After James (31 page)

After the pregnancy she had slipped into a kind of beyond, a place she once couldn't have imagined. She had no illusion that her father could be there with her, but she had hoped to tell him about it someday. Now he had taken some turn of his own. She realized she'd recently been expecting a change in him. But why the expectation? In everyone was a reservoir of intuitive knowledge. The mistake was to think of this reservoir as magical. Around her eighth week she began listening for intuition,
which she pictured dripping from the top of her skull, pooling in the cranial dish of her occipital bone, then trickling down her spine to her sacrum. She had simply found herself believing that the falling drops connected her to her deepest processes, to the possibilities in her future, even more truly to her father. She'd made herself vulnerable to lazy, superstitious thinking, and had failed to pay attention to what was real, a fetus, and made some error, distracted by dream. Though she listened, she heard nothing, won nothing, and after she lost the baby she stopped believing in things unseen. Science, madness, religion. They all had their sorting systems, all depended on belief in things unseen, but they weren't equivalent. Who wouldn't want to believe in the soul? Who had the sense and mettle not to?

A tail of light in the river. Something caught the moon. She couldn't tell if it was on the surface or just below, or see at all what it was. It moved by in the dark. Maybe she was seeing the edge of a piece of wood washed off an upriver bank. It rolled, flashed, and disappeared downstream.

As she returned to the table a scented wind presented itself. Storms here would appear unannounced from over the mountains. They'd show up and rain floods, ruining the roads and breaking off conversations, interrupting the passage of thought.

Her father admitted he was trying to say a thing without saying it.

“You mean something like
mystical consciousness
,” said Koss.

“What were you describing the other night? The Hindu word?”

“The state of absolute
samadhi.
”

“I think that came up in yoga class,” she said. “The words were even worse than the pan flute. I had to quit. I mean, who fails a yoga class?”

“Well, I'd never heard of it. We seem to need new things, strange words now and then. They're part of the mystery we're made of.”

“We're made of gene codes and brain architectures,” she said. “Including our religious impulses. You've always known this, Dad. Maybe it gets harder to know after a while.”

For a moment there he was, the fixing look he used long ago when she was a misbehaving child. But the look gave way. She couldn't read what took its place.

“Whoever we are,” he said, “there's a core person in there, and that person is connected to elemental and timeless forces.”

“How can there be a core person if they can be changed completely by a trauma or a little plaque in the brain?”

“But change is our condition,” said Koss. “The only god is the one who's ever becoming. Ever becoming inside of us.”

“The only thing becoming inside us is death,” she said. The men were silent. They looked in her direction without meeting her eye. “I'm not saying this especially troubles me.”

“We've rejected so much as a species, dear. It's vanity to dismiss the wisdoms of earlier men and women. The primitive mind knew a thing or two that seem lost on us.”

So this was how it would manifest. He would speak more often of the mind, less of the bones. She had loved the bones. Through the years he'd made gifts of them, sometimes wrapped in newspaper pages local to wherever he'd made his field trip. He dedicated the bigger ones to her with
a black marker: “(To Celia. Tail Fragment, Megatherium. Argentina. 310,000 years).” The last one—her final year of high school—had been a partial third metacarpal of
Equus occidentalis
, a proto-horse of the Americas, 120,000 years old, wrapped in pages of the
Klondike Sun.
She cherished the bones of extinct species for the thought of her they represented. That year she'd saved her money to sponsor a rescue horse, so he'd given her the
Equus
and not the femur from the American camel, for instance. The year before, after she came through a dental surgery she had dreaded, he chose not the rib fragment of the mammoth but its huge molar, heavy as a cantaloupe, amazing and ridiculous. The ancient, partial bones had the character of his fatherly sentiment, measured exactly in the amount she was able to accept. She kept them wrapped in burlap in a chest at the foot of her bed.

“Maybe we're not so far from watching shadows on the cave walls,” said Koss. “Celia, I want to show you something.” In his hand—where had it come from?—a small device. He turned in his chair and pointed it into the dark and there on a rectangle of dull plaster on the back of the building appeared projected light, a scene. As the animation began, an ache took up in her legs and back.

