After the funeral, Jolene and I went back to our mother’s house. We had grown up in these same rooms, though the place was somewhat altered now—our mother, who believed in plants the way other people believed in God, had turned our old playroom and study into greenhouses over the years. Jolene and I let ourselves in and stood for a few minutes on the threshold, unwilling to take off our coats and face the rest of the afternoon. The air was scented by orchids. The silence was absolute. Jolene, as the only daughter of the house, was the receptacle of family traditions, and in her old-fashioned way she had coped with our mother’s death by covering all the mirrors and stopping the clocks. For two days we had lived like that, glancing above the bathroom sink to find a handkerchief staring back, startled by the blanket draped over a six-foot mirror in the corner. Now, with a sigh, my sister set about undoing the damage, folding up the sheets she had used, winding the grandfather clock again, returning the house to the realm of the living.
Eventually I slipped away and went upstairs. During Mom’s illness, I had moved back into my old bedroom, now handsomely remade into a guest room—although my mother, not normally one for nostalgia, had kept the little sign that had hung on the door in my youth: Maxwell, carved into a wooden panel shaped like a train. I sat on the bed, still holding my jacket. Even here, Mom had kept plants. The very air in the house seemed rarified, freshened continually by so many open green leaves.
My mother’s Alzheimer’s had come on with astonishing rapidity. One day she was absolutely fine—the next I had given up my apartment to come and care for her—and at last Jolene had moved back from Texas, the three of us under one roof again. As the months passed, we had turned the house into a careful prison. Jolene brought in a locksmith to fix the doors so that Mom couldn’t get out when we weren’t looking. I took the knobs off the burners on the stove to keep her from starting fires. Once Jolene found her leaning out of a window on the second floor, waving to a startled child in the street; now the windows were nailed shut too. The fridge had been an issue. Jolene thought that it might be best to chain the handle, since Mom had a weakness for dairy products and tended to carry them around the house, abandoning her glasses of milk and dishes of yogurt in secret places, so that we could only locate them, several days too late, by the sour smell. But I did not like denying our mother her afternoon snack. In the end, we had to pick our battles.
Her death had come about as the result of a fall. It seemed such a mundane event, too small to claim a person’s life; Mom simply lost her balance on the stairs. I was at work, Jolene catching a few hours’ sleep in an upstairs bedroom. Mom had landed hard, and her head struck the banister, causing the subdural hematoma that proved fatal over the next few days. The mailman spotted her lying prone on the floor. I received a call at work and arrived home in time to meet the ambulance.
Jolene was inconsolable, her face buried in her arms. My mother, strapped onto the stretcher, had temporarily regained consciousness and seemed merely annoyed, as though the whole matter was a huge inconvenience. She put out a hand to me as I approached.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You fell,” I said.
“And so?” she snapped. “People fall all over the world.”
The day after the funeral, compelled by forces beyond my control, I brought a sleeping bag with me to work. I did not mention this to Jolene. My sister was handling the situation by going into a kind of walking coma, subsisting on daytime television and cups of black tea. I patted her shoulder as I left, my satchel weighted down with enough food to see me through the evening. I was planning to spend the night in the museum.
The day was clear and cold, and as always I approached the Museum of Natural History from the front, striding up the sweeping marble steps like an ordinary visitor, eschewing the more private employee entrance at the side. It was autumn in Washington, D.C., the wind damp, the pavement speckled with dried leaves. Children raced each other down the stairs. An austere guard nodded to me as I passed through the doors. For twenty years I had worked there, in the rooms behind the scenes, cataloguing insects, now and then publishing a paper to commemorate a new species of Carabus. For most of my career, my mother and I had been colleagues, of a kind. Many people found it a hoot when they learned about us, a mother and son duo, slaving away together in the back rooms of the museum. I’m sure they imagined us working side by side as we catalogued our slides, looked up Latin names, and wrote our papers, destined to go unread by all but a select few.
