Prophet of Bones A Novel Page 7

  “What about the Leakeys?” Paul asked, dabbing her finger with cotton.

  “Bah.” She waved at him in mock disgust. “They get extra. Bloody Kennedys of archaeology.”

  Despite himself, Paul laughed.

  10

  This latest evidence brings us to the so-called dogma of common descent, whereby each species is seen as a unique and individual creation, discrete from all others. Therefore all men, living and dead, are descended from a common one-time creational event. To be outside of this lineage, no matter how similar in appearance, is to be other than man.

  —Journal of Heredity

  Bone is a text. It writes its history for those able to read it.

  When Paul first started at Westing, he often worked late into the evenings. Many nights in the bone room, he would lay the skeletal remains out carefully on the clean blue felt, articulating the pieces, forming an assemblage. He matched the bones in front of him to the perfect image he held in his head.

  But now, as he sat alone at the bottom of Gavin’s pit, he found that no perfect image rose up in his mind. He looked at the bones, and his imagination failed him. The lights cast strange shadows across the phalanx of chalky gray-white material. Heat from the lamp made steam in the damp air. The pit smelled of earth and muck.

  Somewhere above him, it was almost morning, just before dawn. In a few minutes, the rest of the camp would wake and the day would start. The team would congregate and climb down into the pit to continue the dig. Paul had woken early, needing one last look at what couldn’t possibly exist.

  “What are you?” he whispered into the silence of the pit. He gently blew dust away from the surface of the bone.

  Anatomy textbooks say there are 206 bones in the human body, but this is not strictly true. There exists a range of variation. The number of vertebrae in the coccyx, for example, is not fixed in the human species. Some people have more, some less. Also, there exists in some individuals of Mesoamerican ancestry an extra cranial suture. By virtue of its presence, this additional suture creates an additional bone: the Inca bone, which lies at the base of the skull in direct conjugation with the lambdoid suture and the sagittal suture.

  In spite of what the Bible says, men and women possess the same number of ribs.

  Bone is what remains of us after we’re gone. It’s as close as you can get to a permanent record of our lives.

  It was in the silence and austerity of the bone room that Paul first learned that bones can answer you. They can whisper their secrets across a distance of millennia.

  Now he adjusted the light. With a latexed hand, he brushed the dirt away. Here was the radius, impossibly small. Like a child’s arm, though beside it rested a portion of tiny jaw—the adult molars already worn smooth.

  Bone is made primarily of soft collagen and crystalline calcium phosphate. Although resistant to change and to decay, it is rarely featureless. Bone is the scaffolding on which our lives are slung, and it shows the marks of this interface. The stronger a person is, the more they mark their skeleton. There are foramina, tubercles, grooves, and tuberosities, the raised marks of muscle and ligament attachments. There are signs of trauma and healing, the stresses and strains of our lives, written in bone. And other secrets.

  Bone is recycled by the living body. Calcium is laid down and picked up in a repeating pattern of formation and resorption. A never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. Like nature itself.

  From above came a sound, the rattle of the tarp, pulling Paul from his reverie. Then a voice called down, “Paul?”

  “Yeah,” Paul answered.

  “You’re up early today.” It was Gavin. “Didn’t expect to see you down there.”

  “I was checking on one last thing.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “You need anything?”

  “No, I’m done here.” Paul stood and gripped the ladder. He clicked off his light and climbed back up to the land of the living.

  * * *

  Days passed.

  The dig continued. The rain continued. Jungle heat and jungle sounds. The hack of machetes on firewood. The chatter of men.

  Flores.

  In the distance, the Wae Racang River hissed white static against the rocks, an ever-present roar that played background music to the clamor of the busy camp.

  By the fourth day, Paul had grown tired of watching everyone work. He had his samples carefully sealed in their protective lozenges. Until more bones were discovered, he technically had nothing to do, so he gave himself a job. He joined the local labor force and helped carry buckets of soil between the sieves.

  At first the Manggarai workers eyed him suspiciously, this strange, big American with the Asian face, but as the hours wore on they gradually warmed to him. Cebong Lewe they called him, and later, sitting around the campfire, one of the researchers explained that this meant “bathe long,” referring to Paul’s habit of taking a dip in the river at the end of the workday. He lumbered among them, toting buckets of soil in each hand. He could carry more than they could, but he couldn’t squat, couldn’t kneel in the dirt, hunched for hours over the sieves. The workers rotated in their duties, first carrying buckets, then taking turns working at the fine-mesh grates. After only minutes at the sieves, Paul’s knees were screaming. His calves burned like fire. He was too big, too heavy to fold himself up like that. He traded jobs with one of the bucket carriers, who seemed confused by the offer of trade. Paul realized the Manggarai viewed the bucket carrying as the work and the sieving as a break.

  Back in the United States, Paul’s principal form of exercise had been kayaking. He paddled the cold waters of the Chesapeake for three seasons of the year, pulling himself along with the strength of his arms.

  Now Paul trudged the buckets back and forth—his body, he discovered, being particularly well suited to the role of pack animal.