On the chateau wall was the chateau, the very side of it they faced. The image was silent even as they appeared, first Koss and her father, walking out to the table, and then, trailing behind, Celia herself. The scene was lit at not yet dusk. The three of them were approximately rendered. The animated Celia turned to look at the chateau, taking it all in, looking back now at the estate, the river, into the viewing
perspective of the camera or whatever you'd call it. There was something slightly wrong with her. Her hair shorter, she was too tall. Their faces were about half-right. Her legs were too thin, and in fact not plausibly human, just sort of tubular placeholders for legs. This was the intended aesthetic, lazily gesturing at the real. She wore brown pants and a black tunic thing, not really her look. She sat down at the table she was sitting at, same chair. They were talking now, her father and Koss, and Koss was turning to her for a reaction, just as he'd done earlier, and was doing now, in fact, and on the wall they raised their glasses and toasted something or other. Their programmer. Their success at seeming to be. Their motions were stiff with digital algorithms. For a half minute or so they ate who knows what, a lull in the playing-out trick. Then they all stood. The virtual camera dollied in behind them as they walked toward the low stone wall and looked out at the river and the falls. The miracle of it appeared only then, for there were the teenagers, swimming in the pool. Celia looked for the silent boy, wondered if he'd been rendered, but of course she'd never really seen the kids clearly. He could have been any of them, even one of the girls, given that in the water they were indistinguishable. There was a dog on the bank, white with black spots, running to and fro, barking, soundless. Celia was sure there'd been no dog earlier but the dog must accompany the teens more often than it didn't, and Koss had guessed it would be part of their evening as, in a sense, it was.

The movie on the wall, too, was spotted now as moths pressed into the illumination and she felt a chill of revulsion.
The shadows fell left-right on the animated rockface. A figure climbed onto the bank. It was the boy, her quiet boy, she decided, and the dog jumped up at him freed from the earth for just a second and he stepped back and let the dog fall clean and foursquare and then the two of them climbed up the rocks. At one point the dog slipped a little and the boy steadied it and gave it a boost in the hindquarters and then they were above the falls. He picked up the dog and held it squirming in his arms and walked out into the river and she saw now that the river ran straight, it ran very straight here, and there at the bottom of the frame the animated Celia turned her head to look at Koss with a wide alarm and he only half-turned his face, not even that, only just barely acknowledging her, and then lifted his chin at the scene, making her look, so that just as she was about to turn to him now he had already shown her his response, and she kept watching the silent boy in the movie. It was the boy's world cast there on the wall, his silent world was all. The kids in the pool waved their arms as if trying to catch some kind of sense, and the dog was squirming scared, but his tail wagged and he wanted this, wanted to be part of their playing. She tried to picture how it would happen, the boy's posture or whatever, what was the gamble in it, but he just took three running steps and launched off from one leg and he threw the dog forward so the two of them fell separate but level. They hit the water at the same time.

The scene was fully textured now. It played on the backs of insects, and there he was, the boy came up. The dog at first did not and then the wake just before it breached and swam downstream, then looped back and joined them, swimming
right through the too-perfect circle they formed, and continued to the bank and climbed out. And then of course it shook itself and the water from its coat flew everywhere and the kids were cheering, sort of bobbing up and down and throwing their hands in the air like it was all a rave, and only then did she realize it was the first time for the dog, they'd not done this before, and things might have turned out some other way in the video. Except of course they were wrong, the happy ending was assured from the outset, and as if it wasn't false enough, the three of them at their table at the bottom of the frame also raised their hands and waved them in celebration as the kids all ducked under the surface and swam to the shore and climbed out. They turned and waved back at their audience, and for just an instant she saw it—what had happened—and the wall went dark.

“A wonderful show,” said her father. Koss didn't register the comment. He was looking at Celia and she was looking at him.

“You did that on purpose, then,” she said.

“Did it capture you?”

“It was very impressive, Armin,” said her father.

“You've tried to hide it,” she said. “The real story.”

“What is the real story?”

“What are you talking about, dear?”

“The story is that we're distracted by false joy, the dog and the cheering, and we miss the truth. The truth is there were six kids in the water at the start, but only five got out at the end.”

Koss turned his head slightly, as if to listen better.

“I wasn't counting,” said her father.

“One of them never surfaced.”

“Could this be a mistake?” asked Koss. The question had been prepared.

“Is it true?” Her father was trailing, disappointed in himself. “I missed it.”

Her eyes had not fully readjusted. His face looked skyped.

“I would have us think of it as a mistake, but maybe Celia has seen the truth. Maybe even without knowing, I do this. In my little worlds people go missing.”

