necklace I had bought her.

  I looked up, toward light. The rising sun gilded the window frame before lazily entering through the glass, burning a new pattern on the frost. Almost like the outline of a face. No, wait. It was a face. With a woodpecker nose and drowned-rat beard. The snowplower! The curtains … How could I forget to close the curtains? I leapt out of bed, looked out. Nothing.

  Céleste’s eyes opened, though she didn’t move. For a heart-stopping second she looked dead.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said softly and blinked her bright green eyes.

  “Would you like to go back to your bed?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on.” I eased my hand under her and by old habit perhaps, she reached for my neck. In an instant I had her in my arms, blanket and all, carrying her into her bedroom, where every light was on.

  Since arriving at the rectory, I had left my door open in case she should call, in case she should wake in terror. I had suggested she sleep with her own door open, lights on. I had suggested she send me a mayday whenever she got scared, couldn’t sleep, had nightmares.

  “What keeps you awake at night? The pain?” I set her down on the bed, then sat beside her.

  “No. The pethidine takes care of that. Can you get more?”

  “Then why can’t you sleep? Fear?”

  “I can’t sleep, that’s all. My mind keeps jumping like a kangaroo.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “Everything. And then when I finally drift off, nightmares wake me up. Then I start thinking again.”

  “Nightmares about … being dumped in the swamp?”

  She pawed sleepily at an itchy cheek and nose. “No. About other things.”

  “Such as?”

  “What happened to my grandmother. The bears in those cages. That poor bear being lowered … And then there’s Déry. And Gervais and his snowplow—which I saw from my window, I almost forgot. And a red sports car too.”

  I had seen them too, of course, creeping along the highway or down the church lane, lights off, but decided not to mention it.

  “And about getting cut open like a fish and bled like a deer, which is what … never mind.”

  Cut open like a fish? Bled like a deer? Her nightmares are as bad as mine. “Do you mean … what happened to you that night? The knife wounds?”

  She shook her head. “What kind of nightmares do you have?”

  “Me? What makes you think I have nightmares?”

  “You shout out things during the night.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Like … grunting sounds.”

  “Caveman grunts, monosyllables?”

  Céleste smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I’m talking to my caveman family.” There are a handful of modern words, according to glottochronologists, that ancient hunter-gatherers would have understood 20,000 years ago. Seven altogether, which I seem to repeat over and over in my dreams: I, who, we, thou, two, three and five.

  “Some were real words,” said Céleste. “Repeated, like.”

  They make for fairly limited conversations. “I have two nightmares, with variations. In one scenario my wife and child and I are chased by animals—prehistoric usually, but sometimes mythical. The chase ends up inside a fenced-in space, a rectangle or square. And we always end up trapped, with no way out. And I know I’m going to die. Not my family, just me.”

  When I told my father about this, he said it was nothing to worry about. Just bad dreams, which everyone has. But when I told him I had similar visions when awake, he set up that appointment with Doktor Neefe (pronounced nay-fuh) in Frankfurt. “These animals that you see,” the doctor explained, this time in German, “are echo-images or after-sensations. Neural traces left by the imprint of a visually fixated stimulus. The strength of the after-sensation or the speed of its disappearance varies greatly in individual cases. Persons who are field-dependent—who tend to observe a field in its totality—show weaker after-effect traces. Field-independent subjects—people like you, Herr Nightingale, who by selective attention are more likely to consider a specific stimulus apart from its context—show stronger perceptual after-effects. Which can be made even stronger by the use, past or present, of psychotropic
drugs.” The stamps I had pored over endlessly as a child—the prehistorical, mythological and cryptozoological beasts that constituted my specialty—had thus come back to haunt me. “Is it true, Doktor Neefe, that whatever has once been seen is in the mind forever?” The doctor steepled his fingers and smiled. “Ja, in der Theorie.”

  “I get it,” said Céleste. “I understand.”

  “I somehow doubt that.”

  “Caused by images from stamps, right? From when you were a kid? Kind of like flashbacks, maybe triggered by drugs?”

  I thought I was used to this sort of thing by now, this preternatural precocity, but evidently not. I gaped at her for several seconds. “Eine kluge Analyse, Doktor.”

