Not working at all for her now, she had to admit. The trigger in her brain had been pulled, and she was shot. Poor Martin. She wandered in an abreaction, through this handsome stone city that she quite loved. Remembering Martin. It wasn’t so hard when she let herself. In fact it was easy. How she had loved him. Ah Zuri Zuri my town, my town. Some old poem from her German class. This was her town. Martin and she had lived in London, in Dublin, in Paris, in Berlin. Never in Zurich or anywhere in Switzerland. She loved it for that. Really she was very fond of this town. She even loved it. The way they could make her laugh with their Swissness. Their stoicism, their insistence on order suffused by intense feelings of enthusiasm and melancholy. That peculiar unnameable combination that was a national affect, a national style. It suited her. She was a little Swiss herself, maybe. Now aching with old pain, heartsick at the loss of someone gone now forty-four years.
She wandered the narrow medieval streets around Peterskirche and the Zeughauskeller. There was the candy shop where Frank had bought them candied oranges, proud of them, how good they were, how much an example of Swiss art at its finest.
Down to the lake. She headed toward the park with the tiny marina below it, intent on visiting the statue of Ganymede and the eagle. Ganymede perhaps asking Zeus for a ride to Olympus. It wouldn’t be good when he got there, but he didn’t know that. The gods were godlike, humans never prospered among them. But Ganymede wanted to find out. That moment when you asked life to come through for you.
It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn’t seem possible. She saw why people might believe in souls. Souls popping in and out of beings, in and out, in and out. Well, why not. Anything might be true. All things remain in God. Some saint’s line, then Yeats, then Van Morrison, the way she knew it best. All things remain in God. Even if there was no God. All things remain in something or other. Some kind of eternity outside time.
As she stood there above the little marina she heard a roar, saw smoke across the lake to the left. Ah yes: it was Sechseläuten, the third Monday of April. She had completely forgotten. Sachsilüüte, to put it in Schwyzerdüütsch. The guilds had marched in their parade earlier, and now a tall tower erected in the Sechseläutenplatz had been set on fire at its bottom. Stuck on top of the tower would be a cloth figure of the Böögg, the Swiss German bogeyman, his head stuffed with fireworks that would explode when the fire reached them. The time it took for this to happen would predict whether they would have a sunny summer or a rainy one; the shorter it took, the nicer the weather would be.
Mary hurried across the Quaibrücke to Bürkliplatz, past the squeak and squeal of the trams over their tracks. If the Böögg went fast she wouldn’t get there in time. Had to hope for a bad summer if she wanted to see the fireworks burst out of its head.
She got there sooner than she thought it would take. The platz was jammed with people, as always. The cleared circle they kept around the burning pyre was smaller than any other people would have kept it; the Swiss were strangely casual about fireworks. Their independence day in August was like a war zone. Some kind of wanton pleasure in fireworks. In this case they were at least going to go off well overhead, as opposed to August 1 when they were shot off by the crowd into the crowd.
The tower in the center of Sechseläutenplatz was about twenty meters high, a flammable stacking of wood and paper. On top, the humanoid big-headed figure of the Böögg, ready to ignite. The crowd was thick to the point of impenetrability, Mary was as close as she was going to get.
Then the Böögg went off. A fairly modest explosion of colored sparks bursting from out of the head of winter’s monster. Some booms, then fireworks pale in the late afternoon light, then a lot of white smoke. Giant cheer from the crowd.
The smoke drifted off to the east. She walked over to the lakeshore, just a few blocks from her schwimmbad. It was near sunset. She could see three ridges to the south; first the low green rim of the lake, then the higher, darker green ridge between them and Zug; then in the distance, far to the south, higher than the world, the big triangular snow-splashed peaks of the Alps proper, now yellow in the late light. Alpenglow. This moment. Zurich.
97
There are about sixty billion birds alive on Earth. They’ve been quicker than anyone to inhabit the rewilded land and thrive. Recall they are all descended from theropods. They are dinosaurs, still alive among us. Sixty billion is a good number, a healthy number.
The great north tundra did not melt enough to stop the return of the caribou herds to their annual migrations. Animals moved out from the refuge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and repopulated the top of the world. In Siberia they’re establishing a Pleistocene Park, and re-introducing a resuscitated version of the woolly mammoth; this has been a problematic project, but meanwhile the reindeer have been coming back there, along with all the rest of the Siberian creatures, musk oxen, elk, bears, wolves, even Siberian tigers.
In the boreal
