G.H.
Hartford, Connecticut
There is a scratching noise.
It is the sort of thing that could happen even here, amid the named and stop-signed streets, on a quiet night of sharp metallic stars, glittering cars, the moon’s gleam piercing shades and curtains—even here. As Matthew Goldsmith is out walking, late and rapidly down the cracked, uneven sidewalks, past the houses built a prudent distance up above the river, across the playing fields behind the college. A windless autumn night on which sleep has not come, in which the reflectors on bicycles, the shadows of the ordered trees, even the sounds of the river, are luminously distinct. His heels raise a faint rustling on twig-strewn pavement, dew-cast ground. His walk is long, with hands in pockets and steady pace, toward no particular destination except exhaustion. He cannot, perhaps, even say what he is thinking.
When fatigue looms near enough, he returns to his house, carefully shutting out the sounds of the night.
And I stand outside, waiting.
Both Sarah and the bed are warm and tousled with sleep, Sarah so far under its cover that she does not respond to his kiss. Settling into bed, pillow arranged and wristwatch off, Matthew turns the pages of a Scientific American, stopping at the cover story, an article on genes and DNA, enzymes, proteins—the stuff of life. An architect rather than a scientist, he’d nevertheless seen and been taken by the article’s title, “The Structures of Life,” had bought a copy of the magazine on his lunch hour.
Timothy had whistled when he saw it. ‘”Structures of Life’? Hey, you find out how it works, you let me know.” He turned back at the door of Matthew’s office. “Save you some shoe leather, buddy,” he whispered, “The Big Answer is there isn’t any.” And laughed again, slapping the door frame as if it were a friendly shoulder in a bar.
“I just bought a magazine, for chrissake,” Matthew called to Timothy’s back, his own face aflare with the shame of the innocent accused, the innocent who then convicts himself of the intention, if not the crime.
But now, in the dim light, in the warm bed, the reading of this suspect article proves difficult. The strings of words begin to twist themselves harshly together, their Latinate elements making a scratchy sound where they join. Deoxyribonucleic. Nucleotides, guanine, polymeric, chromosomal replication double helix adenine thymine cytosine axishelixaxis Experiments with the stuff of life, how scientists had isolated certain proteins, very large experiments with them: Really, one of them explained, almost everything is proteins in the stuff of life. But, he asks him, How does life shape itself from all this? The answer, he suggests, might be found in the results of one little-known experiment, an experiment with broad and perhaps sinister implications: In the course of the fifteenth trial we created a most interesting phenomenon—phenomenal!— a roomful of identical white-haired scientists (and from such a small amount of protein, too, only as much as can be extracted from the average supermarket chicken thigh), perfectly identical, very large, rather handsome and mustachioed old scientific men. I start to interview each one, wanting to know whether the cold fluorescence of the laboratory bothers his new-old eyes, but as I ask l notice their identical cinder-dark moles, perched high on the comer of each ruddy left cheek, except for one whose mole instead has alighted on his right cheekbone and I’m confused by this, uncertain of its implications. I begin furiously to jot notes on my clipboard while the scientists begin to sing, trilling out different theories as l write, their voices descend from a piercingly querulous chorus down, down to incomprehensible low thudding and scratching sounds that strike heavily, like a blow to the chest, they come closer, surround me, the one with the wrong-sided mole reaches out to thump on my chest
The Scientific American has in fact collapsed of its own weight onto Matthew’s chest; he is awake and the white-haired, mustachioed scientists gone. He is awake with that stark sudden late-night wakefulness in which the sleeper sits up straight, blood scrambling, heart shrieking, mind clawing back up the muddy cliff toward consciousness. His brain yells out rough reconnoitering commands to his eyes to dammit look around the room, determine where he is and, then, that everything is as it was. Sarah. Bed. Night table. Lamp. Watch. Magazine. Window. Check. Matthew’s brain issues further quietening instructions: he must ignore feeling foolish at what seems to have been a whopping bodily response to his own idiotic dream; must slow heart and lungs to a steady march; must rearrange the molecular structures of his hands and arms so they are again filled with bone, nerve, and muscle instead of flan. So that he can put the magazine on the bedside table, switch off the lamp, pummel his pillow into a comfortable knot, and return to sleep. Working steadily, Matthew is able to obey all orders except the last.
His eyes refuse to close, as if only by watching for sleep will it return. When at last he forces them shut, his body begins to leak awareness. He feels the size and shape of his body, and it in relation to his sleeping wife’s, and theirs in relation to the bed, and the bed to the room and the room to the house and the house to the street and on and on until he is intensely small, searchingly concentrated, a laser beam of wakefulness. And so he hears the scratching noise. It is a noise quite unlike the pretty little trickling that precedes the muffled boom of the furnace, or the creaks of the floorboards or the random drip of a faucet or the pinging sighs of the first cold rending the foundations. It is a scratching noise, a sound he’s never heard before and much too close to be leaves or branches rasping at the roof, too heavy and close and deliberate to be any of that. He looks over at Sarah but the black tumult of her hair hides her face, her breathing is even, she does not move. He strokes an arm, a curve of breast, she fits her body closer to his and offers up a tiny mumble that nevertheless acts as a bugle call to his desire. But she does not wake. And there is no point in waking her.
No. But there is this noise.
This noise. It is not coming from the roof; it is not going away. It seems, it is, it’s coming from the crawl space under the roof, the attic alcove behind the wall, just beside his wife’s head. It is the sound of movement, of someone or something walking. But the sloped ceiling is too low for a person. It must be an animal, then. An animal. But how could an animal that sounds so big, so heavy, get into the crawl space?
Something is knocked over. Something breaks.
He is out of bed, stumbling over a left shoe, scrabbling in the night table drawer for the flashlight, following its lowered beam around the foot of the bed, standing at the low door to the crawl space, when the noise stops.
Quiet. More quiet. He lies down again, listening hard.
Again. He hears it again, this sound, this scratching in the crawl space beside his head, in his house.
Once more he is up, moving quietly, as if stalking. He unlocks, opens the low door to the crawl space, bends his head low and ducks in, the cold under the roof rushing down to meet him.
Nothing, at first. An old vase in shards. Nothing in the pale yellow light tipping from his hand. No. At the right, something. A dark shape, dark shining animal eyes. An animal. So round back, small hands clasped. Staring through a mask—a raccoon.
Gone.
He snakes the flashlight beam along the sides of the crawl space, prods a box or two with his bare foot, and then considers rabies. Wiser to go back. Back. Out.
At some point while Matthew Goldsmith was taking his late night stroll, the raccoon had climbed up from the banks of the Park River, moved among the wooden houses and the trash cans, found the honey locust tree beside Matthew and Sarah’s house. For such a nimble animal, the climb up the honey locust tree was easy, easy the journey out along the branch that overhung the roof. For an animal that size, it was no great stretch from there to the rotting slats of the attic louvre; no strength or dexterity uncommon to its species was required for the animal to pull away the slats and the torn wire mesh screen behind it, and then slip into the relative warmth of the crawl space. Where, in the way of its species, it had begun to scratch. The only aspect of all this that was even slightly unusual was the place the raccoon came to be, in seeking a sheltered place in which to rest.
But this tidbit of knowledge would give little sustenance to Matthew, would, in all likelihood, only send him groping down a blind alley of thought. And beside, he is tired, unprepared, can think of nothing to do that would not wake his wife, rip her sleep to no purpose.
So throughout the night he dozes patchily, dreamfully. Only to be wakened again and again by the sound of the raccoon’s sharp claws. Scratching.
My experiment is begun.
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The Nature of Things 