  The native population of Flores divided itself into a half dozen tribes: the Lio, the Sikka, the Bajawa, the Endenese, the Ngadha, and the Nagekeo. Some of the tribes were related, others not at all. Paul had studied a book on the island’s history on the long flight over. Flores sat in an intertidal zone between converging waves of Asians to the east and the older, endemic Australoid groups to the west. The men he worked with represented a complex mixture of both. Uniformly dark-skinned, many looked almost Filipino or Cambodian, with straight black hair and delicate frames; others were more Austronesian in appearance, with curly hair and strong noses. All chewed betel nuts as they worked, drooling blood-red spit into the dirt. They spoke two or three dialects apiece, and understood more.

  For lunch, they ate simple meals of rice and fish, gulped small spotted eggs straight from the shell. They sipped rice wine while they ate—an extended hand, an offered jug. “Safer than the water,” one of them said in perfect English.

  Paul drank deep.

  * * *

  That evening when the dig shut down, Paul helped Gavin pack the jeep for a trek back up to Ruteng. “I’m driving two of our laborers back to town,” Gavin told him. “They work one week on, one off. You want to come with me?”

  “Sure,” Paul said.

  The trip up the valley was just as perilous as the trip down. If anything, the track had grown muddier.

  Gavin rented Paul a hotel room for the night and gave him some money—three ten-thousand-rupiah notes. To Paul’s questioning look, he answered, “About sixty dollars, American.”

  Paul showered properly and shaved his four-day stubble. He threw himself onto the bed. After the previous few nights in the camp, sleeping in a bag in a tent, this bed felt like the under-down of baby angels.

  In the morning, he woke early and walked the streets, past the already thronging masses, into the bazaar. The sun angled down from a clear blue sky. A cool breeze blew up from the ocean several miles away, thick with the smells of jungle. Large black lizards, skinned and cooked, hung like ghoulish bunches of bananas from vendors’ tent
posts.

  “Hello mister, hello mister!”

  He walked on, ignoring the calls, losing himself in the crowds. Bright fabrics draped the small shops in color. The smells of spices and fresh fruit permeated the air—a multitude of vendors cooking their products in tiny, smoky stands wedged strategically into the flow of foot traffic. Music skirled from radios hung at the backs of shops, marking territory by aural display, outlining each vendor’s sphere of influence.

  He saw Chinese noodles and blue sarongs, and coconuts, and fish, and western T-shirts, and cigarette lighters, and shoes that would not fit him. People on bicycles and motorbikes.

  He saw a trinket hanging from a post, a beaded necklace with a shark’s tooth dangling from the bottom. He paused for only a millisecond, the slightest hint of hesitation, and a voice came out of the booth: “Hello, mister.”

  Paul turned. “How much?”

  The shop owner came forward. He was old and gray and bent. His rheumy, bloodshot eyes did a quick appraisal. “With respect, sir,” he said in good English, pointing to a pair of small signs that seemed to give two different prices for the same necklace. One sign read 25,000 RP and the other 15,000. “Very nice necklace. Grandson caught shark with own hands.”

  “Which price is it?”

  “That depend,” the old man said.

  “On what?”

  “On if you want haggle. You want haggle, we start this price here,” he said, gesturing to the sign with the higher price. His knuckles were knobby with arthritis.

  “I’d rather start there,” Paul said, pointing to the other sign.

  The man shook his head. “No, that the no-haggle price. If you want haggle, we start at twenty-five thousand rupiah. But don’t worry, we talk price down.”

  “How far down?”

  “Almost to here,” he said, pointing to the lower price.

  “Almost?”

  “Can’t haggle all the way to the no-haggle price. You understand, sir. I must earn something for my time, yes? Now I start. Mister, this is price of necklace.” The old man pointed to the higher price. “Very nice necklace. Grandson caught shark with own hands. I can go no lower. What you offer?”

  Paul grinned and shook his head. “I’ll take the no-haggle price.” He opened his wallet and pulled out two ten-thousand-rupiah notes. He knew when he’d met his match. “Keep the change.”

  * * *

  Paul found Gavin back at the hotel a few hours later.

  “You had me worried,” Gavin said. He was sitting at a table near the front steps, sipping coffee. The sun was higher now, but the building’s awning provided shade.

  “About what?”

  “About where you’d gotten to.”

  Paul gestured around. “There’s not a lot of places to wander off. This town isn’t that big.”

  “Call it a healthy paranoia. To be honest, bringing you here has created some attention we didn’t want yet. I had several meetings this morning—some of them unexpected. So far, we’ve shuffled under the radar, but now…” Gavin let the sentence die.

  “Now what?”

  “We’ve flown in an outside tech, and people want to know why.”

  “What people?”

  “Official people. Unpleasant people. Indonesia is suddenly very interested.”

  “And I’m the outside tech in question?”

  “The very same.”

  “I take it this interest is a bad thing.”

  “Interest from officials always is.”

  “Is it a question of permission?”

  “We have all the right permits, of course, from the Ministry of Culture and Social Politics. And more permits from ARKENAS and the Department of Education—a mountain of permits, let me tell you, and half of them redundant. In Flores, bureaucracy is raised to the level of a martial art. Even our permits have permits, and all of it costs money. And worse than that, it costs time. Our visas come straight from the Indonesian Academy of Sciences. But maybe none of that will matter now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because certain people might decide it doesn’t matter. That’s all it takes.”

