A postcard pokes out of a book at bedside, marking the progress through a current paperback. The card is perforated to be trimmed down to a recipe, its thumb tab reading: “Healthy Chinese Vegetables and Noodles”:
½ pound rice noodles
SAUCE
3 tablespoons rice wine
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon sesame oil
½ cup broth
2 tablespoons tamari
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 red bell pepper, sliced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, slivered
1 cup sliced water chestnuts
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cups sliced bok choy
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1 (8-ounce) can bamboo shoots, drained
1 cup snow peas
½ cup sliced carrots
Prepare noodles as directed. Meantime, blend sauce ingredients thoroughly. Over high heat, heat oil in wok or nonstick pan. Stir-fry ginger and garlic for ½ minute. Add mushrooms; stir-fry another ½ minute. Add remaining ingredients and fry 2 minutes. Drizzle with sauce; let cook 2 minutes. Add noodles, stir briefly, and serve. Serves 4. 350 calories, 12g protein, 60g carbohydrates, 6g fat. No cholesterol!
Beneath these instructions is a color picture of the finished meal. Behind the perfect dish, a broken fortune cookie: Use what you have; work for what you need. At bottom, next to the Copyright © 1997 Attention Grabbers Marketing, two tiny icons proclaim: PRINTED WITH AMERICAN SOY INKS ON RECYCLED PAPER.
On the back of the card—Bulk Rate U.S. Postage Paid, Lacewood, IL Permit No. 534—arranged to fall within the recipe card’s outline, the Next Millennium Realty logo adorns a picture of Laura Rowen Bodey, Broker, GRI, CRS. More than just an agent. Because your home is more than just a house. Call your friend in the business.
Three phone numbers—office, home, and toll-free—carry the clause This is not intended to solicit currently listed properties.
You don’t have to sail halfway around the world to enjoy this delicious and healthy Chinese dish. And you don’t have to look anywhere else to enjoy the best real estate service available. I can make your move easy and comfortable. You’ll be home safe, whenever you’re coming, wherever you’re going!
The Peacock, reprieved, made for Sydney Harbor. Their last communication with the Commander had the Vincennes and Porpoise setting off for a survey of Disappointment Bay, one of the happiest-named of the map’s newest features. By landfall in the Feejee Islands three months later, Clare had shaken the scent, but not the carcass that it marked.
Truly the Feejees were Botany’s Eden. For three months, Clare enjoyed near-continuous unearthing. He collected what the great Asa Gray later classified as the new genera of Brackenridgea and Draytonia. He helped Brackenridge draw and describe Maniltoa grandi-flora, the thimbithimbi tree. His steady hand proved invaluable, not just to the botanists, but to the ethnography being done by the vessels’ zoologists and philologists.
He collected many magnificent Feejeean war clubs and ceremonial paddles, later bequeathed to the Peabody. Each ritual engraving represented an inordinate overhead, given the item’s function. The New Englander shrank from this irrational richness of carving while simultaneously thrilling to the appalling waste.
Surely, he asked an island warrior, there must be a more economical manner with which to propel a canoe or bash in a head.
More economical, the native conceded. But not as convincing.
This handiwork bore some fuller utility to it than Clare’s eye could discern. The Baroque, tortuous adornment of cudgeling: no maker could hope to turn a profit on such an object. But use supped more broadly in the islands than it did in the land of measure. A war club more elaborate than a railroad locomotive, taking more time to make: it begged the same question that his whiff of scentlessness had. What, in the final face of things, was the use of use?
Clare put it to his fellow Scientifics that the races of the world ought to be approached in the same objective spirit as one might approach a new species. True, the inhabitants of these islands were, as the Commander noted, “in many respects, the most barbarous and savage race now existing upon the globe.” But therein lay their peculiar importance.
Clare reveled less than the Commander in the “considerable progress in several of the useful arts” that the islanders had made since contact with the white man. For the day would come, and lamentably soon, when the makers of these astounding clubs would grow as docile as the Christianized Tongans, and present as little interest to the investigation of diversity. They would pass from the earth like some great, flightless bird, and any further attempt to know their ways would be akin to recovering from a magnificent but fossilized plant the facts of its prior existence.
Clare relayed to the Commander, for inclusion in his Narrative, the Feejeean myth of racial origin. By native tradition, all men were born of the same primordial couple. The Feejeean was firstborn, but wicked, black, and naked. The Tongan came next, only partly bad, and therefore whiter and better clothed. The Papalangis—white men—came last. The best behaved, they were awarded many clothes, immense ships, and great freedom of movement.
In the islands, the squadron exercised its chief commission: compiling a reliable cartographic description of an area whose riches had previously been sealed in ignorance. For want of reliable maps, the ships plying these channels had paid greatly. Trade could no more survive in a map-free world than the world could survive without trade. For weeks, the tedious task of surveying spun out the reefs’ corona. The crew added no end of features to the storehouse of geography: Peale’s River, Budd’s Forest, Rich’s Peak.
