Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  She first opened The Book of Imaginary Beings. And this is what we learned:

  There are two types of unicorns: the Western variety, which originates in Greece, and the Chinese variety. They differ completely in appearance and in people’s perception of them. Pliny, for instance, described the unicorn of the Greeks like this:

  His body resembles a horse, his head a stag, his feet an Elephant, his taile a boar; he loweth after an hideous manner, one black home he hath in the mids of his forehead, bearing out two cubits in length: by report, this wild beast cannot possibly be caught alive.

  By contrast, there is the Chinese unicorn:

  It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Its short horn, which grows out of its forehead, is made of flesh; its coat, on its back, is of five mixed colours, while its belly is brown or yellow.

  The difference was not simply one of appearance. East and West could not agree on character and symbolism either. The West saw the unicorn as fierce and aggressive. Hence a horn one meter long. Moreover, according to Leonardo da Vinci, the only way to catch a unicorn was to snare its passions. A young virgin is set down in front of it and the beast is so overcome with desire that it forgets to attack, and instead rests its head on the lap of the maiden. The significance of the horn is not easily missed.

  The Chinese unicorn, on the other hand, is a sacred animal of portent. It ranks along with the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise as one of the Four Auspicious Creatures, and merits the highest status amongst the Three-Hundred-Sixty-Five Land Animals. Extremely gentle in temperament, it treads with such care that even the smallest living thing is unharmed, and eats no growing herbs but only withered grass. It lives a thousand years, and the visitation of a unicorn heralds the birth of a great sage. So we read that the mother of Confucius came upon a unicorn when she bore the philosopher in her womb:

  Seventy years later, some hunters killed a qilin, which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius’ mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.

  The qilin appears again in Chinese history in the thirteenth century. On the eve of a planned invasion of India, advance scouts of Genghis Khan encounter a unicorn in the middle of the desert. This unicorn has the head of a horse and the body of a deer. Its fur is green and it speaks in a human tongue: “Time is come for you to return to the kingdom of your lord.”

  One of the Genghis’s Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the animal was a jiao-shui, a variety of the qilin. “For four hundred years the great army has been warring in western regions,” he said. “Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the jiao-shui. Spare the Empire for Heaven’s sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure.” The Emperor desisted in his war plans.

  In the East, peace and tranquility; in the West, aggression and lust. Nonetheless, the unicorn remains an imaginary animal, an invention that can embody any value one wishes to project.

  There is, however, one species of porpoise called the narwhal or “sea unicorn.” It does not have a horn so much as an overgrown fang of the upper jaw protruding from the top of its head. The “horn” measures an average of two-and-half meters and is spiralled with a drill-like threading. This cetacean is rather rare and does not figure in medieval records.

  Other mammals resembling the unicorn existed in the Mesozoic, but gradually died out.

  She picked up the Archaeology of Animals and continued:

  Two species of ruminants existed during the Mesozoic Period, approximately twenty million years ago, on the North American continent. One is the cyntetokerus, the other is the curanokerus. Both have three horns, although clearly one of the horns is freestanding.

  The cyntetokerus is a smallish horse cum deer with a horn on either temple and a long Y-shaped prong at the end of its nose. The curanokerus is slightly rounder in the face, and sprouts two deer-like antlers from its crown and an additional horn that curves up and out in back. Grotesque creatures on the whole.

  Within the mammal class, single-horned or odd-number-horned animals are a rarity and even something of an evolutionary anomaly. That is to say, they are evolutionary orphans, and for the most part, odd-horned species like these have virtually perished from the earth. Even among dinosaurs, the three-horned giant tricerotops was an exception.

  Considering that horns are close-range weapons, three would be superfluous. As with the tines of forks, the larger number of horns serves to increase surface resistance, which would in turn render the act of thrusting cumbersome. Furthermore, the laws of dynamics dictate a high risk of triadic horns becoming wedged into mid-range objects, so that none of the three horns might actually penetrate the body of the opponent.

  In the event of an animal confronting several predators, having three horns could hamper fluidity of motion; extracting horns from the body of one for redirection to the next could be awkward. These drawbacks proved the downfall of the three-horned animal: the twin horn or single horn was a superior design.

  The advantage of two horns rests with the bilateral symmetry of the animal body. All animals, manifesting a right-left balance that parcels their strength into two ligatures, regulate their patterns of growth and movement accordingly. The nose and even the mouth bear this symmetry that essentially divides functions into two. The navel, of course, is singular though this is something of a retrograde feature. Conversely, the penis and vagina form a pair.

  Most important are the eyes. Both for offense and defense, the eyes act as the control tower, so a horn located in close proximity to the eyes has optimum effectiveness. The prime example is the rhinoceros, which in principle is a “unicorn.” It is also extremely myopic, and that single horn is the very cause. For all practical purposes, the rhinoceros is a cripple. In spite of this potentially fatal flaw, the rhinoceros has survived for two unrelated reasons: it is an herbivore and its body is covered with thick armor plating. Hence it does not want for defense. And for that reason, the rhinoceros falls by body-type to the tricerotops category.

