University of Northern Iowa

The Secrets of Phylogeny, or What Jason KnewAuthor(s): Barbara CarterSource: The North American Review, Vol. 271, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 42-43Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124730 .

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NAR

Barbara Carter

THE SECRETS OF PHYLOGENY,

OR

WHAT JASON KNEW

J ason lost none of it on his way to birth?the feel of gills,

the sense of scales, the prick of a feather, the curl of a tail. He never told anyone he still had it, because, at first, he

thought it was only natural, and then because he thought it was odd.

He looked like anyone else, and for the most part, acted like anyone else. He loved sports, running, swim

ming, skiing, though he never cared to ride a horse. He loved to visit zoos and aquariums. "It sharpens your

wits," he said on his first visit, standing by the foxes' cage, his eyes dancing, his blond head tilted as if to hear better.

Of course, he swam like a fish, taking in great mouthfuls of water and holding it next to the membrane where his gill slit lay to taste the fresh oxygen within. He ran like a gazelle, with bounding joy and freedom, as if his feet were protected from the pounding ground. He skied like a racer, a black racer snake, slithering down the slope in a silent rush?a blur of blue-black.

He was an appealing lad, if somewhat withdrawn. When in high school, he was often found on weekend

nights with his puppy up in his room, sitting at his desk,

pencil in hand, a large notebook, marked "private," open before him, his head cocked, staring out the window into the night. All was silent, the dog curled in sleep, the boy poised in thought, a still life by desk lamp.

In college, he majored in the biological sciences, but when he was only a year away from his doctorate, his

parents were killed in an automobile accident, and he decided to give up college and return home to their little house and garden in Eugene, Oregon. He could learn as

much there as anywhere, he figured. He had no sisters or

brothers, only his secret, his explorable, deplorable, ever more fascinating secret.

His life was conventional, in the conventional sense. He took a job in the accounting department of the local

bank, because he liked the dry cricket rustle of paper and the soft katydid clatter of computers. It gave him a rest from his real job of expanding the range of his embryonic

memories and insights, for many of which there were no

adequate words in the human language. He would have to make up a little dictionary of new words, perhaps, to go with the journals he had been keeping.

At first, his aim had been merely to correct the misap prehensions about animals found in common speech.

"Sly as a fox," he wrote, for example, in one of his early journals, "is all right as far as it goes, but actually it's the

slyness of the comedian, done for the sake of surprise or a

laugh. The mother fox curls up at the edge of the cave, as if asleep. The baby kits, hungry but warm, doze off. The

mother steals out over the snow, and returns with a

bound, sprinkling them all with a fur-shake of icedrops, a

grey goose in her mouth. The sharp barks ringing out under the icy stars are not to keep back the cold but a round of applause."

Or again, "Wise as an owl," he wrote, "is way off.

'Phony as an owl' is more like it. Lacking binocular vision, she sees everything double, twice as many dangers and threats. That great swelling up of feathers, that great puff of bluff she puts up, is nothing but pinion-stiff fear. Her round yellow eyes, as she moves her head from side to side all the way to the back of her neck, are dim with

terror, not the eyes of a seer at all."

But he had moved on from that. His aim had changed, becoming deeper and darker. He would, if he could, go back through the phyla of animal life, leaving the verte brates?the birds, snakes, and fish he knew so well?to move down through molluscs and shrimps, spiders and

insects, midges and mites, and the segmented earth

worm.

He was, like a Yogi, in training. He had already learned to control his heartbeat, his temperature, and his rate of metabolism. His first two-week vacation he had

spent, like the bear in winter or the hummingbird over

night, in hibernation, floating in a state of lovely sus

pended animation, with slow and stately dreams wrapped in murmuring rainbows. He was that refreshed when he returned to work. He learned to sense the nearness of

objects through his forehead, like the mole, or by emit

ting high, nearly inaudible squeaks, like the bat, and to

control all his inner secretions, including those from duct less glands. And he learned other things, not so pleasant to think about.

After work, when the weather was warm enough, he

would sit in his garden an hour or so before fixing his

vegetables for dinner. He watched and listened as if at a

class or cross-phylum reunion. When the jay cawed, his throat tickled from the knuckles of his would-be crop.

