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looked carefully at hedgerows, Emily Dickinson cauterized her lopped-off words with dashes. Ella Wheeler Wilcox implacably persisted. Shackleton came back against all odds, Scott didn’t. There was a round-the-world singlehanded sailing race in which one of the yachtsmen stopped in one part of the ocean and broadcast false positions.
    There is no place for me to find. No beach, no breeding grounds. Do I owe the turtles more or less because of that? Is everyone obliged to help those who have it in them to find something? I bought a second-hand mathematical book, I don’t know why, on self-replicating automata. Not robots but mathematical models. The book said that random search could not account for evolution. Something evidently wants there to be finding. Time’s arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.
    I went into the kitchen, had some tea and toast, came back and sat in my reading chair with my eyes closed. When I opened them it was time for lunch. I had some cheese and apples, went out. I had no intention of going to the Zoo but I went there. The penguins were yawping and honking in a way that had unmistakably to do with procreation. An Australian crane was performing a remarkable dance for his mate. It was as if place and time were internalized in them and not in their surroundings, like Englishmen who dress for dinner on plantations in Borneo. The lions and tigers have no such faculty, must pace madly or lie still and doze.
    I stood in the darkness by the turtle tank for some time, not so much looking at the turtles as just being near them and waiting. A man in shirt-sleeves came out of a door marked PRIVATE andstood in front of one of the fish tanks as if checking something. He was obviously one of the keepers and he had an air of decency about him, as if he paid attention to the things that really need attention paid to them.
    I rehearsed the question several times in my mind, then spoke to him. ‘Were any of the turtles full-grown when they were brought here?’ I said.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘They were only little when they came here, no more than a pound or two. The big ones have been here twenty or thirty years.’
    ‘Full-grown turtles,’ I said, ‘how are they transported?’

11

William G.
    A lady came into the shop one afternoon, arty-intellectual type about my age or a little younger. She was wearing a long orange Indian-print skirt, an old purple velvet jacket, a denim shirt and expensive boots. Not at all bad-looking. Rather troubled face, circles under her eyes. All at once I felt a strong urge to talk to her for hours and hours about everything. And at the same time I felt an urge not to talk to her at all.
    She drifted about the Natural History shelves for a time in a sleepwalking sort of way, picking up books and turning the pages without always looking at them. Then she picked up a book on sea turtles by Robert Bustard and read about a quarter of it where she stood. Eerie, the way she read, as if she’d simply forgotten to put the book down. And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.
    Had we anything new on sea turtles other than the Bustard, she asked. Her voice was as I expected, low and husky. Shespoke as if she’d come a long way from wherever she’d been in her mind and couldn’t stop long.
    No, I said. Nothing else new. Had she read Carr?
    Yes, she had. She looked