The Gallery of Lost Species (31 page)

I took my niece's hand in mine and we started for the hill.

FIFTY

T
HE
G
ALLERY'S SPECTACULAR
C
HRISTMAS
fir went up again.

Each year the colossal tree reached its destination like an emerald animal on an altar, and the Gallery made a big production of the unveiling. I walked in as it arrived on its flatbed truck, bound by thick cords. Traffic cops held back rush-hour streams while the driver went over the curb and onto the plaza, the boughs brushing snow from
Maman
's legs where a crew waited to drag the old conifer in on its side, up the ramp and into the Great Hall dome.

It took a day to hoist it up with wires and clamps. Overnight, workers climbed ladders, decorating it with nooses of glittering lights and opaline balls larger than human heads. I imagined lumberjacks hunting nearby townships for the oldest, most majestic balsam fir, piercing the heart with a spike. It would be taken down the morning after New Year's Day to be disposed of in a landfill, dragged out of the glass dome and down the ramp, leaving a trail of flat green needles behind.

During the lighting ceremony, musicians wearing Santa Claus hats played carols, signalling the holidays. I went up close to the giant fir, expecting my lungs to open. But the tree had no scent.

I drank eggnog and watched Raven beaming with Zach, her belly growing beneath her spangled dress. She hadn't said a word until just before the party, even though for the last month I'd suspected. I wasn't upset that my closest friend hadn't let me in on her news earlier. For all her no-nonsense ways, Raven was superstitious about things going wrong. Afflictions and maladies, or worse.

When she motioned me over, for a moment I pictured Liam and me standing with them, the four of us in our prime.
Beatific Couples,
the painting would be called.

Soon after, I left the party.

Over my vacation, I took nightly strolls in the snow, dragging an unresponsive Mira along on my outings. Often I put her in the hood of my anorak. From the sidewalk we observed festive families around tables, their doorways framed in twinkling bulbs, their houses lit up like cathedrals.

I nailed a wreath to the wall to perk up my interior and broiled delicacies including fish cheeks. The scent of paperwhites infused the apartment. I spent time reading and standing at the window. The family across the alley had moved away and the rooms were gloomy and bare.

On Christmas Day, I visited Raven and Zach. They gave me a replica of a Pantin salamander—an 1870s paperweight from a glassworks in Pantin, near Paris. There were only twelve known originals in the world. Recently, one had sold at a UK auction for $66,000. Within its glass dome, the bottle-green amphibian rested on sandy ground near a desert flower. Its skin pattern filigreed with gold entranced me. According to mythology, the salamander was associated with fire and resided in the glass-blower's furnace. It travelled back and forth to the flaming underworld, returning unscathed.

I brought Raven and Zach a yule log and a Jolly Jumper. Their euphoria drained me and I went home early, wishing an avalanche would clear my mind of all its debris. Just before Christmas I'd received a polite postcard from Chile, wishing me happy holidays. One last tangible trace of Liam. I inhaled deeply from it but, like the fir at the Gallery, the paper smelled of nothing.

*   *   *

I
N THE EARLY
New Year, I recalled Theo telling me to go to the Museum of Nature. Ask for Jonathan in ichthyology, he'd said. For lack of anything better to do, I made an appointment.

When I spoke to Jonathan by phone, he recommended I wait in the main entranceway of the building. Children ran everywhere, their shouts resounding around me. I distanced myself from them, examining a moose mosaic on the floor, thinking back to that day with Henry at the Royal Ontario Museum, when we stood beneath the heavenly dome. How I was merrily ignorant then, not knowing there would come a time when I wouldn't revere and champion my father.

I'd gone rigid with these thoughts when Jonathan appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. He was maybe a few years older than me. He wore high-top sneakers and a T-shirt with a
Tyrannosaurus rex
on it. His face was bristly and his thick brown hair uncombed, as if he had better things to do with his time.

He shook my hand enthusiastically. “You must be Edith. I see you've met Ted.” He pointed to the moose. “Sorry to keep you waiting, right this way.” He offered me a Visitor sticker and led me through a double set of doors marked Staff Only.