Koss walked them to the car. He shook her father's hand and then opened his arms to her interrogatively, leaned in, held her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her on both cheeks. She stood very still.

The road was empty and dark, the headlights dim. The illuminated rockfaces led them onward. He tested the high beams. They seemed to make no difference.

He said, “It had its effect, his movie. Different on you than on me.”

He stared ahead, failing to work through some thought about people and their behaviours. He wouldn't know whose version of the video to accept. Koss had given ground too readily, as if to allow Celia a way out of an embarrassment. Again he had known that she and her father would read him differently.

Even in the car she felt the night chill. She watched the passing rockfaces and dozed. She dreamed of floating spores,
a dozen or so people standing in a field. We breathe in spores of light that tax us, thin our thoughts. Then the spores were high above and they were airplanes and the whole world was a city in wartime. She saw what would happen, her father's remaining days.

She woke to the road, the cliff wall gone.

The bobbing brass machine. Koss had said a secret, not a trick. Her body would catch up to her in a day or so. She'd have her senses about her, alarmed at the course of her thoughts just now and relieved that she hadn't gone back into the chateau and taken hold of the machine, as if to break or understand it.

When they arrived at the house she was just for a moment a young girl, coming home with her father from a sad, antiseptic hospital room. The house stood there with its darkness locked up and peering out at them. She knew what it felt like to the touch, the home darkness, and then he walked ahead and the lights came on in their wide and ancient pretending.

T
here'd been days like this in grad school, up before dawn getting ready for an outing. Back then they'd all loaded into a minivan too small for them and their four tents and propane grill and hiking boots and at least two secreted thesis chapters to be edited by moonlight and lantern, headed north for eleven hours, and there they gathered, around a fire, seven students and their mentor, Erik Bouma. The yearly weekend in bear country was unstated mandatory. Research money was siphoned off to fund it. Erik joked in all seriousness that it was “teamship-building,” getting the word wrong, but on the third trip Celia wanted the days for silence, or at least talklessness. For dream. Erik liked to induce in them a shared dream, to insist they were all at the centre of what was coming, that there would be applications for their knowledge no one could yet imagine, and then he tried to steer the dream and imagine for them. He told stories of disease therapies and reversals, of antiaging, memory enhancement. In their off time, he said, they could sell their genetic science expertise in
every direction. Already he'd been offered huge sums to speak to Mounties and G-men, play the expert at drug piracy trials, authenticate unsigned de Koonings. Not all of these jobs he'd said yes to. He'd had set before him by a captain of Japanese industry a briefcase full of money to entice him to clone the long-extinct, thirty-five-hundred-pound South American short-faced bear. The briefcase, the short-faced bear, half of the dreams and their contents were stolen from movies, though they were also real, or possible.

In the pause after he said, “The future is in front of us,” she almost said, “No shit,” but then he added, “and so is the past.” He could take some ribbing, could Erik, but he wouldn't stop with the pithy sayings. “We serve the living, the dead, and the unborn.” The unborn came up a lot. Celia found she couldn't picture them except as newborns or futuristic adults of very pale skin wearing spaceship uniforms with stirruped pant legs. The real unborn, as they could be conceived of now, in their current state, were more like shapeless energies inside the living. If she followed the thought long enough they became, basically, the sexual impulse. Complicated, to be struggled with or surrendered to. Even when joyful, unstable.

Or so she had thought then. Now, in bed in a guest room in rural France, the unborn was someone specific. His name was James. He would be seven months old.

She'd left them at the campfire and gone to pee and then walked farther into the woods until the voices were gone. She hadn't brought a flashlight but the moon was bright. She sat on a fallen tree, felt the bark and guessed cedar, and closed her
eyes and listened into the silence. In nature she'd learned to picture an ever-deeper auditory penetration of the darkness. Smaller sounds would take form. Others would trail the end of a breeze. At first you had to let the sound be sound, and not try to assign it to animals, birds, jet planes, water. She found a state of nonthought and the silence took its place. It seemed she was there a long time and nothing emerged but a small wind, its empty wake. With nothing to hold on to she slid into memory echoes from the day, mostly voices, Erik's Swiss-German English, making great claims. At one of the highway stops he had looked over at her, standing slightly apart, and she saw a sympathy, or at least a sad acknowledgement of her. She was not the most talented or ambitious of his students, not the easiest to direct. She expanded discussions into strange territories, beset by a kind of speculative ethics. Not just, what are the dangers in bringing extinct viruses back to life? but what does it
mean
to play god or, as she'd always thought of god, nature? He probably expected her to become a teacher at a minor university or a science journalist, maybe even an enemy of the cause. She was learning about herself through his view of her, as she imagined it.

