by Michael Helm
The other teams, from Amsterdam and Indiana, got her situated on-site. Jenny and Dresen were always together, an older woman, younger man wearing identical wide-brimmed sun hats. They were hunting for ancient tuberculosis and staph infections. They set her up at the edge of the boneyard. A grid was laid over the site based on images from full-spectrum cameras. The dig proceeded steadily. She wrote to her father every few hours with updates, questions, asides about methodology and record keeping. That he didn’t respond made no sense. She checked the weather in Cozumel, blue sky and light breezes. Since France he sometimes went silent, a practice Koss had effected, but he wouldn’t have abandoned her, so she pictured him unplugged, in transit, heading her way.
On day three at a depth of seven feet she came to her skeletons. They were lying face to face, and as she brushed away the dirt, uncovering them over many hours from the skull down, she discovered they were buried holding hands. She saw the hands, stopped, got out of the hole, looked back down. It might have seemed like an ancient joke or sentimental ploy but in fact it moved her in a way she could not account for. There was no one near her. The light was clean. She tried to smell the sea but the wind was from the east. Then she looked back into the grave and decided she was done for the day.
She spent the night in her small room, with the sounds of singing muezzins and an English translation of The Iliad that some previous guest had left in the broken safe. In Homer the origin of disease was hot-tempered Apollo, “who in anger at the king drove the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished.” There was no appeasing Apollo, not then, not now. He had turned our weapons against us, taking us out. Against Apollo, the plague warriors had targeted enrichment and next-generation sequencing (TENGS). They had comparative genomics to track changes that could account for the sudden virulence of a transient pathogen. They had reverse-engineering technology, in-vitro and murine models, and Indrani’s message on her cellphone saying, “Hartley just stole my lamb burger” and Didier asking, “How are TENGS today?”
By the time she arrived at the site the next morning her skeletons had been fully revealed. People gathered, took pictures, went back to work. She took a picture herself and got a young guy at the imaging station to enhance it. To distinguish one set of bones from the other he coloured them in the image. Only then, looking at the bones on-screen, did she see a third set, that of a child, between the adults. The grave held a family. She pressed a hand into her hip, a gesture entirely new to her.
When she’d looked down at the couple, looked through her camera’s viewfinder, how had she missed the smaller skeleton? The profound failure to see forced her to admit this had been happening recently. Since France there’d been gaps in attention. Her father’s outward drift had suspended her in a state of perpetual distraction. In dreams he was nearby but not visible. She called for him but he wouldn’t appear. Even when she was awake he seemed both close and absent.
She tried to locate herself in the work of securing a twenty-five-hundred-year-old killer. Upon sugarless diets, even before mint-flavoured pastes and fluoride, human teeth endured. The bacterium sat in the pulp, protected over centuries by enamel. The idea was simply to pull the tooth from the skull. In a clean room in her father’s lab in California, someone would drill from the root end and pull the bacterium from the pulp. Part of the pulp would be sent to Celia’s lab in Vancouver. If it was well enough intact, its genetic code could be sequenced and compared to known plagues. Before her father’s group published their results, Celia’s company would have a few months’ head start on beating the odds to design a new generation of antibacterials for one or all of the pneumonic, bubonic, and septicemic plagues.
Dresen offered to help with the extraction. He kneeled beside her in the pit and put his hands on the skull of the adult female. He’d been working hard and smelled of sweat. With slow delicacy he turned the face toward them and removed the skull from the body. Celia got out of the hole and helped him up. He carried the skull before him, hands top and bottom, to the work tent. One of the Dutch grad students directed him to place it in front of a tripod-mounted camera. The student photographed it and catalogued the photo, and then Dresen opened the jaw. With his index finger he pointed to what seemed a good molar. Celia confirmed his choice. He produced a pair of small pliers and plucked it out expertly. Celia put the molar in a gamma-sterilized Falcon tube and marked it and against her resistance Dresen took her phone camera and tapped off a picture of her with the dead woman’s skull.
“So whose tooth do you have? What will you call her?” asked Dresen. He said researchers always named their skeletons and cadavers. “It humanizes them.”
“The researchers, you mean. I’m not naming her.”
But she did name the skeleton, privately, against her will. The name should have been Turkish or Roman, she supposed, but what came to her a minute later when she was briefly alone with the skull, came fully and unbidden. The head, the skull, was Alice. If there could be a Helen of Troy, surely there could be an Alice.