We entered a clean, sterile lab. He tossed some papers on a desk covered in binders and cups, with rubber dinosaurs glued along the top of the computer monitor.

“You're here for the coelacanth, right?”

“I'm not sure.”

“No worries, right this way. I know what he wants you to see.” He patted his pockets for a swipe card. We walked down a hospital-like hallway and entered another lab marked Wet Specimens. “Most of our collections are off-site. Lucky for you, this critter was recently on display.”

In the lab, some students sat around a counter covered in jars of dead mammals, deep in discussion. Jonathan steered me toward a stainless steel tank on wheels. He pulled back the thick cloth that was covering the front, revealing a window to the gargantuan fish inside.

“Ta-dah! Presenting the darling of cryptozoology.” He slapped the tank. “This is one of the oldest fish in the world. A living fossil from the Devonian period. More specifically, a coelacanth in an ethanol bath.”

“Devonian,” I muttered, transfixed by the mammoth creature. “When was that?”

“Three hundred and fifty million years ago. Way before dinosaurs. He's their ancestor, like a great-great-grandfather.”

The
seelakanth
was a primeval-looking fish from marshy lore. It was at least five feet long and looked to weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Rather than the soft exterior of fish I knew, it had an armour-plated outside consisting of shale-like scales as large as guitar picks, speckled with silver flecks. Its fins were more like arms and legs, and it had a big, wary eye. Its mouth was agape, revealing sharp teeth.

“Is it real?” I asked.

Jonathan nodded. “Extinct and eluding us for sixty-five million years, until a fisherman trawled one off the coast of South Africa in 1938.” He knelt so that he was level with the fish.

“How many are there?” I leaned in closer to the peculiar fins.

“Less than five hundred. After lasting millions of years, they're headed for the abyss of mass extinction again,” he said, his voice thickening. As I stared into the milky-white marble eye, Jonathan added, “They need constant water pressure around them. When they're brought to the surface, they die, turning from indigo to slate grey.”

It was a bewitching fish extricated from primitive art. A mirage.

Jonathan took a cloth from the counter, wiping his fingerprints off the glass. Then he asked if I wanted to get a coffee.

We went by the gift shop. In the window a pyramid of sea monkeys was displayed, each kit stamped with the Instant Life! insignia. I hadn't seen any in ages.

“My sister and I used to buy these,” I told him.

“Same here. Retro, hey? They're a big hit.”

“What were they, tadpoles?”

“Brine shrimp in a state of suspended animation.”

“Ours didn't live long.”

“Ours neither.”

Still, the aquarium pets were magical to me back then, so I entered the shop to buy one for Clair. Although they were spending the holidays with Nahlah's family in Montreal, I was already planning another visit with my niece.

The coffee in the canteen poured brownish clear. We sat at a table near some lively camps of children. Jonathan watched them with a mirthful look on his face.

“They're here for the planetarium show,” he explained.

“Do you always work over the holidays?” I asked.

He nodded. “It's fun to tour the kids around this time of year. I don't get much accomplished.” With his guileless brown eyes, he was like a big kid himself.

I noticed he had dry, chapped hands. “I have the perfect cream for that,” I told him.

“Yeah? I've tried everything.” He laced his fingers together, then asked, “How do you know Theo, anyway?”

“I work in the National Gallery's viewing room. He came in to study some prints. You?”

“He advised me for my thesis on the thylacine. Did he tell you about it?”

“I don't think so.”

“Check out the archival footage on YouTube. Type in ‘last Tasmanian tiger, thylacine, 1933.' It died of exposure in the zoo three years after that film.”

“So Theo was your professor?”

He looked up at the ceiling as though he was trying to determine how much information to disclose. “And I worked with his wife here. Saskia. She was our librarian.”

“Theo didn't mention her.”

“She passed away a few years ago. Brain tumour. I owe them both a lot.”

“Did they have children?”

“No, no.” He paused before going on. “His family was in the Amsterdam diamond trade.” There was a malaise in his voice as he spoke.

“He said they were merchants of some sort,” I told him.