  “I don’t speak German, but I take it I’m right?”

  “Did you figure that out because you have delusions too?”

  “I don’t have delusions.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re in denial.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “See what I mean?”

  Sigh. “Okay, what kind of delusions do I have?”

  “BDD. Body dysmorphic disorder. Commonly known as ‘Imagined Ugliness Syndrome.’”

  Céleste paused to think this over. “You’re delusional. What’s your second dream?”

  “The second one’s very short, very simple, but it’s repeated over and over, on a loop. A large metal spoon is in a white sink. I turn on the tap, the jet of water hits the spoon and comes back up into my face.”

  Céleste smiled, came close to actual laughter. “But I’ve seen you do that in real life! Lots of times!”

  “It’s my destiny, I can’t escape it.”

  This time she erupted. A real belly laugh. All right, I thought, I understand now. Forget the wordplay. It’s slapstick that snaps agelastics, makes them gelastic.

  “How did you end up choosing prehistoric animals?” she asked, hand over mouth. “I mean, as your stamp … whatever, specialty.” She began to cough, the way you do at school to conceal laughter, and motioned for the glass of water on her nightstand. “Sorry. Continue.”

  “It’s the most popular theme for kids. By far. For boys, at least. It’s amazing how—”

  Another detonation. She laughed until water came out of her nose. “Sorry Nile, really, I just … I don’t usually … Can you hand me that box?” She nodded toward some Kleenex on her desk. “Thanks. Continue.”

  “Where was I?”

  She blew her nose. “It’s amazing how …”

  “It’s amazing how many countries put dinosaurs on their stamps.”

  “Because they know that kids, or their parents, are going to buy them?” She wiped a tear of laughter from her eye, struggled to control herself.

  “Exactly. Then I went on to mythological animals, then extinct.”

  “Not endangered?”

  “I’d need a big album for that. A mile wide.”

  “So that’s the area you made your money in?”

  “No. Those are stamps I bought, never sold.”

  “So how’d you make your money?”

  “Forgeries, mostly.”

  “You were a counterfeiter? I knew you were a criminal.”

  “I didn’t make them, I bought them—famous ones, usually at a laughably low price. And then sold them later—at a much higher price.”

  “You sold them as authentic, you mean?”

  “No, as forgeries.”

  “Hold on. Time out. What?”

  “I bought the stamps from sellers who advertised them as genuine. I told them I knew they were forgeries, but that I’d take them off their hands. And not report them. So I usually got them for next to nothing.”

  “I still don’t get it. How can you—”

  “Because fakes and forgeries have become a collecting area of their own. Some forgeries are more valuable than the originals. By masters like Jean de Sperati, who worked in Italy and France, or Raoul de Thuin in Mexico. I had a pretty good sampling from each. And rich collectors wanted them.”

  “How brilliant, how … diabolical! What did your dad have to say about all this? Did he approve?”

  “No, not at all. At least not at first. He changed his mind when his lawyer sent him an article from the Star-Ledger. And The New York Times. About one of the sales.”

  “You made The New York Times? God, I had no idea stamps were … newsworthy. I thought it was more like a hobby for little nerds. Little male nerds. What was the story about?”

  “It wasn’t about me. It was about postage stamp mistakes, typographical errors, which is another thing I got into. I was mentioned because I sold an upside-down airplane to Bill Gates’s cousin or cousin-in-law, I never got it straight. For six figures.”

  “What’d you pay for it?”

  “Five figures.”

  “You crook, you capitalist crook!”

  “That’s what my mother said. That I was like her father.”

  “So she disapproved too …”

  “No, she was with me all the way. She’s the one who got me started, gave me my first album. And when she saw I was serious about it, she gave me her father’s collection. One of the finest French colony collections in the world.”

  “Is that what you brought with you in your duffle bag?”

  “No no, that’s … in a safe. I brought the album my mother gave me.”

  Céleste nodded. “Why that one?”

  Because it’s a book of memories, because each stamp takes me back to a time when I was happy. “A whim.”

  “But why would you bring stamps up here if you don’t … I mean, what do stamps mean to you exactly?”

