Jane Weddell took any of several routes from her apartment on West Sixty-fourth Street to the museum on West Seventy-seventh, depending. Her path was determined by a pattern of complexity outside her thought, the result not solely of her emotional state but also of her unconscious desire, say, to avoid a wind blowing black grit down Columbus Avenue on the morning when she was wearing a new blouse for the first time. Or she gave in to whim, following a path defined by successive flights of pigeons, a path that might lead her east down Seventy-third Street to the park instead of across on Seventy-fifth or Sixty-eighth.
The pattern of her traverses from one day to the next gave her a sense of the vastness in which she lived; she was aware not only of the surface of each street but, simultaneously, of the tunneling below, which carried water mains and tree roots, like the meandering chambers of gophers. And ranging above, she knew without having to look, were tiers upon tiers of human life, the joy and anger and curiosity of creatures like herself.
She arrived by one or another of her footpaths—she imagined them, lying awake at night, like a rete mirabile, a tracery over the concrete, the tar, and the stone—at a room on the second floor of the Museum of Natural History, a vaulted, well-lit space in which she worked six or seven hours a day, preparing fossils of marine organisms from the Cambrian period and the Precambrian era. It was her gift to discern in the bits of rock placed before her lines of such subtlety that no one who beheld her excisions could quite believe what she had done. Under the bold, piercing glass of a microscope, working first with the right hand and then, when the muscles in that hand lost their strength, the left, she removed clay and sand and silt, grain by grain, her eyes focused on suggestions indescribably ambivalent. When she finished and set the piece apart, one saw in stone a creature so complete, even to the airiness of its antennae, that it rivaled something living.
From an inchoate maze of creatures alive in the early Paleozoic, she released animal after animal, turned them loose for others to brood over. And from these creatures the systematists cantilevered names, a precarious litany; it was hard to believe that among things so trenchant, despite their silence, names so bloodless would adhere. What was certain was that from a piece of stone in which a creature might reside—guessing simply from the way light broke on its surface—Jane Weddell would pry an animal wild as a swamp night.
The shadow across Jane Weddell’s life did not come from living alone, a condition that offered her a peace she esteemed like fresh water; nor from being patronized for her great gift by people who avoided her company. It was thrown by the geometry of a life her professional colleagues implied was finally innocuous. No one, perhaps no one in the world, could make the essential pieces of the first puzzle of Earthly life so apparent. But in the eyes of her associates she wandered thoughtlessly outside any orthodoxy in discussing fossils. She strayed from recognized subdivisions of geological time, so people had trouble agreeing on the value of her ideas. Many tried to give meaning to what she did; but because she would neither insist upon nor defend any one theoretical basis for her thought she was ultimately regarded as a technician only. The pattern in her work, what propelled her to the next thing and then the next, was the joy of revelation. She saw no greater purpose in life than to reveal and behold.
What Jane Weddell rendered was conveyed solemnly from the room in which she worked by people who behaved as though they bore off brittle sheaves of IV dynasty papyrus. In adjoining rooms, each creature was photographed, matched to a technical description she provided, inventoried, and given space in a protective case. Frequently, her exacting descriptions were marked for the attention of one of several researchers who, from this alien menagerie, sought to fathom an ecology of early sea floors. Jane Weddell’s memory for any particular fossil was thorough and unconfused; and she understood how the details in this complex, ramulose array of images were related through extraordinary subtleties of shape—but she was rarely consulted. Systematists might ponder at their computer screens for weeks looking for ecological relationships Jane Weddell could have articulated in a moment, if anyone had conveyed to her how they anticipated fitting everything—even these most rarefied forms of early life—together.
She listened politely to urgings that she concentrate on figuring out taxonomic sequences, or that she stick, say, to the Middle Silurian for a while; but she didn’t follow through. She hoped, instead, someone might ask what the difference was between two trilobites of the same species where one had been extricated from its matrix with the music of Bach in her ears, the other with Haydn. She wanted to say that there were differences; for her, the precision the systematists sought in their genealogies, even with a foundation as exquisite as the one she provided, was a phantom, a seduction.
