Cartilage and Timetable

I.

I am on a train. It is I who am on it. I don’t know exactly when I boarded, though I have the ticket, or had it — the conductor took it or I put it somewhere, in the pocket of my coat or in the bag with the forms, the institutional forms for the retrieval, the forms I was given before I left, though perhaps I was given them during the journey itself, at one of the stations where I changed, or failed to change, which is really the same thing when you consider it. But I am on the train. That much is established.

My name is Ewa. I work at the museum, or I did, or I will again when I return, if I return, which is not guaranteed but which the museum seems to expect, judging by the forms. The forms have a line for my signature and a line for the date and a line for the description of the specimen, and I have filled in the first two but not the third, because I have not yet seen the specimen, and it is possible, I want to say probable, but I will say possible, that the specimen does not exist.

The specimen is a knee. A preserved human knee, dissected in the eighteenth century, attributed to a collection that has since been absorbed by another collection that has since been absorbed by another, each absorption a kind of digestion, the way a river absorbs a tributary and the tributary loses its name but not its water. The knee has a catalog number. The catalog number is the only evidence that the knee is real. I have the number on the form. I have the form in the bag. I have the bag on the seat beside me, and the bag is heavier than a piece of paper should make it, but that is because the bag also contains my lunch, which I have not eaten, and a pebble, which I have been carrying for longer than I can account for.

The pebble is gray. It is not interesting. It is not from anywhere in particular — a parking lot, or the edge of a road, or the bottom of a planter outside the museum. I pick it up and hold it and put it down and pick it up again. I am aware that this is a compulsion. I am also aware that calling it a compulsion does not diminish it. Naming a thing is not the same as governing it. I have spent twenty-three years naming things — labeling jars, entering catalog numbers, writing descriptions on index cards that no one reads except me and occasionally a graduate student who is trying to look busy — and in all that time the things have gone on being exactly what they are, which is to say: themselves, unlabeled, indifferent to the card.

The train stops. I do not know the name of the station. The sign is in a language I should be able to read but the letters seem to have rearranged themselves, or my eyes have, which amounts to the same thing. No one gets off. Someone gets on. The train moves again.

Fragment: On the knee.

The human knee is a hinge joint. It permits flexion and extension, with a small degree of medial and lateral rotation. The joint is formed by the articulation of the distal femur with the proximal tibia; the patella, which is a sesamoid bone embedded in the tendon of the quadriceps femoris, articulates with the femoral condyles. The menisci — medial and lateral — are fibrocartilaginous structures that deepen the articular surfaces and distribute load. Cartilage covers the articulating surfaces. The cartilage is white, or was white, in the living joint. In the preserved specimen, if the specimen exists, the cartilage will have yellowed, dried, contracted. It will look like old paper. It will look like something that was once between two things and is now between nothing, a separator without anything to separate.

I know this from the catalog. I have not seen a living knee since my own, and my own I look at without seeing, the way one looks at anything that is always there.

The conductor comes through. He is a short man with a face that has been organized by disappointment into something approaching symmetry: the left side droops and the right side droops and together they achieve a balance. He asks for my ticket. I tell him the other conductor took it. He says there was no other conductor. I say there was. He says the train has only one conductor and that conductor is him. We look at each other. It is possible that he is right. It is possible that I gave my ticket to someone who was not a conductor at all — a passenger, a hallucination, a man in a dark coat who happened to be standing in the aisle at the moment I was holding the ticket and whose hand I mistook for an official hand. These things happen. The conductor writes something on a pad and tears off the page and hands it to me and moves on. The page says nothing I can read. I fold it and put it in the bag with the forms and the pebble and the lunch.

Fragment: On the Docimium quarries.

In Phrygia, in what is now central Turkey, there were quarries that produced a marble called pavonazzetto: white stone with purple veins, like a body under strain. The Romans shipped this marble across the Mediterranean to build temples and forums and baths. The Hagia Sophia has it in its walls. The marble carries its geological history in its coloring — the purple veins are records of iron infiltration under pressure over millions of years. You can read the stone, or you cannot read it. You can look at it and think: this came from somewhere else, and the somewhere else is written into its surface, and the surface is the only text that matters, because the quarry is gone, obliterated by modern extraction, and the stone in the wall is the only evidence that the quarry existed at all.

