Otherness (9 page)

Oh, don't be so cynical, Joe-boy. It's late. Put away the journal and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.

FRIDAY

By now I thought we'd wrestled with every county, state, and federal agency, from public health to Indian Affairs, but I never expected to be stopped dead by the Coroner's Office!

Zola found the bones down at South-22, a neat row of ribs sticking through a pile of dingy rags. At first we thought it was a pet, some large dog. On realizing they were human, we had no choice but to report it. We're digging in strata from
A.D.
1958, after all. It might be somebody's long-missing great-uncle.

What a mess! Reporters and detectives trampling through the pit. Hot lights reviving dormant aromatics, making the place stink to Sheol. Yellow police tape stretching back and forth in a confusing maze. Fortunately, some of the cops seem competent and sympathetic. I watched as one young homicide investigator worked delicately with a brush and evidence kit. I couldn't help kibitzing about the effects of time and anaerobic chemistry on fingerprints. Finally—perhaps to shut me up—Lieutenant Starling invited me through the cordon to help.

Turns out our jobs have interesting overlaps, and even more interesting, quirky differences. Afterward we cleaned up and talked shop until late. Her profession seems narrowly focused from my point of view. But I can relate. We're both in the business of piecing together clues, reading hidden stories.

This morning the lieutenant overruled her gruff sergeant to let us resume work at the north end, while her crew keeps fussing down south. It's hard not to be bothered by all the commotion nearby, but I exhibit calm concentration for the sake of the team. We are professional time travelers, after all, privileged to visit the past. No distraction should make us forget our jobs.

SUNDAY

At a pace that makes glaciers seem juggernauts, the Earth's Pacific Plate grinds alongside the North American Plate. Unlike the head-on collision shoving up the Himalayas, this glancing blow makes modest mountains. Where Hyperion now squats once lay a gentle valley where mule deer grazed and condors soared. Quite recently, in geologic time, the Shoshone discovered a rough paradise here. Then, in an eyeblink, Spaniards came to graze their cattle. Hopalong Cassidy filmed exploits where I stand each day, or rather, many meters lower down, where molder the smothered roots of ancient oaks.

When burgeoning Los Angeles engulfed these hills, little upland valleys like these seemed ideal sites for dumping refuse. Regiments of trucks came and went, day in, day out, their way lit by torches burning off methane gas as buried garbage fermented. More matter moved here in just one year than Rome put into its roads. More than was shifted for canals at Suez or Panama. Then, sooner than anyone predicted, a flat plain stretched between former peaks, and the trucks had to move on.

Nowadays the gas gets piped away. You can't build on this kind of unsteady fill, so no one expected visitors to this abandoned place, despite its poetical name. Not until slow processes someday turn detritus into a new kind of stone.

Then we arrived to dig and pry.

No human trait ever stirred up such trouble as curiosity.

MONDAY

Detective Starling finished her investigation. Her report—inconclusive, except to say the bones date from the time of the surrounding stratum.

Net tabloids are rife with speculation about gangland executions. Artists' renderings show mobsters ceremoniously interring their victim beneath a sea of waste. Getting the dates all wrong, someone nicknamed the skeleton "Jimmy H."

Unfortunately for sensationalists, there were no obvious signs of foul play. That didn't keep some of the police brass from trying to shut us down. But Helen saw no legal cause and refused to sign the order, so we're back in business! After a decent interval, I must find a good way to thank her.

TUESDAY

The day after work resumed, I found a strange note in my mailbox. Scrawled on real paper in a thin, cramped style, it simply read—LEAVE IT BE!

Some kook, I guess. Why should anyone care about a half-dozen eggheads, scratching around in garbage?

WENDESDAY

Europeans laugh when Americans speak of "history." As for Los Angeles, you can find every nationality on Earth within ten minutes of downtown, but each draws its heritage from somewhere else. Here in the "World City" everyone is rootless and often
glad
to be cut loose from the past.

Besides, who needs to dig in order to know this place? L.A.'s story is well-documented in newspaper files, ledgers, videotapes. Was any culture ever so self-involved? Books on current slang and pop culture come out every year. As they say about pornography—nothing is left to the imagination.