  Nonetheless, all pictures that exist of unicorns show the breed to be of a different stripe. It has no armor; it is entirely defenseless, not unlike a deer. If the unicorn were then also nearsighted, the defect could be disastrous. Even highly developed senses of smell or hearing would be inadequate to save it. Hunters would find it easy prey. Moreover, having no horn to spare, as it were, could severely disadvantage the unicorn in the event of an accident.

  Still another failing of the single horn is the difficulty of wielding it with force, just as incisors cannot distribute a force equivalent to that of molars due to principles of balance. The heavier the mass, the greater the stability when force is applied. Obviously, the unicorn suffers physiodynamic defects.

  “You’re a real whiz at these explanations, aren’t you?” I interrupted her.

  She burst into a smile and trekked two fingers up my chest.

  “Logically,” she continued, “there’s only one thing that could have saved the unicorn from extinction. And this is very important. Any idea?”

  I folded my hands where her fingers were and thought it over a bit, inconclusively. “No natural predators?” I ventured.

  “Bingo,” she said, and gave me a little peck on the lips. “Now think: what conditions would give you no natural predators?”

  “Well, isolation, for one thing. Somewhere no hunter could get to,” I hypothesized. “Someplace, say, on a high plateau, like in Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Or down deep, like a crater.”

  “Brill!” she exclaimed, tapping her index finger now on my heart. “And in fact, there is a recorded instance of a unicorn discovered under exactly such circumstances.”

  I gulped. Uh-oh.

  She resumed her exposition:

  In 1917, the very item was discovered on the Russian front. This was September, one month
prior to the October Revolution, during the First World War, under the Kerensky Cabinet, immediately before the start of the Bolshevik Coup.

  At the Ukranian front line, a Russian infantryman unearthed a mysterious object while digging a trench. He tossed it aside, thinking it a cow or an elk skull. Had that been the end of it, the find would have remained buried in the obscurity of history. It happened, however, that the soldier’s commanding lieutenant had been a graduate student in biology at the University of Petrograd. He noted a peculiarity to the skull and, returning with it to his quarters, he subjected it to thorough examination. He determined the specimen to be the skull of a species of animal as yet unknown. Immediately, he contacted the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology at the University and requested that a survey team be dispatched. None, of course, was forthcoming. Russia was in upheaval at the time. Food, gunpowder, and medicine had first priority. With communications crippled by strikes, it was impossible for a scientific team to reach the front. Even if they had, the circumstances would not have been conducive to a site survey. The Russian army was suffering defeat after defeat; the front line was being pushed steadily back. Very probably the site was already German territory.

  The lieutenant himself came to an ignoble end. He was hanged from a telegraph pole in November that year. Many bourgeois officers were disposed of similarly along the Ukraine-Moscow telegraph line. The lieutenant had been a simple biology major without a shred of politics in him.

  Nonetheless, immediately before the Bolshevik army seized control, the lieutenant did think to entrust the skull to a wounded soldier being sent home, promising him a sizable compensation upon delivery of the skull, packed securely in a box, to the Faculty Chairman in Petrograd. The soldier was released from military hospital but waited until February of the following year before visiting the University, only to find the gates closed indefinitely. Most of the lecturers either had been driven away or had fled the country. Prospects for the University reopening were not very promising. He had little choice but to attempt to claim his money at a later date. He stored the skull with his brother-in-law who kept a stable in Petrograd, and returned to his home village some three hundred kilometers from the former Imperial Capital. The soldier, for reasons undetermined, never visited Petrograd again, and the skull lay in the stable, forgotten.

  The skull next saw the light of day in 1935. Petrograd had since become Leningrad. Lenin was dead, Trotsky was in exile, and Stalin was in power. No one rode horses in Leningrad. The old stablemaster had sold half his premises, and in the remaining half he opened a small hockey goods shop.

  “Hockey?” I dropped my jaw. “In the Soviet thirties?”

  “Don’t ask me. That’s just what I read. But who knows? Post-Revolution Leningrad was quite your modern grad. Maybe hockey was all the rage.”

  In any case, while inventorying his storeroom, the former stablemaster happened upon the box his brother-in-law had left with him in 1918. There in the box was a note addressed to the Chairman of the Faculty of Biology, Petrograd University. The note read: “Please bestow fair compensation upon the bearer of this item.” Naturally, the purveyor of hockey goods took the box to the University—now Leningrad University—and sought a meeting with the Chairman. This proved impossible. The Chairman was a Jew who had been sent to Siberia after Trotsky’s downfall.

  This former stablemaster, however, was no fool. With no other prospect, rather than hold on to an unidentified animal skull for the remainder of his days and not receive a kopek, he found another professor of biology, recounted the tale, and prevailed upon him for a likely sum. He went home a few rubles richer.

  The professor examined every square millimeter of the skull, and ultimately arrived at the same conclusion as had the lieutenant eighteen years earlier—to wit, that the skull did not correspond to any extant animal, nor did it correspond to any animal known to have existed previously. The morphology most closely resembled that of a deer. It had to have been a hoofed herbivore, judging by the shape of the jaw, with slightly fuller cheeks. Yet the greatest difference between this species and the deer was, lo and behold, the single horn that modified the middle of its forehead.