I think about this on the train. I think about surfaces that carry their origins. The knee in the catalog, if it exists, was once part of a person who walked, who knelt, who climbed stairs, and every one of those actions wore the cartilage in specific patterns, and the patterns are an autobiography that the person never wrote and never intended to write and that is now, if the knee exists, sitting in a jar in a collection that may have been dissolved.

The train stops again. This time I recognize the station, or I think I do. I have been here before, or to a station that resembles it — the same yellow bricks, the same ironwork canopy, the same clock with one hand missing, though which hand I cannot say without looking, and I find I do not want to look. If the hour hand is missing then I don’t know what time it is. If the minute hand is missing I know the hour but not how deep into it I am. Both kinds of ignorance have their comforts.

I get off the train. I stand on the platform. The train leaves without me, which seems like a statement but is probably just what trains do. I sit on a bench. The bench is made of wood that has been painted green and the paint is peeling and under the green paint there is another green, slightly different, and under that another, and I think about how many times this bench has been painted and whether anyone has ever sat on it while it was being painted and refused to move and been painted over, incorporated into the surface, another layer in the stratigraphy of sitting.

I take out my pebble. I hold it. I put it in my left pocket. I take it out of my left pocket and put it in my right pocket. I take it out of my right pocket and hold it. The sequence calms me, or does not calm me but gives me something to do with my hands that is not checking the forms, which I have checked eleven times since boarding, or the first time, the time I remember as the first time, though there may have been earlier boardings that I have compressed into the general experience of boarding, the way one compresses a series of identical mornings into the concept of morning.

A woman sits down beside me. She is carrying a bag. In the bag — I can see because the bag is open — there is a jar. In the jar there is something I cannot identify from this angle, something pale and glistening, suspended in liquid the color of weak tea.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Is that — ”

She closes the bag.

I should say something about my body. I have been avoiding it, the way I avoid my own knee when I look down, but the journey has made the body unavoidable. My left hip has begun to ache — not the sharp ache of injury but the dull ache of use, of years of standing at the catalog drawers, bending to read the lower labels, straightening again. The hip is communicating something I do not want to hear, which is that it has been keeping a record of every motion I have asked of it and the record is not flattering. I have favored the right side for decades. The left hip knows this. The left hip has been compensating and the compensation has worn a groove in the cartilage that I imagine, though I cannot see it, looks like a creek bed after the water has gone — a path that remembers traffic.

I walk the platform. The walking makes the hip worse and the hip makes the walking necessary, because the only way to negotiate with a body in discomfort is to keep moving, to find the gait that offends the least, the stride length that distributes the complaint evenly between the joints. I find it, or I find something near it — a shuffle that is not quite walking and not quite standing still, a motion that has all the qualities of travel without the element of progress. I cover the length of the platform three times. I return to the bench. The bench is where I started. This is the nature of platforms: they promise departure and deliver return.

Fragment: On preservation.

The first anatomist to preserve a human specimen in spirit — in alcohol — was Frederik Ruysch, in Amsterdam, in the late seventeenth century. He injected wax into the blood vessels to maintain their shape and then submerged the preparations in jars of liquor. His collection was famous. Peter the Great bought it in 1717 and shipped it to Saint Petersburg, where the sailors, during the journey, drank the preserving alcohol. The specimens arrived compromised. Some had to be re-prepared. Others were lost.

I think about this when I think about the knee. The knee, if it exists, has traveled. It has been preserved, re-preserved, transferred, re-cataloged, its fluid changed, its jar replaced. Each transfer is a kind of translation — the specimen says the same thing in a different medium, and the saying is not quite the same, the way a sentence translated from one language to another carries the shape of the original but not its breath. What arrives at the destination is not what departed.

This is also true of me. I departed from the museum as one person — the cataloger, the reader of labels, the woman who knew where everything was — and I am arriving, or failing to arrive, as someone else: a body on a platform, a hip in negotiation with a bench, a pair of hands that cannot stop rotating a pebble through a sequence that has no purpose and no end.

Fragment: On the Daria-i-Noor.

The Sea of Light. One hundred eighty-two carats of pale pink diamond, looted from the Mughal treasury by Nader Shah in 1739, carried to Persia, passed from dynasty to dynasty, inscribed with a dead king’s name, and now displayed in a vault in Tehran behind glass that is, I imagine, very thick. The diamond may have been cut from a larger stone — the Great Table, described by a French jeweler in 1642. If so, the smaller piece is the Noor-ul-Ain, sixty carats, set into a tiara. A single stone broken into two stones, each carried separately through history, each acquiring its own provenance, its own chain of hands, its own catalog number.

