“Maybe this isn’t the place,” Jack kept saying. “Maybe it’s the next street up,” as if I had misremembered the map of my entire childhood. I know memory is malleable, but surely not to that degree.
Jack did not do well at school. His teachers said he always seemed distracted, as if he had dog-hearing and he was listening to sounds no one else could hear. On weekends, we drove through the mountains and camped beside crystal lakes. Jack hated it. He froze. Sun child, he despised shoes and socks and the big, fat, larval jackets we wore against the wind.
It was months before I made any friends. I felt down and dark, like a wrong decision. No one would talk to me, barely even smile. And I, mirror-like, lost the knack of smiling myself. People moved slowly here, as if the air itself weighed upon them. I had forgotten that. Here, nothing was superficial, nothing light.
And then Robin, a scientist who had been employed by the museum for decades, showed me the foetus.
“Come with me,” he whispered.
I had finally past some test I hadn’t known I was sitting.
He ushered me through silent corridors and locked doors. It felt as if I were being admitted to some exclusive private club. After many long minutes of walking, we reached a temperature-controlled room somewhere in the centre of a maze of offices and labs.
Robin brought the object out carefully. He put me in mind of medieval monks handling holy relics. He told me of how they had taken many samples from the creature in an effort to reconstruct the architecture of its existence.
The thylacine itself resembled a baby rabbit more than anything. Its blind eyes, as opaque as peeled grapes, reminded me of my mother’s preserves. This animal was so young when it was taken that it had still been in its mother’s pouch. And now, long dead, it could yet become a mother itself. Imagine that, I thought, a mother who has never lived. It’s the kind of thing you read about in the bible. It has to be a miracle, surely. The equal of the Immaculate Conception, almost.
It wasn’t the only thylacine that had been preserved, Robin told me. There were at least half a dozen others, some of them siblings to this one, raided from the same pouch. But this one, unlike many of the others, was in excellent condition. It had been kept all these decades on the back shelves of a cool, dark room, safely forgotten. Robin let me briefly hold the jar. I tilted it. The animal had fur and the first signs of stripes. The stripes were its camouflage. The animal belonged in the shadowy mosaic of a dry eucalypt forest, a jigsaw of wetlands and grasslands, not a laboratory jar. You could see, even in its infant state, that its jaw was heavy, reptilian, mythical. Its paws were stretched out as if begging, its eyes huge and open, as if it were staring at something unbearably sad, like life.
I had read somewhere that dogs always showed great fear in their presence. On the surface, they were such similar creatures, but underneath there were vast, unseen differences. That dissonance between expectation and reality had thrown everyone.
Robin replaced the jar and led me back through the long hallways. I memorised the way.
One afternoon, as he stared out the kitchen door at the forest, Jack told me he wished we’d never come. “I miss my friends so much,” he said. “Whatever I do here, it ends up bad.”
“Life’s like that sometimes,” I replied. “But it’s not like that forever.”
Since arriving, I was forever feeling as though I were standing at a great height, looking downwards. Too much past flooding into the present, I had discovered, produces vertigo. I’d had to come, but I wished it were easier. Perhaps, leaving it all too late, this place could never be anything more for Jack than someone else’s story.
“We can do something special tomorrow,” I told him. “How about that?”
So I took Jack to see the thylacine. Hell, I thought, it’s something for him to tell the grandkids.
“Ohhh,” Jack exhaled when he saw it.
He went to caress the jar. I pulled it back.
“It is very precious,” I told him.
“Its paw is cut,” he said.
The right paw was almost gone.
“That’s to make more of them,” I explained.
His eyes filled. “Can’t we bury it? It looks so sad.”
“It’s not ours. Besides, it can’t feel anything anymore. It doesn’t know what is happening to its body. The real beast, its essence, is exactly in the place where it belongs. Some cool, green plain where it can run and laugh and be its true self.”
Since the afternoon Robin had first shown me the beast, I had been reading everything I could find about it. Dog-faced dasyurus, it was called once, dog-headed opossum, striped wolf, VanDiemen’s Land tiger. I knew all the names. Thylacinus cynocephalus, meaning pouched dog with wolf’s head, named for the backward pouch in which it carried its young. But also, I liked to think, for the way it carried its testes, folded softly inside a partial pouch, protected by the lateral folds of the belly skin. And slut, too, it was called. Used, of course, only when speaking of the female of the species. Ironic really, for one who bred so rarely, and never in captivity.
Meanwhile, Jack had fights. He turned vicious. Telling me over dinner what he would do to his enemies. I couldn’t believe it. Where was my gentle boy? The child who cried in sympathy when other children did? Had I brought him too far?