The truth was that Mom and I never had much to do with each other. Her province had been the Botany Department. She was a legend in the field; at the time of her retirement, there were no less than fourteen species of plant named after her. My specialty, on the other hand, was beetles. I knew little about the day-to-day reality of Mom’s work. She knew less about mine; she had always been squeamish about bugs. (I had once presented her with that pie chart—ubiquitous in biology classrooms—which showed all forms of animal life laid out by relative quantity. Beetles comprised one-fourth of the pie, by far the largest chunk, while mammals, human beings included, were relegated to a tiny golden slice, barely visible beside the invertebrates. Mom was unimpressed by my logic.) Now and then she and I would bump into each other in the hallways. We had made it a habit to go out for lunch once a week. Occasionally I would visit her office, or she would stop by mine, but we were both usually too busy, too engrossed in the task at hand, to welcome this sort of interruption. That much we did share—a passion for the work.
Today I took my time roaming past my favorite exhibits. The stuffed lion, its lips pulled back in a snarl. The dinosaur bones, guaranteed to awaken my inner ten-year-old boy. It never failed to give me a jolt of pride, stepping through the portal into the back rooms of the museum. The visitors could not penetrate this inner sanctum. I set my sleeping bag out of sight in the corner of my office and spent the afternoon trying to name a new species of beetle. The specimen was gorgeous, the size of my knuckle, with wings as burnished and bright as a fresh penny. Finding a new name was a pleasantly exhaustive business. Carabus arvensis was taken—I could not christen the beetle after the meadows it preferred to live in. Carabus monilis, too, had been used before—I could not name the beetle after the funny frill on its pronotum that so resembled a gentleman’s collar. Carabus mirabilis—“the wonderful beetle”—was a possibility, but I thought I remembered seeing something similar in a list of species discovered by the Germans. This required a search among the ancient tomes of Latin names in the library. So the time passed. My peace was broken only by a few well-intentioned, if misguided, calls of consolation from my co-workers. The fact of my mother’s death had apparently passed around the museum like wildfire.
Eventually the lights began to go out in the offices along the hallway. I heard footsteps in the corridor, and cheerful voices. The sky, through my office window, dimmed. The janitor knocked on my door and informed me in a mock-solemn voice that it was getting late.
“What?” I asked, with every appearance of surprise, gazing blearily over my glasses. “Is it that time already?”
He laughed and went away again, whistling. I turned off my lamp and unrolled the sleeping bag. There, on the hard tile floor, I spent the night. It was uncomfortable, and slightly ridiculous, but whatever compulsion had gripped me that morning had not yet lessened its hold, and I knew with terrible certainty that I was not ready to go back to my mother’s house.
I awoke with my brain already whirling. It was early, the smoky light filtering through the blinds. Jolene and I had planned to put Mom’s house on the market and divide the spoils. My sister did not want any of the furniture, having a well-stocked home of her own in Houston, not to mention a husband with very particular taste. I wouldn’t be able to take anything of Mom’s either; as a poorly paid museum grunt, I tended to get by in tiny studio apartments as near as possible to the National Mall. Jolene was planning to hold a yard sale and just auction everything off. She had spoken of it with relish, not being of a sentimental turn of mind. But to me it called up a sinking feeling of nausea, of loss. I was more familiar with the house than Jolene was. Though we had spent our childhood there together, my sister’s home was in Texas now, while I had lived with Mom for over a year, ever since she had succumbed to Alzheimer’s—and even before that I had been a frequent visitor. I knew those auburn couches and clunky bookshelves well. The thought of them going away in the hands of strangers made me feel as though we were parceling off bits of our mother—her eye for color, her dislike of varnish, her addiction to Tiffany lamps. “What will we do with her plants?” I had asked, and even practical Jolene didn’t have an answer for that one.