But mutual growth demanded more than maps. Some half a dozen years earlier, natives had slain seven crew members of an American brig, the Charles Doggett, cooking and eating their Negro. Whites had traced the crime back to a powerful island royal. International cooperation required the Wilkes expedition to demonstrate that the massacre of white visitors could not go unpunished.
The murderer turned out to be a resourceful nobleman named Vendovi. When the fugitive eluded one group of seamen, Captain Hudson designed a fuller plan for his capture. The officers of the Peacock prepared a feast aboard ship and invited all the native luminaries to attend. The promise of gifts and lavish entertainment proved too much to resist. For even the High King of Feejee coveted the most worthless trinket of New England manufacture.
Ship’s fireworks astonished the audience. A magnificent Jim Crow theatrical performed by the ship’s tailor provoked wide admiration. The banquet consumed, the local nobility made to depart. Captain Hudson then informed them, with apologies, that they were all hostages pending Vendovi’s surrender. The natives agreed that Vendovi was a dangerous man who had to be brought to justice.
A warrior agreed to go to the village of Rewa and take Vendovi by surprise. After his departure, the King asked for a draft of ava, to soften his confinement. Ben Clare combed the botanical specimens on board and produced some Piper methysticum to brew the calmative. The grateful King asked Clare if he were a plant doctor. Clare equivocated.
The two men exchanged botanical knowledge. Clare copied into his journals the infinite uses to which the natives put each plant species. Marking Clare’s interest, the King produced an herb pouch full of stems, leaves, and seeds. A rhizomous tuber of unknown genus attracted Clare’s attention.
The King called the root by a name that meant either strength or use. Clare noted the King’s claims in his journals, as interested in the plant’s fictive attributes as in any real properties. The root possessed a faraway smell, an astringency that Clare would not have been able to detect until a few months before.
Vendovi’s capture, according to Wilkes’s Narrative,
shows the force of the customs to which all ranks of this people give implicit obedience. Ngaraningiou, on arriving at Rewa, went at once to Vendovi’s house . . . Going in, he took his seat by him, laid his hand on his arm, and told him
that he was wanted, and that the king had sent for him to go on board the man-of-war. He immediately assented . . .
Brought aboard ship, Vendovi confessed to the assembled chiefs his complicity in the murder of the white sailors. He expressed some regret at having eaten the Negro, whose flesh had tasted of strong tobacco. The Captain put Vendovi in chains and freed the King and court, once again explaining why their imprisonment had been necessary,
for he would have thought it incumbent upon him to burn Rewa, if Vendovi had not been taken. The king replied, that Captain Hudson had done right; that he would like to go to America himself, they had all been treated so well; that we were now all good friends, and that he should ever continue to be a good friend to all white men . . . They were assured of our amicable disposition towards them so long as they conducted themselves well; and in order to impress this fully upon them, after their own fashion, presents were made them, which were received gratefully.
The King, in turn, lavished on his captors the gratitude of reprieve. On Clare he pressed the moist rhizome from his herbal kit, the one with the hollow, astringent scent.
After the Rewa affair, relations with the islanders degenerated. The squadron burned the town of Rye in retaliation for the theft of a boat, and resorted to punitive shelling with twenty-four-pounder Congreve rockets those populations that would not be subdued in any other fashion. Warriors on Disappointment Minor invited Clare and two other plant collectors into the reef at spearpoint. Two officers, including the Commander’s nephew, died in the skirmish on Malolo.
The expedition pressed on to safer anchorage in the Sandwiches, where Clare explored Honolulu. But when the Peacock later ran aground in the mouth of the Columbia River, Clare lost the best of his own work forever. The ship, so narrowly spared destruction by ice, wallowed into the mud and expired in what soon became a pitifully well mapped grave.
In the Peacock’s demise, Peale lost his whole natural history library as well as a vast collection of Lepidoptera. The great Dana also lost extensive notes and priceless crustacean specimens. Fortune hit Clare hardest of all. He fished from the wreck no more than a quarter of his papers and not a single collected plant of any importance, with the exception of the root given him by the Feejeean King.
This stroke of fate punished Clare. In the wreck he lost all chance to add to science’s legacy. He made halfhearted attempts to start new journals. He began a grammar for Chinook trading jargon, but his lack of philological training proved insurmountable.
Among the Spokane people, the amateur anthropologist did, by accident, produce a minor prize, dutifully recorded by the Commander for a later public. Chief Silimxnotylmilakabok, whom the expedition christened Cornelius, told them
an account of a singular prophecy that was made by one of their medicine-men . . . before they knew anything of white people, or had heard of them . . . “Soon,” said he, “there will come from the rising sun a different kind of men from any you have yet seen, who will bring with them a book, and will teach you every thing, and after that the world will fall to pieces.”
These words haunted Clare’s journey back across the Pacific to Manila. They darkened his passage through the Mindoro Strait and drove him to a flurry of unproductive energy in the Singapore Roads, where the Commander was forced to sell the weathered Flying Fish into the booming opium trade.
Musing on the Spokane prophecy, Clare grew possessed of an urge to communicate with the prisoner Vendovi. The old island savage had sat languishing in the brig, America’s captive, for the year and a half since Feejee. During this time, the only person who knew enough of the prisoner’s language to be able to converse with him had been Vanderford, the Master’s Mate.
