Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  Three months after the double funeral at Paradise Farm, Brian Nollinger’s point of view received some convincing support from the surgeons who had operated on Adam to enable him to speak. With permission, they released to the press several X-rays of Adam’s skull. Taken from different angles, these X-rays created a small sensation. Never before had RuthClaire or Adam let anyone examine him with an eye to precise physical measurement or speculative comparison. These X-rays, along with the plastic surgeons’ computer-generated “blueprints” of Adam’s head, revealed that he had a cranial capacity of 870 cubic centimeters. This figure exceeded that of most known fossil representatives of Homo habilis, but not by much. Even more spectacular was the discovery that in its overall shape and proportions, Adam’s skull bore a point-by-point resemblance to Skull ER-1470 in the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi. Because 1470 belonged to a creature once identified by Louis Leakey as an H. habilis individual, this startling resemblance led many paleoanthropologists to classify Adam, too, as a habiline. What RuthClaire had surmised about him on the first day she saw him, the scientific community had now also officially conceded. Even Alistair Patrick Blair had begun to come around.

  By this time, however, the Montarazes had left the country. A few of their friends in Atlanta, among them the Blaus and the Loyds, knew their general whereabouts, but refused to divulge the information to reporters or scientists. RuthClaire and Adam had gone away to escape the public’s prying, to renew themselves on fresh and exotic shores. Moreover, I privately suspected that they mailed the postcards pinpointing their “current” locations only after having made up their minds to go elsewhere. Once they reached this new place, they lay low. Lying low, I told myself, was a survival strategy at which a Lolitabu habiline dispositionally excelled. If he did not want to be found, he would not be found—except by the rarest of accidents.

  But the Montarazes apparently wanted to be found. Soon after she had sent us a postcard from Rutherford’s Port, RuthClaire wrote a bona fide letter. It reached us early in April. Here is what it said:

  Dear Caroline and Paul,

  Once, in a letter, Adam called Paradise Farm his “unjumping Eden,” because although everything else might go blooie for him, Paradise Farm would remain the fixed center of his Coming of Age as a civilized being. It was where he and I met, where he outgrew the feral habits of his youth, and where his son was born. Today, of course, it’s where his son lies buried, next to the coffin of his murderer.

  Well, Paul has sold Paradise Farm, and Adam’s Eden has—forgive me, there’s no other word for it—jumped. We’ve come “home” to Montaraz, an Eden somewhat more Edenic than Paradise Farm but maybe not quite so paradisiacal as the dusty Lolitabu Hills (chronologically speaking). It’s like Chinese boxes, isn’t it? Edens inside Edens.

  I’m writing not only to give you news of our doings but also to ask you a favor. One big favor, actually, with at least three little favors nesting inside it like—well, you know. Ready for the big favor? It’s this: Adam and I want you to drop what you’re doing in June and come down to Rutherford’s Port (our beach cottage, actually) for at least a month. We’ve already asked for and received the special permits to visit Montaraz that you’ll need from the Haitian Ministry of Tourism, and Adam has extorted from the publishers of Popular Anthropology enough money to cover your travel expenses, round trip. Caroline must simply agree to write an article for that magazine about your visit with us. This shouldn’t be too hard because the article will consist almost entirely of a historic taped interview at which she’ll function as moderator.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The first little favor nesting inside the big favor of coming down here requires you to bring Tiny Paul’s ashes. Because Adam’s entire preconscious past belongs to Montaraz, we’ve decided to make the island our permanent home. We’d like to have Tiny Paul’s physical remains close to hand. Sentiment rather than reason talking here, but sentiment has compelling reasons all its own. The distasteful part for you guys—for Paul, anyway—is that you’ll have to dig up our baby’s burial urn and carry it down here virtually in your arms. No checking it with your airline baggage. No consigning it to steerage or the cargo hold when you board your Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship out of Miami. It’s too valuable for that, and you may come to regard it as a nuisance before you’ve actually handed it over to us. Forgive us for asking such a thing, but we—or, to be fair to Adam, I—have no other choice. Do you understand?