The morning was pale and golden. As I stood on the front steps of the Museum of Natural History, stretching in the light, it occurred to me that I did not have to go back to the house just yet. I had meant to shower, but I could get by another day without. I needed a change of clothes, but I had been planning to do a little shopping for months now. Perhaps I would buy a few shirts and keep them in my office, just in case. I would stock up on snacks, too. There was a great deal of work to be done, after all. I still had not named my beetle. (I had thought briefly of calling it after Mom, half in respect of her passing, half as a little inside joke, since she had treated most insects as something to be promptly flushed down the toilet. But since our surnames were the same, it would have looked like I was honoring myself instead—and in my field, you didn’t do that. It showed far more humility to wait and let others name a new specimen after you, rather than to arrogantly do it yourself.) I set off up the hill, toward G Street, where I knew there were clothing stores.
When I returned to the office, laden with a few bags of shirts and underwear, there was a message on my machine. Jolene sounded half awake and gruffly affectionate.
“Sorry I missed you last night, doll. I fell asleep at the kitchen table, if you can believe it.” She gave her wet, early-morning cough and continued, “We’ll have that yard sale today. I hired some moving men to take all the furniture onto the lawn. As Mom was so fond of reminding us, we are middle-aged coots now—no point in giving ourselves a hernia. Just make sure you’re home by four to help me. Okay?”
My mother’s Alzheimer’s took away her ability to organize the world. First her words began to disappear. When I came by for dinner, she announced that there were four radios in the living room, and she didn’t know how to use any of them. After a while I figured out that she was referring to the many remote controls, all speckled with incomprehensible buttons, that had proliferated as she purchased a cable box, a DVD player, and a new TV. Then she forgot the word for her calendar. She wanted me to buy her one of those things that showed the date and let her tear off a page each day.
“A calendar?” I asked warily.
“No, Max,” she said, slapping me fondly on the arm. “Not that. I mean those doodads that tell you what day it is. Jolene always knew where to buy them for me.”
Presently time itself began to elude her. I stopped by to take her out for a walk, and she informed me that it might be Tuesday upstairs, but here, in the living room, it was definitely Wednesday. “What day is it out there?” she asked, waving vaguely at the window as I helped her with her coat. She forgot how time progressed. She forgot that each hour was a specific amount, measured and immutable, and that the time of day repeated, once in the morning, once in the evening. I reduced her to tears during a long and cyclical discussion about how she needed to take her medicine every twelve hours. At this point I thought it prudent to give up my studio apartment and move in with her for a while. She could no longer tell time, but she was fascinated by it, aware that it must be something profound. I would come in from work and find her on the sofa, a beady-eyed woman wrapped in a knitted shawl, eyeing the clock on the mantle as though it might explode.
Then there was the day I found policemen in the living room. There were two of them, a man and a woman, huddled beside the couch. I rushed past them, flinging my briefcase against the wall, agonized, already preparing for the worst—but Mom was perfectly all right. She was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, apparently in the process of giving a report to a third police officer, a young man holding a clipboard. The boy looked up at me in some relief. It transpired that Mom had found a few of her plants missing. Two orchids, a ficus, and a four-foot cactus had been stolen. Since no one had been in or out of the house except for me—whom, Mom insisted, she trusted completely—she was absolutely certain that ghosts had taken her plants. That was the substance of her police report: thieving ghosts.
I apologized and sent the policemen on their way. I went upstairs and verified that Mom’s plants weren’t missing, that she had just moved them to another room and forgotten. Then I went into my childhood bedroom and called Jolene in Texas.
As it turned out, I did not help with the yard sale. I didn’t go home at all. In fact, I spent the next four nights in the museum. I didn’t feel too guilty about this. The yard sale had been Jolene’s idea. She was the one with the head for numbers, and she had always been better with people. She was the elder sibling, too, and there existed between us an age-old dynamic: I was the golden boy, following proudly in our mother’s footsteps, while Jolene was the odd duck, shipping off to parts unknown, marrying a man Mom had never liked. (Not that Mom ever particularly took to any of my girlfriends, either. She could be a little possessive, believing that no one was smart enough for me, or perhaps smart enough for our family.) It was not the first time I had left Jolene stranded, high and dry, with an unpleasant task to accomplish. I spent the days advising on a specimen of larva that a colleague of mine had discovered in Bolivia. Jolene left an irate message on my machine, calling me a coward and a prick. But it was clear that she felt the satisfaction of a job well done, watching Mom’s new kitchen table being carried down the street, our old bureaus and black-and-white TV handed out as curiosities to the next generation.
