My mother, though, is all too easy to understand. I know what she must be feeling, alone in the dark in the Birdcage with its crazy jims and jambs, the staircases crammed with preserved corpses, the stink and froth and rage of the river beneath her as it carries off to sea Whitby’s whale grease and slag and excrement. Her Papa gone, lost. A perpetual torment of rushing water. This is all too easy to imagine.
She doesn’t understand why they’ve left her alone. They’ve left her, all of them. Left her with her secret, trying, all alone, to decide what to do.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to like my father. He is, as William Cloverdale would have it, foreign to me. Unaccountable. Lost in more ways than one. While Clotilde, who will run away, washing her hands of me completely, feels close.
Despite everything, we have a lot in common, she and I. Not that I like to admit it.
Like me, for instance, she, too, has a map of the place where her father disappeared. She found it among the odds and ends of her “inheritance,” in a box also containing the preserved head of a lowland gorilla and a specimen tray labeled “miscellaneous pupae.” The map itself was carelessly folded and stuck in between the lid of the tray and the pupae themselves, which, true to their label, were rolled about loose, slightly seedy, peeling, like the fossilized stubs of partially smoked cigars. The map was Felix Girard’s own map, bearing the stains of Bury Place and home—it even smelled like home, when she first unfolded it, a rich mélange of preserving fluid, gazpacho, Beaujolais, and chocolate. It is marked by Felix Girard’s soup, by his tea, by his pencil. There, on the map with which he planned his trip, is Punta Yalkubul, a green, ape’s-brow bulge at the northernmost prominence of the Yucatán. And there, to the north, in the blue void of the Gulf of Mexico, marked in pencil in her Papa’s beloved hand: Isla Desterrada.
• • •
My mother discovered this map by accident. She was not, initially, interested in the map at all, but rather exclusively in the pupae. She had even some notion that she would try to identify and label the pupae, as a completion of and testament to the work of her dear Papa. She thought she would feel close to him that way. The map, at first, she set aside and ignored. She surrounded herself instead with books belonging to her Papa, containing pictures of pupae, and tried her hand at identification. The pupae, though, proved unpromising. She realized she did not even know where they were from. Were they European pupae? North American? South American? Central Asian? From New Guinea? Malaya? Mongolia? Toronto? Clotilde did not know, could not begin to know. Instead of making her feel closer to her Papa, the pupae made her feel farther away. There was nothing, in them, of her Papa. Clearly he had found them uninteresting himself, or else he would have labeled them. He did label very many things, but not these. Already distracted, she could not concentrate. Then one afternoon, she opened the map. She opened it listlessly, without any conviction. That is when she noticed it—written in, in her father’s hand.
Isla Desterrada. 22'49" N, 89'70" W.
She noticed, and then she quietly put the map away. She put it away without thinking. She also immediately lost what little interest remained for her in the pupae as well. She thought she would never look at them again, and the map, if she thought of it at all, was included in that.
It would take her a while to digest the implications. She even, for a time, forgot about the map, as if she had never seen it. She put it and the pupae back in the box with the gorilla’s head and took the whole thing out, into the shed, and left it in my father’s studio. Dropped it on the floor and walked away.
Then one day she suddenly thought:
He knew.
A huge realization.
And then:
He planned it.
An even huger.
And worse yet: