“Eggers,” I said, “do you really have a Porsche?”
“Where’d that come from?”
“I’m asking the questions here,” I said. “Do you speak Japanese?”
“Domo arigato.” he said. “You want some French? Merci beaucoup.”
I eyeballed him good. “Are you a billionaire?”
Eggers took a toke of weed.
“You insult me, Dr. Hannah. You know I’ve taken a vow of poverty. I possess nothing but my friends, my loyalty, and twelve thousand years of history.” Here his eyes got hot. “And I’ll have you know, from direct observation, that a billionaire is the most loathsome thing on earth. It’s a person who uses for himself the resources of a thousand others. Worst of all, this wealth makes him think he doesn’t need other people, no matter who they are.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t have a fat book contract?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “I want to change people. My book will make them reconsider everything that’s important in life, the way your book did.”
What was there to say to that?
Satisfied, I lowered my goggles in a way that said, Let’s open this puppy.
A rooster tail of red clay shot from the saw when the ball touched its blade, instantly dulling the ribbon of teeth. Still I cut on, scoring a circle around the equator of the ball, which I cut deeper with each revolution. After I’d worked through about an inch of clay all the way around, the pitch of the blade changed, and it seemed clear I’d hit some softer material.
I shut down the saw and moved the ball to a workbench.
Eggers pulled an antler from his game bag. He worked it into the seam I’d cut, and with a little prying, the clay shell broke loose, revealing an inner core, wrapped in a velum of ancient, hardened tissue that was certainly animal intestine. These yellowed layers of watertight membrane were stiff and crackly to the touch. Picture a head of iceberg lettuce, but with leaves made of hardened rawhide, nearly translucent, tough as bark.
At that point in my life, I had yet to become intimate with the husking sound an animal sternum makes when it’s cracked wide — that yawning, almost creaky noise that comes after you stick your foot into a gaping chest cavity, hatchet through the breastplate, then bend the ribs back to the snapping point. But that’s the kind of sound we heard as Eggers and I began peeling back layers of velum until we reached the center, which contained a cache of tiny white beads.
Eggers and I both grabbed a handful. They rolled smoothly in your fingers, and you’d think they were little pearls except they weren’t quite round. They tended toward a teardrop shape. Too light to be pearls, too.
Eggers sniffed one, then held it up to the light.
“What the hell is it?” he asked.
It struck me suddenly that this was some kind of wampum, that what we’d discovered was the equivalent of Clovis cash, and a wave of dejection ran through me. Certainly there was some anthropologist out there somewhere nerdy enough to study ancient monetary systems, and to him this would be the discovery of a lifetime. Personally, it made me sick — those beads meant that Keno had been a fat cat, bent on taking it with him, that his vision of the afterlife was based on maintaining wealth rather than discovering the infinite, transitioning to the eternal.
The news was going to crush Eggers. I watched him put a bead on the table, but when he went to smash it with an antler, it skittered away. He grabbed another one and inspected it closely.
“What is this made of?” he asked. “Is it ivory? Horn? No one could carve beads so small, so uniform. Who would? And why?”
I put my beads back in the ball. I didn’t want anything to do with them.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’ll worry about it later.”
Eggers looked at me like I was insane.
“Seriously, now, Dr. Hannah, what do you think?” he asked. “Are they man-made? Or naturally occurring? Hey, what about freshwater pearls? Or kidney stones removed from game? Weren’t the Mactaw known to save the kidney stones of the buffalo they butchered?”
It was so like a grad student to be concerned with the small picture, to get caught up in form rather than function. This time, I was happy to keep it that way.
“Not to worry,” I said. “We’ll do some tests later this month and get to the bottom of things.”
“Month?” he asked. “I don’t have a month. My dissertation’s almost over.”
I leaned against the table, crossed my arms. “Just when are you done?”
“Exactly?” Eggers asked. “I don’t know, exactly. It’s not like I use a calendar or anything. I’ll have to check where the sun sets on the horizon.”
“You said you started last year, after Parents Weekend, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, “Parents Weekend is over.”
“Let’s just get back to work,” Eggers said, and moved to put a bead in his mouth, as if taste might solve this problem.
I grabbed his wrist. “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You don’t know what we’re dealing with. Remember the National Geographic team who discovered that galleon in the North Sea? They celebrated by drinking a jug of wine from its hold, and everything was one big party until they became the first people in five hundred years to contract the Thames strain of the black plague.”
Eggers adopted a look of bemused indulgence. Or maybe it was the reefer.
“Dr. Hannah, my worms have worms,” he said. “My amoebas have dysentery. Over the past year, I’ve devoured frogs, ducklings, and minnows, still wriggling, and I’ve actually taken a liking to a dish I call ‘culvert surprise.’ I’ve eaten eggs straight from bird nests, little blue speckled things that you crunch down whole. I’ve gnawed on acorns till I shit lentil soup, and I ate a perch straight from the gullet of a dead river eel. I had squirrel fever for three weeks. I’ve eaten larvae, fungus, crabapples, and sap. I’ve siphoned blood from livestock, then frozen it into little cubes I could chew on for breakfast. In October, I practically lived on pumpkin meat, and I was the one who stole the candy canes off the USSD Christmas tree. I’ve eaten old fishing bait, Dr. Hannah. I’m a man who’s sucked the sunflower seeds from bird feeders.”
That doobie gave him a serious case of the munchies, I thought as Eggers droned on and on about his diet. But then, out of the blue, I said, “Seeds.”
“Seeds?” Eggers asked.
Like a thunderbolt, it had struck me. “What if they’re seeds?”
“Seeds,” Eggers echoed, starting to nod his head.
I grabbed one of the beads, studied it. In the light, it did appear organic. Indeed, you could see a tiny dot at the end of the seed — the growth bud.
“It looks like corn,” I said. “Don’t they look like miniature kernels of maize?”
Eggers looked dubious. “Sure, it looks like corn, but maize comes from South America. It’s only migrated north in the last few thousand years.”
“Bear with me,” I said, gesturing largely. “Let’s imagine, hypothetically, that maize was indigenous to all the Americas, but then the Clovis came along, and through overconsumption they eradicated it, the way they eradicated everything else they touched.”
“But what about the Law of Seeds?” Eggers asked. “Doesn’t the Law of Seeds state that the fruit of plants beneficial to humans will be made profligate — not extinct — by them?”
“But not when the food is cooked,” I countered.
Eggers looked at me suspiciously. “The Clovis left no grinding stones,” he said. “There are no cooking pots, no hearths, nothing. Clovis teeth show none of the wear associated with milled cereals. Yet you’re saying the Clovis cooked corn fritters?”