Clare studied with Vanderford, to learn what he could of the savage’s tongue. Vanderford, however, took ill before transiting the Cape of Good Hope. He died and was committed to the deep before teaching Clare sufficient grammar to be intelligible. The passage across the Atlantic found Clare and Vendovi in a repeated dumb show of frustration.
Vendovi lived on in strangeness until the ships drifted into New York Harbor. Looking on the metropolitan skyline, he died of a sudden burst of incomprehension. Clare all but followed him.
The voyage came to an inglorious close. A healthy chunk of the expedition’s ethnographic collection eventually wound up in the capable hands of P. T. Barnum. The aging ships were privatized or broken up for parts. The public grew indifferent to the fleet’s discoveries. Expansion had long since outgrown the excursion.
At day’s end, the chief legacy of the expedition lay in its charts. With them, fabled locales fell into fact, hurrying the world toward a society of universal trade. The expedition added more miles of coastline to the world than any other single venture. Aside from a few spurious islands drawn by a disgruntled midshipman, the charts were appallingly accurate. One hundred years later, the American invasion of Tarawa employed a map that Ben Clare had helped to draw.
History came to remember Commander Wilkes for sparking international calamity during the Civil War by whisking two Confederate commissioners off the British packet Trent. Captain Hudson ended up commanding the ship that laid the first transatlantic cable. Clare lived on, immortal, in a rhizomous bulb of Utilis clarea, named for the man who noticed a pungency that set it apart from all the species it resembled.
The priceless zoological treasures fell prey to the raids of Washington souvenir hunters. The public picked over the stuffed creatures. Plants lost their labels. Museums and zoos skimmed off what they wanted. After much loss, government intervened. Thereafter, even the wife of His Accidency, President Tyler, was denied cuttings.
What remained of the rummaged collections formed the core of the infant national museum. An ancient Encephalartos horridus cycad in the U.S. Botanic Garden still survives, the lone living remnant of the expedition, aside from Clare International.
Late already, even before fate screwed them royally.
Don tells himself as much with each new wallowing boxcar. Would have been late anyway, even if God and the Illinois Central hadn’t chosen this exact moment to engineer the longest freight in creation since that interminable peace train song that Laura used to play throughout the first four years of their marriage.
His fault. He hadn’t allotted enough time to pick up the kids at their schools and haul them back across town. The hospital—no more than five, six blocks from West High. Shouldn’t have taken more than ten minutes, max, the way he planned it.
His plan was already a shambles, well before this little kicker. Maybe he’s stuck in nostalgia, some image of the Town That Time Forgot. Like, a place where you just drive, from start to destination, no complications, no surprises, no fucked-up stoplights, no Emmett Kelly work crews sticking Band-Aids on collapsing infrastructures, no in-your-face work-stoppage public servants picketing the hood of your Toyota.
What happened to that manageable, mid-sized town they used to live in, where everything still worked the way it was supposed to? The one with the intact tax base, where they fixed the potholes, where you could drive anywhere in ten minutes?
As it stands, if the cattle cars and chemical cars and car cars shuffle off to Topeka by the top of the hour, they’ll be in the recovery room right around five after. Exactly forty-six minutes. He’s reached the stage of life where everything takes forty-six minutes as an absolute minimum. It takes forty-six minutes to walk down to the goddamn mailbox.
Ellen counts out loud: “One-huuu-ndred-three . . .” Her aristocratic heiress routine, bored out of her skull by the stupidity of existence. But making sure to share the tedium with everyone, generous soul.
Tim’s quit trying to get her to shut up and has moved on to trying to talk right over her. Don’s given up even going through the motions of policing them. Five more minutes, plus whatever the rest of the train takes. Just get them to the hospital, and their mother can deal with them.
Tim says, “Wonder what’s inside those metal canister thingies. Probably rad
ioactive waste or something.”
“Rubbish,” Don says. “They don’t ship radioactive waste by train.”
“Sure they do. They do! All the time.”
“They don’t just sling radioactive waste around the country, through cities and—”
“Sure,” Tim taunts. Like it’s a fact of growing up, and his dad’s in some kind of denial. “How else’re they going to get it from one place to another?”
“They don’t. They just leave it where it is.”
“Great. Okay. So what do you think is in those things?” Like he’s just happy, having any kind of conversation with his father. Even this one.
Ellen says, “One-huundred-twenty-fi-ive . . .”
“Those whats?”
“These. The submarine whatchits. The Imperial Storm Trooper ones.”
“They’re all empty. This whole train is just some old guy’s hobby. Have you ever heard of anyone actually shipping anything by train? What do you think we have airplanes for? They just keep these trains around to make things look quaint, and to harass people who have to get—”
“And to lug around the stuff that the pilots won’t touch,” Ellen chimes in, smelling blood. At least she’s stopped counting.
Just to spite him, Tim calculates the total bulk of all the freight being hauled past them. How many thousands of dead cows. How many cubic milliliters of explosive fuels. How many Nissans. How many tons of polyvinyl whatever. The kid knows how to estimate.