Meg is someone who loves both humanity and people; William Bartram loved humanity and people and also nature.
He was a gifted and perceptive scientist who also believed in God, which seems a rather gymnastic form of philosophy.
She misses believing in God.
Here comes a prospector with a tiny pick; two scary teenage clowns in regular clothes; a courtly family, the parents crowned regents, the boy a knight in silver plastic, the girl a fluttery yellow princess.
What a relief that she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions.
Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can’t even save itself! she says aloud to the masses of princesses seething in her brain; but it is her own black dog who blinks in agreement.
She reads by bat light and sees two William Bartrams as she does: the bright-eyed thirty-four-year-old explorer with the tan and sinewy muscles and sketchbook, besieged by alligators, comfortable supping alone with mosquitoes and with rich indigo planters alike, and also Bartram’s older, paler self, in the quiet of his Pennsylvania garden, projecting his joy and his younger persona onto the page.
Both Bartrams, the feeling body and the remembering brain, show themselves in his descriptions of a bull gator: Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.
Usually, she’s the one who trick-or-treats with the boys, with Meg and her three children, but this year Meg is out with Amara, a banker who is nice enough but who competes sneakily, through her children.
She can take Amara in small doses, the way she can take everyone except for her sons and her husband and Meg, the only four people on earth she could take in every dose imaginable to man.
Maybe, she thinks, Meg and Amara are talking about her.
They’re not talking about me, she tells her dog.
* * *
—
Something has changed in the air; there’s a lot of wind now, a sense of something lurking.
The spirits of the dead, she’d think, if she were superstitious.
The dark has thickened, and she hears music from the mansion down the road where every year the neighbors host an extravagant haunted house.
She is alone, and no trick-or-treaters have wandered by in an hour, the white sandbags of candlelight have burned out, and the renters have all turned off their lights, pretending not to be home.
She reads from Bartram’s prologue, where he describes his hunter companion slaughtering a mother bear and then coming back mercilessly for the baby.
The continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunger to save its life, but to no effect! for by habit he had become insensible to compassion towards the brute creation, being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead upon the body of the dam.
And now she is crying.
I’m not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.
The dog needs to take a little break from her.
The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.
A lonely old piano.
She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the “Moonlight” Sonata.
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.
The wine is finished; she sucks a lollipop that only tastes red.
She reads for a long time until she hears what she thinks is her stomach growling, but it is, in fact, nearby thunder.
And just after the thunder comes the rain, and with the rain comes the memory of the baby sinkhole near the southeast corner of the house.
Her husband texts: the boys and he have taken shelter at the haunted house; there’s tons of food, all their friends, so much fun, she should come!—but he knows her better than that, this would be the third circle of hell for her, she cannot abide parties, she could not abide any friends when she’s lost the best one.
She can’t even read Bartram anymore because the thought of the sinkhole is like a hole in the mouth where a tooth used to be.
She prods and prods the sinkhole in her mind.
The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed, but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers.
The rain rains yet harder, and she puts on a yellow slicker and galoshes, and goes out with a flashlight.
Her face is being smacked by a giant hand, and another is smacking the crown of her head.
She puts a fist over her mouth to find the air to breathe and stands on the edge of the sinkhole, then crouches because the light is weak in the downpour.
No rain is collecting in the crater, which she thinks is extremely bad, because it must mean that the water is dripping through small cracks below, which means there’s a place for the water to go, which means there is a cavity, and the cavity could be enormous, right there beneath her feet.
She becomes aware of a stream of water licking its way down the end of her hair and into the collar of her slicker, and then slipping coolly across the bare skin of her shoulder and then over her left breast and across her lower left rib cage and entering her navel and unfurling itself luxuriously over her right hip.
It feels remarkable, like a good cold blade across her skin.
It is erotic, she thinks, not the same thing as sexual.
Erotic is suckling her newborns, that animal smell and feel and warmth and tenderness.
Laying her head on her friend’s shoulder and smelling the soap on her skin.
Letting the sun slide over her face without worrying about cancer or the ice caps melting.
She thinks of Bartram in the deep semitropical forest, far from his wife, aroused by the sight of an evocative blue flower that exists as a weed in her own garden, writing, in what is surely a double entendre or, if not, deeply Freudian: How fantastical looks the libertine Clitoria, mantling the shrubs, on the vistas skirting the groves!
This, this is what she loves in Bartram so much!
The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body’s hungers and delights.
Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.
For years now, she has been unable to see it all around her, the erotic.
The rain, impossibly, comes down harder, and even the flashlight is no help.
She is wet and alone and crouching in the dark over an unknowable hole, and now she locates the point of breakage.
Odd that it had taken so long.
Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an article about the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a mysterious whitish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go, the oceans go, and Meg had answered, as she always does, but she had just put her youngest back to bed, and she was weary after a long day of helping women, and she said, Hey, relax, you can’t do anything about it, go drink the rest of the bottle of wine, take a bath, we can talk in the morning if you’re still sad.
That was it, that last call.
Poor Meg.
She is exhausting to everyone.
She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.