When the praying mantis hopped onto the trellis to clean

42 June 1986

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FOUR. MINUTE FICTIONS

his mandibles and claws, as absorbed in the ritual as a

monk washing his hands, and closed his lavender eyelids in complement to a body articulated in pale willow green, Jason could feel the tip of his tongue become slightly bulbous with a tiny secretion of fly-catching glue.

But this was old stuff. He was more interested in the

mourning dove nestled in the grass, one wing raised over her head, which was bobbing in a sharp and intimate raid

against lice. It was the lice that fascinated him, hanging on to their feathery world by four tiny legs ending in

claws, their biting mouths filled with a gruel of blood and

down, fringes of hair at the top of their heads, their legs, and along their bodies, but no wings, and no escape. Jason could feel their exterior sensations, but crawling inside

was hard work. He would have to hypnotize himself over

the published texts and drawings of lice, and wait for the

revealing dreams to come.

Outside events were making the dreams harder to

come, and interrupting and jumbling them when they came. A new employee at the bank, for instance, named

Jenny Wilkens, had made things a bit awkward for a time. An otherwise likeable and merry girl, she had unilaterally decided he was lonely and pursued him with invitations to dinner and Saturday walks. Marriage, of course, was out

of the question in his line of work. So was an affair. It wasn't just that he didn't know from day to day whether he would be heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, pansex ual, or asexual?it depended on his line of research. Nor was it that, having experienced imaginatively so vast a

variety of sexual delights and smells, he had drifted away from the more routine human expression of passion. It

was, simply, that he could not share many of his inmost

thoughts or feelings until he found the words for them.

Tongue-tied at the human level had rendered him emo tion-tied there as well. He had simply put the matter out of his mind. Jenny Wilkens had been easy enough to turn

away, but she had unsettled him, had caused him to go over things he thought had been laid to rest, had

provoked him to look back up instead of down the chain of being, even to question his line of work and the value of his journals.

The newer insecticides also brought his journals into

question. How would man use his discoveries? Advances in chemical knowledge were only leading to ever-refined

cruelties, to use the female hormone of gypsy moths, for

instance, to attract the males, in a buzz and fuzz of

anticipation, to a swarmy death in a trap. Or to tap in on

the privacy of the pupa in the cocoon, before it ever got to

spread and dry its wings, and lock it in one stage of

metamorphosis, repeated over and over, until it burst its skin. What would man do with his secrets, his insights?

The questions would not go away, and bothered his dreams for years. One autumn afternoon, watching a tiny greenworm swinging gently on a single rainbow strand it had spun out from the pear tree above, wafting back and forth in the dappled light, content as the ocean in its bed, he knew what he should do. After supper, he brought all his journals and notes down to the living room, lit a fire in the grate, and burned them, every one. And in the gar den, in the dark, the greenworm swung back and forth in

praise. D

DICK ALLEN

IF YOU VISIT OUR COUNTRY

At night, in the little towns that crop up in America

Where the highway curves beside a river bank

Or lifts you suddenly up a drumlin to the lights Left burning in closed restaurants and filling stations, Someone is always walking with a dog, and someone

Is always standing at a window looking pensive.

And if you drive on further through the pensive Fields and leaning forests of America,

Singing or dreaming, and you share the wheel with someone

You love, you will likely see a bank

Of stars in the west. Tune to an all-nite station

Playing crazy rock. The world will be blinking lights

Racing toward you or away, your headlights

Picking up old things along the highway: pensive And dilapidated barns, abandoned railroad stations, The culverts, junkyards, flagpoles of America

That never left the Thirties?the small town bank

Closed for the Depression, then reopened. Someone

Is always starting out or starting over; someone

In jeans and open shirt has seen her name in lights Or told a cowlicked boyfriend he can bank

Upon the future. In every town a pensive Father reminisces to his son about America, Or a priest is walking slowly through the Stations

Of the Cross, praying he might rise above his station

In this anguished life, becoming someone

Truly worthy, truly, truly worthy. All across America

You will find embracing lovers under streetlights,

Tiger lilies, Queen Anne's lace, the pensive Look of high schools closed for summer, empty banks

Of bleacher seats at baseball games; and if you bank

Hard where the highway curves, and if you station

Yourself securely at the wheel, sooner or later pensive

Thoughts will overcome you. Try to be someone

For whom the country opens, for whom traffic lights At empty crossroads signify America:

The shades and awnings of America, the kid who banks

A billiard shot, fizzed neon lights, the military station

High on Someone's Bluff, the sentry walking pensive.

June 1986 43

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