Still, there is something special about the layers we visit. They represent a time and place unlike any other, when people remade reality in new, garish colors, unrestrained by precedent. Towering creativity mixed with profound stupor. Rock bands and symphony orchestras. Stench and stainless steel. Nothing compares save renaissance Florence, also the object of scorn, hatred, and ultimately envy. Someday people may romanticize TwenCen L.A. as they do the time of Michelangelo.

And pigs might fly?

They do. One Angeleno took his pet porker hang gliding. I have the newspaper in front of me, circa 1978.

What a place.

THURSDAY

No time for a personal entry tonight.

Today's big discovery—this time at South-31—four more sets of bones.

FRIDAY

My, what a fuss. They're still hollering downtown, but the upshot is obvious. They need expert help, and the only place to find skilled hands quickly is right here on-site. I'm sitting quietly, twiddling my thumbs till they ask.

SATURDAY

They asked. Helen gave us a one-day cram course on how to be Junior Crime Scene Investigators, then deputized us and put us to work. Since then it's been slow going, but we're used to that. Only big difference is we don't have to watch our budget, agonizing over what to put in labeled plastic bags and what to discard. Near the bodies we save everything.

Everybody in the world wants to come to Hyperion. The crowd-control cordon stretches miles. Helicopters buzz, along with scores of whirring autocams, sent over by newsie-mags and hobbyists. Police drones snap up those straying too close. Still, it's quite a din.

The press is calling it "Jimmy's Pit." Reporters scan old missing-person files like bloodhounds, eager to break the story of the year—who the victims were, why they were dumped here, and who might've dunnit. The city is having a wonderful time.

Well, not everybody. I found another note last night, on coming home.

STOP IT NOW, the scrawled piece of paper read. BEFORE YOU REGRET IT.

Too late, whoever you are. Events now have their own momentum. Tomorrow we start lateral holes, expanding the trench in case one or two more bodies might lie buried nearby.

Funny what bothers you at a time like this. Amid all this furor, what bugs me is the coincidence . . . how unlikely it was that we should have randomly chosen a site directly over Jimmy and company. To a scientist—and a detective, I suppose—coincidence is an awfully suspicious thing.

MONDAY

Zola was in tears when she reported finding the child. A five-year-old, judging from the little bones. This time the clothing was well preserved. A pink and blue print dress. We all stared as Keoki and a police pathologist worked. That was when we realized this was no gangland dumping ground.

Half an hour later Leslie gave a shout. He had found another pair of skeletons. Then, suddenly, it seemed diggers were yelling from all sides. Autocams began colliding overhead as newsies dived in for pix and we scurried from one set of remains to the next. In minutes word flashed across the Net to every continent.

Massacre in L.A
.!

Tomorrow, over my protests, Helen brings in bulldozers.

Ah, Schliemann.

TUESDAY

For a time, during the Second World War, the city of Los Angeles mandated compulsory recycling. Materials of all kinds were needed for the effort, from glass and metals to paper and baking fat. Nothing is wasted when you pay heed to the true value of things. Very little refuse wound up coming to Hyperion during those years.

Then, with the war fading into memory, a candidate ran for mayor on a crowd-pleasing platform, promising to repeal the inconvenient law. He won handily. Curbside recycling ended and the trucks began rolling as never before. By the ton, by hundreds and thousands of tons. In a few years an average family might throw away a volume of material equal to their home. A new, disposable way of life seemed ordained forever.

Archaeologists could have told them.
Nothing
lasts forever. The Golden Age of Athens waxed and passed away again within a single human life span. So did the Age of Waste.

The world won't soon forget either.

According to the Indian Bones Act, any remains less than a thousand years old aren't specimens, but someone's ancestor. You need the local tribe's permission before digging near a burial ground, and must reinter all unearthed bones with honors.