  The second little favor inside the big one: David Blau tells us that in only a few months Paul has become an able artist’s representative. (He wasn’t too bad at that while we were married, but he was always more interested in peddling avant-garde marinades and sauces than avant-garde paintings and sculptures.) Adam and I would like Paul to ply his new trade on behalf of a small contingent of local artists whose work you can see when you get here. You’ll need to bring photographic equipment with you to capture some of this work, however, and high-speed color films capable of producing quality images in poor, sometimes nearly nonexistent, light. (See the attached list for the recommended brands and quantities.) What Adam hopes for, Paul, is a modest habiline show at Abraxas similar to the Haitian exhibit of fifteen months ago. (Probably, though, we won’t want to call the artists habilines.) As you may have already guessed, these artists are Adam’s habiline relations. They exist. They live here. Because I’ve met them, I know they’re more than just the diminutive Caribbean equivalent of the Northwest’s elusive Bigfoot. Adam wants you and Caroline to meet them, too.

  And the third little favor: Caroline’s interview and/or article for Popular Anthropology. If you arrive in June, Caroline will be able to moderate a historic meeting between Adam and the Zarakali bigwig A. P. Blair. This is the man who once argued that a photograph of Adam was in fact a photograph of a black man in a shaped latex mask. This past autumn, Blair hosted the PBS series on human evolution called Beginnings. Right now he’s trying to raise money for his digs at Lake Kiboko in Zarakal. Under the aegis of the American Geographic Foundation, he’ll spend the late summer and the early fall delivering paid lectures to audiences all over the United States. He’s stopping in Montaraz in June before going on to Miami and then Pensacola. Adam and I invited him to come—with the proviso that he withhold any written account of his visit until our own authorized account of the meeting has seen print in Popular Anthropology. He agreed. Not without some epistolary grumbling, of course, but he did agree. And it’s Caroline whom we want to do this piece.

  As you know, Adam and I spent most of last fall on the Greek island of Skiros, working and recuperating. In mid-November, there was an international convocation of paleoanthropologists in Athens. This affair lasted a week, and the rumor of our presence less than a hundred miles away (as the Olympian eagle flies) got back to these men and women. Blair was in attendance from the University of Marakoi. (Richard Leakey was there from Kenya, Donald Johanson from the United States, and so on.) Blair didn’t want to commit himself to a wild-goose chase, but, if the rumor were true, he didn’t want to miss out on talking to Adam in person, either. So he sent a grad student from the University of Marakoi, an apprentice paleoanthropologist in his party, to Skiros to check out the scuttlebutt. She was a native Zarakali of the Sambusai tribe, and she tracked us to our little villa as expertly as her forefathers had tracked their enemies across the salt flats of the Lake Kiboko frontier. She wanted us to go back to Athens with her. If that was unacceptable, she wanted us to grant Blair an exclusive audience on Skiros at the end of the big paleo-powwow in Athens.

  We didn’t want to go to Athens, and Adam wasn’t quite ready to meet Blair face to face. So we gave the Zarakali student a letter outlining the conditions under which we might later grant Blair an interview, and, as soon as she’d left, we made our own plans to leave. We didn’t actually pull up stakes until December, though, and by January we were in Mexico City. There, feeling guilty about denying Blair’s interview request, Adam wrote th
e Great Man in care of the Interior Ministry of Zarakal, clarifying the conditions set forth in the first letter and specifying a June meeting here on Montaraz. Blair responded quickly. A June meeting in the Caribbean suited his schedule and travel itinerary almost perfectly. So, at long last, it will happen, and Adam will finally show the old bastard he’s not wearing a latex mask.

  Let us know if you’ll be able to come. We’ll help you financially as far as we can, but both Adam and I believe you can make some money from this trip. Just exercise your professional skills and try to get some funding in addition to the Popular Anthropology travel money. It’s tacky to poor-mouth, but Adam and I are not wealthy. I’ve made next to nothing since forsaking the porcelain-plate business (a decision I don’t regret), and, as you may imagine, we’ve spent a small fortune pretending to be jet-setters and establishing residences here and there in the course of our travels. At last, though, we’re home. H.O.M.E.

