I can’t say I got past the first page or two on that opening night of reading. I had many asides and interjections planned, but whenever I dove into an anecdote, it felt forced and clumsy. And all the gossip I inserted about rival anthropologists ended up sounding catty. I would read and jabber, read and jabber, and soon I couldn’t tell what I had written and what I was ad-libbing.
Before me in the sound booth was a Bible, a book with way more ancient tribes than mine, not to mention convoluted family trees and unpronounceable names. Still, the book had some poetry going for it, and more than one cliffhanger. Talk about reversals of fortune. As I read The Depletionists into the microphone, I lifted this Bible, flipped through its illustrated pages. Another prisoner must have read this during his hour, and the thought of sending scripture out into the dark prairies was somehow soothing to me.
As I droned on about Clovis hunting technologies, I flipped through the Bible, looking at all the color plates, paintings in watery pastels of blond angels cavorting with bearded prophets. One picture near the end was nothing but ringing trumpets and flaming chariots, shining cymbals and thrones of gold. The Bible, it seemed, occupied most of its time describing the manifold kingdom of the afterlife, with all its rings, rooms, levels, and layers. The Good Book told you what songs the angels sang and how many steps led to the seat of the Holy Ghost. Over and over, the dead had it made — all was glory and light. Halos, harps, lapis, and linen were standard issue. But there was little real news of our loved ones — where did they sleep, and how did they occupy themselves? Isn’t that what we, the people left behind, wanted to know? Isn’t that why we point our telescopes skyward — to catch some glimpse among the firmament of the glitter-dust of the soul? Why else did people watch sunsets, if not to observe the contrails of the heavens cross the horizon line of the earth?
And what of the rest of us stuck here below? Why did the prophets make no provision for the living? And why is heaven an either/or situation? Should we just pretend that souls are swept cleanly to some golden afterlife — that, of a mother or lover, not even a crumb remains? I know that people leave shadows behind. I feel the traces of the departed — in the stillness of my room, just before sleep; in the moans of ice on the water; in the shine, dusty and spectral, flashing off a digging trowel. So — why won’t the Bible give us the coordinates of where to look in the sky? Why doesn’t it tell me the frequency I need to hear the voices of the departed? What are we supposed to do? Use our dang imaginations?
And why does no one ask of a lover or friend, Tell me, if a piano falls, or your car rolls over, how will I find you? Why doesn’t anyone simply ask, Where will you leave some of yourself when you’re gone? How come no one grabs a parent, before Dad’s heart attack, before Mom’s stroke, and asks, Where will I feel your presence? Where should I stand, what object should I touch, what language should I speak when I say I still need you?
And why did I not ask this of Yulia? Why did I waste my breath querying her over what bulbs she had planted? How could I fritter important time away, wondering what flowers would rise from her garden come spring? I needed to implore of her, If you leave me, what will evoke you? I should have demanded, Tell me what movie I should watch, what tune I should sing, what book should be open on my chest when I wish to fall asleep and dream of you. Tell me, dear colleagues of tomorrow, tell me that in the future these are questions no one’s afraid to ask.
In the broadcasting booth, a red light flashed, which meant my time was up. On the table before me were a Bible and my book, both open, and I realized I hadn’t been reading either of them, that, lost in thought, I’d been broadcasting silence to the blind of the Dakotas, and because only silence came back, I had no way of knowing how long it had been going on.
* * *
Over the next couple days, they began killing the pigs. I can’t say any of us thought too much of it. There was some new kind of swine influenza going around the Midwest, they said, and it was true: people were starting to come down with a nasty bug. Some of the guards had called in sick, and Gerry was working round the clock, which was fine by him. Plus, in the last couple years alone, we’d seen news images of Europeans slaughtering cattle in the tens of millions, and Hong Kong had killed every chicken in its principality, by lots of a million a day.
When they first lit the swine fire, I was sitting on the dorm steps, attempting to shape a piece of chert into a spear point. The evening was clear and still, with the setting sun teetering on the horizon, its light limp, urine-tinted, and coming right at us. Through this, the smoke rose vertically, with dark billows breaking free.
Several prisoners drifted out. Hands buried in their blue jumpsuits, they studied the blaze. Someone said the National Guard had left the armory in Rapid City for parts unknown. Other people who had watched the news said the sickness started in meatpacking plants. Fifteen million hogs, someone said, were being slaughtered in Iowa alone. Bacon was being pulled from the shelves. Hospitals had opened quarantine wards. As they were talking, an old prisoner coughed, and everyone took an instinctive step away.
They went on and on — what was rumor and what was true? I didn’t need any news, let alone speculation. The night was clear enough that the truth was before our eyes: at all points on the horizon, bright sparks of light were igniting in towns like Doltin and Willis, like Hollister, Glanton, and Langley. There was to be a Holocaust of hogs, and, unfortunately for the pigs of America, their Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Birkenau already existed. The dark aria of pigdom, I knew, would soon be finished, and I figured that, within the week, they’d be importing fresh little piglets from places like Portugal and New Zealand. What I didn’t know was that when the oven bricks glowed white-hot at Hormel they’d glow for good, and I’d soon be stoking the flames.
Eventually, Gerry joined us in the cold night air. He looked at the assembled prisoners as if searching for some petty infraction he could berate them for, and, finding none, he turned his attention to me. He toed through the various samples of stone I had spread on the steps.
“Don’t these look just like the pretty rocks in the warden’s garden?” he asked.
I didn’t respond. Whatever I said would earn me push-ups, and then there was the fact that I was flint-knapping chert, a difficult stone to work, and I was shaping the initial blade line, the most critical part. Holding the chert in a flap of buckskin, I chipped my way from the tip to the base, using an antler to strike short, deep cuts.
Gerry sat beside me and picked up a piece of obsidian. “You think you know everything, don’t you, Hanky?” he asked. “You think everyone else is a stupid little doofus.” Copying my motions, he began fashioning the stone — cleaving off larger, convex chips with strikes to the edge, and then lining the cutting surface with teeth in a twisting, pressure-flake maneuver.
We watched the fires, which had been ignited only an hour or two before, and still smelled mostly of fuel. Though we couldn’t yet feel the heat on our faces, the columns cast deep shadows, the turning air inside corniced with the black carbon of fat and blood. Gerry picked up stone-blade technology faster than anyone I’d seen. He really had the knack, especially when it came to obsidian, which even Clovis probably wouldn’t work in a low-light situation. Gerry was basically playing with black glass in the dark. I offered him a piece of chert, which was white. He shrugged this off and kept working, occasionally watching my technique, occasionally casting an eye to the growing fires. Though Gerry had no idea how to make a spear point, he somehow knew that strikes to the base would broaden the biface and that sharpening the tip should be saved for last. He didn’t understand the need to flute the point or to segment the tail so it could attach to a spear. Yet the cutting edge he had going looked ready to butcher a mastodon.