I have thought about this often, though I did not know I had thought about it until now. The knee I am looking for may also be a half. It was dissected from a body — separated from the femur above and the tibia below, from the tendons and ligaments that connected it to motion. Whoever dissected it made a decision about where the knee began and where it ended, and that decision was arbitrary, or was governed by a convention that had the appearance of necessity but was actually a preference — a preference for a certain kind of cut, a certain idea of what constitutes a joint as opposed to a limb. The catalog records the result of this preference as though it were a fact.

II.

I was told to find someone. I will say that much. I was given a name and an address and a set of forms, and I set out, which was already a concession, already a defeat, because setting out implies a destination, and a destination implies a purpose, and a purpose implies that the world is organized in a way that rewards motion, which I have long suspected it is not.

My name is not important. I am the one who sent Ewa, or who was told to send Ewa, or who would have sent Ewa if I had been asked, which I was, which is why she is on the train and I am here, which is not the museum, which is closed, which has been closed for four days now due to a problem with the climate control system, the system that keeps the specimens at the correct temperature and humidity, the system that is, when you think about it, the only thing standing between the collection and the general tendency of organic matter to return to what it was before someone decided to preserve it.

The museum is closed but I am here. I have a key. The key works. The door opens. Inside it is warm — too warm; the climate control has failed in the direction of warmth rather than cold, which means the specimens are not freezing but softening, which is worse. A frozen specimen can be thawed. A softened specimen has begun to remember that it was once alive, and the remembering is decomposition, and the decomposition is irreversible.

I walk through the galleries. The jars are on their shelves. The labels are in their slots. Everything is where it should be, including the gap on shelf fourteen, row three, position seven, where the knee should be — the knee that is not here because it was never here because it is in another collection or because it does not exist, which is why I sent Ewa, to determine which of these is the case, though now that she is gone I find that I do not care which is the case, because the gap on the shelf is its own kind of specimen: a preserved absence, a jar with no jar.

I have spent thirty-one years in this museum. I have cataloged four thousand two hundred and eleven specimens, or four thousand two hundred and twelve if you count the gap. I count the gap. Everything else I have labeled is gradually becoming something other than what the label says — the heart in jar 1144 is not the heart it was when it was labeled; the cells have changed, the preserving fluid has darkened, the organ has entered into a relationship with its container that has altered both. But the gap remains exactly what it is.

Ewa has not called. This is expected. There is no requirement that she call. The forms do not include a field for progress reports. The forms include a field for the specimen description and a field for the condition assessment and a field for the transport method and a field for the signature and a field for the date, and none of these can be filled in until the specimen is in hand, which it may never be, and so the forms will remain as they are: incomplete.

I sit at my desk. The desk is in the office that is attached to the gallery that contains the gap. The office smells of formaldehyde and something else, something sweet, which may be the decomposition I mentioned earlier or which may be my lunch, which is in the drawer, where it has been for several days. I do not open the drawer.

The telephone rings. I do not answer it. It rings again. I do not answer it. It stops ringing. It rings again. I pick it up. There is no one on the line, or there is someone, but they are breathing without speaking, which is a communication, I suppose — the body transmitting its most basic information: I am here, I am taking in air, I am alive, for now.

I hang up. The phone rings again. I pick it up. A voice says something about a delivery, a shipment, something arriving at the loading dock that needs to be signed for. I say the museum is closed. The voice says it has a shipment and the shipment requires a signature. I say I am not authorized to accept shipments. The voice says the shipment has already been accepted; what is needed now is the signature.

I hang up. I walk to the loading dock. There is a crate. The crate is approximately the size of the gap on shelf fourteen. I do not open the crate. Opening crates is not my job. My job is the catalog, and the catalog says nothing about a crate.

I return to my desk. I take a pebble from my pocket — I have one too, or I have taken hers, or we have always had the same pebble, the way two people can have the same thought without knowing it, the thought traveling between them like a specimen between collections, losing its provenance, gaining a new catalog number — and I hold it, and I put it down, and I pick it up, and I put it in my left pocket, and I take it out, and I put it in my right pocket, and I take it out, and I hold it, and the sequence goes on, and the sequence is the only schedule that matters, the only timetable that delivers me anywhere, which is: here, still here, the same here as before but slightly later, the here that has been painted over so many times that the original color, if there was an original color, is buried under all the greens.