On my fourth night in the office, I was plagued by insomnia. It was a strange place to rest—the ceaseless rumble of cars in the street, the unfamiliar rattle of the heater, the tap of branches against the windowpane. At home I would have meandered down and watched a little soporific television, or at the very least clicked on the light and read for a while. But here I could not risk it. I was aware that what I was doing did not make a whole lot of sense—grown men did not curl up under a desk with a pile of dirty clothes for a pillow—but by some mysterious process, it was getting me through the dangerous aftermath of the funeral. If I were discovered, however, people would be concerned. I might be forced to take a leave of absence, to meet with a therapist. At the very least, I would have to go back to my mother’s house, which I was not prepared to do. Fretful and uncomfortable, I tossed and turned. Mom’s best cure for insomnia had always been to change position: She would urge me to spend the night on the couch or to flip the arrangement of my bed upside-down, so that my head lay where my feet used to be. Usually this worked. I hefted myself off the floor, rolling my sleeping bag under one arm.
The long hallways looked different in the gloom. I had never really explored the wings beyond Entomology. It was my tendency to stay focused on my own area of expertise; I was methodical (“a plodder,” Jolene had always said, with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation). My work revolved around details. The plating of a beetle’s thorax—the shape of the antennae—even the number of hairs on the leg might be the only distinction between separate species.
In the rooms behind the scenes at the museum, the world was strictly divided into categories: Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy. The exhibits for the public were not like this, of course; they were laid out in a kind of cheerful chaos, stuffed birds alongside monkeys alongside zebras, geodes beside flowers beside petrified bones. Each exhibit was created as much to entertain and excite as to educate. But the back rooms had another purpose. Here, our job was nothing less than to discover and label absolutely everything. To that end, there were elephant, trilobite, and robin experts, each shut away in his or her own office, peering at butterfly wings or fossils beneath a microscope. I had always enjoyed the idea of us researchers together, the fungus men, the soapstone women, the gnat specialists, carefully cataloguing the thousands of varieties in our particular disciplines that might be out there.
But I had never bothered to visit the rooms of these colleagues. Now, treading cautiously through the darkened hallways, I began my exploration. Many doors were locked, of course, and I moved quietly, trying not to scuff my feet. Paleontology was not far off. I knew by sight the people who worked there: the man with the snowy beard, the woman with the spattering of freckles, and that fellow who was terrifically handsome, the sort who might play one of us in a movie but seemed oddly out of place in real life. I found my way through a side door into a room of filing cabinets—ancient mahogany things, lovingly crafted. Inside there were bones. There were fossilized teeth, half sunk in sheets of limestone. There were vertebrae and tiny fingers. In the murkiness of the great office, the fossils seemed eerily portentous, colored in flickering gold by the streetlamp beyond the window. At last I took my sleeping bag into the corner and settled behind a bookcase, where my mother’s advice was once again proven right. I fell asleep quite easily.