  The horn was still intact. It was not in its entirety, to be sure, but what remained sufficed to enable the reconstruction of a straight horn of approximately twenty centimeters in length. The horn had been broken off close to the three-centimeter mark, its basal diameter approximately two centimeters.

  “Two centimeters,” I repeated to myself. The skull I’d received from the old man had a depression of exactly two centimeters in diameter.

  Professor Petrov—for that was his name—summoned several assistants and graduate students, and the team departed for the Ukraine on a one-month dig at the site of the young lieutenant’s trenches. Unfortunately, they failed to find any similar skull. They did, however, discover a number of curious facts about the region, a tableland commonly known as the Voltafil. The area rose to a moderate height and as such formed one of the few natural strategic vantage points over the rolling plains. During the First World War, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies repeatedly engaged the Russians in bloody confrontations on all sides. During the Second World War, the entire plateau was bombarded beyond recognition, but that was years later.

  What interested Professor Petrov about the Voltafil was that the bones unearthed there differed significantly from the distribution of species elsewhere in that belt of land. It prompted the professor to conjecture that the present tableland had in ancient times not been an outcropping at all, but a crater, the cradle for untold flora and fauna. In other words, a lost world.

  A plateau out of a crater might tax the imagination, but that is precisely what occurred. The walls of the crater were perilously steep, but over millions of years the walls crumbled due to an intractable geological shift, convexing the base into an ordinary hill. The unicorn, an evolutionary misfit, continued to live on this outcropping isolated from all predation. Natural springs abounded, the soil was fertile, conditions were idyllic. Professor Petrov submitted these findings to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in a paper entitled “A Consideration of the Lifeforms of the Voltafil Tableland,” detailing a total of thirty-six zoological, botanical, and geological proofs for his lost world thesis. This was August 1936.

  It was dismally received. No one in the Academy took him seriously. His defense of his paper coincided with a power struggle within this august institution between Moscow University and Leningrad University. The Leningrad faction was not faring well; their purportedly non-dialectical research incurred a summary trouncing. Still, Petrov’s hypothesis aside, there was the undeniably physical evidence of the skull itself. A cadre of specialists devoted the next year to excruciating study of the object in question. They were forced to conclude that it, indeed, was not a fabrication but the unadulterated skull of a single-horned animal. Ultimately, the Committee at the Soviet Academy of Sciences pronounced the embarrassing artifact a spontaneous mutation in Cervidœ odocoileus with no evolutionary consequence, and as such not a subject fit for research. The skull was returned to Professor Petrov at Leningrad University.

  Thereafter, Professor Petrov waited valiantly for the winds of fortune to shift and his research to achieve recognition, but the onslaught of the German-Soviet War in 1940 dashed all such hopes and he died in 1943, a broken man. It was during the 1941 Siege of Leningrad that the skull vanished. Leningrad University was reduced to rubble by German shelling. Virtually the entire campus—let alone a single animal skull—was destroyed. And so the one piece of solid evidence proving the existence of the unicorn was no more.

  “So there’s not one concrete thing that remains?” I said.

  “Nothing except for photographs.”

  “Photographs?”

  “That’s right, photographs of the skull. Professor Petrov took close to a hundred photos of the skull, a few of which escaped destruction in the war. They’ve been preserved in the Leningrad University library reference c
ollection. Here, photographs like this.”

  She handed me the book and pointed to a black-and-white reproduction on the page. A somewhat indistinct photograph, but it did convey the general shape of the skull. It had been placed on a table covered with white cloth, next to a wristwatch for scale, a circle drawn around the middle of the forehead to indicate the position of the horn. It appeared to be of the same species as the skull the old man had given me. I glanced over at the skull atop the TV. The T-shirt covering made it look like a sleeping cat. Should I tell her? Nah, a secret’s a secret because you don’t let people in on it.

  “Do you think the skull really was lost in the War?” I asked her.

  “I suppose,” she said, teasing her bangs around her little finger. “If you believe the book, the city of Leningrad was practically steamrollered, and seeing how the University district was the hardest hit, it’s probably safe to say that the skull was obliterated along with everything else. Of course, Professor Petrov could well have whisked it away somewhere before the fighting started. Or it could have been among the spoils carted off by the German troops.… Whatever happened to it, nobody has spoken of seeing the skull since.”

  I studied the photograph and slammed the book shut. Could the skull in my possession be the very same Voltafil-Leningrad specimen? Or was it yet another unicorn skull excavated at a different place and time? The simplest thing would be to ask the old man. Like, where did you get that skull? And why did you give it to me? Well, I was supposed to see the old prankster when I handed over the shuffled data. I’d ask him then. Meanwhile, not to be worrying.

  I stared absently at the ceiling, with her head on my chest, her body snug against my side. I put my arm around her. I felt relieved, in a way, about the unicorn skull, but the state of my prowess was unchanged. No matter. Erection or not, she kept on drawing dreamy patterns on my stomach.