Fragment: On cartilage.

Cartilage is a connective tissue. It is composed of chondrocytes embedded in an extracellular matrix of collagen fibers and proteoglycans. It is avascular — it has no blood supply — and so it heals poorly when damaged. The cartilage in a knee wears away over time, through use, through the simple repetition of walking. The wearing outpaces the repair, and the joint opens, bone grinding on bone, and the walking becomes something other than walking — a negotiation, a series of concessions between the body and the ground, each step a small treaty that expires before the next step begins.

I should say something about why I sent her. I sent her because the board required an accounting. The board required an accounting because the catalog lists a specimen that is not on the shelf. The board does not care about the specimen; the board cares about the catalog. The catalog is the real collection. The specimens are illustrations.

This is not cynical. This is accurate. A museum is not a warehouse; a museum is a system of descriptions. The jars and their contents are the physical evidence that the descriptions are not lies, but the descriptions would survive the loss of the jars more easily than the jars would survive the loss of the descriptions. A heart without a label is meat. A label without a heart is a record, a fact, a piece of the system, and the system is everything.

Ewa understands this. She catalogs. She does not study the specimens; she describes them. There is a difference. A student opens the jar and measures and weighs and sections. Ewa reads the label and enters the information and moves on. She is a reader of surfaces, which makes her the ideal person to send, because the question is not what the knee is but whether the knee’s catalog number corresponds to anything — to any object, in any collection, anywhere. The answer may be no. If the answer is no, she will bring back the forms, unsigned, and the gap will remain, and the catalog will be corrected, and the system will be whole again, having absorbed the absence into its records the way it absorbs everything else.

Fragment: On timetables.

A railway timetable is a document of extraordinary optimism. It asserts that at a specific minute on a specific day, a machine weighing several hundred tons will be at a specific point on the earth’s surface. It asserts this about hundreds of machines simultaneously. It prints the assertion in small type and distributes it to millions of people, all of whom accept the assertion as though it were a law of nature rather than a guess that has been laundered into a promise.

I have kept timetables. Not railway timetables — specimen timetables. Schedules for when the preserving fluids should be changed, when the jars should be inspected, when the labels should be verified against the catalog. These timetables are also optimistic. They assume that the museum will continue to exist on Tuesday, that the electrical supply will remain stable, that the person responsible for jar 2207 will still be employed and still be willing to unscrew the lid and sniff the formaldehyde and decide whether the concentration is sufficient. The timetable is a form of prayer. It is addressed to a future that has not agreed to cooperate.

Ewa is on a timetable. She has a return ticket, or she had one; the ticket specified a date, and the date has passed, or has not yet arrived, and in either case the ticket is a piece of faith that the railway has filed under a different heading.

The train, I have been informed, is not running. The line has been suspended. Technical difficulties. I stand on the platform with my bag and my pebble and my forms and I think about the people who used to walk — who used to simply walk from one place to another, through ditches and over fields, without tickets or timetables, dragging their bodies through the landscape by force of intention, and I think: at least the ditch was continuous. At least the ground did not close for maintenance.

I sit on the bench. The bench has been painted recently — I can smell the paint, see its sheen — and I worry that I will become part of the bench, another layer, and that someone will sit on me and not know I am there, will feel only the slightest irregularity in the surface, a bump where a body used to be, and will think: this bench has character.

My hip aches. The ache has shifted — it is lower now, closer to the joint itself, closer to the cartilage I have spent eight hours thinking about without once thinking about my own. The body does not announce its autobiography. It writes it in private, in a language you cannot read until the pain translates it for you, and the translation is approximate, and late.

A departure board across the platform shows three entries. As I watch, one is removed. Then another. Then the third. The board is blank.

I take out my pebble. I hold it to the light. It is gray. It contains no veins of purple, no geological autobiography, no record of the pressures that made it. It is a pebble. It is from nowhere. It is going nowhere. It is the only specimen in my collection that I trust completely, because it has never been described, because it has no catalog number, because it sits in my hand with the full weight of its own indifference, which is lighter than I expected, which is almost nothing, which is —

I put the pebble in my pocket. I take it out. I put it in the other pocket.

The train comes. I get on.