Prophet of Bones A Novel Read online

  One of the team members, a broad, dark-haired man, sat hunched over a test tray of PCR tubes, pipette in hand. The young man straightened when Mr. Lyons whispered in his ear. He was big and young—Asian cheekbones, blocky shoulders. His father’s shoulders, Gavin thought. Gavin knew it was Paul without being told.

  Paul stood, pulled off his latex gloves, and followed Mr. Lyons across the room for an introduction.

  “Gavin McMaster.” Gavin stuck out his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Carlsson.”

  They shook.

  “Paul,” the young man said. “You can call me Paul.”

  “I apologize for interrupting your work.”

  “It’s time I took a break anyway. I’d been sitting at that stool all morning.”

  “I’ll leave you two to your discussion,” Mr. Lyons said, excusing himself.

  “Please,” Paul gestured to a nearby worktable. “Take a seat.”

  Gavin sank onto the stool and set his briefcase on the table. “I promise I won’t take much of your time,” he said. “But I did need to talk to you. We’ve been leaving messages for the last few days and—”

  “Oh.” Paul’s face changed. “You’re from—”

  “Yes.”

  “This is highly unusual.”

  “I can assure you, these are unusual circumstances.”

  “Still, I’m not sure I like being solicited for one job while working at another.”

  “I can see there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “What misunderstanding?”

  “You called it a job,” Gavin said. “We just want to borrow you, not hire you away. Consider it a temporary change of pace—a transfer position.”

  “Mr. McMaster, I currently have more than a full workload. I’m in the middle of a project, and to be honest, considering the backlog we’re dealing with, I’m surprised Westing let you through the door.”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” Gavin smiled. “Your company is already on board. They’ve granted you a … let’s call it a sabbatical of sorts. I took the liberty of speaking to management before contacting you. They were very accommodating.”

  “How did you…” Paul looked at him, and Gavin raised an eyebrow. With corporations, the question of “how” was usually rhetorical. The answer was always the same. And it always involved dollar signs. Pay a company enough money, and they’ll subcontract you any employee you want.

  Gavin saw understanding dawn in Paul’s eyes. “Of course, we’ll match that bonus to you, mate.” Gavin unfolded a check from his suit pocket and slid it across the counter.

  Paul barely glanced at it. Instead he looked around for Mr. Lyons, who was nowhere to be seen.

  “Is this how you usually staff a project?” Paul said.

  “We’d prefer not to take on reluctant third-party participants, if that’s what you’re asking. On the other hand, we’re on a tight schedule, and, as I mentioned, this is an unusual circumstance. We need to be wheels-up in twenty-four hours, so I’m afraid we really must insist.”

  “Insist? What if I refuse?” Paul’s face was unreadable.

  Gavin smiled. “Normally I’d take that as a negotiating tactic, angling for a bigger check. But that’s not the case here, is it?”

  “No.”

  Gavin studied the young man in front of him. “I was like you once. Hell, maybe I still am.”

  “Then you understand.” Paul smiled tightly.

  “I understand you better than you think. It makes it easier, sometimes, when you come from money. Sometimes I think that only people who come from it realize how worthless it really is.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience,” Paul said curtly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Gavin had seen this before, politeness like a wall. He understood it. Did you learn that politeness from your mother, Paul? What did you learn from your father?

  “If you want to refuse, you can take it up with your management.” Gavin stood.

  “I will.”

  “But you might find they’re a little more reluctant to part with their check. Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume your cooperation, as your employer assured.”

  “You can assume whatever you’d like.”

  “We leave tomorrow afternoon. You haven’t asked what you’ll be working on.”

  “Does it matter?” Paul said, the slightest irritation seeping into his voice. He was on the edge of walking away—but that same politeness held him there for the vital split second.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t,” Gavin said. “Before you turn your back, I have something for you. Something perhaps more interesting than a check.”

  Gavin opened the latches on his briefcase and pulled out a stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs. He held them out for Paul to take.

  For a moment Paul just stood there, and Gavin was afraid the young man wouldn’t accept them. If he walked away without looking, then tomorrow could be tricky.

  Paul reached out and took the photographs from Gavin’s extended hand.

  Paul looked at the photos.

  He looked at them for a long time.

  “Give us two weeks,” Gavin said. “If, after two weeks, you don’t want to stay, we’ll have you transferred back, no questions asked. And you can keep the check.”

  “Where were these taken?”

  Gavin said, “These fossils were found last year on the island of Flores, in Indonesia.”

  “Flores,” Paul whispered, still studying the photos. He leafed through them slowly, one after another. “I heard they found strange bones there. I didn’t know anybody had published.”