—
For the next two days she helped others with their work. At night the dinner talk turned to the end of the world. Deforestation, changing fruit bat habitats, bushmeat markets, Ebola, bored undergrads or terrorists creating smallpox from the genome on the internet, the next great airborne flu. One night a journalist joined the group, Lacey Ann Kronin of the Washington Post, and the talk narrowed and became more responsible. Lacey Ann was writing a profile of Jenny and Dresen but asked Celia questions about her work and her father. For some reason Celia felt protective, evasive, and that night she did research. She’d written on TB, Lacey Ann, on medical marijuana, West Nile, sex workers, pertussis, arterial stents. Before becoming a science and med journalist, she was a foreign correspondent in Egypt and Turkey. Her older stories were on uprisings and protests and—here was the link—the spike in deaths from treatable wounds and diseases in Syria during the war. Attached to the story were photos of dying children, the crowded hallways of hospital wards without electricity, a doctor in a surgical gown lying dead in a street, executed for reasons unknown. After a minute Celia found she’d been staring at the straight edge of her screen. How neatly it penned up the chaos out there. The stories were smart and true-feeling. The only things not true were the endings. The reported events had no endings, obviously. Cause to effect they went on forever. She clicked back to one of the photos and found a young girl staring into the camera from beneath a wall clock missing half its face on a half-missing wall, and now Celia realized she’d seen the picture before somewhere, on some other cruise through the headlines months ago. This was the news, a succession of scenes soon forgotten. Did anything mediated actually stay in memory? In the hell wards of the mind the clocks had all stopped some time ago.
On the sixth day, as she showered, she thought she heard the room phone and ran out dripping on the tile floor but the room was silent and she doubted her senses. Upon her unanswered emails she’d passed from disappointment through anger to concern. Now in her inbox was an automatic notice informing her that the last seventeen messages to her father had bounced back. His remote server was full. This had happened before and infuriated her. Wherever he was he hadn’t received her emails since she’d arrived. Yet he must have sent her messages, and they should have been getting through.
Koss would know where he was—they were likely still travelling together—but how to reach Koss? She tried his website. It was no longer under reconstruction. What she found on the home page was a large image of herself. Or rather Koss’s version of her as projected on the wall of the chateau. It presented as a portrait. She was seated, framed from the waist up. She wore the same clothes she’d been given in the animation but the background was uncertain, as if she were in a room with a dark wall far behind her and windowlight crossing her figure. The chair was slightly at an angle so that her head was turned to the viewer but her face lacked distinguishing features. Maybe it wasn’t her after all, she thought, maybe it was just
the way Koss designed all his women, but then she saw the attention he’d given her hands, folded in her lap. They were rendered much more realistically than the rest of her, and she remembered catching him staring at them at dinner. On the little finger of the right hand was the same ring with a delicate, rectangular face that she had worn that night and wore now. She’d bought it from a crafts vendor at the Granville Market, a microchip daubed in amber.
The page had no text. She was forced to click on herself, a hollowing little tap of surrender. She learned that the image was from an art show opening in Berlin: Apokalypse: neue Kunstwerk von Armin Käding Koss. There she was again, Celia, or the animated version of her, this a daytime image. The view behind her was recognizably that of a cityscape, her city, Vancouver. The mountains, the squat, accordioned downtown high-rises. The image was after one of her own snapshots. She’d taken it with her phone camera and posted it in one of the online albums she sometimes put together for her family and friends. Her father must have sent Koss the password to the site. Had he forgotten or misread her response to the chateau film? Koss’s live attentions were creepy enough. Now he’d made a project of her. Her site had five albums, over a hundred pictures. For forty-eight of these Koss had constructed what the text described as “memory theatres,” twenty-by-twelve-inch windowed boxes, in each of which played a short, silent, animated film. The shortest film was four seconds, the longest thirty-two. Celia on a ferryboat, Celia holding a bottle of champagne on the day they’d made a breakthrough at the lab, driving a car into Seattle, unsteadily on skis on Whistler Mountain. Some were entirely fictional, Celia playing with Hartley or swimming in a lake, and seemed intended to advance a narrative, strike a theme, or finish a chord.
The on-screen pointer became a hand over the live link. As if complicit in her own theft, this sure, remote violation, she had to click on herself twice more to find a fuller text, each German paragraph repeated in French and English. The English looked shorter than the German. He’d written that the memory theatres were inspired by moments in the life of a friend he left unnamed. He didn’t presume to understand how the moments came together, what they amounted to, but he sensed in them a thing larger than themselves. He would not call this thing meaning or story, though it seemed to involve both. “It is a mystery, forever-yielding,” said the text. “To be revealed at the end of the future, all at once.”
She chose another sample box on the site, number seven: Celia in an orange life vest standing with strangers on a boat near Tofino, a whale just off the stern. Indrani had taken the photo. She clicked the play button. The camera angle looked right, as she remembered the picture, but in the box the whale was too close to the boat, maybe fifteen feet away. The photo had made it seem farther than it was in truth but the film brought it too close. The figures beside her looked unspecific, some genderless, the backs and tops of heads. They were on the water for about an hour, she remembered. Nervous conversation, stories of past such trips. There was a couple from Chicago, a woman from Saskatoon, an elderly man from Manchester or somewhere in the north of England, but none of them was there now and the dorsal was too large. The back breached and she waited for the sound of human awe but there was silence, and then the geyser from the blowhole, a sound she remembered as if it were happening now but absent here, the spray almost not visible, not showy, and then as it crested and dropped under she saw that Koss had changed the whale. That day the whales were all humpbacks and greys but he’d made this one an orca, killer whale, apex predator, the black-white seam disappearing under the surface. The wave hit them and the camera bounced and steadied just as the whale breached again, closer now, almost right under the boat. The white patch above the eye, the eye itself a whorl, and animated-Celia turned to the camera and the video stopped. She tried to read the look on her face and decided it came off as dreadful.
