But what did beyond-being mean, exactly? Was the living moment between time and water a real place? When? How?
Tomorrow she would deliver the umbilical cord to the person who needed it. Tonight she nestled herself at the foot of a sycamore across from several box maples. She covered herself in leaves: tulip poplar, northern spicebush.
She thought about animals — about the short bursts of intense variation within species that occur after geologic catastrophe or upheavals in the environment. Like a meteor striking the earth, or the rapid diminishment of the ozone layer that led to glacial melt, the great Water Rise, and the social collapse of nations. A species could split and its evolution could take different paths. Any speciation event you could explain by anagenesis could also be explained by cladogenesis.
Hyracotherium evolved into
Mesohippus evolved into
Merychippus evolved into
Pliohippus evolved into
Equus: Horse, a direct ancestor of Hyracotherium, small changes over time gradually, for example, from three-pronged foot into hoof.
Or:
Hyracotherium goes extinct.
Ancestor X gives rise to Mesohippus.
Mesohippus goes extinct.
Ancestor Y gives rise to Merychippus.
Merychippus goes extinct.
Ancestor Z lineage gives rise to Pliohippus.
Pliohippus goes extinct.
Equus: Horse carries seven extant species traces that branched and braided.
When Pangaea split into Laurasia to the north, and Gondwanaland to the south, and then into continents, species living on the land masses split with them.
Polar bears and brown bears shared a common ancestor with the extinct Eurasian brown bear. Glaciation made movement southward difficult, isolating them. When the glaciers melted, inside the speed and power of climate change, hybridization between brown bears and polar bears quickly followed.
Laisvė pictured the Hawaiian archipelago. In her mind’s eye they looked like pieces of land breaking away from each other, each land mass forming its own ecology. She thought of the earless Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species. The hoary bat, also endangered. The vesper bat… extinct.
Could stories break free of stasis and equilibrium, give way to bursts of radical change? Could stories themselves become extinct? Could history? Could stories carry us differently? Could children branch off, away from their ancestors, like a body disassembled and reassembled in an otherwhere across time and space?
Laisvė pictured her baby brother breaking off from the ferry ride like a puzzle piece, traveling to another formation, or family, or species.
The woman she meant to meet next did not know yet that Laisvė carried an object that could help deliver something profoundly lost to a different boy.
She fingered the cord against her chest until sleep came for her.
Umbilical
Morning. The scent of river water, dirt, tree bark, and tiger lilies and a tiny grunting sound. Being awake meant moving toward a fountain, as the turtle had said: “Go to the fountain with the turtles spitting water.” Laisvė opened her eyes to orange and yellow: the smell of orange and yellow, the image of orange and yellow, and that curious tiny crunch or grunting sound that came with the colors. She pushed herself to sit still, with her hands in the dirt.
The dirt moved.
A tiny voice emerged. “It’s not a problem that you’re here, girl,” the dirt said. “Just don’t get in the way of our labor.”
Laisvė focused her attention closer to the ground. Terrestrial invertebrates. Class: Clitellata, order: Opisthopora, phylum: Annelida. Earthworms. Hundreds of them. Crawling and grunting and eating their way through the roots of a patch of tiger lilies hard by the river. Now that she was paying attention, she could hear a kind of low hum, the chatter of the worms as they worked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”
“Typical human. Just mind the ground,” the worm said. “We’ve got all this organic material to get through — protozoa, rotifers, nematodes, fungi, bacteria… and the project at hand, these invasive fuckers. Look at them. With their showy arrogant orange heads. Makes me sick.”
Laisvė didn’t need encouragement to admire the earthworms: their fluid-filled, hermaphroditic coelom chambers, their hydrostatic skeletons. Their central nervous systems, with their subpharyngeal ganglia, their ventral nerve cords, their bilobed brains made from a pair of perfect pear-shaped ganglia. The profound, all-consuming power of their guts. Even their commonplace names were beautiful to her: rainworm, dew worm, night crawler.
But mostly she loved their burrowing and their mating. How, as they drove down into the wet earth, they ate soil, extracting nutrients, decomposing leaves and roots and organic matter, their little tunnels aerating the soil, making way for air and water. How, after copulation, each worm would delightfully be the genetic father of some spawn and the genetic mother of the rest, the mating pair overlapping each other, exchanging sperm with each other, injecting eggs and sperm into each other inside a kind of ring formation, the fertilization happening outside of their bodies in little cocoons after mating, their families untethered from gender or the stupid false suction of the nuclear family in humans. Parthenogenetic.
“The tiger lilies,” Laisvė said gently, aiming her voice down at the worms. “They are so very beautiful, though.”
“Beautiful my ass,” the worm groused.
Laisvė heard a kind of raised murmur of agreement from the dirt.
“That’s how things go, isn’t it? The flashy beautiful thing gets all the goddamn attention. The so-called ugly thing close to the dirt gets the contempt. We move the goddamn earth around this entire planet. No credit. Not from humans.”
Laisvė considered this carefully. Aristotle had called earthworms the intestines of the soil. A few years ago, she had liberated a book of Darwin’s, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, from the library to give it a loving home with her and her father. She held worms in high regard. “I am sorry if I offended you. Anything I can do to help?”
“Your lot doesn’t help. You destroy. We were just talking about this with the mycelium. Hey, mycelium, what were you saying before? About the Amazon?”
A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. “It’s true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon — staggering. Do you know there are around four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally ‘found’ a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that’s a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are ‘discoveries’? How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally ‘found’ it? You ‘discovered’ it?”
Laisvė looked away. Her eye lit restlessly on the bark of a nearby tree, then back to her own skin. She felt something like shame except deeper.
Another worm picked up the point. “You ever seen a waxy monkey tree frog? That’s a more spectacular species than you. You know all the problems you’re having with bacteria resistance? What a man-made, idiotic problem. That frog’s skin could form the basis of a whole new arsenal of antibiotics. Did you know their skin has a protein that contains dermorphin, an opioid fifty times more potent than morphine? You know what you knuckleheads use dermorphin for? Doping thoroughbred horses. So your racehorses can ignore the pain you’re putting them through and run faster.”