  What do they mean to me? Cancelled trips. A record of a past moment, a past transaction, literally stuck in time. “I don’t give them much thought. That’s all in the past now.”

  “So why did you bring that one album?”

  Collectors, I once read, acquired physical matter to substitute for what they lacked in the spiritual department. “You already asked me that.”

  “You avoided the question.”

  “I brought it to … to try again.”

  “Try what again?”

  Happiness. “Years ago my psychotherapist suggested I get a hobby—to help me stay dry, stay sane. That’s why I brought it. To try again.”

  “So you’re no longer a collector or dealer? You just … stopped one day?”

  “After my mom died, I stopped doing pretty much of everything.” And have had a foot in the hereafter ever since. It’s the mother, they say, who stands between the son and death.

  “Except alcohol,” she said.

  I thought of stopping the interrogation, but the truth was I didn’t mind it. Céleste was asking me questions that few had asked before. “Right.”

  “What was she like? Your mom. Was she American?”

  She was a beautiful Frenchwoman who became an alcoholic to endure a workaholic. “No, French. She was … well, beautiful. With a kind and loving heart. And a touch of madness.” A family trait.

  “And your girlfriend? What was she like? Like your mother?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “What was she like?”

  “French. Beautiful. With a touch of madness.”

  Céleste smiled. “But without the kind and loving heart.”

  “Correct.”

  “What was your father like? Was he a good man?”

  I looked up at the ceiling, to see what might be written there about the kind of father I had. His mission, it seemed, was to heap distinction upon himself, and indistinction upon his son. Rightly so, in both cases. “He was a good man, yeah. Absolutely. His mission in life was … well, lofty. He won all kinds of humanitarian awards.”

  “What’d he do when he retired? Did he keep busy?”

  He became addicted, it seemed, to the pizzazz and foofaraw of auctions and black-tie balls. “Yeah, he was a workhorse, he never stopped. He raised money for paediatric
oncology institutions, for sick kids in New Jersey, Manhattan, the outer boroughs, Long Island, Westchester. That kind of thing.”

  “Paed onc? All that does is keep babies alive so they can pass on their bad genes. It’s Darwin in reverse.”

  Was this more ventriloquism, her grandmother speaking?

  “And he treated you well?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Count to ten. “How about you? Did your grandmother treat you well?”

  “Of course.”

  “She wasn’t too strict, didn’t push you too hard?”

  “You can still love someone who pushes you hard. Venus and Serena Williams still love their father. I think.”

  Snow began to fall that evening as I sat serenely in the living room, in a large grey armchair whose springs had gone. Moon was sprawled across my lap, her motor running. My coverless paperback was open on top of her.

  Céleste, along with two or three cats, was on the uppermost floor, under the mansard roof, in an attic refuge a squad of inspectors could never find. You had to go through a hall closet to get to it, ducking under clothes, to a small drywall door, then up a flight of dark stairs. She had renovated the space herself: white wall-to-wall carpet, hyacinth-and-hummingbird wallpaper, an antique wicker chair and a rocking horse with a mop for a mane and a marble for its one eye. Behind one of the walls, embedded in pink insulation, was a cache of documents: photographs, videos, DVDs and court documents, all relating to the Bazinet poaching ring. Along with Gervais’s boots and rubber gloves. Céleste had pried open a nailed panel to show everything to me. Why? “In case something happens to me,” she explained.

  “You’re not afraid of them burning the whole place down?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Despite the streams of frigid air, Céleste would stick her telescope out the attic window and peer through it for hours, drawing constellations in her sketchbook or trying to find Apophis, the next asteroid scheduled to collide with Earth.

  I was feeling good in my new home, my castle over a bog. It was the holiday season and I wanted to sit back, feel the peace on earth and mercy mild. Or lie back, shut my eyes and wake up deep into next year. Forget that a war was raging inside my head, that time was running out, that the future loomed like a cliff. The police would soon be here, with questions about a missing girl or missing ranger or my impersonating a missing ranger. Child Care, or whatever it’s called up here, would also come calling, as would a certain Alcide Bazinet …