Darwinia

Later — during the troubled times, when the numbers of the poor and the homeless rose so dramatically, when coal and oil grew so expensive, when there were bread riots in the Common and Guilford’s mother and sister left town to stay (who could say for how long?) with an aunt in Minnesota — Guilford often accompanied his father to the print shop. He couldn’t be left at home, and his school had closed during the general stroke, and his father couldn’t afford a woman to look after him. So Guilford went with his father to work and learned the rudiments of platemaking and lithography, and in the long interludes between paying jobs he re-read his radio magazines and wondered whether any of the grand wireless projects the writers envisioned would ever come to pass — whether America would ever manufacture another DeForrest tube, or whether the great age of invention had ended.

Often he listened as his father talked with the shop’s two remaining employees, a French-Canadian engraver named Ouillette and a dour Russian Jew called Kominski. Their talk was often hushed and usually gloomy. They spoke to one another as if Guilford weren’t present in the room.

They talked about the stock-market crash and the coal strike, the Workers’ Brigades and the food crisis, the escalating price of nearly everything.

They talked about the New World, the new Europe, the raw wilderness that had displaced so much of the map.

They talked about President Taft and the revolt of Congress. They talked about Lord Kitchener, presiding over the remnant British Empire from Ottawa; they talked about the rival Papacies and the colonial wars ravaging the possessions of Spain and Germany and Portugal.

And they talked, often as not, about religion. Guilford’s father was an Episcopalian by birth and a Unitarian by marriage — he held, in other words, no particular dogmatic views. Ouillette, a Catholic, called the conversion of Europe “a patent miracle.” Kominski was uneasy with these debates but freely agreed that the New World must be an act of divine intervention: what else could it be?

Guilford was careful not to interrupt or comment. He wasn’t expected to offer an opinion or even to have one. Privately, he thought all this talk of miracles was misguided. By almost any definition, of course, the conversion of Europe was a miracle, unanticipated, unexplained, and apparently well beyond the scope of natural law.

But was it?

This miracle, Guilford thought, had no signature. God had not announced it from the heavens. It had simply happened. It was an event, presaged by strange lights and accompanied by strange weather (tornadoes in Khartoum, he had read) and geological disturbances (damaging earthquakes in Japan, rumors of worse in Manchuria).

For a miracle, Guilford thought, it caused suspiciously many side effects… it wasn’t as clean and peremptory as a miracle ought to be. But when his father raised some of these same objections Kominski was scornful. “The Flood,” he said. “That was not a tidy act. The destruction of Sodom. Lot’s wife. A pillar of salt: is that logical?”

Maybe not.

Guilford went to the globe his father kept on his office desk. The first tentative newspaper drawings had shown a ring or loop scrawled over the old maps. This loop bisected Iceland, enclosed the southern tip of Spain and a half-moon of northern Africa, crossed the Holy Land, spanned in an uncertain arc across the Russian steppes and through the Arctic Circle. Guilford pressed the palm of his hand over Europe, occluding the antiquated markings. Terra incognita, he thought. The Hearst papers, following the national religious revival, sometimes jokingly called the new continent “Darwinia,” implying that the miracle had discredited natural history.

But it hadn’t. Guilford believed that quite firmly, though he didn’t dare say so aloud. Not a miracle, he thought, but a mystery. Unexplainable, but maybe not intrinsically unexplainable.

All that land mass, those ocean depths, mountains, frigid wastes, all changed in a night… Frightening, Guilford thought, and more frightening still to consider the unknown hinterlands he had covered with his hand. It made a person feel fragile.

A mystery. Like any mystery, it waited for a question. Several questions. Questions like keys, fumbled into an obstinate lock.

He closed his eyes and lifted his hand. He imagined a terrain rendered blank, the legends rewritten in an unknown language.

Mysteries beyond counting.

But how do you question a continent?

Book One Spring, Summer 1920

“Oh ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky: but can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

— Gospel According to St. Matthew

Chapter One