On the fifth night I found a room in the Zoology Department, one I knew of by hearsay but had never seen. Mom had referred to it as Get Pickled, though officially it was the Spirit Room, also known as the wet collections. Normally, to preserve living things indefinitely, you must dry them and treat them carefully with chemicals. In my mother’s department, there were pressed plants kept under glass that might be several hundred years old. In Entomology we relied on naphtha, an effective if pungent solvent, to keep bacteria from getting at our beloved bugs. In the Spirit Room, however, the specimens were suspended in glass jars of alcohol or formaldehyde. On the shelves were a thousand gleaming containers, arranged importantly by kind: fish, amphibians, lizards, crustaceans. I moved in a daze among them. There were frogs, splayed in a half-human posture, their bulbous eyes frosted over by time. There were snakes whose coils echoed the curve of the jar. The chemicals bleached out all the colors, so that each mussel and anemone, goanna and flounder, was as pale, clammy, and luminous as an albino. It made the differences between them seem slighter—the wan monkfish appeared to be related to the ice-colored lobster several shelves away. It would have been a bizarre place even in the daytime, but at night it was positively otherworldly. Around each corner another ghostly oddity glared at me from within its glass cage. Feral lizards from Australia. Deep-sea fish with sabers for teeth. Miniature jellies ringed by feathery tentacles. I slept against the bank of windows, shielded beneath a table, and suffered from feverish dreams.
In the morning there was another message on my machine from Jolene. She sounded grumpy this time.
“I’ve spoken to your boss,” she said. “He claims you’ve been at work, so apparently I can’t file a Missing Persons Report.” There was a pause—she might have sniffled. “And since there isn’t such a thing as an Insane Little Brothers Report, I’m not really sure what options I have.” She paused again. “Anyway, I’ve been on the hunt to sell Mom’s house. I did find someone to take her plants—a local nursery. So that’s good news. I’ve been meeting with real estate agents, and I think I found one I might actually trust, but— Look, Max, this is ridiculous. Just call me back, all right?”
Toward the end, Jolene had borne the brunt of our mother’s care. This was in part because she had no job in D.C., as I did; in part because it was as much her nature to assume command as it was mine to relinquish it; and in part because they were both women. When Jolene and I discovered, for example, that our mother had been forgetting to bathe, there was no other recourse but for my sister to roll up her sleeves and dive in, while I discreetly retired with a book. I knew what it cost her. She had to abandon indefinitely her powerhouse career in a prestigious law firm—and her tetchy, nervous husband, whom she quietly adored—and come back to her hometown to be an underappreciated and unpaid nurse.
And yet it was lifesaving to have her there. There were days when Mom began singing to herself at the dinner table. There were days when the anti-psychotic medicine, which the doctors had prescribed to keep her from believing in ghosts, made her sick to her stomach, and she threw up every half an hour until it left her system. There were days when she was obsessed with milligrams. She would squint at her pill bottles, counting out how many milligrams there were in each, and then refuse to swallow them, insisting that 200 was all right, but 500 was just too many. In vain did we try to tell her that the concentrations were relative, that it was meaningless to compare each dose. There were days when Mom kept trying to make us understand that her legs were too big—no one could possibly understand how big her legs were. She complained that they were too big to fit into her bed, and Jolene and I would simply have to find her a larger mattress somewhere.
During these times it was essential to have another sane adult there in the room, someone to lock eyes with, someone to stay up late with, clinking your beer bottles together and laughing until you cried.
“You know, there’s nothing as contagious as Alzheimer’s,” Jolene told me once.
She made a grimace. “Mom and I spent the whole morning talking about the telephone. She had picked it up and dialed a few numbers, but the line was always busy. Finally I realized she was trying to figure out how to call some of her old friends. She couldn’t remember their numbers. She had just been dialing her own number over and over, since we wrote it right there on the phone for her.” Jolene passed a hand over her eyes. “So Mom went to take a nap, and after three hours with her, my brain wasn’t working anymore. I sat up thinking, How do we find out what somebody’s number is? How the hell does a telephone work?”
Most men, during a midlife crisis, will try to return to the age of their greatest sexual potency. They buy sports cars, take trips to the wilderness, daydream about quitting their jobs. A colleague of mine explained that what triggers this behavior isn’t usually the aging of the man, but the aging of his wife. Once he no longer has a fertile partner—once there’s no chance, within his marriage, for him to pass on his genes to new offspring—he is biologically driven to try and attract a younger mate. This happens regardless of whether he has any conscious urge to stray. Suddenly he finds himself needing to flaunt his income and visit bars where young women congregate. Suddenly he’s shopping around for toupees.
After two weeks of sleeping at the museum, to my great chagrin, I realized that I was undergoing a midlife crisis of my own. I still had not been back to my mother’s house. I had not gone to meet with the real estate agents. I had not even found the nerve to return any of Jolene’s increasingly frantic messages. Each night I brought my bedroll to a new room, a new wing. I was becoming expert at washing myself, section by section, in the sinks of the men’s bathroom, changing into a brand-new starched shirt, noshing on trail mix and restaurant food. Perhaps because I had no wife, my midlife crisis had caused me to retrogress far beyond my sexual peak. Instead I seemed to have moved right back into my childhood.
When I was a boy, Mom had already begun her career at the Museum of Natural History. She did not want me going home after school to an empty house. (My father had died years before—I could barely remember him, a certain earthy smell, the feel of a bristly beard.) Jolene was old enough to be a latchkey kid, but not quite old enough to care for me. And so I came to the museum instead. Every afternoon I marched up the marble steps, stuffed my backpack into one of the lockers, and, in an important voice, told the woman at the information desk that she should let my mother know I had arrived. Usually Mom was too busy to leave just then. She had enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks, becoming in record time the Keeper of the Herbarium, a post she had always coveted. At meetings, she was referred to simply as the Keeper, a title that never failed to amuse and impress me; it evoked images of an Amazonian warrior, guarding the door to some hidden, coveted garden.
While I waited for her to be done, I would wander among the exhibits. Back then I had never gone behind the veil, into the rooms beyond. I knew that Mom did something with plants, but in truth I wasn’t much interested. I loved the museum for itself. I loved the stuffed wild animals, posed so that you could catch a hint of how they had moved in life. I loved the gem room, the glittering Hope Diamond and the enormous crystal ball, larger than my head, that had been carved hundreds of years ago by unknown means. I discovered out-of-the way staircases. I counted the rings on the cross-section of a monstrous sequoia, which was mounted on the wall to chart the passage of time, its girth marked to show when major human events had occurred during its long life. I learned that there were bathrooms hidden at the end of the hallway of giant sloth and woolly mammoth bones. And without fail, I visited the insects, so firm and well-armored, mounted in rows like soldiers. Even the pins that stuck their bodies to the backing seemed wonderful to me.
When my mother finished with her work, she would bustle out between the glass cases, drawing on her coat—and when, invariably, she could not find me, she would page me. This was the most delicious moment of the afternoon. The loudspeaker would crackle, and Mom’s warm voice would float through every hallway, every room: “Max, to the front. Max, to the front.” The fact that the whole museum heard her calling me seemed like the most precious token of love.
Jolene went back to Texas. She had settled on an asking price with a real estate agent, and there was nothing left to do but wait for a buyer. Her husband was pining for her. She herself was pining for her home and her career. I knew all this not because I spoke to Jolene, but because she left the information in a series of teary, half-crazed messages on my machine.
The first few were rather kind. “I know you’re suffering over there, but give me a call—I have some numbers to throw at you.” Or else, “Listen, let’s meet for coffee. I can come to you. Just let me know where.”
Presently, though, she began to lose her temper. “It’s Jolene, your sister,” she would shout. “I don’t know if you remember me. What the hell has gotten into you?” And once: “I came by the damn museum today. But guess what? They wouldn’t let me in to see you. It’s restricted.”
Her final message was broken by sobs. She was calling from the airport, a last-ditch effort to reach me before leaving town. “Fine, fine,” she wept. “I don’t have a brother. When the house sells I’ll just send you a check for half the money, and I’ll never speak to you again.”