In an empty lot on West Seventy-fifth—one that had been cleared of its building and then abandoned to grow up in weeds, feral grasses, and ailanthus trees—Jane Weddell occasionally saw phantoms. It was a peripheral sensation, not anything viewed directly but only glimpsed, like a single bird, high up, disappearing between two buildings. The existence of the lot exerted a pressure upon her, like a wind growing imperceptibly but steadily more forceful.
The lot was separated from the sidewalk by a gateless, chain-link fence and shadowed east and west by windowless walls of brick. To the north it was closed off by a high, gray-board fence. One ailanthus, in the far western corner, shaded several hundred square feet. In spring, the grasses grew waist high and among the tall and running weeds purple aster, small white daisy fleabane, and yellow coltsfoot bloomed. In winter the lot fell comatose, exposing a soil of crushed brick and cement powder where shards of glass glinted beside matchbook covers and aluminum cans and where rainwater beaded up on cigarette packs.
Jane Weddell found the lot alluring. One evening when she was walking back late from the museum she saw a small creature run out through the fence and beneath a parked car. She watched motionless for many minutes; then movement on the lip of a trash barrel halfway down the block drew her eye. It was the same animal, discarding some odd bit of debris and falling back into shadow again.
It disturbed Jane Weddell’s sense of grace and proportion to be drawn any more to one place than another; she resisted the desire to pass by the lot more frequently once it began to occupy her waking mind. But her sense of perception now grew more acute as she drew near, prepared to catch the faintest signal; and her peripheral awareness intensified. She took in the sky, the shudder of the street beneath her feet, the roll and ruffle of the stout limbs of a London plane tree nearby. To perceive the lot clearly, she believed, she must gain a sense of the whole pattern of which it was a part, taking in even passing cars, the smell of garbage cans, the shriek of schoolchildren.
The lot slowly changed. Through the weeks of spring, and while summer grasses rose up vigorously, bits of broken pipe, a length of coaxial cable, coffee containers, pills of gum foil, a strip of insulation—all this vanished. When Jane Weddell pressed her eyes to the fence now and looked down between the flowering weeds she saw an earth dark as loam.
Cabot Gunther rapped sharply on the translucent glass of Jane Weddell’s studio door, a sound that announced he was about to, not might he, enter.
“Jane—there you are, busy in your very perfection.”
She regarded him, smiling, wordless, not eager to put him at ease. He walked up close and leaned over her body to see what she was working on.
“Some of the Ediacaran fauna, yes?”
“Yes. They are remarkable, aren’t they?” she answered, putting her eyes back to the microscope.
“Jane, I’ve a difficult thing to convey to you, which is why I’ve come down here instead of asking you to see me.”
She turned to look at him. He found her composure annoying.
“The board met last night, to thrash out the budget. You’re still on, I saw to that, but the feeling overall, is that this field”—here he indicated the stone before her—“is drying up, compared to others. The long and short of it is, you’ve created enough material for us. And since you actually take directions from other people—which periods to focus on, what to look for, and so on—and you yourself are not publishing, the board felt you’d see why we had to cut you back, to four days a week.
“Now, of course, you can still come in whenever you wish—and this will continue to be your office and no one else’s—but I can only pay you now for four days a week. That would come out to your annual salary less two months’.”
She ran the tips of her fingers lightly over her lips but did not say anything.
“I’m sorry. You know it’s the ebb and flow of money, Jane, whatever’s new, hot. We’ve covered this before. You could write your own ticket if you’d only publish something, write more than notes, detailed descriptions, if you’d tackle the real meaning of these things, present us with phylogenies and ecologies.”
“Would it be possible—”
“Benefits? The benefits package, all that—pension? Unchanged.”
“Would you mind if I just went on the same way but took two months off without pay?”
