Vigil (2 page)

Embedded in the sparkling rock, as if struggling even now to break free, he could just make out what looked like talons, sharp and extended, long and gnarled. They were clearly defined, yet melded to the stony wall.

“It’s a fossil,” he said, hardly believing it himself.

“Of what?”

He bent to look closer but the water sloshed around the glistening walls and it was tough to see if the talons—or were they more like claws?—were attached to anything else below the waterline.

“You got me,” he said. “I got Cs in science.”

“Whatever it is, it gives me the creeps,” Jennifer said, an uneasy note in her voice. “Let’s get out of here.”

Kevin couldn’t have agreed more, but he didn’t want to give Jennifer any more of a scare than she’d already had. “You go first. But just in case this is worth something,” he said, touching two fingers to the petrified talon, “maybe I’ll just chisel off a little piece.”

“No!” Jennifer cried. “Don’t do anything to it. Don’t even touch it.”

“I was kidding,” he said, reassuringly. “I don’t even have my chisel on me.” He could see this was no time for jokes. “Let’s get back to the boat. You go out first and I’ll follow you.”

She slipped past him, into the dark water, and as he turned to watch her go, a wave swept into the cave and pushed her back. He heard her splutter and take a couple of hurried breaths. He’d been a lifeguard enough summers to know the sound of impending panic.

“Take it easy, Jen,” he said. “Go out with the same wave that just came in.”

But he couldn’t help but notice that the opening of the cave did look markedly smaller already, and the light from outside was less than it had been. Was a sudden storm rolling in?

“Just let the water take you,” he said, as calmly as he could, and he saw her head dip down, her arms sweep forward. He glanced again at the glistening rock, with its buried claws. Or . . .
fingers?

Another wave, bigger than the one before, washed up against him, and he felt himself losing his balance. His feet tried to grip the ledge, but the rock was too slick. Something loose and stringy licked again at his calf. He fell forward into the water, his shin banging on the underwater outcropping.

But Jennifer’s head, he could see, had just cleared the lip of the cave; her feet kicked up a flutter of water as she propelled herself out into the cove.

Thank God for that,
Kevin thought.
She’ll calm down now.

When he was sure she was clear, he pushed off after her, but he’d timed it wrong, and another surge, cold and stinging, slapped him in the face.
So much for my own advice,
he thought. He wiped the water from his eyes, and to his surprise another wave—how fast could they come?—hit him again. The water rose up, lifting him, and he suddenly felt the top of his head graze the rough wet roof of the cave.

Relax,
he told himself.
Just relax and you’ll be out of here in a few seconds
.

He took a deep breath and paddled again toward the opening—there was no sight of Jennifer anymore—but the water in the cave seemed to be eddying and churning now, pulling him sideways, pulling him back. He tried to swim harder, but it was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to run but never getting anywhere; he wasn’t moving forward at all.
Christ—why did I ever let Jennifer go into this damn sinkhole?

The light at the mouth of the cave was only a sliver now, and the water was swelling upward again. He started to lift his hand to protect his head, but it was already too late; the water raised him up, harder and faster than before, and the next thing he knew he felt his head crack against the jagged stone. Even in the cold, dark water he could feel the sudden seepage of blood; he knew he’d just cut open his scalp.

“Kevin!”

Had he heard that?

“Where are you?”

I’m here,
he thought, dazed.
I’m right here.

He tried again to swim out, but the water swelled once more, smashing his head into the same sharp rock, knocking the breath right out of his body.

Something in his legs gave way, and they stopped kicking. His arms, too, stopped swirling in the water.

Go with the flow,
he thought, dimly.

But it was as if a black velvet curtain, very thick and very warm, were suddenly descending over him. The top of his skull ached as if he’d been struck with a hammer.

“Kevin!”

He answered, or at least he thought he did. His mouth was filled with icy water. The curtain wrapped itself tighter. He felt himself falling, drifting down, it was actually sort of pleasant, and the last thing he saw in his mind’s eye—and it made him want to smile—was himself, in his rented tuxedo, feeding Jennifer a big, unwieldy slice of the white and yellow wedding cake.

 
—The [Lost] Book of Enoch, 2-3
(translated from the Aramaic), 4QEN f-g

As one image left the screen and another took its place, Carter Cox wondered just how many of the undergraduates ranged around the darkened lecture hall were actually still awake. From the lighted lectern, it was impossible to see them, but he knew that they were hunkered down in their seats out there, the steady hum of the projector providing just the right amount of white noise to help induce sleep and even camouflage the occasional snore.

“This will be over soon,” he said, “stick with me,” and he was gratified to hear a little laughter from various quarters. “In fact, this is the last slide of the day. Would anyone here like to tell me what it is?”

There was the sound of a few seats creaking as various students sat up to take better notice.

“Looks like a dinosaur fossil,” a girl said, from somewhere toward the back; it sounded like Katie Coyne, one of his better students. “One of the smaller carnivores.”

“Okay, good. But what makes you say that?”

“Nothing does. I thought of it all by myself.”

There was a wave of laughter, and now he knew it was Katie.

“Let me rephrase, Ms. Coyne,” Carter said, trying to regain control. “What makes you think, for instance, that it’s a meat eater?”

“From here, it looks like whatever it was had sharp teeth, maybe even serrated—”

“That’s good—because it did.”

“—and although it’s tough to make out, maybe its feet had claws, like one of the raptors. But I can’t really tell that for sure.”

“So you’re looking down at this area,” Carter said, touching his pointer to the bottom of the slide; there, the creature’s feet were splayed apart and did indeed look clawed. But even in its entirety, the fossil image didn’t offer much in the way of clues. It was really no more than an impression of faint gray and black lines—twisted and broken and in some spots doubling back on themselves—set against a blue-gray backdrop of volcanic ash. Katie had done a good job of picking out some of its most salient characteristics. Still, she’d missed the most important.