  “That’s because we haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  Paul came to one photograph and stopped. He was silent for a long time, then said, “I’m not sure what I’m looking at here.”

  “Neither are we. Not one hundred percent sure, anyway.”

  “It looks adult, by the wear on the teeth.”

  “It is.”

  “These dimensions can’t be right.”

  “They’re right.”

  “A six-inch ulna?”

  Gavin nodded.

  “Then these are unique.” Paul looked at him. “You must have people clamoring to work on this.”

  “We’re holding these close to the vest at the moment.”

  “You could take your pick of samplers.”

  “We did,” Gavin said. “Why else would I be here?”

  Paul’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “No,” Paul said. “Maybe I do.” And just like that, the wall was gone. Politeness replaced by something different.

  “You have the education and training we’re looking for.”

  It was Paul’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “So do other samplers.”

  “We need someone who works fast.”

  “I’m hardly the fastest.”

  Gavin sighed. “I don’t know if archaeology was ever meant to be as important as it has become. Will that do?”

  Paul only stared and said nothing.

  “We live in a world where zealots become scientists. Tell me, boy, are you a zealot?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s your reason. Or close enough.”

  8

  Paul’s father had died of a heart attack in the summer after his freshman year of college. It happened suddenly, leaving a thousand things unsaid.

  The funeral procession followed the hearse from the church to the graveyard where four generations of his father’s family lay buried. A green hill where Paul suspected that he, too, would someday find his final repose. His mother cried.

  “I could take a semester off,” he told her. “I could stay.”

  “No,” she said. “Go back to school.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I’m not alone; I have the church.”

  And it was true. For the last several years, as his father’s behavior had
grown more erratic, his mother had retreated into her Bible study. She spent five days a week up at the church. Sometimes she didn’t come home.

  * * *

  “Your father’s things are yours now,” she told him.

  “What things?”

  “The things fathers give their sons.”

  On the last night he was in town, he went up to his father’s room. His mother was downstairs. She’d fallen asleep on the couch.

  Paul opened his father’s closet. Shirts and ties. Books. In the back, near the wall, a loaded gun, silver black. He’d seen it before, years earlier.

  He found a coin collection. Susan B. Anthonys, and a dozen Liberty Bells. There was a stack of scientific periodicals. Inside each one, a scrap of paper bookmarked a page. Paul realized these were his father’s publications. All his published papers. Studies on antagonistic pleiotropy, heterosis, and the mitochondrial haplotype distribution of the Przewalski’s horse.

  Behind the stack of journals, against the wall, something caught his eye. He reached in and grabbed the green spiral notebook. He opened it, recognizing his own childish hand. His father had kept it, all these years.

  He flipped the pages until he found it. Not a date, but a mouse. January-17.

  He closed the notebook and threw it back into the closet.

  The next day he headed back to school.

  At Stanford, Paul double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He sat in classrooms while men in tweed jackets spun theories about Kibra and T variants, about microcephalin 1 and haplogroup D. He plowed into 300-level biology, where from the lectern his professor singled him out from the other students, responding to his question by saying, “You have the gift of insight, my boy.” And then, to Paul’s startled expression, he added, “You know which questions to ask.”

  There were classes in comparative interpretation and biblical philosophy. He experimented with fruit flies and amphioxi and, while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Mathew Poole.

  He also scrutinized the fringe theories. He contemplated balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinberg. But alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.

  In the medical library, he came across research on the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world—and he wondered how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul discovered that although APOE4 often produced Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy saves it at seven months. He read that people with sickle-cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by Delta 32 and HIV.

  In his anthropology courses, Paul was taught that all humans alive today can trace their ancestry back to Africa, to a time almost six thousand years ago when the whole of human diversity existed within a single small population. And there had been at least two dispersions out of Africa, his professors said, if not more—a genetic bottleneck that supported the Flood Theory. But each culture had its own beliefs. Muslims called it Allah. Jews, Yahweh. The science journals were careful not to specify, but they spoke of an intelligent designer—an architect, lowercase a. Though in his heart of hearts, Paul figured it all amounted to the same thing.

  Paul read that they’d scanned the brains of nuns, looking for the God spot, and couldn’t find it. He examined, too, the theory of evolutionism. Although long debunked by legitimate science, adherents of evolutionism still existed, their beliefs enjoying near immortality among the fallow fields of pseudoscience, cohabitating the fringe with older belief systems like astrology, phrenology, and acupuncture. Modern evolutionists believed the various dating systems were all incorrect, and they offered an assortment of ridiculous and unscientific explanations for how the isotope tests could all be wrong.

  The evolutionists ignored the geological record. They ignored the ice cores, the hermeneutics, and the wealth of biological evidence. They ignored the miracle of the placenta and the irreducible complexity of the eye.