I did not call her back. I did not find an apartment. I was frozen, no more, no less. It seemed that there was an initial stage of grieving, one that came before even denial and bargaining—a stage that kept me floating helplessly in space, unable to move forward. I kept returning to the Spirit Room on my nightly vigils, touching the glass of the captured specimens. I grew familiar with the grouchy faces of the fish, their plump lips invariably settled in a pout. I pored through a few of the books, reading up on the newt, the horned lizard, and the anaconda. (The latter hung in a massive glass container, captured in its full length, and even its ashy pallor could not diminish the power of those muscled curves.) While there, I discovered the existence of a species of crab that survived by digging holes in the rock. It then would systematically shut itself in, sealing off the aperture with secretions from its own body, until it had only a tiny window left and was trapped there forever, feeding on the plankton and scraps carried passively into its cave by the tide. Its view of the world was limited to whatever it could glimpse through the window it had made. I felt a certain kinship with this crab as I peered out at the street, between the blinds. A strong breeze from the river blew a torrent of leaves across the road. Tourists marched to and fro. Squirrels buried and unearthed their acorns. Once there was an ice storm, and in the nightly glow of the streetlamp the sidewalks glittered as though they had been transmuted into something other than simple concrete.
At last I got up enough courage to visit my mother’s department. Entomology and Botany were separated by two floors and a veritable warren of corridors, and by the time I made my way there, I had slept almost everywhere else in the museum. I had probed the cabinets of Mineralogy, examining blocks of quartz infused with coils of a foreign crystal, as yet unidentified. I had looked through the drawers in Zoology, coming across bat teeth, rodent skulls, and leopard claws. I had laid out my bedroll beneath a table on which stood a variety of zebra heads, all of different sizes. I had found storage rooms in which a strange arrangement of leftovers could be found—old dinosaur exhibits, now outdated; a portrayal of human evolution that flirted with creationism; and a half-finished exhibit on the mating rituals of different species, apparently rejected as being too risqué for the younger set.
On my first night in the Botany Department, I broke into someone’s office and camped out there, unwilling to brave the rooms that had been my mother’s jurisdiction. Gradually, though, I grew more comfortable. I examined the pressed flower petals. The ferns had been Mom’s favorite—so ancient!—each leaf and root precisely arranged to stand out crisply from the stem. Some of the labels had not yet been remade in the printed font that was now standard issue. Some of them were still handwritten in my mother’s own curly script.
In the shaded halls over which she had presided, I understood what ought to have been obvious to me all along—that I had moved out of my mother’s house as a young man only to live comfortably in her shadow at work. I had not resented it (as Jolene, I knew, always assumed I must). Rather, I had felt safe there. Mom certainly never treated it as strange. Other people might make jokes, but she appeared to accept without question that I would want to work in what she considered to be the best place in the world—even, perhaps, that I would want to work near her. Before my initial interview, she had put in a good word for me. Whenever she won an award for her scholarship, or had another species of plant named after her by an admiring colleague, or was promoted once again, we would go out together to celebrate. Sometimes I had the nagging sensation that she wished I were a bit more ambitious, more like her, or else more likely to reflect well on her. Sometimes I was certain that she rather enjoyed showing off for me, knowing that I would not mind it. I never got the feeling that she wanted me to move on, to move away, as Jolene had done, to complete the last stage of growing up, to become independent.
In her department, I came across the simple fact that time washed the color out of things. We might be able to preserve the shape and size, but the hue was invariably lessened. Only the insects seemed to be impervious. Butterflies, fire ants, cockroaches—pinned to the backing, they all blazed as brightly as they had done in life, their knobby shells and segmented wings invulnerable to the years. Elsewhere in the museum, however, I found each leaf and petal faded. Each bone was the same bland ivory as every other. Even the glossy pelts of the animals lost their luster.
My mother had been similarly diminished by her illness. She set aside her patterned clothes and allowed her hair to turn its natural silver, giving up the glamorous echo of youth. She left off her makeup, so that I was always surprised by the chapped pallor of her mouth. During the last few months of her life, she began to unravel completely. Dressed in habitual gray, her skin seemed as colorless as a snowflake, her features undistinguished and uncertain.
Our last conversation had taken place the day she died. After hitting her head, she was brought by ambulance to the hospital and sequestered in a private room. I met her there, feeling nothing but the calm delirium of shock as I sat beside the bed and watched her sleep. Mom moved in and out of consciousness. Her hands twitched on top of the quilt.