“But what do you make this out to be?” Carter asked, raising his pointer to the top of the slide, where a bony protuberance twisted upward and ended with a blunt flourish. Even Katie was silent.

“Maybe a tail, with something on the end of it,” another student hazarded.

“An armored spike,” Katie said, “for warding off other predators?”

“Not exactly. On closer examination, which this slide is probably inadequate to provide, that little clump at the end of the tail—and it is a tail—turned out to be,” and he took a second for dramatic effect, “a plume of feathers.”

The hum of the projector was all that could be heard. Then Katie said, “So I was wrong? It’s not a dinosaur—it’s a bird?”

“No, you’re right, in a way, on both counts: it’s a dinosaur, with feathers, called—and be prepared, I’ll expect all of you to spell this on the final—
Protoarchaeopteryx
robusta.
It was found in western China, it dates from the Jurassic era, and it’s the best proof to date that present-day birds are in fact descendants of the dinosaurs.”

“I thought that theory had been discredited,” Katie said.

“Not in this class,” Carter said. “In here, that theory is alive and kicking.”

The bell—more of an annoying buzzer, really—sounded, and the students started gathering their books and papers together. The projectionist turned up the lights in the lecture hall, and the slide instantly paled into obscurity on the screen.

“So that thing you just showed us,” Katie said, “whatever it was called, did it fly?”

“Nope, doesn’t look like it,” Carter replied, as the other students shuffled toward the door. Katie was always the last to go, always had one more question for him before she buttoned up her army surplus jacket and headed out herself. She reminded Carter a little of himself at that age, always trying to tie up one more loose end or get one more piece of the puzzle. Usually he hung around after the class to answer any remaining questions, but not today; today—and he’d put a yellow Post-it on his lecture notes so he wouldn’t forget—he had an appointment to get to.

He pulled on his leather jacket, stuffed his notes in his battered briefcase, and left through the side door, just behind Katie.

“So, do you believe that
T. rex
had feathers, too?” she asked over her shoulder.

“It’s not inconceivable,” he said.

“Guess they’re going to have to reshoot
Jurassic Park
then.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll do that,” he said, “and while they’re at it, maybe they ought to call it
Cretaceous Park.
”

“How come?”

“Because
T. rex
didn’t actually show up till then. See you next Thursday.”

 
Outside, it was crisp and autumnal, the kind of day when
New York actually seemed to sparkle, when the store windows gleamed, the falling leaves littered the pavement, and even the pretzel carts looked tempting. For a second, Carter thought about stopping at one—all he’d had for lunch was a microwaved burrito—but then he remembered the
New York Post
exposé about the vermin in the warehouse where the carts were kept overnight, and he kept on walking. At times like this, he was often sorry he’d ever read that article.

The appointment he had to keep, in just forty minutes, was in midtown, and right now he was only in Washington Square. But if he walked briskly, he figured he could still make it in time. A cab would cost a fortune, and the idea of descending into the subway on such a beautiful afternoon was too painful. Zipping up his jacket, with his briefcase bulging at his side, he set off, up Fifth Avenue, for an appointment that he was, in all honesty, not that eager to get to.

It was another doctor appointment, this time with a fertility specialist, one that Beth had found through her friend Abbie. Beth was only thirty-two, and Carter one year older, but they’d been trying the baby thing for over a year, and so far nothing was happening. Part of Carter wanted to know what the problem was—and part of him didn’t—but this afternoon, he was afraid he was going to find out either way.

They’d been married for six years, and for most of that time the whole subject of kids had been tabled. No, he couldn’t even say that it had been tabled; it just hadn’t come up at all. For one thing, they were both so wildly passionate about each other, the idea of actually making love for some other purpose—to start a family—would have seemed absurd; sex was just for sex, and why would they have wanted to confuse the issue with . . . issue? That wasn’t a bad way to put it, he thought. They’d existed, quite happily, in a kind of little bubble, and there was nothing inside that bubble but each other. And it didn’t feel like anything was missing.

The other consideration had been their work—Carter had always said he didn’t even want to think about starting a family until he knew that he was going to get his career on track—until he knew, for instance, that he was going to get tenure somewhere. His nightmare was to wind up like so many of the other postdocs he knew, a gypsy scholar drifting from one temporary post to another, one year in New Haven, two years in Ann Arbor, with a wife to support and a couple of kids in tow, and nowhere to write, no time to think, no freedom to go where he needed to go in order to get the work done that would make his reputation. But that was not a problem anymore. Eighteen months ago, New York University had given him tenure—along with the newly funded Kingsley Chair of Paleontology and Integrative Biology—so there went that excuse.

At Thirty-first Street he made a right and headed toward the stretch of First Avenue he’d come to think of as Medical World. When he’d once been involved in a cab accident, this was where the ambulance had taken him. When he went to see an orthopedist about a climbing injury to his right leg, this was where he’d come. And when he’d had to undergo some physical therapy afterward, the clinic, too, had been just half a block from the avenue. All things considered, he was entering pretty familiar territory.

But that didn’t mean he felt comfortable there.

Dr. Weston’s office suite was on the second floor of an undistinguished hospital annex. A pair of polished oak doors bore his name on them in raised gold letters six inches high, and below that the letters
P.C.
—for “private corporation.” Since when, Carter wondered, had doctors started to seem more like businessmen? As he was ushered through the elegantly appointed reception area and down the hall—polished wood, with an antique Persian runner on it—to Dr. Weston’s inner sanctum, Carter felt more and more like he’d entered an investment banking house and not a medical office—an impression that was only bolstered when he got to the private office with the view of the East River.