  “After all, the eye,” his anatomy professor lectured, “is biologically useful only in the sum of its parts. It can’t be reduced to functional precursor components.”

  During his sophomore year, Paul got a job cleaning cages in the biology department. There were snakes and rabbits and owls, and a lonely alligator with a broken jaw—a veritable mini-zoo on the campus grounds, all of it housed in state-of-the-art facilities and cared for by a small army of lab-coated undergrads.

  That first day of employment, his trainer met him in the lobby, and he followed her around as she explained his duties. He watched her slender form as they walked the cement corridor. She was young, another student. Brown skin, beautiful dark hair.

  “This job isn’t what you think” was the second thing she said to him. The first was: “I hate to break your heart.”

  They took the stairs up to the second floor. “You come highly recommended, let’s get that out of the way” she said.

  “I do?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s assume. And you have stellar grades, too. You must, or you wouldn’t be here.” Her accent was subtle, hard to place at first. “But still, there are no strings you can pull to get a different set of duties, so don’t bother asking. The new hires all want the monkeys, but that’s not what you’ll be working with mostly.”

  “Okay,” he said. He followed her deeper into the facility. The research building was huge. It was a maze of rooms upon rooms. White walls and white tile. The top two floors were dedicated to the research library, but the rest belonged to the animals. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail that exposed the delicate curve of her neck.

  “Besides that,” she said. “You only think you want the monkeys. Monkeys are dangerous. They’re fast and insanely strong for their size. Seven times stronger than humans, pound for pound. Plus, they bite.”

  She paused before a set of double doors and withdrew a pair of green foam earplugs from the breast pocket of her lab coat. Paul could already hear the barking from the other side, so he knew what to expect. As they entered the kennel, the sound became deafening. “And these are the dogs,” she shouted, in case there was any doubt. “Another popular aspiration for new hires. But you won’t be working with these either, unless one of the regular workers calls in sick for the day, in which case you’ll probably be responsible for the bigger dogs.” She gestured toward the row of German shepherds at the end. “They poop more,” she added by way of explanation.

  They took another flight of stairs.

  “We house all kinds of animals in the facility. A few for the veterinary program and the psychology department, but most are for the genetics program, the medical school, and the experimental sciences.”

  “Which animals do you take care of?”

  “Me?” She smiled, revealing neat white teeth and a dimple. “The monkeys, of course.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  She went on: “The monkeys and dogs are the positions that everyone seems to want, and that you probably won’t stay long enough to get. So as the new guy, you’ll get what’s left over.”

  They came to a door at the end of the hall. The trainer swiped a badge and opened the door. She hit the lights.

  Paul’s mouth dropped open.

  “And this is where you’ll be working,” she said, sweeping an arm out in front of her. “Welcome to the mouse room.”

  * * *

  During his junior and senior years, Paul dove into archaeology. He examined the ancient remains of Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. He examined the un-men: afare
nsis, and Australopithecus, and Pan.

  He examined the shape and skin and touch of a girl named Lillivati.

  They took a class together: ancient skeletal anatomy.

  She also trained him for his job in the biology department. Her specialty: monkeys. Together they studied for tests, and they found reasons not to study, stealing moments between classes and work shifts.

  Lillivati’s long fingers clasped the small of his back, pulling him into her, dark hair an inky pool around her head while she whispered to him in Gujarati. Though he asked, she’d never reveal what she said to him in these moments. She’d only smile, her dark eyes half-lidded, and say, “It’s dirtier than you think.”

  Students at most Ivy-caliber schools could be divided into three categories. First (of course) were those who were rich. Second were those who might or might not be rich but had, more significantly, gotten scholarships. Third were those who were going to graduate with a debt approximating the national deficit.

  This third category could be subdivided. Some of these debt-indentured students would, after graduation, go on to make an amount of money even more obscene than the world-crushing debt they’d labor under. They’d work their asses off. Money would rain from the sky and sluice into the overflowing gutters of their bank accounts. They would, in fact, pay off their obscene debt without too much trouble and later wonder what all the fuss was about. Anybody could do it, right? They’d succeed largely because they were computer savants or good-looking, charismatic lawyers with the attention surfeit of competitive Chinese rice farmers and eidetic recall of corporate tax law, or because they’d invent Google or something. In short, they’d be able to pay off their obscene debt because they came out of the box preoptimized for dollar acquisition. The rest of the students in that third category were screwed, though.

  Lillivati was in the first category; Paul, the second.

  They used her room for sex, because her parents could afford for her not to have a roommate.

  She was a year older than him and graduated early.

  And true to her first words to him: she left. Or had to leave.

  I hate to break your heart.

  First, home to India. Then graduate school in Seattle.