Free The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

places. In the end he was shot down by a German fighter, and he and his plane were lost forever in the Mediterranean Sea.
Along with the jacket and the pilot’s hat, my mother also gave me a book by someone named Daniel Eldridge who she said would deserve a Nobel if they gave them to paleontologists. “Is he dead?” I asked. “Why do you ask?” “No reason,” I said. Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a paleontologist. The only difference is that paleontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life. Every fourteen-year-old should know something about where she comes from, my mother said. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of how it all began. Then, very quickly, as if it weren’t the point of everything, she said the book had belonged to Dad. Bird hurried over and touched the cover.
It was called Life as We Don’t Know It . On the back cover was a picture of Eldridge. He had dark eyes with thick lashes and a beard, and was holding up a fossil of a scary-looking fish. Underneath it said he was a professor at Columbia. That night I started to read it. I thought Dad might have written some notes in the margins, but he hadn’t. The only sign of him was his name on the inside cover. The book was about how Eldridge and some other scientists had gone down to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible and discovered hydrothermal vents at the places where tectonic plates met, which spewed mineral-rich gases reaching up to 700 degrees. Until that point, scientists thought the ocean floor was a wasteland with little or no life. But what Eldridge and his colleagues observed in the headlights of their submersible were hundreds of organisms never before seen by human eyes—a whole ecosystem that they realized was very, very old. They called it the dark biosphere. There were a lot of hydrothermal vents down there, and pretty soon they figured out that there were microorganisms living on the rock around the vents in temperatures hot enough to melt lead. When they brought some of the organisms to the surface, they smelled of rotten eggs. They realized that these strange organisms were subsisting on the hydrogen sulfide spewed from the vents, and breathing out sulfur the way plants on land produce oxygen. According to Dr. Eldridge’s book, what they had found was no less than a window onto the chemical pathways that billions of years ago led to the dawn of evolution.
The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.
25. MY BROTHER, THE MESSIAH
     
That night while I was reading, Bird came into my room and climbed into bed with me. At eleven and a half, he was small for his age. He pressed his little cold feet into my leg. “Tell me something about Dad,” he whispered. “You forgot to cut your toenails,” I said. He kneaded the balls of his feet into my calf. “Please?” he begged. I tried to think, and because I couldn’t remember anything I hadn’t already told him a hundred times, I made up something. “He liked to rock-climb,” I said. “He was a good climber. Once he climbed up a rock that was, like, two hundred feet tall. Somewhere in the Negev, I think.” Bird breathed his hot breath on my neck. “Masada?” he asked. “Could be,” I said. “He just liked it. It was a hobby,” I said.