  Much love,

  RuthClaire

  P.S. Three days ago, I saw Brian Nollinger at the open-air market in Rutherford’s Port. You thought he was somewhere in the Dominican Republic, didn’t you, Caroline? But he’s not. Austin-Antilles has apparently relieved him of his duties as a canecutter demographer there. Adam says it’s possible he made suggestions for improving the workers’ lot that struck company officials as dangerous boat-rocking. On the other hand, maybe he’s simply doing the same kind of work for them on their Montaraz coffee plantations. Forgive me, Caroline, but I can’t help seeing his presence here as highly suspicious. Oh, yes—he didn’t see me when I saw him, and I was careful not to let him see me. I finished doing my marketing and drove home as quickly as I could.

  P.P.S. Please do us these favors. Adam and I have really missed our friends from stateside. We really have.

  Caroline and I decided to go. Our honeymoon over the Christmas break had consisted of five days in Savannah and two on Tybee Island, a week of blustery weather during which we had dreamed of the voluptuous dazzle of summer. Our trip to Montaraz, then, would be an improvement upon our December honeymoon. We would combine business with pleasure. Caroline hadn’t committed to teaching a summer class, and I could set my own hours. That we could deduct almost everything we spent as business expenses had escaped neither of us—the Montarazes had arranged matters to make that possible.

  The P.S. to RuthClaire’s letter disturbed me. Last summer, Brian had gone to the Dominican Republic for Austin-Antilles Corporation; now he had shown up on Montaraz at a great time for someone who had once told the world that Adam was a habiline. Had Brian gotten a tip through the paleoanthropological grapevine that A. P. Blair was traveling to Rutherford’s Port for some undisclosed, but promising, reason? I looked at Caroline, remembering her former interest in the man, and my heart misgave me. In my most self-critical moments, I told myself that I had caught her on the rebound.

  “When’s the last time you heard from your old flame?”

  Caroline’s eyes cut across me like lasers. “In January. He sent a card wishing us happiness and long life. I’d told him we were getting married, and he sent that card.”

  “Why tell him anything? Why rub it in?”

  “Brian meant something to me once,” she said. “I still consider him a friend. I like to stay in touch with my friends.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve seen every note Brian’s written me since he left Atlanta. There’ve been four, all but the last one mailed before we married. What’s the matter with you?”

  “He’s in Montaraz, Caroline, and I don’t want to see him.”

  “Well, I had nothing to do with his showing up there, and I won’t pussyfoot around everyplace we go on that damn island trying to avoid him. If I see him, I’ll speak to him. He may not even be there when we arrive. He may have taken a holiday from his work in the Dominican. He may have been trying to satisfy his natural curiosity about Montaraz. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Get off my case, Paul. I’m not Brian’s pen-pal paramour.”

  The conversation ended. I’d almost provoked a serious quarrel, but Caroline had not let me. She’d held her anger in check. As a penance for my boorishness, I took her to dinner at Bugatti’s, and we spent nearly the entire meal making our travel plans.

  In mid-May, I drove to Paradise Farm to disinter T. P.’s ashes. The Hothlepoya County Sanitarian, Jim Stevens, approved my request, and a new owner of my former property escorted me to the burial plot, which, in fulfillment of a clause authorizing the sale, his cooperative had enclosed with a treated-redwood fence and a hedge of flowering shrubs. I did the digging myself, and it took only twenty minutes to unearth the miniature casket holding the urn. I removed the urn without pulling the casket clear of the grave and then refilled the hole with displaced soil and sod. A small pink-marble headstone with a brass plaque remained to mark the site. I let the plaque stay, a memorial as much to Adam’s idealism as to the sadly brief life of my murdered godson.

  *

  In June, Caroline and I flew to Miami.