  “Are you worried they’ll shut down the dig?”

  Gavin smiled. He remained silent for a while and sipped his coffee. Paul thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then Gavin asked, “Have you studied theology?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve long been fascinated by the figure of Abraham. You’re familiar with Abraham?”

  “Of course,” Paul said, unsure where this was going.

  “From this one otherwise ordinary sheepherder stems the entire natural history of monotheism. He’s at the foundation of all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jews, Christians, and Muslims get on their knees for their one true God, it is to Abraham’s God they pray.” Gavin closed his eyes. “And still there is such fighting over steeples.”

  Around them, Flores bustled on. A small gray van blared its horn at a swerving motorbike.

  “What does this have to do with the dig?”

  “The word ‘prophet’ traces back to the original Greek word prophetes. In Hebrew, though, the word is nabi. I think Abraham Heschel said it best when he wrote, ‘The prophet is the man who feels fiercely.’ What do you think, Paul? Do you think prophets feel fiercely?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Never mind.” Gavin smiled again and shook his head. “It’s just me rambling again.”

  “You never said if you think they’ll shut down the dig.”

  “We come onto their land, their territory; we come into this place and we find bones that contradict their beliefs; what do you think might happen? Anything.”

  “Contradict their beliefs?” Paul said. “What do you believe about these bones? You still haven’t said.”

  “I don’t know. Strange bones like this, they could just be pathological.”

  “That’s what they said about the first Neanderthal bones. Except they kept finding them.”

  “It could be microcephaly.”

  “What kind of microcephaly makes you three feet tall?”

  “The odd skull shape and small body size could be unrelated. Pygmies aren’t unknown to these islands.”

  “There are no pygmies this small.”

  “But perhaps the two things together … perhaps the bones are just a microcephalic variant on the local pygmy phenotype.”

  “So both pygmy and microcephalic?”

  Gavin sighed. He looked suddenly defeated.

  “That’s not what you believe, is it?” Paul said.

  “These are the smallest bones discovered that look anything like us. Could they just be pathological humans? I don’t know. Maybe. Pathology can happen anywhere, so you can’t rule it out when you’ve only got a few specimens to work with. But what my mind keeps coming back to is that these bones weren’t found just anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These bones weren’t found in Africa, or Asia, or Europe. They weren’t found on the big landmasses. These tiny bones were found on a tiny island. Near the bones of dwarf elephants. And that’s a coincidence? They hunted dwarf elephants, for God’s sake.”

  “So if not pathological, what do you believe they were?”

  “That’s the powerful thing about genetics, my friend. You take your samples, do your tests. One does not have to believe. One can know. And that’s precisely what is so dangerous.”

  * * *

  “Strange things happen on islands.” Margaret’s white long-sleeved shirt was gone. She sat slick-armed in overalls. Skin like a fine coat of gloss. The firelight beat the night back, lighting candles in their eyes. It was nearly midnight, and Paul sat in the circle of researchers, listening to the crackle of the fire. Listening to the jungle. Gavin had already retired to his tent for the night.

  “Like the Galápagos,” Margaret said. “The finches.”

  “Oh, come on,” James said. “The skulls we found are small, with
brains the size of chimps’. Island dwarfing of genus Homo—is that what you’re proposing? Some sort of local adaptation over the last five thousand years?”

  “It’s the best we have.”

  “But in five thousand years?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Those bones are too different. They’re not of our line.”

  “But they’re from younger strata than the other archaics. It’s not like erectus, some branch cut down at the dawn of time. These things survived here. The bones aren’t even fossilized.”

  “It doesn’t matter, they’re still not us. Either they share common descent from man or they were a separate creation at the beginning. There is no in-between. And they’re only a meter tall, don’t forget.”

  “That’s just an estimate.”

  “A good estimate.”

  “Achondroplasia—”

  “Those skulls are as achondroplastic as I am. I’d say the sloped frontal bone is anti-achondroplastic.”

  “Some kind of growth hormone deficiency would—”

  “No,” Paul said, speaking for the first time. Every face turned toward him.

  “No, what?”

  “Pygmies have normal growth hormone levels,” Paul said. “Every population studied—the Negritos, the Andamanese, the Mbuti. All normal.”

  The faces stared. Pale ovals in firelight. “It’s the domain of their receptors that are different,” Paul continued. “Pygmies are pygmies because of their GH receptors, not the growth hormone itself. If you inject a pygmy child with growth hormone, you still get a pygmy. It’s a completely different etiology.”

  “Well, still,” Margaret said. “I don’t see how that impacts whether these bones share common descent or not.”

  The firelight crackled. James turned to the circle of faces. “So are they on our line? Are they us or other?” He looked around at the circle of faces in the firelight.

  “Other,” came a voice.

  “Other.”

  “Other.”

  Softly, the woman whispered in disbelief, “But they had stone tools.”

  The faces turned to Paul, but he only watched the fire and said nothing.