Right there in the New Delhi airport, Weary decides that the one-day conference he just attended will be his last. He is exhausted. There’s the time difference, for starters. He can’t handle it anymore. Five and a half hours for a trip that fast is enough for him to feel achy and spinning. He was awake all hours of the night, and now he is left with a strange pressure in his head. There was New Delhi itself, too, the mad crush of cars and strange little taxis and bicycles and people and jammed-together buildings and jammed-together languages and jammed-together smells.
And then there was the event, the International Conference on Animals. Even with his single fifty-minute talk, which came after Dr. Isaac Roseway’s on “The Neuropsychological Issues in Australian Kangaroos” and just before Dr. Margaret Che’s on “Wildlife Systems and the Epistemological Implications for Environmental Analysis,” it was stressful. Gavin Gray had always underscored the need for a normal yet cautious face in the world, a public presence for the facility, but Weary thinks passing this particular hat to his best Ph.D. students might be wise now. Even Gavin Gray might feel differently if he were alive today—two years ago, there weren’t so many phones, so much clicking and tapping and documenting of each and every moment. It’s utterly nerve-racking. In spite of the firm rules No recordings! Turn phones off! Weary swears he heard the whoosh that meant a photo was taken.
Must everything be shouted about and publicly demonstrated? Must every inane thought and minor occurrence be boringly proclaimed? Who really cares! If a tree falls in a forest and no one has taken a picture of it, did it really happen? What are we doing, watching everyone else eat and vacation and succeed, succeed, succeed? Document the forgotten lettuce leaf turned to liquid in the fridge, photograph the sore throat and the crushing failure! And how does anyone do anything surreptitiously anymore? How does anyone have a moment’s privacy? We are witnessing the age of the secret coming to an end, he is sure.
Still, the conference went well, and there was more than polite applause for his talk, “Intelligence in the Corvid Family.” He heard the murmurs of appreciation for the facts he conveyed: that corvid brain size in relation to their bodies is equivalent to that of great apes and dolphins. That corvids use a part of the brain with no human counterpart. That, while all corvid brains are large, the brain of New Caledonia’s Corvus moneduloides is largest of all. There were chuckles at Weary’s story of the university crows in Japan, who wait patiently on the curb along with the pedestrians for the traffic lights to change. When the lights turn red, they hop out into the street with their walnuts, plucked from nearby trees, and set them under car tires. When the light turns green, they collect their newly cracked bounty.
And there was a hum and buzz at one other story in particular. That of the Clark crow of North America, who collects up to thirty thousand seeds in the winter and then buries them for safekeeping in a two hundred square mile area. Over the next year, they manage to locate ninety percent of those seeds or more, even when they disappear into deep, deep snow. Humans, he told the delighted crowd, often cannot locate their car keys from the day before.
That is the power of memory, Weary thinks, as he sits in one of the black vinyl seats set in a row on the gold patchwork rug of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting to board his plane. That is the power of intelligence.
Intelligence is not something one usually ponders at the airport, not with the travelers baffled by shoe removal and metal bits in pockets, not with the balancing of too many things, like the man in shorts and a blaring blue graphic T-shirt coming Weary’s way, wheeling luggage while impossibly clutching a foil-wrapped dosa and a lassi with a plastic straw. With the conference finished, though, Weary can mentally luxuriate. He can ponder and pray and dream about hidden bounty and the best way to crack a nut. All Weary must do now is wait for the boarding call, bustle inside the plane with the other cattle, and sit for the too-long ride home. And then it will be time. When he gets home, he’ll send what he believes will be the last package. The package that completes the plan. That is, if Isabelle and her own intelligence can be counted on.
An ill-attended child with a Hello Kitty roller bag bumps his shoes, but he barely scowls. No, all the horrors of the airport fall away as Weary imagines it: He envisions himself flying to the very spot in the two hundred square miles where the document is buried. He imagines unearthing it, even though it is covered in layers of time and secrets. But he will not peck and consume and indulge. He’ll set it in Isabelle’s hands instead. He’ll deliver it like a shiny treasure. The next move will be up to her.
Finally, they board. Well, eventually, Weary does. There is first class, and MVP this, and MVP that, and Gold this and Silver that, special this, special that, until it is practically just Weary and the man with the now half-consumed dosa.
He is filled with exquisite joy, though, when he finds his seat. He has struck the real traveler’s gold, hit the mega jackpot, because there is an empty seat between him and the young Indian woman in her salwar kameez, the loose trousers and tunic in shades of orange. The woman has her book already open, and Weary is next to the window. He feels fortunate, because his thoughts need this extra room. He hopes the space between him and her, his fellow passenger, muffles the ba-bamp of his heart. Now that the conference has been ticked off the list, there is just Weary and his deepest desire, and he is terrified and buoyant and impatient.
Honestly, he can’t wait.
Here comes the safety business, exit aisles and flotation devices, with the accompanying cheerleader gestures from the flight attendant and the nonsense about the whistle on the life jacket. The plane roars and lifts. Weary is already checking the time. There will be the cab ride home, the sleepless night, the next morning at work, the excuse and the escape to Jean-Marie’s. He will leave Jean-Marie’s sweltering apartment, knowing he has done all he can. Then he will wait to see what happens.
Brain size to body: There are the dolphins and the great apes and the corvids. But larger still is the human brain. Weary is counting on this. He cannot spell out the most important information in that document, not without putting himself in danger. It will be up to Isabelle to see what’s really there.
Weary peers out of the plane window, which has tiny crystals forming at the edges. Clouds stretch to infinity. Here, it is too high even for birds. But Weary is soaring. He flaps to that glass house on that cliff. He imagines Isabelle with her brown hair and kind eyes. She’s smart, because Henry wouldn’t be with her otherwise.
Still, when she was with him, how smart was Sarah? How smart was Virginia?
God, it makes his stomach lurch with nerves, or maybe it’s just the chaat he ate at the Hotel Delhi.
Come on, Isabelle, he says to those stretching clouds. Come on, he pleads, as the woman in orange turns another page.