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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.” a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 228

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 prereq-uisites, 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 scientifi c journals where his family and his friends r u n

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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 scientifi c 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 fi rst 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 fi n 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 a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 230

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 fi sh that sat on either side. It was so logical, after all, the redbreast sunfi sh 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 fi sh?” 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 fi sh.”

“Last week, the week before.” Tip picked up a slender jar of in-land 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?”

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“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 fi sh, and how many more fi sh 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 fi sh?

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, fl at river, the jungle, sweet smelling and sticky, stretching out behind him, the shadows fi lled in with darkly twisting tropical vines. “Don’t you want to find your own fi sh?”

a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 232

It had been a long time since Tip thought about fi eldwork. There was so much to do on the species that other people were fi nding 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 fi nished 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 r u n

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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 sunfi sh 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 fi eld 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 jars on their sides to let the fi sh swim out undisturbed.

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“ ‘ 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 fi sh 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?” Kenya shook her head.

The science teachers took classes there to make lists of plants and birds (marsh grass, nuthatch); their history teacher had taken them there to discuss the political majesty of Massachusetts, and their English teacher had taken them there to stand beside the pile of rocks that had once been Thoreau’s cabin while she read aloud from
Walden
. How was it possible that any child could go to school in Boston and not get dragged out to Concord for something? “It isn’t far from here,” Tip said. “When the weather gets warmer I’ll take you. You can see where he lived.”

It was one thing to say to someone that one day you’d take them to the Amazon to poke around in the leaf litter, that was an abstract invitation. But it was something else to offer a trip to a place that was close by in a month that was not so very far away. Would he really want to drive her out to see a pond in the spring? She pictured the two of them in the car, the windows down, the landscape shoot-ing past: apple trees heavy with white blossoms, the daffodils waving yellow flags beneath the boughs. They would hardly notice the scen-ery because they would be having serious discussions about matters of science. “Thoreau studied fish out there?” she asked. She wanted so much to understand why this was important, why these fi sh were his favorites when there were over a million to choose from.