When the local news came on, Eggers set the remote aside.
He said, “The footage is from this morning, but the evening news always replays it.”
On the screen was a program entitled Parkton 7 Action Report. In the world update, a forest fire gripped Eastern Europe, a Russian pyramid scheme had collapsed, and, like twisters crossing open water, twin columns of civil war walked tall and storm-faced across Africa. Locally, there was a warehouse fire, a funeral-home lawsuit, and a couple of lost dogs.
“Here we go,” Eggers said.
On the screen came a typical powder-puff public-relations segment for a local ground-breaking ceremony: there was footage of a big ribbon being cut, and then a tedious shot of several guys in white hard hats and business suits pretending to push shovels into the frozen earth. There were a few sound bites from a speech — the bright future, partnerships for tomorrow, and so on.
“Eggers, please,” I said, “is this what you’ve been doing with yourself? Did your year as a Clovis impart to you nothing but a love for Nikes, Doritos, and the couch?”
“Calm down, Dr. Hannah,” he told me. “Watch.”
On the screen came a shot of the thunderbird logo, and I realized this was an expansion celebration for Phase II of the casino.
The Parkton 7 Action anchor then cut “live” to a Parkton 7 Action reporter. The two women looked identical to me — lots of puffy hair and bright suits. On the screen came a standard Native American purification ceremony, held in the casino’s parking lot. Cedar and hemp were burned, an Honor Circle was maintained, and there was a very serious execution of the Dance of the West Winds. When one of the Elders entered the circle and appealed to the Great Spirit, I needed to know what he was saying.
“Eggers,” I said, “turn it up, would you? Pass the remote.”
“Shh,” Eggers said, trying to figure out how to work the thing.
The volume went up, but all you could make out was the babbling of the Parkton 7 Action reporter’s voice-over. I stared at the Elder. It was time, I knew, for the sacrifice, but instead of offering the Winds objects of previous good fortune, like proven arrows, musical instruments of particular sweetness, or heirlooms with strong medicine, the Elder hefted Keno’s other ball.
Suddenly the camera panned to film the assembled crowd. Just when Keno’s ball was about to be destroyed in an act of sacrifice, we were given images of the geriatric gamblers, convention-goers from the American Meat Wholesalers Association, and a fleet of sleeping tour buses, their parking lights outlining them in the cold mist. When I needed to hear the Confirmation of Elders and see which dance they chose, I was instead forced to watch off-duty meat cutters and guards from Club Fed as they fed their fat kids cotton candy and Indian fry bread. That’s what drove me crazy about television — you could never see the images you wanted to see. I stood. “Eggers, I can’t take this shoddy videography!”
“Please, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said, “control yourself.”
Finally, the camera did one last pan of the ceremony. The dancers, of course, were moving under trance, and members of the Honor Council wore gazes that come only when one contemplates the millennia. The Elder, after appealing to the sky with force and purpose, simply smashed the ball against the pavement before moving on to conduct his other duties — sanctifying the circle’s perimeter with handfuls of flax that quickly blew away, and making appeals to the wind that swept the circle’s four corners. That was the end of the segment, but as the camera cut to the reporter’s pitiful summary, we could see in the background something that nearly made us jump out of our seat: a cloud of grainy black dust issued forth from the smashed ball, looking like instant coffee as waves of it took to the wind, blowing in streaks down the line of spectators. The cloud smudged ties, blacked faces, left old people coughing and meat wholesalers shaking out their collars.
The reporter signed off, and Eggers killed the television.
“That black cloud,” I said, “what could it have been?”
Eggers said, “If you ask me, that was meat — blood and meal weathered down to an oily dust. That was what remains of a raw mastodon flank. Take a look at the bottom of my game bag if you want a lesson on meat desiccation.”
The Egyptians were the ones who came to my mind, the way they removed a human’s vital organs before burial. These organs were placed in individual clay jars marked with the appropriate insignia of the god intended to watch over them — liver, Isis; heart, Anubis; lung, Amen-Ra — so the body could retrieve them in the afterlife. But I didn’t tell Eggers that. I didn’t outwardly muse that it was Keno’s organ meat floating up the noses of meatpackers, that it was the blood of the best animal-killers on earth that had gritted their hair and gotten under their skin.
What shocked me was that it was over. A door to the past had closed, right before our eyes, and the horror I felt was magnified by the fact that we witnessed it as a rerun. Of course, what we couldn’t know there, on that couch in the prison rec room, was that the opposite had really happened: that what we’d really witnessed was eternity’s icy door opening wide. “Is there any way to know?” I asked Eggers. “Will we ever figure out what that cloud was?”
Eggers put his new shoes up on the ottoman. He rubbed his hair, then gave his wrist an almost imperceptible shake. This little tic was something I’d noticed during his days as a Clovis, but only now did I understand that the gesture was meant to wind the movement inside his perpetual watch. “Negative,” he said.
My dear colleagues, were there any anomalies that would help you, so far in the future, to figure out the exact day on which these events took place? Was there an odd weather disturbance that might leave a long-term mark? Were the sun and moon engaged in some rare dance, or did the planets align in an unusual pattern that might allow you to trace this day from your distant vantage? Negative.
* * *
I had been feeling pretty spunky about my debut in the broadcast booth, but as evening came on and I walked toward the signal tower, I did so contemplatively, staring at my feet, the fur of my coat scampering in the wind. Of course, I couldn’t have known that things had forever changed. A scientific opportunity had been lost, certainly. Some insight into the past was irretrievably gone. It didn’t matter that it was in the name of greed, gambling, or quality meat. That was the way of the world. The loss I felt was more personal. It was as if I’d come close to meeting an aged relative from the Old World who then expired on the crossing. As long as Keno reclined in a grave, and someone wanted to know her story, she was alive. And now, after waiting thousands of years for me to come find her, she’d died. I’d spent my life shining a flashlight into the universe, trying to back its mystery up a few steps with the weak beam of my inquiry. Well, it was the universe’s turn to put me on my heels.
The broadcasting booth looked not unlike a grad student’s cubicle — cement walls, carpeted partitions, and pipes above that rattled with every toilet flush. I’d expected a big microphone and fancy instrument panel, one whose displays would flicker with my every word. There wasn’t even a sound team. Instead, there was only an old white guy who sat me down in front of some obsolete language-lab equipment and clamped a pastel-blue headset on me, the kind with the loopy cord. He broke the news that my readings wouldn’t be archived, that no tapes would be made for posterity. My words would simply be beamed out into the world, and they’d never come back.
When the red light flashed above me, I opened my book, folded back the front matter, and looked at the first sentence, which was a long and lofty metaphor comparing humanity to a wildfire that would consume the fuel of the earth until it burned itself out. The flashy, sophomoric bravado of hooking the reader with an opening shock made me cringe. I began with the second line instead: “So, when examining pre-Holocene Paleo-Indians, we must follow a twin-pronged strategy of examining the fire of Clovis lithic hunting technologies with the fuels of North American megafauna.”