“He didn't speak of it. But he would get in these moods. It was hard on Saskia.”

“Was he—”

“Not him, his family. All of them. His parents, two sisters, a brother. He went out to buy bread, and when he came home, the door to the house was open. A chair was overturned. The rest was exactly the same, except everyone was gone. The neighbours—a doctor and his wife—hid him. Not for long, the war was almost over. He slept on a slab of cement in the attic, in case soldiers fired at the ceiling. Never saw them again.”

“I wish I'd known.”

“Better you didn't. He wouldn't have wanted you to.”

“I hope he's doing well on that island.”

Jonathan seemed puzzled.

“Where he went to find his bird,” I went on. “Hiva Oa.”

“The koao? Funding for that was cut. Grant committees said his work was founded on too much circumstantial evidence.”

“I guess he went on his own dime,” I said. “He told me goodbye in November.”

Jonathan shook his head. “Theo's travels ended years ago. He had bypass surgery in November. There was a stroke. He's in a home now.”

*   *   *

A
FTER MY VISIT
with Jonathan, I stayed up past midnight, reading about Theo on the Web. Dated Internet biographies stated that he was a renowned zoologist who conducted research in the most inaccessible habitats of Vietnam, Africa, and South America. The only personal information I found was that he'd emigrated from Holland in the 1960s with his wife, and that he taught zoology at the University of Toronto, where he lived for many years.

There was just one picture of him. In it, he looked to be in his early thirties. He wore a narrow suit and thin tie. His hands were in his pockets and he leaned against the bars of a cage with a pipe sticking out of his mouth. Behind him to the left was the okapi, with its long, tapered face and butterfly ears. Like Theo's, its enormous eyes were on the camera. Theo's furrowed brow, his untamed hair and intense gaze gave him the presence of a brooding artist. The younger Theo had been what Constance called
un beau laid
—a person of ugly beauty whose disproportioned features made him alluring.

Online there were dozens of articles with his name on them, about quests for exterminated species and species discovered over the last fifty years. Then I came across Bernard Heuvelmans, who wrote one of the books Theo had given me. Heuvelmans was a Belgian-French zoologist who became known as the father of cryptozoology. I wondered if he'd mentored Theo; Holland being adjacent to Belgium, where Heuvelmans had studied.

On the Track of Unknown Animals
was reputed to be one of the most influential works in the field. Like Theo, Heuvelmans had searched the world's oceans and forests for animals known to local people but unknown to science. Skeptics called his belief in cryptids outrageous, but he held to his convictions until he died.

“Cryptozoological research should be actuated by two major forces,” Heuvelmans said, “patience and passion.” He founded the International Society of Cryptozoology in Washington, DC. But it was now defunct.

“There are lost worlds everywhere,” Heuvelmans also said.

*   *   *

I
CHECKED MY
email. There were no messages. I scanned the weather forecasts for Ovalle, Hiva Oa, and Florida. All were hot and sunny.

I envisioned myself following Liam all my life, leagues behind him, unnoticed, floundering for him inside his vast landscapes studded with crevices and meandering rivers. I envisioned seeing Viv in his eyes.

I resisted writing to tell him that the open-air amphitheatre where we used to meet had been roped off and would be dug up in the spring—the grass and trees, the curved stone seats with a view onto the bluffs. Since the earthquake, the entire area was deemed unsafe. Even
One Hundred Foot Line
would be moved once the ground thawed.

Before going to sleep I googled the thylacine. Jonathan had described it as wolflike with a straight, stiff tail and a pouch opening to the rear of its body. What the choppy footage showed was a graceful and otherworldly animal with the facial traits of a small kangaroo and the stripes of a tiger on its back and hind legs.

When the black-and-white film opened, the thylacine gave a dramatic, toothy yawn. For an instant its jaw seemed to come unhinged, so concealed was its face by its gaping mouth. The animal paced in its cramped concrete and wire enclosure. It held a piece of meat down with its paws, tearing at it. It rested in the sun, lying atop a crack extending the length of the ground, and did more pacing, momentarily looking like a plain old dog, almost smiling.