  The next day we set sail aboard the Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship ’Zepaules for Cap-Haïtien. Our voyage was easy and uneventful. We docked in Cap-Haïtien on a mild summer evening, spent the night in a plush hotel, and took a tour boat to Rutherford’s Port with a small group of French-speaking Europeans who held themselves aloof from Caroline and me.

  On the boat, the only person who took any notice of us, and who smiled at us each time he caught our attention, was a dark-skinned member of Duvalier’s Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. This militia is better known both locally and abroad as the “Tontons Macoutes,” a folkloric appellation implying that its “volunteers” are evil uncles who sometimes bag up unoffending citizens and, without charge or trial, spirit them away to nowhere, never to be heard of again. Our smiling Tonton Macoute wore the rural uniform of the species, namely faded blue jeans, a faded denim vest, scuffed military boots, a crushed black beret, and a pair of huge mirror-lens sunglasses. These monstrous lenses led me to suspect that the man was spying on us even when he appeared to be half-facing away. On a shoulder sling, he carried an ancient Springfield rifle whose barrel he had lovingly oiled and whose stock he’d either waxed or lacquered. A bulge under his denim vest told of another weapon, a revolver, in an armpit holster. He made me nervous, this smiler. And, to my dismay, he sauntered across the deck to the rail at which Caroline and I were standing. Rather like a Muslim, he touched his forehead in greeting.

  “Americans, yes?”

  We admitted to the charge.

  “On what business do you come?”

  I looked at Caroline. How much to tell this bogeyman? Was he making small talk, or were his questions subtle commands for self-disclosure? His teeth, when he smiled, looked like nicotine-stained cuff links—that big, that yellow.

  Caroline played coy. “How do you know we haven’t come for pleasure?”

  “Rutherford’s Port is, uh, ennuyeux. Dull, I think you say. Real pleasure-seekers go to Port-au-Prince. Habitation Leclerc, maybe. Those gentlemen—” he nodded at three of the French-speaking travelers—“are coffee buyers from the mother country; not playboys, not drug dealers. They come to Montaraz to work. You, too, I bet.”

  “Does it make a difference?” I said, more hostile than inquisitive.

  The Tonton Macoute kept smiling. “I am practicing my English is all. Sorry to trouble you so.” He touched his forehead again.

  To make up for my rudeness, Caroline disclosed our names and said that we had come for business and pleasure. We were friends of Adam and RuthClaire Montaraz, the artists. Had he heard of them? (But of course.) Did he know anything about the habiline remnant from which Adam had supposedly sprung?

  “Officially, I know nothing. Unofficially, I know it is hard to find this remnant because Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, well, he—” He gave an exaggerated shrug.

  “What?” I urged him.

  “He encouraged the local houngans—voodoo priests�
��to cast spells against these creatures. He said they were demons. And the priest most powerful on the island, Odilon Roi, was not only a famous houngan but also local chieftain of the security volunteers. Roi and his men cast bullets as well as spells at the habilines. This was over twenty years ago. A dozen or more of the little cigouaves were shot. My father was a civil volunteer under Roi and he remembers.”

  “Duvalier, a medical doctor, thought the habilines were demons?”

  “To carry out the vaudun persecution, Monsieur Loyd, yes. He feared any part of the population that had a certain—uniqueness. He thought such persons dangerous. They would corrupt others, or be corrupted. Castroites and Marxists would maybe turn the cigouaves against him. This, you see, made him decide they must go.”

  Caroline said, “What would Baby Doc, your current President-for-Life, do if he heard you telling us these things?”

  “Is it your wish to inform on me?” asked the macoute, smiling.

  “Oh no! But if we went home and had your allegations printed in a newspaper as the story of a talkative civil guard on Montaraz, wouldn’t your loose tongue convict you as a traitor to the late Duvalier’s memory?”

  “Things are freer under Baby Doc. Besides, I haven’t said my name, have I?” His big ivory teeth reflected sunlight off the water. “Do you suppose me the only security volunteer on the island?”

  “What about all the habiline hunters who swept through here last fall?” I asked. “Did you tell any of those eager people your persecution story?”