“Since the beginning,” he said.
“Of the semester?” I asked.
Everyone laughed.
Brad’s father continued: “I think what Brad’s trying to say is that these fertility people don’t show any signs of progress, which is what sets us apart from the more primitive cultures. There’s a tribe in Borneo that hasn’t even discovered fire, and, you know, we’ve been to the moon.”
I stopped the slide projector and wound the cord while I took a good look at Brad’s father. He wore a polo shirt and a gold necklace, and you could tell that, despite his hard features, he’d led a soft life. I headed for the lectern, and the students groaned as I placed a foot casually on the podium’s rung. They knew what was coming.
“That is a thoughtful contribution, sir, but I would modestly propose in response that the concept of progress is a lie. Certainly, technology improves, but the state of being human is constant. When it does change, well, we’ll be something other than human. It is because we don’t change that the Grecian urn speaks to us.”
My blood was up. I flexed my hand open and closed, then glanced into the hall to see if, in the sliver of her class that I could view from my lectern, Trudy was visible. She wasn’t.
“Of the twin fallacies of humanity,” I continued, “the first is that people invariably believe they live in times of great change and significance. Eighteenth-century England believed it. The pharaohs believed it. Turn-of-the-millennium America believes it. How about living through a great plague — say, 1348 Europe or 1521 Mayan Mexico. Is that significant? Perhaps a few centuries of bondage for a people? A hundred-year war?”
Brad’s father sat with his arms crossed.
“Verdun,” I announced. There was no response. “Birkenau, Bhopal, Black ’47.”
I eased forward to one of the front desks, which always seemed to be empty, and rested a foot on its seat. “Pompeii,” I said. “Apartheid. If these are times of great significance, why isn’t the hair standing on your arms? And if the Trail of Tears is not such a time, then what is? I ask you — can anything that happens to one part of humanity change the sum of the whole?”
I whipped off my glasses for effect, a trick they were used to. A lone student produced an exaggerated yawn, and in the blur of the room, I couldn’t make out the culprit. True, I was getting off the topic with my world tour of tragedy, but the students looked ignorant and scared, the desired effect, so I rolled on past plagues and wars and lectured on torturous despots and senseless disasters.
Yet, after a while, the real truth became evident — the fates of strangers had little impact on us, and I was angry not because I felt connected to anyone in Dresden or Hiroshima, but because I’d witnessed a single disappearance and a single death, and I’d been changed by them. My pity pony wanted to trot the ridge where my pain was visible to those who inhabited both the valley of friends and the mountain of strangers. But you can’t just quit a rant. I’d started something and, like it or not, I had to play it out. I described the backstroke we cut before the waterfall of time, paid some lip service to the bellows of injustice, and finally sketched out the raven of Regret.
I shook the podium one last time, and, before dismissing class early, admonished them: “All life offers us is the moment. There is only the ravishing spontaneity of being, then nothing more. Moments, people — enhearten them, for they are fleeting.”
We all waited to see if I was done, including me.
Then someone asked, “Is that going to be on the final?”
I was the first one out of the room. A queasiness tightened my ribs, and I stared at my feet as I passed Trudy’s door. But I couldn’t resist glancing in. The desks, as I’d imagined, were empty. Walking down the rows of faculty offices, I endured the looks of cartoon characters taped to teachers’ doors, felt the dour, accusing stares of jazz musicians glaring off tacked-up black-and-white postcards. Moments are fleeting? I sounded as dramatic and fake as the romantic poetry glued to English teachers’ in-boxes. Was “enhearten” even a word?
At the end of the hall, my office stood open, as it always did, because of those stupid boxes of research. There were raw ice-core data from Greenland and summaries of nitrogen levels in the air pockets of late-Pleistocene volcanic flows. I’d accumulated diatomaceous readings from glacial loaming and summaries of paleo-pollen samples extracted from amber. Junior had started as an appendix, a small response to critics of The Depletionists, a junior answer to their junior minds. But as my critics grew over the years, so did Junior, and now I was looking at constructing a unified-field model, one that incorporated every variable in the disappearance of the Clovis, if I was ever to rescue my reputation.
I stepped awkwardly over the boxes, adding another set of dirty footprints to these smudged reams. When Peabody was a young professor here, he became fascinated with the ancient petroglyphs lining the canyons around the river. He’d always planned to map those cliff carvings, tracing each one and its relation to the others. Such a comprehensive survey was a big job, but there was no other way to understand the hands that carved them. “I always thought I’d have time,” Peabody told me. “I thought there’d be time.” But he waited too long — they built the dam, and everything was lost underwater.
What a fool I was. In my office, I grabbed my blizzard overalls and left.
Winding down the old staircase, I made out Trudy’s voice, faintly at first. She had her whole class crammed into the Hall of Man, and when I crossed the foyer, she was leading a discussion. Her face was visible over most of the students. I glimpsed her shoulders and recalled our dark work last night. Her eyes were serious, and this display of passionate teaching made me suddenly ashamed of the desire that had animated my imagination before sleep last night.
“That’s a good point,” she was saying to a student, “which brings us to the reason I call this place the Hall of Hoochie. Let’s look at Homo habilis, the earliest hominid represented here. Notice that the person who created this exhibit chose to depict her as lone female. She’s also made older, with droopy features and saggy, flattened breasts. An older ancestor is depicted as an older woman, past child-bearing, and therefore of lesser use.”
Trudy left behind an artwork of smudges and fingerprints where she’d gestured against the glass, then moved on to the next diorama, in which two Homo erectus females sat next to a fire, suckling, while behind them on the wall Peabody had painted, with an amazing sense of perspective, two men in mid-hunt. This was an exhibit I’d always loved. Peabody had captured the meditative way people stare at flames, and I somehow recognized my own gaze in their eyes, which was the best that anthropology could hope to do — in some small way, connect people to the past.
Trudy asked, “What message can be gained from this anthropological display?”
A young woman spoke immediately. “The women are stuck at home with the babies while the men go to work.”
“They’re kind of fat, too,” a young man added.
“Big jugs, though,” Trudy amended, “and less hair. Which brings us to Homo sapiens.”
The whole class shifted over a few steps.
“Here two males carve spear points,” Trudy pointed out, “while the females lounge like supermodels, one of them sucking on a bone. Their breasts are perfect, bodies lean, and they’re unencumbered by offspring. My favorite is the touch of bouffant to their Pleistocene hairstyles. Anachronistic though their coiffures may be, the message to those who view this exhibit is clear. Males provide. Females consume, and the closer we get to modern times, the more women evolve into sexually desirable and available beings.”