She tried again to quiet the thoughts. The silence was a presence in itself. When the wind came up she heard something inside it, and let it be, just listening, and then she understood it was one tree rubbing against another in the distance. It hadn't been there before. The wind had changed. Now it was gone but something else was there, then wasn't, then there it was again. On the edge of her perception, miles away, a wolf was howling. She tucked inside the furrowed
note and it ran with her and died. Then the same note grew forth again and, in a higher register, a second howl joined the first. Soon there were many overlapping voices, calling and answering, it seemed. Asserting the only shared truth. Blood bone I am.

She stayed with the wolves for some duration, until, at last, she could no longer hear them. Then came the greater absence, and then even the absence attenuated to nothing. How lucky not to have been with the group. They'd have talked of wolf studies, certainly, the meaning of howls, of pitches and amplitudes, the human measures of animal territories. Maybe someone would have brought up Prokofiev or Red Riding Hood, or Lon Chaney versus every wolfman since. Whatever the subject, they would certainly have talked. Briefly she succeeded in banishing the thought of them and now, in the aftermath, came something low, in approach. The underbrush took animal weight. She tried to measure distance with sound. She listened for a kind of breath, the huff of a black bear or grizzly, but the thing in approach was gone and then no it was behind her and she turned and saw the flashlight beam. For a moment her voice wouldn't come, and then she said, “I'm here.”

“Oh thank god.” It was Chandra. “Erik and Jeremy are out here somewhere looking for you, too.”

Chandra was the only other woman in the group, the new student, a hard wisdom just starting to take up in her dark baby face. She was smart and ambitious. Presumably she understood what it meant that the future and the past were before her. She knew she was in a world of boys and their
toys, and she had shared a joke or two with Celia. In the end, though, Celia knew, if it came to it, Chandra would always side with the boys.

“No bears. Just the wolves.”

Chandra hadn't heard the wolves. When they returned to the fire, the group, Celia learned that no one had heard them. Erik asked her how far, what direction, how many distinct howls. He didn't ask her to describe the feeling of hearing them, a question she wanted but wouldn't have been able to answer. It intrigued the hapless Jeremy to suggest that she was probably just trying to scare them. He wanted to sleep with her but hadn't puzzled out a method.

Erik was sitting across the fire from her. He turned his head this way and that to address the group, his stern­oclei­domas­toids popping grotesquely in his neck.

“Celia's not the type to cry wolf, Jeremy. It's no game to her. She believes the wolves are out there. Even if they aren't.” He looked into her face. The rest of them kept their eyes forward, into the fire. “We need a few Celias in any population. They imagine just enough to keep us honest.”

Her story had no defenders but she didn't care what was said about her—she'd graduate in months and Erik had already written her strong enough letters of support—and yet the pronouncement seemed to render the wolves imaginary, even for her. She found she couldn't call them back to mind, and didn't until the end of the weekend. In the years since, she had never doubted them. The wolves became more certain with time. She didn't think of them as past or as hers alone. Their offspring were still out there somewhere,
nothing other than what they were. She tried not to assign meaning to them, not to read portents or to assume they'd been sounding a warning. They were wolves, not harbingers. The harbingers were elsewhere, in numbers and graphs, infection and transmission rates. They had a different pull and cast, and they grew ever closer. Soon everyone would know them. A great wing would appear in the sky and the talking would stop all at once.

After breakfast they tied an aluminum ladder to the roof of her father's Suzuki Swift and set off into the mountains to explore the possible Neanderthal cave.