Jolene was out in the hall, haranguing one of the doctors, when my mother opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Where’s Max?” she asked.
“Right here, Mom,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, then smiled, as though deciding I must be joking.
“No, no,” she said. “The other Max. You know, my son.”
After three months, her house sold. Just like that, the spell was broken. For three months I had lived at the museum, creeping from room to room, never staying too long in one place, bathing in the bathrooms like a homeless man. There had been several near misses—once the janitor had banged open the door of the office in which I was nestled on the floor; perhaps he had heard me snoring, for he shone the beam of his flashlight around the room, frowning. The glow fell on my shoes, but he appeared to see nothing odd in a pair of old Oxfords beneath the desk, and he missed the rest of me, huddled in my sleeping bag behind the closet door. Another time I overslept, waking to the sound of voices. I was back in my mother’s department then, stretched out beneath a table in the Herbarium. The room was ablaze with fluorescent light, and a few young women had come in and were collating slides. Slowly I crawled out from beneath the table, balling up my bedroll. They were intent on their work and paid no attention to me as I made my way to the door.
Then one day I received a copy of the housing contract, signed by the new owners. My sister had mailed it to me from Houston, without comment. Suddenly all things became possible again. Within the week I rented a furnished studio apartment, only a few blocks away from the museum. I threw away my sleeping bag, which had reached a rather alarming degree of filthiness. The drawers of my filing cabinet were crammed with dirty clothes—these, too, I had washed in the bathroom, inexpertly, and now I tossed them all in the bin. I even telephoned my sister, who evidently screened my call and did not return it. (It would be a few months before she would speak to me.) Finally I emerged from inside the museum, like a beetle larva rising out of water, ready for the next phase of its existence, blinking in the light.
It is a strange thing to lose a parent.
When, at the hospital, I told Jolene about Mom’s last words to me—her wish to see her other son—my sister had rolled her eyes and muttered something that sounded like Alzheimer-tastic. But I wondered if Mom was trying to say something else. Her illness had taken from her the deepest core of her nature, her desire for discovery and order; it had taken away the place at which we came together, the part of us that was the same. Perhaps she was wishing for herself back. My mother would have hated to succumb to Alzheimer’s, the vanishing of her renowned and formidable intellect. And yet, of course, she never really grasped that she was ill. Most sufferers of Alzheimer’s are unaware, by and large, that they are suffering. Indeed—in strange, wild, illuminating moments—I had the odd sensation that her illness was a gift, rather than a burden. It allowed her to die unafraid. She had misplaced her awareness of time passing, of the possibility of loss. And perhaps it was a gift for Jolene and me as well. Our father had died suddenly—he went to work one day, and the next day we buried him. With our mother, we had a long duration in which to understand that she was disappearing, to move into her house and care for her, to use the last months that were given to us.
There are times when I still find her in my dreams. Through the back halls of the Museum of Natural History I follow her stocky, linen-clad form. My mother is young again—as young as she was when I was a boy, her hair tarnished by just a few locks of gray. Sometimes I catch her, grabbing her by the hand and earning myself an affectionate, if absent, pat on the head, but more often than not I never find her. She is always just ahead of me, the trail of her perfume leading me into the open, high-ceilinged rooms of the Botany Department, past Mineralogy and Entomology, through closets where discontinued exhibits of whale bones and gemstones gather dust. There are times, in these dreams, when I understand that the rooms of the museum are in fact the compartments of my own mind—or perhaps the collective mind of the human race itself—cluttered up with all the lists of things we have insisted on learning. Here we have the carefully identified drawers, each animal consigned to its own species, each pebble categorized in bright, bold letters. Room upon room details our obsession to know and name everything, as though by labeling it we can come to own it, its nature no longer mysterious at all. And yet I am certain—for it brings me a steady rejoicing—that the task will never be finished, that we are up against nothing less than the full, chaotic measure of a limitless world.