Something had changed in the boat. She rolled back into the video and counted seven strangers, then clicked back to the beginning. Eight. Watching again, not distracted by herself or the whale, she saw what looked like a family of three on the edge of the shot, then the camera’s dip and shift and they were out of frame until it found its position again. The tallest one, the father, she supposed, was gone. There was no reaction from wife or child, as if he’d never been there.
After some interval she got off the bed, walked across the hotel room, and sat on the tile floor with her back to the wall. She drew her knees up and hugged them and missed her dog. Whenever she got onto the floor and hugged Hartley he moved to an open space and left her feeling pathetic. She told herself never to watch another of Koss’s films. By the next morning she’d watched them all.
4
Her little sister lived in Brooklyn or Williamsburg, or Bushwick, the name kept changing when Chrissy said it over the years but the apartment address was the same, a warehouse on Bogart Street. Chrissy had known no one in all the United States when she moved to New York. She’d gone simply because that was where people like her went, they moved to New York and allowed themselves to be swallowed like all those over time who had left the Mother Country for the Great Maw. Now she was living with a guitarist from Arkansas named Clete, though Clete literally wasn’t in the picture anymore whenever Celia skyped them. He was always at a gig, was the story, or preparing for one or on the road. Chrissy waited tables and sold to local shops the jewellery she made from found materials. The items were simple and beautiful. She’d once sent Celia a necklace with an acorn folded into the curved metal tongues of so many broken Jew’s harps.
In any season, when Celia talked with her sister, saw her face lit up by the row of small windows that ran high along the length of the apartment, she pictured the same sky over Brooklyn that she’d seen the one time she’d visited, a cold blue April sky, unevenly portioned by high-rises. On the warehouse rooftop they had drunk wine and talked about safe things, Chrissy’s life and work, and New York, Manhattan in the distance at an unfamiliar angle. Until the bottle was half-gone they did not talk about what truly separated them, money, love, life trajectories, the way their father thought differently of Celia than of Chrissy, the way he’d trapped them in different misconceptions. That evening had ended with Chrissy angry and in tears, then embarrassed when she had to run down to answer her door and talk to her landlord, a Hasid named Hammuel, in Celia’s memory now only red curls, white socks, and black shoes, to whom Chrissy claimed to feel very close. She’d shut the door and explained that Hammuel had always been good to her. “Some people are naturally good,” she said, as if this would be news to Celia, as if she had no intuitions about people and had always to wait for hard evidence of goodness or treachery. “Others just lack decent human beingery.”
When she returned from the dig, Celia stretched out on the bed and dialled and Chrissy’s face surfaced on the screen. The call had not been arranged. There were never any pleasantries between them, Chrissy just started in. Now she was saying she’d given up waitressing, that she’d met a woman who wanted her to work with a “not-for-profit book-repurposing thing” called MEND, which she seemed unable to be specific about. Celia reduced her on-screen and did a quick search, trying to press the keys rather than tap them, hoping she couldn’t be heard. “It’s not like there’s nothing meaningful in service jobs. But maybe it’s time for a change.” Celia pulled the screen, the camera, closer. She tried not to look down at the letters. “I mean, maybe someone else can recite the specials— What? You getting a little work done while we talk? Writing something up on your poor lab rats? You called me, remember.”
“Sorry.” She pushed the screen back and put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I should know better. Multitasking makes us forty percent slower at each task on average.”
“The species can’t afford to get any dumber. Though I’m all for slow if it’s deep and rhythmic.”
Chrissy had begun making lewd asides only recently. Celia had never heard them addressed to anyone but her.
“I’m wondering if you’ve
heard from Dad recently.”
“You’re always wondering that. I should keep a chart.”
In spurts of three or four words Celia read the MEND site but mostly just peeked at the pictures. The impression formed that discarded books were being put through “green-driven machinery” that pulped and compressed them, maybe into boards and walls that were shipped off, maybe to help house the global homeless. It was hard to imagine Chrissy in any of the pictures.
“Has he mentioned Armin Koss lately? The German guy?”
“Dad’s German should be ten years younger. Clete and me are split for the duration. I hereby announce.”
“I’m sorry, Chrissy.”
“You already half-knew.”
“Surmised, I guess.”
“I should fly off and meet this Armin. Maybe the age difference doesn’t mean anything, at least not for six or eight years.”
“He’s not what he seems, or at least not what he seems to Dad.”
“You met him for, what, two hours? Has he been sending you dirty emails? He has my coordinates but so far it’s all been strictly flirtless on his part.”
“You’ve been emailing with him?”
Chrissy said Koss wanted her version of certain stories their father had told him.
“They’re about us mostly, maybe mostly you.”