Fair enough, but I never thought I'd see the act applied to
this
project. Today, while yellow machines peeled away detritus for a bigger trench, lawyers arrived with injunctions to halt the
desecration of graves
! Turns out they were fronting for the same bunch of retirees who tried to stop us earlier. Don't these people have better things to do with their time?

The dozers stopped for just three hours; then the stay was overruled and digging resumed. I stood around watching machines tear through layers it had taken us months to penetrate with brush and trowel. Wonderful items kept popping into view, only to vanish into hoppers and be carried away. I stopped Keoki and Les from chasing between flashing backhoe blades, plucking enticing tidbits. Without careful photography and provenance, none of it would provide useful data. So I set them to work tarping over the north end of the old trench, preserving it from contamination.

I'm making this entry with my portable. We've set up a pressurized tent and sleeping quarters, partly because work continues round the clock now, and partly because each of us has had anonymous death threats. Zola's house was vandalized, and someone fired a shot through Les's window. We voted to stay together on-site till it all blows over.

FRIDAY

Helen called off the dozers as we neared mid-fifties strata. An army of muscular cops waded in, under our direction, and soon hit bones.

And more bones! More than we can count by searchlight, all mixed in with old boxes and bed-springs, melon rinds and tea bags, newspapers and candy wrappers.

Rib cages. Vertebrae. Femurs. Grinning skulls.

Lieutenant Starling ordered a halt for coffee, to let people catch their breath. That's when word spread about The Theory. Seems the idea's been crisscrossing the Net all evening, but we hadn't heard till half the world agreed it
must
be the explanation.

When you think about it, none other fits! The 1950's was an era of frantic building in Southern California. Inevitably, greedy developers took shortcuts. If an old graveyard stood in the way, you were supposed to move the bodies and markers with due care, but often the whole mass was just scooped up and dumped in a pit somewhere.

And what better pit than Hyperion Landfill? A few bribes, some turned heads . . . within days layers of new garbage would hide the evidence. Besides, who was harmed?

It's remarkable how calming a good theory can be. What had verged on panic now seems placid as people wander back to work at a slower pace. There is talk of wrapping it all up tomorrow, after all.

I keep my misgivings to myself. Somehow it all seems too pat.

SATURDAY

It didn't wash. Not even for a day.

Oh, for a time headlines blared—
Dump of Death Mystery Solved
! Big shots came down and posed next to the bulldozers, anointing the graveyard-dumping theory and announcing that, while this had all been a nice, diverting summertime distraction, it was time to stop wasting taxpayers' money on a minor "crime" whose statute of limitations ran out before most living citizens were born. Time to let the dead rest in peace.

The old farts seemed in an awful hurry to put all this behind them. Some of the young beat reporters said their editors were hastily reassigning them. All told, things smelled pretty fishy.

We sat around pondering.

Suppose some greedy bastards did once gather up the bodies in a cemetery, trucking them off to make room for houses or a shopping mail. That's plausible. But think, what shape would the remains be in, after tumbling together in a hole? I could testify to that, having excavated ancient battlegrounds where armies of Xerxes, or Teng Ho, buried their dead in haste before the sun could rise. The skeletons here in Hyperion look nothing like those jumbled boneyards. Each one is coherent, whole, and they come spread across an area far too wide for the convenient dumping theory to explain.

We agreed unanimously. We're going back out tonight, orders or no orders.

THURSDAY

Helen Starling says her boys found the guy who set fire to my garage. I couldn't have been more surprised to learn it was old Mr. Hansen down the block! Here I'd been expecting some cabal of fundamentalist loonies to be behind the threats and vandalism against my people. But in each case it's been
individual
action by someone they knew. No visible connection between the perpetrators, except their advanced age. It's all very, very weird.

Haven't made a diary entry in some time. I always thought it part of being a careful scientist, like keeping good field notes. But what we're doing hasn't been science for a long time.

To recap—the bigwigs were horrified to learn we had resumed digging. While they slept, we managed to double the excavation. They then dithered, went back to their offices, made phone calls, and issued orders—and we doubled it again. By the time judges signed restraints and had them delivered, the whole chain of command lay in ruins. No cop on the beat was going to enforce a halt.