She followed their route on a map covered with his printed additions and notes. They drove on the edge of La Vallée du Terrieu. He'd marked the names of each peak—Montagne d'Hortus, Pic Saint-Loup—each perched chateau, but as they climbed on ever narrower roads the names fell off until finally the doubtful path disappeared from the map and became only a track through a field that ended in trees. Above them the forest climbed steeply to the base of an immense, white, vertical rockface. He studied the approach routes. From the trunk he took their supplies, shrugged into a small backpack. He gave her a coil of rope. He untied the ladder, put it over his shoulder, and led the way into the trees. There was little underbrush but the climb was steep, improvised, awkward with the ladder, and soon they were too spent to speak, though they had said very little that morning anyway, and before long Celia was sweating in her
unbreathing layers. Four times at intervals of thirty or forty minutes they stopped to rest. “I wasn't sure we'd make it,” he said. “I kept you out too late.” He wouldn't normally express such a concern. He needed a simple summation with which to cap the events of the previous night, as if they could be put away. She said nothing, he let it go. Maybe he understood that she had taken herself out of play in response to last night's man-of-god nonsense. Two peregrine falcons floated on thermals at the top of the mountain.

In time they broke above the treeline, then rested once more and ate their packed lunches while looking out at the valley and the distant Mediterranean, a seam on the horizon. The set of his face was as she'd seen it at the chateau, when she'd caught him in his reverie. She let it run and in time he said he was trying to imagine the view of fifty thousand years ago. A colder climate. The trees would not be oak, as now, but pine and beech, species adapted to the cold. In the valley, deer and sanglier, and European megafauna, mammoths and giant elk. And humans and protohumans. Glaciers had pushed Neanderthals this far south, and
Homo sapiens
had migrated here from Africa. They overlapped for maybe twenty thousand years.

“They must have recognized their difference from one another.” His voice was sure. He had caught his breath faster than she had. “The genetic record says they interbred. We still have Neanderthal in us. The fossil record gives no evidence of war, though it does of murder. Bones showing evidence of tool-scarring, as if they'd been de-fleshed.”

“News of the day.”

“We still behave this way, yes. But they were much closer to the originating moment. If we wanted to, with the genomes, cloning, we could recover ourselves—I mean ancient man—but we'll never recover our minds or beliefs. We don't even know ourselves now, most of us.”

The ledge ran above a sharp drop. Navigating it required him to balance the ladder on a forearm held away from the rockface, so that from her position behind him the ladder seemed a floating incongruity, a surrealist object juxtaposed against the stone sublime. The face curved away from them for a time and then the ledge widened to a large table of rock. There was the cave mouth, across a wide cut. They walked to the edge. Her father extended the ladder and timbered it across the gap, then squatted to rest, letting his arms hang limp. The crevasse meant business. There was no telling its depth but the noon light disappeared at about thirty feet. It was maybe fifteen feet across, too far for anyone to jump, with too short a run up and no safe place to land. Maybe the cave really was unexplored.

The exertion had slightly elated her, and now in the pause before they continued she detected a hopefulness in the air that must have been coming from him. For years they'd shared a weight never discussed, not father to daughter, or adult to adult. The grief, coming so early in both of their lives, had inside it a degree of fear. But they hadn't named it, hadn't known there was anything to figure out, Celia realized, and now they understood but had no way of crossing back over the silence.

She held the ladder firm on one side as he walked across it rung to rung. Seeing him take the deliberate steps brought
on her first shiver of apprehension. If one of them fell, even if they survived the fall, there'd be no way out. What exactly would the other do?

“We're being careless,” she said after he'd crossed. “This is pretty stupid.”

“Don't cross if you're not committed. I'll go and report back.”

She threw the rope coil to him and told him to hold the ladder and crossed over on her hands and knees, looking forward. He pulled the ladder clear and laid it by the side of the cave mouth. From his backpack he produced two flashlights and a truffle pick for digging out artifacts. There was no threat in the sky, unless it was behind the mountain. No one knew they were up here.

They approached the entrance, ducked under a pediment ledge, and stood in quiet light. Only a short distance ahead the rock ceiling above them curved down to form a back wall. The space was certain and empty. It led nowhere. He said nothing, kept still. She walked in, letting him have his moment of disappointment. Near the back wall she crouched lower, turned and sat on the cave floor and looked out at him silhouetted there against the blue sky.

“It could still be your cave. Grotte du Dad.”

“I feel something. Do you feel it back there?”

In fact she did feel it, a draft. She shined her light into the corners and saw that the floor opened about twenty feet to her left. She scuttled over on her ass. The walls of the hole formed the first revolution of a kind of curved well that seemed to open into a space beneath them.

She had no time to speak before he was with her, shining his light into the hole.

“Holy christ,” he said.

“Okay.”

They were silent. She wanted to stop him from thinking but it was too late.

“I wonder if they named it, the first humans,” he said.

“Maybe they called it ‘the hole in the floor.' ”