The Signature of All Things

incalculable failed experiments.”
    She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”
    Sometimes she had to cross out entire pages of work, when she looked up from her writing only to realize that hours had passed, and she had notstopped scribbling for a moment, but was no longer exactly discussing mosses.
    Then she would go for a brisk circumambulation of the ship’s deck—whatever ship it happened to be—with Roger the dog trailing behind her. Her hands would be trembling and her heart racing with emotion. She would clear her head and her lungs, and reconsider her position. Afterward, she would return to her berth, sit down with a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing all over again.
    She repeated this exercise hundreds of times, for close to fourteen months.
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    B y the time Alma arrived in Rotterdam, her thesis was nearly complete. She did not consider it entirelycomplete, for something about it was still missing. The creature in the corner of the dream was still gazing at her, unsatisfied and unsettled. This sense of incompletion chewed at her, and she resolved to keep at the idea until she had conquered it. That said, she did feel that most of her theory was irrefutably accurate. If she was correct in her thinking, then she was holding in her hand a rather revolutionary forty-page scientific document. And if, instead, she was incorrect in her thinking? Well, then she had—at the very least—written the most detailed description of life and death in a Philadelphia moss colony that the scientific world would ever see.
    In Rotterdam, she rested for a few days at the only hotel she could find that would accept Roger’s presence. She and Roger had walked the city for much of an afternoon, in an all but futile search for lodging. Along the way, she’d become increasingly irritated by the bilious looks that hotel clerks kept throwing their way. She could not help but think that if Roger were a more handsome dog, or a more charming dog, she would not have encountered so much trouble finding a room. This struck Alma as terribly unjust, for she had come to regard the little orange mongrel as noble in his own fashion. Had he not just crossed the world? How many supercilious hotel clerks could say the same? But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.
    As for the hotel that did accept them, it was a squalid place, run by a rheumy old woman who peered at Roger over the desk and said, “I once had a cat who looked just like him.”
    Dear God! Alma thought in horror at the idea of such a sad beast.
    “You aren’t a whore, are you?” asked the woman, just to be certain.
    This time, Alma uttered her “Dear God!” aloud. She simply could not help herself. Her answer seemed to satisfy the proprietress.
    The tarnished mirror in the hotel room revealed to Alma that she did not look much more civilized than Roger. She could not arrive in Amsterdam looking like this. Her wardrobe was a ruin and a havoc. Her hair, which had grown increasingly white, was a ruin and a havoc, as well. There was nothing to be done about the hair, but over the next few days she had several new frocks quickly sewn up. They were nothing fine (she modeled them on Hanneke’s original, practical pattern) but at least they were new, clean, and intact. She purchased new shoes. She sat in a park and wrote long letters to both Prudence and Hanneke, alerting them that she had reached Holland, and that she intended to remain here indefinitely.
    She was nearly out of money. She still had a bit of gold sewn into her tattered hems, but not much. She’d kept precious little of her father’s inheritance to begin with, and now—over these last years of travel—the better part of her modest bequest had been spent, one precious coin at a time. She was left with a sum not nearly sufficient to meet the simplest demands of life. Of course, she knew