“No, it can’t work that way. I have to reduce each paycheck twenty percent. You’d in effect be taking two months off with eighty percent of salary. Too much paid vacation, is what it would look like.”
She folded her hands under her chin and nodded in polite, wry indignation.
“Don’t pout, Jane. It doesn’t become you,” he said.
“I’m not pouting, Cabe. I’m doing a sort of mathematics. In a few moments it will all seem possible.” She smiled at him. “Thank you.”
“Make up whatever schedule you want for a week. I’ll make the adjustment in the payroll, you can handle the hours, the vacation time, however you want.”
He nodded curtly, affirming their agreement, and backed out the door, which he closed gently.
Later that summer, Jane Weddell started a notebook about the lot. She worked evening after evening, divesting her memory of all it held of this place from the afternoon she first saw it two years before, a few weeks after the building had been torn down. The more she demanded of her memory, the more it gave. The first notebook of two hundred pages gave way to a second, and she became aware in her notes of a pattern of replacement, of restored relationships. The incremental change was stunningly confirmed for her the morning she saw a black bear standing in the lot. She could not tell if it was male or female. It was broadside to her in the tall grass, chewing a white tuber. It lifted its head to the air for a scent, or perhaps it was only bothered by grass tickling its chin. She watched until it ambled on toward the gray fence at the back, which it appeared to wander through.
For the first time Jane Weddell decided to change her routing to and from the museum, even though by no longer walking certain streets regularly she knew she would begin to lose her sense of them. She wanted to know more about the open lot. She thought of it as a place she’d been searching for, a choice she was finally making, with which she was immediately at ease. The lot became a sort of companion, like friends she went to dinner with. She didn’t press the acquaintance, any more than she did those of her friends. Only occasionally did she pause before the lot and stare for long minutes into its light and shadows. Early in the fall she saw a herd of deer, four does browsing and seeming to take no notice of her. That same morning she didn’t notice until she was leaving a switching tail, a tawny panther hunkered in the tawny grass.
Winter came, but the grasses and wildflowers in the lot did not die back as they had the winter before. Every time Jane Weddell passed she would see animals. Even on the rawest days, when wind drove a dry, cold wall of air against her or when sleet fell, she would see foxes bounding. Flocks of chickadees. Sometimes she imagined she could hear a distant river. Other times she saw birds migrating overhead, through the buildings. The lot comforted her, and she puzzled over how she might return the comfort.
When winter was at its steadiest, in January, she went to Aruba with her sister’s children. When she came back she saw instantly, the moment she turned the corner at Seventy-fifth Street, that it was gone.
She walked up the block slowly, wondering why she had not done something, whatever that might have been. A construction portico had been erected over the sidewalk. The chain-link fence was now woven with metal slats. She peered through a crevice where a fence post abutted the adjacent building. The lot was not there. A deep excavation faced her, with strands of twisted wire and pipe protruding from the pit’s earthen walls. Fresh brick sat foursquare on pallets. Two crane buckets sat crookedly on the ground, half filled with rock and debris.
Jane Weddell stood before two plywood doors padlocked askew at the center of the fence and saw between their edges ten or twelve pigeons, drinking from a throw of rain puddles in the pit. Two workmen arrived in a red and silver pickup. One eyed her accusingly, warning her, as though she were a thief. She left. On the way to the museum she remembered a tray of samples she had set aside years before, rocks so vaguely fossiliferous even she was not sure anything could be drawn from them. So much of the fauna that existed on Earth between Ediacaran fauna in the Precambrian and the first hard-shelled creatures of Cambrian seas was too soft bodied to have left its trace. These rocks were of the right age, she knew, to have included some of these small beasts, and as she climbed the stairs to her studio she knew she was going to extract them, find them if they were in there. More than anything she wanted to coax these ghosts from their tombs, to array them adamantine and gleaming like diamonds below her windows, in shafts of sunlight falling over the city and piercing the thick walls of granite that surrounded her.