Then he rolled away.
* * *
Inside, there were no messages, no notes, no pets to greet me. Janis’ face, when I passed it, pretended not to see the state I lived in. I grabbed a tumbler of water and sat in the living room, the light through the windows frail but clear as I reclined in a chair that had belonged to my father. A parade of hypotheticals overtook me — flashing from Julie to Keno to Peabody to a woman in a motel I’d never met — making it seem as if their lives were accessible, open to influence, coexisting in a realm of simultaneity, of possibility, with mine. In my animation of them, we were all in a room together, or at a picnic bench, laughing, talking, and Peabody could toss peanuts that Keno would catch in his mouth as easily as Julie and Janis might reminisce on fate. But really I was as remote from them as Ivan, in his own chair in Siberia, wondering why he was all alone.
I absently tugged at the gift-shop bag Trudy had given me. I pulled out clear baggie after clear baggie, each of them containing a bone. Most looked like metatarsals and phalanges, though one cracked section might have been part of the radius. Each bone was tagged with a numbered marker and individually sealed with an instant photo of the bone in situ, next to a metric ruler. At the bottom of the sack was a receipt from the casino gift shop for a Polaroid camera, a roll of toilet paper, and a box of Ziplocs. On the back of the receipt was a note in Trudy’s handwriting:
Dr. Hannah — I need your help to pull this off. Eggers can never know.
I got up and walked to my bedside table. Here was the Clovis point Eggers had given me, and his battered, annotated copy of my book, as well as the cast of my mother’s leg and a pair of Janis’ blocky eyeglasses. I placed Trudy’s note among these things. I knew Trudy and Eggers’ excavation was still wrong, that the whole project was undertaken in bad faith, but I must admit that a feeling of well-being had spread over me at the idea that Trudy had learned a thing or two, that I’d taught her something.
I flossed and shaved, and in the shower I used double the shampoo, going after my scalp with a hive of fingernails. I put on a spiffy sportcoat while I steeped a cup of tea, though all I had was an herbal brand called BabyDreams, the only kind Janis could drink near the end. It tasted a little like candy canes, but I didn’t mind. I stood there a minute, sipping it. Her plants draped the room, and in the sideways light you could see the veins in leaves that look X-rayed.
Then I took off the sportcoat, the slacks. I suppose I’d been planning all along to attend Julie’s lecture. In the back of my closet was a suit I’d worn only once, when I was invited to sit on a panel at Harvard. It was chocolate-brown, cut smart, with a faint windowpane pattern and a three-button breast. For a while, I’d lacked occasions to wear it again, and then, as time went by, the more I thought about that day, the less I wanted to remember it. The best minds in anthropology were there — Stanford’s Hatitia Wells, the Rogers-Klugman team from Princeton — but all I could think about was how the other panelists kept interrupting me, cutting me off, and when I finally got my chance, my mouth became a device whose sole purpose was to blab about my theory, my book, me. I honestly can’t remember one thing anybody else said. Maybe now, I figured, I could meet a new day in that suit.
I didn’t so much put it on as step into it. The jacket hung perfectly — shoulders snug, vents loose, buttons custom-fit-and the slacks looked creased by cardsharps. “Julie,” I said, snapping the cuffs. School was only a block away, but I fired up the ’Vette. There’d be no parking, of course, but I could usually squeeze into that little zone reserved for motorcycles.
On campus, I was struck by the void where the helicopter had been. Its absence was overwhelming. I had Trudy’s bag and about thirty minutes to get to work before Julie’s lecture, but I stood in the quad, just staring at the snowless zone where that chopper had been.
Inside the anthro building, I needed a secure location to study Keno. The answer, when I nosed around a little, was obvious: the Hall of Man. It was the only place with serious locks on the doors, and students, unless forced to enter, avoided the place like the plague. Peabody had also installed temperature and humidity controls to maintain his exhibits. The lighting was great. From my office, I grabbed a fine-work kit, complete with detail tools, most of them dental, and a couple of bottles of light acid for etching.
With all my gear, I crossed campus for the biology department. The white lawns were nearly empty on a late Saturday morning. A lost Frisbee lay half exposed in the rotor-washed snow, and a pair of moon boots hung from the bough of a diseased elm, slowly turning in the bright light reflected from the newly iced river. This side of campus was home to all the “hard” sciences, like engineering and physics, and all the buildings had been constructed in the sixties with the same lust for broad expanses of cheap, overly red brick.
I used an old master key Peabody had left me to get upstairs into the dissection lab, which was also where they stored all the veterinary pathogens. I needed a gurney, and, luckily, lined up at the edge of the room were several stainless-steel autopsy tables. Any of these would be perfect for storing Keno, as Eggers and Trudy unearthed him piece by piece. I’d begun to wheel one away when I spotted one of those tall, rolling stools that lab techs use; I’d always wanted one of those, and this baby was chrome. I sat on it, lifting my legs to push off the cabinet. I rolled across the room toward the bovine-virus freezers, where I came face to face with a pair of big orange biohazard signs that warned of imminent, deadly contamination. I liked those swirly, spiky biohazard symbols — so threatening! — and when I pushed off and rolled back, I had these signs in my hand.
The biohazard signs, when I’d taped them to the doors of the Hall of Man, had quite an effect. No one was going to bother Keno in there. He’d be safe on his personal autopsy table, though I didn’t like to think of it that way — we were reconstructing Keno, not the other way around, even though all we had of him were some bones from his left hand, half a forearm, and a shoulder blade. Ninety percent of his skeleton was still missing, and somehow I loved the knowledge that the other pieces would come, that he’d no longer be lost as the three of us brought him in from the cold. When I looked at those six empty feet of brushed steel, I didn’t see the metallic void where a person should be but, rather, the place where we were going to make the remotest of humans materialize.
It was in this state of mind that I made my way to the agribusiness building, which was really just the old history building, gutted and renovated. I walked under that Santayana quote, shaking my head, and I couldn’t help noticing how watery and colorless the building had become since agri-business took over, since history had become an entertaining elective, not a subject that merited a major. Entering the alcove felt more like striding into a dentist’s office — pastel carpets now covered the old wooden floors, and the lath and plaster had given way to expandable, accordionlike walls that could accommodate any conference or team-building session. The old water fountains, copper with malachite basins, had been replaced by a lone blue cooler. It was as if they’d tried to remove the history of the building itself. But history isn’t so easily glossed over. I could feel the past fixed here by a century of storytelling in these rooms. The meditations of Sor Juana seemed woven into the banister’s scrollwork. The fate of Darius felt cut in the ceiling’s frieze.